Interrupted with Dutch sounds and physical gestures, people's accounts
blurred incomplete and intimate knowledge, invoking the understood and the
foreign at the same time. Recitations of remembered Dutch words: "eten,
slepen, koken, wassen . . ." punctuated their accounts as if these words were
emblems of the foreign codes they had to learn to work in Dutch homes. Their
always partial mastery was expressed in the common assertion that one could
understand Dutch but not speak it: the words "wouldn't come out." Ibu Sastro
noted that one had to be "gutsy" (berani) to work in a Dutch home, precisely
because one had to confront a language only partially understood.lll Ibu Darmo,
too, remembered overhearing her employers talking about which servants
were trustworthy, but understanding only the gist of their words