All Ships Follow Me Read online

  The locals seem to handle the erratic nature of the weather here with calm indifference. They haul their birdcages, bananas, puppets, or whatever wares they are selling to and from the side of the road multiple times a day, crank parasols up and down, and never complain. In a downpour, the throng of scooters in the road arches around deep puddles en masse, never ceasing its momentum. I watch from inside our van, relieved to surrender control to Joko, who navigates the swarming traffic with nonchalance. It’s a beautiful dance for which everyone but I seems to know the choreography. Amazed, I witness a man beside us calmly maneuver his tiny scooter through heavy rain and flooded potholes. A clear plastic tarp contraption covers him, a baby sitting on his handlebars, the bag-laden wife sitting behind him, and a standing toddler sandwiched between them. They are like a monsoon circus act, performing death-defying feats as they fly through this chaos of an Indonesian city. My father is fixated on the scooters. “Wow! My God! Mieke, take a photo of all those scooters waiting at the traffic light!” he exclaims. “We never had this when I lived here! All of our roads weren’t even paved yet back then.”

  * * *

  By the time my father was born, the Dutch had already been in Indonesia for centuries, and an enormous amount of infrastructure had been built. The Dutch had maintained a foothold in the country since the late sixteenth century with the spice trade. They dominated the trade route via the United East India Company, known in the Netherlands by its Dutch initials, VOC. The company—which imported nutmeg, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, as well as coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, and tobacco, from all over Asia, but particularly from Indonesia—was hugely profitable for the Netherlands. For that reason, the Dutch government granted the United East India Company the rights to protect their commercial interests by waging war, taking over territory, and creating massive stone fortresses in the areas of production to protect the stolen land. For two hundred years, Dutch people working for the VOC infiltrated the Indonesian archipelago, expanding operations onto more islands, establishing plantations. However, on December 31, 1799, the VOC dissolved, and the Dutch government, reluctant to cede the territory back to Indonesia, took control over these areas in Java, Sumatra, and a number of Indonesia’s seventeen thousand smaller islands. More Dutch moved to Indonesia to start plantations and farms. The British seized control for five years, until the Dutch took the regions back in 1816. For decades, there was fighting with the British as the Netherlands conquered territory, including northern Bali and Lombok. Finally, around 1900, the entirety of Indonesia officially fell under Dutch colonial rule.

  As the longest-held regions, Java and Sumatra had existed under colonial rule for 130 years by the time my father was born. Generations of Dutch families occupied sprawling plantation homes across the landscape, and Dutch society was firmly established within the colonial territory, with Dutch architecture, Dutch imports, and the Dutch language appearing alongside the Indonesian language on signs. Streets often had Dutch names, and the people even walked around in wooden shoes. This was mixed with Indonesian culture, with horse-drawn dokars and cycled becaks in the streets and Indonesian foods on every Dutch household’s table. Into this culture, my father was born.

  * * *

  We waste no time immersing ourselves in my father’s history. Jet-lagged and overwhelmed, we visit the Kalibanteng cemetery, maintained by the Dutch government for its war dead, on our very first day. This memorial cemetery is one of the last strips of land in postcolonial Indonesia that the Netherlands government still manages. Logically and emotionally, it may not be a great plan to visit it as a first destination. The visit constitutes a plunge into the smoldering remains of the war before we’ve even traced the buildup, similar to entering a theater during the final scene of Hamlet. This cemetery was created solely for civilian victims in the Semarang region during the war, and it is only one of many war cemeteries throughout the country, but even so, I am astonished by its size: thirty-one hundred people are buried here out of approximately thirty thousand Dutch civilian casualties, many of them women and children who died in the Japanese internment camps established for the Dutch in the area.

  These dead were people who lived in this former colony of the Netherlands, some descended from hundreds of years of family history. These were not soldiers, who lay in other cemeteries. Nor were they all wealthy plantation owners, as one may imagine colonial inhabitants. These colonists were teachers and bus drivers and chefs. They were musicians and clockmakers and housepainters. They were twelve and they were seventy and they were twenty-five. They danced the Charleston and took their kids fishing on the weekend. They rode the train and did math homework and read bedtime stories. What they all had in common, from teacher to bank owner, was being herded into internment camps in the spring of 1942 by the Japanese forces that occupied the country during World War II.

  Joko rings the buzzer at the huge wrought-iron gate spanned across the entrance, then drives down a short driveway. Joko is familiar with this place. He drives many Dutch people to these same monuments each year, former inhabitants or, more often lately, their surviving kin, on a similar mission of finding the past. Inside the cemetery gates, we are met by kind Indonesian employees with bottles of cold water. They invite us to sit down on the shaded patio, where we sign the guest log under the syrupy diplomatic smiles of the Dutch royal family, who look out at the cemetery from inside a frame hanging on the wall.

  The clipped grass, a brilliant, unmarred green, stretches as far as I can see, dotted with white crosses. The cemetery employees give us parasols to protect us from the dogged sun. One of them is assigned to escort us through the cemetery. He looks up the number of my father’s “aunt” in a massive book, and walks us down a long path to her grave marker. “Aunt Lien,” one of my grandmother’s best friends, died in the camps two months before the end of the war, and in her final days, she asked my grandmother to take care of her two children. I have read the account my grandmother wrote about this death in her secret camp journal, comprised of letters to her husband that were saved until their reunion at the end of the war:

  It is Sunday today. I just visited Lien. She is very ill. It looks like she is ready to give up the fight. My sister Ko is looking after her children, as I was recently quite ill myself and not so strong anymore … If only some food and medicine would come!

  April 13, 1945. Lien passed away in the night, at 11:30. I visited and sat by her bed in the afternoon. She was short of breath but eating and drinking a little better than the day before. At 11 p.m. in the night I was called. Lien was already unconscious and died quietly a little later. Her troubles are all over now. But she was so young. I cannot write much more about it.

  We stand quietly, staring down at the white cross that now represents Aunt Lien, just one in a row among hundreds of rows, neatly hammered into the shorn green grass. What is there to say now? We gather awkwardly around her grave, perhaps the only people who have ever done so. I’m not even sure if her bones are under there. I presume they were exhumed along with all the other bones in the camp graves when the war ended and moved here in a massive unidentified jumble. But were they? I realize that I don’t know where Aunt Lien’s body actually lies. There may be only dirt in this grave.

  Our cemetery escort waits for us at a distance, and I walk past the rows, reading the names of the deceased. The separate area of smaller crosses for the children who died in the camps moves me the most, followed by the sole Jewish star, which catches my eye amid the acres of crosses. The irony of a Dutch Jew escaping the Holocaust by living in Indonesia, only to be interned in a camp and killed by the Japanese, sends chills up the back of my neck. There is also a section of Islamic tablets marking the graves of Indonesian-Dutch Muslims, those whose families merged with the Dutch families over centuries of colonialist communities, those who allied themselves with the Dutch. I had not expected to see these tablets, carved to resemble the tops of mosques. It complicates the narrative of colonialism and history. I appreciate that it
muddles conceptions.

  My mother has brought the ashes of a friend’s recently deceased husband, Jongk, whose mother’s grave happens to be in this cemetery. Jongk’s mother died one day before the liberation of the camps. He was a young boy at the time, and had been in Holland on vacation when the Japanese invaded Indonesia; he never saw his mother again. Escorted by the man with the big book, we find his mother’s grave. My mother produces a ziplock bag, carried from California inside a sock in her luggage, and sprinkles Jongk’s ashes over his mother’s grave while I videotape so Jongk’s wife can see that he finally made it back to his mother. This too feels anticlimactic. It’s breathlessly still in the moments that follow, and we wander quietly back to the path under the cover of our parasols.

  I recognize in that moment what is so disquieting about this place, besides the obvious presence of the war and the specter of death. Ironically, it’s that there’s no sign of life in this cemetery. In cemeteries in Holland or the United States, people stroll the pathways, lay flowers, visit the graves of those they love. Car tires roll slowly over gravel. Lawn mowers buzz. There is movement, the signs of involvement, people engaged in the pursuit of remembering. Here, the stagnation is palpable. In the yawning green vastness of this meticulously groomed memorial cemetery, under the spotlight of the sun, we are the only visitors.

  We walk to the end of the cemetery to see the monuments. There, I am surprised to find the original bronze statue of a miniature replica that sits on the mantel in my parents’ house in California. It is called The Patjoler, named after the boys who went into the fields to do farmwork for the Japanese officers every day. The life-size statue depicts an emaciated boy in a loincloth with a hoe (patjol) over his shoulder. The plaque dedicates the statue to the boys imprisoned in my father’s camp, all of them patjolers. My mother and I swallow our tears, but my father is stoic. “Pop, did you know this was here?” I ask him. “Oh sure,” he says. This fits with the father I have always known, the father who responded to family deaths with quiet contemplation and pragmatism, who responded to every sobbing tragedy I had growing up with “It will get better, sweetheart; you just have to keep trying” and a pat on the back, regardless of the circumstances. Still, I don’t believe he isn’t moved. I know emotion is threatening just below the surface. I suspect he learned during the war to shut down his feelings. This man was once a boy who watched a friend die from grief in the internment camp, who learned that the boys who cried were punished by the Japanese officers, who had strict beliefs about men and emotion. I make my father stand next to the statue and take his photograph as he smiles uncomfortably.

  My emotion is enough for us both. Walking back to the car past row after row of white crosses in this deserted place, I am moved in a way I haven’t been before when hearing stories about the war or reading statistics back in the United States. Seeing markers for the dead here is overwhelming and makes the war real to me. Mothers, fathers, children, aunts, uncles. Their graves are still here in Indonesia, reduced to rows of white sticks in the middle of an oblivious city that has moved on, out of context in a place that doesn’t exist anymore, thousands of miles from their families.

  * * *

  Bengkulu, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, 1933

  “Doctor Eerkens!” Two men my grandfather recognizes from the village hurry up the banana tree–lined drive to his grand colonial home. A hornbill in a tree is startled by the men and takes wing with a shriek. The peacocks in the garden fan their tails and high-step toward the visitors. My grandfather, Dr. Jozef Eerkens, stands on the porch in his linen suit, squinting, wondering what the trouble might be this time.

  Having studied in the Netherlands during the 1920s, my grandfather has been assigned as the doctor to the Bengkulu area during his period of service to the Dutch military to work off his medical school costs, just as his father did before him in the Dutch East Indies. Now he is back in the country of his birth, stationed in this coastal jungle region of Sumatra, to service the health needs of the province. It has become quite clear to my grandfather by this point that to many of the rural inhabitants, “doctor” is a catchall term. The garden features adopted geese and peacocks that were left on his doorstep. A few weeks earlier, an orphaned sun bear cub had been brought to him after its mother was killed in a hunting expedition. Reluctantly, my grandfather took the cub in, and my grandmother began to bottle-feed it. Now, as the men rush up the driveway, the bear cub sleeps in my father Sjeffie’s playpen on the porch.

  Jozef Jr., or Sjeffie, pronounced “Sheffie,” is a two-year-old archetypal Dutch boy with white-blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a nautical bobby suit typical of the era. He is carried onto the porch by his babu, who is curious about the commotion. The nanny sets my father down in his playpen with the bear cub, which wakes and ambles over. It begins climbing on my father, who laughs in delight at his playmate’s antics. The men reach the porch and hold out a bundle of blankets to my grandfather. “Doctor Eerkens, you must help it.” A mewling can be heard from within. My grandfather unwraps the bundle. Inside is a Sumatran tiger. A tiny version, to be sure, but yes, it is definitely a tiger. “No, no. I am not an animal doctor,” he tells the men, but it’s of no use.

  The relief has already settled into their faces. They explain that the cub’s mother killed two people in the village, so they shot her because a tiger with a taste of human blood will keep returning to kill again. They noticed afterward that the mother was nursing, and have brought her cub to my grandfather to raise, just like the bear cub. My grandmother, a plump and pleasant schoolteacher, emerges onto the veranda. She takes the tiger cub in her arms. Hungry and frightened, it cries. She sets it down in the playpen as she goes inside for a bottle, and my father is beside himself with glee at this development. Months later, my father will run through the garden with this same tiger, now grown to the size of a small dog. When the tiger grows too large to live safely with the family, it is sent to a zoo in the Netherlands, a sort of reverse colonization, but it dies from stress in a crate on a ship somewhere in the middle of the journey on the roiling sea.

  My father and his siblings are doted on in this culture, and their early childhood is as idyllic and privileged as a childhood can get, the most colonial of colonial stereotypes. In old black-and-white family films, my father rides around in a cart being pulled by a goat, his face lit up with laughter. A house staff member dressed in a white Nehru jacket leads the goat around the tropical garden. Later in the film, this man serves the children drinks from a tray.

  Every family in the Dutch East Indies has many household employees, and my father’s family is no different. At the head of the staff is the djongos, the house manager, who oversees all the other staff. He lives at the house with the family, in the servants’ quarters. There are also two babus who live there, the head babu and the assistant babu, who do the washing and cleaning and watch the children. The rest of the servants have their own homes and come in to work. The kokkie, or cook, prepares the evening meals. To manage the lush, flowered grounds, there is a kebon, or gardener, and his assistant. Some of the staff become close with the family. For example, Suwardjo, their djongos, chooses to move with them each time my grandfather is relocated to a new city. Yet despite the appearance of harmony in this whole system, there are undercurrents of tension between the staff and their employers. When my father plays in the garden, the teenage assistant to the gardener sometimes is tasked with watching him, and corners him under the trumpet flower trees. “You better behave, totok,” he hisses. Totok is the word for “white person,” and it’s clear to Sjeffie that the gardener’s assistant doesn’t mean it in a friendly way. “I might just have to kill your mother if you don’t mind me.” Sjeffie avoids the assistant kebon as much as he can thereafter, racing for the safety of the house or hiding behind the babu’s skirts when he sees the boy approach. But he doesn’t tell the adults.

  My grandfather has a stately car, a sleek black Terraplane, and the tjoper, or chauffeur, drives him to mak
e house calls, sometimes hours into the jungle. On short holidays, the family piles into the backseat and ventures into the jungles of Sumatra, where orangutans climb onto the hood and examine the intruders curiously through the windshield. On one occasion, they come to a river they must cross to continue, and travel across on a raft built out of logs, a makeshift ferry service designed by Indonesian men in the village nearby. For a fee, the Indonesian men swim the Dutch man’s car across the river on the raft, their heads bobbing just above the waterline.

  Like many colonial families, my grandparents often spend weekends at “the Soce,” short for the Sociëteit, a social club for the upper classes in the tropics. Every city in colonial Dutch East Indies has a Soce. The members are mainly Dutch, but there are prominent Indonesians and other upper-class immigrants to Indonesia who can afford the monthly dues and are regulars at the Soce as well. They play tennis, have bridge nights, and drink jenever, special gin imported from the Netherlands. Sometimes they dance to the swing bands that perform there. The children usually stay home with the babus, except when they have afternoon roller-skating tournaments and puppet shows at the Soce. The women form knitting circles and gossip, and the men discuss the politics of the global depression and the rise of the Nazi party and Hitler in Germany. These people feel connected to the Netherlands, but they don’t feel solely Dutch. Rather, they feel specifically Dutch-Indonesian, a different brand of Dutch, because they also talk about the treks through the jungle and hunting and coffee plantations that are part of their lives at the equator.

  In 1932 and 1935, my father’s sisters, Doortje and Fieneke, are born in Bengkulu, and my father revels in his new role as big brother and sole son. In the province around Bengkulu, the capital, his father is the senior government doctor. He’s required to go on tours of small villages in the jungle or to Enggano, an island off the coast of Sumatra, where he holds clinics for the rural population, and he often brings little Sjeffie along.