6They came to my cousins' house in Surabaya that night, the drunk Indonesian soldiers with their bayonets and their rifles, waking my cousins up from sleep.
"Open up, you Chinese filth," they shouted, banging on the door, ramming into it with their shoulders, kicking at it with their hobnailed boots. My two uncles, who always slept in the hall in case of such an attack, furiously blinked sleep from their eyes and dragged the heavy chest filled with stones across the doorway, stalling the soldiers as their wives woke their children and rushed to the back store room to hide.
"We are going to die," Rathay, the pessimistic aunt, cried. "They are going to torch us in the streets and laugh."
Her sister-in-law, Katrin, slapped her lightly. "Snap out of it. If you continue making such a fuss, they will find us, and believe you me, we will be burning in the streets."
Wijaya, the youngest person in the house at nine years old, stifled his sobs immediately. "Ibu, why do people want to kill us?"
Katrin bent down to her son's level to explain. "We are Chinese, my sweet. We are Chinese people in Indonesia. Not only that, we are Catholics living in an Islamic country. A lot of people want us gone."
Wijaya protested about the unfairness of it all.
"A lot of things are unfair." Melati, Rathay's practical, senseible fourteen year old daughter said, tapping on the back wall and peering out the one dirty window.
My uncles burst into the room, their singlets sticking to their bodies as they flicked sweat from their brow. Kosasih announced that they had bought, at the most, fifteen minutes. So the idea would be to come up with an idea. Fast.
"Can we escape through the kitchen door?" Katrin asked.
Her husband, Suwandi, shook his head. "Too risky", he panted.
Melati looked out the window again as her father, Kosasih, bolted the door. "This overlooks the alley. I can see Puan Romilah Buhdi's back door from here." her eyes lighted up.
Kosasih smiled grimly, and picking up an old, rusted axe, sank it into the thin back wall.
The hammering from the front door fuelled their determination to survive as the entire family, from Suwandi down to Wijaya, knocked a hole into the wall. They would run over to Puan Romilah's house-she had promised to help them if the militants came. She was a good woman, a good Muslim. Thank the Lord the walls were thin and the house dilapidated-living in a large house attracted trouble faster in that area.
The hole was created in thirteen minutes and everybody squeezed through. Suwandi just managed to pull the cupboard across the hole as the front door gave way.
Wijaya was the first to reach Puan Romilah's door. "Tolong, Puan, tolong! Help!"
There was an anxious pause as they heard the soldiers thunder through their empty house behind them and a quiet scuffle behind the door in front of them. Puan Romilah yanked the door open silently, pale under her dark skin. "Cepat. Hurry."
Puan Romilah and Katrin were good friends-as a native Indonesian, if she was caught helping her Chinese neighbours, she would be killed by the militants as well-but the point was to not get caught.
Puan Romilah snatched at Suwandi's sleeve with a thin, clawlike hand. Times were hard in those days, for both Chinese and the Indonesians. She held a soft, whispered discussion with him before freeing him and indicating for her son to show the family to the garage.
The plan was to take Puan Romilah's lorry and drive it to Dinyayo, where I lived. We were more influential in Dinyayo, where the militants were afraid to touch my family. As the head of the Chinese community there, my grandfather called all the shots. If they attacked my famliy there, there would be an uprising. Once they reached the town limits of Dinyayo, my cousins would be safe.
Kosasih had found a tarp, and ushering the women and children to the back of the lorry, threw it over them and secured it tight. Puan Romilah handed the keys to the ignition to Suwandi and he started up the truck as Kosasih climbed up beside him. "How long is it to DInyayo?"
"Two hours." Suwandi replied, tensely waiting for the garage door to open. Both did not bother with the seat belts. As soon as he was clear, Suwandi stepped on the old gas pedal and goaded the lorry out into the night.
Out of my six relatives in Surabaya, only Melati made it to my home in Dinyayo. She arrived with bruises and torn clothing, and sores on her feet from walking the twenty-seven kilometres from where the militants caught up with her family.
"They were in their truck," she later told us. "With their rifles, shooting at us. For no other reason, save that we are Chinese. It was a miracle that the tarp wasn't hit, not that it mattered in the end. A bullet hit a tyre and it punctured, send the lorry careening off the road. I was thrown out of the lorry and onto the grassy verge at the side of the road. The road cuts through a forest, if you recall-I managed to roll further in and hide behind some trees."
"The lorry?" we pressed.
She gazed at us with haunted eyes. "They made my family get out of the lorry after it crashed into a tree on the other side of the road. My father and uncle were killed on impact. They shot the rest, one by one, starting with Wijaya. They just laughed as my family screamed. After the execution, they just got into their truck and drove off-and then, there was silence."
Author's note: This story was written for an English exam-write a story ending with the words 'and then there was silence'. I used parts of my family history to come up with a story, changing names as I went along. Till today, the Chinese in Indonesia are ostracised and sometimes persecuted; in the olden days, it was worse. This story, told through my mother's eyes, is set in the 1970s, when my great aunts and their family were saved by their neighbours when the militants came knocking. My mother was never allowed to step out of her house alone, because she was a girl and a Chinese at that. This story was repeated in many different variations across Indonesia in those days; even the dead were not let off. A girl's corpse was torched and burned, all the women at the funeral were violated and the men killed. But not all Indonesians are cruel and prejudiced in their treatment of my race, as shown by Puan Romilah's kindness. Please review this story and tell me what you think.
Surabaya & Dinyayo-towns in Indonesia.
Ibu (Ee-boo)- Mother
Puan (pu-ahn)- Madam/Mrs
Tolong (toh-lohng)- Help
Cepat (ch-er-paht)- Faster/quickly/hurry.