Empire of the East (2 page)

By now we had the girls on our side, but with all the goodwill in the world, they couldn’t make the buses run. It was clear that it was a car or nothing. ‘We are making special deal for you,’ the spokeswoman said, ‘but’ — she hesitated, and her smile increased in brilliance — ‘it is necessary to take a guide.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you cannot find your way. Some new roads are not on map. The car is no problem. For the guide I do not know. Maybe we find one, maybe we don’t. I can telephone.’

She went away to phone and came back shaking her head. ‘I try them all. They don’t want,’ she said.

‘Did they say why?’

‘They tell me distance is very far. They do not want to leave their family. I think their wives are saying them don’t go.’

‘So what can we do?’

‘Well, now I try another company. These guides have no work to do. Maybe one will come.’

This time she was joyously successful, with a gain of face as the bringer of good news. ‘This is very good man, but very poor. When there are tourists he is water-skiing instructor, but now no tourists and he must take work. He will come. This man’s name Mr Andy.’

‘Mr who?’

‘Real name you will not be able to speak, so he has taken short name. Many people are doing this, because short names are more suitable for us.’

We called back an hour later to meet Mr Andy, a small, neat man in a carefully pressed denim suit with meticulous repairs over the trouser knees where wear and tear had gone too far. He had a kind and sensitive face embellished with an army-style moustache, which in view of the extreme passivity of his expression seemed out of character. His glittering eyes were devoid of malice, and the impression he gave was of a responsible citizen occupied with a struggle to maintain the decency of his poverty. He could have been in his late thirties and for some reason the name he had chosen for himself could not have been more inappropriate.

The girls had retired to the rear of the office and from a diffused image of them through a glass screen appeared to be involved in the gentle gymnastics of what I supposed to be a Sumatran dance. ‘You are wishing to go for water-skiing to Lake Toba?’ Mr Andy asked. ‘On this lake I am chief instructor Albatross Club.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re going north to Aceh.’

‘Ah, Aceh, you say?’ His moustache flickered. ‘In Aceh only Lake Tawar is good. You may enquire if Hotel Takingeun have boat for hire.’

‘We don’t want to go water-skiing.’

He smiled moving only the corner of his lips, as we were to learn he always did, as a matter of politeness, to conceal emotion of any kind. In this case he was resigning himself to a disappointing situation. ‘What is purpose of your visit?’ he asked.

‘To look at the place. We wouldn’t expect problems in driving from Medan to Banda Aceh, but we’re told the west coast road is bad and we need a guide. The people here tell us you’re just the man.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. How long will we be away?’

‘At this stage I don’t know. Are you sure you want to take this on?’

A change had come over him. He straightened himself, and there was a briskness in his manner I had not seen before. For a moment he reminded me of a man I had known who had suddenly come to terms with the fact that he was about to go to prison, and I knew I was witnessing a case of resignation.

‘I can take it on,’ he said.

‘And we can start tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow. What time shall I come?’

‘Well, let’s make it early. Say seven.’

Parting company with Mr Andy, we walked over to the main post office and picked up letters at the poste restante. One from London contained a
Financial Times
cutting which reported that the Indonesian government had sent in five battalions to crush a rebellion in Aceh. The newspaper spoke of the worst violence in years. If this were the case it seemed extraordinary that I should be allowed simply to pick up a hire car and drive it into an area of some sensitivity.

By coincidence a front-page editorial in the English language
Indonesian Times
caught my eye on a news-stand. It was headed — as might have been expected —
INCORRECT REPORTS ON SECURITY IN ACEH
, and the gist of what followed was that any such reports were the baseless inventions of the foreign media, produced with the intention of harming Indonesia’s image. No more convincing evidence of trouble could have been offered than that from Jakarta’s point of view the situation in Aceh was serious enough to have jolted the Indonesian press out of its normal silence in all such matters. This very long and puffed-out article provided absolutely no information on the subject of current happenings. There was nothing to bite on. The Indonesian people, who have lived for some thirty years in a news blackout, shy away like deer from any discussion into which politics enters. No one we spoke to in Medan admitted to any idea of what was going on in the North.

There was also a letter from my daughter Claudia — a medical student who would be working and travelling for a year in Indonesia — dealing with her adventures on the island of Sumba. Her letters were an ideal complement to my own experiences in these islands, and it was hoped that we would be able to meet and travel together to East Timor at some point during these travels.

Claudia and her friend Rod, also a medical student, had been engaged in a project with homeless street children in Java, and at the termination of this were visiting a number of islands where their principal concern was the predicament of the original inhabitants. In many cases these were threatened by the loss of their land, and under pressure to abandon traditional religions, dress, housing and means of subsistence, thereby becoming available as the labour force of logging, mining and plantation industries that were moving in. In Sumba the enemy was mass tourism, and as this letter shows the processes of deculturation involved were much advanced.

Well, we finally made it to the Pasola, and stayed in a house where a funeral was going on. The people were no longer Merapu but converted to Christianity and we heard some had been forcibly baptised. The only difference this appears to have made is they don’t keep priceless ikats (traditional dyed fabrics) symbolising the Merapu religion in the rafters any more and they don’t kill a horse to carry you off to heaven. In the one we saw they were not even allowed to inject the corpse to preserve it — so when they showed us grandma wrapped up in an ikat in the sitting position, she had a lot of bubbling red exudate coming out of her nose and mouth. They said tomorrow she’d be black and smelly, so they’d keep her covered up. We gave a donation to help her on her way, and so she’d protect us and give us a long and prosperous life. We also brought gifts of sugar, and were given local betel which we bravely tried but didn’t enjoy too much, but caused a lot of merriment as we inexpertly spat it out. Three pigs were swiftly killed by a knife in the chest, then we got to eat pig fat served with blood soup — Mum enak! Yesterday the second day of the funeral saw the end of a cow and a buffalo, then off to the ancient grave with a massively heavy stone top. There were cries of ‘Wooohhh’ as they levered it up, then pushed her in. The Pasola was wonderful — far, far more exciting than expected. Full details in my next.

Next morning Mr Andy was waiting for us at the reception exactly on time. If possible he seemed to be even smaller and neater than on the previous day, and there was evidence of some further needlework on the doubtful areas in his denims. He was clutching a small wallet containing, it was to be supposed, the essentials of travel, and his moustaches were lifted slightly by his unrevealing smile as we came into sight. The car, delivered to the forecourt, was a seemingly new Toyota of robust appearance, with enormous tyres, a high ground clearance, and bearing a self-satisfied maker’s claim about the construction of its body. The agreement was that the two boys would take turns to drive. Gawaine got in behind the wheel, I settled myself beside him, and Robin and Andy climbed up into the back. We drove to a filling station to top up with petrol and the man at the pumps asked Andy where we were bound for, and when Andy told him he laughed and drew his hands across his throat. Taking this to be a joke we paid little attention, but the menace it concealed revealed itself and grew until in the end it cast a shadow over the journey.

The road northwards from Medan to Banda Aceh, capital of the province, keeps close to the sea, and a wide coastal plain, now virtually cleared apart from recent plantations of rubber and coconut palms, is described in one of the guide-books as boring. This was far from being the case, for much of it is flanked by rice-paddies, and there are few livelier and more varied scenes of farming activity than those concentrated in these sparkling wetlands, and nowhere softer colours and more indulgent light. Rice-farmers everywhere enjoy and pride themselves upon their orderly existence, and orderliness is inseparable from the efficient production of their crop. The water in which they work can only be kept under control by exact practice and conformity with natural laws, and this enforces tidiness. One never sees a rice-field with a ragged boundary, and paddies are firmly geometrical and fitted into their surroundings in a lively mosaic of shapes that increases rather than detracts from the charm of the landscape. Monotony is avoided by variation from field to field in the growth of the rice seedlings: some barely pricking through the water’s surface while others already display the viridian brilliance of full growth. The trimness of the paddies is accentuated by that of the little matched shelters where tools are kept, and from which the farmers operate the devices they hope will scare away the birds. These are waders of the most elegant kind: delicately stepping storks, herons and egrets. The familiar coolie hats of the East are normally worn by the rice-farmers here in Aceh, although as we drove north more and more wore black witches’ hats, miraculously kept in place as they bent over their work, which added a stylish and dramatic note to the scene.

We spent a morning dawdling through this pleasant landscape. Until 1870 the great eastern plain of Sumatra had been covered with the densest of jungles, but with the discovery that the Deli tobacco grown in tiny clearings was probably the finest in the world, plantations on the old American model were introduced. By the end of the century the number of persons contracted to work on these equalled half the population of Holland, and for all the legalistic quibbles they were hardly distinguishable from slaves. It was the Eastern equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps rather worse. Van Stockum’s invaluable
Traveller’s Handbook to the Dutch West Indies
(1920) regards the plantations with benign interest. ‘These industries brought much prosperity to the district, and they necessitated the importation of Chinese and Javanese labourers who work under contract and are very well looked after, owing to the combined efforts of the employers and the government. The labour legislature and the welfare work are highly developed in this plantation district.’

Such self-deluding pictures of a tropical near-Arcadia were damaged by the disclosures of a young Hungarian planter, Ladislao Szekely, whose book
Tropic Fever
was to arouse a frenzy of protest in Dutch colonial circles. Szekely, puffing on an English opium-filled cigarette, was present at the arrival of a new coolie transport. The coolies, including women and children, had been tricked by the recruiting officers of the Coolie Importing Company into accepting a silver coin and putting a fingerprint on a contract form. The victims were then seized and led away. ‘On the boat the sailors had beaten the coolies and taken away their young wives. Coolies who had worked well for the company were waiting at Deli to take their pick of the women left over.’

The first part of the book is a catalogue of horrors. Families are torn from the jungles and split up, the women being not only separated from their menfolk but from their children. All names are changed, cancelling previous identities. There are scenes of unending violence. On Szekely’s first day in the jungle a suspected thief is taken in a tiger trap, and the corpse of a coolie who had died in the night is flung as a matter of course through the nearest barrack-room window. Batak tribesmen with a notable propensity for cannibalism are hired to track down would-be escapers. Persuaded by a superior, Szekely buys a coolie’s wife for ten guilders — although up to this point he appears as full of shame.

Then suddenly all this record of atrocity is put out of mind. The mood changes so dramatically that a suspicion dawns that perhaps the author has suffered a kind of breakdown, causing him to throw in the towel and call for someone holding opposite opinions to finish the book. So far we have been reading an account of a Sumatran version of the outrages of Putamayo, but now the view is through different eyes. Szekely, at twenty-six, has become a Tuan Besar (big man), sanctioned by the Board of Directors to clear more and more forest for plantations, and living in a kind of forest suburbia. ‘In front of my house was a large garden with carefully tended flower beds … four gardeners worked the grass mower from morning to night.’ There are tennis courts and golf courses for the Europeans and football for the natives. ‘I gazed upon the gentle, friendly landscape. Only six years had passed since our first axe-blow brought about a new life here.’ In the next two weeks five hundred coolies would be arriving. He finishes on a note of quiet satisfaction.

We lingered happily in a pleasant environment of work in these days easily performed; of buffaloes ploughing through shining mud with women following to tuck in the seedling rice plants. Farmers with time on their hands fished a little, with unimpressive results. There was always a child in sight flying a home-made kite. Eventually the matter of food came up. Andy knew this area and recommended a restaurant at Langsa. ‘Here food very clean,’ he said. ‘You will enjoy.’

The restaurant turned out to be what at first appeared as a substantial double-fronted shop, an impression heightened by a modest display in both windows of cooked foods of various kinds, all these exhibits appearing more as crudely made plastic imitations than the real thing.