The Interpreter from Java Read online

  My father was around twenty when he saw the Allies’ armoured cars roll into Surabaya, the city of his birth, and offered his services as an interpreter. Once the Japanese had capitulated and the Dutch arrived to take over the reins from the Allies, he took up with the Marines. Regular Dutch soldiers played bumbling bit parts in his tales of heroism, unlike the Brits, Australians and above all the Gurkhas he encountered. Those Dutch dopes – Belandas in the local lingo – thought nothing of lighting a cigarette in the pitch dark with the Indonesian enemy just a stone’s throw away. Razing villages to the ground didn’t count as heroism. That was just part of a marine’s job, nothing romantic about it. Romance only reared its head when a village wasn’t torched.

  ‘No, don’t. I’ve got a sweetheart in that kampong!’

  ‘Hey, a girl there swears she’s had a baby by a cousin of mine, ha ha! Those Belandas fuck themselves silly over here. Will us Indos get the same privileges in Holland? Weird, isn’t it: the Belandas don’t hit their women. Hear that? In Holland the women hit the men! The girls over there are tough as nails, aduh!’

  East Java. Bodies never floated in the kali for long. Crocodiles still swam there. By the time Police Action No. 1 was under way, Our Jan had found himself a berth on a ship bound for home, the sly dog. He wiped the crocodile tears from his kisser and whistled tunes of mock nostalgia through his porthole. From the truck that drove him down to the docks, he had chucked his correspondence book at a bunch of local interpreters for a laugh. It eventually fell into my father’s hands and became his most treasured possession. The lads from Limburg and Brabant loved to wave those books around, brimming with photos and addresses of beguiling Dutch girls eager to write to brave young men out in the tropics: goddesses in the eyes of every Indo.

  My father’s Chinese mother had given him a Germanic name: Arend, which means eagle. But Java being a place where names are readily corrupted, most people just called him Arto. It was only in Holland that his birthname was restored to him, by us, his children. We added the definite article for good measure: the Eagle. Calling your father by his given name was unheard of. Back then, we didn’t even call him Pa. He was something else entirely.

  Before we arrived on the scene, dashing Arto had managed to charm no less than three Dutch women with the photos and letters he sent from East Java: a cultured lady from Amsterdam who had her picture taken on a soaring staircase in a high-class photo studio; a middle-class woman from The Hague who posed with a parasol in front of the splendid Kurhaus Hotel; and a heffalump with a cheery smile from the southern town of Helmond, the Kediri of the Netherlands if you will. Kediri being the town in East Java where Arto’s mother was born.

  The lady from Amsterdam sent impeccably calligraphed letters in green ink, tied with lilac bows. The woman from The Hague used a typewriter on which the e and the o had worn away, a shortcoming made good by the fact that she could reach speeds of up to two hundred strokes a minute, or so she said. This was a skill Arto envied, since the interrogation reports he had to bang out on rolls of paper were often the length of his arm, verbatim accounts of the agonized cries of Indonesian resistance fighters as they were tortured by the Dutch marines and their interpreters.

  Arto belonged to a group of ‘native’ interpreters. He could speak and write Dutch, English, French, German, High Javanese, Middle Javanese, Low Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese, Chinese Pidgin, Cantonese, Japanese, Arabic and, of course, Malay, the lingua franca of the Archipelago’s coastal regions. The heffalump from Helmond was wowed by Arto’s linguistic prowess. He in turn was taken aback by her childish handwriting, idiotic punctuation and inane comments. He let a marine chum from Brabant read her letters and he said she must be left-handed, explaining that in Holland everyone who wrote with their left hand was made to switch to their right. It was the Brabant boy’s considered opinion that left-handed women made the best lovers. He based this assertion on his own experience and even went so far as to spurn the advances of right-handed women.

  The Helmond heffalump had a couple of sisters, the prettiest of whom was determined to find herself a dashing young man from the tropics. Her name was Riek and she dictated choice phrases to her elder sister, the heffalump, such as ‘them eyes o’ yours don’t half make me melt like butter’.

  ‘That’s barely even Dutch,’ grinned the marine from Brabant, sitting beside Arto as they barrelled along in an armoured vehicle during Police Action No. 1. Seconds later, dashing Arto hit a landmine and was thrown 250 feet into a ravine. To his dismay, the spinal injuries he sustained prevented him from taking part in Police Action No. 2. For a time he lay low at Willemsoord Barracks in Surabaya, going out on the town once in a while, until he began to hear his name carried with increasing frequency on the wind that was stirring in Sukarno’s back yard. He was on a blacklist. The war had been decided, Arto had lost, decolonization could begin. Ship after ship packed with servicemen and civilians left for Dutch shores. Dashing Arto was ordered to remain within the confines of the barracks. Help came in the shape of a Dutch captain, a shadowy figure without whose network he would never have been able to escape his homeland, where the only future that awaited him was in the belly of a crocodile.

  Days before his departure, during the quiet, less dangerous hours of the afternoon, Arto said farewell to his mother, the cook and the housemaid. The rest of his family were absent. That evening he sneaked out of the barracks with Ben de Lima, an Ambonese pal, who knew a good Chinese place on Embong Malang. Ben swore they served the best pork in town, perhaps in East Java, if not the whole island. He also claimed to know the Chinese chef’s secret, but he chuckled and kept it to himself.

  ‘I’ll find out,’ said Arto. ‘Just you wait. There’s no keeping a secret from me, you know that. Whenever you couldn’t get those bastards to talk you came to me, remember?’

  Arto was referring to the interrogation techniques he employed to loosen the tongues of Indonesian prisoners. In that respect, he had always been superior to good-hearted Ben de Lima. The two men had a long voyage ahead of them. There was more than enough time to make Ben spill the beans.

  Ben nodded indifferently; all he wanted to do was to eat and forget. Before long, Arto was forced to admit his friend was right: he had never eaten more succulent pork in his life. It was a small, nondescript restaurant, a little off the beaten track, with a side entrance you would walk right past if you didn’t know it was there. Beyond the dining room was a courtyard teeming with cockroaches. Night shadows crowded around the dim light of bare bulbs orbited by buzzing insects. Nothing unusual about that, but Arto had been rattled by the news that people were out to get him and had to suppress the urge to ask Ben to escort him to the kamar kecil.

  The toilet had a wooden door with a heart-shaped hole at eye level. Ben had told him the Dutch marines called it a cesspit and that the restaurant’s Chinese owner had done his best to imitate the Dutch experience. It was lit by the feeble glow of an oil lamp and contained a raised pot with a lid on it, something Arto had never encountered before. He removed the lid, sat down and set about his business.

  He counted three before he heard the turd land far below him. As he scooped water from the pail beside the pot to rinse his backside, a noise beneath him made him jump. Hurriedly, he pulled up his trousers. As he wiped the sweat from his brow, the noise came again: the contented grunting of pigs down in the depths. He felt a stab of anger at Ben for making a fool of him, but putting the lid back on the pot, he decided there were worse things in life. An arse riddled with bullets, to name but one.

  *

  Arriving in Holland after his long voyage, Arto’s first impulse was to leap into the water. His second was to turn and run back up the gangway and into the belly of the Great Bear, the troop ship that had carried him to the Dutch coast in six weeks. As the ship’s librarian, he’d had a decent enough time. The lads from Brabant and Limburg he met on Java had told him a thousand times that the sun did not always shine in Holland, but he had never wanted to belie
ve it. Now, looking down at the quayside shrouded in mist and the sombre figures in thick woollen overcoats – men in hats, women in headscarves – a joyless, irrevocable future flashed before his eyes. His mother had given him a set of six ivory table knives to take with him, knives that severed the physical ties between Arto and Java forever.

  As Arto was setting foot on the IJ docks in Amsterdam, five pemudas armed to the teeth were paying his mother a visit. These young Indonesian freedom fighters had tied red bandannas around their fevered brows, Japanese warrior style. They did not take the trouble to enter by the gate but leapt – no, flew – over the razor-sharp teeth along the top of the fence, spikes Arto and his brothers had once filed down with the patience of angels to make sure that any would-be intruder would end his life as satay. The five pemudas laughed at this notion but were denied the chance to blast open the lock on the front door with the guns they had stolen from the Japanese capitulators.

  Arto’s mother had appeared in the doorway, with a searching look that somehow made her small frame tower high above them. Her sarong was the earth, her kebaya the sky, her brow the heavens.

  The five pemudas greeted the Chinese woman with the traditional Indonesian sembah, and, apologizing profusely, explained why they had come.

  ‘Go on then, shoot me,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Sie, we are very sorry. We have come for your son, your last-born. It’s Arto we want.’

  ‘Arto is in Holland.’

  ‘What? Has Arto fled to Holland?’

  ‘Listen, you bunch of jessies, your friends have come knocking on my door before now. What was Arto supposed to do, sit here and wait for your bullets?’

  One of them lit up a kretek cigarette. Pensively, he blew the clove-scented tobacco smoke into the air and said in melodious Dutch, ‘Mrs Sie, it would have been better if you had handed over your son to be tried by us. Then our dead could have slept in peace.’

  ‘In that case, take my life instead of my son’s.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Sie. You are a good person. We will pray for you.’

  They quietly opened the gate and backed away over the porch in single file, clasping their hands as they took their leave of the Chinese woman. Once they were out on the street, they turned their backs on the house at number 5, thrust their weapons in the air and yelled ‘Long live the Republic of Indonesia!’

  Some 18,000 nautical miles away, dashing Arto had been housed in the Alexander Barracks behind the dunes that shield The Hague from the North Sea. In the city centre, he met up with people he knew from the Indies. No one ever called it the Dutch East Indies and it was never, ever referred to as Indonesia. Years later I see a young man, barely twenty-five years old, posing in full dress uniform with a former comfort girl beside the kiosk designed by Berlage. A postcard-sized black-and-white photograph, never sent. The young man believes the citizens of The Hague will hold him in high esteem for his wartime deeds of heroism, while the young woman hopes to erase her shameful past as a plaything for Japanese officers in a new city where no one knows her name. But both are looked on with suspicion. Holland has barely recovered from German occupation and whatever happened over there in the Indies is of concern to no one but ‘the colonials’. Those foreigners have bags of money, after all. They can bugger off back to whatever island they came from. There’s a bloody housing shortage as it is, and those darkies stink as bad as that muck they eat, reeking of garlic and that shit they call trassi.

  The misguided notion that ‘the colonials’ were loaded with money had also occurred to the lady friend Arto went to meet in Amsterdam. He felt distinctly out of place in the starched-linen restaurant she had chosen, understood very little of the menu and soon began to wonder whether the woman had rehearsed her lines in advance. Her words seemed to have been dictated to her and reminded him of the green ink and lilac bows of her letters. Lilac was also the colour of the bow that adorned her hat. He had to make a conscious effort to follow her as she spoke of all kinds of writers who didn’t interest him in the least. At school he had got no further than Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Robinson Crusoe and a handful of other Western classics. Fortunately, he was able to tell her a thing or two about his father’s family, a subject about which she was more than curious. They were well-to-do, unlike him, the bastard son, who had to live on bread and water for a week after the starched-linen restaurant handed him the bill.

  The second candidate from his list of female penfriends was a good deal cheaper. They arranged to meet at an establishment in Scheveningen, where they drank tea together. A solitary biscuit was served with the tea, a cultural difference that received ample coverage in one of the many letters he sent to his family in Surabaya, half of which never arrived. The lady from The Hague spoke in a different accent to her rival from Amsterdam, more regal. In other ways too, her bearing was a touch more formal, but thankfully she spoke of things he knew: typewriters, mostly. She worked at a notary’s office and he asked her whether that was more prestigious here in Holland than working for the government. When he signalled to the waiter to bring extra sachets of sugar for his tea, the lady from The Hague’s neutral expression soured somewhat. He explained his request. ‘Us chaps from the Indies like our tea sweet.’

  ‘Oh yes, I understand. So you drink tea there too?’

  ‘Tea grows on Java. As does sugar. And coffee.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. And what about typewriters?’

  ‘Typewriters do not grow on Java.’

  Unable to gauge his intonation, she did not know whether to treat this as an attempt at humour. The best course of action, it seemed to her, was to glance at her wristwatch and postpone the stroll they had agreed to take until another day.

  Relieved, Arto was now free to wander the length of the busy promenade unaccompanied. He looked around constantly, keeping an eye out not only for Indos, but also for Indonesians. He had heard about traitors coming to Holland as stowaways, men who, as far as he was concerned, should be throttled without a second thought. He wondered whether buying a hat might help him escape the notice of all these people who were staring at him so strangely. Even the sea seemed to greet him with a filthy grin.

  His final trump card lay in Helmond, and a slow train took him to this provincial southern town on a summer’s day in 1950. He relished the punctuality with which the train pulled into the station, not one minute sooner or later than the arrival time announced at Hollands Spoor station in The Hague. Try telling that to those Indonesian layabouts on Java.

  Helmond was small. Even quieter than The Hague, which itself was a mortuary compared to the bustle of Surabaya. There was no one at the station to meet him, he had told no one about his trip. All he knew was the heffalump’s address: Beelsstraat 1, where her father had a cobbler’s shop. Arto approached several people to ask for directions. Friendly though they were, they proved even more difficult to understand than the marines from Brabant he had hung around with in East Java.

  Beelsstraat was a thoroughfare by Helmond standards but, in his eyes, it was a poor excuse for a street. Even the corner property at number 1 looked like a doll’s house. A matron with a greasy, checked tea towel knotted to her apron opened the door to him, uttered a cry of alarm and bolted back inside. Then the sharp, birdlike face of a wiry man popped out of the adjacent cobbler’s workshop and shouted indoors in a calm voice. Three girls, the man’s daughters he surmised, appeared in the doorway and giggled as they examined the East Indian – which was what people called his type at the time – from head to toe.

  He looked down at the tips of his shoes, gleaming in the afternoon sun of Helmond. The crease in his trousers was as sharp as when he had left, despite the train journey. Only a sliver of cufflink glinted below the sleeves of his jacket. What was there to giggle about?

  Was his hair out of place? Had he overdone the brilliantine?

  People from the Indies were apt to bemoan the penny-pinching ways of the Dutch, but in Brabant this was less of an issue and Arto sat down to a generous lunch. The
heffalump said very little; in fact, she said nothing at all. Every now and then her sister Mies would give him a fish-eyed stare from behind her thick glasses and ask him a question about the tropics, but most of the talking was done by Riek, the tallest sister and, with her bouncy hair, the prettiest of the three. Her thick Helmond accent meant he understood very little of what she said, but she sounded amusing. Our Jan was not around, a matter of some regret to the cobbler, because Our Jan had such great stories about the Indies. ‘Or is it called Indonesia now?’ he said, mainly to himself and oblivious to the sensitive chord he had struck in the young man from the tropics sitting opposite him.

  Following an odd meal consisting of soup, bread, cold meats thinly sliced, a boiled egg that had to be eaten with a spoon, tea and an orange, it was time for the three sisters to leave the room. This they did in the wake of the speechless matron, still in shock at the presence of a young man from the tropics in her own home.

  But before dashing Arto came to sit face to face with the man of the house, he asked in flawless Dutch if he might avail himself of the toilet.

  As it turned out, the cobbler’s family did not have the kind of modern toilet he had become accustomed to in The Hague. They still had what might be referred to as a cesspit, in an outbuilding accessed through the garden. As he approached it, Arto was reminded of his farewell meal at the Chinese restaurant in Surabaya: the incredibly succulent slices of roast pork, coated in seasoned flour and accompanied by a red sauce made from tropical fruits.