“I already regret taking on this work,” she then said. “If I had known it was going to be like this…”
“I don’t.”
“Who is paying you?”
“God Almighty, Mevrouw.”
Madame Annelies didn’t move at all, at least not of her own will. Sometimes the swaying of the train would heave her body a little. She no longer even opened her eyes. She wasn’t interested in seeing the Netherlands.
The nurse hadn’t stayed with us. The train moved off slowly, as if it hated leaving its stable.
“Where are we taking this sick one?” I asked.
“According to the agreement, to my own house,” answered the old crow, who still showed no interest in either my name or where I came from.
“Agreement with whom, Mevrouw?”
“With those who have hired me.”
“Mrs. Amelia Mellema-Hammers?”
“How did you know that?”
“Let’s take her to a hospital,” I proposed.
She wouldn’t agree. It would mean disobeying her orders and she might lose her job.
It seemed a very long time. My legs had gone to sleep. Madame Annelies showed she was alive only by her breathing. The train stopped at Huizen. We transferred her to a hired horse cart. Only then did I realize that all Annelies had with her was an old suitcase. It was very light, as if it had nothing in it. Were there other things left on board ship? Ah, what meaning did they have, I thought almost in the same second. So I looked upon that lone suitcase as all that came with her from the Indies.
The horse cart left Huizen and made its way straight to a village, B——., a peasant hamlet. The road was rough and rocky and in bad repair.
We carried Annelies upstairs. It was a small room, smelling of new hay. The house itself was a farmer’s cottage made from earth and stones with a thatched roof, just like in all the pictures. Its occupants were the old woman herself, her daughter and son-in-law, and their two children, both still very small.
After all this was finished, Mama and Minke, and Annelies lay in an old iron bed, maybe two centuries old, covered in a thick blanket, I fed her some hot milk. She finished half a glass.
After many different approaches, I was finally able to obtain the address of Mrs. Amelia Mellema-Hammers. I returned to Huizen and sent off a telegram telling her of Madame Annelies’s severe illness. After that I looked for some accommodation. The innkeeper only wanted me if I paid more than the normal tariff because I wasn’t European. Perhaps they equated me with a demon or devil. It was there, in that inn, that I started to think about what I must do next in order to help Madame Annelies. If there was no word from Mellema-Hammers within two days, I would go and see her.
My dear Minke, that event which shook all of Surabaya did not reach the attention of a single person here. There is no concern over Madame Annelies anywhere. Everyone seems busy with their own affairs. So I thought again of Miss Magda Peters, our teacher who was expelled from the Indies. Didn’t she once tell us that progress in this age was pioneered by the radicals? I will find Magda Peters and get her help. Sooner or later I will find out her address.
I write this letter at the inn in Huizen. Forgive me, for I have left Madame Annelies now for almost twenty-four hours. As soon as I finish this letter, I will be off to the village again.
May God continue to give strength to Mama and Minke.
Another letter stamped Huizen read like this.
I don’t know what I must write under these anxious and worrying circumstances, Mama and Minke. But even so I must write and tell you. I must not make Mama and Minke wait too long. Dear friends, you must be even more worried and anxious than myself.
I have already been to Amsterdam and protested to Mrs. Amelia Mellema-Hammers. Engineer Mellema wasn’t to be found at home that day. That woman only hunched her shoulders and then said: “There is no need for you to involve yourself. There is already somebody taking care of the matter.”
At that moment I came to understand how one human being could murder another. But Christ still guided me. Nothing happened.
I explained to her that I had been looking after Madame Annelies ever since she set sail from Java.
“Are you demanding to be paid?” she asked.
“If it was only a matter of being paid, Madame Annelies’s husband and mother would be far more able to look after that than you,” I answered, infuriated. “Are you not her guardian? At least you could visit her while she is so ill.”
She told me to leave. I threatened that I would take the whole affair to the liberal press. She became even more fierce and slammed the door shut in my face. I had no formal rights in any of this; I knew that, so I could do nothing else but go away.
Amelia Mellema-Hammers never did come to Huizen, let alone that three-house village. She owned a dairy business, but it wasn’t so big as your business in Wonokromo.
I returned to Huizen without being able to get in contact with Speceraria. I was lucky that the old woman looking after Annelies still allowed me to come and visit each day. I made up a flower arrangement and placed it on the bedside table, near Annelies’s head.
Madame Annelies herself is no longer conscious of anything. Only God knows what her condition really is at this moment.
Just a few hours after we received this last letter, a telegram arrived.
MY DEEPEST AND SAD CONDOLENCES ON THE PASSING AWAY OF MADAME ANNELIES. PANJI DARMAN.
And so the tension of all this time, which had utterly destroyed our nerves, reached the moment of explosion.
And Mama looked calm, though of course I knew that inside she would be feeling the same as me. She had lost her daughter, and was soon to lose her business. I had lost my wife.
After reading the telegram she covered her face with both hands. Her cries were stifled by her palms. She groaned and ran upstairs. My head collapsed upon the table as if a sword had cut through my neck. How cheap was life. We will never while away the time talking as we used to. You will never again listen to my stories. Between us there is only a cluster of beautiful memories, and they were all beautiful.
Her smile, the light from her eyes, her voice, her sometimes childlike words—all were now lost forever, to me, Mama, and to the world. Mother, your daughter-in-law is no longer with us. You will have no grandchildren from her. You will never attend their wedding.
I don’t know how long my head lay on the table. Rapid footsteps from behind startled me. Mama was standing there, still overcome: “It’s as I predicted, Child, they set out to destroy her and for no other reason than to obtain this company. They have murdered her in the manner available and permitted to them.”
“Ma—”
“The same as Ah Tjong, but more vile, more cruel, more barbaric.”
“Ma,” and I could say no more than that.
“And there is nowhere we can turn.”
“Ma.”
“A satanic alliance more evil than Satan himself. Everything has come to pass.”
“That a human being could be treated that way, Ma.”
Mama stroked my hair, as if I were her own small child, and as if I were the only person in the world in mourning at that moment.
“Ya, Child, this is what they have been doing all along, only now it is our turn to experience it.” She spoke again but as if it had nothing to do with her own grief. “Three years ago neither of us knew the other existed; we had never met. In just a little while we have become friends. Now this grief we shall bear together forever.”
“Ma.”
“My two children have gone, and this business too will soon go. I do not want to lose my son-in-law too—you, Child.”
Even in my grief I could sense that Mama would now become isolated from everything outside. She would return to being the maiden-girl who was thrown out by her family, sold to the house of Master Mellema.
“Child, if I ask you to remain my son…?”
Ah, what is the use of writing about this dark time in ou
r lives? Let me just say that from the arrival of that telegram Mama felt closer to me. And I to her.
Panji Darman’s letter following the telegram said his task was over now, so he would come home to the Indies. Mama answered in a telegram that it was best he rested for a while in the Netherlands. If he wanted to continue his studies, she would pay for it.
Panji Darman answered with another telegram. He was a thousand times grateful, but he was not willing to be a burden on someone who was threatened by disaster. Indeed, it was he who should be helping Mama. Anyway, the Netherlands had given him only bad things to remember it by. He would come home quickly.
His letters kept coming.
The newspapers presented all sorts of reports from all over the world. But I saw only Annelies.
“For nine months I bore her, then I gave birth to her in pain. I brought her up. I educated her to be a good administrator. I married her to you.… She should now be growing into her full beauty…murdered, dying in the grip of somebody who never knew her, who had never done a single good thing for her, and who only abused her,” Mama moaned during those days.
Finally I marshaled the courage to answer her. I repeated Panji Darman’s words. “All we can do is pray, Ma, pray.”
“No, Child, these are the deeds of human beings. Planned by the brains of humans, and by the warped hearts of humans. It is to people we must speak our words. God has never sided with the defeated.”
“Ma.”
“It is to people we must speak.”
I knew that revenge was raging inside her heart. She needed nobody’s pity.
And so it was that I too began to feel the fire of revenge.
3
Life went on without Annelies.
I returned to my old activities: reading the papers and certain magazines, books, and letters; writing notes and articles; and helping Mama in the office as well as with the outside work.
All this reading taught me a great deal about myself, about my place in my environment, in the world at large, and in the unrelenting march of time. Looking at myself this way, I felt I was being carried along by the wind, with no place on earth where I could stand secure.
This is the story, put together in my own way:
Eighteen ninety-nine—the closing year of the nineteenth century.
Japan has become increasingly interesting. These people, who arouse such admiration, are achieving more and more amazing things. I read from my notes: The Netherlands and Japan signed a treaty of friendship about half a century ago. One by one the European nations have come to look upon Japan as an Asian people different from the others, exceptional. And about five years ago I read in an article that Japan had entered the arena, not wanting to be left behind by the white nations in dividing up the world. Japan has been taking its share too. She attacked Manchuria, the territory of China. And the Netherlands, and the Netherlands Indies itself, announced official neutrality in that war. Neutral! Neutral towards an ally that is on the attack. I could see in my imagination: a small child, clever and strong, thieving the possessions of an old giant riddled with disease—an old giant, laid out on a stretcher, powerless.
Elsewhere, a war had broken out between Greece and Turkey: The whole civilized world, they said, was watching the Bosporus Straits. Meanwhile, Japan continued to overrun the possessions of the decrepit giant China. The Spanish-American war broke out in the Philippines at the edge of the Indies. Two Dutch frigates sailed back and forth around the waters of Manado Sangi-Talaud on the one hand, and in the waters between Geelvinkbaai and the Mapia Islands on the other, both, no doubt, ready to defend the neutrality of the Indies. So the civilized world then turned its eyes to the Philippines. And Japan was still overrunning the possessions of the decrepit giant China. Victory after victory. Her power swelled; she became more resolute, more self-confident. Amazing Japan!
Three years ago, one history book said, a treaty had been signed between the Netherlands Indies and Japan. In it the Netherlands Indies had claimed the right to look upon Japanese residents of the Indies as having the status of Orientals. That was three years ago. One year after that agreement the Indies government hurriedly prepared a new law that gave the same legal status to Japanese residents as to Europeans.
Now, at the time of my writing, Japanese residents in the Indies have the same status as Europeans.
How proud must the Japanese be. How proud must Maiko be. And why not? They were the only people in all of Asia that had the same status as the white-skinned peoples! I could only sit, mouth agape, in wonderment. What had transformed these people? As a single grain of sand of the great sand-mountains of Asian peoples, I secretly felt some pride too, even though, yes, even though as a Javenese youth I felt far below them. I was a child of a conquered race. The European teaching that I had received had not equipped me to understand Japan, let alone the greatness of Europe.
What I was feeling then was that Europe had obtained its glory from swallowing up the world, and Japan from overrunning China. How strange it was if every glory was obtained only at the cost of the suffering of others. How confused I was, surrounded by the reality of the world. I was overcome by directionless ideas and feelings. Perhaps I was still too young to expect to reach any clear conclusions. Yet it was precisely conclusions that I needed. Conclusions—the mother of a clear and firm stance in life.
The conferring of equal status on the Japanese in these Dutch-conquered islands startled all who heard of it. Japan had left the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Turks behind—flying by themselves up into the heavens to join the ranks of the Europeans, and not just on paper, but in the treatment they received.
People said that on the plantations and in the workshops, the businessmen and foremen now called them tuan. But Maiko certainly marred Japan’s good image. It was even being said that the Japanese had the right to be paid the same wage as Pure Europeans for the same work. I didn’t know if it was true. The Japanese, it happens, don’t like working for employers who aren’t Japanese themselves.
Perhaps, in all of the Indies, I am the one and only Native who keeps notes like these. Who else is interested in other peoples? Notes like these bring no respect, let alone any material benefit.
Mama, like the others, was not interested. It is true that she once said there was no point in hiring Japanese if Natives could do the work. Even so, because she had never paid attention to the matter, she was surprised to find several auction papers urging, “Sack all the Japanese coolies! Their labor is too expensive!” In the midst of all these proposals and demands the papers also got an opportunity to advertise the goods they had for auction. Indeed, several of our own workers told how three Japanese had been sacked from a carriage workshop and a bakery. Both businesses were owned by Europeans.
Then the news was announced: The Country of the Rising Sun, of the Meiji Emperor, was appealing to all its people overseas, advising them: Learn to stand on your own feet! Don’t just sell your labor to whoever is willing to hire you. Change your status from a coolie to an entrepreneur, no matter how small. You have no capital? Join together, form capital! Learn together! Be diligent in your work.
I felt that appeal was addressed to me too, like a voice from the heavens, just like in the wayang, shadow puppet plays when a god calls out from the heavenly ether above.
The reality, however, was that the colonial newspapers and magazines were savagely and angrily opposed to the new legal reality. They did not want the position of the Japanese equal to that of the Europeans.
And Jean Marais said that those accustomed to enjoying the suffering of the Asian peoples will, of course, never be ready to lose even a small part of the respect that they consider their right, as well as a gift to them from God.
Then there were others who wrote rudely—in auction and advertising papers naturally. Japan, they said, the biggest exporter of prostitutes and cooks in the world, with its new status will be able to ruin the world with its pleasures and its delicious food, bankrupting good fami
lies, bringing the disaster of moral collapse, creating chaos in Indies European society. The cities will fill up with red-light areas, with slant-eyed, kimono-wearing misses whose behavior will offend the hearts of civilized European ladies. Will granting equal status to the Japanese mean the acceptance of prostitution? Before it is too late and things have gone too far, would it not be better for this Indies State Decision No. 202 to be reconsidered?
Just imagine, growled my old landlord Telinga, what would become of the world if Europeans had to accept equality with colored peoples, peoples who can in no way be properly considered equals? All sit on the same level? Perhaps it could happen. Stand at the same level? No! All this while our heads have been bowed in obedience to the knives and scissors of Japanese barbers, our stomachs have been caressed by their restaurants, and perhaps even our fertility and potency have been thieved by their prostitutes…as if there aren’t enough half-breed Indos in the Indies already!
A fellow graduate angrily gave his ideas on the whole matter. He was well known as a regular patron of the Japanese Gardens. “If things keep on like this, one day that slant-eyed dwarf, with legs shortened by too much sitting cross-legged, will be found everywhere—sitting in our offices where we ourselves should be sitting. How shameful! Would we have to bow first? Sadly, I feel this will happen. But I will refuse to look at even a Chinese officer! Even if they have hundreds of sacks of money!”
Another friend, the son of a former consul to Japan, had something different again to say. It was, perhaps, a rather imperfect repetition of something his father or mother once said: “Japan? But they have been of great service to us, the Dutch. In the battles and wars to conquer the Indies, didn’t a great many die for the Dutch East Indies Company, the VOC? When we had to defend Batavia from the attacks of Mataram?… Even so, it doesn’t seem quite right.”
And Maarten Nijman wrote: “Indeed the concern, unease, and disagreement with this decision to give equal status to Japanese has succeeded in casting a shadow over the hearts of all you colonial gentlemen. There are grounds for your fear, but there is also something strange about it. The great Roman Empire never entertained such feelings, not even towards those peoples it had defeated and then colonized. And in this matter, the Netherlands never defeated and colonized the Japanese. Relations between Japan and the Netherlands have always been without blemish since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Yes, there was a fight in 1863–1864, but that was only with one particular lord of the central government of the Dai Nippon Empire. And in the end that gave birth to the Shimoneski Convention of 1864, which improved Dutch-Japanese relations even further. So it is indeed strange that you colonial gentlemen feel so worried and unhappy over this!