All That Is Gone by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Author:Pramoedya Ananta Toer [Toer, Pramoedya Ananta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), http://www.archive.org/details/allthatisgone00toer
ISBN: 9780143034469
Google: GTxpPwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0143034464
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2005-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

ACCEPTANCE

NOTHING ESCAPED THE attention of the Japanese, not even villages found on no maps. And because the small town in which I lived straddled the road that linked Rembang and Lasem on Java’s north coast with the island’s strategic interior, Japanese troops found their way to my town too—to my once peaceful, almost somnolent, town.

They came in a convoy: two trucks full of armed soldiers followed by four more trucks laden with corpses. Tarpaulins covered the bodies, but they had been pulled so taut that rigidly open jaws, frozen with skyward screams, were clearly outlined beneath them. That particular detail wasn’t especially important at the time; much more significant was the fact that the Japanese had arrived. Government officials ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, and my poor, forgotten little town, with its own quota of saints and sinners, became a place in turmoil.

In the week that followed the Japanese arrival, those who had been hobbled for so long by the oppressive laws of the former Dutch regime began to take revenge. There was looting everywhere, even in broad daylight. The town was flooded with people from the surrounding areas who had come to see with their own eyes the death of Dutch rule—as well as to take part in the plundering of stores, office buildings, and even schools. During this brief time, no one seemed to understand the meaning of government or what it stood for anymore. That was when the Japanese military stepped in to fill the vacuum of power.

Posters with large red circles were pasted everywhere. Like a dark veil, the threat of death or imprisonment hung over every moment of the day. The looting died down and there returned the reassuring tranquility of a previous century—before modern commerce had wreaked havoc with the life of the town. The town’s stores, which in a free-market economy would function as centers for the distribution of goods, had been cleaned out; trade was dead. For a time, stolen goods flooded the local market, but within a matter of weeks, they too were gone and the town began to flounder like a fish thrown up on land. The end was nigh for all trade activity.

Havoc of both the mental and physical kind came to reign and people began to die from hunger and despair. It was at this time, in May of 1942, that Sri’s mother died. Sri was just eleven and she shed sad tears for her mother, but, perhaps because of her youth and her ignorance of the true meaning of her mother’s death, she did not cry for long.

Sri had been in the fifth grade of a private school when her mother died. However, because the Japanese were bent on eradicating their newly occupied territory of anything that smelled of the former colonial Dutch government—especially educational institutions with ethnic-based admissions systems—her school was soon forced to close its doors. Sri didn’t want to leave. The school was a town landmark and was where all her older siblings had received their education.

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