Footsteps (26 page)

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.

I jumped up from my chair, marveling at whether the logic here was right. I thought it over again and again.

Suddenly I was interrupted. A postman arrived and asked me to sign for a registered letter. From the director of my former school. A summons to come back to school? What did school mean to me now?

But it was something else. He wrote to say he was sorry and that they had overcharged me regarding the money I repaid the school. There was another letter giving me authority to obtain a refund from the State Treasury Office—eight hundred and sixty-five guilders.

I would return it to Mama in Surabaya.

A good omen. A good omen.

None of the newspapers would publish my article. They turned it down coldly. All the editors I had got to know returned it without comment. Finally I took it to a small paper that carried no advertising. Its pages were small too. After reading it the editor asked me: “So what do you want the Natives to become, Meneer? You want them to become white people?”

“I want them to stand equal with and not under your people,” I answered.

“Here is not the place for this,” he said. “I don’t think the paper that would publish this has been born yet.”

What Kommer had always said turned out to be right. They allowed no road that leads to a better life for Natives. The Natives would have to struggle for themselves. This is a basic truth that must be faced.

The clerk I had hired for a week had finished his work. He had made twenty-three copies of my translation of the Constitution of the Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan. I had changed it here and there according to my own thoughts. There was also a covering letter and another calling on people to help establish the organization. I also had these copied.

I checked over the copies and addressed them. The clerk put them in envelopes and put stamps on them.

“Post them now and then come back here,” I said.

Ten minutes later he was back. And so his work was done. He would collect his pay and go.

“Tuan,” said Sandiman, “if you’re satisfied with my work…” He didn’t go on.

“What is it, Sandiman?”

“Were you disappointed with my work?”

“There was not one word that was wrongly written.”

“Allow me to work for you.”

“I can’t afford to pay a monthly wage.”

“I have no wife or child, Tuan. Any wage will be all right.”

“Ten guilders?”

“That would be fine, Tuan.”

“And what happens when I don’t have any money?”

“Whatever you decide, Tuan.”

“And if I have no work for you?”

“There will always be work, Tuan. I can also sweep.”

“And if one day I can’t afford to supply you with rice anymore, then what?”

“I don’t think things will ever reach that stage, Tuan.”

And so it was that I obtained a helper.

He was born and raised in Solo. His older brother was a soldier in the Mangkunegaran Legion. His brother had suggested several times that he also join, but he did not like the soldier’s life. He left his brother and came to Betawi seeking new experiences.

“Why didn’t you look for a job in a sugar plantation?”

“No, Tuan.” He always spoke in Malay.

“What are your hopes for the future, working for me like this?”

“It is not my future that concerns me now.”

“Very well, that’s your business.”

It turned out he did not have a place to stay so he moved into my house. He stayed in the room at the back. And his only clothes were the ones he was wearing. That was all he owned in the world that could be touched and seen. He did not bow and bend all the time like most Javanese. And he did not raise his thumb every time he told me something was ready. He spoke school Malay, not bazaar Malay.

Sandiman soon proved himself to be a very good assistant. Every morning when I awoke there was a newspaper beside my coffee. Breakfast was waiting in the front room. He noted down both my ingoing and outgoing correspondence, washed the floor, swept the yard, fixed up the garden, scrubbed the window frames and tidied up the tables and chairs, as if I were some rich man whose money he could hope for.

One afternoon when I arrived home he handed me a bundle
of letters. There was a letter from Ter Haar and some replies to the materials I had sent out. Not everyone replied and only four supported the idea. One of these was the Bupati of Serang.

The Bupati of Serang was well known in educated circles as a student of
Dr. Snouck Hurgronje.
He was the student Mir had told me about long ago, the boy Snouck Hurgronje had used as a guinea pig. Guinea pig or not, he was well respected by both educated Natives and Europeans. People said that he not only always scored nine out of ten for his French, but he was a diligent reader and was never afraid to speak his mind, no matter to whom.

If someone as widely respected as the Bupati of Serang publicly supported the formation of a new organization, then no one would have any excuse to be suspicious or apathetic. People would flock to join. I would try him first.

The next day I handed the house over to Sandiman. To Serang!

The train journey was slow. The rain meant that every time the furnace was stoked thick, black smoke spewed out. It was evening by the time I arrived. I had to book into a very simple inn.