Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer Page A

want to lose my son-in-law too—you, Child.”
    Even in my grief I could sense that Mama would now become isolated from everything outside. She would return to being the maiden-girl who was thrown out by her family, sold to the house of Master Mellema.
    “Child, if I ask you to remain my son…?”
    Ah, what is the use of writing about this dark time in our lives? Let me just say that from the arrival of that telegram Mama felt closer to me. And I to her.
    Panji Darman’s letter following the telegram said his task was over now, so he would come home to the Indies. Mama answered in a telegram that it was best he rested for a while in the Netherlands. If he wanted to continue his studies, she would pay for it.
    Panji Darman answered with another telegram. He was a thousand times grateful, but he was not willing to be a burden on someone who was threatened by disaster. Indeed, it was he who should be helping Mama. Anyway, the Netherlands had given him only bad things to remember it by. He would come home quickly.
    His letters kept coming.
    The newspapers presented all sorts of reports from all over the world. But I saw only Annelies.
    “For nine months I bore her, then I gave birth to her in pain. I brought her up. I educated her to be a good administrator. I married her to you.… She should now be growing into her full beauty…murdered, dying in the grip of somebody who never knew her, who had never done a single good thing for her, and who only abused her,” Mama moaned during those days.
    Finally I marshaled the courage to answer her. I repeated Panji Darman’s words. “All we can do is pray, Ma, pray.”
    “No, Child, these are the deeds of human beings. Planned by the brains of humans, and by the warped hearts of humans. It is to people we must speak our words. God has never sided with the defeated.”
    “Ma.”
    “It is to people we must speak.”
    I knew that revenge was raging inside her heart. She needed nobody’s pity.
    And so it was that I too began to feel the fire of revenge.

3
    L ife went on without Annelies.
    I returned to my old activities: reading the papers and certain magazines, books, and letters; writing notes and articles; and helping Mama in the office as well as with the outside work.
    All this reading taught me a great deal about myself, about my place in my environment, in the world at large, and in the unrelenting march of time. Looking at myself this way, I felt I was being carried along by the wind, with no place on earth where I could stand secure.
    This is the story, put together in my own way:
    Eighteen ninety-nine—the closing year of the nineteenth century.
    Japan has become increasingly interesting. These people, who arouse such admiration, are achieving more and more amazing things. I read from my notes: The Netherlands and Japan signed a treaty of friendship about half a century ago. One by one the European nations have come to look upon Japan as an Asian people different from the others, exceptional. And about five years ago I read in an article that Japan had entered the arena, not wantingto be left behind by the white nations in dividing up the world. Japan has been taking its share too. She attacked Manchuria, the territory of China. And the Netherlands, and the Netherlands Indies itself, announced official neutrality in that war. Neutral! Neutral towards an ally that is on the attack. I could see in my imagination: a small child, clever and strong, thieving the possessions of an old giant riddled with disease—an old giant, laid out on a stretcher, powerless.
    Elsewhere, a war had broken out between Greece and Turkey: The whole civilized world, they said, was watching the Bosporus Straits. Meanwhile, Japan continued to overrun the possessions of the decrepit giant China. The Spanish-American war broke out in the Philippines at the edge of the Indies. Two Dutch frigates sailed back and forth around the waters of Manado Sangi-Talaud on the one hand, and in the waters