Child of All Nations (35 page)

“Young Master,” he protested.

“Don’t refuse. This is an order. Take that watch wherever you go.” I took his left hand and I shook it, trembling.

He became even more amazed. And in that condition, I left him.

The pendulum clock in the front parlor rang out twice. All my things were packed in my suitcase. My briefcase was full of writing paper. I had resolved not to sleep. I walked back and forth in the front rooms and the back, making sure I would remember all these things that I was about to leave behind for who knows how long, perhaps forever: the furniture, the phonograph that had not been used for so long, not even for recording, the ornaments on the walls, and the shiny, newly polished parquetry, all glowing in the light of the gloomy oil lamp.

For quite a while I gazed at the portrait painted by Jean Marais—the picture of Nyai Ontosoroh. In the dim light of the lamp it seemed more alive than even Mama herself. All her strength was there, as if she were a goddess immune from pain and death, remaining strong in all weather and situations. Yes, even the clouds in the background seemed to be running away to avoid her head. If she had lived ten or maybe thirty centuries ago, the painter would have had the right to paint her with a halo. In the future, if I am given a long life, long enough to become senile, this
woman will still never leave my memory. Her face, her kindness, her wisdom, her patience and resolve, her strength, I will take them all with me to my death.

I went back into my room and took out from its wine-red velvet cover Jean Marais’s painting of Annelies and stood it near a lamp.

Ann, you are still smiling. It was you who first brought me into this room, and into the garden beside it. I am still here now, Ann, even though for the last time, and you left it before me to go who knows where. I know I will never see you again in this life. Nor will I ever meet a woman like you.

“Put the picture back!”

Mama was standing behind me. She was a carrying a bamboo bag, which she put on the table.

“Here is some bread and drink; you must breakfast before you board the ship.” From the basket she also took an envelope, and gave it to me. “This is what you have saved while you have been working here. One hundred and fifty guilders. A carriage is waiting. Leave now. You must carry all your things yourself. No one must see you. Good luck, Child, Nyo. Good luck.”

She embraced me. She kissed my forehead. She helped me carry my things to the door. Before leaving the house I asked for her prayers for my safety and for her blessings. She gave them, then said once again: “Good luck, Child. Live up to your ideals.”

She turned and went inside. I stood in a daze on the steps. It was here that I first met Annelies and came to know her, then became a member of this family. My breast felt heavy. What more could I hope for from this beautiful house? There is no longer anyone waiting for me to come home, waiting for my caresses. A tear dropped.

The cold wind struck my face. The basket and bag and suitcase I carried all together in my two hands. I had taken just a few steps.

“Let me help you, Young Master!” My bag fell from my hands. It was Darsam.

“You won’t talk to anyone!”

“Where is Young Master going?”

“You’re the only one who knows. Keep quiet about it.”

We stealthily made our way to the road. Seeing us approach, the driver lit the carriage’s lamps.

Silently Darsam lifted my things up onto the carriage.

“A safe journey, Young Master, wherever you are going.” From his waist he took a dagger in a leather sheath and handed it to me. “Take this, Young Master.” He pushed the weapon into my belt.

“Come on, driver!”

Good-bye to you all: Wonokromo, beautiful and sorrowful memories, Mama, Darsam, Trunodongso and your family. Goodbye; I will not return. Mama, the woman I admire most in my life, you, in whose hand I was no more than a lump of clay to shape however you wished, who can explain the great issues, who can dig deep into many things at once, who is intelligent and educated, who is ahead of your times, good-bye. All your hopes for me will be realized, Mama. All of them.

I sobbed in the darkness of the morning.

The carriage traveled slowly through the stillness, farther and farther away from Wonokromo. I ordered the driver to drive around Kranggan, past my old boarding house and Jean Marais’s house. Maysoroh was no doubt still asleep under her blankets. Good-bye everybody, good-bye to you all. And to you too, Mr. and Mrs. Telinga! I had to use all my strength to resist the urge to see Maysoroh. That sweet child! How clever she had been in keeping her father’s friendships alive! How deeply she loved him! All her father’s hurt and pain became her hurt and pain. So young a little one! Good-bye May!

Good-bye to you all.

I instructed the driver to fill in a few hours traveling around, visiting the places I used to like, and also my old school. The building was still blanketed in darkness—no light, either in the compound or along the street outside. Ah, you, my school, are you afraid to look me in the face? Because what you gave me has turned out to mean so little?

The carriage kept moving. Good-bye to you all. I will never return to see any of you again. I am on my way to become my own person, to become what I was meant to be.

Good-bye.

T
he ship
Oosthoek
set sail from Tanjung Perak.

The crowd that had come to say last farewells dwindled in the distance; the people now looked like ants swarming over the wharf. I knew not one among them. No, I was afraid, not discouraged. Good-bye to everything, to men and their earth.

The sea took me farther and farther away from the land. I needed to become complete, not the shadow or image of someone else, no matter how much I respected and admired that someone else. I must not see this parting as a sad event. There was nothing more I could expect to gain or learn in Surabaya and Wonokromo, the places that had swallowed up my youth. As time passed, the crowd on the wharf became a blur. In the end all I could see were the mountains to the south.

Though I hadn’t slept at all the night before, I had no desire for sleep. This was the first time I had traveled by boat. My first view of the island of my birth from the ocean: A white line of beach pressed by heavy layers of green growth and mountains,
looking like rows of gray-blue waves—Multatuli’s “Emerald Horizon.”

“Something wrong?” I heard someone greet me in Dutch.

Beside me stood a European—young, friendly-looking. His face was adorned by a smile. His lips were pale. His teeth were somewhat yellow from smoking. He was tall and slim. On his little finger he wore a gold ring with a small diamond, less than a carat. His clothes were all of white cotton.

He held out his hand by way of introduction: “My name is Ter Haar, Mr. Minke, or is it Mr. Max Tollenaar.” He knew my old pen name.

“Oh, Mr. Ter Haar—have we met?”

“I’m a former subeditor at the
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws.
”

“I don’t think I ever have seen you before.”

“Of course you have not. Mr. Nijman does not wish others on the editorial staff to deal with Asians, especially not with Natives.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Especially in your case, Mr. Minke. He did not want you to be influenced by anyone else.”

“Influenced? How?”

He laughed and slapped my shoulder. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. After he had put them back on, he offered me a cigarette. I said I didn’t smoke; he nodded: “It’s best you never take it up, Mr. Minke. Once you try you’ll never be able to give it up. But my smoking doesn’t bother you?”

“Please, go ahead, sir.”

“It is good that you graduated from H.B.S. Too few Natives receive an education as good as that.”

How many times had I heard that? It was a signal: Get ready to discuss a European-type matter. Like a mechanical voice-box I automatically produced from my mouth the usual ever-so-polite response: “I will try to follow what you say as well as I can, Mr. Ter Haar.”

He nodded, focusing his eyes on me. The lecture was about to begin.

“In these times we live in, Mr. Minke, there are different ideas floating about the place. Mr. Nijman doesn’t like people who don’t think as he does.” He coughed several times and threw his
cigarette into the sea. “Ah, this is how it is for cigarette addicts. If you don’t have a cigarette you must have one; once you get one your throat’s hot and sore. You’re lucky you don’t smoke.”

Perhaps he threw his cigarette away not because his throat was sore, but because he needed time to make up his mind whether to tell me what Maarten Nijman was like.

“Mr. Nijman doesn’t like radicals,” I said.

“Ah, you have sharp insight. You are right. And more than that, he is actually an Indo. He is a member of the
Indische Bond.
”

“You’re a radical?”

“A good guess, Mr. Minke.”

I remembered Miriam de la Croix, who had joined a political party, so I asked: “You’re a member of the
Vrizinnige Democraat
party?”

“That’s about right.”

“And you mean that Nijman doesn’t approve of it?”

“Oh, he’s a shareholder in TVK.” He scratched his neck. “So people say, anyway. It seemed he didn’t like my thinking. We often argued, even when it wasn’t necessary. I had no involvement with the TVK. You know about the TVK, the sugar company?”

“Of course. The Madurese call it
te-pe-ka.
”

“It’d be strange to find a Surabayan who didn’t know of it.” He whistled, his cheeks collapsed, and his lip shook. “We had so many fights, I gave in and left.”

“That’s what you’re doing here?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you heading?”

“Semarang, Mr. Minke. I’m going to work for
De Locomotief.
Have you read that paper?”

“Not yet.”

“A pity. The oldest paper in the Indies. It has a long and brilliant history. It’s read in the Netherlands too.”

“A strange name for a newspaper—
De Locomotief.
”

“To honor Mr. Stephenson. The paper was founded at the time the very first locomotive was put to use on Java—thirty-six years ago.”

“How would you compare it to the
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws?
”

“There’s no comparison, Mr. Minke. The
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws
is no more than an extremist colonial paper.”

“So it is a sugar paper.”

“Yes. Many of its younger reporters have been let down, disappointed. They’re sent off to do jobs that aren’t really work for journalists at all.”

Ter Haar did not go on with his comments. Having heard about Kommer’s experiences at Tulangan, it was easier for me to understand what he was saying.

“While nothing adverse is being said about sugar, it looks like any other neutral paper, but as soon as sugar interests are offended, it appears in its real colors. I heard you’ve had some bad experiences of your own with Mr. Nijman.”

“No.”

“Even so, you should write for
De Locomotief
instead. It’s more famous, has a bigger circulation. I’ll try to get your writings published. The paper is read not just in Holland but in South Africa—the Transvaal and Oranje Vrijstaat—and wherever Dutch is understood: in Surinam, in Guiana, in the Antilles. It gives a realistic picture of the Indies to the world.”

He talked with great enthusiasm about the world of the press. I listened like a little boy being told a bedtime story.

There was virtually not a single neutral paper the world over, he said. In the Indies nearly all the papers were colonialist in the extreme. The plantation papers were even worse. Their job was to give indirect orders or make suggestions to government officials that suited the plantation owners. The news reports were merely a formality, so they could call themselves newspapers.

“Your pieces, for example, were published just to keep the readers entertained, humored—to assure them that nothing was wrong in the Indies, that all was safe and secure—safe and secure for the sugar mills, so that the shareholders in the sugar companies would feel at ease, and the share prices back at the exchange in Amsterdam would remain stable.”

I felt he was accusing me: My writings were no more than a way of making the mill owners happy. But I had written those articles in full seriousness, mobilizing all my abilities, all my emotions, and exhausting both in the process.

“And if I had written negatively about the sugar interests?”

“There would have been no space in the paper for your work. On the other hand, everything must be done to keep the confidence of the shareholders, for example, if there were a sugar crisis because of a fall in prices.”

I didn’t understand. How stupid and ignorant I was! A sugar crisis! Fall in prices! How much I did not know. And I was ashamed to ask—an H.B.S. graduate who doesn’t know anything about sugar, who tried to make contact with a cane coolie and was laughed at by Nijman.

As time went on his lecturing became more and more overbearing. He became more enthusiastic—the enthusiasm of an unpaid teacher. It was killing the enthusiasm of the student, who had never paid his fees anyway. What I had heard and understood from Kommer’s story about
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws
was no longer enough to help me. I couldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand! Who can fault someone who simply doesn’t understand?

“So now you know why Nijman could get so upset about a peasant farmer.”

He became more and more carried away. Lustily were the wolf’s teats pushed towards me. In anger and frustration my throat was seized and the nipples jammed into my mouth.

And that sugar-owned man, Nijman—his hands have never held cane, his trousers have never brushed the earth of a cane plantation—why must he become so savage just because of one farmer? Doesn’t the government have enough soldiers and police?

Ter Haar nodded in his knowing-teacher fashion. He raised his head and lit a new cigarette. His sucking made the cloves in the cigarette crackle. The dirty white cigarette paper caught alight, curled, and turned into ash. His threw his gaze towards the deck tower.