Empire of the East Read Free Page B

fingerprint on a contract form. The victims were then seized and led away. ‘On the boat the sailors had beaten the coolies and taken away their young wives. Coolies who had worked well for the company were waiting at Deli to take their pick of the women left over.’
    The first part of the book is a catalogue of horrors. Families are torn from the jungles and split up, the women being not only separated from their menfolk but from their children. All names are changed, cancelling previous identities. There are scenes of unending violence. On Szekely’s first day in the jungle a suspected thief is taken in a tiger trap, and the corpse of a coolie who had died in the night is flung as a matter of course through the nearest barrack-room window. Batak tribesmen with a notable propensity for cannibalism are hired to track down would-be escapers. Persuaded by a superior, Szekely buys a coolie’s wife for ten guilders — although up to this point he appears as full of shame.
    Then suddenly all this record of atrocity is put out of mind. The mood changes so dramatically that a suspicion dawns that perhaps the author has suffered a kind of breakdown, causing him to throw in the towel and call for someone holding opposite opinions to finish the book. So far we have been reading an account of a Sumatran version of the outrages of Putamayo, but now the view is through different eyes. Szekely, at twenty-six, has become a Tuan Besar (big man), sanctioned by the Board of Directors to clear more and more forest for plantations, and living in a kind of forest suburbia. ‘In front of my house was a large garden with carefully tended flower beds … four gardeners worked the grass mower from morning to night.’ There are tennis courts and golf courses for the Europeans and football for the natives. ‘I gazed upon the gentle, friendly landscape. Only six years had passed since our first axe-blow brought about a new life here.’ In the next two weeks five hundred coolies would be arriving. He finishes on a note of quiet satisfaction.
    We lingered happily in a pleasant environment of work in these days easily performed; of buffaloes ploughing through shining mud with women following to tuck in the seedling rice plants. Farmers with time on their hands fished a little, with unimpressive results. There was always a child in sight flying a home-made kite. Eventually the matter of food came up. Andy knew this area and recommended a restaurant at Langsa. ‘Here food very clean,’ he said. ‘You will enjoy.’
    The restaurant turned out to be what at first appeared as a substantial double-fronted shop, an impression heightened by a modest display in both windows of cooked foods of various kinds, all these exhibits appearing more as crudely made plastic imitations than the real thing.
    We went in and found ourselves in the Victorian surroundings of what could have been a family restaurant in the back street of an English country town. The walls bore massive, fly-spotted mirrors in heavy frames carved from dark, expensive-looking wood, and the dining area contained nine circular tables with marble tops, each of them some seven feet across. Having seated us at one of these, two waiters went off together to a cupboard under the back of one of the windows, opened it, and came back carrying between them a tray holding twenty-five dishes of food which they proceeded to arrange on our table. We prodded with our forks at the items on offer, identifying what might have been lamb or goat, the unmistakable limbs of chickens wrapped in yellow, parchment skin, a short black length of rubber imitation of bowel, segments of fish, and octopus tentacles. It was all cold, rock-hard, and caked with what had once been a reddish sauce, recalling an unimaginative museum exhibit illustrating, perhaps, articles of food recovered from a Celtic settlement. Within minutes of our arrival four customers sitting at the nearest of the enormous tables got up and prepared to