Child of All Nations (36 page)

“Take this ship, Mr. Minke. Listen to the engine. This is not owned by the government. The Dutch company KPM owns it. Yes, people say that most of the capital comes from the queen. And that’s why they can use the word
koninklijke
—royal—but it’s not owned by the government.”

His talk became even noisier, the milk from this wolf was becoming thicker and thicker, too sticky to swallow. His lips moved quickly, sometimes sucked in and almost disappearing, but his voice lashed out, overcoming the power of the wind that was crashing into my ears. “Surprised? That there is a company owned by the queen but not government property? That’s called a phenomenon, sir, a phenomenon of our age. Don’t ask me. I know what it is you want to protest. Ah no, you already know.”

I shook my head in a panic.

“No? Truly?” He gave a short, biting laugh. “It is the government that guards, that guarantees the security of the queen’s ships, the profit that comes from each trip. It is the same with all the sugar mills and plantations, all the private businesses.”

He went on to tell me all about all the giant businesses in the Indies: figures, protozoa spread throughout my land, growing and multiplying, making the people of this land dance like marionettes.

He flung his cigarette into the sea. It didn’t sink, but bobbed with the waves as they broke against the ship’s sides.

“Any kind of capital can enter the Indies. The government has opened the door. The government guarantees the security of that capital. A bitter thing to know, Mr. Minke, where all that capital comes from. Mostly from the Netherlands, sir, but lately there has been more from the peasants of Java themselves. Have you read about this year’s sensation?” He stared at me like a devil about to pluck out my eyes. “No? Of course not: It hasn’t been reported in the papers here. An incredible story, Mr. Minke. Something uncovered in Holland and exposed to public view in the Parliament. N. P. van den Berg and Mr. C. Th. van Deventer have made the accusation that the royal family has taken from the peasants of Java the amount of 951 million guilders. Have you ever seen a thousand guilders?”

The wolf’s thick milk was gulped down in one clot.

“The royal family misappropriating the wealth of the Javanese peasants! Farmers, just farmers! That’s what they have alleged—van den Berg and van Deventer.”

Ter Haar stared at me once again, as if he wanted to lift me up and fling me onto the deck. He was angry, frustrated. “We here in the Indies have been waiting and waiting for something more to be done about the matter in Parliament. But no, that was all, Mr. Minke, nothing more. I don’t know how many mouths the palace gagged with wads of money, but all of a sudden the members of Parliament went mute.”

I didn’t understand, but I nodded. Even how one thing related to another I didn’t understand.

“But the greatest outcry in Holland is over the debt the Indies accumulated—one hundred million guilders in six years—to finance its lust to conquer Aceh.”

The image that appeared before me was of Jean Marais. And
a question: Who was this man that I have called Ter Haar? As he watched me—perhaps I was standing open-mouthed in confusion—he laughed boisterously.

“What can one do? Your eyes must see these things clearly. Ignorance is shameful. Allowing someone to remain in ignorance is betrayal. I’m free from accusations of betrayal now.”

He slapped my shoulder. “What a
De Locomotief
man says is different from what a
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws
man says.”

“Do you know Kommer?”

“Kommer? The reporter from the Malay paper? I’ve heard his name.”

“He’s never spoken as you have.”

He didn’t react. Instead he bent his tall body over so he could bring his lips close to my ears. “And Governor-General Rooseboom, famed for his liberality and gentleness, no less a fraud—the deceit of a mousedeer, Mr. Minke.” Abruptly, he straightened his body. Leaning against a ship’s ladder, his head thrown back, he broke into cascading laughter. And when he finally stopped laughing, he bent down again, his lips near my ears: “You read the newspapers.” And like Nijman: “But not everything is printed in the papers. Have you heard about the decision to grant the Japanese equal status with Europeans?” I nodded. “Russia is furious with the Netherlands Indies.”

“Russia?”

“Yes, Mr. Minke, the czar. You know why?” I shook my head. “Well, isn’t Russia at odds at the moment in Manchuria with Japan? Several weeks ago”—he tried to count it out on his fingers but was unsuccessful—“the Russian fleet turned up at Tanjung Perak harbor, Mr. Minke, at Batavia itself. Old Governor-General Rooseboom, Mr. Minke, he was rushing about everywhere looking for ways to make the Russians happy. Yes, Mr. Minke, the crown prince was with the fleet. He was on his way to Port Arthur.” He let out a breath. “Do you know where Port Arthur is? In the name of neutrality of the Netherlands Indies, the crown prince was entertained with a hunting trip in the forests around Priok. And so there would be no complaints, Rooseboom ordered that some of the deer from the governor’s palace at Bogor be caught and let loose at Priok.” He broke out into that boisterous laughter again. “Just imagine how happy the crown prince must have been to make those half-tame animals topple to kiss the earth.
And the flattery from the Dutch officers, already prepared: What a great hunter is His Highness, the noble crown prince of Russia. It was the first time in the history of the Indies a hunter could down three deer in one strike.”

Now his voice slowed down.

“That was during the day. At night the daughter of a bupati was brought to him. God! In the name of the neutrality of the Indies! How old was that girl? Almost fourteen! God! In Europe, in the Indies, the lies are the same.”

I wasn’t capable of following all his chatter and all his laughter, his bendings and straightenings. Now a new cigarette inhabited his mouth. The previous one had been elegant; this one was of corn husk, tied with red thread.

“And that neutrality, Mr. Minke, is all for the sake of big business in the Indies.”

It seemed he was relieving himself of some burden that had nothing to do with me. Now that he was released he was silent. I used the opportunity to question him about where he came from and where he received his education. He seemed so young. He laughed. He did not avoid my questions, but neither was he clear in his answers. From his sparse replies I gathered that at twelve he had become a cabin boy on a ship bound for the Indies. In Surabaya he had jumped ship. He then became a general run-about at a factory. Later he went into the interior of Borneo, and the land of the Torajas in the Celebes, and the Batak lands in North Sumatra—perhaps then too as general servant—with a research scholar. Since that time many researchers had sought to hire him as an assistant, especially people from the churches.

Humbly he acknowledged: “It was from them I gleaned what knowledge I have of the world. But it was with my own eyes, my ears, the soles of my feet, that I gathered a few clumps of knowledge about the Indies themselves.”

“What you’ve just been telling me—it’s not about the jungles, is it?”

He laughed again, but not so boisterously this time. He was no longer smoking; his stock had been wiped out.

“What’s the difference? All these great cities are just jungles, places to wield power over others, to get whatever life-essence can be sucked from people’s bodies. Yes? Isn’t that so?” His laughter was less and less convincing. Then, abruptly: “Mr. Minke, the
government is not as it used to be. Your people, Mr. Minke, there’s nothing left of them but the dregs after their bodies have been squeezed by forced cultivation. The great companies pay the fattest tribute to the Indies state now. So, if necessary, the government will mobilize army and police, civil service and village officialdom to make sure their will is done.”

So we returned once again to that issue. I could find no way to escape the harangue.

He talked on and on about a dozen things of which I had never heard before. The
Oosthoek
sailed calmly to the west. Everywhere there were sailboats of the fishermen, and of the Bugis and the Madurese.

“I don’t know how long these Buginese and Madurese boats will be able to hold out against the Dutch ships. There used to be many more; I myself have witnessed how the steamships—first the Arabs and then the Chinese—started to push them aside.”

“That’s never been taught at school.”

“Sorry, Mr. Minke, I’ve never been to school. And anyway, what would be the point of teaching things like that? Truly, I am so happy to hear a Native say something like that. These times, Mr. Minke: Like a perforated rice-steamer, this age can never be filled up, no matter how many different questions are asked and answers given. Deceit is flourishing everywhere. Not the deceit of people who only want a dish of rice—that’s no more than the cunning of a people already at the same level as the mud of their homeland—but deceit and falseness that ride the wind, Mr. Minke, deceit as the legitimate child of excessive power. I’m sorry, Mr. Minke, this person you speak to here is no more than the illegitimate child of one mother and who knows how many fathers.”

His confused talking, as if he were being hunted by some devil, ended abruptly. His hands groped in his pockets, left and right, but he couldn’t find a single cigarette.

“Why would the queen invest capital here?” A question flew from my mouth to mask my stupidity.

“What for? Ah, Mr. Minke, what does it mean to be a queen in these mad times? Without capital she too would be the servant of capital. Even a king is best off being a king of capital.”

“But the teachers all say we are entering the age of modernity, not the age of capital.”

“They only half know what’s going on, Mr. Minke. The
journalists know more about what’s actually happening. And to half know something is not necessarily to know it all. Look, Mr. Tollenaar, didn’t you use the pen name Max Tollenaar to conjure up the image of Multatuli’s
Max Havelaar?
From that alone people will know you are the spiritual child of Multatuli. Your humanity is great; even so, Mr. Minke, such humanity, without real knowledge of life in the Indies, could miss its mark altogether. What people call the modern age, Mr. Tollenaar, is really the age of the triumph of capital. Everybody alive in this modern age is ordered about by big capital; even the education you received was adjusted to capital’s needs, not your own. So too the newspapers. Everything is arranged by it, including morality, law, truth, and knowledge.”

As time went on Ter Haar’s talk became more and more like a pamphlet. (I myself had some doubts about including all this here, especially as I wasn’t really able to fathom it all. But not to include it would also not be right; Ter Haar took me on a journey to new continents that I had never encountered in my geography lessons. So if these notes read like a pamphlet—yes, that was the situation in which I found myself. The ship, the past, Surabaya and Wonokromo back there—they all became the pages of a pamphlet, splinters of an incomplete knowledge.)

And it was still difficult to accept the notion of the absolute sway of big capital over people’s lives. In the villages people weave, spin, make batik, plant their fields, marry, reproduce, die, and are born—and none of this is because of capital. And early in the morning people leave their beds, ritually wash themselves, and face God—and is that because of capital?

Now I was beginning to understand what Jean Marais had said about the power of capital in the Aceh war. Ter Haar gave more than a glimpse: It was a flash of lightning. Marais had said that the Netherlands Indies was jealous of English capital, which could fondle and control Andalas through Aceh, a buffer state. The independence of Aceh was violated by the Dutch, even though Holland always said that the Netherlands violated Aceh with the agreement of England.

“Yes”—Ter Haar spoke again—“but what people call capital is more than just money, Mr. Minke. It is something invisible, abstract; it has a supernatural power over real objects; it causes everything that is scattered to collect together, that which is together
to scatter, that which is liquid to solidify, and that which is solid to turn into liquid. Once in its grip, everything changes shape. The wet is made dry and the dry made wet. A new god has the world in its fist. Yes, it’s a boring thing, but a fact. Production, trade, the sweat of the people, transport, communications—no one, not one person, is free from its power, influence, and instructions. Also, Mr. Minke, the way people think, people’s ideals, they too are approved or not approved, blessed or not blessed by it.”

The longer he spoke the more fantastic his story became, contradicting everything I had ever been taught at school. It burst from my lips—an attempt to restate a classic issue: “Would it be as true to say that everything is ruled by science and its laws?”

He laughed amiably. “Science and its laws are now no more than just an empty swelling, powerless.…”

And Mama reckoned everything was ruled by authority, by power. Ter Haar broke into that uncontrollable laughter again. His tall body shivered. At that moment I reckoned he must have a nervous disorder. Neither he nor his rhetoric could be completely accepted.

“There is no power that does not stem from massed capital, Mr. Minke, not these days. That other kind of power is to be found only among shepherd peoples wandering the grasslands, or other nomads in the deserts, jungles, and savannah. The cleverest of people, and even Stephenson, the hero of the century, would never have been able to give the locomotive to the world with no capital. It is only with capital that he was able to order the clouds of steam to make those carriages move hundreds of feet. Without capital people could not make light or bring to life the telegraph. Without capital, those big men would be nothing more than leather shadow puppets with no backbone to keep them from flopping. Isn’t that so?”

The wild wolf had spoken too much. It was too complicated to digest.

That afternoon I slept well. I used the evening to note down all his babblings and to think a little about the truth of his words. Everything my teachers had taught me was now threatened with being turned upside down, thanks to this Capital. What had Ter Haar said? Everything is subjugated by it: individuals, societies, and peoples. Those who don’t wish to be subjugated remove themselves, run away. Kings, armies, the president of the United
States, France, even the beggars by the roadside stalls or the churches, all, he said, are in its grip. Peoples who reject the power of capital will languish and die. Societies that run away from it will return to the Stone Age. All must accept it as a reality, like it or not.