Around us, the birds, too, twittered and squawked and added to the din. Tawny-breasted honey eaters, friarbirds, mouse warblers, scrub wrens, butcherbirds, orioles—all oblivious to the signs of a country under siege.
The Japanese had taken our radio, so we no longer heard news about the war. Jeeps and trucks continued along the streets, but now more and more of the soldiers were returning after weeks of battle and enjoying their respite. Troops of them ran around in white loincloths like overgrown toddlers in diapers, and it seemed to our ears that their screaming and chattering was no different than a monkey’s. They would enter houses at will to find food. Many had already been in our own home, inspecting the flushing toilets and opening and closing drawers to search for any objects of value.
That morning, it was less surprising than it should have been to see our father approaching us and carrying a folding chair to match the ones that Pietje and I were using. He set the chair down and sat beside us in companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the movement at the tip of the fishing rod.
“Is there water under the house that I’m not aware of?” he finally asked.
“No.” I was cautious in my answer. Usually my father was direct and impatient. Usually he spoke but didn’t listen.
“Aaah,” he said, as if that explained everything. But he didn’t spend much time around me and Pietje, so I doubted he understood why I had a fishing rod in hand, with the line running beneath the house.
He waited a few more minutes to see if I would explain. I out waited him. He must have had a purpose for joining us, and I had my fears in this regard. Earlier in the morning, I’d heard Simon yell in pain. More than once.
“Niels and Martijn have not slept well the previous nights,” he said. “Apparently they have had rats in their mattresses. Has this happened to you?”
“Yes,” I said. Each of the last three nights since the Governor-General had announced surrender, I’d moved the mattress onto the floor and slept on the mattress frame and bedsprings so that the rats could have their privacy and I could have mine.
“Rats in your mattress wasn’t something you needed to tell me?” he asked.
“It’s best not to complain,” I said. “I know you don’t like involvement in what happens among us, as long as the furniture doesn’t get broken.”
I was quoting his own words back to him and wondered how he would take this.
He remained calm. Very unusual, which made me more nervous. “So this means you suspect one of your brothers was responsible for the presence of the rats?”
“You don’t like tattletales,” I said.
“Niels had a hole in his mattress,” he said. “Someone had pushed a few handfuls of peanut butter into the hole. Same with Martijn. Naturally the rats began to explore when it was dark. Is this what happened to you?”
“I can’t say whether there was peanut butter in the hole of my own mattress. It seemed best not to put my hands in that deep. I wasn’t interested in letting a rat bite my fingers.”
Pietje’s head swiveled back and forth as he followed our discussion.
“Simon’s mattress was untouched,” my father said. “Do you find that significant?”
“If that is true, it would be best if Niels and Martijn didn’t know that,” I said. I was running a bluff. Niels and Martijn had been in my room first thing this morning to see if my own mattress had been tampered with as well. Certainly they would have checked Simon’s too.
“I suspect they already know. I found the three of them fighting a half hour ago. Furniture was broken, which is why I had to get involved. That’s when I learned about the peanut butter in the mattresses.”
“And Simon?”
“He swears he didn’t do anything.”
That answer disappointed me. I had actually been hoping for a medical report. Simon would have put up a good fight, but Niels and Martijn would have been furious at Simon, and I knew the effects of that fury.
“In this case,” my father said, “I’m tempted to believe Simon. You would think he’d know that if there were peanut butter in every mattress but his, naturally his brothers would suspect him and punish him for it.”
“You would think,” I said as neutrally as possible.
“A suspicious person might actually believe that someone else wanted revenge for the other day when Simon opened a certain envelope that had been addressed to a certain other boy in the family.” My father examined my face, but in this family, you learned early how to remain expressionless. “Tell me, Jeremiah, does peanut butter wash easily off the hands?”
I handed the fishing rod to Pietje and stood. I now knew the direction this was going. I unbuckled my shorts and lowered them to my knees, making sure my two pouches of hidden marbles were safe. I turned away from my father and took a deep lungful of air and held it. It’s best not to breathe during the initial few blows of a flat hand across the buttocks. It internalizes the cries of pain.
“Please sit,” my father said, not unkindly. “Our family has far greater things to worry about.”
I pulled up my shorts and buckled. Pietje gave me his inquiring look. I glanced at the tip of the rod. It was still quivering. “Not yet,” I told Pietje.
I resumed my seat in my chair, and Pietje returned me the rod. “I haven’t once told you that I am proud of how you can draw,” my father said.
Often, at the end of a school day, while he sat at his desk and graded papers, I would sit at a student’s desk nearby and practice those drawings. It wasn’t art, but symmetry. I sketched buildings. His indulgence of allowing me time at something that wasn’t practical or school oriented told me of his pride. I was startled to hear him state it openly.
“Neither,” he said, “have I told you that I know you are a remarkable boy.”
My chest swelled with this praise, then deflated when my father said, “I’m going to miss you.”
“Are you sending me away?” I asked. Pietje must have come to the same conclusion. He clutched at my free hand in fear.
What I’d done by planting peanut butter in all the mattresses but Simon’s did deserve a spanking, but I hadn’t expected to be banished from the household. Of course, I would then be out of reach of Simon, so there was some benefit in it. Eventually, he’d figure out what my father had figured out.
“You’ve seen what is happening,” my father said. “The Japanese are taking over. Dutch currency is being replaced by Japanese currency. I’ve heard rumors that it will be illegal to speak Dutch on the streets. The Japanese know that to rule this island, they have to control the Dutch.”
I listened.
“Accordingly, sooner or later,” my father continued, “a truck will arrive to take me and your older brothers. All the Dutch men are going into work camps, and Dutch women and children will go together into different camps. Boys over the age of sixteen are considered men, so Simon will be with us.”
I pondered this and had no reason to disbelieve it. It was strange how quickly I had accepted what was happening around us.
“Simon is only fifteen,” I said.
“The Japanese count ages differently than we do. On a day that a baby is born, it is his first year, and the baby is considered to be one. The Japanese will consider you to be eleven years old, not ten. I’ve changed your birth certificate so that it looks like you were born a year later. You are not tall, and they will believe you are younger.”
“You want me to be a nine-year-old?”
“A ten-year-old to them,” my father answered. “We don’t know how long this war will last. I need you to stay with your mother and Nikki and Aniek and Pietje as long as possible.”
Pietje let go of my hand.
“I know how you are,” my father said. “I don’t need to ask you to keep taking care of your younger sisters and brother. But I ask anyway, because it makes me feel better. I am already helpless in protecting my family.”
Now I was afraid. My father, admitting weakness?
“What I’ve heard,” he said, “is that when the soldiers order you from the house, you are given one hour to pack and you are only allowed to take what you can carry. I’ve already packed a suitcase that you must make sure to take. It’s the big brown suitcase with a red ribbon tied around the handle, and I’ve put it in your room. Don’t open it until you get to where they are taking you. Don’t let your mother open it either.”
I knew exactly the reason for this. My mother was not a practical woman and wouldn’t know what to pack. My father, on the other hand, was practical to the point of denying the existence of emotion. I was still reeling from his earlier admissions.
“I’m also asking you to have patience with your mother,” he said. “The way she is, is not her fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you must do everything possible to help her in everything. And when she is cruel or seems uncaring, don’t blame her for it. Her illness is no more her fault than catching a fever.”
“Illness?” If it was true in some way that my mother was not to blame for the way she was, perhaps it wasn’t my fault that she often ignored me.
My father reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled something out that I could not see and left it curled in the center of his closed hand.
“You may think that I don’t know you that well,” he said. “But that’s not true. It’s just that …” He took a breath. “Sometimes a man has to put so much energy into one area of his family that it appears he doesn’t care for other areas. When I’m gone, it will be your turn to watch over your mother.”
That seemed to satisfy him, for he left it at that.
“Your fishing rod,” he said. “It’s stopped moving.”
“Eventually it does,” I answered. “But a mouse can live for a lot longer time than you would expect.”
It was his turn to wait for more explanation, but two can play that game. Besides, I wanted to know what was in his hand.
“When the soldiers come for me and your brothers,” he said and looked back and forth between Pietje and me, “I will not give them the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurts to be taken away from you and how afraid I am for what will happen to you when I am not there to protect you. I don’t want you to cry, for we will not show them any weakness. Nor will I say good-bye then or how much I love you, and I won’t even look back. So I’m saying it now.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t need to—”
Father moved to Pietje and pulled him in close, and to the astonishment of both Pietje and me, Father said, “Dag, lieve jongen.”
Good-bye, my loved little boy.
He released Pietje, then put a hand on my shoulder. “I love you. I will miss you.”
He leaned back. “More importantly, I respect you for who you are and what you’ve become. And I dread getting on the truck and leaving you behind.”
He opened his other hand and what I saw made me gasp far louder than the hardest of his spankings ever had.
It was a sulphide marble. Transparent green glass. With a miniature statue of a rearing horse in the center.
“I played marbles when I was a boy too,” he said. “This was given to my father by his father, and not once did I ever risk it in a game. It is yours now.”
He didn’t add that it would be something I would have to always remember him, but I could hear it unspoken in the tone of his voice. This was as difficult for him as it was for me.
“I expect,” he said, “that you will add it to the pouches you hide in your shorts.”
I was astounded. How did he know about my other marbles?
He stood.
“Good fishing,” he said. He was making a point that I understood. By not asking about why I had a fishing rod with a dead mouse at the end, he could be as stubborn as I was.
“Yes,” I said.
As he walked away, Pietje tugged on my hand, giving me no time to absorb what had just happened. That would come later, when I realized I’d just had my last real conversation with my father.
“Now?” Pietje asked.
“Now,” I said, turning my attention to my little brother. I gave him the fishing rod, and he began to reel in the line. I wasn’t worried he would get hurt. A poisonous snake would have killed the mouse within seconds before swallowing it, and a bigger one would simply regurgitate the mouse as the line pulled. The fight between our bait and the snake that had taken it had lasted five minutes, so whatever we had on the line hadn’t been able to kill the mouse immediately and was so small that the mouse couldn’t make it back out past the inward facing bones of its throat.
To the satisfaction of both of us, we had landed a small python.
I gave the machete to Pietje and let him do the honors of chopping off the snake’s head, unaware of how that species would later take revenge for this act.
EIGHT
Days later, the Japanese arrived as my father had predicted. On the street between our house and the muddy river, soldiers jumped out of a large truck. Holding machine guns, they marched to the door and pointed bayonets at my father, screaming in Japanese.
Again, we didn’t need a translator. Their orders were obvious, for the open back deck of the large truck was already near filled with men and teenage boys, each clutching a suitcase and staring at the road.
In less than fifteen minutes, my father, Niels, Martijn, and Simon were on the lawn in front of our house with their own suitcases. The rest of us stood on the steps. Pietje held my hand, and Nikki and Aniek crowded my other side, finding shelter beneath my other arm. I can only guess at the farewell that my mother had given the other males in our family. She remained inside the house.
It was clear that my father had given my half brothers firm orders to remain stoic in front of the conquerors. None of them looked back as they walked away, even with Pietje biting his lip to keep from crying and Nikki and Aniek begging for them to stay.
The four of them joined the other silent men and boys in the truck, and with the crunching of gears and a belch of diesel exhaust, the driver took my father and half brothers out of our lives.
It wasn’t until the truck rounded the corner that I remembered I had forgotten to thank my father for the sulphide marble. I turned to Pietje and told him I would be back as soon as I could. Then I ran after the truck, hoping to catch it so I could shout to my father.
But it was too late. When I reached the corner, I saw nothing except cracked pavement and silent houses where all our Dutch neighbors had retreated into their shells in the face of the Japanese invasion.
I refused to weep in public, and I didn’t want Pietje to see me cry, for that would have made him afraid. I managed to hold back my tears until I was on the other side of the house in the shade. Then I began to sob in gasping spasms that drove me to my knees.
For the Japanese, it had been urgent to eliminate any threat posed by Dutch males. A scattered guerrilla resistance managed to form over the next weeks, but to no real effect. Dutch overlords like my father had been a minority to begin with, and where possible, the Japanese appointed non-Dutch replacements for the newly vacated positions. That meant the rest of the country continued in its usual economic fashion, subsisting on plantations and oil—except that the Japanese were not paying for the oil they used. They merely paid wages to those who kept the wells pumping crude and the refineries converting it.
Without the male income-earner, Dutch households began to struggle financially, and since the Netherlands was under siege by Nazi Germany, distant relatives were of no help. Many of the matriarchs sought ways to make money by sewing or baking or other odd jobs. Then when textiles became scarce, the women sold clothes, bedding, and other fabrics to Indonesians who would pay good money for them. My mother, who did not sew or bake, dug into our trunks and linen closet. Piece by piece she also sold our remaining household furniture, paintings, kitchen items, and other knickknacks. Eventually, our house was bare except for the basics we needed to live and sleep each night.<
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As it turned out, selling our possessions was not unwise because young Indonesian extremists had begun looting Dutch homes. One evening, a gang of them pushed open our door but then burst out laughing at the bare interior already scavenged by our mother. They thought it not worthwhile to search the house and never found the suitcases that were packed and ready for the anticipated Jappenkamp.
In no time, our household money had run dry, and we were depending on church charity for food. To complicate matters, there came a day when I realized that the swelling of my mother’s belly meant that she was pregnant. I began working for an Indonesian launderer. Pietje did what he could to help too, but that was not why he came with me every day. After our father was taken away, he refused to leave my side. The sound or sight of Japanese vehicles—which, unfortunately, were far too frequent—would cause him to freeze, for as much as he wanted to hide and bury his face in my side, he never stopped looking to see if our father might be in one of them.
The Indonesian who hired us—a greasy-faced man with a drooping, thin moustache—paid us half of what he would have had to pay locals, partly because he could but partly because he’d always hated the Dutch. It gave him satisfaction to calculate down to the penny the dividing line between what was enough to make us servile to him and what kept us from seeking employment elsewhere.
Except for Sundays, Pietje and I began at 6 a.m., washing clothes by hand in large barrels with soapy water, then rinsing and hanging them to dry on lines that stretched beneath the tin roofs of an open shelter meant to keep the clothes from rain. One day in early August, with our fingers wrinkled from hours in wet laundry, Pietje and I were walking through the village on our way home after a full day’s work. It had been an afternoon punctuated by brief thunderstorms. Our destination was the baker’s stall where the elderly baker’s equally elderly wife had made a habit of setting aside two-day-old bread for our daily purchase. Unlike the launderer, this was not a petty act of revenge against the Dutch. The selling of our household goods was well known in the village, so the husband and wife understood our family was desperate for anything to supplement what the church could give us. Theirs was the cheapest bread available.
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