July 1947
The clouds dissipate as they push on toward Malang, the air cooling as they climb higher into the mountains where orchards and small flower gardens create a patchwork of color. Sam enjoys a moment of bliss at the sweet crunch of an apple’s dark red skin, streaks of pink bleeding white into the flesh. He’s brought back by the howl of three Dutch fighters, their machine guns opening fire on targets on the west side of the city, the flak from anti-aircraft guns ricocheting back. Tossing his apple core, he holds his ears as the fighters circle back and buzz the convoy.
“We’re taking out the airport and some warehouses held by the rebels.” Mertens tells them. “Ploppers torched the rest themselves.”
Flowers and apples give way to destruction. Malang smolders, its people like ghosts wandering through a surreal scene. Nuns mill about the smoking remains of a large two-story convent, their faces blank with despair and fear while small children peer at the convoy from behind the sisters’ black skirts. Sam feels like part of a strange parade. The town hall is completely destroyed and the high school still burns. Further down the street, an elderly Chinese man sorts through what remains of his tobacco shop. Stopping to run his hands through thin black hair, the man looks up at the advancing troops in bewilderment — they have come too late.
“Every time, it’s the Chinese.”
“Because they run the whole economy like it’s their own,” Darma snorts.
The Chinese work as middlemen with a reputation for buying low and inflating the price on resale, merchants always on the hustle. Sam has to admit it jangles his nerves. Yet the Chinese have trusted the Dutch to restore order, have stayed despite terrible suffering at the hands of the Japanese. Apparently they suffer still.
Beyond the sad skyline stands a tower topped with a huge metal horn. It is an air-raid warning system, one of many all over Java built by the Japanese. It has no purpose now, nothing and no one left to protect. The rebels torched the plantations and now the cities — Sam wonders if this self-destruction is happening across Java and the other islands, wherever Dutch troops advance. He’d watched the helmeted goose steps of the Nazis through Heibloem and could never have imagined his family and neighbors burning everything in advance of the Germans.
They pass the grand entrance of the Tugu Hotel, its marble pillars scrawled with graffiti: We hate the Dutch and Merdeka: freedom or death. In a quiet street, children play in the dirt in front of a clapboard and bamboo house, a stinking gutter nearby carrying away both the waste of their lives and the monsoon floods when they come. Opposite the children’s home are an abandoned tennis court and open-air clubhouse where an elderly Dutchman sits on a piano stool looking into the distance, perhaps into some future he can’t quite see, or maybe at a past he can’t believe is gone.
At the center of town, the battalion is called together. Commander Hagen tells them they will be dispersed, squads and platoons sent in various directions to rebuild infrastructure and to guard any assets claimed in the advance. A regional control center will be set up in Malang from which Hagen will run the field operations.
“Remember, this is about law and order, about keeping the rebels under control so the people out here can live their lives without harassment and fear,” Hagen says. “But it’s also about protecting our assets. So if they blow a road or a bridge, we fix it. And we don’t give back a goddamned inch of what we’ve got. Spoor wants to press on to Yogya and get rid of Sukarno and his bunch. Decapitate the movement as it were. This thing could be over in a week. But the politicians back home think securing the assets is enough. So . . .” His pause is full with what he cannot say, his mouth pinched. “I guess it has to be enough.”
Sam’s squad is sent east of Malang as part of a platoon of thirty men, a steep climb taking them past small farm huts hugging the road, their back doors hanging absurdly over the mountain precipice below. They descend again into lush lowlands, green crops glistening into the distance as a slow double line of peasant traffic comes and goes on the rutted dirt road. Women walk single file, some so poor from endless war they wear cornsacks for sarongs, shoulders straight in spite of the great packages of goods balanced on their heads. In the sawah next to the road, peasants stoop to thin the precise rows of fresh green rice shoots growing alongside paddies almost ready to harvest. Sam is filled with a sudden ache to go home. He means nothing to this ancient culture molded by millions of plantings and rains and harvests, by their belief in the power of the natural world.
“It’s like they’ve been standing there for a thousand years,” Sam says. “As though whatever we’ve done before, what we’re doing now makes no difference at all.”
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Darma says quietly.
They follow a muddy tributary of the Brantas River. It boils round giant boulders, disappearing further downstream into a swamp edged by brilliant green bamboo thickets, dropping suddenly into a crevasse it has carved into the volcanic loam. Mertens drives ahead in his jeep, the trail narrowing until they are forced to move single file down the road, a minesweeper pushing ahead. But there is nothing to find. Nearing the village of Ngadipuro, they find the bridge into it obliterated, not a rebel in sight, the village quiet on the other side.
A few men patrol as the others hunker down to rest and eat and get their bearings. Sam waits with Andre and Darma, Raj and Bart and Freddy, stretching out on the riverbank, soaking blistered feet in the cool water. Mertens finds them there, pulls off his oversized shoe and unwraps the bandages from his stump-like foot before lowering it into the water. He closes his eyes and a smile cracks across his broad face.
“They’re sending in materials for a Bailey,” he says after a minute. “Should be here first thing tomorrow. It’ll take two, three days to put together.”
“Will it make a difference?” Sam asks.
“Word is Van Mook is negotiating a ceasefire and we’ll be restricted to the areas we already hold,” Mertens says. “That village is friendly. We have to build the bridge and push a little further or those people will be left to the jago.”
Three women emerge from the trees across the river and downstream, setting down their baskets and plunging their laundry into the river. Naked children splash beside them, ignoring the remains of the toppled bridge, chunks of its wood trellis bobbing in the water around them, the acrid smell of explosives weighing down air drenched in heat.
Jago: Mertens used the word. Sam won’t. Saying it out loud will somehow mean he believes in Raj’s story of the invincibility of the pemuda, their lust for death by freedom fight. Give a thing a name and it has potential. Say it out loud, you make it real.
“Bridge is here,” Raj shouts in the morning, prodding the squad out of their bedrolls, everyone expected to work until the construction is finished.
They are camped along the riverbank and fifty meters off the road. One of the villagers has been persuaded to take Mertens across in a shallow-bottomed boat to negotiate for someone to cook for them and do their laundry. The young woman who arrives is hunched into her worn and loose fitting kebaya, shrinking back when some of the men edge too close, avoiding their gaze as she slops porridge into their camp bowls and pours dirt-black coffee into the tin mugs they hold out to her. The powdered milk disappears into the murky depths without a trace. Sam wonders if he dares to drink the brew, thoughts of the dysentery he’s finally conquered still fresh in his mind.
“Selamat pagi,” Darma says quietly, taking a small banana from a basket.
Beside him, Andre nudges Darma. “What did you say?”
“Just good morning.” Darma grins at him.
“Selamat pagi,” Andre says awkwardly, holding his mug down to the girl who is half his height. His cup shakes a little as she pours, and she looks up at him a moment, her face relaxing into a smile that makes her eyes dance. She moves on to the next bowl, the next mug.
“Holy shit, she’s beautiful.” Andre sits on the running board of Mertens’s jeep to eat. “I wonder what her name is.”
Raj bursts out laughing. “Likely married off to some old man with a few goats.”
“Jesus, you’re an asshole.”
“Yeah, well, at least I’m not looking for love in the Javanese jungle.”
“Shut up, Raj.” Andre is on his feet and moving toward Raj.
“Okay, settle down,” Sam sighs and stands between them, facing Andre. “You’re right, she has a great smile. And Raj is an asshole.” He hears a snort behind him. “Now can we just have our coffee? It’s going to be a long day.”
The Bailey bridge helped the Allies win the war in Europe, the structures quickly built over crossings destroyed by the retreating Germans. They might be ingenious, but Sam’s afraid his back will break from the work of building one. Quarter-ton welded trusses, sledgehammers to slam the pins home, steel connectors and four-meter wooden slats for the driving surface. As each section is completed, a small dozer pushes it toward the other side of the river, the nose pointing upward and slowly reaching across open water. The villagers of Ngadipuro watch silently from the other side, and Sam can’t tell if this feels to them like rescue or invasion.
They break for lunch. Sam sinks to the ground with a bowl of bakso ayam, soup containing chunks of pepper and bits of yellow-looking meat they’re told is chicken. A banana leaf filled with steamed rice completes the meal. Andre sits beside him, glancing at the girl often, sometimes staring as he wolfs down his food. He heaves himself up to ask her for more.
Sam laughs. “Wonder how much he’ll have to eat before he gets up the nerve to talk to her.”
Beside him, Darma doesn’t respond. He’s leaned back in the grass, helmet pushed back and mouth gaping. Sam watches him a moment. Asleep, Darma’s features seem even more refined, cheekbones high, nose long and slim like the rest of him. Even his hands are slender with tapered fingers and finely shaped fingernails rimmed with dirt. Those hands. Sam feels suddenly and strangely protective.
Andre thumps down again beside him. “Wake him up.” He points his broad chin at Darma. “I want him to ask her name.”
“You know what they told us about fraternizing.”
“Yeah, whatever. You can hardly tell she’s native.”
How much native is too much?
Mertens hollers. They groan and go back to building the bridge, straining, pounding, pushing. The roar of the dozer drowns out all sound. Sam holds a panel alongside Andre, hammers pounding in his ears, vibrations running through his straining biceps and rattling his body.
“Don’t know what the hell the rush is,” Andre huffs beside him.
Sam wonders the same. Just as he bears down on the iron bar to lift another panel into place, the world crashes into silence. Craning to see, he watches the dozer driver fall forward over the steering wheel, slowly tumbling sideways off his seat and to the ground, rolling down the riverbank into the water. Blood trails down his face from a hole in his forehead.
“Sniper!”
The panel Sam’s holding tips as the men scramble, Andre pulling him away as he narrowly misses being crushed. The dozer at the end of the bridge erupts in an explosion, shrapnel whistling past Sam’s head. He crouches beside one of the side panels for a moment. Holy shit. He ducks, runs behind Andre over the roadbed, jumps into the water, slips, splashes to shore. Sniper fire bursts in the air around him. A shriek just as his feet hit the bank and he dives for cover under Mertens’s jeep parked there on the road.
Andre rolls in behind him. “Jesus. Holy. Fuck. How did that happen? How’d they rig the dozer?”
Sam’s chest heaves. He fumbles for his pistol, crawls forward to peer out. He’d taken his shirt off to work and stones dig into his ribs, his elbows. In the distance, rat-faced Freddy crawls away from the bridge, dragging his left leg. Mertens covers him, standing in the center of the road firing his rifle. Sam scans the trees above the river, the rocks along the bank. Nothing except the dozer driver’s body bobbing face down, riding the slow current at the edge until it picks up speed in the middle. The noise subsides. Touching his forehead to the ground, Sam gulps hard. “Jesus, holy, fuck,” he says quietly and looks at his friend.
Neither the sniper nor the body of the man he killed is found. An unexploded aircraft bomb had been strapped to the dozer, the sniper exploding it with his second shot. Freddy’s leg was only grazed but he was hustled off to Visser, who has proven useless at almost everything, and so was given a little training and made camp medic. It seems an impossible thing to have happened right under their noses and they suddenly understand the rush to finish the bridge.
The number of men patrolling is doubled and Raj volunteers to cross the river and scout the village for rebels. Sam sees him haranguing the women who continue to beat their laundry on the rocks as Raj waves his arms, impatient with what he believes they are not telling him — that one of the villagers is the sniper, or the guy who rigged the bomb. Sam doesn’t want to believe it, hates that he watches the locals more closely, looking for signs he doesn’t know he’ll recognize.
All the men are jumpy, impatient, with nowhere to unleash their nervous energy. Darma alone is completely civil, politely nodding his appreciation to a heavy woman who takes their stinking laundry and paddles it back to them under the watchful eyes of the patrol guards. Each day he thanks the babu for his food. They’ve learned her name is Bonita.
“Bonita.” Andre says slowly, rolling it off his tongue like a prayer.
On the third day the nose of the bridge touches the other side and is secured. Mertens does a test run with his jeep and the men finally have something to cheer about. Someone starts singing the Dutch anthem and they are somber for a moment as they sing. A man lost his life for this bridge, for these people. They’ve done a good job. They should be proud. At the final words, Andre does a dance, leaping and flailing, splashing in the water before falling on his back to float there an instant as the men roar with laughter and smiles play around the mouths of the villagers. Sam watches Bonita’s tight face open ever so slightly, a silent laugh shaking her ample breasts.