Empire of the East (22 page)

We gave the Father the message from Sister Paola. It was about the girl Selina who had tried to bring fifteen children out of the forest, and was now in the orphanage. In the last days someone had gone there to tell her to go to Lospalos to see her mother, who was dangerously ill. Selina suspected a trick to get her away from the orphanage and then kidnap her, so this was an appeal to the Father to make local enquiries into the case. He went aside to read it, stuffed it into a pocket and said he’d look into it. ‘I’m busy at the moment, but Father Palomo will show you round.’

The next thing was to find Father Palomo. We climbed into the orphanage truck and went in search of him, only to be immersed instantly in the empty silent countryside from which we had just emerged. Within minutes we were the subjects of an extraordinary experience. On these remote roads one saw few trucks of the kind in which we were travelling, though there were frequent military vehicles and the occasional pickup. I could not remember sighting an ordinary saloon car since we left Díli, yet here — where to leave the one main road was to plunge into a journey without maps along a narrow, rutted track — was such a car containing five Japanese. Four were young men dressed in normal Western style; the fifth, a woman, white-faced with kohl-encircled eyes and enswathed in ectoplasmic veiling, could have been a leading lady in a Kabuki theatre play. With huge difficulty and at a loss both for words and pronunciation, the male spokesman managed to get across the information that they were members of a born-again Japanese Protestant sect, of which the woman was the sect’s ‘sacred mother’, who had commanded them to bring her here to settle the problems of East Timor. Now they were lost, and at this point the spokesman’s English collapsed, becoming for us a meaningless gabble, from which a single comprehensible sentence emerged, ‘We are talking at cross purposes.’ This we suspected he had learned by heart to cope with such emergencies. Nevertheless it was true, and understanding was in no way advanced by Father Ernie’s evident belief that a series of courtesies delivered in Italian might be of help. There was nothing for it but to lead the way back to Lospalos, where the Japanese were left to confer with the headman, who possessed the only detailed map. ‘I do not know what is born again,’ Father Ernie said, and I had to agree that I didn’t either.

Father Palomo was then run to earth, and Father Ernie went off to look into the Selina affair and left us to him. He sprang out of the chair in which he had been slumped when we came in, reminding me at that moment of an athlete gathering strength between strenuous events. There was an aroma about him of guarded pessimism, but my friend who had commented in the notes given me on the enforced banality of meetings with priests in difficult circumstances would certainly have absolved the Father of this charge. ‘The army just moved in again,’ he said.

‘We didn’t see anything.’

‘You wouldn’t. We heard they were coming, which means that everybody knew. They’re chasing after the Fretilin in these mountains, which means the Fretilin pulled out yesterday or the day before.’

‘Do they ever manage to catch up?’

‘So far as I know, no. They cannot finish this war and the Fretilin certainly cannot. Hunger will be the winner. The Fretilins run out of food. They have to eat anything. Leaves, grass. The people would feed them but they cannot. They have nothing left to give away. This island is so weakened it’s hard to see it ever recovering. Do you know how many died in the war?’

‘They say one third of the population.’

‘More,’ he said. ‘Much more. A half.’

‘Is Xanana Gusmao still up there?’

‘Who knows? It makes some people happy to believe he is. I think this man must be alive, because if they had killed him surely they would put the body on display to prove he was dead.’

The Father had heard nothing of the contact made with the guerrilla leader by Robert Domm in September 1990, which was published in the Australian press. From that it had been clear that the Fretilin resistance remained active. As an army organized on conventional military lines it had been defeated by the encirclement and annihilation campaign of the Soul Mountain and the ‘fence of legs’, and its commanders killed on the spot, or taken prisoner and subsequently executed. Shortly before the invasion Jill Jolliffe visited the command headquarters of those days, being much impressed by Nicolau Lobato, the leader of old, but far less so with Xanana Gusmao, then a shy boy hardly out of his teens who had been put in charge of propaganda and seemed to spend too much time playing with a camera.

A silence of nearly three years followed the collapse, then the news leaked out of clashes with guerrillas in the Lospalos area, and it was from the Lospalos-Venilale-Baucau redoubt, with Gusmao now in command, that an attack was actually launched in 1980 on Díli itself. Domm spent sixteen hours in the guerrilla camp ‘at the top of a miniature Matterhorn’, many of them talking to Gusmao. The leader still appears as shy, although thoughtful, articulate and intelligent. Domm was amazed at the efficiency with which his mission was organized. Although at first startled when a Fretilin bodyguard dipped a finger into a supposedly magical substance and drew a symbol on his chest and forehead rendering him invisible to the Indonesians, he later thought ‘perhaps the tradition worked after all’, for they passed through thousands of troops, on one occasion within metres of them, ‘but they never saw me’. So involved were the people with the Fretilin, Domm says, that ‘people in the army, intelligence, police, shops, hotels … are all really resistance people, who are regularly providing intelligence to the guerillas in the mountains’.

Father Palomo took us to the village of Maupara where the working population had been relocated to a roadside settlement following the burning by the military of a number of houses abandoned in the village. Everything had gone wrong for the people moved to the new site. The curfew had lasted until two years before and land could only be cultivated in certain unsatisfactory areas where those at work could easily be kept under surveillance. These difficulties had coincided with a long period of drought. In Maupara it had not rained for four months before our visit, with the result that the river had dried up, leaving only scattered pools in its bed.

We called on an average couple submitted to this fate. Their garden of 25 x 25 metres was two kilometres from the 12 x 12 foot shack they had been given, but they had to walk one and a half kilometres in the opposite direction to collect water from one of the pools in the river. The total daily trudge to water their vegetables was therefore seven kilometres, one half of it while laden with the filled cans. These were the dust-bowl peasants of America of the thirties, almost drugged by resignation. Father Palomo asked the man to open his shirt. He did so, displaying his muscles and bones, like an anatomical chart. This couple seemed almost indifferent to their predicament and incapable of self-pity. They spoke in a dispassionate mumble, eyes lowered, hands clasped over their breasts as if in prayer. The Father listened attentively, nodded in agreement with whatever was said. ‘As soon as the troubles are over they have been promised a hectare [two and a half acres] of land,’ he translated. ‘And do they believe that?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. For the peasants there was a congratulatory smile, followed by a hug. ‘Baik lagi’ (it will be better later), he said. It was an expression that enshrined the flickering flame of hope among the poor of East Timor.

From the relocation area and its dismal prospects Father Palomo guided us up to the village centre to inspect some beautiful old traditional houses that had survived. They were built on exceptionally high stilts — we wondered why, since none of these eastern islands of the archipelago contained animal predators. The platform, in the case of the best specimen, was used as an open-walled room, supporting two more rooms built one above the other and the highest thatched steeple-roof I have ever seen. Access was by a narrow, spindly ladder through a square aperture in the bottom floor. At the moment of our approach a baby of about two was being urged by its mother, who stood by shrieking encouragement, to climb up. This it was extremely reluctant to do, accompanying its resistance by penetrating infantile screams so rarely heard from the normally docile and well-adjusted babies of the East.

The Indonesian government frowns upon such reminders of a torpid past as traditional houses — however charming their appearance and suited to the climate — on the grounds that they are unhygienic and backward and, in the case of the famous long-houses of Kalimantan, that they foster immorality. It has demolished them throughout the islands by the thousand. Rural Indonesia, according to the official hope, is to become a countryside of planned villages of small, single-family shacks, the inhabitants of which, ideally, will work for wages on local plantations or in mines. It is envisaged that only a few select examples of such peasant constructions as we were admiring here will be preserved (although not usually lived in) as tourist attractions. But, currently, there were no tourists in East Timor, nor were there likely to be in the immediate future. Why then had these houses escaped the fate of so many works of art in the same category?

An explanation was provided by an unusually well-dressed villager who now approached. The house, he told us, speaking reasonable English, belonged to his friend, a rajah, whose property had been respected because he had not wished to run away and hide in the forest as so many had.

‘Were you here at the time of the army’s arrival?’ I asked.

‘I am in this village all the time,’ he said. ‘When the soldiers came, I say to them you are our friends. You are welcome. I shake them by the hand. I bring tea for drink. So I live in my house and no one touches me. I am making no problem for anyone. So it is OK for me to stay.’

We left the rajah’s friend and drove back to Lospalos, where a small embarrassment arose. Sister Paola had given us cassava cakes for the journey, and we were determined to avoid imposing in any way upon the Fathers, for in Lospalos food was reputed to be in even shorter supply than in Venilale. The story agreed upon was that, having brought rations with us, we wanted to drive on to Tatuale, the last village on the island’s eastern tip, where there were archaeological remains and striking views over the land’s end of East Timor. The excuse was waved aside. Father Ernie would have nothing of it. He insisted on our staying to lunch, adding that preparation of the meal was already under way. There was nothing for it but to give in.

My impression was that the spaghetti cooked with local herbs, and eaten in the bare kitchen of the house shared with two more priests, was a rare treat. Once again I found it impossible not to compare not only the personal lifestyle, but the character of the mission — even of the faith — with that of the post-war wave of fundamentalists in South America who had caused me so much dismay. Although without doctrinal affiliation, it had always seemed absurdly anomalous to me that the standard-bearers of Western religious expansion among the so-called ‘backward peoples’ should display an affection for materialism so diverse from the self-denying lifestyle of the founder of their faith and so arrogantly diverse from those they aspire to convert.

Here at Lospalos the Italian Fathers were living like Neapolitan peasants — and who could fail to respect them for it? The one luxury that might have tempted them was an electric generator. ‘We always seem to be kept busy,’ Father Palomo said, ‘and it would save time to have one.’ But there was no generator, and therefore no electric lighting, no fridge, nor any of those small pleasures of the world that would have sneaked through under the Fathers’ guard in the generator’s wake. And, as was to be imagined, there was no store of meat air-lifted from Canada, no stocks of canned foods, no crates of 7-Up, Pepsi or Dr Pepper, no radio-transmitter to keep them in touch with a missionary headquarters — which in any case did not exist — or in an emergency to call for a Missionary Airforce plane.

There was the faintest possible aroma of Italy in this house, but it was hard to guess at the elements in its composition. One of the Fathers had been puffing at a thin, black, straggling cheroot at the moment of our arrival. Perhaps that came into it, as even the odour of spaghetti, cooking too slowly for Father Ernie’s liking over a faltering wood fire. He popped out and came back with a handful of twigs, snapped from a moribund garden tree. ‘Sometimes a woman comes in when we have friends,’ he said, ‘but I do not trust her with the pasta.’ The water in the pot boiled in fits and starts and he shook his head in a pretence of frustration.

No mention was made of the case of Selina, and we sensed that it was a subject to be avoided. Father Palomo had probably gone as far as it had been safe to go by introducing us to the problems of the relocation at Maupara. The co-operation of the fundamentalists with self-imposed authority was absolute. A heroic prudence had been forced upon the Catholics. They may well have witnessed the murder of members of their flock in circumstances comparable to those facing their predecessors at the time of the Nordic invasions in the European Dark Ages. Of this, had it been so, not a word was said. Even Christ had been tricked into a situation where only diplomacy could save. ‘Is it meet’, the Centurion asked, ‘that we should render tribute unto Caesar?’ to receive the reply, ‘Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.’ It is certainly the recommendation the Fathers would have made in similar circumstances, for a more direct expression of opinion could easily have put an end to the mission.

W
E HAD BEEN TAKEN
by Sister Marlene to register with the police who turned out to be extremely courteous. The sister explained who we were and what we were doing in Venilale and they shook hands with us in order of rank. The police station reflected the drive by Jakarta to improve its image in East Timor. It was brightly furnished, like a tourist office in the capital, with coloured views of outstanding scenery in less troubled parts of Indonesia: a line-up of Japanese gawking at the slaughter of buffaloes in Sulawesi, a cremation in Bali, a tidied-up long-house in Kalimantan. Besides these there were wall posters illustrating the ideal Indonesian policeman and policewoman — both of them tall, of slender build and impeccably uniformed. They stood to attention to face the viewer, their faces imprinted with sincerity and resolve
. THE POLICEMAN AND POLICEWOMAN,
said the notice in translation,
ARE SERVANTS OF PANCASILA, OUR NATIONAL IDEAL, AND THE GUARANTORS OF THE FREEDOM OF THE PEOPLE.
The NCO in command said he had no objection to our wandering about the countryside, if that was what we wanted to do, but was concerned for our sakes, and offered to detail one of his men to accompany us on such expeditions. From this offer we extricated ourselves as gracefully as we could. It was hard to imagine any of these mild-mannered men in the situation of the policeman friend of our taxi-driver in Bali, who had volunteered for service in East Timor, then on being told of ‘secret enemies’ in the village, dealt with this possibility by executing all the males.