Hello, Mister! Where Are You Going? The story of Husen, a Javanese Betjak Driver – Part II

Although he was familiar with most of the wajang stories from seeing them performed as a child, Tjasta rarely went to see a shadow play, preferring instead genjring, a form of combined magic show and acrobatic display peculiar to the Tjirebon region in which very young girls leapt from great heights into the arms of two young men or balanced flaming tables on their legs, sometimes with as many as twenty people sitting on them. These and other seemingly impossible feats were attributed by the villagers to the supernatural powers of the genjring acrobats. Tjasta, unlike Husen, also was fond of tarling, where a singer accompanied by a small orchestra sang popular songs by request and prostitutes danced.

What both had in common was a fondness for the sandiwara. Tjasta had wanted to be a sandiwara actor as a youth and had actually began training when his father found out and refused to let him continue, saying it did not befit a boy learning the Koran at the local Moslem school.

As betjak men Tjasta and Husen had totally different styles. When Wyatt asked Husen, however jokingly, for a girl, he was told to take a taxi to a nightclub which offered them. Tjasta would not only readily agree to take a passenger to one; he was likely to whisper an invitation to the nearest brothel in their ear.

If Husen’s father’s cottage in Pilangsari was almost bare, with its earthen floor, one cupboard and a crude table and chairs and a few bamboo benches, the living room of Tjasta’s house in Karang Ampel seemed luxurious by comparison: draperies, framed photographs of all the family on the walls – except there was no picture of Tjasta himself – a glass-topped coffee table with a bouquet of artificial flowers, polished, glassed-in cabinets, porcelain figurines, upholstered chairs with pink slipcovers it came very close to middle-class standards in Djakarta.

If in their poverty, Husen’s parents were highly dependent on what money he could send them, Tjasta’s sometimes complained of how much money their son cost them. Once he had lost his betjak and they had had to pay the owner fifteen thousand rupiahs. In recent years, they said, he sometimes would borrow a hundred rupiah from each member of the family during a stay and on one, when they all refused, he had to sell rubber sandals in the marketplace for two days to earn his fare back to Djakarta.

“He never brings money home like the other children,” his elderly mother would sigh. She was a tiny, frail, bone-weary old lady who suffered a chronic and painful stomach complaint and just seemed to her family to be slowly wasting away. Recently, when she had taken a sudden turn for the worse and it was feared she might die, the family had summoned Tjasta from Djakarta. When he heard the bad news and related it to a sympathetic foreign passenger, the man gave him three thousand rupiah to speed him on his way. Tjasta’s mother recovered, fortunately, since he did not arrive for four days and when he did, he came without a penny. The story he told his father was that, passing through a market town, he bought a package of cigarettes through the bus window from a vendor. When the vendor ran off with his change Tjasta said he jumped off the bus and knocked the man down. He was arrested by the local police and jailed for four days. In actuality, Tjasta had stopped off to visit his intended bride, had lingered in her village and had ended up giving her the money.

But the story seemed plausible enough and enough in character so that Tjasta’s father told his wife, “Yah, maybe he had to give money to the policemen. You know those foxes.” Tjasta stayed home less than a day before returning to Djakarta. His visits home to Karang Ampel had become rarer and shorter as the years went by. His mother would only sigh and lament, “Tjasta just doesn’t like it in the village.”

Note: One of the professional gangsters I interviewed in Djakarta, whom I shall call Djok here, was contemptuous toward Tjasta and other villagers like him who might have committed a crime or two in their lives and served in prison but did not, in his view, qualify as authentic criminals. Djok, after reading my notes on Tjasta, pointed out that the betjak driver did not even know the jargon of the Djakarta underworld, where, for instance, to forcibly grab a watch and run, as Tjasta had attempted, was known as “playing football” and breaking and entering a house at night to rob was called “to bomb.”

Djok, also a Javanese, was twenty-seven and had been in and out of most of Djakarta’s jails. He said each time he was imprisoned, he was beaten up by the guards. “Then they tell you to go take a shower and finish. Oh, they might call you back at night to ask questions and then they have a special man to beat you.”

Djok claimed prison conditions were far worse than Tjasta described. “All we had was a little morning tea, no sugar, maybe not even boiled and a handful of rice at noon and another at four. I saw two prisoners die because of not enough food. But if you’re inside, two or three times, you learn to be strong and fight for your living. We’d take the clothes of new prisoners, give them some old rags to wear, and sell theirs to the guards to buy food. Also, I never saw anybody working in the yard as in Tjasta’s story. There was nothing to do inside.”

Djok, oddly enough, was a high school graduate who had originally come to Djakarta to work in the Department of Religion. “I only had a salary of five hundred roops and a wife and three children. The money was only enough to buy cigarettes. Sometimes I had to sell my rice ration a month or two in advance. After a couple of years I got desperate. When I looked into the future, everything seemed dark and when I looked back at the past, everything was wrong. I tried being a garbage coolie, sold newspapers and finally carried fish from Pasar Ikan to the fish market. My friends said, ‘All right, let’s go,’ and I began to steal, just a little fish each day. I got caught and beaten up badly by the Banten fishermen.” He then turned to crime in earnest, entering the house of a senior military officer to steal two million rupiah in payroll money. Djok felt he was caught because he became too greedy and tried to carry away a radio and tape recorder too. He was jailed for four months and when he came out his wife asked him for a divorce. From then on Djok drifted into the Djakarta underworld, pimping in Planet, running a gambling table, peddling narcotics. For a time he served as the chauffeur for a gang of house breakers who dressed in suits and ties, spoke good English, were educated and specialized in robbing the wealthy homes in Kebajoran Baru between the hours of nine and eleven in the morning, when husbands and children of the mostly foreign victims would be away from home. When I interviewed him, Djok was earning a living procuring young girls for rich Chinese. His body bore the scars of police torture and he felt himself completely alienated from both respectable society in Djakarta and the village culture from which he came. Djok spent all his considerable earnings on expensive prostitutes, ganja and gambling. At times, he remained high on ganja and marihuana for days on end and he had experimented with smoking morphine powder and opium. As long as he had money he had a pleasant, sleepy manner; but if he was without some days, he became very nervous and depressed and was probably dangerous.

Aminah and the Java Bar in Tandjung Priok

Late afternoon. A drizzling rain had been falling incessantly most of the day but now the wind had shifted and was blowing in hard from the sea. The wind whirled up the wet, sodden leaves along the Sampur and Aminah pulled her raincoat more tightly around her throat as she stared out at the sea, watching the rolling black waves breaking into whiteness against the seawall. The strong wind felt fresh on her cheek and the sky above was still heavy and grey with rain clouds. She had walked her usual route along Djalan Dajak and Kartika Ba Hari and past the Tandjung Priok Yacht Club without meeting a single sailor.

At the end of the road by the Yacht Club, the evening’s cars were beginning to park. As she strolled by, Aminah glanced with disinterest at the couples inside them, who were embracing and kissing and paying no attention to the other cars or people walking by. Along the Sampur, the sate (fried pieces of mutton on little wooden skewers) vendors were setting up their stalls. Some already had their charcoal fires going and the evening wind was heavy with the scent of sate spices.

Aminah greeted one of the vendors, an old man who was blowing on his fire, thus lighting up his own face with an orange glow. She sat down on a bench near his stand, facing the sea. Perhaps, she told herself, she would have done better to have stayed at home that night. But there had been no freighters in the harbor for a week and the President Jefferson had docked that afternoon. For a long time Aminah sat huddled, clasping her shoulders with chilled hands, waiting.

The long concrete seawalk of the Sampur was almost deserted save the sate vendors and herself. The gaily-painted red and yellow little boats which carried couples out into the bay on dark, calm nights now bobbed unattended along the quay. As she looked at them, Aminah shuddered. Delia, her friend had taken such a boat with a stranger one night just a month before. Delia, so vain of her jewelry, her sapphire medallion and her gold rings. Aminah had been asked by the police to identify the body when it broke loose from the rocks that had weighted it down until it floated to the surface after five days. Two of the fingers had been severed and by then, the salt water and fish had done their work. The police had warned Aminah she must be careful.

Now she no longer walked alone on the Sampur after dark, but came earlier in the evening, even though the chances of meeting sailors was less. Aminah sighed and shook her head. The old sate vendor threw something on the fire, it flared up and he laughed. Her visions of Delia disappeared and as a little while before there had been only the black sea and grey sky and emptiness, cars and people began arriving the length of the Sampur and she heard distant voices, shouts and laughter.

She wished there were a dance that night; she would have gone. But there was none and so she supposed she would have to go down to the Kodja (the waterfront and bar area of Tandjung Priok, notorious for crime) and the Radio Bar or the Java Bar. Aminah looked around. A lone betjak man pedaled by, his bell ringing like a telephone in an empty house. He was still soaked from the rain; his thin shirt plastered against emaciated ribs. Aminah hailed him. Darkness was already descending and it was too far to walk on such a night.

Aminah was short, plump and fortyish. At home, in her pleasant bamboo cottage and leafy garden on Tjilintjing Road, which faced across an open flatland of marsh grass, Djakarta Bay and the Java Sea, she washed her face clean, brushed back her hair and tied it into an austere bun and, in her faded, shapeless but always freshly washed cotton dresses, appeared the very image of a cheerful, demure, respectable Sundanese mother.

Indeed, this was the image most of her sailors carried away with them, for she mothered the young ones and was a real wife-away-from-home “mama” to the old. A superb cook, she and her servant girl, carefully chosen for her skinny, chinless homeliness as her loyalty and devotion, would prepare lavish repasts: large tender steaks, french-fried potatoes, roasted chicken, fried fish, chicken soup and steaming rice, hot rolls with plenty of butter, cucumber and tomato salad, thick hot Javanese coffee and great platters of sliced mangoes and papayas.

And there was always plenty of beer, with great chunks of ice in the tall glasses and Aminah there always at hand to replenish the glass each time a few sips were taken. If cigars or cigarettes were produced, her hand was out with a lighter; if shoulders were tired, they got expertly massaged; if clothes needed washing or shoes polishing, the servant girl whisked them away and they were back, clean, pressed, folded and polished in an incredibly short time.

A grown son, whose studies Aminah financed at a technical school, added to the air of domesticity. A quiet youth and devout Moslem who went to the mosque five times a day, the son was usually about the cottage in the day, pouring over his books in the kitchen or the garden, but discreetly withdrawing to his room in a neighbor’s house in the evening. A sea breeze usually cooled the small garden, where Aminah had some papaya trees and two carefully-tended flower beds and a few shrubs to screen off the high picket fence along the road.

The sun-flooded house with its open veranda and comfortable slip-covered chairs was always immaculate, from the bath and kitchen to the bedroom where Aminah’s oversized bed, with its clean white mosquito net and embroidered sheets and fluffy down pillows, was within easy reach of the radio and a good reading lamp.

Aminah was popular with the neighbors; once a week she loaded up all their children, jammed them into a couple of betjaks, and took them to the swimming pool in Tandjung Priok. It was known she entertained her “boy friends,” but this was a status high above the common young whores in the two brothels next door.

For Aminah’s specialty was to pick up drunken, bitter sailors who had had one of any number of the bad experiences Tandjung Priok has to offer seamen on shore, take them home, give them a shower, cold beer with ice, a good meal and lots of sympathy and mothering. She was not greedy and never asked outright for money. But usually, after a day or two at Aminah’s, the sailors were more than generous feeling a vague sense that not to be, would be like denying their mothers, sisters or wives.

As Aminah never tired of saying, her “friends” came from many countries, and she would call the roll: “American, Norwegian, German, Danish, Greek…Not Japanese. They shot my mother and father in the rice field. I know it’s not the sailors but others, but still I cannot. And not Indonesians. I am finished with the broken heart.”

For Aminah’s husband, the father of her son, a Sundanese who had worked as a petty clerk on the docks, had one day arrived at the house with a pretty young girl whom he introduced as his second wife. Since Aminah owned the house, that ended it. She told him to get out, adding, “I can get enough to eat from the sailors.”

And so she had. There was, however, a dark side to Aminah’s life. Ships sailed, crews changed, sailors came and went and while some always came back when they were in port, these were not enough. Aminah had to go out and find her customers; unlike in the brothels down the street, they did not come to her.

Thus three or four nights a week and every Saturday if there was a dance, Aminah would frizz her hair, paint on a garish face of pink, lips ticked, rouged youth, struggle into a corset and a “sexy” red silk slack suit and walk the streets of Tandjung Priok. It was the only part of her life she hated and she never got over being afraid. There were many pimps and gangsters around the Sampur and the bars and the docks and they forced women like Aminah to pay them bribes on the threat of beating up or knifing their customers. And it seemed to Aminah, as the years went by, and especially during the lean times when few ships came into port, that they kept asking for more and more. And every so often a foreign sailor would be badly beaten and found bloody, robbed and stripped of his clothing, to set an example.

Many of these toughs belonged to what was known in Tandjung Priok as the “Djanggo” gang. Most, but not all, were Ambonese, like their counterparts in the “Alamo” gang of Kwini Street. But unlike the Alamo members, who even if they were high on ganja all day long and may have killed a person or two were mostly teenagers, the Djanggos were older, many had been sailors and were as familiar with Brooklyn and Times Square, Houston and Baltimore as any port in the islands and virtually all were pimps. Some had one prostitute who supported them, some had several. The Djanggos also had their own enterprise, picking up a sailor at the dock and showing him around the town, to the bars, to the ganja and opium vendors, to boys or bantjis or blue movies or exhibitions or whatever the sailor desired. Usually he was safe, provided he had enough money and paid them well.

This evening, it was dark when Aminah’s betjak reached Kodja and she could barely see the stark dim outlines of the derricks and fork lifts along the pier. But turning into the small lane between the Java Bar and the Radio Bar, the whole place seemed to be coming to life. There were people everywhere. The fronts of the bars were festooned with lights, kerosene lamps glowed from the rows of vendors and little groups of eaters squatted in the dust around the food sellers. A boy of about ten sat on his haunches playing a bamboo xylophone, while another beat a drum. The lane was jammed with people including, thank God, many American sailors, and the betjak drivers rang their bells incessantly as they maneuvered the brightly-colored vehicles through the gaps.

From inside the Radio Bar came the lush, international sound of a pianist playing American music and Aminah started to go inside when someone called to her from across the way.

“Aminah! Aminah! It’s me! Piet!”

She recognized with relief one of her old regulars standing in the doorway of the Java Bar, the Dutch captain of a small cargo ship that plied the outer islands. Piet was the only non-Indonesian on the crew; although still in his thirties, with a lean, pleasant, almost boyish face under a shock of blond hair, he was an old hand in the Indies.

Her spirits reviving, Aminah darted through an opening between the betjaks and pedestrians and gave him a big hug, then frowned in mock petulance and told him in Dutch “Long time. I think you forget me.”

“Forget Aminah! Never!” The Dutchman laughed and with an arm around her waist, swept Aminah back to his table where two men were sitting. Her eyes nervously flickered over them to see if they were Djanggos but she didn’t recognize them. One was a muscular, handsome little man with the flat features and high cheekbones of the western Javanese; he had a good-humored smile and Aminah smiled back. The other was dressed all in black and his forearms were heavily tattooed. With a quick, practiced glance at the tattoos, Aminah could tell he had been in prison, probably Tjipinang. She didn’t like the looks of the man’s intent stare but she gave him a nod.

“Aminah, Husen and Tjasta, a couple of betjak men from the hotel. I brought them along so I could find the place again.” Aminah knew what he meant; that he could find the place well enough but he didn’t want to go there alone; these two were brought along for protection. She must tell him they wouldn’t be much help. They were not Djanggos.

The Java Bar was one large, bare rectangular room. There was a steel screen across the entire front and the entrance was kept padlocked and chained after seven o’clock. A tall, hatchet-faced Batak woman, who was in charge, let people in and out, using a ring of keys chained to her belt. There was a latrine in one corner and a small bar with stools in the other. On the bar was a moth-eaten stuffed orangutan. There were five round steel tables surrounded by cheap rattan chairs. Otherwise there was no decoration. Behind the bar, almost hidden in shadow and inconspicuous sat an Indonesian chief petty officer. Although the Batak woman ran the bar, the Indonesian Navy owned it and if the chief petty officer was not there, the bar didn’t open. He seldom moved but if he did it was swiftly, usually to blackjack a troublemaker who was then unceremoniously dumped in the street.

Most of the prostitutes who hang out at the Java bar were middle-aged like Aminah. But while she was plump and cheerful the others were thin and gaunt, with corpse-like faces covered with chalky white powder. Four of them sat woodenly at one table, looking at nothing. At the table nearest the bar sat a very large big-boned American sailor with a crew cut. He sat up very straight and seemed, rigid, almost as if rigor mortis had set in. But when Aminah entered he turned, called out one word, “Baltimore,” and then went back to his frozen posture. Aminah guessed that he was high on narcotics. Next to him, drumming her fingers with boredom on the table’s surface, was a young, rather pretty Javanese girl in a tight, low-cut pink dress. On his other side were two young Ambonese men in white shirts and very tight denim pants. Both had long, oily-looking, brilliant black hair and they sat watching Aminah and her Dutchman.

One table was still empty. At the fifth, two Ambonese, one very tall and Satanic with a long, droopy black moustache and Negroid features, who wore a white shirt and black string tie and the other, who wore a bright yellow shirt, with a sickly, cruel face, sat bent over. Each was working intently, removing the tobacco from a cigarette and inserting in the gap some kind of white powder, which they took out of little blue pieces of paper. At a chair all by himself against one wall sat a very thin, elderly Chinese. He appeared well-dressed in polished shoes, black trousers and a white shirt, but sat with his head toppled forward and his arms dangling loosely from his sides. An opium addict, Aminah knew.

Piet, the Dutch sailor, ordered another round of beer for himself and the betjak men, getting a glass of orange pop for Aminah, who neither drank nor smoked.

“First thing I look for in a port is a good girl,” Piet said, rubbing his long sideburns. “Not a beautiful girl but clever. Everything is corrupt over here in the Indies. Very corrupt. You’ve got to have a good girl to see you through.”

Aminah giggled girlishly and gently elbowed him in the ribs.

“Like today. I must go to the market . Buy six thousand eggs. Fifty cauliflowers. The whole market is sold out. I had a million rupiahs in my pocket this afternoon.” Piet took out a pouch of tobacco and began rolling a cigarette. He offered the tobacco to the betjak men and Husen took one and started rolling his own.

“Two cows. One hundred and fifty chickens. We must eat, of course. Better and cheaper to buy it at the market. I had two taxis and four coolies. One coolie, the whole morning, was two hundred fifty rupiah. When you do it that way, you learn plenty. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘give me five hundred kilo. Oh, you have only two kilo. Can you fix things. Okay, for a little money.’ Ah, but you must have an Indonesian man behind you. Forty kilo oranges, fifty papayas, fifteen kilo bananas. I take the cook. I say, ‘Okay, we go. What we must have on the ship, we must buy.’ Big fish. Small fish. Coconuts, two hundred coconuts. Spices. You must buy. Two thousand kilos of rice. Of course, you must eat. Forty five hungry men. Every day eat fifty kilo rice. I buy four pigs, two cows, one horse, one thousand five hundred chickens, one thousand kilos of potatoes, seven thousand eggs. Now we have cool room on ship and the meat goes into the deep freeze.”

“What are you doing in Djakarta?”

“Oh, I must meet the director of the company at Hotel Indonesia.” Aminah guessed they had quite a few drinks before he started back to Tandjung Priok.

Husen lit his cigarette and inhaled. He seemed to feel a strange warmth. He drew again to be sure. Yah, it was some kind of drug. He slipped it under the table to Tjasta to finish. Tjasta had smoked gangja before and might be more used to it. Better he not try.

“It not dangerous here?” Husen asked. The beer had relaxed him but he still felt uneasy and apprehensive as he had ever since they had arrived a half-hour before.

The Dutchman grinned. He had a pleasant, open countenance that seemed strangely out of tune with the Java Bar.

“When you have a nice face, you smile always and be kind to the people, you’ll always be welcome,” he said. “You must learn the languages of the world. There are many languages but the best is the smile on your face.”

Husen twisted his face into a smile and glanced around the room, getting nothing but dead, bold stares. A man entered selling a large, beautifully carved wooden model of a sailing vessel.

The Dutchman said it was the same kind used by the Sulawesi sailors to carry copra from Sumatra to Djakarta. “No compass. No nothing. Sailing by the stars and moon. That’s all.”

Aminah sat back and rested, happy to have found Piet and seeing he was enjoying himself. He always like to talk. But she kept an alert eye on his beer glass and when the level dropped a third or so, she reached over to refill it from the bottle again, leaving Husen and Tjasta to fend for themselves.

Husen asked what the two Ambonese with the cigarettes were doing. Piet glanced at them. “They break the filter open just a little and put Chinese hemp in. You can go and see. Accch, that marihuana stuff is no good. My crew take marihuana and fall down the stairway.”

“Why do you become sailor? Why not stay at home in Holland?” Husen asked him.

“I want to see the world. I want to learn the people, that’s all.”

“Yah, is good. Going to everywhere. Where you going now?”

“Djambi, you know it?”

“No.”

“It’s a place filled with malaria. In Sumatra. Two days up the river. You pass many kampongs. All the kids are calling, ‘Jambo, Jambo!’ No pilot. And when it gets dark you drop anchor. No lights. You bring rice from Djakarta. You take rubber and bring it to Singapore. Then to Manila. In Manila you get arak with coconut milk. She open the coconut and the milk and put arak in.”

It had started to rain again outside, a soft drizzle, and the traffic outside in the lane became more muted.

“Raining time,” the Dutchman went on. “In Djambi it can rain two or three days without stopping. Not small rain. Big drops. Is falling plenty of rain. It’s like the sky coming down. Three days rain. It’s monsoon time. Raining like hell. And then you get all the mosquitoes. The bloody mosquitoes. In Djakarta, when the rain comes over the mountains, it’s cool. At the moment, it’s not hot.” The radio began playing a haunting Indonesian ballad. “A kronjong,” the Dutchman said. “Music for love.” It must have been magrib time for they could hear the start of an Islamic prayer outside. “If you want to you can pray,” he went on. “Not me; if I dies nobody can help me.” He turned to chat intimately in Dutch with Aminah.

Husen said to Tjasta in an undertone, “I think better we going back to Djakarta now, Tjas.” But just then a musical troupe came in the bar and their attention was distracted. There were three men with guitars and a long-haired youth with a beaming brown face and white teeth. First he sang “Island in the Sun” in English and, warming up, “On Top of Old Smoky,” “It’s a Long, Long Road to Tipperary” and, at the request of the girl with the sailor from Baltimore, Djakarta’s most popular hit tune, “Bina Riya.” She and one of the older prostitutes rose and began to dance. Piet asked Aminah if she wanted to dance. She said no.

Someone pushed the bar door open and a big and very fat European, his glasses hanging down on the tip of his nose and his shirttails hanging loose, staggered inside. Weaving and almost unable to stand the man turned to their table and said in a loud accusing voice, “What are you doing here?” Then, before they had time to say anything, he turned and staggered back out into the street.

A moment or two later an Indonesian sailor in a blue fatigue uniform, who was almost as big and fat, came staggering in. “Where is that old American?” he shouted to the bar at large.

“He left,” called the girl with the Baltimore sailor.

The Indonesian sailor turned to Husen and Tjasta saying, “Oh, shit! I drove him around all day and he didn’t pay for the gasoline. He has no money. I asked if he has dollars; I can change.” The sailor drew a large wad of rupiah notes from his pocket and waved them around. All the Ambonese youths looked up with interest, but the sailor shoved them back into his pocket and went outside.

“What about Holland?” Husen asked the Dutchman. “You have windmills and wooden shoes like I hear about?”

“Yah, sure. When it’s raining on the farm. We have about seventy-five cows. Only three horses. Just for show. My father runs the farm.”

“He can milk seventy-five cows?”

“No. It’s electric. Yah, of course. Nobody does by hand in Holland. Yah, I’m the only seaman in my family.”

“How many brothers?”

“Two and three sisters.”

“Are you the youngest?”

“Yah, I’m the last droplet of my father’s prick. The bad one who didn’t turn out no good. I’ve got a chicken farm in Guatemala. Six thousand chickens. When I get old I’m going to retire there.” When the Dutchmen and Aminah started talking once more, one of the old prostitutes came over and sat down with Husen and Tjasta. Husen asked her if she had been at the Java Bar a long time. She told him her story:

“I work for this bar a long, long time. Before I was married. My first husband was a man from Padang. I was only thirteen. From Bogor. We had to wait four years to sleep together. Got two children. One survived; now he’s a car machinist in Priok. My second child was miscarriage. I was depressed, upset, because my husband fall in love with an orchestra singer from Sundan. He leaves me, I can’t stay alone. And then – I’m very hurt. I wanted to join with him forever. I was hurt, I was distressed, but I got a job in a Chinese restaurant because I could speak a little Dutch. In Pasar Senen. Then I was taken on by a Dutch sergeant. But he has a wife too. He looked after me until the colonial times were over in ’50. When he left for Holland with his wife and children.”

“Now I help this Batak woman who runs the bar. Some think work like this is easy and pleasant. But sometimes I must take drunks home. I must go late at night to send drunks back home. Sometimes have to notify the consulate.”

“You have much experience,” Husen said politely.

“Oh, nobody can cheat me about Djakarta. Because I was here since a young girl. I know each corner in Djakarta. One time the police arrested me in the night. They said, ‘How you get money, so much?’ But I’m not afraid. Once a taxi driver took me to the wrong place in Kodja. And I told him, ‘Look, mister, I was born in Djakarta. Don’t try to cheat me. If you can’t find Antjol, leave me here. I can go home alone.'”

The Dutchman wanted another round of beer and the woman hastened off to the bar. Aminah, who had gone over to speak to the other women came back agitated.

“A little boy, a shoeshine boy, has been taken away on a ship by Negro sailors,” she told them. “That was his older brother beating the drum outside a while ago. They say he’s indifferent. The father wept but he didn’t go to the police.”

“Who was the boy?” Piet asked.

“A little seven year old. Jusof. He didn’t speak English. Only a little like ‘Yes…Jusof, you want to eat? You have money? Yah?’ His brother saw it. Is big man, Negro, he wrapped his arms around the little boy and carried him away. Many little boys go out to the ships to shine shoes and beg. Jusof went with his brother and these Negro men took him away.”

“What they do with him?” Husen asked.

Aminah frowned, “Maybe the man has no son, maybe send to school is good. Maybe sell in Arabia, I don’t know. I used to say, ‘Jusof, you must go to my house. I no have baby. I no have son. Only big son.’ And he’d say, ‘All right. Tomorrow.’ And I’d say, ‘No, tonight.’ ‘Okay, let’s go.’ ‘No, only joking, Jusof. You have father and mother.’ His face is sama sama as Spanish boy. Maybe, who knows, he will be sold.”

Piet said, “I don’t think they’d sell a little boy.”

“We don’t know. If he want to sell, where he want to sell, we don’t know.”

Over in the corner the Baltimore sailor’s head fell back against the wall with a thud. He blinked and sat up rigidly straight again. “If a man has smoked so much gangja,” Aminah told them in an undertone, “he forget, he forget girls. He has been smoking since noon, the girls say. Then he went back to his ship to get money and came back to the bar again.”

Tjasta spoke for the first time. “I am worried to see tonight. I have seen about ten peoples come in and out of the bar. I see some boys with blurred eyes. One just a small boy.”

“That’s Unang. He’s naughty. He’s only thirteen.”

“Oh, no, he’s too small,” Tjasta said. “He knows about girls?”

“He used to make accident with visitors, Chinese, and then get men to come and help him beat them up.”

“Who is that one?” Husen asked, nodding in the direction of the two Ambonese sitting alone at their table.

“The big one with the long moustache is Poli. He’s jobless. He has only one pair of clothes. He washes and wears again. His job is to stop some people and make pressure. Once if you don’t give money, he will beat you. The other, with the Afro haircut yah, his girl gets money for him. All is nothing working. Just joking, joking and smoking marihuana. The character of that woman there – if you have a lot of money, she will take it all. I tell you the woman from Kodja, she will take all your money. Recently, the girl of Poli went with an American and she didn’t get much money. Poli was angry and told her to get a lot of money from the American but she cannot get it. If someone doesn’t give money, he might be beaten by Poli. The sailors don’t know Poli is the pimp of that girl, if they know they’d be afraid. The girl loves Poli very much and he is always threatening to leave her.”

Aminah sighed. “Most of the gang around this bar knows the way to get money. If you have money to give, you’re all right. But I don’t want to be accompanied by a man, even if I lose my visitors. These boys just want money, to smoke ganja.”

Tjasta was watching their table. “Look, he’s unrolling…he’s making something with the cigarette.”

Piet who was drunk now, stood up. “I go look and see how he does it.” Aminah tried to stop him but he staggered across the room.

The two looked up at him. “Hi,” said the one in the yellow shirt. “My name’s Charlie. I’m putting heroine and morphine inside, you want to try?” Piet said no thanks, but he sat down at their table. The one called Charlie lit the cigarette and inhaled it deeply to no noticeable affect. Piet saw his eyes were already bloodshot and glazed over. “Where are you from?” he asked the other.

“Ambon.”

“Oh, many of my crew are Ambon. Good sailors. Not like the Javanese. And if an Ambon wants to stab you, he’ll do it from the front, not like the Javanese, in the back. Always in the left lung. So, what do you do? Your work?”

“I’m a sailor. But right now I’m out of work. I’m waiting for a ship. Maybe next month.”

They were diverted by shouting in the street. A crowd of betjaks had gathered. Aminah went to see what it was and reported a Chinese had quarreled with the betjak driver over the price and then had lost his temper and tried to hit him before running into a house. “Let’s go home,” they heard one betjak driver say. “If you make a quarrel now, it’s wrong. But when the incident happened even if you kill the Chinese, it’s all right.”

The Ambon with the long moustache, Poli, now told Piet, “I’ve been all around the world.”

“Oh, in the United States, Europe?”

“New York, Houston, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Rotterdam.”

When Piet returned to their table and related his conversation, Aminah scoffed, “He can say that, it’s his story but its nonsense. Who would want to use him on a ship? (See footnote on Poli at end of sketch). He cannot work. He has no skill. Only pick pocketing. There’s many men who went to the sea. But two days, one month, come back here again. They’re just bantjis from Makassar.”

“What?”

“It’s a saying. If a bantji is Makassar man there’s no market for him in Makassar. Nobody wants to buy. So he must come to Djakarta. Poli has no home. He’s in the bar the whole day and night.”

“He can rest if he’s got the money,” Tjasta said drunkenly. “I am very hate to talk with a man like that if his aim is biguto (bad). If a person’s aim is right, I can speak. But that man who is biguto, I not like to speak with him.”

Husen got up to go to the latrine. On the way he was stopped by the Ambon in the yellow shirt, “Who are you?” he asked. “Who’s the white man?”

“He’s Dutch. A sea captain.”

“Don’t worry about anything here. Everything will be all right.”

“No. I am his friend.”

“Oh, no, don’t worry. We are sailors. We speak the same language. Don’t worry about this place. We have been here many years.”

“Be careful to talk to him,” Aminah told Husen when he returned. “He’s high.”

“Better we go from here,” said Tjasta. “The aim of all the people here is not true.”

“But Aminah comes here every day,” said Piet.

“Because all the people here are her friends. Yah, we have friends here but their way of living is like that, bad way. I think better we go, tuan. Better we leave this place.”

“Yah,” said the old waitress Husen had spoken with. “Finish those beers. Let’s go. Ask him to go home, Aminah.”

“Better we go now, Piet.”

“Why? I am enjoying myself. These are sailors.”

The Dutchman was very drunk now and Tjasta reached across and undid his watch. “I give you, when we are out of here,” he said, putting it in his own pocket. “Give it back now.” “No, tuan,” Tjasta said with surprising firmness. “Don’t talk with them again. Besides talking something dangerous will happen.” Husen, too, had wanted to leave long ago but now he saw the Dutchman was too drunk and they could not go without him.

As they were speaking, six more Ambonese entered and took the empty table. “All Djanggos!” Aminah hissed in a whisper. She got up telling Husen and Tjasta,” Wait here. I’ll try to get him outside.”

As she moved toward the door, she was intercepted by Poli. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Look, Poli. He’s my best friend. If he’s in trouble I’m responsible.”

“Hey, your friend wants ganja?” Charlie asked her.

“No, he’s with me. Leave him alone.”

They were in the doorway now. Aminah saw the newcomers were all gathering around Piet. She started to turn back. Charlie said in a low voice, “Don’t take him away from us, Aminah.” She looked down and saw he was holding a knife.

Aminah stumbled out into the street, distressed. She walked down the lane to a cigarette vendor she knew, Ali.

“What’s wrong, Aminah?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m worried. There’s a lot of Djanggos went into the Java bar.”

Inside the Djanggos seemed to be closing in on Piet. They ignored Tjasta and Husen, shoving them to the side.

“Hey, we’ve got a good girl for you,” Charlie, the one in the yellow shirt, said.

“No. I’m waiting for my girlfriend. Aminah.”

“She’s old and fat. We can offer you a young one.”

Outside Aminah said, “Look, Ali, write a letter for me.”

“Are you stupid, Aminah? You cannot write a letter? Here, let me do it.” Aminah dictated and the cigarette vendor wrote:

“My dear Piet,

I want you to follow the bar road to the little cigarette stand under the green light. Ali, the man there, will bring you to meet me in a quiet place.” Aminah

She sent the note in with a betjak man. A moment later the Dutchman, followed by Tjasta and Husen, came out and went to the cigarette stand. Ali quickly shoved them into a dark passageway between some houses where Aminah was waiting and she led them to a betjak stand. Seconds after them several Djanggos came running toward Ali.

“Where is the Dutchman gone?” Ali shrugged. “Back to ship.” “And the girl?” “I dunno. Maybe go home.”

As their two betjaks passed the Kodja police station and it was clear they were not being followed, Tjasta called to Aminah to stop her betjak so he could give Piet back his watch. Then Tjasta and Husen said goodnight; they were returning to downtown Djakarta.

“Wah!” said Husen, “I not like to back to Java Bar again. Miss Aminah, I think dangerous for you.”

Aminah smiled and said with a gallant air, “Yah, if you are not clever or brave, maybe difficult to stay there. Djanggo. Cowboy. Is cowboy for money,” and with a wave she and her Dutch sailor moved off into the blackness of the Tandjung Priok night and Aminah could be heard asking him, wouldn’t he like a nice cool shower and perhaps change into a sarong and she would fix him a nice tender steak and did he like fresh papayas?

Note: Aminah underestimated one of the Djanggos, Poli, who shipped out as a seaman on a freighter to Taiwan two weeks after this incident. Later, in a moving interview, the prostitute who had supported him told me she believed Poli was a good man inside but had fallen down with bad luck and worse company. It should be noted also that one evening, when Tjasta and myself were coming from the Java Bar, Poli insisted on escorting us back into the city proper. On the road, Charlie and several other Djanggos were waiting, apparently to waylay us, and Poli bought them off with a hundred rupiah note. There is, it appears, in Indonesia as elsewhere, a kind of honor among thieves. Also, I found a surprising readiness to be interviewed in the underworld; perhaps if one has lost his sense of cultural identity, one is eager for anything that underlines one’s existence.

Aminah’s operation, of course, was not typical of Djakarta’s prostitutes. More representative was a brothel next door where the girls were very young, between fifteen and twenty. In interviews, during which they caressed, held hands with and bit the shoulders of myself and my interpreter, they related histories of having been abandoned by a husband, losing their parents in the village and needing money or having been carried to the brothel by who they presumed was a marriage suitor and then being raped and left there. The brothel was a very transient place; most of the girls stayed only a few months before drifting onto another; most of the customers, sailors, petty dock officials, policemen and betjak drivers, paid two hundred to three hundred rupiah, although the occasional foreigner was asked for a thousand, and stayed less than half an hour. The girls were not allowed to leave the brothel and go about Tandjung Priok although they were not prisoners and could go home when they chose. The brothel itself consisted of front rooms for drinking and sitting, large, good bedrooms for business and a large shed with a mat floor where the girls actually slept and kept their clothes. The food was very poor.