State of Siege

2

The dark green mass of the jungle moved away beneath us and we began to follow the coast line with its ragged fringe of islands and turquoise-coloured shoal water.

Jebb glanced over his shoulder at me. He was lean, rangy and very Australian.

“Done anything about getting yourself a room, Steve?” he asked.

“I thought of trying the Orient.”

“You might get a bed there. You won’t get a room to yourself. Isn’t that right, Abdul?”

“Oh yes. You can’t sleep alone in Selampang. That is what they say.” The first officer giggled deprecatingly. “It is a joke.”

“And not a very funny one. They’ve got six beds now in some of those fly-blown rooms at the Orient. It’s a fair cow.”

“I’ll buy my way in,” I said; “I have before. Anyway, it’s only for three days. I’m hoping to get a plane to Djakarta on Friday.”

“You can try if you like, but you’ll still have to share with a stranger. Why don’t you come over to the Air House with me?”

“I didn’t know they let rooms.”

“They don’t. I’ve got a little apartment up top there over the radio station. You can doss in the sitting room if you like.”

“It’s kind of you, but …”

“No ‘buts’ about it. You’d be doing me a favour. I’ve got to go to Makassar tomorrow and won’t be back till Friday. It’s asking for trouble these days to leave an apartment unoccupied.”

“Thieves?”

“Either that or you come back and find some bloody policeman’s wangled a requisition order and moved in with his family. I lost my bungalow that way when I went on leave last year. Now, I always try and get a pal to stay, even if it’s only a couple of days.”

“Then, I’ll be glad to.”

“It’s a deal. What do you want to do on your first night of freedom?”

“Where’s the best food now?”

“The restaurants are all pretty bloody. Did you know we’ve got a new club? The New Harmony it’s called.”

“It’s a year since I’ve been down here.”

“Then that’s settled. Your evening’s made. Now then, Abdul, what about some tea? Where’s that thermos?”

Selampang lies at the head of a deep bay looking westward across the Java Sea. It used to be called Nieu Willemstad, and along the canals near the port there are still a few of the old houses, with brown-tiled roofs and diamond-paned windows, built by the early Dutch colonists. It stands on what was once swamp land, and the network of canals which covers the whole city area is really a system of drainage ditches; ditches in which the majority of the inhabitants, serenely ignoring the new sanitary regulations, continue to deposit their excreta, wash their bodies, and launder their clothes. When the Dutch left it, Selampang had a population of of about half a million. Now it has over a million and a half. Yet, when you drive along the wide, tree-lined streets of the modern sections, past the big solid bungalows standing in their spacious compounds, there are no signs of overcrowding. It is only the pervasive smell of the canals and the occasional glimpses you get of the teeming attap villages which encrust their banks that remind you. The new slum city has grown like a fungus behind the colonial façade of the old.

The Air House was on the south side of the big Van Riebeeck Square, next to an eighteenth-century Residency which housed a department of the Ministry of Public Health. The highest and the newest building in Selampang, it had been put up by a consortium of oil companies and airline operators as an office block, and was nearing completion when the Japanese occupied the city in 1942. For a time the Japanese had used it as a military headquarters; then their psychological warfare people had moved in, erected lattice masts on the roof and made a short-wave radio station of it. After the war it had remained a radio station. Only the ground floor had been handed back to the airline operators, and this was now a booking office and the terminal for the airport bus.

Jebb’s apartment was on the top floor. The lift only went to the fifth; after that you walked along a rubber-floored corridor, through some swing doors and up a flight of stairs. Beyond the doors the building was still unfinished. The concrete of the auxiliary staircase was as the builders had left it in 1942. Footsteps echoed dismally down the staircase well. The window openings were roughly boarded up and it was not easy to see where you were going.

“Mind yourself here. You’ll catch your coat,” Jebb said.

We rounded a concrete upright bristling with the ends of reinforcement rods and walked a short way along a dusty passage. Then Jebb stopped at a door and took a key out.

“They’d just started to put the drains in these apartments when the Japs came,” he said. “This is the only one they finished. The other five are still empty. After all this time and with a housing shortage, too! What a country! I had to bribe the whole of the city hall before I could even get the water turned on.”

He opened the door and we went in.

My spirits had been drooping a little as we mounted the stairs, and I was remembering the camp bed I had so confidently given away; but inside things were different. There was a small tiled hall with a kitchen leading off it and another door into the sitting room. This was long and narrow, but almost the whole of the outer wall was taken up by french windows leading on to a deep terrace with a concrete balustrade. Over the terrace there was a plaited bamboo sun roof and, at the sides, attap screens. There was not much furniture; apart from the usual bamboo long chairs and a divan that was clearly used as the spare bed, there was a radio, a portable phonograph, a bookcase full of paper-backed novels and a bamboo serving trolley with drinks on it. On the walls were some Balinese pictures. It was cool and comfortable. I said so.

“The girl-friend helped me fix it up.” He started the ceiling fan going very slowly. “Got to watch this bastard. Don’t switch it on too quickly or it’ll blow the main fuses down on the floor below. Now, what’s it to be, Steve? Drink first or shower first? I’ll tell you what. We’ll have a long drink first while I show you where everything is. Then we’ll shower and go on from there. What’ll it be? Brandy dry? Gin fizz? Scotch if you like, but if you want to stay on the same thing all the evening, brandy or gin are easier. I’ll go and get the ice.”

When he had made the drinks, he showed me his bedroom and then took me out on to the terrace. It faced north, and from one end you could see out over the funnels and masts of the shipping in the port and across the bay. Beyond one of the attap screens at the other end was a Dutch bathhouse with a big stone ewer of water and a galvanised iron scoop.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded. “My word! Fancy putting a thing like that in a new building.”

“Some people say it’s the best sort of shower there is.”

“Not me. Sloshing the water all over yourself with a thing like a saucepan, when you could pipe it up another four feet to a sprinkler-it’s crazy! Besides, you have to be a bloody contortionist to rinse the soap off all over. The can’s okay though-ordinary civilised type. Last place I had, it was practically the old pole-over-the-pit.”

“How long have you been here, Roy?”

“In this country? Four years. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot I like about it besides the fat salary they pay me. But they’re a funny lot. For instance, all these things they’re getting now, like cars and fridges and radios, they don’t look on them just as things to use. They wear them like lucky charms. Doesn’t matter if the thing’s any use to them or not, or even if it works. They’ve got to have it to feel all right. Abdul saw an American wearing a gold wrist-watch in a movie, so he had to have a gold wrist-watch. He starved himself for three months to pay for it. Why? He never looks at the time, he doesn’t wind the bloody thing, he’s not even particularly proud of it. It’s just his. They’re mostly like that, and that’s what fools you. You think they’re simply a lot of show-off kids trying to ape western civilisation.”

“Until one day you find out that they’re not simple at all, and that you haven’t ever begun to understand them.”

“Too right. You know, when I was new here, I once asked a bunch of them at the airport what they thought was the most serious crime a man could commit. Know what they said?”

“Not murder anyway. They think we’re too fussy about that.”

“No, not murder. To steal another man’s wife, that was the worst, they thought.”

“I’ve never heard that one before.”

“Neither had I. I didn’t know then that it’s no use asking questions in this country. You only get the answer they think you want to hear. During the war my wife went off with another man. I’d just divorced her. Those jokers happened to have found out, that’s all.” He grinned. “You married, Steve?”

“Not any more. Same story.”

He nodded. “Mina’ll fix you up all right.”

“Who’s she?”

“The girl-friend. Tell you what. You have the shower first. I’ll go and call her up now and tell her to bring a friend along.”

It was dark when we went down into the square again and the whole place had come to life. There were people everywhere. The casuarina trees and travellers’ palms which ringed the gardens in the centre were festooned with lights, and market stalls had been set up beneath them. Chinese food-sellers surrounded by little groups of eaters squatted in the dust. A boy of about ten sat on his haunches playing a bamboo xylophone, while another beside him beat a drum. The road which ran round the square was jammed with crawling cars, and the betjak drivers rang their bells incessantly as they manoeuvred their brightly painted tricycles through the gaps. It was a tribute to the wealth and influence of the Selampang black-market operators that, in a city where the cheapest American car cost three times as much as it cost in Detroit, there should be a modern traffic problem.

There was a line of empty betjak by the Air House entrance and, as soon as he saw Jebb, one of the drivers swung out of the line and pedalled up to us, smiling eagerly.

“We need two this evening, Mahmud.”

“I can take both, tuan.”

“Maybe you can, sport, but we want to be comfortable. Where’s your friend?”

Another driver was summoned and we set off.

Once you have learned to disregard the laboured breathing of the driver pedalling behind you and have overcome the feeling that you are the sitting target for every approaching car, the betjak is an agreeable form of transport, especially on a hot night. You are carried along just fast enough for the air to seem cool, but not so fast that the sweat chills on your body. You can lean back comfortably and look up at the trees and the stars without being bitten by insects; and, providing the driver does not insist on muttering obscene invitations to the nearest brothel in your ear, you can think.

I was glad of the respite. After the Tangga hills Selampang was suffocatingly humid, and even a light cotton shirt seemed like a blanket. Also, I had had three large brandies at the apartment; one more than I really wanted. I would be busy the following day and had no intention of burdening myself with a hangover. I had no intention either, I told myself, of spending the night with some local drab selected by Jebb’s girl-friend. I had heard his telephoned instructions, and decided that there was a point at which hospitality became officiousness. Besides, the breaking of a habit of continence, especially if it has been enforced, should not be too casually enjoyed. I had my own ideas about the occasion, and they did not, at that moment, include Selampang.

The New Harmony Club was outside the city. Beyond the race track there was a stretch of about a mile of straight, unlighted road, with large bungalow compounds on either side of it. It was very quiet on this road, and you could hear an approaching car almost as soon as you saw its lights. Even the cicadas seemed muted, and we had left behind the smell of the canals.

“Nice part this,” Jebb said; “as long as you’re not too near the race track.” The two betjak were travelling abreast now.

“Who lives here?”

“Foreign legations mostly. One or two rich Chinese. They have to pay through the nose for the privilege though. Look, there’s the club. That light ahead. Shove it along, Mahmud! We need a drink.”

It was a bungalow much like the rest, but with an electric sign by the entrance to the compound, and a gatekeeper in a peaked cap who peered at us intently as we turned in. As we stopped, the warm, humid air seemed to close in again, but now it was heavily scented by the frangipani growing in the forecourt; and from inside came the lush, sentimental, international sound of a night-club pianist playing American music.

In the vestibule a Chinese doorman in a sharkskin dinner jacket made out a temporary membership card for me, and sold me a pack of American cigarettes at double the black-market price. Then, we went through into the room beyond.

Once it had been two rooms, but arched openings had been cut in the old dividing wall to make it one. There was a teak-panelled bar at one end and a platform with the piano on it in an alcove. The rest of the space inside was filled with tables, about a dozen of them. Out on the covered terrace there were a few more tables and a small raised dance floor. The walls were painted to imitate stonework, and the light came from electric candles in wrought-iron wall brackets.

It was early, and only two or three of the tables were so far occupied. The bar, however, was crowded. Most of the men were Europeans, though there were a couple of slick young Sundanese in air-force uniforms sitting on bar stools and a neat Chinese with rimless glasses. The pianist was a supercilious-looking Indian wearing a gold bracelet and a ruby ring. A Dutch couple were leaning on the piano with glasses in their hands, listening to him raptly. The wife’s hair was untidy and she seemed to be a little drunk. The Indian was ignoring them.

“ ‘A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon,’ ” Jebb quoted facetiously, and began to elbow his way towards the bar, exchanging greetings with people as he went. “Hullo, Ted. How’re you doing, sport? Hi, Marie.”

Marie was a stout, dark girl with big, protruding teeth and a tight silk dress. She smiled mechanically and blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. Jebb winked at me. I had no idea what the wink meant, but I grinned back understandingly. The effort was wasted. He was greeting the Chinese with the rimless glasses.

“Evening, Mor Sai. Want you to meet a pal of mine, Steve Fraser. Steve, this is Lim Mor Sai. He owns the joint.”

As we shook hands, a middle-aged blonde with haggard eyes and a foolish mouth came through the door beside the bar and slipped an arm through Jebb’s. “Hullo, Roy love,” she said. “I thought you were going to Makassar.”

“No, that’s tomorrow. Molly, this is Steve Fraser. Steve, this is Molly Lim.”

She gave me a glassy stare. “Another bloody Britisher, eh? Why don’t you people stay at home?”

I smiled.

“One day, my darling,” said her husband primly, “you will make such a joke too often. Then, a lot of our furniture will be broken and there will be trouble with the police.”

“Oh, go on with you!” She fondled his cheek. “He knows I’m pulling his leg. I’ll give you three guesses where I come from, Mr. Fraser, and the first two don’t count.”

“Lancashire?”

“Of course. Mor Sai says I even speak Cantonese with a Liverpool accent. Isn’t that right, love?”

Lim looked bored with her. “As this is your first visit to the club,” he said to me, “you must have a drink on the house.”

“That’s what we’ve been waiting to hear,” said Jebb. “We’re drinking brandy.”

“You’ll find it on the bill,” said Mrs. Lim sardonically and moved away.

Lim snapped his fingers for the barman and gave the order. Jebb nudged me. I glanced across the room and saw Mrs. Lim snatch a glass out of a man’s hand and swallow the drink at a gulp. The man laughed.

Lim saw it, too. The moment our drinks came, he excused himself and went over to where she was standing.

“I ought to have warned you about our Molly,” Jebb said. “Don’t buy her a drink, whatever you do.”

“It doesn’t look as if she waits to be bought one.”

“Yes, you have to hold on to your glass when she’s around. That bastard should know better. He’ll be unpopular with Lim if he’s not careful.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s as well to keep on the right side of him. Lim’s got friends in the police department. You know the time they take over exit papers? A week sometimes if they feel bloody-minded. Last time I went on leave, Lim got everything for me in a couple of hours, and I bet you …” At that moment he broke off, grinned over my shoulder and said: “Hi, Mina baby!”

I looked round.

Eurasian women are difficult to describe accurately. One’s first impression is always dominated by one set of racial characteristics to the virtual exclusion of the other; but closer acquaintance always seems to reverse that first impression. It is not just a matter of clothes; a European dress can make the same woman look both more Asian and less; the change is as unpredictable as it is with those optical illusions with which you may make a pyramid of solid cubes become a pyramid of empty boxes, merely by blinking.

At first sight Mina looked completely European. She was a slim, attractive brunette with the sort of aquiline bone structure that you find mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean; Greek, you might have guessed. Her friend, Rosalie, on the other hand, looked like a Filipino girl of good family who had learned to wear her clothes at an American university. Yet, after ten minutes, Mina’s features had become for me unmistakably Sundanese, while Rosalie looked like a European girl who was modelling her appearance on that of her favourite ballerina. Their voices had something to do with it. Both spoke good English with Dutch accents; but in Mina’s voice you could hear the Sundanese gutturals as well. She was tense and emphatic. Rosalie was quieter and more self-assured.

Jebb had explained that they both taught Western dancing at a school run by a Chinese, and that we would be expected to pay them for spending the evening with us at the club. After midnight, further negotiations would become necessary; but I would have to conduct those myself. With Mina, he had a more or less permanent arrangement. Rosalie was known to be very choosey; if she did not like you, there was nothing doing, even if you were a millionaire. It was up to me.

I was resigned, then, to a dull and probably squalid evening. It turned out to be neither. I think that the thing which broke the ice for me was the realisation that, unsentimental though it might be, the relationship between Mina and Jebb had at the same time a basis of genuine affection. I don’t think I was being ingenuous. You can be deceived about loving, but not so easily about liking.

Mina talked a great deal at first. Most of the time she was playing a favourite Sundanese game. If you owe a man money, or if he has caused you to lose face in any way, or if he is someone in authority whom you dislike, you invent a scandal about him, preferably with a wealth of scatological detail, suggesting that he is impotent, cuckolded or perverse. Nobody believes the story, but the more circumstantial you make it, and the more carefully your audience listens, the more superior to your enemy do you become. Mina’s scandals were pungent and outrageous and she told them like a good comedienne, with a sort of bland amazement at their strangeness. Jebb’s part was to refuse to believe a word she said. If, for example, the story was about the Chief of Police, Jebb would declare that he knew the man personally and that her story was impossible. This in turn would lead to a further extravaganza in order to prove the first.

It could have been boring, but for some reason it wasn’t. Once or twice, when I laughed outright, she would laugh too, and then hasten to persuade me that what she had said was no laughing matter. Rosalie only smiled. Her attitude towards Mina was that of an adult towards a precocious child who may become overexcited; amused but guarded. Now and again I saw her out of the corner of my eye watching me shrewdly and weighing me up. I was surprised to discover that I did not mind. Once, she realised that I was examining her. She was saying something to Jebb at the time, and the realisation made her hesitate for a word; but otherwise she seemed completely self-possessed.

The dinner was Vietnamese and very good. After it we moved out on to the terrace and drank tea. Then, Lim switched on a record-player and we danced for a while; but the small floor soon became too crowded for comfort and we wandered out into the compound.

Once there had been a garden neatly laid out with stone walks and flower beds and ornamental fish pools; now, it was all overgrown, the crotons and banana trees had run wild, and the pools were choked with Java weed. But the air was pleasantly scented and I was glad to get away from the noise of the record-player. I lit a cigarette and for a minute or so we walked along a path that had been roughly cleared to one side of the compound. Then a bat fluttered close to my head and I swore. The moon was very bright and I saw the girl look up at me.

“You do not have to be polite to me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“It is eleven o’clock. Mina and Roy will not leave for two hours yet. You have had a long journey today. I think you must be very tired.”

“I’ve enjoyed this evening, but now, yes, I am tired.”

“Then you should go and sleep.” She smiled as I hesitated. “We can meet again tomorrow if you wish.”

“Yes, I’d like to do that. Roy’s going to Makassar tomorrow morning and I know no one else in this place. No one, that is, that I want to see.” I hesitated again. We had stopped and she was looking up at me.

“What is it you wish to say?”

“There is my side of the bargain too.”

“I do not think we need to talk about that. You will be here for two, three days. When you leave you will give me a present of money. If we have not liked each other, you will give it in contempt. If we have liked each other, it will make the parting easier. In any case you will be generous.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I am sure.”

That was all that was said. She took my arm and, in silence, we continued the circuit of the compound. It was a fine night and I suddenly felt peaceful.

We were walking along the path that ran parallel to the lane beyond the boundary fence, when I saw a light flickering through the bamboo thicket ahead of us.

“What’s that light?” I asked.

“There are some old kampong houses there. When the Dutch people were in the bungalow, that is where the servants lived. But I did not think that they were used now.”

The stone surface of the path had ended and we were walking on soft earth that deadened the sound of our footsteps. Then we heard voices ahead, and our pace became slower. One of the voices was Mrs. Lim’s and neither of us, I think, wanted to encounter her just at that moment. I was about to suggest that we turn back, when she began to shout at the top of her voice.

“And I say they can’t! Do you want us all murdered? You’re out of your bloody mind!”

A man said something quickly. Mrs. Lim uttered a sort of gasp, as if she had been hit, and then began to weep.

Rosalie’s hand tightened on my arm. Suddenly, there was a faint clatter of feet on wooden steps and then the sound of someone, Mrs. Lim presumably, hurrying back towards the bungalow.

For a moment we stood there uncertainly. We had half turned to go back; but the shortest way back to the bungalow was straight ahead, and there seemed no point now in retracing our footsteps. We walked on.

The servants’ houses were among some palm trees on the far side of a rough track that led from a gateway on to the lane. It was wide enough for a bullock cart and had probably been used as a sort of tradesmen’s entrance. The houses were built on teak piles, and the frames were substantial enough, but the attap walls had suffered in the monsoons and both places looked derelict. The light, which looked as if it came from a kerosene vapour lamp, was in the house farthest away from the track, and it shone through the tattered walls. A low murmur of men’s voices came from within. There seemed to be four of them. By the steps up to the verandah of the nearer house stood a jeep.

Jeeps are common enough in that part of the world. It was a bracket welded on to the side that made me stop and look at it. Quite a number of the ex-army jeeps had that bracket; it had been fitted originally to support a vertical exhaust pipe when the jeep was water-proofed for driving out of a landing-craft; but this one was bent in a vaguely familiar way. I glanced down at the number.

In a place where you depend on mechanical transport for practically every move you make, even a highly standardised vehicle like a jeep acquires character, has its own subtle peculiarities, its special feel. You prefer some to others, and because they all look the same you learn to differentiate between them by their numbers.

I knew the number of this one only too well. I had already seen it once that day. It had been standing outside Gedge’s office.

I must have made a startled movement, for Rosalie looked up at me quickly.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Wait here a moment.”

The house with the light was about twenty yards away. I walked towards it. At that moment my intention was to go in and ask what the hell a jeep from the Tangga Valley project was doing down in Selampang. Luckily, by the time I had covered half the distance, I had come to my senses and stopped. It had been about eleven a.m. when I had last seen the jeep in Tangga, and yet here it was just over twelve hours later in Selampang. It could not have come by sea in that time. It could not have come by air. That meant that it had been driven down two hundred miles by road. Which meant, in turn, that it had been passed quickly and safely through every road block manned by the insurgents in Sanusi’s area, as well as the outposts manned by the Selampang garrison. That meant that the person who had been in it was someone to stay well away from at that moment; and that applied to his friends, too.

I stood there for a second or two with my heart thumping very unpleasantly. I could distinguish the voices inside now. They were speaking Malay. One man was repeating something emphatically. His voice was light and ugly and sounded as if he were trying to speak and swallow at the same time.

“All of them. We must have all,” he was saying.

The voice that replied was certainly Major Suparto’s. It was very calm and controlled. “Then it must be delayed until the second day,” he said. “There must be patience, General.”

I turned quietly and went back to Rosalie. She said nothing and took my arm again as we walked back towards the club.

When we had gone a little way she said: “Is there something wrong?”

I hesitated. I thought she might think that I was being stupid. “That jeep back there,” I said at last. “It was in Tangga this morning. A Sundanese army officer drove it here today-by road. A major. He’s in there now.”

I need not have worried. The implication, when she saw it, made her draw in her breath.

“With Lim Mor Sai?” she said quickly.

“I suppose so. There were others there, one of them a general. I think we’d better forget about it.”

“Yes, we must forget.”

We went on back to the terrace. Mina and Jebb were in the bar and the floor was fairly clear, so we decided to have one more dance before I went.