Footsteps

  If your people had the courage to fight like the Balinese, to the last man, woman, and child as in the Puputan War, but using modern methods! But how? Organize! Organize now! cried Mei, the old doctor, Ter Haar. But how? How? HOW?

  Begin, and you will find the answers, resounded Mei’s voice from several years before.

  I bowed my head, went back to my desk. I took out my diary and wrote these words: “Today I begin.”

  That evening some of the students from the medical school came to my house. We all sat and chatted beneath the picture of Flower of the Century’s End. The room was filled with smoke. My housemaid was busy going back and forth looking after my guests. There were also some who had been my juniors. There were sixteen in all.

  They were all talking about girls, a subject that never ran dry. There was a new student there who sat silently through the whole conversation, just staring at the picture.

  “You seem to be really taken by that picture,” someone chided him.

  He turned away without answering, and then seemed to fall into a silent reverie.

  “You’re usually quite cheerful,” someone else commented.

  “Can we discuss something more serious,” I suggested. Before anyone had a chance to protest, I continued: “Have any of you heard what has happened in Bali?”

  Not one knew what had happened. Not one.

  The rowdiness disappeared. Everything was quiet. I told them about Bali, about the attack on Denpasar and how the war escalated, and about the Puputan battle.

  “There has never been such a heroic war in Java, or in Europe.”

  “But they were defeated,” interrupted Partokleooo.

  “They lost only because they weren’t properly prepared. As human beings and heroes, they are worthy of much more admiration than the army.”

  “Perhaps. But they lost,” insisted Partokleooo, who had never read a newspaper in his life. “Not being prepared is just an excuse. If you decide to fight the army, it means you’ve calculated that you are prepared and that you do have the ability to win.”

  “I know what you’re getting at,” interrupted Tjipto. “You want to talk about what preparations are needed, what are the conditions that have to be fulfilled.”

  The one who had been admiring Flower of the Century’s End, the one with the round face, smiled, and looked at me with gleaming eyes, but he still didn’t say anything.

  “Begin,” Tjipto encouraged me.

  And I began to explain my views about what the backward countries, very backward countries such as ours, needed to survive in the modern era.

  “It is precisely fulfilling the appropriate conditions that makes you modern. First you must have modern science and knowledge, then modern organization and modern technology.”

  “We’re starting to get more modern science and knowledge,” someone said.

  “But we don’t have any modern organization yet,” I quickly added.

  “So you make technology the bottom priority?” someone asked disapprovingly.

  “Exactly. What we need now is organization.”

  “The old doctor failed in his efforts,” interrupted Partokleooo.

  “He didn’t fail completely. His voice lives on in the hearts of some people. It’s just that no one has started yet,” Wardi supported me.

  “At the very least, my heart is not a desert in which he cries out hopelessly,” I said, “and I think that goes for many of us.”

  “It’s easy for you to talk like that,” contradicted Partokleooo, no longer timid like a rabbit. “You’re not studying anymore. You’re not being hounded all the time by the teachers. Why didn’t you talk like this before?”

  “Up to now all anyone has done is talk about organizing.” The round-faced youth made his voice heard. “No one has ever dared try to do it.”

  The maid came in and told me that the locksmith had arrived.

  I excused myself for a few minutes and went out back.

  The locksmith was a young full-blooded Chinese. I took him into my room to open my wardrobe so he could make a key mold.

  “There’s the wardrobe,” I said.

  But he didn’t move straightaway. He stood instead in front of the painting of Mei, glancing back and forth between me and the portrait. Only after a while did he come away from the painting. He took out a big bunch of keys from under his pajamas and tried several of them. None of them worked. Only then did he try the master key, with its many teeth, and after a bit the door opened. He studied the master key for a moment and then made a mold in some soft wax. Using the mold he made a dummy key from tin and tried it.

  “It works, Tuan,” he said. “Tomorrow you will have a new key.”

  He didn’t leave straightaway, stopping again in front of Mei’s picture. He glanced across at me and, putting on an innocent air, asked: “There is a picture of a Chinese woman here, Tuan?”

  “Engkoh knows her?”

  He looked at me again, his accusing eyes also full of suspicion. He neither nodded nor shook his head. Perhaps this locksmith was a member of the Young Generation and a friend of Mei. Or he could also be a member of the Old Generation. If he was the latter, then he was a potential murderer or kidnapper of my wife. It was clear from his behavior that there was no other possibility. Whether he was from the Old or Young Generation, he was looking for Mei.

  “She died, Koh,” I said.

  He seemed stunned and bit his lip.

  “Her name was Ang San Mei. You’re looking for her, aren’t you? She was my wife.”

  He seemed nervous. I guessed he was indeed a friend of Mei.

  “While she was sick none of her friends came to see her.” He bowed his head deeply. “You didn’t come either. She died peacefully in my arms in the hospital.”

  He didn’t say anything, pretending not to understand what I was talking about. He asked permission to leave, his head still bowed down. I escorted him outside, down the steps and across the yard to the street.

  I went back to my friends. From my chair I could see the locksmith. He couldn’t make up his mind what to do. He walked back and forth, stopping occasionally to look in the direction of my house. Perhaps he had smuggled himself into the Indies like Mei and her fiancé. Perhaps he was someone new, who had just arrived. Perhaps he too was a university student, and now wandered about Betawi in pajamas as a locksmith. Whether or not he was a locksmith, maybe he was also working away for his country and people, even though they might not know it. His English might also be as fluent as my late comrade’s or Mei’s. And such lack of pretensions!

  My country has not been conquered by a foreign people as yours has, chided Mei’s voice. Your work will be more difficult than mine. Your method of work will also be different. And you still haven’t started.

  The locksmith disappeared from view.

  “Gentlemen,” I continued, “two years ago the old doctor, who had spent all his savings to travel around on his mission, said that we were already four years behind the Chinese who had founded the Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan. And we were already two years behind the Arabs. Now we must add a further two years. So what will we do about it, my friends?”

  They had not been able to come to any agreement while I was out attending to the locksmith. They suggested that I begin, but that they couldn’t afford to disrupt their studies. They would not be able to pay the school if they were expelled.

  “I do not mean to disrupt your studies, gentlemen. Even so I ask you to at least think a little about what we’ve discussed. The others have brought in teachers from China and Japan, and the Arabs from Egypt and Algeria. They insist on not teaching Dutch, but English instead. Their graduates continue their studies in schools in Singapore or other British countries. They will return to the Indies as first-class graduates. We will be left even further behind. And still we are not making any efforts. None.”

  The discussion had spoiled their evening. The gaiety had disappeared. The round-faced student returned to silently gazing at the picture
.

  “It’s only a picture,” someone teased him.

  It wasn’t even nine o’clock before they had drifted back to the dormitory. When the curfew horn blew there was not a single one left. It was my fault; they did not need an organization yet.

  The next afternoon the locksmith returned as promised with the new key. After he had handed it over, he forced himself to ask: “Don’t be angry, Tuan, but may I ask where your wife is buried?”

  If he knew, his friends might come and ask for her to be moved from the Moslem cemetery where she was buried. No. She will be buried in the earth that I had bought for her, and for myself in the future. I would not tell him where.

  And he didn’t insist.

  “She didn’t leave behind any writings?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see them, Tuan.”

  I knew that her friends had a greater right to them than I. I went inside and tried out the new key. It worked. I took out a bundle of Mei’s writings and gave them to him.

  While standing in the door, the young Chinese man silently read through them. I didn’t know what was in them. And while he was reading I was able to study the young man’s face. A free man, selling his services cheaply, yet with an interest in papers, dedicating himself to his country and people. No one can possibly love their country, echoed Mei, if they aren’t familiar with the materials that tell about it. If they are not familiar with its history. And especially if they have never done any service for it.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and was served coffee and fried bananas. I stood next to him as he read. His bag, which was canvas and had once been white, rested across his legs. After he finished reading, he become lost in thought and then he glanced up at me.

  “What do they say?” I asked in English.

  “They are not for Tuan,” he answered in Malay.

  So he did understand English.

  “Yes,” I said in Malay, “but what do they say?”

  “They are not for Tuan,” he insisted.

  “Very well. Then take them all.”

  He bowed politely and left, taking with him the letters and his old canvas bag. His pajamas were old, and washed thoroughly as if they had never ever been dirty. So unpretentious. He knew one of the modern languages. He was educated. What force was it that gave him the strength to work so hard for a country so far away, with an income of just a few cents here and there?

  I was engrossed in trying to estimate my own strength. I must also be able to do it! I shouted.

  I will begin. I had obviously failed with the students from the medical school. There was no other choice but to use the tried and tested method of calling out to people, explaining and giving information. But call out to whom? In public meetings? On a one-to-one basis? And if individually, whom?

  I chose the latter.

  While thinking about just whom I should approach, I left the house and went for a walk through Kwitang Kampung. Remembering what my friend Jean Marais, the painter in Surabaya, had once said, I started to observe more closely all the people about me. It was clear that I could not ask these people to discuss the issue of a modern organization. They know nothing of their own country. Most probably they rarely ever leave their kampung. They have never read a book. Illiterate. Their ancestors knew only the epic tales of heroes greater than the gods, yet who were always defeated by the colonial army.

  The little children were playing in the streets as usual, with only bibs covering their chests. A tuft of hair on the top of their foreheads. Snot dribbling down about their mouths. In a few years they will have grown up to become the illiterate youth of the kampung. Only one or two of them would learn to read and write and would end up as foremen over the others. Most would die due to one or another parasitical disease. Could they reach forty? And if they did survive until forty, if they overcame the diseases that afflicted them, would their lives be any better than they were when they were children? They would continue to live within their narrow destiny. Never having any comparison. Happy are they who know nothing. Once you can compare your situation with others, once you have that knowledge, only restlessness and dissatisfaction ensue.

  Along the side of a lane was the leather workshop owned by the man Da’im. His workers slaved from nine in the morning until nine at night, working half naked to make harnesses and horseshoes. I often passed this workshop. None of them knew me, although they all knew who I was. I thought to myself, if the breadwinner was tied to his workplace like this, how much more so his children and his wife.

  The local dokar owner, wrapped in a sarong and wearing a Chinese shirt, nodded and gave me a friendly smile. Perhaps he was on his way to an opium den. His lips were blue and he had sunken eyes. And standing over by the food stall was Mat Colek. Everyone was afraid of him. People said he was a thief and a paid killer. Perhaps, like Abang Puasa in Francis’s story of Nyai Dasima, Mat Colek seemed to think humankind was his personal herd of cattle, the same attitude displayed by British, Japanese, and European imperialism. He also nodded a greeting. Perhaps he remembered the time his jaw was dislocated and couldn’t be closed anymore and I helped him. Maybe if I hadn’t fixed his jaw that time, he wouldn’t be able to ride herd over his cattle. Aha, over there is Mak Romlah, walking along, chewing betel nut and expelling red fluid onto the ground as she goes. She is a madam kept busy looking after many prostitutes.

  Young men dressed in pajamas were off to earn some money and young Moslem women, their heads covered, were heading off to unknown destinations. What lived within these young people’s minds? Marriage, bearing children, multiplying snotty-nosed, naked, bib-wearing babies, getting divorced, marrying again?

  And out there to the north, Japan had defeated the Russian army and navy.

  And still I could not think of whom I should approach.

  I looked back over my past. Not everything had gone smoothly, like a train shooting along its rails. None of these people around me had ever known any of what I had known. They probably had never even sat in a classroom. They knew nothing else except making a living and multiplying themselves. Beings kept like a herd of cattle! They don’t even understand how badly off they are. And neither do they know of the giant forces building up to the north, eating everything in their path, never satisfied. And if they did know, they would not care.

  Among all these people I felt like an all-knowing god, who also knew how pathetic would be their fate if the bacteria of the north kept spreading. They would become cattle ridden over by criminals and imperialists together. Something had to be done. Something! Was organizing the only way? I could not answer. I didn’t know. And if we had an organization, then what?

  Was their situation any better before the people and land of the Indies had fallen into the grip of the Dutch? My teachers at school had taught that things had been worse. The rajas had never cared about the health and welfare of their subjects—only about how to rob them and use them for royal pleasure. And, damn it, I had to agree with my teachers.

  Ibu Baldrun kept pushing me to marry again. She rattled off a list of candidates: “It’s better Denmas take one, two, or even three wives rather than take a mistress,” she said.

  I left her house. I continued my stroll. Now I began to think about mistresses. As everywhere else, people here looked at mistresses somewhat askance. They were considered to be only slightly higher than prostitutes. Except of course if you were taken as a mistress by a foreigner. Nyai Ontosoroh in Surabaya had been able to prove herself to have a high social status, higher than a woman who was legally married. My mother was not ashamed to be with her, even to have her as the mother-in-law of her son. And the children of mistresses taken by foreigners all seemed to be more advanced than the children of genuine Natives. They received a European education and they absorbed either the best or worst from both their parents. And once they were adults, society eventually acknowledged them.

  And so what about taking mistresses and what about prostitution? Well it began with their using
their only capital—their bodies. The resident of East Sumatra also prostituted himself, didn’t he? With his power? And what about all the Native kings who had prostituted themselves, selling their authority to the Dutch? To the plantations? Even to the extent of hiring out the villages and their people? The aim—money, money, to get money without working. There was risk! What isn’t without risk? Life itself is a risk. Every tooth lodged there in your gums is at risk.

  Ah, why was my head full of mistresses and their children, and prostitutes? It’s another issue! My late comrade, the late Ang San Mei, the locksmith and his friends, had they ever come face-to-face with the problems of prostitution and the keeping of mistresses? Had the organization they praised so much answered them then? How is it to be done? How? How? HOW? Everything that we are fighting, Mei once said, has the one source—our own backwardness, and our stupid, groundless, and excessive national pride. And our backwardness made us choose the empress as our symbol, the empress and all her power and all her instruments of power. The empire had to be overthrown and replaced with a republic.

  Would that guarantee change?

  A start must be made by beginning, she repeated over and over again.

  At the corner of a lane across the way, a man and wife were arguing. The children were looking on. The wife was roaring her protests against her husband: You’re hardly earning anything, every year there are more kids, and now you go and take another wife!

  Wasn’t life so often hell for the women who gave birth to it? Surely there was more to life than this? What was the meaning of life if this was all there was?

  When I got back I ordered that all the front doors and windows be shut. I was receiving no guests, no matter who. I had to think everything over. And my pen flowed across paper. The voices of the old Java Doctor, of Mei, of Ter Haar, echoed within my mind, of the rise of Japan until its victory, of the time we first met until the time we separated forever. In the end, I concluded, a progressive people can look after their own welfare, no matter how few they are or how small their country. The Netherlands Indies government has an interest in limiting Native people’s access to modern knowledge and science. The Natives must look after themselves.