Stories from Deli

The ‘singkeh’, the youngest of the assistants at the company had now been in line for two years and it seemed that he could be made into a useful tobacco. In those years he had had to unlearn many of his European concepts and master many Delian customs, which was particularly difficult in the beginning. For he had ended up in a completely different community than that of the small provincial town, society where he had spent his youth. That’s where life in the small houses on the narrow streets went into quiet, regular gait. Only rarely was that peace disturbed by a fire or an accident, which filled the entire city. 

Sundays and the Christian feast were always honored; every now and then a one-day folk party brought some life to the brewery, while anniversaries or marriages were taken into account. The life of those good citizens went according to fixed rules, which were never deviated from. In the morning a good breakfast with the morning paper at a well-prepared table, then to the office or work at the coffee table at noon. In the afternoon de-place and the ladies went for a walk and the gentlemen after their day’s work went to the club to view the magazines from the reading table or to play a game of dominoes or billiards while enjoying one bit of bitterness. After lunch, visitors often came and the events in the city were discussed over a good glass of wine. 

Children were born, the old of days died, whose places were again taken by the sons and daughters, who had grown up in the same circle and who knew nothing but that this was how life had to be lived. It was quiet, it was safe and they coveted nothing more, the appearance of the Max Havelaar and a speech by Multatuli in person did cause some commotion in that town, but this soon subsided again, because oh, that India was so far away away and that man would have exaggerated greatly. Moreover, his personal life did not seem to be too pure and that was the verdict: such a man did not fit into their world. 

Our young man, who had grown up in that environment, had been a real mischievous boy there in his youth, who repeatedly indulged himself in irritating wanton acts with a few friends. They kicked the buckets of water, with which the service. girls scrubbed the streets; they pulled the cobbles from the streets with leather suction cloths; they shot with their arrows and slingshots at all the dogs and cats they encountered and did not even spare themselves to pierce the colorful glasses of the church windows of the synagogue with those arrows. They celebrated their fighting spirit by fighting fierce battles against the ‘finen’, the students of the special school, using long slings to which half a pavement was attached. 

Thus they had become the terror of the street and a serious dissonance in the quiet harmony of that town. There was really only one solution regarding the future of those brittle boys: to the East! That is where such tomboys belonged and indeed some of them ended up in that part of the Greater Netherlands, where they could give full pleasure to their boisterous nature. As said, it was not easy for that ‘singkeh’ in that foreign country in the beginning and immediately he was taught that strict discipline was enforced, to which both the employees and the European personnel were subject. Working hours were relentlessly adhered to, and the assistants were made personally responsible for the performance of the teams of workers who worked under their supervision. The orders had to be executed punctually and if not with harsh words, then with hard blows and the assistant, who failed to do so, was dismissed as unfit. But great work was to be done in this wide country. 

Here nothing was impossible and you had to understand everything. The primeval forest still had to be cut down and burned at many tobacco companies and within a few months such areas were, fully equipped with drains, etc. ready to plant for the precious product: Deli-tobacco. Dozens of large drying sheds were built on the newly built planting roads; houses for the assistants and barracks for the coolies, bridges were built over rivers and drains, and so built, the daylight of each day was hardly sufficient to get everything ready on time. Sundays or Christian holidays were not taken into account, and only the first and sixteenth days of the month were days of rest insofar as the field work continued to rest, but the Europeans still needed some of those days to complete the update their department’s administration. The quiet course of bourgeois life from yonder in Holland was gone; the interior of the houses also disappeared, where the caring hand of the cared-for lady of the house was everywhere. But the limited scope and the narrowness of the field of work of that old environment had also disappeared. 

Here was the wide space; here they worked on three or four thousand acres of partly virgin land with a few thousand Asians of many races; here they harvested a product that brought in millions of guilders and they were an untouchable greatness towards the employees. Here was exuberance, both in the work and in the pleasures of that small band of Europeans who had gathered in this corner of the world, and the ‘singkeh’ had soon felt quite at home in this exceptional society. In these first years he had experienced all the work, but he could also have shown his worth in sudden disasters, such as fierce forest and dry barn fires, coolerows, cholera epidemics and band-chirping rivers. But now he had been entrusted with a ‘department’ of the company, where he had to produce a crop with two kongsis Chinese and a team of Javanese; he was now indeed involved in the labor process that was to bring the precious product onto the world market. 

Because the fields on which a plantation had been planted were again fallow for eight years and so new complexes had to be cultivated every year, the four or five ‘departments’ were spread over the entire company and the department assistants lived alone on their own. planting ways. There they were in charge of all the activities on areas ranging from eighty to a hundred hectares. All work was carried out with the utmost care and regularity under the strict control of the administrator, who was in turn responsible to the chief manager, whose inspections were therefore highly feared. He soon got used to the loneliness of his home. 

When he came home in the evening after ten and more hours in the blazing tropical heat in the fields, he poured many wells of water over his sweaty body, ate his supper, and settled himself on the front porch with no covering other than a colorful sarong and a thin jacket. He would lay with his bare legs on the balustrade, a cold glass of beer next to him on the large marble table, and he would have no need for company. The tropical night out there was full of animal noises, but otherwise it was dead quiet and he could lie there for hours, satisfied with his work and with his life in this grand environment. But that this loneliness also had its disadvantages, he would still experience in a painful way. A lot had to be done before an assistant stayed at home and was not in his fields, for to the ‘Deli-matjam’ belonged the notion that uninterrupted supervision and control could not be missed, day in, day out and from the early morning. until the late evening. This regime hardened the assistants and disregarded physical discomforts, which were very bothersome, but which were not bad enough to stay at home. 

Moreover, their example worked favorably on the field coolies, who were convinced that they too were obliged to keep working until they simply could not go on, and were really sick. The young assistant, who knew this regime so well, had been struggling for a few days, haunted by severe back pain, until he could barely move, and fell down on his bed exhausted. With difficulty he had scribbled another note to the company administrator, reporting his condition and requesting medicine. After that he had had many drinks for anesthesia, but it got worse and worse and in the most literal sense he could no longer move. Lying on his stomach on his bed, he resignedly waited to see what would happen. He lived alone in this kebon house on a remote planting road from the company, and had no housekeeper to share the loneliness with him, so he was completely taken care of which had taken a few hours of fast walking. pointed to the concerns of his Chinese factotum a Seng, who had served him faithfully in both these years. He had now rushed to the yard with the note, but it was already late in the evening when he returned, for he had had to get the medicine from the central hospital, which had taken a few hours to walk quickly. In the meantime, the boy had had plenty of time to moan out his pain and misery in the quiet house, where there was no one to give him a drink, and seldom had he felt more deserted than that afternoon. 

When a Seng came back, he got such a wind from the front that he let his tuan calm down a bit before saying his message from the doctor. He showed the vial, which read: Chloroform oil, and told it to rub the back vigorously; it would be painful but the boy should not be deterred by the protest of his tuan, for this was the only means by which the disease could be cured. The young man looked suspiciously now at the bottle and then at the boy; but finally he declared himself willing to be treated as prescribed. With his back and loins completely uncovered he lay on his stomach and a Seng rubbed the oil, no, into his skin. Rarely had the tuan been so bungled and abused as in this painful treatment. He cursed his faithful servant to the most distant offspring, and swore that he would spank him as soon as he recovered; that he would throw it out, that he would have it tied up. But for the moment he could not move and a Seng literally followed the doctor’s express orders: rub in vigorously and don’t care what tuan would say. The powerful hands of the Chinese imperturbably massaged the stiff back muscles until the contents of the bottle were used up and his boss lay down exhausted with pain and excitement. The entire back gleamed like a mirror from top to bottom, and the sheet, too, was full of oil stains that had been thrown there in his attempts to knock the bottle out of Seng’s hands. 

The boy carefully chased the mosquitoes out of the bed of the mosquito net, closed it well on all sides and then quietly disappeared to his own sleeping place in the outbuildings, where he was soon plunged into a deep sleep, exhausted from the distant journey and the tiring rub in. The patient had rarely felt so miserable. He had hallucinations from crushing hammer blows on his back, from thousands of pinpricks in his loins. As long as he could piss off at someone and vent his annoyance, it would have been bearable, but lying here alone, without being able to move, was the worst of all. Exhausted as he was, he slumbered after a while and slept for a few hours before waking up with an indeterminate feeling of doom. He opened his eyes and saw in the dim light of a kerosene lamp standing next to his bed, a moving dark stripe from the edge of his bed across the sheet. What? a thin snake? With a natural reaction of defense he wanted to go sideways, but a violent shot in his back was the result, and then he saw that it was not a snake but whole processions of ants, thousands of ants, who had come up from the floor onto his bed, drawn to the sweet oil on his back. 

They marched in never-ending processions to this feast, covered his body, walked on his neck, over his face, on his pillow, and sucked the body full of that unprecedented food. He was helpless at the mercy of this robbery. With his hands he tried to disrupt the procession, to kill hundreds of those tormentors, but new processions continuously appeared. He could neither get up nor turn around to fight the itching on his back and there was no escape at all. Loudly his deep voice roared: “Boy,” through the silent night, but a Seng slept as only a Chinese can sleep and did not hear the oft repeated cry for help. By his efforts to disturb the encroaching noodles, The mosquito net around his bed had also been opened – running procession and numerous mosquitoes flew in to have their part in this unexpected feast as well, and he lay there like a defenseless victim who could do nothing to end it. Until sleep took care of his exhausted body, and when a Seng came to his bed at dusk in the morning, he ended the ant feast by rubbing his back well with garlic, which the teasing spirits for the flight. 

He slept all day long, utterly exhausted from the torments of that night, and he was no longer overcome by the ants, for a Seng had put the legs of the iron bed in bowls of water covered with a layer of petroleum cast. But when he had struggled to get up to eat in the evening, he vented his exasperation to his good keeper and scolded him for not hearing the calling that night. But a Seng, who had already served many a tobacconist, let the storm pass unmoved, as befits a wise Chinese. The next morning he stepped back into the fields as best he could, where he met the clerk, who had already put things in order there, and who had no comment on his story of that wretched night other than the good one. advice to take a housekeeper, as a remedy for all ailments. The boy a Seng, however, had recounted the adventures of that night in scents and colors, and as every European in that country was nicknamed by the natives, they henceforth called him in mutual conversations: Tuan Semoet, the Ant-lord because he had not heard the calling that night.