A chair to die in
reading time: approx 7 min

 
It is a Saturday in early April, the first really beautiful day of this spring. I bought a new chair to sit in outside. The chair hangs on a spring so that I can bask in the sun like a lazy cat, rocking along. This way that very long, gray winter will be forgotten soon enough. 
'I can grow old in this chair.'
'You are old,' answers my ever-charming husband. That's true. I'll go one step further.
'I want to die in this chair.'
Well, he has nothing to say about that at the moment. I purr like the aforementioned cat. The world is perfect. Almost. It would be even better if the chair was in a different place: on a wooden platform in the sea near Saparua.
I close my eyes and let myself be transported to my father's dilapidated jetty. Time and distance are so easily bridged in the domain of memory. With a snap of my fingers I am a kid again and thousands of miles away.
Not all planks could be trusted, you could just fall through them. The jetty extended far into the water, between the crooked water roots of the mangrove. There was no beach. As if I can touch him again, I see my father climbing the steps out of the water, diving goggles in front of his face, his harpoon in his hand.
'Hammerhead sharks, by the dozens,' he says, laughing broadly.
My grandfather, with a faded kain around his hips, is messing around in the garden behind my back. Barefoot. Always a pruning shears in his hands, his garden was his pride: the fiery red flowers of the kembang sepatoe, the gerberas, the cannas, the many types of ferns and palms, the bright colors and intoxicating scents. Grandfather had built all kinds of paths in the garden, each winding footpath had a post with a rusty sign nailed to it, stating what he had called the path, always the name of a village on the island: Itawaka, Sirisori, Tuhaha. And Pia, that one too, I liked that name the most, although at the time I of course had no idea that I would later name my daughter that (and no, for those who want to know, my son's name is not Tuhaha). Some of those paths led all the way to the edge of that large garden, where grandfather's hard work gave way to the never-ending intrusion of the jungle.
Up in the treetops, brightly colored parrots and cockatoos flew back and forth as my grandfather cut the grass short. At ease. Never rushed. Time and attention, he had it in abundance. And I, his grandchild, I skipped around him without a care in the world and listened to his stories.
One day he held my hand as we stood in front of a map he had pinned to the wall. On the map you saw the countless islands and islets of the Moluccan archipelago lying together. At the top is Halmahera, with Ternate and Tidore a little to the west, Seram and Ambon a little further south and: 'Here,' said my grandfather. He pointed a crooked index finger at the island of Saparua. 'We live here. Our ancestors have always lived here.'
I saw my grandfather's hand shake slightly as he tapped the card. 'They gave their blood for this.'
Blood. I looked at the blue around the green islands with different eyes. In my imagination, the red of the ancestral blood mixed with the green and blue to form a colorful palette, as brilliant as the colors in the garden. Grandfather spread his fingers and ran his hand over the infinite blue. The sea, I thought impressed. That mighty, ever-present, never-ending sea.
'Our lifeline,' Grandfather emphasized. 'Without the sea we would no longer exist.'
I turned my head towards the jetty where my father was still climbing the steps – in all my memories of Saparua, my father keeps climbing up those steps – where the murky muddy water of the mangrove lapped around the pilings. Further from the coast the sea stretched like a carpet of deep indigo. As a child I already loved the sea.
'What's important to remember,' my grandfather began, 'is that a man and a woman lived here a long time ago. Frans and Fransina. God had given them two sons, Thomas and Yohanis. They were a godly, good Protestant family, but life was hard for them.'
'What else were they calling?' I asked, because in my experience everyone had to have a last name.
'The mother's name was Fransina Tilahoi and the father's name was Matulessia. Don't forget, you. That father's name was Frans Matulessia.'
In my imagination I saw Thomas and Yohanis running through the sand along the water, not among the mangroves, but further away, where there was a beach. I saw them building rafts and forts, catching fish and hunting small game, romping, fighting and teasing girls. I saw them between the roots of our water trees, where they hid from the hongi boats, which were the pirogues with which the belandas – the Dutch – were brought ashore to check whether the islanders were not guilty of illegal cultivation of nutmeg. That did happen at that time and it was severely punished, the Dutch guarded their trade monopoly with an iron fist. Were the two boys afraid? Who knows? Maybe when they were little, but later not anymore, that's for sure.
'During the short interim reign of the British on Saparua and the surrounding islands, young Thomas was trained in the British army as a sergeant major. When the Dutch took over the Moluccas again and terrorized the islands as usual with their reign of terror, the population was no longer prepared to accept the coercive measures and oppression. They chose young Thomas to lead a rebellion.'
Sometimes Grandfather went too fast. Then in my imagination I was still fooling around with those two little boys playing war with sticks and stones and then I suddenly had to switch to young men with swords and shields for whom the rebellion was bitterly serious.
'They conquered Fort Duurstede,' grandfather said proudly. 'They murdered the resident and his wife and children and their governance and about twenty other soldiers.' Grandfather wasn't concerned with the tenderness of a child's soul. He took a wicked pleasure in describing the revolt in gruesome detail, but when I asked him if all those murders weren't bad, he replied thoughtfully: "Yes, that was bad, but it was inevitable. The uprising wasn't just a war; it was a struggle for freedom. They weren't fighting to get rich; they were fighting to be free. Don't forget that the Dutch, for their part, didn't hesitate to wipe out entire dessa's. And that wás to get rich." 

Thus, there was always pride in his account, and despite my trepidation, I felt that pride with him. When, on moments like that, my father climbed onto the jetty with his harpoon, I did not see my father, but Thomas, who rose from the water with a dagger between his teeth to sneak up on the fort.

I can still muse about this endlessly. Over and over again I can hear my grandfather tell the story of Thomas Matulessia, the rebel leader who led the revolt against the Dutch and won! Now he is known as Pattimura. Ambon's airport is named after him, as is the university. His image appears on a 1000 rupiah banknote. Pattimura has become a national hero and is commemorated annually. But none of that can ignore the fact that he was eventually caught and hung. The long arm of the belandas reached into the furthest corners of the Moluccas and it would take a few more centuries before the Dutch fist lost its power.
I was still standing in front of that map in deep thought when grandfather had long since left for his flowers with two kerosene cans full of water.

Time to transport myself back to the present. 
I would not mind to be found dead in my chair, but not just yet. As I let the chair rock on its spring, a parallel occurs to me: Pattimura was executed on Ambon. His body was placed in a cage that, as a deterrent, was hung on a protruding rock above the sea. I see him swaying in the wind, and suddenly I'm not rocking quite so comfortably anymore. 

                                                    ©marian puijk