State of Siege (11 page)

I don’t think Rosalie even heard it; in any case, she was too dazed to respond to the sound. I did nothing. I guessed that, finding their target still standing, they were trying to shoot up the radio masts. However, they had no ammunition that would penetrate the reinforced concrete roof over our heads; and, with most of the ceiling down and the windows gone, there was nothing more they could do to us.

They made six runs in all and, from what I heard,
only managed to hit the roof twice. They were not very good at their jobs. Then, at last, having circled a couple of times to inspect the results of their work, they flew off.

The plaster had begun to settle now. I gave Rosalie a towel to wipe her face with, and then I went to the window.

The first thing I saw, lying on the terrace amid the broken glass, was the sentry’s machine pistol. I peered through the tattered curtains looking for its owner.

He was sitting on the concrete with his head lolling between his knees, and blood pouring from a deep gash in his neck. I called to him sharply. He raised his head slightly and then sagged over on to his side.

I dragged a sheet off my bed, rummaged in my suitcase until I found a razor blade, and went out to him.

Something had hit him on the head, almost knocking him out; there was blood coming from just above his right ear. Probably, he had been flung against the balustrade by the blast. The cut in his neck, however, had been done when the windows flew to pieces. A piece of the glass was still sticking in the wound. Something had to be done about that. I cut through the hem of the sheet with the razor blade and then tore the material into strips. With one strip I made a pad. Then, as gently as I could, I eased the glass out of the wound. It bled a little more profusely, but not much more so. I clapped the pad over it, and then began to bandage
it into place. He did not utter a sound. He scarcely moved. Once, when I pulled the glass out, he opened his eyes and looked at me, but he was no longer really interested in what was happening to him.

Feet crunched on the broken glass behind me, and I looked round.

The bow-legged officer was picking his way across the terrace towards me. He was covered from head to foot in plaster dust and there was blood trickling down his forehead.

“It is ordered you stay in,” he said.

I went on with the bandaging. He went to the living room and called for two men. They came running out, and he told them to look after the sentry. They stood over me while I finished tying the bandage, but made no attempt to stop me.

When I stood up, they hauled him to his feet and helped him away. The officer picked up the gun.

“He has a head wound,” I said. “He should have medical attention.”

“You go in.” He levelled the gun at me, but without very much conviction. He was a stupid man, and the fact that I had helped the sentry had evidently confused him. I decided to take advantage of the fact.

“It is still permitted to go to the bathhouse?” I asked.

He hesitated, then nodded.

I went into the bedroom and told Rosalie that she could go and wash the dust off. She was still shaken,
but the prospect of a bath made her feel better. As she went along the terrace, I saw that the bow-legged officer was posting a new sentry. The dust had made me intolerably thirsty. While the officer was still there, I asked again for a bottle of drinking-water and some fruit. He seemed to take no notice; but a few minutes later, while I was trying to clear up the mess in the room, the sentry appeared at the window and put a bottle of water on the floor and a bowl of fruit beside it.

I thanked him. He grinned, shrugged, made a gesture of cutting someone’s throat, and, with another grin, pointed to me. I grinned back and he went through the pantomime again. Then, he explained it in words. “Man’s throat cut, man cannot eat, food fall out.” A comedian, this one. I smiled until my jaw ached.

Rosalie, when she returned, was impressed. The fact that they had remembered my request meant, she said, that they were ashamed of their earlier behaviour, which meant in turn that they did not hate us too much. I did not tell her that I had asked again in order to get the fruit and water; nor did I tell her about the new sentry’s little joke.

We ate half the fruit and drank a third of the water. I was still filthy from the plaster dust. When the rest of the fruit and water had been put away to keep cool, I got permission from the sentry to go along to the
bathhouse and clean up. There, I found that the water supply was no longer working. It did not matter at that moment. The Dutch ewer was full and there was a further supply in the storage cistern on the roof, but I could hear that there was no more water coming in.

As I walked back along the terrace, I was surprised to see Rosalie at the window talking to the sentry. When he heard me coming, he smiled and moved away.

Rosalie’s eyes were gleaming with excitement.

“Why did you not tell me that you helped the man who was wounded?” she began, as I went back into the room.

“It didn’t seem important.”

“It has made a very good impression. That man is his friend. He told me he would bring us more fruit later.”

“You mean they’ve decided not to kill us after all?”

“Oh no, but now they do not hate us so much.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

“He told me that there are machine guns being mounted on both sides of the roof in case there is another air attack, also that the Nasjah army is advancing from the direction of Meja.”

“How does he know that—I mean about the army?”

“He heard one of the officers on the telephone. It is curious,” she went on thoughtfully; “before, that man would not have looked at us except to think how it
would feel to kill us. Now, because you bandage his friend, it is different. He speaks to us and brings us fruit.”

“That’s because of the bombing, and because we were all covered in dust just as he was. He’s not used to air attack. He was frightened, and now because he isn’t dead he feels generous and friendly and wants to talk. It’s nothing to do with my bandaging his friend. It always happens. Besides,” I added, “you’re a woman. That would make a difference, too.”

She thought for a moment or two and then nodded. “Yes, I understand. It was the way I felt when the men with the
parangs
did not kill us last night. I wanted you to take me to bed at once. If it had not been for the guns beginning to fire and making me frightened in another way …”

I kissed her, and she smiled. “Was it like that in the war?” she said. “When you had been very frightened of being killed or wounded and were not, did you always want a woman afterwards?”

“Well, there wasn’t much to be frightened of building airfields, and when we were in the desert there weren’t any women to have.”

“But you would want one?” she persisted.

“Oh yes. There was nothing to stop you wanting.”

“Now you are making a joke of it. I think it is very good that people should feel that way.”

“There’s a simple biological explanation.”

“Is it biology that I am here with you?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“No. It is because it is good for a man and a woman to have pleasure together. If they are sympathetic, that is …”

“And if they aren’t being threatened by men with
parangs
, and bombed, and peered at by sentries.”

She looked startled, but did not turn her head. “He is watching us now?”

“With great interest.”

Without once letting her eyes stray in his direction, she walked over to the window and looked up at the torn curtains. “If you will take these down,” she said, “I will pin the pieces together. Then we can put them back again as we wish. If we do it now, he will think it is because of the sun. If we wait until the sun has moved, he will know that we do not wish to be seen and will be offended.”

“All right.”

It was a good idea in any case. The sentry had managed to hoist the bamboo roof back into position, but the blast and débris had split it in several places, and the sun was pouring through the gaps into the room. Every slight movement raised the dust again, and even the sight of it swirling about in the shafts of sunlight made me thirsty.

I made a great show of shielding my eyes from the glare as I unhooked the curtains. The sentry, squatting
in one of the patches of shade, watched idly while Rosalie, with the few pins and a needle and thread that she had in her case, tacked the pieces of curtain together. When I put them up again, I was able to cover almost the whole of the window space.

Since the air attack, the telephone in the next room had been in constant use, but the voices had been those of the junior officers. I had concluded that Sanusi, Roda and Suparto had temporarily abandoned the sixth floor for some less exposed command post. When, as I finished rehanging the curtains, I heard footsteps crunching towards us over the broken glass on the terrace, I assumed that it was the bow-legged officer on his way to the bathhouse. Then, the footsteps ceased, the curtains were brushed aside and Major Suparto stepped into the room.

I saw Rosalie freeze into the passive immobility with which she had faced him before, but he did not even glance at her. He looked at the ceiling, at the débris piled in one corner of the room, finally at the curtains.

“Aren’t these repairs a waste of time, Mr. Fraser?”

“I don’t think so.”

There was no trace of plaster dust on his uniform. I guessed that he had been in the corridor when the ceilings of the apartment had come down.

“The planes may be returning soon,” he said.

“They will have to score a direct hit to do any more
damage here. And I understand that you are putting machine guns on the roof. If they couldn’t manage to hit the place before, they’re not likely to do better when they’re under fire.”

“I hope you’re right, Mr. Fraser. Now, I am sorry to disturb you, but you must come with me.”

The knot in my stomach tightened. “Where to?”

“I will show you.”

“Both of us?”

“Only you.”

“Shall I be coming back here?”

“I am not taking you to be executed, if that is what you mean. If you behave intelligently it is possible that you will be sent back here. Now, please.”

Rosalie had not moved. There was nothing I could do to reassure her. I pressed her arm and followed Suparto out on to the terrace. He turned into the living room.

The sentry stared blankly as I crunched past him.

The living room was in a wretched state. No attempt had been made to clear the rubble. Two pictures were lying on the floor. Some of the chairs had gone.

There were three officers there, one of them on the telephone. Suparto stopped and addressed himself to the bow-legged one.

“Nobody is to go into the next room unless this Englishman is there,” he said. “Is that understood?”

“Ya, tuan.”
He eyed me curiously.

Suparto nodded to me.

I followed him out into the passage, past a sentry and down the stairs to the next floor. There were two more sentries on guard at the swing doors. As Suparto approached they stood aside for him to pass.

The ceiling had come down in the corridor beyond, and some of the doors belonging to the offices leading off it were propped against the walls. Just beyond the main stairway landing, a group of officers stood outside an office door listening to a captain reading out orders for the requisitioning of rice. They made way for Suparto and I followed him through an office, where a man sat loading machine-gun magazines, to a door marked “TECHNICAL CONTROLLER.” Suparto knocked on the door and went in.

There were three men in the room: Sanusi, Roda and a man in civilian clothes whom I recognised as the editor of a Selampang newspaper subsidised by the Nasjah Government. I had met him when he had visited Tangga with a party of other journalists; but if he now remembered me, the memory was inconvenient, for he gave me no more than a blank stare. Sanusi and Roda were reading a copy of a printed proclamation which was spread out on the desk. Suparto and I stood just inside the door, waiting. When the reading was finished, there was a muttered conference between the three men, and then the editor took the proclamation away. Sanusi looked at me.

“Mr. Fraser,
Boeng
.” Suparto prodded me forward.

I went up to the desk. Sanusi examined me thoughtfully as I approached, but it was Colonel Roda, sitting at the corner of the desk, who spoke.

“You are an engineer?”

“Yes.”

“At Tangga Valley?”

“I have been resident consulting engineer there for the past three years.”

“Then you are a fully qualified and experienced person, no?”

I did not hear this properly for the first time. He spoke English with a Dutch accent, but it was his determination to be peremptory that made it difficult to understand. He had broad, fleshy lips, and the words rattled about in his mouth like pebbles.

“I beg your pardon, Colonel.”

He repeated the question loudly and even less articulately, but this time I got the meaning.

“Yes, I am qualified.”

“Then you will consider yourself under the orders of the National Freedom Government. Any delay or negligence in the carrying out of such orders will be punished immediately by death. Major Suparto …”

“A moment, Colonel.” It was Sanusi who had spoken.

Colonel Roda stopped speaking instantly, his eyes alert and respectful within their nests of fat.

Sanusi considered me in silence for several seconds, then he smiled amiably. “Mr. Fraser is a European,” he said; “and Europeans expect high payment for their services to natives. We must fix a good price.”

Roda laughed shortly.

“Were you paid a good price in Tangga, Mr. Fraser?”

“Yes, General.”

“And yet you hope to leave us?”

“A man must return to his own country sometimes.”

“But what is a man’s own country, Mr. Fraser? How does he recognise it?” He still smiled. “When I was a child here in Sunda and worked with my family in the fields, I did not know my country. If we were near a road and a Dutchman came by, or any European, my father and mother had to turn and bow respectfully to him. Us children, too. It was the Dutchman’s law and, therefore, the Dutchman’s country. Are you married, Mr. Fraser?”