State of Siege

When the lull came, however, I made her go out on to the terrace with me to see what damage had been done. There were some craters in the square, and a small building on the far side was on fire; but that was about all that was visible. In fact, the closely built-up area behind us had taken the brunt of the shelling; but there was no point in telling her that. The damage to our own building was also out of sight. As she had clearly expected to find the entire square in ruins, all this produced a very satisfactory sense of anti-climax. We kept to the bathouse end of the terrace, and saw nothing of the men in the living room. I guessed that the council of war had been resumed on the other side of the building. Rosalie had heard something of what had been said while I was there, and now I told her the rest. The possibility of negotiation cheered her up considerably. I did not say what I thought of it. When we went back into the bedroom, I was able to persuade her to eat some fruit and begin another game of gin.

It was just after three when the staff captain came for me again.

Since two, the sounds of street-fighting had steadily been getting nearer, and we had had another twenty-minute bombardment from the destroyer. This had been both worse and better than the first; worse, because the gunners had dropped the range slightly and managed to put every shell into or around the square itself; better, because Rosalie, having decided that her earlier fears had been quite groundless, proposed that we should continue our game of gin on the floor. Admittedly, it was my hands that shook now, not hers, and she who was concerned on my account when a near miss made me fumble and scatter my cards; but on the whole it was an improvement on the earlier situation.

The staff captain was more polite this time. It was Colonel Roda who wished to see me, he explained; but why, he did not know. The radio in the next room was silent, and, with a sinking heart, I wondered if the generator had broken down again. The staff captain shrugged when I suggested this; he knew nothing. I told Rosalie that if I were going to be away for any length of time, I would try to get a message to her, and then went off with him.

He led me to an office on the third floor at the back of the building. The shell that had burst on the fifth floor had gutted three offices and brought down part of the wall along the corridor, but there had been no casualties, and no structural damage of any consequence. It had short-circuited the lights, however, and Alwi was along there trying to rectify the trouble. I asked him about the generator, but he said that it was running perfectly. By the time I reached Colonel Roda’s office, I was both puzzled and worried.

The office into which the staff captain ushered me had the look of a board room after a directors’ meeting. The air was full of tobacco smoke, and there was a litter of dirty coffee cups and crumpled scribbling paper. There had been seven men in there, but now there were only two: Roda and Aroff. The latter had cleaned himself up and wore a black cap in place of the steel helmet; but he looked even wearier than before. Roda’s face was the colour of putty. It did not seem to have been a very successful meeting.

They were sitting at one end of the table reading through a document and comparing it with what was evidently the draft from which it had been typed. To my surprise, Roda waved me to a chair. I sat down as far away from them as possible and waited. When they had finished, Roda looked at Aroff inquiringly. Aroff nodded, but with the air of a man agreeing to something against his better judgment. Roda pursed his lips and turned to me.

“Mr. Fraser, we have sent for you because we believe that you may be willing to assist us.”

“Oh yes?”

“The General and I were much impressed by your co-operation in the matter of the generator. Under circumstances of the greatest difficulty, without proper assistance or equipment, you employed your skill and knowledge to such good effect that the enemy’s attempts to silence Radio Sunda were totally defeated.” He smiled.

This was fantastic. For one wild moment I thought that he was about to pin a decoration on me: the Order of Boeng Sanusi (2nd Class) perhaps. I smiled back guardedly. Aroff, I noticed, was absently studying his fingernails, as if none of what was being said were any business of his.

“That being so,” Roda continued amiably, “we do not think it unreasonable to assume that, as a British friend of Sunda, you are sympathetic to the policy and aspirations of the National Freedom Party and its leader.”

I could have thought of several brief replies to that, but by now I was curious to know what he wanted.

I shook my head doubtfully. “As a foreigner, of course, it would be a gross impertinence for me to express an opinion about a political matter.”