Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Any older than two days, the bread would grow mold in the humidity. During a particularly rainy time, it could emerge in one day. What the baker might not have known was that our family was at the point where I’d scrape away the first traces of mold that had appeared and not tell my siblings as I gave them their meals.

  Just before the baker’s stall, Pietje and I happened upon a native teenage boy kicking at a skinny black puppy that he was dragging by a rope around the puppy’s neck. The puppy had braced its feet in the dirt and was gagging with each kick, the rope tightening around its throat.

  “Hey!” Pietje yelled. He let go of my hand and burst forward as the older boy lifted his foot to deliver another kick. “No!”

  I was surprised by Pietje’s reaction, for it was difficult for him to overcome his shyness. The puppy’s owner looked as surprised as I was.

  “Go away.” The boy was barefoot, in shorts so old that dirt had become their color. Bare chested with protruding ribs that looked as if they were drawn by an anatomy student. Nut-brown skin. Head shaved, a sure sign that his family had been infested with lice.

  Pietje knelt and placed his hand on the shivering puppy. One of its ears stood up, and the other was folded into a lop ear. It wasn’t the cold that caused the puppy to tremble; it probably had a sixth sense about the native boy’s intentions. Or maybe we were close enough to the restaurant that it detected the copper smell of blood from previous dogs who had been butchered in the alley and became the dishes of the day. While the Muslims feared and hated dogs, partially because of religious beliefs and partially because of the danger of rabies, the non-Muslims enjoyed rintek wuuk, sengsu, sate jamu, and kambing balap, all rice and spice dishes with chunks of cooked dog.

  “Go away,” the boy repeated.

  “Jemmy?” Pietje said to me. Pietje’s name for me had begun when he was too little to properly pronounce Jeremiah, and he was the only one allowed to call me that.

  I moved forward and took a stance between the native boy and Pietje, who was kneeling at the puppy’s side. No matter how close I stayed to him all through the night, Pietje had trouble sleeping, and I wondered if this puppy would give him some comfort.

  “How much does the restaurant pay?” I asked. Dog meat was a delicacy.

  This was a mistake on my part. Pietje wailed, for he immediately understood the implication.

  “Restaurant!” He clutched the puppy, then lifted it. The native boy tugged at the rope, and the puppy made the strangling noise again. Pietje did not let go.

  I watched the native boy’s black eyes flicker as he made calculations, and the figure that he gave me was at least triple what he might get, far more than the amount I had in my pocket from our day’s work at the launderer.

  “Thank you for that information,” I said. “I had no idea dogs were worth that much. Pietje and I will begin looking for our own dogs to sell.”

  Pietje wailed again, and I made a note to have a discussion with him about the ways of the world and the value of maintaining indifference.

  The native boy shrugged. He also smiled in such a way that showed he knew I was on the hook and would not be able to wiggle loose. I sighed. Then I dug beneath the waistband of my shorts and pulled out my pouch of warrior marbles. I emptied them into my right hand and held my palm open so he could see that it was a good collection. While some were of little worth except as shooters, others, like the swirlies and cat’s-eyes, were suitable bait. I didn’t say a word because I knew my actions would speak. I put the marbles in two lines on the dirt of the road, forming an X. I used my forefinger to draw a circle around the X, with the line of the circle a couple of feet from the X in the center.

  “You first,” I told the older boy. “Win the game and the marbles are yours. Lose, and I keep only my marbles and the puppy.”

  He shook his head and jerked the rope. Obviously, he believed I had more to offer than the marbles, and he was going to enjoy seeing how far I would go.

  “I understand,” I said. By then, I was well aware of how the majority of Indonesians had welcomed the invasion and how badly the natives wanted independence. “Afraid of a Dutchman. No wonder you needed all those Japanese to fight us for you.” The streets weren’t empty, of course. A few other native boys had stopped at the sight of marbles in a circle. I was insulting them too.

  I watched the puppy’s owner square his shoulders. He handed the end of the rope to another boy. He dug in his pocket for his own marbles—a boy who wasn’t carrying marbles was a boy who wasn’t a boy—and added them to the X, extending both lines. There were twelve marbles in each line. It was winner take all; whoever was the first to take out all twelve of his opponent’s marbles would end the game and get to keep all those marbles, plus have his own lost marbles returned.

  He squatted at the edge of the circle and dropped a shooter into the hollow of his right thumb where it tucked beneath his right forefinger. He flicked it into the center, where it clicked against one of my swirlies. That made the swirly his, which he pocketed and looked at me with a sneer on his face. He was up one and, by the rules, could continue to shoot until he missed, when it would become my turn to shoot. It had been a long time since I’d lost a game of this format.

  He hit three in a row. It didn’t worry me. Early in a game, with the X in place, any smoothly rolling shooter marble had an excellent chance of making contact. Another flick, another click. Methodically and unerringly, he picked off every single one of my collection without missing once, giving me no chance to become the shooter. He’d taken all twelve of mine with twelve consecutive shots, and all twelve of his remained in the circle. I had never seen this before and was impressed. But I was Dutch. I wasn’t giving up.

  “You lost the same way to the Japanese,” he said, “without much of a fight.”

  That earned hoots from the other boys. He stood and the natives around him patted his back. By making this a racial challenge instead of an age-old contest between boys, my calculated insult to force him into a game had made him even more of a hero among his friends.

  He gave me a mock bow. “My marbles. My dog. Go home, Dutch boy.”

  “Jemmy!” Pietje said.

  I had inadvertently tripled the stakes. I needed my warrior marbles returned, and I needed to get the puppy for Pietje. I also needed to redeem Dutch pride, so the only choice at this point was to risk my secret prize.

  I reached beneath my belt for the second pouch. Until my father had given me the sulphide marble with the miniature horse statue, that second pouch had held only one marble. I pulled it out, leaving the sulphide hidden.

  The marble I presented was sufficient to draw gasps of wonder. It was a china marble, not named because it came from that country but because it had been made of china. It had been hand painted with the tiniest of delicate brush strokes by a master craftsman, its deep, rich colors heated at kiln temperatures so that the portrait of a fighting dragon made even the roughest-hewn boy respect the artist’s accomplishment.

  I put the china marble in the center of the circle and pushed it into the dirt so that only the top half was exposed, reducing its exposure to a shooter by half. I also dimpled a mini-circle around it, pushing the tip of my finger into the dirt so that a series of depressions gave a fifty percent chance that any roll of the shooter marble would bounce in a haphazard direction.

  “One shot,” I said. “You miss, I get my marbles back and the puppy. One shot. You hit it, you own it.”

  Good as he was, it was a one-in-ten, one-in-twenty, or even one-in-fifty chance that he’d be able to hit the china marble with his shooter. Such was the obvious value of the china marble that he not only agreed to my terms but thanked me for the chance. And such was the obvious value of the marble that despite the low odds of losing it, my palms began to sweat and my gut clenched as he knelt to take his shot.

  First, he blew on his own palms to dry them. He sorted through his marbles to find the most balanced shooter. He blew on his palms again, then p
laced his shooter into position. At the flick of his thumb, he sent it rolling in a fast, straight line.

  A dog with rabies or a rogue elephant could have been coming down the street and we would not have noticed. All eyes followed the shooter as it hit one of the dimpled impressions and careened upward without any misdirection. I felt horror rise in my throat as the line of trajectory took it directly toward the china marble. But the deflection had bounced the shooter marble just high enough, and it landed in the dirt on the other side of my marble, then rolled a few inches beyond. My opponent dropped his head to his chest, and his friends let out a collective groan.

  I simply stared at my untouched china marble and blinked a few times. While I had earned back my warrior marbles, it didn’t feel like a victory. I had not used any marble-shooting skills of my own. Instead, I’d banked on human nature, no differently than any gambler.

  I scooped up my marble and tucked it back into its pouch. If there was going to be a fight, I needed to protect both of those marbles.

  “You come by tomorrow,” the boy said. “We play again for china marble. I will have another dog for your dinner table.”

  “If I am able,” I said.

  I had no intention of risking the marble again but no desire to start a fight either, so evasion seemed the most suitable response. Especially with his friends still clucking and shaking their heads at the magnificent missed opportunity for the glory of that prized marble.

  “Pietje,” I said, “time to get our bread.”

  “Coacoa,” Pietje said. “That’s his name. Coacoa.”

  I found it reassuring that he wasn’t asking me but telling me. Perhaps already some of Pietje’s fear had dissipated. And for the first time in a long while, Pietje walked down the street with me without holding my hand. He kept a firm grip on the rope, and his new little puppy, Coacoa, followed without resistance.

  When we arrived home, I was prepared to respond to my mother’s protests for allowing Pietje to bring home a puppy with fleas that visibly hopped on its scrawny back. I was the family breadwinner—in a literal sense—and I had a right to add one more mouth to the family if I decided. As for the fleas, those would be taken care of with a long soak in warm water with the puppy’s nose barely above the surface. The trick was to tie a small piece of wool to the dog’s neck so it would float and the fleas could take refuge on it as if it were a life raft.

  At home, Mother stood before us wearing a brown cotton dress that bulged at her rounded belly. Her hair was glossy, for she spent hours brushing it, and her eyes seemed large in the little-girl beauty of a face growing thin from hunger. There came no admonishment after I explained that Pietje had wanted to rescue the dog from a soup dish or casserole. Mother just looked first at me, then at Pietje with the dog. With tragic prescience of what was ahead in the Jappenkamp where we would spend the next three years, she simply looked again at Pietje’s glazed smile of joy as he held the lop-eared puppy and said one sentence: “If you really cared about Pietje and cared about the dog, you would have walked away and let that dog die a merciful death.”

  A little more than a month later, in September of 1942, soldiers returned to our home along the river to put my mother, me, Pietje, and Nikki and Aniek into one of the Jappenkamps.

  NINE

  At highest count, the Dutch East Indies held one hundred seventy-four such camps for Dutch women and children. Aided by native Indonesians, the Japanese transported us to these tiny, cramped ghettos, surrounded by the natives who then lived for the most part as if we had never existed.

  As before, the upheaval began with a military truck stopped in front of our house. This time, however, the open back deck did not hold men and teenage boys.

  The Japanese had been in-country long enough to scream in the native Indonesian language.

  “Lekas!” the soldiers yelled as we dragged our suitcases along the lawn. “Lekas! Lekas!”

  Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  But my mother did not. Or could not. I wanted to take her suitcase for her so she could walk faster, but I could only carry one at a time, and the screaming of the Japanese soldiers indicated that I did not have the luxury of making two trips as I struggled to carry the one that my father had left for me. Nikki and Aniek held sacks filled with clothes and the remaining food from our home. Pietje, too, had a sack, so heavy that it almost bent him in half, and Coacoa at the end of a rope. The little pup was just as scrawny and lop-eared as the day we had rescued him, but noticeably taller and, like Pietje, silent most of the time.

  Mother’s pregnancy was quite visible at this point. The heat had a sauna-like intensity to it, and her dress was stained with sweat at her armpits and where her swollen belly pressed against the material. This did not earn her any sympathy from the soldiers.

  I was grateful that this was one of the weeks where she was in cheerful spirits and seemed strong. At other times in the summer, she would have collapsed on the floor in our bare house if the soldiers had arrived, weeping in total unconcern to the threat they represented.

  At the truck, I saw that many of the other families had taken mattresses on board. I decided we needed one too. With effort, I pushed my suitcase above my head onto the deck, where a couple of other mothers helped pull it into place. Nikki and Aniek were halfway to the truck, and Mother was still barely past the steps of the house. I ran past the startled soldiers and through the empty dining room to my parents’ bedroom. It was a place that children in our household did not visit, and I was expecting to find, like in our own bedrooms, only a mattress on the floor, for we’d stripped our blankets to take to the Jappenkamp. In the threshold, however, I froze as I tried to make sense of what I saw. Most of the walls were covered with pencil sketches on paper. Some of the papers were curling at the edges but some were still flat and new.

  I tried to soak it in. The detail on the drawings was astonishing. Delicate pencil strokes, thickened pencil lines, swooping pencil arcs. One wall was filled with sketches of our family, the resemblances uncanny enough to be photographs. Pietje holding Coacoa, the lop ear plain to see. Nikki and Aniek sitting on the broad front porch of our house. Another wall held sketches of village life—street vendors, children kicking a soccer ball, a priest stepping into a church. A third wall showed scenes devoid of people, the volcanic mountains rising up from valley flats, the port and ships of Semarang, a locomotive pulling away from our local station, plume of smoke rising and then flattening and widening to a horizontal arch. The ubiquitous shell-shaped sign at a service station where flags seemed in motion, not the Dutch red and white and blue that had flown for centuries but the red ball of Japan’s rising sun. If I stepped into the drawing, I would be around the corner from our house, on the highway that led south to Magalang and intersected another one of the village’s main streets. The gas pump had the same cracked glass as the pump I passed every day on the way to the launderer.

  Then there was the wall that felt like a kick in the stomach. Dark storms and clouds that swirled into the shapes of monsters, the pencil lines so angry and deep that in places the paper had been punched through. All those times when my mother had succumbed to her dark moods and disappeared into this room for days at a time, I thought she had been sleeping. But she had been pouring her soul into this.

  “Lekas! Lekas!” The screams made me jump.

  I looked at the mattress and suspected that if I managed to drag it outside, I’d be permitted to struggle with it long enough to get it into the truck. If other families had taken theirs, then they knew something that we did not know about our destination.

  Then another sketch caught my eye. It was me, with my mother. We were holding hands, and her dress swirled at her ankles as if the wind were flirting with her. She and I never held hands. In this sketch she also had a smile on her face that I’d never seen before, and nothing about my eyes in that sketch looked as intense and cold as the eyes I sometimes saw in a mirror. Instead, happiness shone from my face.

  It was the first sk
etch I took down, ripping it loose from each corner, which left an empty square where the tacks had held it to the plaster.

  “Lekas! Lekas!” The voice was louder, angrier, and it came from inside the house. As fast as I could without ruining the sketches, I pulled down paper after paper and tossed them onto the mattress where I intended to stack them before taking them with me.

  “Lekas!” I froze as the voice came from inside the bedroom. I looked over my shoulder at a bayonet on a machine gun held by a Japanese soldier whose eyelids were slitted in anger.

  I risked pulling down the last of our family sketches. When I heard nothing from the soldier, I turned and saw that he was at the far wall, staring at the sketches of life in the village.

  “Lekas!” Another soldier now stood in the doorway.

  As I scooped up the sketches from the mattress, I saw the edge of a pad of paper sticking out from beneath it. I pulled it out and used it to cover the sketches, then slid it inside the front of my shirt.

  The second soldier did not have the same reaction to the drawings. He yelled at his companion, who responded in an angry tone of his own, gesticulating at the drawings on the walls.

  The second soldier screamed again, then lifted his machine gun and fired at the wall that held still-life images of the village. I was deafened as plaster sprayed everywhere and bullets shredded the drawings that remained. In the silence that followed the aftermath of the blast, the first soldier spat out one word in Japanese that later I would learn to understand.

  “Jackass,” the first soldier had said.

  The second soldier laughed. Then he pointed his machine gun at me and gestured that I should exit the room. I made my way down the hall with him shouting “Lekas!” at my back.