The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  PHIL: ‘Christ, that man’s been through a ton of women.’

  AL: ‘The second time I stayed with Pa in Voorschoten, when things were okay between us for a while – it was summer, he was always easier to take in the summer – a new woman from some personal ad or other would show up on the doorstep every weekend. Pa subscribed to a magazine published by a German dating agency and he always managed to learn the language of whatever woman he was writing to within six weeks: Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish – the man was a regular polyglot! He must speak around twenty languages by now. Once an interpreter, always an interpreter.’

  PHIL: ‘One time when you weren’t there, Pa double-booked. The bell rang and I opened the door. It was a Dutch woman, not much of a looker, though that never seemed to bother Pa. I’m still amazed at how quickly he managed to manoeuvre those women into his bedroom. Probably told them it was easier to talk in there, so his sons couldn’t hear. We were part of his gambit, I’m sure of that. Anyway, no sooner had he locked his bedroom door, than the bell rang again. His next victim was so beautiful even I wouldn’t have minded. I didn’t know what to do and eventually sat her down in the room we used to stay in. I kept her talking for ages in the hope Pa would soon be done with that desperate damsel from Den Helder or wherever she came from. I made Number Two a cup of tea, apologized till I was blue in the face and put on some lute music to spare her any grunts and squeals from the other room. We sat there for an hour. I spent an hour gazing at the most beautiful woman Pa had ever blown it with because of his own stupid fault. I finally saved his honour by escorting her back to the bus stop. Her honour too, of course. Pa could have kicked himself when he found out later.’

  AL: ‘And laughed that stupid laugh of his, I bet?’

  PHIL: ‘Yes, people were little more than objects in his universe. Even if he had made a go of it with that blonde stunner, he would have wound up knocking her about too. That’s what happened with his third wife, that German bird.’

  AL: ‘Renate.’

  PHIL: ‘Yeah, she left after an incident like that. Warned him from the start, one slap and I’m gone. But then she came back and he never hit her again.’

  AL: ‘She stuck with him for a while, even moved to Haarlem with him. There she spent a lot of time in bed, maybe life with him was starting to get her down. She called me once from Germany, after she had finally left. She wanted to say goodbye to me, but she sounded tired – tired of life and, above all, disappointed in love. I was fond of her. She knew all about flamenco music, and a fair bit about literature and world history.’

  PHIL: ‘When was that?’

  AL: ‘I can’t remember. I do remember being there when they got married in Voorschoten, I was the only family member in attendance. What a poor excuse for a wedding that was! When it was all over, we had a meal at that Chinese restaurant across from the children’s home. And later, after you had moved to Geneva, he married that Spanish woman. She had her old man with her, one of those proud, old-school Spaniards, and her young son from a previous marriage. Pa used to play weird games with that little boy. He would hold him by the ankles and dangle him with his head just inches from the floor, that kind of thing. It was only then it hit me how strangely he behaved with little kids. There was always a dangerous edge to his games. Didn’t Ma always say he was a sadist? Swinging a child out over the edge of a ravine in Indonesia, or dangling them over a balcony railing in the Netherlands. Pa kept dangling that son of hers upside down and just before the kid’s head went smack on the floor, he would stop and give this strange little laugh. That old Spaniard’s face was rigid with suppressed rage and eventually he took his grandson on his lap. Man, was I ashamed! His Spanish bride was on cloud nine and danced flamenco to gramophone records she had brought with her from Spain. Within seconds the downstairs neighbours came charging up to complain about the racket her high heels were making. Pa just about beat the complainers from his front door. Christ, that was some wedding day.’

  PHIL: ‘How long did that one last?’

  AL: ‘A few weeks, if that. It was easy to see that coming. Hey, do you remember that beefy Portuguese woman he had, the one who used to be an opera singer? She would do her vocal exercises all day, ha ha. Her voice echoed through the flat. He sent her back to Portugal but he couldn’t get rid of her and eventually Pa got you to write and tell her he’d been committed to an asylum, ha ha ha!’

  PHIL: ‘Ha ha, yes! It’s all coming back to me! Must have been quite a letter. We never heard another word from Portugal.’

  AL: ‘What language did you write it in anyway?’

  PHIL: ‘Pa dictated something in Portuguese and I made up all kinds of other shit, in French, ha ha! About him being locked away in some loony bin, under investigation for trafficking in women. That we, his children, had had him committed – that was his idea.’

  AL: ‘Oh, hang on, and a week later I went to visit him in Haarlem and this really sweet Swedish woman had moved in. She literally used to tiptoe around so as not to disturb Pa. She wanted to do everything for him, but he was always taking over her chores and doing them himself. Odd, that. Man, she was sweet. Such a sweet lady.’

  PHIL: ‘And?’

  AL: ‘Never saw her again.’

  PHIL: ‘Do you remember how Pa always used to blame everything on his sign of the zodiac? Like he was proud of it?’

  AL: ‘Yeah, he infected us with that too, with his books on astrology. Claimed that as a Libra his reason and his emotions were always in balance. Not a word of truth in that. Then again, he never could make up his mind: should I hang this up here or over there? And eventually he’d hang one of those batiks of his on this wall, only to take it down ten minutes later and hang it on that wall after all, ha ha.’

  PHIL: ‘Astrology was just a plaything to him. He used it to juice up his letters to all those women, but he didn’t know the first thing about it. Did you know that the ancient astrologers only worked with nine or ten signs of the Zodiac? With the rise of the natural sciences, a line was drawn between astrology as an occult science and astronomy as a modern science. The astrologers were stuck with a gap between Virgo and Scorpio, and for want of a smooth transition they came up with Libra. The scales. A strange symbol when you think about it. Libra, along with Aquarius and Gemini, is an air sign. As humans, the water-carrier and the twins still have a place in the Zodiac menagerie, but there’s nothing human, never mind animal, about Libra. A set of scales is an instrument, a machine, an inanimate object! A perfect instrument that merely responds to commands.’

  AL: ‘Look, you really need to read that shit… sorry, that prose of his. Put a weight on the scales and the balance tips: could a government ask for a better soldier? That’s your style, to explain away Pa’s actions in terms of astrology. But however much you explain, it’s what you can’t explain that really counts.’

  PHIL: ‘Well then, stick to your guitar. Music needs no explanation. You chose the right gig.’

  Esteemed Smart Arse (1)

  Yesterday evening, I skimmed and scanned my way through Pa’s memoirs from start to finish. Then I spent the whole night dreaming about them. Jesus, I thought it would never end, one dream after another. It was only this morning, after I got up and took a shower that I finally had a proper kip on the couch. Hats off to you for digging around in Pa’s past the way you have. I would rather have spent a year in the isolation cell at our old children’s home in Voorschoten.

  Philip Noland

  No virus found in this message

  My Dear Inquisitor

  In that case, how about a little food for thought so we can put our heads together and work out how realistic Pa’s version of events is? Three weeks after what Pa called the second prisoner transport, the head of the Navy’s top brass sent a letter to the Minister of Defence. In it, he referred to that transport as – wait for it – the Corpse Train… A Dutch TV journalist thought this was in such bad taste that, fifty years on, he decided to make it the title of his book on
the subject. He tracked me down – you were still living in Geneva at the time – and came round to poke his nose into Pa’s manuscript while I was in the room next door giving a guitar lesson. He skimmed and scanned too, and only extracted the pages about that miserable prisoner transport of Pa’s. With my permission, he photocopied them and set to work, collecting the declarations and eyewitness accounts of former marines from Brabant and Limburg. And, so he claimed, secret documents and recordings stored in a safe at the Ministry of Defence. He said there was a typed transcript from Surabaya of Pa being questioned at the time. Did they even use tape recorders in those days? Pa never mentioned them.

  To save you reading the book, here’s a brief summary of what the journalist wrote about the Corpse Train. Pa’s prisoners were on a separate transport, remember – let’s call that one ‘the Ghost Train’. As you will see, the journalist’s version differs substantially from Pa’s account. Pa doesn’t sketch the political background, to which he was oblivious. Let’s face it, what man on the ground knew the score back then? Allow the universal soldier to eavesdrop on his puppet masters and he’ll run a mile before you know where you are.

  *

  It all begins in London 1943, where a bunch of commanding officers acting as advisors to the cowardly Dutch government-in-exile hatch a plan to win the Dutch East Indies back from the Japanese. In Camp Lejeune in the US state of North Carolina, the first four hundred Dutch marines, drummed up from all over the world, are given special training. After the liberation of the southern Netherlands, a major recruitment campaign persuades a bunch of volunteers to join the force. By May 1945, there are already a few thousand American-trained Dutch marines. Atom bombs are dropped and Japan capitulates. Oh well, time to dissolve the Marine Brigade before it has even gone into action. But then the goalposts are shifted: with the Indies stampeding towards independence, this brand-new Brigade can help bring the wayward colony back under Dutch control.

  When at the end of 1945, thousands of marines armed with heavy, modern American weapons set sail for the Dutch East Indies, they are not allowed into the country. The British, who have been given temporary charge of the Indies, believe the situation is fine as it is and have no desire to see tensions rise. How right they were. After a few weeks spent sulking and cooling their heels on an old plantation in Malacca, the marines are granted permission to land in the Indies after all. An instant recipe for trouble, as the Marine Brigade is attached to the army’s A Division. This strips the naval commanders of all direct authority and the Brigade is assigned East Java as its field of combat, the very region where the relatives of Pa’s father Willem Nolan own vast plantations.

  The army’s primary focus was strategic, whereas the Marine Brigade saw themselves as a bunch of action heroes. In no time, Pa and his comrades have a whole swathe of East Java under their control but as Pa writes in his memoirs, they are reined back in for the sake of detente, though no agreement between the Dutch government and the newly declared Republic of Indonesia actually materializes. Meanwhile, the financial burden of maintaining a 100,000-strong Dutch army overseas begins to weigh heavily on the government in The Hague. A decision is taken to acquire significant assets by capturing as many stretches of fertile land as possible by force. This is done in the hope that capital will once again start to flow. All with the aim of steering the former colony to independence on terms set by the Dutch, rather than simply entrusting the process to the Indonesians.

  A code name is dreamt up for the battle plan: Operation Product. A military offensive sold back in Holland as the First Police Action – a deceptive term that will stand the test of time. This job is given to the Marine Brigade in East Java, and they get it done in a matter of days. But their success is largely down to the Indonesians pulling out of many areas in preparation for a guerrilla war. Even as a lad of 22, Pa more or less sussed that out. He and his comrades also took over police operations in the city and this generated a lot of ill will among the Indonesian police, many of whom joined the guerrillas out of sheer frustration.

  Pa was with the Security Service of the Marine Brigade and they were tasked with intelligence work. Little wonder that the army quickly lost sight of what he and his cronies were up to. With their typical Marine zeal, they made far too many arrests, and the prisons were soon full to overflowing.

  The Marine Brigade Security Service began to get a bad name. In East Java they became synonymous with torture and cruelty. ‘Everything’s under control’ was the official line sent back to The Hague, but those on the ground knew damn well that things had turned very messy since the First Police Action. As Pa discovered in his prisoner interrogations, the dyke had burst and there was no plugging the leaks. Around this time, the Marine Brigade asked to have its remit extended, most notably to include summary executions. Thankfully, the Commander of A Division failed to issue a response, otherwise the havoc wreaked by Pa and his comrades in East Java would have known no bounds. The army and the marines had never hit it off and there was even talk of disbanding the Marine Brigade altogether. It’s clear that they were a bunch of maniacs in any case.

  The plan to disband the Brigade was shelved, but its numbers were reduced to three battalions of 1,300 men each. That left around 3,900 men in total. Let’s round it up to four thousand: who knows whether Pa and his ‘native’ comrades were even included in the official figures.

  *

  The journalist who wrote about the Corpse Train zoomed in on the prisoner transport which left after Pa’s train. Of the hundred prisoners on board, forty-six were dead on arrival in Surabaya. Pa’s transport was an earlier train, a Ghost Train that never made the news.

  The prisoner transports were needed to ease the pressure in the overcrowded prisons. In Bondowoso there were almost three hundred people in custody, one hundred over the limit. It was therefore essential that one hundred prisoners be transported to Surabaya. The wagons for the Corpse Train were ordered the previous day, while Pa had to make arrangements for his Ghost Train on the day itself. The lieutenant in charge of the Corpse Train clearly had a remarkably low IQ and did something Pa would never have done: he shut all the doors tight and secured them with steel wire.

  Into one of the wagons of the Corpse Train, a prisoner has smuggled a couple of bananas and a fork, which he uses to prick a hole in the floor. A banana leaf is rolled up to serve as a straw through which the prisoners take turns to suck a little oxygen into their lungs on what meteorological records later reveal to be the hottest day of 1947. When the train arrives at Wonokromo station in the south of Surabaya after a journey of nearly 140 miles – eleven hours without water, without food, with no ventilation and a debilitating lack of oxygen – the Military Police are unable to open the third and last wagon. Railway personnel have to be called in to lend a hand. The door opens at last, and the hush inside is immediately apparent. Initially, the military policemen think it’s a silent protest, though the surviving prisoners from the first two wagons are already beginning to stagger onto the platform. When the second sergeant major realizes that the third wagon contains nothing but dead bodies, he collapses – a luxury not afforded to the survivors from the other wagons, who are given the absurd order to drag the corpses of their fellow prisoners from the train and lay them out on the platform. The Military Police count forty-six dead prisoners and fifty-four survivors. The bodies are loaded onto trucks. The living have to sit among the dead and carry the corpses into the hospital on arrival. Then they are thrown into Werfstraat prison, except for the eleven who are in such a bad way that they are admitted to hospital for treatment.

  Have you read the Memorandum on Excesses, Phil? The Dutch government’s investigation into war crimes committed by its forces during Indonesia’s war of independence. Perhaps you’ve never even heard of it. Demands have often been made for a new version, a new farce if you like, since the so-called excesses it details were standard practice. That piece of shit document was published the year I stood at Pa’s front door and he asked:<
br />
  ‘Why did you forsake me?’

  I assume Pa has never read it and neither have you. In pursuit of his Corpse Train, the journalist took an investigative trip to Java and writes that the Memorandum on Excesses devotes only a few paragraphs to what it calls the ‘Bondowoso Affair’.

  When the press finally got wind of the Corpse Train, the Marine Brigade issued a communiqué stating that over fifty previous transports had taken place and that over 2,800 prisoners had been relocated without a hitch. The focus therefore came to rest firmly on the Corpse Train, though Pa’s Ghost Train travelled almost exactly the same route and certainly encountered a hitch or two.

  According to the journalist, who wastes relatively few words on Pa, four Indonesians died on his Ghost Train, in a covered goods wagon that was sealed tight. He makes no mention of the first prisoner who made a run for it when Pa opened the door in Probolinggo, the man Pa says he shot dead on the spot (death number one). No mention of the second prisoner who tried to escape and wound up hanging from a barbed-wire fence (death number two). No mention of the third prisoner who tried to jump from the train as it crossed a bridge.

  Ong shot, but missed. Then I took aim and the fugitive plunged into the ravine. (Death number three.)

  No mention of the two prisoners who tried to jump from the train between Bangil and Sidoarjo and who were shot dead by Pa and his helpers (deaths four and five). And no mention of the prisoner who tried to flee in Sidoarjo and was gunned down by Pa (death number six).

  Pa reports that three prisoners had succumbed to the stifling conditions by the time the train reached Pasuruan and two more come Sidoarjo. Of the twenty-nine prisoners, Pa delivered eighteen alive and five dead to the Military Police.