difficult to cure. Because of insufficient medical examinations, inadequate equipment, and cheap medicine, the water around my lungs would not dry up. After my teacher’s examinations, my temperature remained high.
I do not know what Horensma managed to do, but while I was still sick, sometime in 1916 or 1917, I was unexpectedly approached by a representative of a Netherlands scholarship fund under the patronage of former governor general Van Heutsz.47 This fund gave loans to Indonesian students at an interest rate of 5 percent. The manager of this fund, Tuan Fabius, got in touch with me directly; he was a prominent person in Holland, a former major general in the artillery section of the Amsterdam Defense Force and a writer of books well known for their outspokenness.48 His political views were strong too, like those of his friend, former governor general Van Heutsz, who was well enough known for the destructive attacks on the people of Aceh.
I moved to a new place in Bussum, a small town with many large villas. The house I lived in was average in size for a middle-class teacher’s family.49 The air was always fresh, the sunshine freely entered the veranda, the food was full of vitamins and well cooked, with no lack of vegetables and fruit. With such a climate and food, I recovered half of my strength. And electrical treatments by a well-known doctor, Clinge Doorenbos, dried up the water around my lungs in one or two months and brought my health back to more or less what it had been when I was in Indonesia.50
[32] Such fine food, drink, and accommodation as I had in Bussum could have lulled me to sleep and tied me body and soul to the bourgeois world. Fortunately, my thoughts were already in a process of change that was close to becoming revolutionary. My experience in Haarlem in the home of an unfortunate proletarian family was enough to remind me of the huge distance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat even in a leading imperialist and capitalist country such as the Netherlands. I was still in the bourgeois town of Bussum in 1917 when the Bolshevik revolution broke out. It gave certainty to my spirit, which was still caught up in the struggle between thesis and antithesis, that society was moving toward the era of socialism. For a while, socialism may perhaps be beaten back here or there, but in the world as a whole, society must go beyond capitalism and move toward socialism. With recovered health and with a clear political understanding and world view, I faced up to bourgeois life.
One day I heard that Van der Mey had gone to visit Tuan Fabius to ask that I move back to Haarlem, to his mother’s house. Money was not the only reason, for she already had a temporary lodger; Nyonya van der Mey, that simple, honest woman—of whom there are so many in the Netherlands—was lonely after the death of the elder Van der Mey, and she thought of “Ipie” as her own child. The younger Van der Mey reminded Tuan Fabius of the promise made before I went to Bussum, that I would be brought back to Haarlem as soon as I was well again. I don’t know Tuan Fabius’ precise answer, but the request was rejected. There was no point in trying to guess the reason for this rejection, since I was bound by my debt to this new fund to comply with his decisions.
Tuan Been, a publisher of children’s magazines, acted as a go-between to convey my wishes to Tuan Fabius.51 I did not try to conceal what I wanted to do: “I want to go home. I will work anywhere to repay my remaining debts. Afterwards I will return to Europe to study at my own expense what fits in with my own desires.”
Tuan Fabius’ answer gave my request short shrift. “You can’t. Because of the war there are no places on board ship.”
[33] I was forced to wait until the end of the war, whenever that would be. But I no longer had the will to continue my studies to become a head teacher in the Netherlands.52 If in Dutch eyes I had Europeanized myself enough, I could have attained the same level as the Dutch head teachers. (Although I would naturally remain a European inlander.) Then I would have had the right to teach Dutch children. Further, as a European inlander, I could have Europeanized all the inlanders’ children. But I was not prepared to do this.
Of course, I continued to see the work of educating the children of Indonesia as a noble and important task, as I still do today. As to the direction of this education—the principles to be used and the means to be employed—I was clear enough in my mind about this even then. The only difficulty was that in terms of directions, principles, and method my ideas were in direct conflict with those followed by the colonial Dutch. For me, it was clear that Dutch should not be the medium of instruction and that Dutch culture should not be the direction of our education.
My conflict with this new circle of people in Bussum was really too involved for me to go into here in any detail. I didn’t feel much sympathy with the landlady, Nyonya K, who in my eyes was using the mask of religion solely to gain status in the church and parish. Nyonya K was a fanatical Mennonite. If her fanaticism had been limited to carrying out the tenets of her faith it would not have interfered much with other people’s feelings, but Nyonya K was also convinced that other Christian sects, let alone Islam, were beyond the pale. On her return from church each Sunday, and even during lunch, Nyonya K would discuss the sermon she had heard, in spite of the fact that her listeners were not Mennonites. Even this would not have been too much if it had been discussed in a matter-of-fact way, but Nyonya K saw red when she came home from church. What really upset her were discussions concerning the parish in general and specifically the elections for the parish leadership. Nyonya K had been defeated by another member of the parish in the elections that year. According to Nyonya K, the election was run dishonestly, because she herself really should have won. The conflicts within the Mennonite community in Bussum were very funny. They probably did not have any more than thirty members and “honesty” was Nyonya K’s own slogan.
[34] Fortunately, the landlord agreed with whatever his wife said, and was usually silent and patient. But there was one thing that could arouse Tuan K from his placidity, and that was the topic of socialism in general and the question of authority in schools specifically. Tuan K was a socialist and a schoolteacher. He was fiercely anti-leadership and opposed to having head teachers. For Tuan K and his like-minded friends, head teachers were dispensable creatures. He felt that the teachers could organize the school together in the manner of gotong-royong without being watched over by a pedantic head teacher who did not take any classes and just wandered around twiddling his thumbs.53 What I really did not understand was that whenever he began to sound off about the system of head teachers, there was always some pretext for his wife to go to the kitchen or upstairs. It was as if there was an agreement between the two: if she complained about the parish leadership he would just say yes, while if he ranted about head teachers, she would leave the room.
But they did not use this tactic with me. The clash occurred when the Sarekat Islam and Budi Utomo came to the Netherlands in connection with the question of the Indië Weerbaar.54 This matter penetrated as far as Bussum and the circles of the household. In a conversation after I had come back from an Indië Weerbaar meeting in Den Haag, the landlady brought up the subject, taking the position of a real Dutch colonialist. The conflict exploded.
I moved out and stayed with Tuan D, an exporter who owned a small villa.55 He was a German trader, and he was most hospitable, while his wife was a young, patient, and gentle Dutch woman. These people had already taken into their house two Indo students, one Chinese, and another Indonesian, who had run away from the place where I had been previously.56 The Indo students were two rather wild brothers who had been moved from Den Haag to Bussum to be in a better, more civilized atmosphere under the supervision of Tuan Fabius. They had not gone very far in school. Even though they were eighteen and nineteen years old and came from a family with a fair amount of money, they had been able to get only their primary school certificate. In Bussum they took night courses in bookkeeping. They progressed with great difficulty, for their intelligence was low and their disobedience rose to great heights. They were moved from Den Haag because they had thrown their landlady down from the attic.
When things were hopping—if there was a young man, or, even more so, a young woman about—the older brother (O. S.) became even more mischievous than usual. On the
