Route 77 — English Preview

Stage 1

1

Our maid, or baboe, Attemie brought me into the room with the rattan chairs. After clearing her throat loudly, she announced, “Saya Puan—here I am, Ma’am!”

Mother looked up from behind her treadle sewing machine, her brows furrowed. The servant’s eyes were wide. Holding one index finger to her lips, she pointed with her other hand towards the bottom of the curtain, beneath which a man’s brown feet protruded.

Without hesitation, Mother grabbed a pair of scissors and yanked the curtain aside. Startled, the burglar fled. Mother pulled me towards her and lifted me into her arms. Sobbing with fright, I asked why the Javanese man had been hiding there.

Trembling, she shook her head and sighed.

“It’s all right, Mauki. He will never come back!”

I did not understand. Our garden boys were often hidden among the pisang, or banana trees.

A few months later, Father was threatened by his chauffeur in the driveway leading to the garage. At gunpoint, Tuan Tompot was forced to hand over the keys to his jeep.

I was born in Djakarta on March 9, 1952. The name on my birth announcement was Michiel, although my official name was Maurits Rolff. Just as Batavia had become Djakarta—or Jakarta—after independence, I too had more than one name. Later, I discovered that the director of the timber company in Utrecht, for which Father worked, was also called Maurits.

We lived in a spacious bungalow in Kebajoran, Block O II. Our colonial life still had something of tempo doeloe—the good old days. Besides our many holidays in Bandung, Mother organised numerous tea parties and celebrations that lasted until the early hours. Ballantine’s whisky must have arrived in wooden crates, because my brother Jon and I used them to store our Dinky toys.

As President Sukarno sought to free the new republic from foreign influence, intimidation and burglaries increased. After much urging, Mother finally boarded the Willem Ruys at the end of 1958. Jonneke was eight, I was six, and our sister Jolanthe was four.

Father stood on the quay at Tandjong Priok in his white shirt and shorts, waving goodbye. Mother waved her white handkerchief, then used it to dab her eyes. Would they see each other again?

Jonneke waved with his arm in a white plaster cast. He had broken his wrist a few weeks before our departure. I can still hear the crack.

Seeing Mother’s tears, he asked why Daddy was not coming with us to Holland.

“He still has some business to settle, but he will come by plane as soon as possible.”

Once the heavy mooring ropes had been cast off, the ship slowly pulled away. Its horn sounded so loudly that my whole body trembled.

Later, accompanied by the rattling of the projector, we watched colour films taken aboard the ship: flying fish, sun-drenched Singapore, Port Said and the Suez Canal.

As children from the tropics, we were accustomed to going barefoot, on our bare kakies. But as we passed Gibraltar, we had to put on shoes that pinched and woollen clothes that itched terribly and smelled of camphor.

End of preview. Continue the journey in Route 77: A Journey Beyond the Horizon.