Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  As we waited for our kokki—the cook—to finish the meal at the stove, I stared at the envelope at the center of the table, and the obvious interest was a mistake.

  Simon, the fifteen-year-old, casually worked the envelope loose from the pile and examined the writing on it.

  “What is this?” he asked. “A letter for Jeremiah. By the return address, it’s from someone named Laura Jansen. Who lives in Sampangan.”

  The village was a few miles downstream from our village of Sukorejo, near the port city of Semarang, where the refinery was located.

  Simon waved the envelope. He was big already, like our father.

  “Is this your handwriting?” Simon asked as he examined the envelope. “Are you pretending to send yourself mail from a girl?”

  “Jansen,” my mother said absently, as usual, oblivious to the undercurrents of strife among the children. Another reason I was inured to pain. “Isn’t he the one whose wife died last year?”

  “Engineer at the refinery,” my father contributed. I knew his tone of voice. Cold, almost bitter. That told me that he and Mother were at odds again, although I never understood the reasons, just as I never understood, until later, her mood changes. “Just before Pearl Harbor, his mother had arrived from the Netherlands to help. He and his family left by boat a few weeks ago to escape the Japanese. Along with the Americans.”

  Laura was gone? Left by boat? My lifelong love was no longer in the Dutch East Indies? My daydreams of seeing her at the market again collapsed. Perhaps, then, her return letter would have some answers as to how I could reach her again. This made it even more crucial to read the contents. In private.

  “Did you perfume it too, kleine snotneus?” Simon sniffed the envelope. “No, apparently not.”

  His continuous use of the phrase “little snotnose” was not meant to be endearing. Despite his admonitions that we should try to be like Jesus, Father never corrected this type of insult. He also wanted his children to be tough and had no qualms about the apparent contradiction. Piety and unemotional severity. A typical Dutch combination.

  “If that letter is addressed to me,” I said, “it belongs to me.” I knew better than to appeal to either of my parents. My mother would wave it away as too minor to be of her concern, and Father especially detested whining or excuses in any form. The emotional bonding in our family—typical of the Dutch then—did not consist of open affection. Neither, at least in our family, it seemed, did a marriage.

  “Let’s see what this girl sent you,” Niels said. “And then I’ll be happy to hand it across the table.”

  He started to open the envelope.

  I knew that my father preferred not to interfere. He liked to say that his job was not to prepare the path for us, but to prepare us for the path. But he was also fair. Surely Niels had stepped well beyond the normal teasing an older brother was allowed. But just then the classical music on the radio stopped playing. The Nederlands Indische Radio Omroep Maatschappi—Netherlands Indish Radio Broadcast, or NIROM—broke in with a special news bulletin.

  Halfway across the dining room, our djongo froze and remained motionless, tray of prepared food in his hands. The broadcaster reported that our Governor-General, the Lord Tjarda van Starkenborg—Jonk Heer van Starkenborg, in Dutch—had met the day before with the Japanese Lt. General Hitoshi Imamura and agreed to unconditional surrender and a cease-fire. What remained of the ninety-three thousand Dutch troops and five thousand American and British soldiers were to surrender at 1:00 p.m., only an hour away. This was March 9, 1942.

  A brief silence followed. Then the NIROM broadcaster said, “We are shutting down now. Good-bye until better times. Long live the queen!”

  The notes of the Dutch national anthem began to sound, echoing through our room.

  Perhaps I was the only one to see a smile briefly flash white across the dark-skinned face of the djongo holding our food. He would be among those in the next few days to meet Japanese soldiers in a crowd, waving flags and crying out “banzai Dai Nippon” to the forces that they considered to be liberators. For me, it was my first realization that the native Indonesians were not as happy with life in the Dutch East Indies as were the Dutch. My parents had withheld the news that as the Japanese army had advanced through the archipelago, rebellious natives had also killed Dutch rulers and become reliable informers for the Japanese.

  When the Dutch national anthem ended and the radio went silent, my father signaled for the food to be placed on the table.

  “Even bidden,” he said. All pray.

  It was a perfect time, I would argue, to have asked for divine help in the face of what certainly promised to be a catastrophic time for the Dutch on these islands, but my father merely spoke a blessing over the food and, in so doing, pretended life was normal.

  When I opened my eyes, I discovered that in a way, the normalcy of life had not changed. Across the table, Simon grinned at me as he finished opening the envelope sent to me from Laura. He then held it up and turned it over to shake out its contents. When nothing came out, his expression turned to bewilderment.

  SIX

  Early sunlight cast horizontal shadows across my blankets where the blinds could not seal my room against the new day. I had slept on the box spring, and the mattress was on the floor. Still in pajamas, I ignored movement from inside my mattress and sat on the edge of the bed frame. I examined my right hand to gauge whether it had changed for the better during the night. The meat of my palm seemed to have disappeared. My forearm was weak and shriveled; no one had warned me that weeks in a cast would atrophy the muscles. In contrast to the tanned skin of my upper arm, the portion where the plaster had covered from my elbow almost to my knuckles was as white as spots of leprosy. Curious about pain, I curled and uncurled my fingers as I flexed into a fist. I bent my wrist forward and backward, all in efforts to gauge how far I could stretch with any degree of strength. The day before, the doctor had promised this stiffness would gradually disappear, and that soon it would be as if my arm had never been broken.

  This was a ridiculous promise. Suggesting that I would forget the day I met Laura was like suggesting I would forget to breathe. Or that I would forget the day that an older American boy had broken my arm. I’d been scheming since then to arrange another fight, and now he was gone, on a ship. With Laura. Who had mailed me an empty envelope. No matter how well the bone healed, it would never be as if my arm had never been broken.

  As I was squeezing my right forefinger to my thumb to test how much pressure I could exert, I heard loud thumping at the main door of the house. It was early for visitors. Still, if we had visitors, I needed to look presentable. From my wardrobe closet, I selected my best trousers and a freshly ironed shirt and set them on the blankets covering my box spring. In my underwear, I washed my face with water from a basin on the dresser and ran my wet fingers through my hair. Then I inspected myself in the mirror.

  I hid my right arm behind my back and grinned at the handsome image of myself. Because of my older brothers, I knew what body changes were ahead of me, and naturally, I was impatient. I’d seen them naked many times at the river when we swam. Still, in our contests to see who could urinate the farthest, I rarely lost. The secret is in how hard you can squeeze your buttocks and the correct arch in the back.

  I moved the clothing and wrestled the mattress back onto the box spring to hide how I had slept. I dressed myself with care to avoid wrinkles in my trousers and shirt. I didn’t want to detour to the bathroom until I saw who had knocked on the door. Before leaving, though, I performed a customary check of my hiding hole behind my wardrobe. The two pouches I usually wore during the day were still safe.

  In the dining room, I found my mother and father facing three Japanese soldiers, and immediately regretted my decision not to visit the bathroom first.

  They were stocky and short. One carried a machine gun mounted with a bayonet and wore a dirty single-breasted khaki tunic with five buttons down the front, matching the color of
his flat-topped cap with a single yellow star and neck flaps that hung down to his shoulders. The other two men wore no caps, and their pressed uniforms were darker, almost green, and double-breasted, with narrow red patches on the left shoulder. I hoped my half brothers would come down. They constantly teased me about my fashion standards, but these uniforms were more proof that the way a person dressed indicated status. It was very apparent who were the two officers.

  My father, still in his bathrobe, stood stiffly. When he looked at me, I saw that his lips were tight with suppressed fury. My mother stood behind him, eyes looking at the floor, clutching the front of her robe closed.

  “Return to your room,” my father told me.

  “Kashira naka!” one officer screamed, and the soldier waved his machine gun at my father.

  Impossible to know the words, but the intent was easy to translate.

  I decided the best response would be silence. I held my breath. The same soldier then pointed his machine gun at me. As I stared into the black hole of the barrel, I thought of the eye of a cobra.

  He gestured for me to join my parents, and I could feel a cold rage begin to build. I wanted to reach across and grab the finned barrel, then turn the bayonet on him. My father’s body language vibrated with the same tension, and the Japanese soldier seemed to sense it, for he backed up a little. My mother sobbed in little hiccups, which seemed to irritate my father more.

  The two officers walked over to our dining room table and inspected it. They had a short conversation, then the one that I guessed was the senior officer pulled a tag from his pocket, wrote on it, and slapped it on the table. He wrote pencil markings in a small notepad.

  They moved to the cabinet at the far wall. One opened the door, and both began to chatter at the sight of bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka. The second one closed the door, and the senior officer wrote on a second tag and placed it on the cabinet, then once again wrote in his notepad.

  As the two officers left the room, our guard made threatening motions with his machine gun to keep us in place. We stood before him, still listening to the casual conversation between the officers while they roamed the house. Then came unintelligible shouts punctuated by the voices of my brothers and sisters. When they reached the end of the house and Pietje’s room, we heard a wail of fear, followed by the thumping of feet as Pietje dashed around the house. When he found us in the dining room, he ran to me and clutched my waist and cried, ignoring the Japanese soldier completely.

  “Pietje,” I said, drawing out his name, Peeet-cheh, to soothe him. I placed my hand on his tousled blond hair. “How many times have I told you not to mess my trousers and shirt? I don’t want snot on my clothes.”

  It was my pitiful effort to make him giggle at my oft-repeated and oftignored complaint, but Pietje continued to tremble.

  My talking earned another shout from the soldier with the machine gun. “Kashira naka!”

  I lifted Pietje and held him to my chest. He was warm against me, and I felt more urgently the need to relieve my bladder. I wasn’t worried about Pietje speaking, for he rarely put more than a half-dozen words together. We remained like this until the officers returned.

  The senior officer pointed at the first tag on the dining room table and said, “Juu yong.”

  He held up his hands and made them into fists. He put up his left forefinger. “Ichi.”

  With his next finger, he said, “Ni.”

  Third finger. “San.”

  He counted this way until he reached his tenth finger. “Juu.”

  Then he counted eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. “Juu ichi. Juu ni. Juu san. Juu yong.”

  I had no idea then that in the camps, our lives would depend on how well we could count for the Japanese during roll call. I was able to understand his emphasis on juu yong, which he repeated as he pointed at the tag, and we confirmed it after their departure. Fourteen. He had marked fourteen pieces of furniture with tags. With more gesturing, he made it clear that we were not to touch the tags. He waved his notepad, making it equally clear that he knew where every tag had been placed.

  He made my father nod with agreement, and after that, he turned abruptly and marched out. The other officer and soldier followed.

  “Children,” my father shouted, “come out now!”

  My mother moved to the cabinet and poured herself some Bols gin into a teacup. She drank it straight, without a trace of grimace, then added more to the teacup. Normally I would have been impressed. I had once tasted gin from my father’s glass, and the sharp burning taste had sent me running for a banana to eat and remove the sting.

  As I set Pietje down and he clung to my leg, I noticed a strange quietness to the house. Our servants had not arrived from where they lived in different parts of the town.

  All of the family assembled in the dining room, where my mother sat at the table, staring at the tag.

  “It appears that our home has become a shop for the Japanese army,” Father said. On my return from the doctor yesterday, streets had buzzed with trucks and Jeeps carrying Japanese soldiers. “Whatever has been marked will be taken by the Japanese. We must leave them marked. Later, I assume, someone will return to take all of it away.”

  “Not fair,” Nikki said. “It’s ours.”

  She and her twin sister were like dolls, and my mother dressed them that way as often as possible. It was a constant battle for my father to try to toughen them up for the real world. I sensed he didn’t want them to become as frail and brittle as my mother.

  “I’ve told you many times that life is not fair,” Father said. In another household, perhaps, an invasion and subsequent departure by soldiers might have led to one or the other of parents offering comfort to their children. This, obviously, was not one of those households. “I don’t like to hear complaints.”

  The usual silence followed his admonishment.

  “And,” my father continued, “I don’t expect our servants to arrive. So we will make do as best as we can. Each of you go back to your room and straighten up, then we will have our breakfast.”

  My cold rage had not abated. Despite my aching bladder, I ensured that Pietje and I were the last ones in the dining room, and then I moved to the cabinet. Among the bottles of gin and vodka were three bottles of whiskey. I took them in my arms.

  “Pietje, go out and see if the hallway is clear.”

  He was accustomed to these instructions. My half brothers did not mistreat him, so he could wander the house with impunity that I could not afford. He scampered away, then returned to the threshold and nodded.

  Quick as I could without dropping the bottles of whiskey, I retreated to my bedroom. Pietje followed and hopped onto my bed and watched in his typical silence. He ignored the occasional bumping of the mattress.

  I moved to the window, lifted the shades, opened the window, and one by one, I poured a few ounces of whiskey out of each bottle. I was nearly dancing by then, so badly did I need to pee. But it was that very need that had given me my idea.

  Pietje was my constant companion, so I felt no shyness about undressing in front of him. I carefully folded my clothes, noting for later cleaning that there actually was a spot on the side of my trousers where he’d wiped his nose against it.

  With equal care, I urinated into the first of the whiskey bottles. When it was full again, I replaced the cap and shook it to mix the contents. I wanted just enough in the bottle to satisfy my desire for revenge, but not enough that it would stop the officers from drinking. I did the same to the second bottle, and to the third.

  This episode may seem far-fetched, and once, when I wondered whether my memory of this morning was correct, I searched for information and found that a human bladder can hold as much as eighteen ounces of fluid, although the urge to urinate starts at about five ounces, and involuntary urination—micturition—is triggered at about ten ounces of volume.

  My bladder had been so full that afterward, I noted with some satisfaction that from the open be
droom window I still was able to splatter the leaves of a tree some fifteen feet away from the house. I’d tried to hit it once before but hadn’t looked down first, which earned angry shouts from our gardener and a spanking from my father.

  Pietje giggled at my prowess, as I’d hoped. Sure, this was a bad habit to teach him, and I knew he’d try it soon because he always did his best to imitate me. But given that my family had just been threatened in our own home by soldiers with a machine gun, I didn’t think there would be much consequence if my mother found Pietje aiming out of his own bedroom window in the next few days.

  I had more instructions for Pietje. I said, “Check again to see if the hallway is clear. It’s time to return these whiskey bottles.”

  SEVEN

  A few mornings later, my father and half brothers returned home early after Japanese soldiers had arrived at school and told everyone to leave. Father further explained that our family was not to leave the house. Since Pietje and I were accustomed to entertaining ourselves, this had little effect on us. We were absorbed in our latest venture, sitting in chairs on the lawn near the foundation of the house.

  Our house was built off the ground, supported by crossbeams on pilings. It was skirted by lattice meant to keep out larger animals. Beneath my chair was a machete. I held a fishing rod, and the line from the tip fed through a gap in the lattice into the darkness beneath the house. The tip of the rod was continuously quivering at the slight tugs that came at the end of the line.

  Occasionally, Pietje would give me an inquiring glance and I would shake my head to indicate it was not yet time to reel in the fishing line. Matters like this required patience, and I wanted to be a good teacher.

  Although he and I were not engaged in conversation, we didn’t sit in silence. As usual, geckos—chichaks—scrabbled up and down the walls, making little clicking sounds. I could not have guessed that within a year, I would be desperate to find them because we had resorted to eating them. The small lizards weren’t limited to the exterior of the house. At night, you’d see them near our lamps, waiting for insects attracted to the light. The bigger ones—the tokeks—rarely showed themselves.