Born Before the Dawn: A Story

by PRAMOEDYA AJNANTA TOER

I

BEFORE I was born my father had started a small school in Blora. Our house was always full when I was little because some of the older pupils used to board with us. The one I will never forget was Hurip, who came there when I was seven or eight. That was years before the war.

The others in the house looked up to Hurip because he had already passed his junior high-school exam. He seemed to know more than the others, and everyone listened when he spoke. Even now I still know by heart a lot of the things he said, although I didn’t understand much at the time.

I remember especially the night he stood up and said: “We’ve been asleep too long. We need something to wake us up, and first we must get rid of the silly idea of wanting to be government clerks. The Dutch didn’t come here to make us all high officials with big houses. They have taken everything they could, and now they take more with taxes. We have to pay or go to prison and work for nothing.

The next day I asked my mother what Hurip meant. She said I would know when I was older. None of my playmates understood either. Even the djongos, our manservanl, couldn’t explain.

Later my mother told me that Hurip was in a political party. This surprised me because I thought political meant police, and, young as I was, I knew that everyone in the house hated the police. I asked if Father wasn’t annoyed that Ilurip was in the police. Then my mother explained that anyone in a political party was an enemy of the police.

Pleased to hear this I ran off to tell my friends. But they just laughed when I tried to talk about police and polities. The djongos didn’t, believe me either. I was confused, but fell my mother was right

There was another evening when Unrip talked again about government clerks. Little officials, he called them, leading useless lives, thinking they were better than everyone else. “A government clerk,” Hurip said, “leaves home every morning at the same lime. He sits at a desk for so many hours and then goes home. Year after year he does this. If he plays with his wife in the evening there’s another baby and not enough money. He has to live like a cart horse that can’t want any more than a bit of chaff and a bucket of water and a place to rest. If the director smiles he jumps for joy, but if the director is in a bad mood he is like a beaten dog. His salary only lasts half the month. All his life it is the same. There are always more babies and not enough money. They’ll have to fight back like the resl of us.”

The others nodded and I wished I knew what it was all about. The bit aboul a clerk playing with his wife kept running through my head, and as soon as we had eaten I asked my mother whether it was true that every time a clerk played with his wife there was a baby. This was the first time I ever saw my mother angry. She just told me to go and look at my books, and when I started to ask again, she pushed me outside the room.

Even for us children our town was very quiet. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened . . . until one year things began to change. I felt some sort of excitement in the air. Everyone scented to speak differently — the clerks, the shopkeepers, the peasants who came to the market. The students in our house talked more seriously, often about Japan and India, using words that were strange to me, like “Swadeshi boycott,”“tradition,” and “unity.”

Soon there were changes that I could see. First there were football clubs in the villages. There were other sports groups, too, even for the children. After that cultural clubs sprang up — gamelan orchestras, wayang groups, who put on puppet shadow plays. Most of the members were from among the government clerks. My father helped to organize almost all these clubs, and my mother got the women to form groups, too. We children joined the scouts, and at a camp fire one night many grown-ups were sworn in as honorary scouts.

More and more tilings were said about the Dutch that; I had never heard before . . . “bandits,” “thieves,” “liars.” I remember my father saying to my mother: “They won’t be here forever, these Europeans.” My mother nodded, and her eyes were dreamy. Then, when I looked at her closely as she stood there smiling at my father I saw that she was going to have a baby.

One day my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said: “A farmer.” My father repeated my answer as if he were surprised. But I insisted. He laughed and said I mustn’t be lazy any more if that was what I wanted to be.

I was given a little plot of land behind the house where I used to dig and imagine myself a farmer. My mother always encouraged me, telling me that it was good to wmrk, to use my hands and my brains. When I was grown up, she used to say, the Dutch wouldn’t rule our country any more, so I must work and learn because there would be a lot to do.

She told me that my father was planting seeds too and these seeds would grow into big plants with fruit we would eat forever. I just couldn’t imagine a plant with fruit that could be eaten forever. I asked if the fruit would be melons. It seemed this fruit wouldn t be melons, or any kind I had ever seen, but I would know when I was older.

There was another change I noticed too. Suddenly lurik, the coarse, handmade cloth from the villages, became popular. My mother began wearing a lurik sarong. I didn’t like it — it was rough and faded quickly — and when Hurip explained that in India the people were wearing lurik too and burning cloth from other countries, I said: “What a pity, I wish I could get some foreign cloth.” As soon as I heard the others laugh I knew I had said something silly. I hung my head, half ashamed, half annoyed. Hurip lifted me on to his knee and told me that we should wear lurik and not foreign cloth so that our own people, who made the lurik, could live. He said this was what Swadeshi meant.

Every time the old woman weaver came from the village my mot her ordered lurik. She said the weavers were working day and night, just like it had been when she was a young girl. It was because there was Swadeshi now, my mother laughed. The old woman laughed too and said they were always talking about that in the village. It was good for them all . . . some of the weavers were beginning to plant their own cotton . . . her neighbor who made sandals from old motor tires had fifteen workers and sold dozens every week to the co-operative. My mother looked just as happy as the old woman.

2

AS THE weeks went by my mother became heavier and didn’t move about so much. The loom she had bought was put away. Instead of weaving she sat in a chair on the pendopo porch facing the garden, mostly reading. My father was hardly ever at home. If I asked about him she would just smile and say he was planting seeds for the future.

Gradually our house had become almost like an office. All day and sometimes at night typewriters were tapping and the duplicators were turning all the time. Everywhere there were piles of paper. By then my father’s school had about four hundred pupils of all ages, counting those in the evening classes for reading and writing. There were only ten or so for the Dutch course, and all of these, I think, were teachers at government schools.

I found it all exciting, particularly because I knew my father was an important man in the town. People often pointed me out as his son and sometimes they would stop and talk to me.

So it was all the more puzzling for me when I began to notice that almost every day two or three policemen would ride on bicycles slowly past our house, looking at the doors and windows, trying to see inside. When I asked my mother about the policemen she told me: “They don’t like what your father is doing.” “But he’s a teacher,” I said.

That was why they kept looking at our house, she explained. They didn’t like to see our people learning to read and write. As nothing happened in the next few weeks I forgot about the police.

Then one day my father came home earlier than usual. His face was pale and tired. He looked ill, but when my mother asked him if he wasn’t well he only answered “No” dully, without looking up. He shook his head when Mother said he should rest, and sighed. It wasn’t the work, there was a letter.

“What sort?” my mother asked. “From the government . . . a reminder . . . or a threat. I’ve got to stop . . . it’s all finished, the school . . . everything.”

I ran to Ilurip’s room and announced that my father couldn’t work any more. But Hurip looked tired, just like my father. He listened to me but he wasn’t surprised as I had expected at this news. So I went to the babu in the kitchen. Before she could say anything I hurst out: “Papa can’t work any more, he’s not allowed.” She didn’t believe me. “No one would dure,”she said, “even the district officer is frightened of your falher.”This made me feel better, but only for a little while.

On the veranda I found one of the older students. I told him too, but he knew more than I did. From him I heard that the police had come to the school and had taken away eases of books. They had also cut the electric light wires so that there could be no more classes in the evening. A police officer had gone to my father, and all the other teachers were called to my father’s office.

When I went back to the dining room my father was still sitting at the table, his head in his hands, not even listening to my mother’s sympathy. The expression on his face frightened me.

From that day on there were no more visitors to our house. Even the other children who usually came to play with me stayed away. The school hadn’t been closed down, but within a couple of weeks there were less than forty pupils. Most of the boarders staying with us left. Hurip was restless, sitting around, saying little, sometimes with a book in his hand that he didn’t read. Finally he left too, and we never heard from him again.

My father rarely talked with us any more, and never smiled. Day after day he just lay on the sofa, not bothering with the kitchen or the garden. Soon I noticed that my father was going out in the evenings, as he had a few months before.

It was one evening he was away that my mother held me close, and then, taking both my hands in hers, she said: “We’ve had to give the foreigners in our country too much. All we’ve got back is misery and oppression.” Her voice was low and hard, almost like a growl. She was silent a moment. Then her tone became gentle as she whispered: “I hope it will be better for you . . . Hurip is clever, but he isn’t strong enough. Your father is like Hurip. So you must study and work and be stronger than they are.” As she hugged me again I felt the tears on her face.

Since the police had come to the school I had often seen my father sitting in other houses playing cards or dice. Each time I saw him I fell somehow ashamed, but I never said anything at home. I realized that my mother knew where he went, although she never mentioned it.

We hadn’t seen him for five whole days when my mother called me one morning and gave me a folded sheet of paper. I asked: “Is it for Papa?” She didn’t answer, just turned away, her hands over her face, sobbing.

For hours I looked for my father, but he wasn’t in any of the houses where he usually went to gamble. Tired and discouraged I sat on the side of the road to rest. I thoughl of all the changes of the last few months — the clubs that had started and then stopped, all the pupils who left the school, Hurip, the talks about the Dutch, the police, and my father’s face grown lined and never smiling. Then I thought of the letter my mother had given me, and wondering whether I should read it, I took it from my pocket and opened it. Slowly I spelled the words: “Have you any thought for your child that is not yet born? Como home. If you don’t want to come back after you have read this then pray that I will die and carry your child wilh me to the grave.”

I forgot I was tired and hungry. I knew I had to find my father. Some hours after — I don t know how long it was — I did find him at last. He frowned as I came oxer to him. But after a glance at the letter he said: “I’ll come in a minute.”

He was home before 1 was, sitting with my brothers and sisters, talking a little too loudly as if he wanted my mother to know he was there.

For a few weeks he stayed at home in the evenings, playing with us, telling us stories, until one nighl three of Ids friends came by. I heard my mother refusing to allow gambling in the house. My father hardly protested, and after hesitating, went off with his guests. None of his friends ever came again, but he was always out, sometimes for days on end. He was out too the day the typewriters and the duplicators, and some of the furniture, were taken away in a truck.

My mother couldn’t laugh and joke with the haw kers from the villages any more. She would just shake her head, barely saying a few words. The old woman weaver came once, no longer smiling, begging my mother to buy some more lurik. She lalked about the hard limes in the village . . . nobody bought any morelurik . . . the sandalmaker had gone to the city to work as a coolie. She sighed and turned down the road.

My sister was sent to look for my father the night my youngest brother was born. I had to go for the midwife. My father couldn’t be found. The balm sent us to bed telling us not to make a noise.

In the morning I went to my mother’s room to see my new brother. My mother lay peacefully, the little baby at her side. Her face for the first time in months was glowing and bright. She smiled at me, tired, but happy. Just then my father appeared in the doorway. “A boy!” he shouted. “He will be bigger than his mother and his father.”

My mother seemed to stiffen and there was a sharpness in her voice as she answered him before he could come to her bedside: “He’ll get nothing from you. He’ll be able to grow up himself, and it won’t matter if he has been born here and in these times.” My father said nothing. I edged out of the room.

So my youngest brother was born when the wave of excitement had rolled back, when all the talk about Swadeshi had died down, and the clubs and reading and writing classes had folded up. The children of the government officials went to governmonl schools. There was a lot of gambling and a few more police than before. Everything had gone back to normal in our little town. It was as if the night had fallen before the day was finished. The dawn seemed a long way off.

Translated by A. Brotherton