Uncle Ben held up his trousers with a piece of string. We children made fun of that strange uncle. He was actually a great-uncle, my grandmother's brother. When my father was still alive we sometimes visited his farm, but I think he already preferred us to stay away. In the family album that surfaced when the farm was cleared we found a jagged photo of grandma and grandpa, and I don't mean my grandma and grandpa, but those of my father. Uncle Ben always lived with his parents. Grandma can be seen on the picture as a very small woman in clogs next to her much taller husband. They are standing together in front of the half stable doors; the lower door closed, the upper door opened. Grandma a little hunched over, her head somewhat drawn between her shoulders. The photo does not tell us for sure whether the tragedy that robbed the two old people of their daughter and son-in-law had already taken place at that moment, but if I consider the hunched-up attitude of my great-grandmother, I would think that the accident had already happened. They took on the care of the unruly grandson who had lost both his parents in one fell swoop, my father. The unmarried uncle Ben kept to himself, he had always been a loner according to my father. His grandma and grandpa died of old age when my father was a young man. He stayed with Uncle Ben on the farm for a few more years before he married my mother. They were both still very young and within a year they had twins: a boy and a girl. They were my brother and me. Our great difference in appearance often embarrassed my mother, everyone who looked into the pram pulled a surprised face. My little brother was, as she called it, the 'spitting image' of my father: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. I, on the other hand, was - to my later frustration - of the pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes type, just like my mother. 'Luckily they are twins,' my mother regularly gritted her teeth. 'Otherwise people would think they are from two different fathers.' Every now and then we would visit Uncle Ben in the manor house along the dike. Compared to today's farms, it was only a small farm with a stable that could house maybe thirty cows. Uncle Ben continued the farming business in his own unorthodox way. He was too chaotic and messy to make a success of it and the whole place fell into disrepair. He stacked the hay bales behind the front door and in the rooms of the front house. He built a shed, which was supposed to be a kitchen, in the stable part of the back house, so that he could benefit from the warmth of the cows in winter. When it was very cold he put a calf in that shed behind a partition, for extra warmth. It will come as no surprise that my brother and I were endlessly intrigued by the unusual lifestyle of our great-uncle. We could play for hours in the dim stable where the black and white cattle shook their big heads softly in their chains. In gum boots we chased each other into the shit gutter where it was a waiting game to see who would be the first to slip in the muck. The sweet cow fumes crept into our clothes and the next day at school the smell still hung around us. The room we were not allowed to enter appealed to our imagination the most. The door between the front and back of the house was always locked with a padlock and no matter how curious we were, we didn’t even think about asking the grumpy Uncle Ben about it. We bided our time, one day he would forget to lock the door. In the meantime we entertained ourselves with the calf in the kitchen, put our hand in its slimy mouth to feel its rough tongue or followed with our index finger the trail of droppings that the mice had left around the lump of bread and the hollowed-out knife on the kitchen table. We made a peephole in the stable window above the table to look through the caked-on dirt at the empty farm of the neighbours. Those neighbours had emigrated to South Africa. For the first time we heard about a country far away, where completely different people lived and where wild animals just walked around freely in a forest with different trees. When he wasn't working, Uncle Ben sat at that kitchen table with an electric heater between his legs. However narrow his life was, Uncle Ben's mind traveled far into the big wide world. He owned an atlas, the only book he had in the house, except for the Bible. He studied that atlas meticulously. He scared the living daylights out of us by suddenly lifting his head and looking at us with piercing eyes when he was dozing over his heater. In an almost accusatory tone he would ask: 'You, do you know how many people live in Tokyo?' He knew. Because he was always hunched over, we could see the dirt on top of his bald head, caked between the last few strands of gray hair. We knew that came from milking. When he sat with his cheek against a cow's belly, such an animal would sometimes flick its smeared tail across his head, leaving the green globs stuck behind his ear. We didn’t think about it as children, but as I grew older I sometimes wondered if a woman could ever have loved that man. I couldn’t imagine it. At most his mother, I thought. No one could stand his presence for long, because he stank like a cesspool. My father insisted that Uncle Ben would die if he ever had to take a bath. That old body would give out without that protective layer of dirt. In the meantime, the secrets of the front house continued to stimulate our imagination. According to father, the living room was still completely intact as it was when his grandma and grandpa were still there. There would be a large fireplace with plaster statues of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. A table with a Smyrna tablecloth, chairs around it with carved legs and a lamp above it with beads. The longer father insisted that it was nothing special, the more curious we became. One day our patience was rewarded. During an unplanned visit – we always came unplanned because nobody had a telephone in those days – my brother nudged me as we walked through the stable past the door with the padlock. He put his index finger to his lips and gestured with his head in the direction of the secret room. We dutifully walked with father to the improvised kitchen where uncle Ben was sitting at his table in the semi-darkness. As usual, he didn’t offer us anything to drink and that was just as well because his cups were too dirty to touch. With the hollowed-out bread knife he cut off a slice of gingerbread for us, which we could take because the cake was wrapped. Eager with impatience we stuffed the gingerbread behind our teeth and left uncle Ben and father to each other. For the sake of appearances we ran back and forth behind the cows for a while before secretly entering the mysterious room. It wasn't what father had told us, it was just as much of a pigsty as the rest of the farm. The table with the carved chairs was nowhere to be seen, there were bales of hay everywhere. The windows let in only narrow strips of light because the shutters on the outside were closed, but in the darkness we could see that the curtains were hanging in tatters on their rods. We looked around in disappointment. Only the mantelpiece was interesting. There were indeed a few statues of saints, as father had said. But also two very strange dolls with frightening faces, bulging eyes and a hideously large nose. They looked nothing like the dolls I played with. They were stick puppets. They had thin wooden arms that were connected to their bodies with strings and wore long skirts. On closer inspection we discovered the milk bottle filled with sand with the stick stuck in it. The skirt of the doll fell over the bottle. While I was still busy examining those creepy dolls, my brother was engrossed in an old, moldy photo album. He called me over and pointed with a surprised face to a snapshot of a young Uncle Ben in a uniform and with an army cap on his stiff farmer's head. In one glance I took in the entire page of the album. Six photos were neatly pasted next to each other in two rows of three. Low houses under palm trees. A woman with a baby in her arms. "Toontje 3 months" was written underneath. The woman was unknown to me, the photo too blurry to make out her face properly. She had dark skin, probably a bit darker than my father, I could still see that. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and was barefoot. The photo next to it showed Uncle Ben at the same low house, with a monkey on his shoulder. We were astonished. Uncle Ben, who never left the house! Was he visiting the neighbors in South Africa? No, those neighbors had not been gone that long. Or was this another country? My brother thought the same as I did: 'Gosh, Toontje... he must have liked the baby's name.' 'Yes, the same name as the child of his sister, our father.' Before we had the chance to look at the photo album any further, uncle Ben stormed into the room. He tore the album out of our hands in a rage and gave us both a resounding slap on the ears. At that, father flew into a rage and in no time we were involved in a huge commotion that ended with father walking briskly to the half-stable doors. He dragged us each by our arms along with him and shouted bitterly that he would never set foot in that cursed farm again. Unfortunately, he never did, because he died of a heart attack a short time later. We were ten years old and since mother had no desire to visit the grumpy old man, we never went there again either. For years we hardly saw Uncle Ben. We ran into him in the village on very rare occasions, he didn't seem to know us anymore. People did talk about it when he showed up sporadically. That he held up his trousers with a piece of rope around his waist. That another piece of rope held the various parts of his Volkswagen bus together. We knew that bus of course. He drove it over the dike in the summer to the pasture where his cows were, with the milk cans in the back. Once he had rolled down the dike with that bus and had survived. His bus too. When we became teenagers we distanced ourselves from those stories. We pretended we didn't know him, we were embarrassed that we were family. Once a year, at Christmas, he put on his neat suit - with shiny worn spots, because it was from before the war - and went to church, to midnight mass. Everyone kept a good distance from him; he had wiped the dirt off his head, but that was as far as his washcloth had gone. Midnight mass was always so busy that there was a traffic jam when mass was over and everybody left the church. Uncle Ben would park his bus in the middle of the intersection and direct the traffic. We got away from there because we were so ashamed. One day, his battered bus pulled up in front of our door completely unexpectedly. With open mouths, we watched through the window as he struggled to get out of the vehicle. 'Is he coming here?' my brother asked. 'Where else would he go?' I countered. 'I fear the worst,' our mother said anxiously. He appeared to have problems with his legs, his 'paws' as he called them himself. My mother had to put his feet in a soda bath and then bandage his wounds with a clean bandage. She wasn't asked, she was ordered, and although she pursed her lips in the old bitterness, she was apparently in no position to refuse the old tyrant anything. 'Diabetes,' I overheard once when my mother pointed out to him that he should call in the district nurse. But of course he wouldn't hear of it. He came back twice a week. For at least five years. 'You'll get a nice inheritance when I die,' he promised her. My brother and I fantasized about that at length, because according to us he must be filthy rich, after all he didn't spend anything. But my mother was wiser, she had known for a long time that he would bequeath everything to the church, but she did it anyway, that dirty job, year in, year out. Why did she do it? Did she know something then that we weren't allowed to know? He became a little more human to us when he came to our house twice a week. He lost some of his demonic aura, and now and then we dared to ask him about those strange dolls on his mantelpiece, but he always pretended to have not a clue what we were talking about. The six photos from the album were still clear to me after all these years, but I somehow felt that that was a territory we were not allowed to tread. My brother was less reserved and one day asked Uncle Ben out of the blue if he had been to the Indies. I still don't know why he asked about the Indies; I would have asked about South Africa, but the effect was astonishing. Uncle Ben froze, all the blood drained from his face and his eyeballs rolled white-up in their sockets. 'You gave him a heart attack,' I whispered in alarm. Uncle Ben was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he soon died, either from a heart condition or from the washing they undoubtedly subjected him to. Finally we were able to enter the secret room unhindered and look at the album for a long time, wondering whether it really belonged to our family. But we had to believe it was because the snapshot of grandma and grandpa was in it, and that of uncle Ben in uniform. In the meantime we had learned a thing or two at school about the Indies and the Royal Dutch East Indies Army. Lessons that we had followed without any interest suddenly came to life before our eyes. A tropical country under the palm trees. Did those mysterious dolls have something to do with it? And what about Toontje? Very slowly, various pieces of the puzzle fell into place. We looked a little closer at the photo of that native woman with Toontje on her arm. When we turned the page we saw uncle Ben with his arm around the woman and the child on his lap. They looked like a family. At the back of the book we found a prayer card:
In memory of our dear wife and mother, our heroine Srikandi, forever with God. Ben and Toontje. Salatiga 1947