Ghostwritten (14 page)

The tide’s coming up.

The time’s coming up?

The
tide,
silly …

We’ll have to be quick.

I crossed the beach, inhaling the scent of the sea, then went up the granite steps onto the path, followed it round the cliff through a screen of wind-sculpted trees, then found myself on the edge of the village. The scent of wood smoke hung in the air. I remembered Trennick’s narrow streets, and white-painted cottages, the Three Feathers pub, and
The Boathouse cafe. As I walked up to the square, the light from the shop window cast a yellow rectangle onto the road. I bought the coffee, dropped it in my bag, then walked back the way I’d come.

I stood on the cliff for a few moments, and looked at the sea on which the moonlight had pooled, like a slick of molten silver. I went down the steps, then instead of crossing the beach, I walked to the water’s edge. I stood there, watching the waves curl over the sand, listening to the gentle scrape and rattle of the shingle. I turned to go, started walking, then suddenly stopped, my pulse racing. I’d heard a cry.

Evie … Evie … Wait …

Klara

On the day of our move we piled our mattresses up in front of the house ready for a truck to pick up, then we walked to the gate with our
barang.
Our packing had been quick. After a year in Bloemencamp we possessed only a fraction of what we’d arrived with. Ina had just one small bag, and so she carried one of the twins, Sofie, while Corrie carried Saskia. Kate strapped on her rucksack, picked up their bags, and we all walked together to the gate.

There were already hundreds of women in the queue, many of them wearing several layers of clothing, and surrounded by their cases, trunks, baskets, bags, and impromptu ‘sacks’ made of knotted sheets. Most had saucepans strapped to their rucksacks, as well as kettles, potties, feather dusters, enamel buckets and even folding chairs.

‘How can they possibly carry all that stuff?’ I asked Kirsten.

‘Because they know they don’t have far to take it,’ she answered. ‘I just heard someone say that Tjihapit is only across the street.’

‘Really?’ said my mother.

Kirsten nodded. ‘Seems it’s just another part of northern Bandung.’

We moved forward with painful slowness; this was because, far ahead of us, we could see that the soldiers were inspecting every piece of luggage, unfolding clothes, checking pockets, shaking things out, their fingers probing for any ‘forbidden items’.

By now the sun was high. A woman standing near us fainted and had to be revived. All around us children were crying. Sofie began screaming; I remember wanting to scream too. Suddenly she was sick on Ina’s shoulder.

‘Never mind, darling,’ Ina crooned. ‘Let’s clean you up.’ She took the water flask that Kate passed her and wiped Sofie’s little mouth with a rag, then dabbed at her front, and at her own dress. ‘We’ll soon be there, poppet, and then mummy will make you feel better. That’s what mummies—’

We heard shouting, then gasps. A rumour rippled back to us that a woman had been caught trying to smuggle in ‘forbidden’ items – an atlas, it was said, and a ten-guilder note. As we got closer, we saw her standing to one side, her arms stretched above her head; she was no more than fifteen. There was a red welt on her cheek, one eye was swollen shut. Her clothes were streaked with dust where she’d been hit to the ground.

‘Now you understand why I wouldn’t let you bring the chess set,’ my mother whispered to Peter. He nodded miserably.

‘Poor girl,’ Kate whispered. ‘They’ll make her stand there all day – that’s what the bastards do.’ Two hours later, as we reached the head of the queue, the girl
was
still there, her hands still raised, her head drooping onto her chest, whether from exhaustion or a desire not to be stared at, I didn’t know.

The soldiers looked through Ina’s bag; then they searched her jacket pockets. I was terrified that they’d find the Bible pages, but they didn’t, and we all got through the inspection unscathed.

Tjihapit seemed to be much bigger than Bloemencamp and was far busier. The streets thronged with newcomers carrying or dragging their possessions as they looked for their accommodation. There were also women and teenagers walking to and from work, or fetching cans of food from the
dapur.
There were furniture ladies pushing carts loaded with chests of drawers, tables and chairs – even pianos. Children played in the street with improvised toys: some clattered along on ‘stilts’ made of tin cans with string threaded through them; others had a bicycle wheel and a stick. Many were so thin and listless that they simply sat on the kerb, pretend-playing with their hands.

‘Nice houses,’ said Kirsten with a sour smile.

Front gardens, festooned with lines of washing, grew wild; broken windows resembled missing teeth; shutters were askew, like drooping eyelids; paint peeled and lifted, like diseased skin.

Kate, her girls, and Ina were to be in the same house, on Riowstraat, while Kirsten and my family were very close by on Houtmanstraat.

I felt a wave of relief as we looked at the house – it
was twice as big as the one on Orchideelaan. But as we went inside, my heart sank. There were already at least fifty women and children living in it. The utility room that we’d been assigned overlooked a scrubby back yard, beyond which rose the
gedek
, crowned with barbed wire.

We settled in as best we could. Kirsten put her mattress down in a corner of the sitting room, a few feet away from us.

‘Home Sweet Home,’ she said as she hung up her
kelambu.

Because Houtmanstraat was on the very edge of the camp, sounds from the world outside would drift in; the clucking of chickens being taken to market, the rumble of a bus, or the tinkling of a bicycle bell. Sometimes we’d hear passing vendors calling their wares, their voices becoming louder, then fading away.

We had a stroke of luck in that my mother’s job at Tjihapit was not shifting furniture, but preparing vegetables in the
dapur.
Peter and I urged her to take advantage of her position, so once or twice she hid a carrot in her clothes. But when one
dapur
worker, who’d taken a piece of pork, was chased down the street by a mob of furious women hurling stones, Mum vowed that she’d never steal any vegetables again.

Snails, though, were there for the taking. One day, in the damp alley behind our house, my mother found a giant snail, or
keong
, and brought it back to the house. ‘We’re going to find some more,’ she said, showing it to us, ‘and we’re going to cook them. Well, the
French
like snails,’ she protested when she saw our disgusted expressions. ‘They consider them a delicacy and eat them in the finest restaurants.’

So the three of us went on a snail hunt and on our first foray we came back with ten. My mother heated a can of water on the back of her iron and boiled them – they made an awful, hissing sound I remember. As they were still tough, she boiled them again, then she covered them with a cloth and thumped them between two bricks, to tenderise them. Finally, she cut them up and put them in our rice, giving Kirsten some, as she had shared some of her food with us.

Kirsten kissed her fingertips. ‘Hmmm!
Best
snails I’ve ever eaten.’

‘Have you had them before?’ Peter asked her.

‘No. So those were the best.’

To our amazement the snails had tasted good; but word soon got round about them and within a short time Tjihapit’s
keongs
had gone. Nor, soon, were there any slugs, frogs, snakes or rats to be found and, to my distress, the lucky croaks of the
tokeh
could no longer be heard.

Gradually we got to know some of the people in this new house. There was a woman named Ilse who came from a tea plantation in Central Java. The Japanese had shot her husband because he’d refused to hand over his car keys. I thought of my mother, desperately willing my father to hand over his. Then there was Shirin, who was beautiful with long dark hair and expressive brown eyes, though they often held a sad, defeated look. I assumed that Shirin was
Belanda Indo
but, one day, as we chatted on the front steps, she told me that her father was Persian. She’d been living in Balikpapan, on Borneo, where her husband had worked for Dutch Oil. As the Japanese approached, Shirin explained, she had been evacuated,
with other women and children. Her husband and his colleagues stayed behind, and had managed to blow up the oil refinery, partially destroying it. In a low, calm voice, Shirin added that they had all been beheaded. So the rumours that we’d heard had been true.

There was another woman named Vena, who was very pretty. She had blonde hair and wore a tightly fitting black skirt with a lacy white top, through which you could see her bare skin: she used to put on red lipstick in the mornings, then go and stand by the main gate. I asked Kirsten why Vena dressed like this, and why the women in our house often called her rude names.

‘They can’t stand Vena,’ Kirsten replied, ‘because she’s being nice to the Japs in the hope that she’ll get more food and better treatment.’

I thought about this for a moment. ‘Couldn’t
we
be nice to them too?’ It seemed sensible, given how thin we were getting.

Kirsten laughed, darkly. ‘No, sweetheart. Better to starve.’

It
wasn’t
better, I reasoned. Then I wondered what Vena had to do to be ‘nice’ to the Japs. Did she have to chat to them? Tell them jokes? Sing songs? Whatever it was, it must have worked, because some time later I saw Vena leaving with her case, presumably for a life outside, because we didn’t see her in the camp after that.

One problem that we had in Tjihapit was that the soldiers were always searching our rooms, ordering us out while they ransacked the place for ‘forbidden items’. In addition, they were always putting a stop to this activity or that. There had been lectures and knitting circles, but these were now banned; there was also to
be strictly no
gedekking
, although it still went on in secret. One woman in our house managed to get out of the camp by going through the sewer ditch, and came back with some bananas. Had she been caught, she would have been beaten. A few days later, we heard, someone had swapped a cocktail dress for ten eggs. After she’d been given the eggs, the woman had thrown the dress over the fence, but it caught on the barbed wire. The Indonesian had tried to lift it off with a stick but a guard saw him and the man was dragged away.

The following day was an ordeal that still haunts me. At dawn the whole camp was ordered onto the field. The commandant arrived and shouted for the woman who’d traded the dress to step forward. No one stirred. ‘You will stay here until she does!’ he screamed.

We stood in the sun all morning and were still standing there in the afternoon. Children cried. Adults groaned. Women fainted with sunstroke and, inevitably, wet themselves, or worse. We knew that the commandant would, if necessary, make us stand there for days. He had to, in order to ‘save face’; because for inmates to be
gedekking
implied that the rations weren’t enough, which would reflect badly on his running of the camp.

By the time we’d been on the field for eight hours, I just wanted the ordeal to
end
, no matter what the outcome. An elderly woman had died. Several children were ill with sunstroke. Babies screamed with hunger and pain.

There were furious whisperings.

‘Why doesn’t the wretched woman step forward?’

‘How can she
bear
to let everyone else suffer like this?’

‘Who
is
she? Does anyone know?’

Towards sunset, by which time we’d been standing in the sun for ten hours, someone gave an officer the
gedekker
’s name.

The commandant was duly fetched. He walked through the rows, then stopped. My heart lurched.

‘My
God
,’ I heard Kirsten whisper. ‘It’s Kate …’

I braced myself for the commandant’s rage, but he simply looked at Kate for a few moments, sadly almost, then took her by the elbow.

‘Wait,’ Kate said to him. ‘Please …’ She turned to Corrie and hugged her tightly, kissed her, then whispered something to her. Next, she kissed each of the twins; they’d been asleep at her feet, but were now awake, screaming, their arms stretched towards their mother. As she was led away, Corrie tried to console them, though she was crying herself.

From that day on it was Corrie who looked after her little sisters, with Ina’s help. But Kate was never seen again.

For months afterwards I dreamed about Kate. I understood why she hadn’t confessed – she knew she might be killed. Then I wondered who had informed on her, and whether that person felt bad about it or believed that they had done the right thing. I prayed that I myself would never be faced with such a dilemma. But the time was going to come when I would.

By now we’d been in this second camp for a year, and the rice allowance had dropped to one cup a day. Most women gave half their food to their children, but my mother didn’t. She told Peter and me that the women who did this were falling ill.

‘You
mustn’t
be ill, Mum,’ I said, suddenly terrified. ‘We
need
you.’

‘I know,’ she responded, ‘which is why I’m determined to stay strong.’ Even so she was, by now, pitifully thin, her pillowy plumpness long since gone. At night she would get the photo of my father out of Peter’s bear, and hold it to her sunken cheek.

Once more we were ordered to grow food. We planted tomatoes and carrots, which grew very well, but to our despair they would always be stolen, either by our neighbours, or by soldiers. One day, when I was tending the plants with Shirin, I burst into tears at the frustration of having to work so hard to grow food that we would never get to
eat.
Between sobs, I said I wished we could build a wall round our plot to keep the plants safe. Shirin agreed. She told me that in old Persian, the word ‘Paradise’ translates as ‘walled garden’. From that moment I dreamed of having such a Paradise myself one day.

‘How ironic,’ Kirsten said bleakly, ‘that we live on Java, where everything grows like mad – yet we’re starving.’ She sighed wearily. ‘Do you ever think about that, Klara?’

‘I try not to,’ I answered bitterly.

As time went by we became obsessed with food. A little water, heated on an iron with a few grains of salt became ‘lovely soup’; rice with a sliver of onion became ‘delicious rice’. Being given a tiny lump of sugar in our rations was a sensation that would be talked about in the camp for days afterwards.

Then a strange mania started, for collecting recipes. We’d all sit round and read our favourite ones aloud to
each other, mentally assembling the ingredients, discussing the method, then mentally ‘eating’ the finished dish, savouring it over and over again. We found that doing this did, somehow, alleviate our hunger. I was able to remember the recipes that I’d copied out from Irene’s
Home Notes
magazines. Because they were English recipes, the other women didn’t know them, which seemed to make them especially appealing. So they would rush into our room and ask me to recite them, then they’d sit on the floor, get out their pads, and feverishly scribble down the ingredients for Irish Stew or Lancashire Hot Pot or Victoria Sponge, though they’d often argue about the quantities because I wasn’t good at converting pounds and ounces into grams. My mother kept a recipe book, and said that after the war she was going to cook every single thing in it.