The Timor Man. Kerry B Collison

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СКАЧАТЬ solitary figure sat motionless, staring moodily across the square through a rain-blurred window from the third level of the HANKAM building.

      His office was the typical bleak high-ceilinged room. The walls, stained by the smoke of belching buses and powerful aromatic kretek cigarettes, showed evidence of years of neglect. The discoloured ceilings were now a combination of moss-green and moist brown. Surplus ships paint sloshed over earlier leakage stains did little to camouflage the decay. Overhead fans struggled to cut a leading edge through the polluted air, their blades blackened by the endless movement through the heavy, sticky atmosphere.

      Photographs hung untidily on the wall adjacent to the military green painted door. General Sarwo Eddie, the hero of the liberation of Irian Barat , stood in his typical arrogant style. His picture was placed to the right of the President while Dr Soebandrio sat knowingly in an armchair, holding a pipe, on the left of the Great Leader of the Revolution, placed there obviously by some clerk with a sense of humour considering the good doctor’s role in delivering his country to Communism. The office was furnished simply with a desk and two chairs.

      The man at the window wore an army uniform. The insignia on his shoulder identified him as an intelligence colonel. His dark, almost aquiline features indicated his ethic origins as being somewhere within the Eastern Nusantara group of islands. He was tall for an Indonesian and his face was completely unlined by the worries of his profession.

      To the casual observer, the colonel may have appeared to be mesmerised by the activity in the foreign legation’s grounds, the apparent object of his scrutiny. The United States Embassy was not, however, what was distracting him from the unread folders of military documents spread casually across his desk in this third level office.

      A roll of thunder interrupted his thoughts, obliging him to acknowledge the unattended, indeed relatively mundane, matters before him.

      He sighed. He was bored. Bored with the weather and the overcrowded city that lay sprawled out before him.

      Colonel Seda pondered the problems associated with the rain, turned in his chair and returned to his partial view of the outside world. He ran his hand slowly through the curly hair which would soon require attention, his fingers finding a small crusty patch on the hairline to scratch. He examined the small white specks of dry skin under the nicotine stained fingernail. Disgusted with the find, he wiped his hand quickly against his thigh. It was always the little things that caused the most annoyance, he thought.

      His driver had not, as yet, returned from Bandung. There was a very real possibility his transport would break down, should the incompetent idiot assigned to him from the motor pool attempt to bring the antiquated vehicle through the flooded streets. Again he sighed. His quarters would be leaking. Every roof in the country leaked. ‘ Sialan — Damn,’he thought. The country was deteriorating at an alarming rate. Inflation had eaten his salary away to the point where it was practically valueless. At least the monthly rice rations kept everyone going. It was difficult to secure a position where a little extra income could be earned. He should have joined the police force, he mused. Without exception, police, because of their close access to the public, could always extract those little extras whenever they wished. At any time they could just stop any car with a Chinese passenger and squeeze him for a little cash.

      Although a minority group, the Indonesian Chinese had a very real stranglehold on the Indonesian economy and were easy targets for extortion. Nobody cared when a Chinese was roughed up a little for they had not integrated with the indigenous races and often manipulated commodity prices to the point where many pribumi people starved. Wherever they settled, the world’s oldest trading race eventually became embroiled in some form of racial violence and Indonesia was no exception. The Chinese were despised. They controlled the flow of all agricultural products and other basic necessities. They had their own schools. They controlled the shops.

      And all that gold they wore!

      “Sialan mereka semua!” Seda muttered, cursing the whole race as he continued to gaze through the window. Perhaps he should not complain, he brooded. After all, he’d done reasonably well with his life so far, considering that he had been born and raised in a small village near Dili in East Timor. There, life had been excruciatingly hard. His father had died from one of the many fevers that plagued the rural dwellers.

      Seda had difficulty remembering much about his father, only his strong, sharp facial features remained fixed in his mind. He had obviously inherited his father’s nose, for when he moved to Jakarta as an adult and visited the whores around the Blok M graveyard, they often mistook him for a foreigner. He would never know whether these genes were the result of some careless Portuguese sailor or some Dutch seed sown lustfully generations before.

      The Portuguese began trading with Timor almost a century prior to any serious attempts by the Dutch to develop a foothold on the island. The division of the island between these two seafaring nations ultimately resulted in the development of considerable religious and cultural differences between the Catholic northeast and the Protestant south.

      Although both colonial powers in Timor concentrated their efforts on preventing each other from expanding their spheres of influence, some trade in produce did develop. Coffee became the main export from the two colonies.

      Dutch Timor inevitably became part of Indonesia as a result of the Independence movement. It was officially absorbed into Nusa Tenggara province by the central government in Jakarta during subsequent provincial restructuring. Kupang remained the provincial capital. For a time, Catholics, Protestants, and a few Buddhists, Hindus and Moslems co-existed without any real racial or religious turmoil. Even the head-hunters put aside their old habits.

      When his mother was obliged to migrate to another village across the border, she remarried. Seda became one of seven children in what was already an impoverished family. He slept on a tikar mat alongside his new brothers and sisters cramped together on a dirt floor in a one room house which provided only the barest protection from the elements. There were two small meals a day, taken sitting cross-legged on the roughly woven mat. Some days, when his stepfather was unable to find part time work to supplement his pitiful income, they went without food altogether.

      He remembered that his mother often stood outside, alone, looking down the dry slopes towards the sea and across to where they had lived when his father had still been alive. Occasionally, he would slip quietly outside so that the other children would not follow and go to her, leaning against her frail body, his head tilted against her hip trying to understand just what she stood and stared at from under the old mango tree.

      She would not talk during these private moments but he didn’t mind as he always felt a sense of warmth as her calloused hands softly stroked his hair and the side of his face. He knew that she frequently missed meals, ensuring that the children were fed first. She was often sick and he wanted to cry out for someone to care, but he knew, even in his youth, that almost every hut in the dry desolate village housed another mother whose suffering was similar.

      Poverty and hunger can be great motivators. When his mother had arranged for him to attend classes at the local Catholic school he grasped the opportunity and studied diligently. At first he experienced great difficulty as the other children were more advanced, having had the advantage of attending classes since turning seven.

      Seda was nine before he could read. When he was twelve he had recovered all the lost time and was increasingly being singled out by the priests for his rapid progress in class. These hard working men of the cloth struggled to educate all of the children, regardless of their talents, but their efforts were often severely restricted by a government which favoured non-Christian institutions. During the heat of the day when the classes rested, the children would literally drop СКАЧАТЬ