I JOIN THE RESISTANCE

Anak Agung Nura returned from western Java full of news of the growth of the underground. Under Amir Sjarifuddin's direction and with the covert encouragement of Sukarno and Dr. Hatta it was becoming well organized, not only in Java but in other parts of Indonesia as well. Should there be a weakening of the Japanese grasp over the islands, men of great leadership quality and long political experience stood ready to assert Indonesian claims to self-government.

The honorable professor, still dressed as a peddler, Frisco Flip, and I held a planning conference with Agung Nura at his apartment. The professor would remain a peddler of sarongs, walking the streets, watching the movements of the Japanese. He would be the contact man for a secret radio sender, hidden in the mountains. Frisco Flip would provide the funds; I never inquired as to the source of his revenue. He was in a position to obtain important information that would be relayed, by devious means, to the Allies information that could hasten the day when the Japanese would be thrown out of Java and the red-and-white flag of merdeka of Indonesian freedom could be raised over the Governor's Palace in Batavia.

Anak Agung Nura would go back to Bali to organize his many friends into a resistance group and to further the movement in the nearby islands. Bali had become of considerable importance because the Japanese were using the excellent airport near Kuta as a base for their widespread bombing operations.

My role was to become known as the girl friend of Frisco Flip, and be introduced to Japanese officials and to mix generally in Japanese circles, and to paint pictures of pretty Balinese maidens and sell them very cheaply to the Japanese. "Easel and brash, that's the perfect cover-up job for you," Frisco exulted. "After all, over the years you have established yourself in Bali and Java to some degree as a painter."

"But I have never painted those half-nude Balinese women," I objected. "I hate that kind of painting."

"Even so," my adviser chuckled, "that's the type of art that appeals to Japanese soldiers. I know. So throw away your artistic standards and paint these pretty Balinese girls, bare breasts and all."

We agreed on a password, and swore that if any of us should be caught by the Japanese, we would die rather than implicate the others. It was a strange shivery feeling to find myself part of a spy organization, with codes and all the penny-dreadful trimmings, operating in dead earnestness and at the peril of our lives. Bali days seemed very long ago.

By day, then, I painted canvases, the quickly done, calendar-type pictures which I loathed, but which were greatly admired by the Japanese. I couldn't turn them out fast enough to keep up with the demand. Often I was surprised to find some high-ranking officer among my customers. I would have thought they would have better taste in art. I wondered if I was overdoing it a bit, and decided to paint only things I liked myself. This turned out much later to have been a very wise move.

And at night I became a playgirl, an habitue of the night clubs, a friend of the Japanese and especially of Frisco Flip. For a city at war, Surabaya was surprisingly lively in fact, almost gay at night. The fighting had moved thousands of miles to the east. Allied aircraft were busy defending Port Moresby and striking at Rabaul and at targets in the Solomons to give Japanese-held ports much trouble.

Popular jazz bands were playing at the leading night clubs. In addition to the Japanese patrons there was still a fair sprinkling of white clientele: Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and of course the pro-Nazi NSB Dutch who were collaborating with the Japanese. I must have been classed in this last category by most of the white people who looked speculatively about the night-club rooms.

The liquor stocks left by the Dutch, their Bols, their whiskeys and fine wines were dwindling fast under the impact of Surabaya's night life. But the beer was plentiful, good Java beer, and rather soon some excellent Japanese beer and sake wine.

An interesting addition to the after-dark attractions of Surabaya was a group of geisha girls and a theatrical troupe, recently arrived from Tokyo. They were to tour Asia, entertaining the troops. The geisha girls were bright and charming, not at all the rough type I had expected. And full of informative chatter about conditions in Nippon and elsewhere. The members of the theatrical troupe were most gracious. It was hard to associate them in any way with a war.

Early in the occupation of Java the Japanese allowed the Dutch women in the concentration camp at Surabaya to leave the camp once a week for two hours. This was to enable them to buy provisions for themselves. As yet the Japanese were not organized to feed so many thousands of internees. Malnutrition, bordering on starvation, was becoming all too common.

These poor, hollow-eyed women, foraging for food, had nothing but hatred in their eyes when they chanced on the streets to meet other white people who had not been interned. They could only assume that we were all working for and with the hated Japanese. The evidence of our well-fed good health understandably burned into their souls.

I was surprised, then, one day to be called upon by two Dutch women I had known well in Bali. We had never been particular friends then, and no more were we now. I was delighted to see them nonetheless, and was shocked and saddened at their account of the treatment in the internment camp.

"We are hungry all the time," they said. "But this is not our concern; it is our children. We cannot get milk or eggs or the other things they should have. We have heard that you have been spared from the concentration camp because of your Balinese name and background. Could you please help us to raise money to feed our children and those adults in the camp who have no money, or no jewels to sell?"

Their plan to raise funds was pitifully inadequate. They proposed to knit stockings and bellybands, which all the Japanese seemed to wear, and hoped that I would sell their products. A few of the women in the camp thought also that they might sketch pictures that could be sold to the art-loving Japanese.

I gave the women what little money I had, and promised to try and raise more by selling paintings of my own. I frankly doubted that I could be of assistance in their sales scheme. The Japanese would be wise in no time. I said I would find a way to get money to them, and asked them not to come to my house any more, lest we all get into trouble.

That same night I told Frisco Flip about the deplorable conditions in the camp. "I shall see to it that the children get milk and eggs, and the mothers money," he said. We agreed that I would walk my little dog past the camp, and throw a bundle of money to a Dutch friend who would be waiting at a certain lonely place along the barbed-wire fence. The money came from Frisco Flip, who got it I knew not where, I dared not tell my Dutch friend the milk and food funds for the camp came from a Japanese.

Weeks had passed since I had heard from Agung Nura and I was beginning to worry. Then a courier arrived, with an envelope from Bali. The young man's face was very familiar; I could see that he was not a Balinese. "Don t I know you from somewhere?" I asked.

The courier gazed at me intently for a moment and then his face lit up with a pixy s grin. "Good American lady," he chanted. "You like good guide, I show you the way."

Pito! It couldn't be, but it was. The nine-year-old ragged urchin I had picked up on my first midnight ride in Java years ago, now grown into a handsome young man of eighteen or nineteen. We chatted happily.

"Your father, Pito, what of him?" I asked. "Remember, you told me the Dutch had kidnaped him and sent him to the land beyond the moon to die? Did you ever find him?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. My father was liberated from Tanah Merah when the Japanese came. He has always been a freedom worker for his country. Now he is in the underground with Amir Sjarifuddin, in West Java. That is how I have become a courier."

Pito said that when Anak Agung Nura asked him to take a letter to K'tut Tantri, he did not realize that this was the American lady he had met as a child. He remembered me well by my American name; I had not then, of course, taken a Balinese name.

Pito promised to visit me each time he passed through Surabaya. But three years were to pass before I saw him again.

The letter from Agung Nura asked that Frisco Flip send money and small firearms to Bali as soon as possible. All bank accounts in Bali had been frozen while the Japanese sorted out Dutch accounts from native accounts. The need for firearms needed no explanation.

At the factory Frisco Flip had managed somehow to fashion a crate with a false bottom. He brought it to my house, packed small weapons and ammunition into the bottom part, and filled the top part with books. Our problem was to get the shipment to Bali.

"We must find some deserted spot on the Java coast, and a loyal fisherman to sail the crate to Bali," said Flip. "It will not be easy, and it will take time. We'll have to be extremely careful. The Japanese have spies and informers everywhere." "Perhaps I could ran another car over to Bali, with the crate in the back," I suggested.

Flip said this would be much too dangerous. Besides, cars were now difficult to find. The Japanese had long since seized all the available private automobiles.

Some days later I learned that the Japanese theatrical troupe and the band of geisha girls had been ordered to go to Bali to entertain navy personnel. They would travel by special train to Banjuwangi, and then by a Japanese patrol boat across the Bali-Java Strait.

Calling at the hotel to say good-bye to my little friends from Tokyo, I noticed that their stage props had been nicely crated, ready for transportation. Suddenly it dawned on me; here was the way to get our shipment of firearms to Bali. I got in touch with Frisco Flip immediately, and we worked out the details. I would ask the head of the theatrical troupe if I could go along with them to Bali. If they agreed, Frisco Flip would put our crate among the stage props. Since he was a Japanese, it should not be difficult to deceive the Indonesian guard.

All went well. The head of the troupe was delighted that I would accompany them. "We need someone to speak Balinese, to interpret for us," he said. "It would be pleasant, too, to have you as a guide."

It was necessary now to get the permission of the Japanese commandant to join the troupe going to Bali. "I am homesick for the sight of my Balinese family," I told him.

"Your family?" The commandant smiled knowingly. "You mean a particular member of the family, do you not? Your Balinese brother, perhaps? For this family yearning you are even willing to travel with our singsong girls! What touching consideration for a whole family in Bali!"

Chuckling to himself, he signed a pass for me and wrote a letter of introduction to the navy commander in Bali. Gratefully, I presented him with a large painting of a Javanese dancing girl. Delight shone in his eyes.

"Don't stay away from Surabaya too long," he said. "You have many Japanese friends here. They will miss you."

I looked at his kindly face and felt almost ashamed at my deception.

Frisco Flip delivered the crate to the prop manager, and I saw it stowed with the rest of the baggage. Then Flip and I had dinner in seclusion together, laughing at our private joke that the Japanese would be transporting the firearms that might be used against them.

The long train ride to Banjuwangi was another of the ironies of my life in the early part of the war. Here was I. a white woman in Indonesian dress, sharing in the song and revelry of show girls from Tokyo whiling time away. The geisha girls were hilarious and sang the whole distance. I sang too, partly to banish worries over what might lie ahead for me. I am thankful now that I did not know what the future held in store.

A group of Japanese officers met the train at Banjuwangi. They raised their eyebrows in surprise when they saw me and read my pass. When they heard from the head of the troupe that I was a friend of the commandant, they smirked and exchanged sly looks. There was no doubt about it in their minds; I was the girl friend of the Commander in Chief. Many of the high Japanese officers had acquired white mistresses, most of them Dutch who preferred that kind of life to the concentration camp.

The Japanese cutter took us across the strait and into Gilimanuk just after dark. All the way I worried about how I would retrieve my crate from the show props. I might better have eased my mind. It turned out to be almost too easy. My fellow travelers were not in the least suspicious, nor should they have been. Was not my pass signed by their own highest authority? My friends found my crate and loaded it on a dokkar. "How heavy it is," one commented. My heart skipped a beat. I replied with what I hoped was nonchalance, "My books, I am taking them to the home of a Swiss artist, a friend living a few kilometers outside of the town."

Anak Agung Nura had given instructions that the firearms be delivered to a certain hideaway. It was almost midnight when I reached the place. Anak Agung Nura was astonished at first, and then after hearing my story horrified that I had undertaken such a risky venture. "How could Frisco Flip have been so foolish?" he raged. "Letting you travel with geisha girls, and on a warship! You might have been taken to Japan."

"Please, Nura," I replied. "It was not at all that bad. I was safe and comfortable and we had no trouble. We could think of no other way of getting the things here,"

The arms were removed, and the books replaced, with speed. "I want you to come to my father's puri and stay there," Agung Nura said. Anticipating my refusal he added hurriedly, "at least for a few days. I am worried about you. Stay at the puri until I find out whether the Japanese are suspicious."

I shook my head. "It is much better that I go to the house of the Swiss," I said. "I have said I m going there, and if I don't I may be missed. If all is well, I'll visit you at the puri in a few days. Right now, though, it would be unwise for me to leave a trail that might lead to you and your father."

Nura yielded to my reasoning. I reached the house of the Swiss just before daybreak. The artist was away from home, somewhere in Java, his servants said. But they knew me of course. There was no question when I said I would like to stay. They helped me put the crate in a back room. Then, utterly exhausted, I went to bed for a long, restful sleep.

Good sense dictated that I remain in the house, in hiding, for the next few days. But good sense has never been one of my conspicuous features. With nightfall I was restless again. I must find out, if I could, what was going on in Bali. I had made my way in the moonlight to the restaurant of a Chinese with whom I had long been friends, and whom I knew to be discrete. The Balinese for the most part, I knew from experience, were like inquisitive children, incapable of keeping a secret. Not so the Chinese; they tended to be close-mouthed, inscrutable. My Chinese friend gave a little clucking exclamation when he saw me.

"We heard that the Japs killed yon in Java. How wonderful to see you alive!"

He beckoned me into a back room, away from curious stares, and readily responded to my hurried questions. The Japanese? Already they have become hated, far more than the Dutch in all the years of their rule. Arrogant and overbearing and brutal, they were. Both in Bali and in Java they had been rounding up thousands of Indonesians, men and women alike, from the kampongs and sending them into slave labor in other countries. Large numbers had been sent to Malaya and Burma. And there was the question of food. Everywhere the Japanese were confiscating the rice crops and shipping them to support the Japanese troops throughout Southeast Asia. The Indonesians were beginning to hunger. Too, the Japanese closed all the best hotels to Indonesians, treated even high Indonesian officials as gross inferiors. Resistance movements were spreading, consolidating. There had been many uprisings in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and an especially violent outburst against the Nipponese in Blitar, in Java. Well-confirmed rumors had it that thousands of Indonesian intellectuals were arrested and shot.

I wanted to stay the night, but my friend warned me that it would not do to be found in a Chinese house. Back to my Swiss friend's house I went, my thoughts now turned to my beloved hotel, and to Wyjan, Njoman, and Maday. I must find them. Nura had told me that the hotel had been completely destroyed but I wanted to see for myself. Early the next morning I found a native with a dokkar and set out for Swara Negara, my "Sound of the Sea" hostelry.

My heart leaped as we came in sight of the sea, and the lovely white sweep of Kuta Beach, and my grove of date and coconut palms along the shore. But where was the hotel? And where were the beautiful guest bungalows that had blended so perfectly with the landscape that they were almost part of it?

As the rugged little horse pulled nearer, I could see that not one brick stood upon another. The great carved-stone statues were gone. The grove looked as though it had not been disturbed. The driver, seeing my distress, turned his eyes away. He murmured, "I thought you knew."

Stumbling to the ground, I ran to the spot where my own cottage had stood. Not a piece of bamboo remained; and of the magnificent temple, not a handful of coral. I ran about frantically, looking for a brick, a stone, some evidence that there had been a building anywhere. There was none. The only sign of human habitation was a row of ketalas, or native yams, planted across the ground. My legs gave way under me. Sinking into the grass, I burst into tears. Could wars planned and declared in far lands do this to peaceful Bali? Why should such beauty, so lovingly wrought, be so wantonly destroyed?

I made my way to the headman of the nearest kampong, one of my friends of long ago, and I got the story from him. On the night of their landing the Japanese had bombed the airport. Terrified by the rain of explosives, my boys had fled from the grove, luckily before any were killed. "Then looters came down from the hills and swarmed all over Den Pasar, looting all that the Dutch had left," my friend said. "The Japanese were in possession of your hotel. They told the looters to tear it down, every stick, every stone. Nothing must stand that the hated white people had built." He paused, and sadly assured me: "The looters were not from the kampongs of this area. None of your friends did this to you. They were strangers from far parts of the island. When the Japanese told them to help themselves, to take, take, take they went wild."

"My paintings," I moaned. "Eight years of work. I was just getting ready to send them to the United States for an exhibition. What of them?"

The paintings, I learned, had been loaded aboard a Japanese ship, along with my collection of Balinese art. My books had been scattered no one knew where. Nothing of mine, nothing whatever remained.

To the house of the Swiss, late in the afternoon, came two Japanese officers of the naval police. What of the crate that had been in my possession? they asked. I had been seen removing it from the props of the dancing troupe and driving away with it. This information had come to the police, I learned, from a Balinese named Pageh, the collaborating manager of the Bali Hotel.

"The crate contained books from Java, for myself and some Balinese friends," I explained.

"Where is it now, that crate?"

"In a back room. I have been too tired to unpack it. Shall I open it for you?"

"We shall open the crate ourselves."

Ripped open, the crate produced nothing but books. Books on Japan, Japanese grammar books, Japanese fairy-tale books, Japanese history books.

They looked at me curiously, "Your papers, please," the officers demanded. My pass and papers plainly surprised and confused them. They had not expected to see an order from the commandant that all Japanese should be helpful and pass the bearer and her personal effects safely between Java and Bali. I accepted their embarrassed apologies, and assured them that I knew it was their duty to be suspicious of anyone who might bring harm to Dai Nippon. We concluded our meeting with whiskey and soda all around, and they proposed a toast to the Tenno Haika, the Emperor of Japan.

Although it ended on an amicable note, the incident unnerved me. I must get out of Bali; I must first notify Anak Agung Nura. I hired a car from a Chinese and drove to the Rajah's puri. Somewhat to my surprise I found Nura calm and almost unconcerned. "You are unduly alarmed," he said. "The firearms have been disposed of, and absolutely no traces have been left behind. There is nothing whatever that the Japanese can pin on you." He urged me to wait out my half-imagined storm for a few more days.

Hardly had I returned to the Swiss artist's house when an invitation arrived from the Japanese naval commander to attend a feast honoring the theatrical troupe. I sent my regrets with the excuse that I was unwell, suffering from a dreadful headache. My would-be host refused to take no for an answer. His aide came to fetch me.

By this time I was thoroughly frightened. I tried hard to conceal my fears and chatted with my friends as animatedly as I could. The commandant was outwardly pleasant, but something warned me to be on my guard. "You have had much experience in running a hotel, I am told," he said. "How would you like to manage this very fine Bali Hotel for me? We need someone to keep it going well for our high officers, and visitors from Tokyo."

I assured him that I must return immediately to Java. "I promised the commandant in Surabaya not to stay away long, and I must keep my word," I said. He dropped the subject, but persisted in asking many searching questions about my relationship with the Rajah and his son. Somehow I lived through the evening. I was never more glad to have a party come to an end.

The following morning the summons came again. This time the commander offered me his protection. "You may stay in my house with me," he said. "You will be perfectly safe."

Of course I knew perfectly well what he meant. I refused his offer in polite terms, and repeated that I must return to Java. His manner became very brusque. "What has the army to offer you that the navy cannot give?" he demanded. "You need not worry about the commandant in Surabaya. I have just learned that he is to be transferred to Makassar. You will be left without a protector. The war is young yet; this situation will go on for years."

I tried to explain that the commandant at Surabaya was not a "protector" but a friend, interested in my paintings.

"Rubbish," he barked. "Anyway, you cannot leave Bali without an exit permit from the navy. I shall see that you do not get it. Furthermore, you are not to go to the Rajah or his son. You are not to see them at all, or try to get in touch with them."

He began to question me about my life in Bali and about the natives I knew. "And why did you build your hotel next to the airport?" he asked. "Surely you knew that the Japanese would not allow you to live near it in wartime?"

I was trembling so violently I could hardly reply. "How could I know that someday Bali would be involved in a war between the Western nations and Japan?" I asked. "I did not build my hotel next to the airport. The airport built near me."

"So, if you are not going to move in with me, how will you live?" he gibed. "Have you money? There are no tourists any longer to buy your paintings."

"I shall go to the market and sell baskets, and straw mats, and bananas. I have found that you do not need much money to live in Bali."

"It would be ridiculous for a European woman to sit on her haunches selling bananas," he jeered. "We won t allow it."

I had heard, and I knew from experience, that the Japanese made indecent offers to women but did not use force. I was reminded of this when he said, "You may go now. Sooner or later you will be very glad to come to me."

The servants to whom I had attached myself had little food for themselves, let alone for me. I must forage on my own. And in spite of my boast to the Japanese commander, it was next to impossible to make a living. The same plight confronted a Balinese friend of mine who had owned an art shop but had had to close it after the occupation of Bali. She proposed that we try knitting woolen obis - belly-bands - for the Japanese. "They all wear them," she said. "They are offering one guilder a piece. We can make thirty cents profit on each obi. With eggs two cents each, and bananas two for a cent, vegetables and fruits costing very little, we could get along."

We bought wool in the market and made obis with a strip of red and a strip of white. Our Japanese customers, whether they realized it or not, would be wearing the colors of the flag of the Indonesian freedom movement round their waists.

As I became more proficient in knitting I added a little blue yarn and knit in the word "merdeka," meaning freedom. My friend dissuaded me from this. "Suppose a Jap should show his obi to an Indonesian who would explain the meaning of merdeka - then where would you be?"

At the same time, however, my Balinese friend was sprinkling itch powder on every obi she delivered. It was a dangerous practice, except that the Japanese apparently never did figure out the origin of the skin rash around their stomachs.

So I knitted, rode around the town on a bicycle when I could, and gathered news here and there. Unlike the Dutch, the Japanese did not interfere with my friendship with the natives so long as I remained in the city and did not venture out to my former home in the puri. Because there was a heavy fine and punishment for speaking English, I studied Japanese.

The Japanese had opened a school for the natives where they were taught Japanese. Every evening my Indonesian friends would come to my house and teach me what they had learned that day. Since I spoke and wrote Balinese and Malay fairly well and had a liking for Oriental languages, I found Japanese comparatively easy. Whenever I met a Nipponese officer I practiced on him. The officers usually took the trouble to correct me, and they were eager too, to practice their fragmentary English on me.

Word reached me that the commander had become extremely angry at my avoidance of him and at my ability to live without his assistance and was about to take some strong measures. It might be that he intended to compel me to live with him or that he planned to throw me into prison. In either case, it was imperative for me to get away quickly.

One of my Chinese friends was to be married the very next morning at six. I knew that the bridegroom had won the permission of the Japanese to charter an old bus to take his bride and some twenty members of their respective families to Java for a honeymoon trip.

I was aware, too, that the Chinese had never forgotten or forgiven the rape of Nanking. I knew that at heart they hated the Japanese and were only waiting for a chance to help remove them from conquered Indonesia.

The Chinese groom was entertaining all his friends at a party at his house. I called ostensibly to congratulate him, but really to ask for help. I told him I was in grave danger from the Japanese commander and asked his assistance in getting out of Bali. "Let me join your wedding party," I pleaded.

"I want to help you," he said. "But look at this!" It was the Japanese permit for the use of the bus. "They have all our names listed here, and our ages. They have told us they will call our names as we enter the bus, and no one else will be allowed to get on. They will probably stop us a couple of times on the drive to Gilimanuk. And they will check again when we go aboard the patrol boat to be taken across the strait."

We talked a long time, and finally hit upon a plan that was dangerous but just might work. The bridegroom agreed to smuggle me into the bus before the wedding ceremony, and to hide me under a seat and cover me up with luggage and bedrolls. I promised that should I be discovered along the way I would say that I entered the bus and hid without the knowledge of any member of the wedding party.

I crept into the bus before daybreak. Shortly after sunrise we were on our way. There were a few bad moments when the Japanese called out the names as the wedding celebrants entered the bus. But since everyone was laughing and bustling around, the inside of the bus was not examined.

It is a long way to the western tip of Bali, some 250 kilometers. Twice the Japanese road patrols stopped the bus and ordered every one out for a check of the names on the driver's pass. Under the luggage I tried to still my trembling with the philosophy that what was to be would be, and that my fate was in the hands of the Bali gods. I was not discovered.

The road was rocky and rough; the jolting and bumping of the tin can of a bus bruised me badly. Exhaust fumes accumulating under the seats made me feel faint. The intense heat and the lack of air caused me almost to suffocate. After five hours of this I was relieved indeed to have the bus stop and discharge me at a lonely stretch of beach. I thanked my Chinese friends tearfully for making good my escape and for the money they pressed on me knowing that I had no time to arrange for such necessities before my departure. The bridegroom promised that on his return to Bali he would inform Agung Nura of my delivery from under the nose of the Japanese.

The gods were surely with me, for everything went as I had planned. It was only a mile to the fishermen's shack where two Madurese acquaintances lived. They sailed me across the strait in darkness and put me ashore at a point on Java where I would certainly meet no Japanese. Even if I did, I had the pass of the Japanese commandant of Surabaya to clear my way. But happy as I was to be out of Den Pasar and the domain of the Japanese naval officer, could I have foreseen what lay ahead for me in Java I might have been wiser to stay in Bali at any price.

A PRISONER OF THE JAPANESE

I came back to Surabaya from Bali bruised, weary, worn, and filthy dirty, and a nervous wreck. Sneaking into my house after dark, I phoned Frisco Flip to find the professor and come as quickly as possible. They were aghast at my story and my appearance, but joined me in a toast to the success of the journey. "Left hope that the firearms in Bali will be put to good use by Anak Agung Nura," said Flip. "And the navy commander is the first victim!"

My colleagues informed me that my good friend, the Surabaya commandant, had indeed been transferred to Celebes, the gossip being that he was considered a bit too soft to be stationed in a key city. Since then the Japanese had tightened their controls over Surabaya considerably. It was necessary now to lie low for a while and not to see each other.

The honorable professor said he would go to Batavia and scout around, work his way down the coast, and return in a few weeks time. Flip said I should not venture out of the house until we found out the attitude of the new commandant. He, Flip, would go about his work as usual, and only visit me if anything extremely important developed. We said good-bye to the professor.

Three weeks passed without word from the professor. Flip became increasingly worried and started inquiries through the grapevine. Then one day he came to my house in great agitation.

"The professor has been arrested," he said. "The Japanese Kempetai [Gestapo] police caught him at Cheribon. He s been charged with espionage."

I stared at Flip, unwilling to believe my ears. "That wonderful old man," I sobbed.

Flip's tone was matter-of-fact, "We have no time now to be upset or sentimental," he said. "You must get out of here immediately; it will only be a matter of time, hours perhaps, before the police come looking for you."

"And what about you, Frisco Flip?" I asked. "What will you do?"

"Nothing." His face was glum. "I don t think I am under suspicion; otherwise I would have been arrested by now. After all, I am a Japanese. Remember that."

We decided that I should go to Solo and take refuge in the puri of one of Agung Nura's titled friends. There were no more train departures that night; I would have to go the first thing in the morning.

Flip said not to worry about him. He would leave on the following day, to visit a factory some miles from Surabaya. That might give him a chance to find out what the Japanese knew about him. We drank a farewell toast to President Roosevelt and he slipped out into the darkness. I spent the evening assembling my belongings and destroying incriminating letters and papers in my possession.

I should have known that my activities on behalf of the Indonesian freedom movement would one day lead me into serious trouble with the Japanese occupation forces. Yet, like so many who ally themselves to a cause, I only visualized danger for my fellow comrades. Although rumor came persistently from a good source the servants of a Japanese officer in the next block of frequent house-to-house raids in the district, I still felt safe. Until that next morning, at least, when I planned to be off to Solo.

Very early, long before time to prepare to go to the railway station, a pounding on the door jolted me out of my sleep. Dazed and frightened I called out, "Who is there?"

"Open the door," shouted a man's impatient voice. "The Kempetai."

The Kempetai! My spine froze. Jumping up, I dropped my night sarong and started to pull a dress over my head. My hands trembled so violently I could hardly use them. Still fumbling with buttons, I snatched letters and papers and my American passport from the bureau drawers and stuffed them under the mattress. Then I ran to the door, on which the pounding had risen to a crescendo.

Two Japanese officers stepped quickly out of the shadows. The entrance light gleamed on their large round horn-rimmed spectacles. They marched in, holding themselves stiffly erect, and without a word of explanation began to search the living room. I scurried into the bedroom to finish dressing. I would feel more adequate to face the terror ahead in shoes and stockings.

In less than a minute one of the men entered the bedroom, brushed past me, walked directly to the bed, and pulled the letters from their ridiculous hiding place.

"Come on outside and get in the car" were the first words I heard.

"Where are we going?" I asked, my voice quivering with fear.

"For a ride. You ll find out soon enough,"

Running to the bureau, I showed the officer my pass signed by the commandant. He brushed it aside. "That will do you no good now," he growled. "You are an American citizen, and now we have your passport to prove it."

"But of what am I accused?" I asked.

"You ll soon know." It was the only answer I could get. Having filled a suitcase with my papers and documents, they marched me out into the faint daylight to a waiting staff car.

We drove away. Outwardly I tried to appear calm. Inside I was tortured with apprehensions. After an eternity of two, three, perhaps four hours the car slowed. I caught a glimpse of red-brick buildings and recognized the familiar large town of Kediri, East Java. We stopped beside a grim, gray structure, a prison, I knew, by the look and feel of it. A guard led me into a cell a cage, really, closed on three sides, with the fourth side an iron grille looking onto a narrow hall where Japanese sentries paraded back and forth. On the floor of my cell was a filthy mat of palm and another mat rolled around a handful of straw. The only other feature to be seen was a hole in the earthen floor, the toilet, I discovered later with a bucket of dirty water beside it. This, then, was what it meant to be a prisoner of the Japanese.

For five or six days or maybe a week, it was hard to keep count, nothing much happened. Twice a day a banana leaf of rice was handed to me through the bars; little better than a starvation diet. I must have lost ten pounds in that first week.

At daylight each morning the guard came down the corridor, down the line of tiny cells just like mine, each with its occupant. We had orders always in the daytime to kneel, with hands clasped in front of us. The guard carried a long pole, with which he prodded us like beasts if we were not already on our knees. I could hear the whack of the pole on the heads of prisoners as he passed from cell to cell. All day long, from six in the morning until nine at night, we were required to remain on our knees, never allowed to sit no matter how sharply our muscles pained.

The first feeding, a little rice and salt, came at eleven in the morning. The next meal was at night. After the evening meal we fell over on our mats, often shivering with fear and exhaustion, trying to sleep on our arms to avoid the lice in our straw. There was no such tiling as a bath; no water, even, to wash our faces. No combing of hair, no fresh clothes. Worst of all, there was no privacy. The dirt, squalor, and hunger were weapons to break down our morale, but the most bitter indignity was the guard's persistent staring to humiliate us when we were compelled to use the loathsome little holes in the floor.

There had been no charge against me, or an indictment or trial or punishment. But a day came when I was called out of my cell and taken to an interrogation room around which were seated several Japanese officers. For some minutes questions were put to me, based obviously on my papers which they had seized. This telegram from the Duff Coopers, the letters from Selby-Walker, Far Eastern director for Reuter's. How did I happen to have them? If they had been guests at my hotel, then how had that happened? What other communications had I with people of some importance?

My replies gave them no satisfaction. "Of what am I accused?" I cried. Why are you holding me here?"

"You are an American spy. You must give us your FBI number."

An American secret agent! I almost laughed. "Absolutely not," I replied. "That is ridiculous, and quite untrue." I did not elaborate to my interrogators, of course, but time and time again Frisco Flip had told me that we were on our own, with no tie whatever with American intelligence. He insisted that he had been doing his duty as an American citizen, just as the professor had performed his duty for China, an ally of the United States.

The seated Japanese showed impatience at my responses. My chief questioner scowled fiercely, and his eyes began to flicker with a terrifying yellow light.

"Take off your clothes," he ordered. I stiffened, paralyzed with shame, and a young lieutenant tore off my one garment.

"Stand on one leg," the interrogator barked. "Now raise the other with the knee bent." When I was slow to comply he slapped me. "No, not that way!" he roared. "Turn it out!"

Sobbing with humiliation, I complied. Later, much later, I grew so hardened that I began to undress automatically as soon as the door of the examination room closed behind me, but on this first morning the emotional torture was worse than that of any burn or blow.

"A very dangerous spy has been arrested," my interrogator told me. "A Chinese masquerading as a sarong peddler on the streets of Surabaya. He visited you several times. You were spying with him."

I knew that it would be of no use to deny the visits of the professor. They could easily worm out of my servants the fact that he had sold his wares at my house.

"The streets of Surabaya are full of Chinese peddlers selling all sorts of goods," I said. "They would come around to my house, and several times I bought sarongs from them, for the servants and for myself. That is all they were as far as I knew just peddlers."

At each question I was struck with a bamboo stick that raised welts on my back. I winced and shrank with each blow, but as the pain and shame increased the punishment became less effective. A sort of numbing reaction, both mental and physical, hardened me to the brutality. Besides, I was sure the professor had told them nothing. He had cautioned me always to have the servants present when he came to the house, so they could hear us squabble over the price of his goods. Had the professor confessed, the Japanese would have confronted me with his statement. If they had real information about me they would not have made the absurd accusation about an American agent with a spy number. They were guessing in the dark.

I was returned to my cell for another day of filth and lice and waiting. Each morning I was brought back to the room, and again stripped, grilled, and subjected to beatings and indignities. Again and again I was asked about the Duff Coopers, Captain Kilkenny, the American consul, the Chinese peddler, my official spy number, Colonel R. of the American army, and so on. At last they brought in papers. "This is the full confession of the Chinese peddler," the prison officer said, "He has told us all about you."

"May I see it?" I asked.

He handed me a sheet of paper written in Chinese characters, and said, "See here is his signature." Weeks earlier the professor and Flip and I had agreed on certain little signs in our writing so that we could detect attempts at forgery. I knew at a glance that this was not the professor's doing, this so-called confession.

The Japanese were full of tricks. Another time they came in with an official-looking document and said that American intelligence had admitted I was one of their agents and had offered to exchange me for a Japanese spy who had been arrested in America. This was such an obvious fake that I almost laughed in the face of the inquisitor.

Next my interrogator confronted me with the accusation that I had been the driver and interpreter for an American colonel. He had flown away and left me behind to spy on the Japanese and to relay information over a secret radio transmitter hidden in the hills. "The secret station sent out very accurate reports on our activities, especially in Bali," he said. "We know without a doubt that this information came straight from you. You were in a position to gather the information. You must tell us how you got it and what you did with it, or you will go through tortures that will make the punishment you already have received seem like children s games."

Other questions dealt with my mysterious departure from Bali. "The navy commander in Bali notified our new commandant of Surabaya to be on the lookout for you," the interrogator said. "He wrote that you were forbidden to leave the island, but that you escaped somehow. We want to know who made it possible for you to get away."

Here at last I could give them an answer, and could twist the truth and still sound convincing. "I left Bali without an exit visa because I was afraid of the navy commander," I said. "He wanted me to live with him. I walked to Gilimanuk and crossed the strait with some fishermen I did not know and could not recognize if I saw them again."

"Tell us more about the commander's requirement that you live with him."

I related the whole story of the naval officer's approaches. When I came to the commander's angry query, "What has the Japanese army got that the Japanese navy hasn't?" My interrogators chortled. They laughed loudly among themselves at what they plainly considered a fine joke on the navy.

The ten days or two weeks of questioning were a nightmare. At times it all seemed unreal to me. It couldn't possibly have happened. The beatings, the black bruises, the standing stark-naked before my damnable torturers, brought me back to reality. Life had now become something hardly to be endured, a succession of miseries and horrors.

My failure to confess to knowing anything about a secret radio transmitter stung my inquisitors more than anything else. They decided to try a new refinement of torture. "If you will not tell us the truth, you shall walk the streets of Kediri naked," they said. "Everyone in Kediri shall see your shame. Your Indonesian friends will have the amusement of seeing you as the Japanese see you."

Never let it be said that the Japanese were not as good as their word. They ripped off the last pitiful bit of covering I had. In my hair they attached a large sign reading in Malay: THE YANKEE MATA HARI. And with bayonets they forced me to walk down the very center of the street.

But the Japanese had not reckoned with the Indonesian mentality. Javanese are frank about the facts of life, but modest. One glimpse of what the Japanese were doing to me and they were horrified. They fled in every direction. Doors and windows were slammed shut. No one remained on the street but the Japanese now feeling somewhat foolish and the bruised, filthy, dazed, and unclad white woman they were trying to deprave and unnerve. My tormentors hurried me back to the prison for another severe beating, and then tossed me into my cell. But they knew that they had, somehow, lost face. This time, in spite of the violation of my modesty, I had been the winner.

The Japanese themselves were a complex people, I was to find. Sometimes the interrogators could be human. Late one night I was pulled out of my cell, questioned persistently about the Chinese peddler, and beaten with a big pole on my shoulders and around my hips until I collapsed with pain. When the interrogation was over and I still had not confessed, the nterrogator's attitude changed a little. "Would you like to have a plate of bami with us?" he asked.

Any other time a plate of bami would have sounded like heaven, for I was half starved. But the thought of taking food in front of the men who had beaten me black and blue was, to say the least, repugnant. They insisted that I eat. With the first mouthful I started to vomit, and then burst into tears. One of the inquisitors astonishingly stepped forward, with compassion on his face, and started feeding me with a spoon and stroking my hair. "Kasian, kasian, djangan menangis," he said. "What a pity, don't cry."

On another evening I was lying huddled up on my straw mat in a corner of my cell, looking more like a bedraggled animal than a human being. I was feeling at my lowest ebb and wished that death might relieve me of this interminable torture. A little Japanese cellguard called me over to the iron grille. "Are you feeling ill, Tanchan?" he asked. I answered that I was indeed feeling half dead.

"Would you like me to sing for you?" he asked. "All the officers have gone to a feast. I can sing you a nice song."

In spite of myself I smiled at his earnestness. In my condition I had no desire to listen to songs. But he meant well.

"Sing me one of those soft Japanese lullabies that mothers croon to their children," I suggested.

"Oh, no. I want to sing you a nice American song, "Love in the Wilderness. You know it?"

I confessed that I had never heard of it. The little soldier stood there in front of the bars, then, and warbled what he believed to be one of the best popular selections from the Hit Parade. It was strangely touching. To my expression of thanks he responded, "When I have a chance I will sing you more American songs."

One morning another guard asked me if I would like a hot shower. "That would be a real blessing," I told him disbelievingly. He led me across the courtyard to a series of little cubicles, each with a shower, and pushed me into one of them.

"May I have a towel and soap?" I asked hopefully. His reply was rough: "Do you think this is a hotel? Be glad you have water!"

Pulling off my dress I stepped under the shower. I was about to turn on the water when I chanced to look up at the transom. Two guards were peering through, broad grins on their faces. The men were not leering. I was beginning to understand that nakedness means nothing to the Japanese. But they knew that it tortured a white woman to be seen naked. I realized that these two were enjoying not my nudity but my humiliation. For a moment, conscious of my ugly, bruised body, I wanted to scream and snatch my dress. But the desire for a bath was stronger. I ignored the watchers, turned on the water, and glorified in my first bath in prison for as long as the guard would let me.

After three weeks of almost daily examination, the commandant for some inscrutable reason set me free. But first he took me into his office, motioned for me to sit under a picture of a Balinese temple, and invited me to broadcast to America for the Japanese. "You will have a fine house, money, a car, a radio, every luxury," he promised.

"I could not even consider it." Even after being weakened by the treatment of the Japanese I had plenty of strength to stand firm on this issue. "What would you think of a Japanese girl who would broadcast against her own people for America, and in time of war?" I asked.

"No Japanese girl would."

"And neither would an American girl broadcast for the Japanese."

He smiled slightly, and said no more about it.

Free! At first I was too numbed, too dispirited to care. A young Japanese officer took me to the railway station and found seats for both of us in a compartment of the train to Surabaya. My dress was scarcely decent, held together only by a few pins. My bare feet were dirty. On the train the Indonesians looked at me with disdain; a white girl of the Japanese.

The smug brick houses of Kediri gave way to sawah fields with their little black-thatched temples etched against patches of green or gold. With each click of the rails, with each mile that took me farther from the hell that I had known, my spirits rose. The young officer sensed my mood and smiled at me. "I like Java, I like it very much," he said impulsively. "This is my first posting away from home. I always wanted to visit strange lands and see other peoples. I am sorry that my chance to do so came only through a war."

He watched the changing scenery in silence for a few moments, and then he resumed his theme. "We ought not to hate each other," he said. "Why should we not like each other? The Japanese people have no hatred for individual Americans. There is one good aspect to this war, to my way of thinking. For hundreds of years the white races have treated the Japanese as inferiors, as little more than slant-eyed monkeys. The yellow peril sort of thing. In their hearts the educated Japanese have known that cultured people of all races are equal. Now all through Southeast Asia we have seen the whites bowing low to the Japanese. No matter how the final victory goes, my people will never again feel inferior."

I would say that his thinking was typical of that of most of the Japanese, of the reasonable Japanese. Of course, there were fanatics on both sides.

At my house he held out his hand. "We could be friends," he said.

Safe in my own doorway, I felt almost affectionate toward him. "It was a pleasant journey," I said. "I feel that we are friends." For a moment I had forgotten the beatings, the humiliation. So elastic is the human spirit that I had even forgotten the brutal Kempetai officers.

SOME REFINEMENTS OF TORTURE

It was a dream come true to return to the privacy, the cleanliness, the peaceful quiet, the sheer luxury of my own house in Surabaya. Never had food tasted so good as the simple fare the servants produced. I spent hours under the shower, scrubbing away the prison grime. At last I could give some attention to my hair, my nails, my clothing, my general appearance. Never once did I venture outside; I had no wish to jeopardize my new-found freedom.

In spite of everything my security was brief. On the third morning after my return a Japanese car drew up to the door, and two officers ordered me to come with them to the City Hall. These were not Kempetai, I learned, but PID, Political Intelligence Division. Their reputation was less evil than that of the Kempetal. Perhaps they were taking me in because I had failed to register.

At the City Hall the European residents of Surabaya were queuing up for registration. Lines of them stretched out into the street. They watched without expression as we pushed by and proceeded to the offices of the chief of police on the top floor. The chief, a pokerfaced little man with piercing eyes, glared hard at me. As I sat before a great desk the room began to fill with officers, eying me as though I were some rare bird. "Ah, so this is the Yankee spy!" they exclaimed, brushing against me and flicking me with the ashes of their cigarettes.

At this moment the air-raid siren wailed. The police commissioner jumped up and all the officers left the room, trying not to seem hurried. A moment later the commissioner returned with a guard. "Keep your gun on her," he instructed. "If she tries to get away, shoot." Then he left, his heels clicking rapidly down the corridor.

A great hush settled on the building and the street. It seemed as though the guard and I were the only two people left in the world. Both of us realized that we were almost next door to the airport and on the top floor. We could not be in a more dangerous spot. I don't know which of us was the more afraid. My hands were icy cold; his face was a sickly green. His finger on the trigger trembled. I was afraid the gun might fire at any moment.

Into the middle of the silence plunged a high-pitched whine and then an explosion. For what seemed more than an hour bombs exploded all round. The building quivered and bits of plaster gave way but, miraculously, each time we remained alive. This heavy raid, by the big American bombers, was much more harrowing than the attacks by Japanese aircraft at Den Pasar had been. By the time the "all clear" sounded the Japanese guard and I could have embraced each other. Inadvertently we had provided each other with the solace of human companionship in the face of death.

Once it became apparent that there would be no further bombs, the building came quickly to life. As the officers trooped back, one of them walked over and struck me a sharp blow on the face.

"You are happy, aren't you?" he growled. "You knew those were Yankee planes."

I protested that I was not happy. "I do not like to see innocent people killed by bombs, no matter who they are," I said. "I do not like war."

The mood of my captors had changed. I was no longer that curious, somewhat glamorous creature, the girl spy. I was the enemy; I could feel the force of their hatred. They motioned me out of the chair and we returned to the street, cutting a way through the lines of Dutch registrants. As we neared the car I saw several acquaintances in the line. They noted the officers and the automobile, and stared at me with contempt. When one of the officers opened the door and ushered me into the back seat with a gesture of mocking courtesy, I knew what the Dutch must suspect. "You fools, don't you see I'm a prisoner of the Japanese?" I wanted to shout. I dared not say a word.

Whether the Japanese had intended to imprison me again I will never know. I believe, however, that my unfortunate appearance at the City Hall at the precise moment of an air raid completely destroyed whatever chance of release I might otherwise have had.<

I found my next confinement quarters to be a cell underneath the Surabaya Kempetai Headquarters. I was quickly informed that what I had suffered at the hands of the Japanese in Kediri had been as nothing compared with what I would go through in the Surabaya Kempetai.

No use to wonder what new crime the Japanese had found against me. Hope is strong. For eight days no one came to my cell. Who were in the other cells I did not know. Sometimes I could hear them shrieking or babbling to themselves.

The interlude of quiet came to an end. The guard took me out of my cell for questioning. One glance at the room, a large hook suspended from the ceiling, a table beneath it told me that this was a torture chamber. I shuddered, and my bones felt as though they were melting away. The two officers at the table might well have come straight from the Kediri Kempetai.

They quickly told me why I had been imprisoned. They had been in touch with the Kempetai in Kediri, they said, and had learned that I had not yet confessed to associating with traitors, a group of pro-Ally Japanese. The Japanese army had a few of these, they said, but gradually they were being discovered and "removed".

At first they were reasonably gentle, trying to make me talk. "If you will tell us everything, we will give you complete immunity from punishment," they said. "Give us the name of the Japanese you associated with. Why should you shelter him?"

Again I knew that they were not sure of their ground. I insisted that of all the Japanese I had associated with not one discussed anything with me except art and literature. The grilling became sharper. Between demands, "Now will you tell us what information your Japanese friends gave you?" a questioner would cuff me in the face. Each time he hit harder. Before long I had been battered into semiconsciousness. I heard them say finally, "We have arrested your friend. Unless you give us a confession of your dealings with him we will bring him in and hang you both naked, face to face, until you are dead."

Dimly I realized that they did not know about Frisco Flip. Again they were groping in the dark. With this they stood me on the table, tied my hands behind my back, fastened my elbows together, and then twisting my arms backward in their sockets looped my hands over the hook that dangled from the ceiling. Inch by inch they moved the table away, demanding with each pull that I tell them what information I had received, and from whom.

The pain of my dislocated arms was so excruciating that I writhed from side to side. The veins in my temples felt as though they were about to burst. Sweat poured down my face; I could feel it dripping on my half-naked breasts where my dress was torn away. I clenched my teeth. I could see Flip's kindly face, could hear him say, "Take half my salary to buy milk for the hungry Dutch children in the concentration camp." With a last pull the table slid from under my feet. My weight fell full on my arms. I was hanging. I screamed in unbearable agony.

"Dear God," I prayed, "close my mouth. Don't let me spit out the words that are on my lips."

Blood drooled from the corners of my mouth. My tongue moved with a volition of its own. It twisted to speak. No human being could endure such pain any longer. But as my mouth tried to form the words, blackness swallowed me. The last thing my mind registered was a newspaper in the torturer s hands. He sat with his face behind it, pretending to read. But the paper was upside down, I noticed even in my agony.

When my mind cleared I was on the floor and the examiner was pouring cold tea down my throat. Then the guards carried me back to my cell. For days I lay on a mat half paralyzed, tossing with fever, unable to feed myself. It was several weeks before I could raise my arms.

One day a woman was dragged into my cell screaming and kicking at her jailers. At that time I was so ill from the relentless cruelty that I could not even sit up. The new arrival had evidently been beaten badly too. Her face and arms were a mass of braises.

When the goards went away she just sat and stared at me. After a while she broke her silence. "How long have you been in this place?" she asked. "What have they done to you? You look like a female Monte Cristo."

I remained silent at first. Sometimes the Japanese put prisoners in to spy for them. Studying her, however, I concluded that she had been so terribly beaten that she would hardly be willing to work for the Japanese. I told her I had been accused of being an Allied spy.

"And I was arrested for listening to the BBC radio broadcasts from England and passing the war news to the other doctors at the Surabaya hospital," she said. "I am a doctor, Polish, but I have registered as a German. I am one of the head doctors at the hospital. An Indo-Dutch doctor was jealous of my position and informed on me to the Kempetai. They mauled me, dragged me from my house, and took my two little sons away. I do not know what has become of them, and I am crazy with worries."

My cellmate was obviously in great pain and mentally distressed. I asked her if she would like some aspirin. "I would give the world for an aspirin, but how is it that you have aspirin?" she asked. I drew the box from its hiding place and handed it to her. The printing on the box and the directions were in German. She read it with a puzzled expression, then asked where I had found the pills.

"I had been ill for days, lying on my mat hardly able to move. I was alone in the cell," I told her. "A young Japanese guard became worried, especially when I was brought back half dead after each interrogation. He was a sympathetic little chap. One day he asked me if I could use some aspirin, and I told him that if he got me an aspirin I would be able to forgive his people for much. "He managed for a while to steal one aspirin a night from the first-aid department. Then one night he told me: Tanchan - my Japanese nickname -, something dreadful has happened to me: I am to be transferred to the prison at Cheribon, and I shall never be able to get you aspirin again. But tonight I shall steal the whole box, and you must hide it and take just one a day. If it is ever discovered, you must say you brought it into the cell hidden under your sarong, otherwise I shall lose my head."

The Polish doctor laughed until her eyes watered. "You know what these are, these German pills?" She choked. "This is an aphrodisiac for old men to make them feel young again. Monkey-gland pills. No wonder you are ill. Do you think the guard gave them to you on purpose?"

I was sure that he had not. He could not read German, and they certainly looked like aspirin. It was funny in a way, but I was too sick to laugh.

Still the tortures went on. Burning me with cigarette ends was not pleasure enough for my new tormentor, an officer I called the Green Ape because of his green eyeshade, which reflected a sickly green color over his face. It was his pleasure to beat me black and blue and then to play with a bluebird that flew about the room, attached to his chair by a string. Calling it to his finger, he would talk to the bird in poetic phrases. "Of what are your thoughts, little one? What strange sights favor you that are hidden from our eyes? What beauties beyond those known to mortals?" Then he would reach over and whack me almost unconscious.

Another guard, who, I learned, had been a newspaper reporter in Tokyo before the war, was intensely interested in everything American. One day he said, as he brought in the morning rice, "Tanchan, don't you think I should have an American name? Can't you think of a nice one for me? Come, Tanchan, give me a list."

"If I do, will you give me a lump of sugar and half a cup of hot water?"

"Yes," he promised. "Two lumps."

The next morning, before the officers were around, he slipped me two stolen sugar lumps and a tin of hot water. This precious sugar would give me a little energy for the day ahead.

"Have you thought of a name yet?" he asked.

I hadn't, but the lumps of sugar gave me an inspiration. "I've a good one," I said. "How would you like "Sugar Daddy?"

"Suga daddee, daddee," he tried it out. "Sounds fine, like the name of an opera star." It was not easy to understand each other. He relied chiefly on Japanese and broken English and I on Malay.

A bit dubious about his new name, the guard went to some of the other prisoners who knew English. What did Sugar Daddy mean? They explained that sugar was just as the American woman had said, something sweet. Applied to "father." He was very pleased, and hereafter answered to his new name.

We coold talk on simple things, we two, but on abstract ideas our words failed us. Sugar Daddy was something of a philosopher, and used to say, "Tanchan, how can you take so much and still not hate us?" We agreed that there was no good in hating people, only a system. There were good and bad people. It would be foolish to hate them all.

Sugar Daddy did what little kindness he could when the officers were away, and everyone liked him. It distressed and embarrassed him that my dress should be so torn that it was positively indecent.

"Don t worry, Sugar Daddy," I would say. "They can't keep me here forever." But he would shake his head. "You don't know. It might be months, maybe years."

One of the prisoners, a beautiful half-caste girl who always came back from examinations on her own feet and with a smile on her face, had three dresses, three pretty calico prints that she kept washed and fresh. Prisoners with no serious charge against them were allowed to have two dresses, the one they wore and a change. But Sugar Daddy had been making observations.

"Let me see what you have in your bag," he said to her. "Bring it here to the bars, everything." She obeyed reluctantly, presenting a little wicker bag but holding onto it tight.

"Urn-hum, just as I thought." Sugar Daddy pulled two dresses out through the bars and looked them over carefully. "Here, Tanchan, stand up. This ought to fit you." He made me come to the bars and, sticking his hands through, held it up to me. "Yes, just about right, but a little too long. Go behind the screen and try it on." I had to do it, although I knew the half-caste girl would never forgive me. The other women in the cell looked on with malicious pleasure. They all distrusted the girl with the three dresses.

Sugar Daddy paid no attention to her grumbling. Cocking his head he looked me over, pleased with the effect. "Very pretty, Tanchan. But I still think it would look better if it weren't so long."

For some reason, probably because I was an American, the girl spy, the Yankee Mata Hari, I was Sugar Daddy's favorite. He felt that I was a celebrity, and he puffed with pride when high-ranking officers came to have a look at me. Often they swung their Samurai swords at me with remarkable precision, and just when I expected the blade to slice into my skull, they held up a neatly snipped lock of my hair. It was in such demand for souvenirs that presently I looked as though I were wearing a fright wig that had been thoroughly chewed by rats. Even the guards indulged in more childish antics with me than with the other prisoners, playing tricks on me such as sticking a piece of paper to my forehead on which was written, "I am a spy of the Allies." However, they had more humor than ill will in their voices as they shouted "monkey" and other unflattering terms at me.

Some of the other women were not so well liked. The Polish doctor, for instance. She sullenly refused to co-operate with the Japanese in any way. She was a distinguished physician, fluent in German and Dutch, yet when they brought her bottles of German or Dutch medicines and asked her what they were, she shook her head stubbornly and muttered, "I don t know." Even when they told her the medicines were for her own people, she refused to identify them.

But the doctor and the rest of the women in the cell were not political prisoners, as I was. They had simply broken ordinances. They were beaten and knocked about, but they did not suffer the more refined tortures reserved for political prisoners, the knives on the end of bamboo poles, the tapers for burning one's pubic hair, the pencils with which the fingers were twisted out of joint, the hangings, and worst of all the faked deaths. That last, to me, was the most grueling of all the prison experiences.

The Japanese officers came to my cell late at night, and talked to me in very quiet and serious voices. "We have decided that there is no use going on with this," they said. "We have got nowhere; you have refused to tell us the truth. We know that you are guilty of espionage. Therefore, tomorrow at daybreak you will be shot."

I listened dully, not clearly comprehending, not deeply caring. I had suffered so much that the pronouncement that I would be put out of my misery was almost welcome. If I lived I could see no hope of escape from the continual hounding of my captors. I was sick and in constant pain. I felt I could not much longer stand the beatings and hangings. I had by now been hanged by my arms three times, each time fainting before I could blurt out what the Japanese wanted to hear.

I knew that if I confessed to my dealings with my friends Agung Nura, the professor, the American-bom Japanese, I would not save my own neck, and would certainly bring them to torture and death. So if one had to die, better to die alone, saying nothing. It is curious, but I know now that if one can withstand the interrogations at the beginning without confessing, one gets stubborn with hate, and torture is less and less likely to loosen the tongue. It is the beginning that is terrifying. I was now at the end. Death would mean only release from the Japanese. The officers waited to see if the execution pronouncement would induce in me a change of heart. "We are giving you right now your last chance to tell everything," they said. "If you do give us a complete confession, we will nurse you back to health and send you back to the Rajah in Bali to live in peace until Japan and Germany have whipped America and her allies. This is your last chance to avoid the firing squad."

All I could do was to say what I had said many times before. "I don't know what you are talking about. I can't confess to something I don't know."

The Japanese officers came very early the following morning. This time I could not even stand up unassisted. They had to carry me from my cell and out into the courtyard. They bound my hands behind my back, and tied me against a banyan tree with branches that hung down to the ground like the tentacles of an octopus. They blindfolded me, and once again one of the officers spoke: "You still have time to confess. I will count to three. Jf you say nothing, on the third count you will be dead. You will be with your ancestors."

His voice seemed far, far away. I heard the count in Malay. "Satu." I braced myself. "Duah." Now, now it will come. "Tiga." The shattering roar of the riie staggered me. Almost at the same moment I felt something hot and sharp hit my chest. Everything turned black, and I fell to the ground.

When consciousness returned I was back in my cell. The Polish doctor was bending over me, feeling my pulse. I vaguely realized that somehow I was still alive. "She is dying!" I heard the Polish woman shout. "She is dying!" Turning to the guard, not Sugar Daddy but the cruel one who prodded us, she screamed, "You must do something!" She ran to her corner and, returning, threw over me her most precious possession, the blanket she had brought from home.

"She's in shock. Can't you see? Get someone, quick." Dully I heard the guard unlock the gate and drag her into the corridor. The whacks of his pole and her screams had no meaning for me. I was past caring; these things had no reality. Again I blacked out.

Several days later I awoke in an Indonesian hospital. The Indonesian doctor and nurse told me I had been unconscious and delirious, and they did not expect me to live. They said the Japanese had fired their rifles into the air, and at the same moment had hit me with a stone from a catapult. The intent had been to make me think I had been shot. It succeeded only too well.

"The Polish doctor saved you," they said. "She convinced the Japanese that unless they got you to a hospital immediately you would die in the cell. We do not know what the Japanese have done with her. All they said was that you were to be placed in a third-class ward. No favors are to be shown, but you are to be kept alive at all costs. The Kempetai, they said, is not yet through with you.

I was in the Simpang Hospital in Surabaya. My memory was almost gone, and my arms were paralyzed. But it was heaven to wake up and see friendly, smiling Javanese faces. I was terrified of most people, and would let near me only those I took, in my semidelirium, to be trustworthy. Whenever a Japanese came into the ward I became so violent, screaming and threshing about, that the doctor finally had to screen my bed from the rest of the ward. I was in the poorest part of the hospital, with the most broken-down human derelicts; but the contrast with my prison life was so great that this seemed sheer luxury.

"You are not trying hard enough to get well," the Indonesian doctor told me one day. "You must hold on, and have the will to live. Perhaps it will help you if I tell you some of the news reports that have been coming in. The Americans have been winning some great land and sea battles near New Guinea and in the Central Pacific. Over in Europe the Germans have been retreating under British fire. The Russians are holding their own. It now begins to appear that the Allies have a very good chance of winning the war."

This was the first I had heard of anything other than one incredible Japanese victory after the other. But the news at the moment did not greatly impress me. I was so weak and ill that I did not want to live.

At last the day came when the Japanese wanted to return me to the Kempetai But the Indonesian doctor convinced them that this would be fatal. Instead, I was removed from the hospital to solitary confinement In the Surabaya jail. I took this to be a good sign. Surely the Gestapo must be through with me? Otherwise I woold have been returned to the Kempetai prison. I learned later that the Japanese had theorized that solitary confinement would break my will. I would be unable to stand the loneliness, and they would get the confessions they had been unable to extract by physical torture.

THE PEACE OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

My new cell, in the Surabaya jail, was an almost square room about six paces in each direction. The walls were high and whitewashed, and the floor was of red bricks. Between the top of the walls and the roof, along a narrow ledge, was an iron grille that provided some ventilation against the stifling heat of the day. In one wall an iron-barred door and a small window opened onto a courtyard not much larger than the cell itself. The courtyard, too, was enclosed by very high walls and a roof of iron bars. At one side a thick wooden door opened into the main prison yard. In a corner of the courtyard stood a cement tank filled with water, usually stagnant and covered with green scum and mosquitoes. The odor of the water was anything but pleasant. One hesitated to use it even for washing, but there was no alternative.

I was allowed out of the cell for ten minutes each day. These intervals in the tiny courtyard were unbelievably pleasant. One could study the blue of the sky and watch the tall castor-oil trees swaying softlv in the faint breeze.

Within the cell Itself there was only a woven palm mat to sleep on, a basket, and a broom. There was also the hole in the ground, and a small tank of water to swill down it in lieu of a sewage-disposal system. One accomplished this by dipping a coconut shell into the water and throwing it into the hole. The stench at times was unbearable, and at night black flying cockroaches swarmed from the hole by the hundreds. At first they terrified me. Later they became my companions. The cell walls usually had several small tjitjaks (chirping lizards) crawling back and forth, fascinating creatures to watch.

For more than two years I remained in solitary confinement, rarely seeing anyone except the Indonesian babu, who came twice a day with a plate of rice and a cup of slush called coffee. The solitude that might have proved intolerable to another prisoner was what I had longed for, time to be alone, to find peace for my tortured soul. At this point I hated the human race and was much too ill for any feeling of loneliness. It was a blessing to know that, for the time being at least, I would not be summoned to the Kempetai inquisition, would not be subject to the lewd remarks and the leering gaze of the Japanese guards. No longer would I have to listen to the screams from a torture chamber, watch a man being kicked to death, look at prisoners dying like flies in front of my very eyes. I was thankful, too, that I had been placed in solitary confinement instead of being sent to a concentration camp with Dutch women. That, indeed, would have driven me mad.

The first weeks were hard, not because of loneliness but because of the noises that set my nerves on edge. The sounds emanated largely from the jail's workshop: Whistles, sirens, grinding machinery, clanking bells. A buzz saw ripping its way through lumber where prisoners were fashioning furniture. Even the drip, drip, drip of water from the tank in the yard.

An inner voice whispered to me: Don't let the noise upset you; don't fight against it. Listen carefully. You will find that no two sounds are the same. Listen; you can hear a kind of music.

I listened and pondered. When one has time to sit and concentrate, hidden meanings come forth. In this case hidden melodies. The factory cacophony resolved itself in my ears into a kind of nature symphony. "Mankind in Despair," I called it. A prison rhapsody, lightened in theme at sundown by the chirping of the tjitjaks, the croaking of the bullfrogs, the droning of mosquitoes, the singing of birds. I had no pencil or paper with which to set down the notes, but after many years I can still reproduce in my mind the strange and plaintive songs out of solitary imprisonment.

I spent much of my time, in fact, lying on my back on the floor composing songs, dreaming up plots for operas. And when the night shadows spread softly over the cell walls, their phantom Bickerings became a ballet of exquisite beauty. My dream creatures danced to lovely effects of light and shadow, darkness and moonbeams.

My first new friends, in this strange state-of-suspension existence I was now experiencing, were the birds. They came into my cell through the iron grille that ran along the top of the wall. I started leaving a bit of my rice for them each day. They would come down off the ledge and eat the food I had set out for them on the floor. Little by little they became tame, and would alight on my shoulder or lap and eat out of my hands. I noticed that when an air-raid siren sounded - and this happened with increasing frequency these days - the ledge above my cell would fill quickly with my little friends. It was as though they believed they could hide there from the noise and flame. It was amazing to observe that when the "all clear" sounded, they took themselves off.

The courting, preening and strutting of my tiny friends was constantly amusing. In time I learned that the males were the exhibitionists, and the aggressors. They puffed out their feathers on the top of their heads, spread and coquettishly showed their fanlike tails, and warbled their sweet songs. The females, less brilliant in coloring, at first pretended indifference. Sometimes fights would break out between two males; the fierceness of their contests was astonishing.

In my cell were gray birds, red ones, and black, and yellow birds with blue breasts. I noticed that each type kept to its kind; there was no intermixing, no perching beside a different breed. Some form of natural "racial discrimination" operated here in a mysterious law of the animal world. In rainy weather the birds were quiet, huddled together. But when the sun shone again they all broke forth in rich and glorious song. Sometimes male and female sang a stirring duet.

By day, most of the birds were elsewhere, but at sundown they all came back to eat And their best performances were at sundown. In time, I would talk to the birds, and whistle to them. They would put their little heads on one side and listen attentively. Before long some of them were imitating my whistling almost perfectly. I know that these entertainments by the birds were good medicine for any woes whether physical, mental, or spiritual.

And then there were my insect friends, the cockroaches and the ants. Some of the cockroaches were almost as big as mice. They came out from the hole in the ground at night like an invading army, flying about, crawling over the walls. At first I was horrified and disgusted, and determined to kill them. It was terrifying to have them alight on my head, or my lap. I was afraid to lie down, lest they crawl over me.

But they were too numerous to destroy, and the thought of stamping on them, or squashing them on the walls, was even more distasteful than letting them alone. I decided that instead of being afraid of them I must learn to live with them.

Could they be trained, as fleas are trained? Perhaps I could teach them, since they were scavengers looking for food to go to a feeding place and stay away from my mat, my food plate and drinking mug. Every day I placed a little rice in the comer for the roaches. From time to time a tjitjak would die in my cell; I would place that with the rice also. In time this worked fairly well. The roaches would fiock to the food, and leave my eating utensils alone.

Soon I was able to tell the males from the females. It was surprising to find that the male was smaller than the female, and that only the male had wings and could fly. The female was distinguished by a sort of bag or little sac protruding from the rear of its body. This sac contained the eggs which later they cunningly hid in secret hiding places. When they hatched, between twenty and fifty tiny roaches appeared.

My main trouble was with the ants that came and made off with the food I set aside for the roaches. Occasionally a flying cockroach would alight on its back and find itself unable to turn over. I would watch it straggle and at last weaken and lie still. While the roach was helpless, hundreds of ants would encircle it and mill around, waiting for it to die. The circle of ants would get smaller and smaller until there could be no escape for the roach. Then I would turn it over and enable it to get away. Sometimes I watched the ants build a barricade around a dead cockroach and painstakingly dissect it and store away its parts. I saw red ants and white ants, and watched them at war with one another. Ants, I am sure, are the most patient and determined of all insects. They are utterly ruthless; I usually found myself on the side of the roaches. When one has absolutely nothing to do in a cell alone, the incessant activities of insect life can be most diverting.

There was nothing whatever to read in my prison, nothing with which to write. I found myself wishing for a deck of cards, not merely to play solitaire, but in order to tell my fortune. I had always considered myself psychic and able to look somewhat, at least, into the future with cards.

I stared at the white walls. What murals 1 would fashion there if I only had paint. I stared at the floor. Red bricks. Prisoners had tunneled under floors to escape, but one must have a pick or a crowbar or some strong tool to dislodge the bricks. They were cemented together, securely in place.

Red bricks. Paint could be made from them, if they were pounded into powder and mixed with oil, say, or turpentine. I scraped at them with my fingernails, and found them soft. For days I scraped, until my nails were worn down to the quick. A painful process it was, but I now had half a mug of red powder. But what to mix it with, to give it the consistency of oil paint? Water did not do the job. But there was that plate of unsugared sago that the babu brought me every morning for breakfast. Its taste was so vile that usually I emptied it into the hole In my cell. It was the consistency of starch. Why not mix the red-brick dust with it? Why not give it a try? I mixed the sago with the brick dust and was delighted with the result, a very usable red paint.

But what could I use it on? Not on the walls; the paint would not wash off, and I could risk no offenses that might bring the Kempetai back after me. The floor was no good, for red would not show on red; besides, I had no brushes. I thought of my broom, pulled out a couple of straws, and found they worked well. With one end I could draw a thin line, with the other a thicker one. I couldn't paint, but I could draw or write if I had something to write on. A piece of white cloth, a sheet of paper, anything.

I hid my paint on a ledge just under the floor level of the toilet hole. I knew that the Japanese were much too fastidious to go poking about in such a foul-smelling place.

Every day I scraped more and more red dust. Someday, surely, I'd come into possession of a rag or bit of paper. And then it came to me. I was lying on my mat thinking of the pleasant evenings I had spent in Bali with Agung Nura, translating from the lontar leaves the ancient classics of Bali. Lontar leaves, palm leaves, cut into long strips and dried in the sun until they were hard and stiff. The stationery of the ancients.

Excitedly, I jumped up from my mat. Of course, my woven basket of palm leaves. The strips were almost two inches wide, and I could break them into sections any length I wanted. I would wash the strips and dry them in the hot sun. Each day during my ten-minute recess in the courtyard, I could dry a strip at a time without being noticed.

I worked most of the night, and by daybreak I had five good strips, more than enough for a set of playing cards. I cut the strips into fifty-two pieces with a sharp stone, then started painting hearts and diamonds from ace to king on the small pieces. Spades and clubs would have to wait until I could find a way to make black paint.

The next day during the recess, I searched in the courtyard for black stones, or some black soil, or for soot, or dirt from the prisonyard door. I could find no stone soft enough to pound into dust. There was no soot, and the black dust scraped from the door only made mud when mixed with liquid. And then I found a piece of arang, the coconut shell burnt black that Indonesians use for cooking. I ground the charcoal and mixed it with my breakfast sago, and had the blackest paint an artist could want.

Before long I had a set of miniature playing cards that was a joy to behold. I played bridge with myself, bidding two hands and playing all four. I invented other games. I told my fortune, and convinced myself I would come out of this dreadful ordeal alive but that I would come near death first. I managed to persuade a friendly Javanese babu to pass the cards to some of the other cells and have the prisoners shuffle them, and then return the cards to me and I would tell their fortune.

The outgrowth of that was the writing of messages on cloths, messages that could be sent from cell to cell and then washed out so that the Japanese would not know. These messages made possible the circulation of a considerable amount of news of interest to us all, war news, mainly, supplied by newly arrived prisoners. This homemade deck of cards is still in my possession, one of the few relics from the terrible years of imprisonment. It is still in good condition, the painted card signs for the most part fresh and clear, an interesting conversation piece of the war years.

Some weeks after I first entered solitary confinement, a crazed woman was pot in the cell next to mine. I could not see her, but I could hear her beating on the door of her cell with her tin mug and shrieking at the top of her voice in a foreign language. When the prison babu came with my plate of rice for the evening meal she informed me the woman was a Polish doctor, brought in from Kempetai headquarters. My old friend who had saved my life! She had cracked under the sadistic treatment.

"She is going raving mad," the babu said. "She won't eat, she won't obey orders. All she does is scream for her children."

Her condition became so serious, finally, that the Japanese brought her two young sons to her cell and said they could stay with her over night. It was too late. She failed to recognize her little boys, and only stared at them with dull eyes. The Japanese hoped that the recognition would come after she was alone with her children. They were wrong. That same night, when the boys were fast asleep, she hanged herself in the cell, using the thin wire that ran crosswise for a drying line. When the little boys awoke in the morning they found their mother hanging dead. Their screams brought the Japanese to the cell.

Later I learned that the Japanese who had advised bringing the children to the cell was so upset by the tragedy that he too committed suicide. "He blamed himself and said he had only one way to atone for his error," the babu told me.

The double tragedy unnerved the Japanese prison officials more than a little. For one thing, they began to pay daily visits to my cell. They wanted to make sure I wouldn t take this way out. For another, they removed from my cell the wire on which I dried my sarong and towel. And they took greater note of other tragic developments. A Dutch woman had gone out of her mind completely and had become violently insane, and an Indo-Dutch woman had opened her wrist veins with a safety pin.

Apparently at last they had come to realize that the human spirit has a definite breaking point. One Japanese officer came to me and said, "You are the only prisoner who doesn t create a din in your cell. You never beat on the bars or curse the guards, yet you have suffered more than most of them. How do you remain so calm?" The officer told me that the men were far more troublesome than the women, and went to pieces more quickly.

Now and then the Kempetal officials came to my cell to see how I was taking solitary confinement, for I was still their prisoner. One time an officer brought what he said was a confession from one of my Japanese friends. It was the same old trick. I insisted on seeing it. Frisco Flip may have given me dangerous information, but he was of the samurai code: he would die, but never confess. On examining the document I saw that it was written in Kandji.

"Where is the signature?" I asked. The Japanese pointed to a few characters at the end of the document. I knew immediately it was a forgery, for Flip had taught me to write his name in Japanese characters. "I can read a little Japanese, enough to know that that document is a forgery," I said. It was a mistake for me to be so positive, for it was hard to convince the Japanese that I could read and write Balinese and Javanese and was interested in Oriental languages, yet had no ulterior motive.

Occasionally the Kempetai officials brought visiting officials from Japan to see me; they explained my Balinese background and said I was an Allied spy of unusual cleverness and their most stubborn prisoner. I was their prime catch, a British-born American citizen where most of the other prisoners were Chinese, Indonesians, or half-caste Dutch, and many times I was forced to have my picture taken standing with the visiting Japanese.

One evening, as I pressed my face to the bars, trying to see the moon that had risen behind the cell and was making lovely geometrical shadows in the courtyard, I heard the clanking of doors down the corridor. An officer was making an inspection with the matron on her evening rounds. They stood at my courtyard door. She turned the key, the bolts clanked, and the two came across to my cell. The officer looked about and, seeing me standing motionless, asked, "What do you think about, standing there?" It was a kind voice and interested, as though he really wanted to know, so I answered honestly that at the moment I was thinking about the moon, how beautiful it must be and how I wished to see it.

"Yes, it is beautiful," he said. The tone of his voice told me I had struck an emotional response. But then, curtly, he went on, "If you would confess you'd see it again and be free and safe."

I dropped my eyes and stared sullenly at my clasped hands. After all, what could I expect?

The officer went away, and I lay on my mat thinking of the strange of the Japanese. The officer had been truly moved by even the suggestion of a beautiful moon. I saw common soldiers standing motionless for hours looking at it. High or low, they never failed to respond to beauty - whether in a painting or a natural scene -, a river or a mountain.

Arranging my arms in a position that gave me the least pain, I went to sleep. It must have been well past midnight when the clanking of the outer door awakened me. Sitting up, alert with terror, I recalled stories about the horrible experiences of women in prison. The gate closed, and a figure approached. I could tell by the clinking of his sword that it was an officer.

"Don't scream," he whispered, as my mouth flew open. "I am not going to hurt you." It was the voice of the officer who had spoken to me earlier. He inserted his heavy key in my door, while I clung to it, trying to hold it closed.

"Don t be afraid. I have just come back to let you look at the moon."

He opened the iron door a little way and held out his hand. "Come into the courtyard where you can see it. I'll return in fifteen minutes and lock you up again." He led me out and stood by me a minute looking at it, glorious in its third quarter, spilling silver over the roofs. Then he went out again, locking the courtyard door.

I lay on the ground and looked directly up at the moon. If I was careful not to move my head, there were no walls or bars. It was almost like being in Bali again and lying under the palm trees looking at the light on the Indian Ocean. When the officer returned I was so drunk with remembrances of past beauty that I could scarcely bring myself to earth to say "thank you." He smiled and seemed to understand. "Sleep well," he said gently as he locked the gate.

The very next day the examinations began again, with beatings and another hanging until my senses blacked out. New forms of torture were devised. Men with matches tried to set the hair of my body on fire. They poured castor oil into me, and once forced me to drink a pint of whiskey. They thought if I was drunk I might talk. In this they were mistaken. On an empty stomach the liquor only made me deathly sick.

For too months, on and off, they kept after me. What life remained in me fanned my determination that nothing would make me speak. What was the use now, anyway? It would be foolish to confess after having endured so much. And I was becoming immune to pain. Mercifully, my memory was leaving me. For days at a time I could not remember my name.

A month passed without further interrogation or visits to my cell by the Japanese officials. The little babu came twice a day with my food. Most of the time was relatively pleasant, and I sat on my mat all day and dreamed, making up stories about Bali and the ancient gods of the island. I listened to my bird and prison symphony. Time passed swiftly.

One day this quiet interlude was interrupted by a visit to my cell by a Japanese captain. He questioned me at great length, and then he said, "Tell me, what do you really dream about all day and night, sitting on the floor of an empty cell?"

"Nothing that you would understand," I replied.

"How do you know I wouldn't understand? Why don't you try me?"

I looked at him curiously and said, "Well, if you must know, all I dream of is a bath, bath, bath. For months I have been without a bath. The water in the courtyard is not fit for washing. It is full of water worms and dead mosquitoes, and slime, and it has a vile smell. It has been said that if you think of something you desire long enough, you will get it. I long for a hot bath. Sometimes my imagination runs away with me and I make believe that I am having a warm, perfumed bubble bath. I feel the soft, soapy water caressing my skin, and I soak in it and scrub until I am clean, sweet and clean, and fresh. Then I come back to reality and find that I am still dirty and hardly human-looking any more. That, Mr. Officer, is what I think about more than anything else in the world."

And it was the truth. I had forgotten what a piece of soap looked like. I had, of course, nothing with which to brush my teeth. Tooth paste would have been a luxury beyond compare.

The Japanese gave me a puzzled stare and asked, "If you want a bath so badly, why don't you tell the Kempetai the truth? If you confess, they will be very easy on you. Why remain so stubborn when life could be so easy? The Japanese are winning the war. You would be wise to go along with them."

I remained silent, and he lost his temper. "You Yankee pig!" he shouted, The Kempetal will (???) you again and make that white skin of yours as black as the natives you profess to love. You will never get a bath, make sure of that. You will rot and die in the filth of your cell."

Accustomed by now to name-calling and abuse, I let the incident fade from my memory. One night a week or so later the same officer came back to my cell with the Indonesian warden. I was thoroughly frightened. The Japanese officers seldom came to the cells at night except to drag prisoners off to headquarters, where nocturnal grillings were the rule. The theory was that a prisoner half asleep, fatigued, would have less resistance than the same prisoner in the morning, fresh from a night's rest.

"Get up, you filthy spy," the officer said. "You are going back to the Kempetai for a few more questions."

Cowed by his forcefulness, I raised myself from my mat. He jerked me out of my cell and pushed me through the main prison yard and into a waiting automobile. Then he drove off, leaving the Indonesian to lock the gates. I noticed that, after leaving the Surabaya prison, he turned and drove in a direction away from the Kempetai headquarters. I thought of the Gestapo prisoners who had been found floating in the canal, and the Japanese blunt insistence that they had been put to death by Indonesians. I screamed for him to stop the car.

"You are not going to the Kempetai," I shouted. "It is against Japanese rules for officers to take prisoners from their cells this way. Turn back, or you will be in real trouble."

He took no notice of my shouts. If he was not going to kill me and throw me into the canal, even worse, he might be taking me to a house where prostitutes were kept, either for his pleasure or for others. I wept and pleaded for him to take me back to the prison. He remained silent. The streets were full of Japanese soldiers; I knew it would be of no use to try to jump out of the car into their clutches.

We were driving now through the Darnio district of Surabaya, an area I knew well. At last we stopped outside a pretty bungalow I recognized as having belonged to a Dutch doctor. The officer dragged me out of the car and up to the entrance of the house, opened the door with a key, and shoved me inside. Closing and bolting the door, he snapped on the electric light in a pleasant living room. I stood dazed in the middle of the room, and he leaned against the door and laughed.

"Don t be frightened," he said. "You said you wanted a bath. And believe me, you need it. I did not realize just how filthy you were until I got you away from the prison. "You seem to think I brought you here for some bad purpose. You are very wrong. I was impressed that a prisoner who could be dreaming of revenge, thinking of satisfying her hate, hoping for freedom, would long most for a bath. You shall have a bath, a good hot bath."

The officer pressed a bell on the wall, and a little Indonesian serving maid came gliding into the room. She stared at me at first, then giggled nervously, "Njonya, njonya."

"Take this njonya into the bathroom and give her the hottest tubbing she can stand," the Japanese said. "Wash her hair thoroughly. And give her one of your sarongs and baju." The baju is a little coat of cotton or silk worn on top of the sarong. "Take her dirty sarong and the towel she has wrapped round the top part of her body, and wash them and put them in the oven to dry. They must be dry in an hour."

We entered the bathroom and locked the door. She drew a bath and put in scented pine cubes. I lay in the bath, luxuriating in the suds and warmth and scent and watching the babu wash my sarong in the hand basin. Afterward she combed my newly cleaned hair and gave me powder and lipstick to apply. I used a little powder but didn't apply lipstick.

When I entered the living room afterward the Japanese officer jumped up from his chair and exclaimed in Malay, "Adoh! Terlaloe tjantik, roepanja lain sekarang." He was remarking on my appearance and cleanliness. "Sit down; don't be afraid of me," he said. "The babu will bring some coffee and cake. We shall hear some good music while your sarong is drying. Some Shostakovich. I love Shostakovich."

If I had to listen to music, sick and weary as I was, I would have preferred something less robust. But we listened to Shostakovich to his heart's content. Between recordings I asked him how he dared kidnap a prisoner and bring her to his house.

"A big reception is on in Surabaya tonight for General Tojo," he said airily. "Everyone above me in rank is at the feast. I had to be a bit rough with you to convince the Indonesian warden and I'm afraid I'll have to be rough in the same way when I take you back."

He recommended that, for my part, I keep my head down on reentering the prison so that my clean hair would not be noticed. It would be dark in the prison courtyard, they would not notice that my sarong and towel were newly washed. "I wish I could let you keep the babu's sarong and baju, but this would be impossible," he said. Obviously so, for all prisoners wore the same type of sarong, dark blue with white stripes.

The officer told me that before the war he was a private citizen. "I am a writer of sorts who he can paint," he said. "My hobby is music. I was never interested in politics. I have seen the mess that politicians on all sides have gotten us into. Nor have I hated Americans. It is a pity that the presidents and kings of this world are not artists. If they were, there would be no wars. When the presidents, kings, emperors, dictators, and politicians are dead and buried they will not long be remembered, but the great artists of the world shall be, and their work will bring joy to future generations."

This extraordinary man added that the one reason he decided to arrange for my bath was that I was an artist "and we should not make war on artists." - "All art Is universal," he continued. "The Japanese people appreciate all forms of art. After the war is over perhaps we can meet again under different circumstances. For now, we must get back to the prison before the Tojo reception is over and I am missed."

At the prison gates he pushed and shoved me again and called me unflattering names. The Indonesian guards smiled at his treatment of me, as was expected of them. I smiled too, but secretly. This night I had learned much about the Japanese, about certain types of Japanese.

THE SIGHT OF FREEDOM

Although the two years of life in solitary confinement were far easier for me than the months under the direct jurisdiction of the Japanese Kempetai, the earlier beatings and starvation had taken their toll. Many days and nights I lay in my cell unable to move my arms or to eat.

Twice a day a Japanese doctor came to give me medicine and to try to stir my interest in life, but I grew steadily weaker and weaker. At last the doctor pronounced that I could not live longer than twenty-four hours. A few Dutch prisoners were brought into my cell and were allowed to file past to say good-bye. One doctor said I was dying of a broken heart. One of the Dutch women asked permission to hypnotize me to induce an interest in living. She tried to lift me and firmly held onto my arms beseeching me not to give up. "We need you, we women in the prison need you for moral support," she said. But I asked her to leave me alone and let me die in peace. I sank into a coma, and after I had been unconscious for twenty-four hours the Japanese doctor from the jail, a very inexperienced young man, pronounced me dead. A burial number was attached to my big toe. I was to be taken away for burial at daybreak.

In the early gray dawn I opened my eyes. I was frightfully cold and could not move, could not even call out. I heard the door of my cell being unbolted. I heard voices, and then someone yelled, "Her eyes are open! She's alive!" I was by this time sufficiently conscious to discover the tag on my toe and to realize that I had been almost on the way to my own burial. But the Japanese are a superstitious lot. My apparent return from the grave created quite a stir. In minutes I was surrounded by excited Japanese, and the doctor was feeling my pulse. Kempetai officials were sent for, since I was still technically their prisoner. They were so impressed that they ordered a mattress to be brought to my cell at once and said I must have hot milk and eggs daily.

To my tortured mind it seemed that the Japanese were determined to bury me alive. I screamed and raved and became completely unmanageable. The Kempetai officials talked of sending me to Porong, an institution for mental patients, but the doctor recommended that they wait awhile until I had recovered from the first shock. For days I lay in semiconsciousness, between life and death. The peace and quiet of my cell and the extra food that the doctor had ordered had their effect. Although I could not walk or raise my arms above the waist I was rational once again. The mattress of straw that had been given to me as a luxury had to be removed. I showed the attendants that it was full of lice and a nesting place for the cockroaches.

From time to time Japanese officers came to see how I was getting along, and one day one of them asked me what it was like to be dead, and if there was a next world, and they asked me if I could predict who was going to win the war. I told them no one will win the war, even though one nation is forced to capitulate. Who will win the peace that is what counts.

After several weeks had passed my captors told me that I was to be removed to a political camp hospital In the middle of Java. I was astonished at first, and then incredulous, sure they were taking me only to some Kempetai headquarters in the country. But this time they spoke the truth. I was placed on a stretcher and taken by train to the Ambarawa hospital three hundred kilometers away.

The Japanese plainly had realized by this time that they soon would lose the war. They did not want an American citizen found in a prison cell, ill and tortured and almost starved to death. Should the Allies land at Surabaya and make such a discovery, it might go badly Indeed with the persons responsible. Much better if I were found in a hospital, receiving good treatment.

I was transferred to the Ambarawa hospital only six weeks before the Japanese capitulation. In those six weeks my treatment improved dramatically. I was a human being again, receiving hospital care from kindly doctors and nurses.

It must not be understood by my long narrative on my life as a prisoner of the Japanese Kempetai that I hate the Japanese, for this would not be true. Certainly I hated the Gestapo and the military police, but for every sadistic Japanese I encountered I had met two or three that were good and kind. I am convinced that, as in other races, the good Japanese people far outnumber the bad.

And then came August, 1945, and the final defeat of the Japanese all down the chain of Islands they had won so easily. All we knew at the hospital was that the war was over. Shouting Indonesians stormed the hospital and also the camp at Ambarawa, disarming the Japanese. All of us behind the bars cheered and wept, and threw our arms around each other. It was a wonderful time.

The Indonesian soldiers who took the hospital by force quickly learned my story, and that I was still in a critical condition. They put me on a stretcher, placed me in a truck, and drove me to a private hospital in Surabaya. Later I was taken to the mountains to the chalet of a highly respected Indonesian doctor. I weighed only sixty-five pounds, less than half my normal weight, and was still partially paralyzed, physically and mentally. But good food rustled op from who knows where during this period of hardship and of low commissary stocks and tender care worked wonders. I regained health rapidly.

Japan's house of cards, based on her lying propaganda about "Asia for the Asians", had fallen about her. Indonesians, fiercely bent on revenge against the Japanese and particularly against the hated Kempetai, killed the Nipponese invaders by the hundreds, threw others into the very prisons they had operated.

Many Javanese, Sumatranese, Balinese and Chinese, and other Indonesians from the outer islands, had been tortured to death or shot, and the Indonesians were not prone at this moment to forgive.

I learned that my Chinese friend, the honorable professor, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Frisco Flip had disappeared under most mysterious circumstances and was never heard from again. Some said that the ship carrying him to Makassar was bombed by the Dutch Air Force and that everyone aboard was drowned. No one really knew the truth.

And what of Anak Agung Nura? I would have no news of him until communications with Bali were restored. I was sure that this would not take long and that I myself might soon travel back to the puri that had for so many years been my home.