Free My Year Off by Robert McCrum Page A

East Timor. My friend the photographer Julio Etchart and I had already made plans. The rainy season was approaching. We could not delay a moment longer. Early in December 1993, we took off for the sad city of Dili.
    Flying via Bali, we arrived in East Timor shortly before Christmas. All my thoughts were with Sarah, who hadn’t wanted me to go, but I was exhilarated to be on the road again. No question that this was the fabled East Indies. Blink, and you could almost mistake the palm trees and corrugated roofing for the Caribbean. Almost,but not quite. As we passed through Customs I was conscious, among the taxi drivers pushing for work, of searching eyes - uniformed officials and soldiers with guns.
    We rode into the capital in a beaten-up blue taxi with door handles made of coathanger-wire and a garish photograph of Pope John Paul II on the dashboard. It was very hot, the streets were almost deserted, and beyond the broken promenade, small boys dived and splashed in the bitter sea. A hog rootled among the mangroves on the shore. Further on, there was a piazza, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and on the corner a street vendor was selling noodles in the shade of a mahogany tree.
    When we arrived at our hotel, we were aware that many people hanging about the dark lobby were noting our arrival with interest. My visa said I was a tourist, but a one-legged Australian swinging on crutches like Long John Silver, swigging from a can of local beer, asked if we were selling guns. After dark, troops in crash helmets rode shotgun in open trucks. Within hours, I was conscious only of the oppression and the fear.
Timor conturbat me
 … What I’d been told was true: East Timor was an occupied territory, a police state, an infernal paradise, one of the saddest places in the world. Some time during my first twenty-four hours here that famous line from
Doctor Faustus
popped into my head: ‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.’
    Such are the paradoxes of global communication that it was not difficult to find a telephone from which to call through to Sarah in New York on the far side of the world, and thus we spoke, night after night, while the police spies hung around the gloomy, air-conditioned hotel lobby, watching my every move but unable, Ijudged, to understand what I was saying. In answer to her questions, I explained to Sarah that there was, along the mean, dusty streets of Dili, a kind of desolate normality to everyday existence. ‘It’s so
boring
here,’ whispered one of the hotel maids. Outside, especially to the south and east, there was the conflict between the army and the guerrillas, a story that had gone comparatively unreported. I persuaded Julio that it was time for us to take the bus into the interior.
    Eventually, we reached our destination, a Roman Catholic mission on the edge of a forest. Father Fernando De Souza, the local priest, was forty years old. His mission and its church were at once a school, a surgery, a place of recreation, a refuge, a social centre and a source of inspiration. Beyond the walls of the mission there were spies, policemen, informers - the Indonesian army of occupation. Inside, there was teaching, prayer and song - at almost every hour of the day there seemed to be groups of nuns and schoolchildren rehearsing anthems and Christmas carols. (I thought of Sarah in the frosty air of New York at Christmas, and felt terribly far from home.) Father De Souza said he would arrange for us to make contact with ‘the armed struggle’. He said it might take some time. So we settled down to wait. I passed the time with a copy of
The Woman in White.
The day slowly faded. The hours ticked by. Night fell. We sat on the verandah of the mission, waiting. I remember looking up at the stars of the southern hemisphere wheeling overhead and wishing that I had more such times in my life for reflection. When such a moment came, with a vengeance, eighteen months later, alone in the National Hospital, I