When I stepped out of the house, I discovered that every woman and child on the truck was staring with horror in my direction. My mother was already halfway to the house, her suitcase abandoned back at the truck.
“Jeremiah!” she said, but stopped from running forward and hugging me.
It hadn’t occurred to me that they would think I’d been shot, but when I realized their perspective, hearing machine gun fire from the street, I understood why. With all those eyes upon me, I resorted to my normal swagger as I walked toward my mother, wishing that I’d had a chance to shake off the plaster dust from my shirt and shorts and sandals.
“Everything is all right, Moeder,” I said in a voice loud enough to reach the other women and children in the truck. “I decided to let them live.”
Timing is everything. Just as I finished saying this, the soldiers stepped out of the house. Giggles burst forth from the truck.
“Lekas! Lekas!” the second soldier shouted again.
I was already tired of that word.
TEN
We were the last family to be loaded onto the truck before it joined a convoy parked a few miles down the road. A half-dozen or so trucks were loaded with more women and children and were heading south. Volcanic mountains, draped in thick jungle growth, framed the valleys. The lushness was deceptive, though, since the valley we drove through had no shade. The tires kicked up dust that loomed over us like the monsters in my mother’s sketches, and the heat bore down on us. The dust clogged our breathing and formed into clumps on our sweaty bodies as we stood cramped together with no space to stretch.
Our family seemed to be the only one on our truck who had not brought containers of water, and I was furious at myself for not anticipating the need for it. While many of the younger children cried as the day grew hotter, Nikki and Aniek and Pietje did not complain. Their thirst was so obvious, however, that a couple of families took turns sharing water with ours, even as some women glared at my mother for her obvious incompetence in her care for us.
Early in the trip, when I felt the sweat begin to drip down my chest and onto my belly, I surreptitiously removed the sketch pad from under my shirt and slid it into Pietje’s cloth sack. I would have loved to have placed it in my own suitcase for safekeeping—I was burning with curiosity about its contents—but I’d promised my father it would not be opened until we were in a Jappenkamp. After keeping my word this long, I would not break it now.
We passed through tiny villages strung along the road like horse droppings, the huts squalid and tiny and primitive. The natives would come out and stare at us as the trucks churned almost at a walking pace down the rough roads, the disrepair of these roads evidence that the Dutch had not been in administration in this region. Some natives jeered as mothers on the trucks begged for water. Others rushed up with buckets of water only to be waved away by the Japanese soldiers. If I hadn’t already begun to hate the soldiers, this would have been reason enough to start. What danger was there in letting a container of water reach little boys and girls who were passing out in the heat?
Finally, just as dusk descended, lessening the unrelenting heat, we reached Ambarawa. It was a market town, about halfway between the port city of Semarang and the town of Magalang, and an important rail link of the Semarang-Ambarawa-Magalang line.
One by one, the trucks in the convoy stopped at the open gates of a newly constructed barbed wire fence. In the gloaming, the fence appeared a harmless dividing point between houses on one side of the street and those on the other. As we looked into the neighborhood behind the fence, some of the women began to chatter with optimism. Other camps, I had learned through overheard conversations, were formed in institutes for the insane, or in barracks surrounding parade grounds. Here, we would have houses!
Ours was the second truck of the convoy to stop at the gates. The translator, a heavyset Dutch woman in a gray formless dress, with features difficult to distinguish in the growing darkness, gave orders through a megaphone. We were told to take all of our belongings out of the truck when we dispersed and find a room in a house, one room per family. We could see people from the first truck still streaming down the streets in the neighborhood.
Our family was fortunate to have been on the second truck in the convoy; families in the final four trucks would have fewer choices of houses. We also had been the last to load onto the second truck, which meant we were the first family to get off, and that put us ahead of all the rest in the race for lodgings. And my choice to take the sketches instead of a mattress meant that we had less to carry.
Because my father had given me the responsibility of taking care of our family, I determined what to do next. On the ground, I whispered to Mother, “I need you to carry Pietje’s sack while I take him. I’m going to go ahead and when I find a room that’s good, I’ll send Pietje back to you so you will know where to find me.”
I hoped I didn’t have to explain anything else. Most families, I guessed, would be so tired that they would want to travel the minimum distance. There would be crowds in the nearer houses, but in the farther houses, the choices would be better.
My legs were cramping from dehydration, but nothing in the last few months had shown that my sisters and brother and I could depend on Mother to look out for us. Her sagging shoulders and indifference to my instructions proved that, so I pushed forward with the suitcase that father had packed for us months earlier. Later, I told myself, I could rest.
Without taking any detours to consider houses close to the main gate, Pietje and I and Coacoa made a line straight to the end of one street where a two-story house backed up against the barbed wire fence. By my count, we were four residential blocks from the main gate.
The Japanese had obviously confiscated all of the houses and sent the residents of this previously Dutch enclave elsewhere. Before exploring the inside of the house I had chosen, I sent Pietje and Coacoa to tell my mother and sisters where we were.
I roamed the empty rooms and saw that all the interior doors in the house had been removed. A large bedroom on the upper floor looked to be a good choice for us, but it occurred to me that it could be too large. What if we had to share it with another family? Other rooms seemed to be too central; if the house were crowded, people would walk past us constantly, making it a noisy location. I settled on a room on the main floor at the back of the house where foot traffic would be minimal and where we would have the most privacy. It had been a storage room, lined with permanent shelving, and I considered the disadvantage of such a small room against the advantage of having shelves when all the other rooms were empty of furniture. I decided to go with the shelves.
The room did not have a mattress, but a neighboring room did. I was still alone in the house, so I had no hesitation in dragging the treasure to our room. The large mattress almost covered the entire floor, but that didn’t matter. At least we had a secure and private place. With my suitcase in the room to establish ownership, I roamed around in the dark. In the kitchen, a battered pan had been left behind in a cupboard. I took it to the cistern and pumped water into it, then splashed the water on my face. I drank so deeply that it felt like my belly would burst. I refilled the pan for the rest of my family when they arrived a few minutes later.
These houses of the Dutch—confiscated by the Japanese as ours had been—had the bathroom and shower area set outdoors, with water fed to the faucets from cisterns that collected rain. The water was always warm and fresh and clean, and in better days, the brightness of the sun combined with the shelter of the privacy walls gave the bathroom area the feeling of a resort spa, complete with friendly geckos that patrolled the area and kept the floors clean of insects.
Our first few moments here alone would be the last of any pleasantness, however, for as the house filled with one family per room, the bathroom area would too soon become a dank area of backed-up sewage.
Pietje insisted on letting the puppy drink before he did, and none of us complained about Coacoa’s slurping tongue
. It was a good forty-five minutes before other families began to enter the house, long enough that Pietje and Nikki and Aniek had fallen asleep on the mattress, and Coacoa slept on the floor nearest to Pietje.
One woman after another stopped and peeked inside our room, then turned away after seeing it already occupied. One woman returned a few minutes after she’d left and, holding a lighted candle, stepped inside our room.
“Allemaal opstaan!” she said. Everybody up!
Coacoa growled at the tone of the woman’s voice, but my sisters and brothers were too exhausted to be roused.
She was an inch taller than my mother and perhaps a few years older. Her hair was dark with streaks of gray, and its short style matched the expensiveness of her clothing, which I couldn’t help but admire. This lady, I thought, had not been depending on church charity when the Japanese arrived at her house.
My mother seemed to shrink.
“It is not fair that some families had first choice,” this interloper said. “All of the rest of us latecomers had a lottery in the kitchen, and my number was drawn to give me this room. Take your children and go to the kitchen to find out where your family belongs.”
This could be nothing but a bluff, and it clearly came from a person accustomed to having her way with shopkeepers and servants. I searched for the words to protest, but children did not disagree with adults.
“So,” this woman told my mother, “off you go.” She reached down to shake Pietje awake, but Coacoa’s growl deepened, which caused her to hesitate. In the next instant, Elsbeth, my mother, exploded with unexpected fury. As if the shell of despondency that had built up around her suddenly fragmented, she took a single step forward and slapped the taller woman hard and flush across the face.
“Do not,” my mother said, “touch my child.”
She spoke as if she was barely restraining herself. Coacoa, too, was on his feet and rumbling with a deepness I could hardly believe came from the chest of a puppy that young.
Still holding a candle in one hand, the interloper raised her other to strike back.
“I hope you hit me,” my mother said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Because that will give me the justification to kill you.”
The woman froze.
“I have not agreed to any lottery,” my mother said. “I doubt any of the others here have either. I don’t hear them leaving their rooms. So your lies will not work with me.”
“You must clear the room,” the interloper said, sounding unafraid and matching my mother’s anger. “This room now belongs to my family, as does the mattress.”
My old friend, the cold rage, began to build. I debated with myself the ethics of fighting a fully grown woman. It would be unthinkable to attack a girl, but perhaps this woman’s size and age would offset her gender and allow me to fight with honor.
“What is your name?” my mother asked.
“Hilda. Hilda van Stromst.” The woman squared her shoulders and straightened her back. “And yours?”
To me, this charade of civility after that first slap gave me a new insight into the nature of how women sometimes fight.
“Elsbeth Prins,” my mother replied. “Are you prepared to fight me right now to try to take this room from me? Because if you do, I will scratch your eyes out. And if somehow you manage to outfight me tonight, tomorrow night, when you are asleep, I will sneak into the room and slit your throat and let your blood flow onto your children.”
“You are making an enemy,” Hilda hissed.
“You made one when you tried to steal this room from my children. What you don’t know is that until a year ago, I was kept in a mental institute for outbreaks of violence.” My mother paused, probably letting the other woman consider what she’d said—a nice touch to give credence to my mother’s lie. “I would advise you to not only keep your distance from me but also not to provoke me again in any way. So let me ask again, am I clear?”
I was as astounded at my mother’s smooth lie about the mental institute as I had been to see the pencil sketches on her bedroom wall. She sounded so certain and true that Hilda’s resolve collapsed. Hilda stepped backward, keeping her eye on my mother as if fearing an attack.
When the woman was in the doorway, my mother spoke again. “Stop.”
Hilda stopped.
“Take your family to another house,” my mother said. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to control my mental illness if I have to live in the same house as you. If I kill you, your children will be without a mother, and so will mine when the Japanese take me away.”
“You are crazy,” Hilda said, a tremble in her voice.
“That’s the point, now, isn’t it?” my mother asked. “It can’t be helped.”
Much, much later, I would more fully understand the significance of that answer, but in that moment, as Hilda slipped out of our sight, I wanted to walk over and hug my mother.
But we didn’t do things like that in our family.
ELEVEN
When the crying of a young child from another bedroom woke me the next morning, I discovered I was glowing with an unfamiliar emotion, the same one that had cradled me into sleep the night before. It was an ironic emotion, given that I had spent my entire life among the privileged Dutch in a large house attended by servants and now was sleeping in a storage room in a camp patrolled by Japanese soldiers.
For the first time ever, I felt secure.
Even though I was only ten years old, I could have articulated the reason for it if anyone had asked. Elsbeth had finally become a protective mother. Seeing another woman reach for her child with an intent to harm had been the catalyst for it. And if that weren’t enough, Elsbeth put it into words the next morning.
The other three were still asleep beneath the blanket—each holding the other, back to front, back to front, with Coacoa at Pietje’s feet on top of the blanket. I rubbed my eyes to see Elsbeth kneeling in front of her open suitcase on the floor.
She noticed I was awake and sighed.
“Look at this,” she said, pointing to the contents. “The last months have been like a bad dream, and I’m waking to this.”
I followed her instructions and knelt beside her to see what she had packed for life in camp. There were jars of cold cream, jars of hair coloring, eight bottles of Bols sloe gin, laced underwear that made me blush, packs of cigarettes, a silver hairbrush and matching comb and mirror, several straw hats, sunglasses, paperback romance novels, and rolls of nylon stockings.
I winced, thinking how much money this could have brought to our family. It would have taken two years of laundering ten hours a day to earn what this must have cost her, as the scarcities of luxury goods had soared in the first months of the Japanese occupation. How much of this had she purchased after that by scavenging our house and clearing it of furniture?
“Jeremiah,” she said, “some days I do feel a little crazy. I can’t help myself and I don’t know what it is.”
My father’s words came back to me.
“The way she is, is not her fault. 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.”
“It will feel like weeks on end,” she said, “that I’m in a bad storm that makes me blind and deaf to everything else.”
She picked up a jar of cold cream and set it back into the suitcase. “And when the storm goes away and the sun comes out, it seems like the world owes me happiness, and I should be more beautiful than a movie star, deserving of all the good things that a woman can have.”
I said nothing. Tears started rolling down her cheeks, but unlike any other morning I’d ever seen her, there was no makeup to smear.
“Yesterday,” she said, “when I heard shooting in the house, I thought you were dead. I’d never worried about you before because you are such a sturdy little man, and it’s never seemed possible that you could get hurt. I’d never worried about Pietje and Nikk
i and Aniek either because they could depend on you more than on me.”
She paused to wipe her cheeks. “I heard the shooting and pictured in my mind your crumpled little body with blood pouring out, and it tore my heart. But then you walked out like nothing had happened and made a joke like you were on a stage, and it all seemed normal again. But all day in the truck I thought of how it would have been if the soldiers had killed you. And I looked at Pietje and Nikki and Aniek who were so thirsty and saw that every other mother had taken along water. And I was so miserable at how I had failed all of you for so, so long.”
She looked at me through her wet eyes and gave a slight smile.
“But last night,” she said, “that was something different, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was.”
“And from today on,” she promised. “I will be different. We don’t know how long the Japanese will keep us in camps, but I will be as much a mother to my family as any mother here.”
She closed the lid to her suitcase.
“What did you bring, Jeremiah?” Her bright smile dimmed. “I’m sure it’s very practical and full of things I should have taken.”
“Father packed it,” I said. “I haven’t opened it yet.”
At my words, her face looked as stricken as if I had stabbed a knife through her heart. I remembered that expression with full clarity for decades, and only as an adult could I guess how she must have felt at the reminder of her husband’s love and faithfulness to her. The baby in her belly made it obvious to anyone who did the math that someone else besides my father had been responsible, but the same conclusion was one that my ten-year-old mind did not comprehend.
Mother swallowed and took a deep breath. “Let’s open it.”
On top was a note in carefully printed pencil.
Jeremiah,
I am sorry for missing any things that you might need, but a suitcase is only so large. I can only guess at what is ahead for you and how long I will be away from you.
Thief of Glory Page 7