It is a Saturday in early April, the first really beautiful day of this spring. I bought a new chair to sit in outside. Outside, that's life for me. Outside, where I can bask in the sun like a lazy cat. Then that very long, gray winter will be forgotten soon enough. Today I went to the shopping center with my neighbor to buy that new chair. At home I settle into it and the world is perfect. Almost. I purr like a cat in heat.
'I can grow old in this chair.'
'You are old,' answers my ever-charming husband. That's true. I'll go one step further.
'I want to die in this chair.'
Well, he has nothing to say about that at the moment. The world is perfect. Almost. It would be even better if the chair was in a different place: on a wooden platform in the sea near Saparua.
I close my eyes and let myself be transported to my father's dilapidated jetty. Time and distance are so easy to bridge when you surrender. With a snap of my fingers I am a kid again and thousands of miles away.
Not all planks could be trusted, you could just fall through them. The jetty extended far into the water, between the crooked water roots of the mangrove. There was no beach. As if I can touch him again, I see my father climbing the steps out of the water, diving goggles in front of his face, his harpoon in his hand.
'Hammerhead sharks, by the dozens,' he says, laughing broadly.
Of course it's not right: me as an old woman in that incredibly comfortable chair on the jetty and my father emerging from the water as a young man. But what the heck: anything is possible in dreams. The little girl I was doesn't see that chair at all, she frolics around that old woman as if she doesn't exist, and that's right, because that old woman didn't exist yet.
My grandfather with a faded kain around his hips in the garden behind my back. Barefoot. Always a pruning shears in his hands, his garden was his pride: the fiery red flowers of the kembang sepatoe, the gerberas, the cannas, the many types of ferns and palms, the bright colors and intoxicating scents. Grandfather had built all kinds of paths in the garden, each winding footpath had a post with a rusty sign nailed to it, stating what he had called the path, always the name of a village on the island: Itawaka, Sirisori, Tuhaha. And Pia, that one too, I liked that name the most, although at the time I of course had no idea that I would later name my daughter that (and no, for those who want to know, my son's name is not Tuhaha) . Some of those paths led all the way to the edge of that large garden, where grandfather's hard work gave way to the never-ending intrusion of the jungle.
Up in the treetops, brightly colored parrots and cockatoos flew back and forth as my grandfather cut the grass short. At ease. Never rushed. Time and attention, he had it in abundance. And I, his grandchild, I skipped around him without a care in the world and listened to his stories.
One day he held my hand as we stood in front of a map he had pinned to the wall. On the map you saw the countless islands and islets of the Moluccan archipelago lying together. At the top is Halmahera, with Ternate and Tidore a little to the west, Seram and Ambon a little further south and: 'Here,' said my grandfather. He pointed a crooked index finger at the island of Saparua. 'We live here. Our ancestors have always lived here.'
I saw my grandfather's hand shake slightly as he tapped the card. 'They gave their blood for this.'
Blood. I looked at the blue around the green islands with different eyes. In my imagination, the red of the ancestral blood mixed with the green and blue to form a colorful palette, as brilliant as the colors in the garden. But still the blue on the map predominated, I couldn't escape it. The sea, I thought impressed. That mighty, ever-present, never-ending sea.
'Our lifeline,' Grandfather emphasized. 'Without the sea we would no longer exist.'
I turned my head towards the jetty where my father was still climbing the steps – in all my memories of Saparua, my father keeps climbing up those steps – where the murky muddy water of the mangrove lapped around the pilings. Further from the coast the sea stretched like a carpet of deep indigo. As a child I already loved the sea.
'What's important to remember,' my grandfather began, 'is that a man and a woman lived here a long time ago. Frans and Fransina. God had given them two sons, Thomas and Yohanis. They were a godly, good Protestant family, but life was hard for them.'
'What else were they calling?' I asked, because in my experience everyone had to have a last name.
'The mother's name was Fransina Tilahoi and the father's name was Matulessia. Don't forget, you. That father's name was Frans Matulessia.'
In my imagination I saw Thomas and Yohanis running through the sand along the water, not among the mangroves, but further away, where there was a beach. I saw them building rafts and forts, catching fish and hunting small game, romping, fighting and teasing girls. I saw them between the roots of our water trees, where they hid from the hongi boats, which were the pirogues with which the belandas – the Dutch – were brought ashore to check whether the islanders were not guilty of illegal cultivation of nutmeg. That did happen at that time and it was severely punished, the Dutch guarded their trade monopoly with an iron fist. Were the two boys afraid? Who knows? Maybe when they were little,but later not anymore, that's for sure.
'During the short interim reign of the British on Saparua and the surrounding islands, young Thomas was trained in the British army as a sergeant major. When the Dutch took over the Moluccas again and terrorized the islands as usual with their reign of terror, the population was no longer prepared to accept the coercive measures and oppression. They chose young Thomas to lead a rebellion.'
Sometimes Grandfather went too fast. Then in my imagination I was still fooling around with those two little boys playing war with sticks and stones and then I suddenly had to switch to young men with broad swords and narrow shields for whom the rebellion was bitterly serious.
'They conquered Fort Duurstede,' grandfather said proudly. 'They murdered the resident and his wife and children and their governance and about twenty other soldiers.'
That seems to have happened in a gruesome manner. Grandfather could indulge in the most gruesome details of the massacre. The images he evoked were an attack on my overwrought childhood imagination.
'Wasn't that a bad thing, grandfather?' I sometimes asked, 'that they committed all those murders?'
But then he shook his head resolutely. 'One hundred years earlier, the Dutch had massacred the entire island of Banda Besar because of nutmeg, and at some point there had to be retaliation.'
Grandfather was not concerned about the delicacy of a child's soul, there was always pride in his story and despite my trepidation I felt that pride with him.
When my father climbed onto the jetty with his harpoon, I did not see my father, but Thomas, who stalked the fort with his sword between his teeth. I thought the best part of the story was the part where the resident's youngest son was found. The little boy's life was spared by the insurgents and he was taken to a mountain village and adopted into the family of his protector. That's where my imagination really started running away with me. Such a little blond boy. Would he have watched as his entire family was slaughtered or was he hiding in a dark closet with his eyes shut tight? Was he scared when he was found? Did he consider the man who found him a murderer or a savior?
I can still muse about this endlessly. This new chair, the chair I want to die in, is very suitable for that. When I close my eyes, the sun on my fragile cheeks effortlessly takes me, chair and all, to Saparua. Over and over again I heard grandfather tell the story of Thomas Matulessy, the rebel leader who led the rebellion against the Dutch and won! Now he is known as Pattimura. Ambon's airport is named after him, as is the university. His image appears on a 1000 rupiah banknote. He has become a national hero and is notable annally. But none of that can ignore the fact that he was eventually caught and hung. The long arm of the belandas reached into the furthest corners of the Moluccas and it would take a few more centuries before the Dutch fist lost its power.
I was still standing in front of that map in deep thought when grandfather had long since left for his flowers with two kerosene cans full of water.
I would like to be found dead in my chair, but not just yet. My always charming husband connects the garden hose and waters the border.
©marian puijk