Christmas with Irena

by Jordan Borgman (East Timor)

Making a local connection East Timor

In the days before the genocide, before the Indonesians and the Portuguese and the sandalwood and the black-gold oil, the island of Timor was born from friendship: that of a boy and a crocodile, who gave its life to become the land. I lived in the capital of Timor-Leste, cradled between the sea and the mountains of the crocodile’s scutes, but in the country’s easternmost district of Lospalos—where crocodiles are still respectfully called “grandfather”—the landscape boils into the dramatic, all plunging heights, cliffs and sheer rock walls. The crocodile has teeth. Christmas morning found me in the midst of those teeth, silently drinking coffee with a friend’s father on the verandah of the family home, a teenager sleeping on a rug at our feet. His sister drifted out of the house, laughing. “Did I put him out of a room?” I asked.  “No,” she said, and laughed again. “He drank too much last night and passed out, so his friends rolled him in a rug and brought him home on a motorbike.” She glanced fondly down at him, this boy Cleopatra. “That’s all he does, just drinks and hangs around.” The father watched his son, saying nothing. He had been a schoolteacher through the churn of regimes and languages, and knew, intimately, the limits to what love could accomplish. Instead, he looked into his coffee and told me a story. “My name is Ado, you know,” he told me, and paused. “That’s an unusual name for a Timorese. I was given it by a Portuguese man—his name was also Ado.” The Portuguese man took him when he was very small, he said. This was when Timor was a forgotten Portuguese outpost, with colonial policies that restricted education to all but the royal families. But a passing military commander took a shine to this child, playing in the village’s dirt road, and asked his parents if he could have the boy to raise. The child had thus been cared for as a foundling by the commander for many years, sleeping in military barracks and receiving a Portuguese education. Then Portugal’s Carnation Revolution and the pullout of the colonial government came like a flash flood, and the commander was ordered to leave Timor immediately. He went to his foster child’s parents and begged them to let him bring the boy with him to Portugal, but they’d refused; the last thing he gave his adoptee was his name. Nine days later, Indonesia invaded and the genocide began. By now Ado’s wife had joined us on the verandah. “It sounds as though he was like a father to you,” I ventured, and Ado nodded as his wife said, “He was, he was just like a father.” The couple were emotional echoes of each other: “It was so sad,” Ado’s wife said, looking directly at her husband. “It was so, so sad.” Years later, a Portuguese teacher, imported after independence and saddled with the thankless task of filling the linguistic gap, was startled when Ado spoke to her in unaccented Portuguese. She’d tracked down the commander, blind from a crossfire and retired in Australia—closer than ever to Timor-Leste, but he and Ado had never spoken. It was unclear if he even knew that his foundling was searching for him. Portugal was a poor country when it controlled Timor, Ado said, but now it was rich. It would have been a different life with the commander, now retired in Australia, while Ado contemplated old age in a house without running water. But there would have been other changes: his wife, gone in a twist of history, their children, the school. Forty years of choices. He had a foil for this other life. His older brother had emigrated to Portugal for university, acquiring a Portuguese wife, Irena. With Timor’s independence and the Indonesian invasion, he returned to fight for his homeland, only to be shot almost immediately. His wife was left a young widow in Portugal. “I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead,” Ado said, and repeated her name: “Irena.” Love and separation. The loved and the lost.