What Is Written On The Tongue , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Anne Lazurko

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188 pages

English

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'For readers of Anthony Doerr s All the Light We Cannot See and Tim O Brien s The Things They Carried, a transportive historical novel about finding morality in the throes of war and colonization Released from Nazi forced labor as World War II ends, 20-year-old Sam is quickly drafted and sent to the island of Java to help regain control of the colony. But the Indonesian independence movement is far ahead of the Dutch, and Sam is thrown into a guerilla war, his loyalties challenged when his squad commits atrocities reminiscent of those he suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Sam falls in love with both Sari and the beautiful island she calls home, but as he loses friends to sniper fire and jungle malady, he also loses sight of what he wants most to be a good man. '

Sujets

Historical fiction

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	26 avril 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773059228
Langue	English

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What Is Written on the Tongue A Novel
Anne Lazurko

Contents Praise Dedication Epigraph PART I Chapter 1: To Say This Is Mine Chapter 2: If We Only Knew the End Chapter 3: What If We Do Nothing Chapter 4: A Jew in the Chicken Coop Chapter 5: Depends Which Side You’re On Chapter 6: Give a Thing a Name Chapter 7: Cash and Starvation Chapter 8: The Hope Required for Courage Chapter 9: Blinded by Loss PART II Chapter 10: Befehl ist Befehl Chapter 11: Saints and Monsters Chapter 12: Walking as Men Chapter 13: Pray for Us Sinners Chapter 14: This Strange Family Chapter 15: The Distance Between Truth and Luck Chapter 16: An Ugly Wave PART III Chapter 17: A Flash of Gallows Chapter 18: This Simple Thing Chapter 19: A Scream in the Distance Chapter 20: Lost Souls Chapter 21: The End of One War Chapter 22: The Beginning of Reckoning Chapter 23: One White Man Amidst the Brown Chapter 24: One True Thing Chapter 25: The History of the World Chapter 26: Walking Leo Home Epilogue: If We Only Knew the Beginning Author’s Note Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright

Praise
“This novel is the vivid and gripping story of a man caught in two brutal occupations: Sam is first a young victim of the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands in World War Two. He then becomes a colonial perpetrator as a Dutch soldier in the occupying army of Indonesia in the late forties. He suffers and then he deals out suffering. In this moving novel, Sam must search for a way to navigate his way through moral quagmires and find some kind of peace for himself and the ones he loves.”
— Antanas Sileika, author of Provisionally Yours
“In this deft and deeply moving novel, Anne Lazurko disperses the fog of war to shine a light on one soldier’s process of reckoning. As Sam confronts the enemy without and within, his creator honours the terrible vulnerability of our bodies, the essential balm of love and friendship, and the life-affirming beauty of the natural world, all the while lamenting the hell we so often make of this paradise we call home.”
— Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
“ What Is Written on the Tongue is a gripping story of frailty and resilience. Anne Lazurko’s novel is a fully engaged, deeply researched study of one man’s struggle to retain his humanity amid the many tragedies of war.”
— Helen Humphreys, author of Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium
“Teeming with life and drama, What Is Written on the Tongue is an ambitious, sweeping, riveting story of war, immorality, love and family. Spanning The Netherlands, Germany and Indonesia during and after the Second World War, Anne Lazurko’s novel serves as a grim reminder that the oppressed sometimes become oppressors. The novel hooked me on the first page and captured me to the last.”
— Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes and The Illegal

Dedication
For my parents,
Gerardus Theodorus Johannes Groenen, who loved to tell a good story,

and Anna Maria (Cisse) Groenen, who loved to read one.

Epigraph
“I am sure there are those who . . . feel that the dead have no voice. Theirs is a stone-age sensibility with a criminal blush.”
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer

PART I
“As a general rule, don’t try to act macho and think you know better than seasoned inhabitants of the tropics.”
— Scheepspraet (Guidebook to Living in the Tropics)

Chapter 1 To Say This Is Mine
SURABAYA, ISLAND OF JAVA,
DUTCH EAST INDIES
May 1947
It is the measure of a man, Sam thinks, to drop his pants on command and without hesitation as the army doctor shuffles down the line, head bent to inspect the genitals of each in his turn. Foreskin back, squeeze the head, firm grasp on the balls, the selected soldier asked to blow on the thumb he holds tight in his mouth like a drooling toddler. As a final indignity, he is then expected to turn and bend so the doctor can peer up his ass and discover whatever might be amiss there. Pecker inspections are a monthly occurrence. Sam watches the faces of men turn crimson as their dicks weep with the disease they’ve brought back from a few days’ leave in Yogyakarta.
The generals say they need the men healthy for Operation Product, a planned offensive to regain control of the coffee plantations and coal mines from nationalist rebels who took them over when the last of the Japanese left the East Indies. A good case of VD makes a man vulnerable to capture or death, they say. A good case. Sam tries not to look at the others. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d been horrified at the loss of his belt in the latrine at the Nazi camp, forced to choose between dignity and bread, shame at his nakedness. But now his superiors ask him to wave it around like it’s just another part of the uniform or a gun to be cleaned and working properly for this new goddamn war.
“Not sure why they’re so concerned about our lul,” Andre echoes his thoughts as they return to barracks. “It’s the rebel bastards will get us. Them, or malaria, or this fucking dysentery. It’s all the same. You’re dead in the end.” Andre is a big, thick, idiot of a guy, but good with his hands and sharp with a gun. He pauses long enough to look down at Sam’s foot. “Jesus, what the hell is that?”
A chunk of flesh has come off in Sam’s sock.
“Not as bad as Bart’s.” Sam nods toward a young man sitting on his pallet, wildly plunging a stick inside the plaster cast encasing his lower leg, a version of heaven on his face as the itch is relieved and then hell as bits of rotten skin come up with each stroke. It’s a disgusting thing, but Sam’s got his own afflictions to worry about. While the locals go about their business barefoot, the army doesn’t understand the torture induced by leather boots worn in flesh-melting heat. He finds his Whitfield ointment, smears it between his toes, and wraps each foot in a light cotton hankie before sliding them into sandals. Such relief.
“Indonesia for the Indonesians.” He mutters the guerrilla mantra under his breath. “They can have it.”
Obliterated by Hitler in only five days, the Royal Dutch Army relied on the British to organize, train and even dress new conscripts like Sam. After six months of boot camp in the Netherlands, he was sent to the Indies and has spent another six deployed in Surabaya. His squad of a dozen men from the Twelfth Infantry has seen little of the country they’re supposed to be fighting to reclaim. Day patrols and guard duty, sometimes twenty-four hours at a time, but mostly their lives are reduced to finding relief for ravaged feet, or from prickling skin rashes, or dizzying malaria. On a constant diet of rice and fruit and small amounts of meat of suspicious origin, men drop regularly from stomach ailments, the human enemy almost trivial.
Vices keep them sane when the advice of the Scheepspraet is not enough. The guidebook reminds them to forget toilet paper and use instead a small water dispenser to avoid anal fissures, instructs on the proclivities of ants and mosquitoes and how to keep them out of food and gear, offers techniques for boiling water to ward off typhus and dysentery. Cigarettes are a lifeline, the constant companion hanging lit from their mouths even as they raise their weapons. And they drink. A lot.
Feet wrapped, Sam heads outside in an undershirt and cargo shorts to smoke and share a beer with others in the squad. Andre is soon by his side, reaching for Sam’s lighter.
“They’re tough sons-of-bitches.” The voice pipes up from behind Sam. It’s Raj, his brown face looming out of the night.
“Who?”
“The pemuda .” Raj jumps onto a barrel and rests his lean frame against the shack behind him. A bottle dangles from his hand, a cigarette from his lips, his dark eyes glittering. He’s part of the KNIL squad stationed nearby, Indo-European soldiers in the Dutch colonial army, their clothing and attitudes, skin and song mixed up after two hundred years of their ancestors pretending not to love each other. Housed separately, the Indo eat at their own end of the canteen and have little to do with Sam and his full-blooded totok friends until they are thrown together on patrol.
“What does he know?” Andre nudges Sam in the ribs.
“I know they torched my family’s printing business here in Surabaya in ’45,” Raj barks with contempt. “And, for good measure, they tortured and killed anyone who worked for my father. Most of them locals.”
Sam recalls the newspaper reports: British soldiers liberating local populations from Japanese camps only to be horrified at the violence the Javanese inflicted on each other in their rush to fill the power vacuum.
Raj puffs smoke lazily into the air, but his voice is pained. “They kill their own as easily as they’ll kill you.”
“Jesus.” The men scuff the ground with their toes or look toward the harbor.
“They’re stealthy. Unpredictable. Fight like they’re possessed. Like they have mystical powers.” Raj jumps down from the barrel, sarcasm painting his words. “They wear a fucking amulet around their neck that makes them immune to pain and death. Or that’s what they believe, what the villagers believe. They call them jago s, fighting cocks.” He stumbles to the center of the group and struts about, flapping his arms in a drunken dance.
Sam holds up his hand, laughing. “Enough already. You’ll scare the boys.”
“They should be scared,” Raj snarls, his eyes whirling across them. “You white boys don’t know shit