Ghostwritten (25 page)

Klara

I wept to think of what my father had been through. I regarded it as a miracle that he had survived. My mother wrote back and broke the news about Peter to him. I had asked her not to tell him about my role in what had happened, as I wanted to explain this to him face to face. She had agreed. She gave him a brief account of our life in the camps. She recounted what had happened to the Jochens and to Flora. Finally she told my father that we would wait for him in Tjideng, where our lives were improving daily.

The Americans, who were in a caretaking role until the Dutch could return, supplied us with food and drinking water. They had also brought in a huge open-air cinema screen. One warm evening 500 children sat cross-legged on Laan Trivelli – Corrie and I had a twin on each lap – and, as night fell, we all watched
Snow White.
For many of us it was the first film that we’d
ever seen, and I was enchanted by those magical images, glowing against the star-lit sky. We saw other films too –
The Wizard of Oz
was one that I’ll never forget. This entertainment was a welcome distraction from the increasing stress of the ‘Bersiap’ uprising, which was now raging on Java. In a bewildering reversal, the Allies had ordered the Japanese to stay where they were and protect the people in the camps from the nationalist rebels.

‘So here we are,’ Kirsten grumbled one morning, ‘liberated, but not free; in peacetime, but still at war, being protected by the very people who, until recently, starved and beat us.’ She put an imaginary gun to her temple at the absurdity of our situation.

‘Do you think we’ll
ever
get out of this dump?’ Ina asked. ‘And if so, what will happen to us? Will we be able to go back to
tempoe doeloe
?’

‘To the good old days?’ Kirsten translated. ‘I don’t see how we can – those days are
gone.
’

‘I think we will,’ Mrs Moonen countered, ‘once the Dutch come back and re-establish the old order.’

‘Well, they’d better hurry up and do it before the
pemuda
kill us all,’ Kirsten groused.

No European now dared venture onto the streets, especially after dark. One night a huge mob armed with bamboo spears and
klewangs –
sabre-like swords – made their way up Laan Trivelli, screaming
Merdeka! Merdeka!
As we all cowered inside our houses, it sounded like
Murder! Murder!
Suddenly I heard a splintering sound.

‘The
gedek!
’ Corrie screamed. She hugged the twins tighter to her. ‘They’re tearing down the
gedek!
’

As the
pemuda
got closer we huddled together, the
women shielding the children with their bodies, crying and whimpering. Many were praying. Then I heard shots and the sound of Lieutenant Sakai shouting. He and his soldiers were firing rounds into the air, which finally made the gang disperse. We slowly emerged, shaking with shock.

‘To think what we’ve survived these last three years,’ Ina said grimly. ‘And now this!’ She shook her fist at the sky. ‘Haven’t we suffered
enough
, Lord? I’m losing patience with You here!’

It was little comfort to be told that Batavia was calm compared to the bloodbath that was taking place in east and Central Java. In one atrocity the
pemuda
slaughtered a hundred Dutch women and children as they tried to leave their camp in Surabaya. The conflict had become an orgy of killing in which all Europeans,
Belandas
, Chinese, Japanese and pro-Dutch Indonesians were targeted.

By now the talk was no longer of
tempoe doeloe
, but of repatriation.

‘But Holland is in ruins,’ Ina said as we sat under a tamarind tree, discussing it. ‘How can we go back there?’

‘Because for most of us there’s nowhere else,’ Kirsten remarked.

My mother, who was a little calmer since my father’s letter, agreed with Kirsten. ‘When we’ve been reunited with Hans we’ll go back to Rotterdam. Ruined or not, it will have to be our home. In any case, we could never be happy on Java again.’

Irene nodded feelingly. ‘We’ll go to England. From there we might go to Australia.’

Susan scrambled to her feet, to collect drinking water.
Once she was out of earshot, my mother turned to Irene. ‘If you go to England, what will happen to Arif and Susan?’

Irene gave a shrug. ‘They’re both
s
o young. He’s gone back to the plantation now, as you know. He told us that he wants to go to technical college, but that will mean a lot of studying. Susan’s missed four years of school. She’ll need to catch up. So they’re going to write to each other and see what happens. But as she’ll be in England and Arif will be on Java, the circumstances are against them staying together.’

‘Do you think Wil would object if they did?’ my mother asked.

‘He wouldn’t mind,’ Irene responded. ‘Not now.’ Then she showed us Wil’s most recent letter, and pointed to a paragraph towards the end.

Irene my darling, having lost our beloved Flora, and having myself almost died amidst scenes of utter cruelty that I will never forget, I no longer care about artificial barriers of race or class. I care only about the real, everyday things of life – having enough to eat, having shelter, and above all having the love of family and friends.
Nothing
else matters.

In early November, Irene and Susan left. The RAF, who were evacuating British subjects, were to fly them to Singapore where they would be reunited with Wil; from there they would sail to England. They said goodbye to all the women that they’d been with – Kirsten, Ina and Corrie and the twins. Then they came to say their goodbyes to us. It was a dreadful wrench: my mother and I knew them so well; we’d been through so much together. But our sadness was lessened by the knowledge that we would soon see my father again.

Finally that day came, in November 1945. Because of the turmoil on Java, families were to be reunited at Balikpapan. That morning I put on the silk dress that I’d saved and my mother put on the one good dress that she had been keeping, then we boarded the tarpaulin-covered truck that would take us to the airfield. We were told to lie on the floor because of snipers. As we raced along, I prayed that the truck wouldn’t be attacked; but we arrived safely and saw the B-25 bomber waiting for us on the runway.

Most of us had never flown before and everyone was smiling at the excitement of it, and at the fact that we would soon see our loved ones again. The noise and vibration of the plane were tremendous, and I tried not to scream as we rose into the air. As we flew towards Borneo, I looked out of the windows at the glittering blue of the Java Sea.

As we stepped off the plane I saw dozens of men waiting. I scanned the crowd for my father and felt a pang of disappointment that he wasn’t there. Then, with a jolt, I realised that I was looking straight at him. When I’d last seen my father he had been a young man. Now he looked old. His hair, which had been fair, was the colour of ash and was very short. Where once he’d been big and powerfully built, he was now pitifully thin, his muscles wasted. But as my mother and I ran towards him, his eyes were full of love for us. We held each other tightly, and cried for our years of separation and for what we had suffered. Most of all we cried because Peter wasn’t there.

At the camp there were hundreds of green tents, pitched neatly in long rows. I shared one with my mother
because husbands and wives weren’t allowed to cohabit. Her relief at being reunited with my father softened her mood. We had our first shower and were given soap and toothpaste, which we hadn’t seen for three years, and clean towels. Just to have clean running water seemed like a miracle.

For meals we filed into a massive tent where the long tables groaned with food. We would stare at it, overwhelmed. Children were allowed to have whatever they wanted, with as many helpings as they could manage. I sat next to a little boy. He took a hard-boiled egg, and ate it; then he anxiously gave the shell to his mother to crush up. She touched his cheek and told him that they didn’t have to do that any more.

As my father sat, smiling at us but saying little, I tried to imagine him pickaxing coal in the darkness and heat, then freezing above ground. I imagined him lying in the hold of a ship, with two thousand other men, in tumultuous seas. I imagined him feeling the shock of the bombs.

‘What
are
atomic bombs?’ I asked him now.

He shook his head. ‘I still don’t really know. But I’m glad I was in the mine when it happened as many of the prisoners were above ground and heard the terrible explosion and saw the lightning flashes and strange clouds.’

One evening, I told my father the truth about Peter.

As his eyes filled with tears, I panicked that he’d also say that I’d done the wrong thing, made the wrong choice, betrayed Peter. But he took my hands in his.

‘Poor Klara,’ he murmured. ‘What agony for you.’

‘I wish they’d pushed pins under my nails instead,’ I told him. ‘Or hung me up by my wrists. I could have
coped with that, but I can’t cope with this! Mummy feels that I took Peter away from her. She said that I made the decision selfishly, because I didn’t want anything to happen to
her.
’

‘She won’t feel like this forever,’ my father assured me. ‘She needs time, Klara, we’ll
all
need time. It won’t be easy. Be patient with her.’ A few days later my father was discharged, fit, so we travelled down to the port of Balikpapan. During the Battle for Borneo, two of the quays had been reduced to rubble; there was a slick of oil on the sea, and an acrid smell hung in the air. On the beach, amongst the shredded palm trees that littered the sand, were the burnt-out carcases of Japanese tanks.

We boarded the SS
Noordam
that would take us to Holland. It stopped first at Batavia, now renamed Jakarta, and we took on hundreds more evacuees. Because of the conflict we weren’t allowed to disembark, so we said our farewell to Java from the ship. My mother murmured that it was exactly ten years since we had first arrived. I suddenly remembered the joy on my father’s face that day as he’d rushed forward to greet us, then the drive up to the plantation, when I’d first seen the curved terraces of rice fields, rippling like waves across the mountains, and the jungle-clad volcanoes with their deck of cloud.

As I heard the long blast of the ship’s horn we leaned on the rails, and watched the island recede. As it grew smaller, I cried, not for the loss of our home, or for what we had suffered.

I’d never leave Daddy on Java …

I cried because we were leaving Peter there.

We stopped in Colombo, then sailed on to Ataka in the Red Sea, where we were taken to a Red Cross clothing depot that had been set up to equip East Indies evacuees for a European winter. We travelled by train through the desert to a huge warehouse surrounded by sand that had been whipped up into dunes. Inside the building, a band was playing, made up of German and Italian prisoners of war, in shabby uniforms, with numbers stencilled on their backs. There were long tables with soft drinks and piles of sandwiches. I still couldn’t get used to the idea that food could be there for the taking. After years of deprivation, abundance felt wrong.

The rails of clothes seemed to stretch for miles and gave off a strong whiff of camphor. It felt so strange, trying on these thick garments in the desert heat; but we each selected a winter coat, and my father chose a tweed suit, some shirts, a hat and leather brogues, as well as long-johns, vests and ties. My mother and I selected worsted jackets, long-sleeved dresses, cardigans and hats, and we chose some underwear and a handbag each. These garments had all been donated, and the idea that they could just be ours, without having to trade for them, let alone risk being shaved or beaten, seemed miraculous.

We returned to the ship with our new wardrobe and our journey continued. We reached Port Said where the boat was refuelled for the final lap of the voyage, then went through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean past Portugal and the west coast of France. Going through the English Channel I gazed at the white cliffs and thought of the Jochens, who would be in Kent by now; then we entered the North Sea where the ship
pitched and tossed in the swell. Finally, on the evening of 19 February, we saw the glimmering lights of the Dutch coast. The
Noordam
was piloted into Amsterdam harbour and in the morning we all gathered on the decks to disembark.

A welcoming party had gathered; a band was playing the national anthem as the evacuees walked down the gangplanks and stepped onto Dutch soil. For the many
Belanda Indos
, it was the first time they had ever been to the ‘mother’ country, which they had been brought up to think of as ‘home’.

My parents and I took a bus to Rotterdam, three hours away. As I travelled over cratered, rubble-strewn roads, past buildings with no fronts, and churches without spires, I realised these were the scars of a war that I hadn’t known. This had been
their
war. Our war had been the war of
tenko
and dysentery, of
gedekking
and barbed wire, of bayonets and beriberi and head-shavings.

We stayed with my grandmother, Oma, for a few nights. My mother was sad that she would never see her father again – he’d died, with thousands of others, during the ‘Hunger Winter’, when northern Holland was blockaded. My grandmother had barely survived. They had burned their kitchen cupboards to keep warm, and their tables and chairs. She had very little left. But she had kept the photo albums that she’d compiled from the many pictures that my mother had sent home before the war. When my mother opened one I saw her eyes fill with tears and I thought she must be looking at a photo of Peter. But then I went closer. I saw that it was the photo of me, dressed as Cinderella, barefoot and in rags.
My grandmother gently shut the album, then put them all away. It would be a long time before they were opened again.

We discovered that we were to be accommodated in a ‘repatriates camp’. The one we were sent to was a former army barracks in Nijmegen, close to the German border. We were allocated a living space and a bedroom with jute sacks filled with straw for beds, which had to be turned before we could sleep on them. The whole ‘camp’ was enclosed by a fence of wire mesh and the man who owned it lived in a house by the gate. So it echoed what we had endured on Java, except that we were being fed, not starved, and were not baking in the sun, but shivering in the bitter cold.