Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Sophie’s good eye had widened for a moment, but she only said in a quiet voice, “Could you give me some water first? I have difficulty reaching it.”

  There was a pitcher on the floor, with a battered tin cup beside it. I poured water into the cup, then took a cloth beside the bed and folded it. I tipped the cup so she could drink, and I held the cloth beneath her chin so that any escaping water would not drip onto her. This is how I’d seen mothers in camp with little children.

  “Thank you,” she said. She closed her eyes. “If you want to leave, I understand.”

  I set the cup down.

  At the doorway, I stopped and turned and spoke. “Memories drift like leaves, blown by winds gentle before a gale heaves. Tears grace my cheeks, burning of love unspoken and deeply yearning.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said, opening her eyes and revealing the exhaustion that was plain to see on her face, despite the camouflage of bruises.

  “That’s how my letter to her started.” I maintained as much dignity as possible. “It’s not my fault I’m such a bad poet I made her cry. Or that it was the wrong thing to send.”

  “Don’t go,” Mrs. Jansen said. “Please. Step closer and repeat that to me. So that no one else can hear but me.”

  I was reluctant, but did as requested. “Memories drift like leaves, blown by winds gentle before a gale heaves. Tears grace my cheeks, burning of love unspoken and deeply yearning.”

  “It’s the beginning of a sonnet,” she said, kindly refraining from commenting on the straining of metaphors and the forced rhyming. “Did you write it?”

  I nodded. With reluctance.

  She closed her eyes again, and I thought she’d fallen asleep, but when I tried to move away, she stopped me again.

  “Jeremiah,” she said, “hearing that from you explains many things to me. Take my advice. Someday, speak those same words to Laura. I think you’ll be surprised at how glad she’ll be to hear it from you.”

  Not likely, I thought. But I didn’t want to argue. I already felt as if I’d exposed too much of my soul.

  “Jeremiah, I would be honored if you called me Sophie,” she said. “And if there is anything I can ever do to help you or your family, please let me know.”

  TWENTY

  I did not trust Dr. Kloet. In this camp, he was too well fed. A boy of nobler spirit would have avoided the man, but hypocrite that I was, I had no pangs of conscience as I maintained our unspoken agreement. At our marble game at the end of each day, I would allow him the dream of someday possessing my china marble in exchange for the food he brought for Pietje the spectator. Late the next afternoon, as farmers in the surrounding valley were clearing for new fields by burning, Pietje and I made our way to the doctor’s residence. The smell of smoke was a welcome change from the stench of the sewage pit, and the flat, gray, hazy sky was a relief from the sun. After Dr. Kloet had treated the claw scratches on my leg with disinfectant, I pulled my warrior pouch from its safe place under the waistband of my shorts. Under Pietje’s silent observation, I made a show of counting out the final seven marbles that were the obstacle between him and the china marble.

  “I can only afford to start our game with five today,” I said.

  Having set the hook deep enough—after all this time I thought it a miracle I hadn’t ripped out all sections of his lips—I put one marble back into the warrior pouch and kept the seventh as my shooter.

  “How about Dropsies?” Dr. Kloet suggested. He stroked his beard a few times. There was a creepy hypnotic rhythm to the way his long fingers would manipulate the hair. “Perhaps you need a change of luck.”

  This, on the surface, would have appeared to be true to him. The day before, I’d lost all of my warrior marbles except the seven that he’d just watched me count. With those gone, he knew, I’d finally have to risk the treasure that made him lust, my ceramic china with the dragon.

  “Dropsies.” Normally, we played shooting games, and the level ground in front of Dr. Kloet’s residence was a good enough surface that few bad bounces came into play. That was good for me. Better players prefer to rely on skill instead of luck because, of course, it gives them more control over the outcome.

  “We’ll each put five in the square,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m not too good at Dropsies.”

  This meant he believed he was world-class, which matched his self-perception and self-deception in all areas. Time and again, he’d told Pietje and me how he’d deserved to be accepted into surgeon school and that the dolts who had left him stranded in the Dutch East Indies were doddering old fools who probably still prescribed leeches.

  To play Dropsies, each player scattered five marbles anywhere inside a square. A player’s toes could touch a line on the square as he leaned in, but straddling any part of the square wasn’t permitted. To win a marble, the shooter would have to hit and knock a marble outside of the square without the shooter escaping too. If successful, the player took another turn, but if a player knocked both his shooter and the target marble out of the square, he would keep both marbles and lose a turn.

  “Dropsies,” I repeated, thinking through my odds. If Dr. Kloet thought he had a chance of winning, I was probably safe. However, Dropsies took away my key strength, shooting. I wasn’t worried that I would lose a winner-take-all game if it came down to my china marble, but I still would have preferred not to risk it.

  “I hope he’s not chicken,” a voice came from over my shoulder. My archenemy. Georgie.

  I’d been so focused on a potential game of Dropsies that I hadn’t noticed Georgie’s approach. I turned my head and saw his habitual smirk.

  “Hello,” Dr. Kloet said. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I’m Georgie Smith.” He stuck out his hand and gave Dr. Kloet a firm and proper adult handshake that I could see impressed the doctor. “My mother met you today and told me what a wonderful man you were. She also said you told her that I should come at the end of the day if I wanted to play marbles.”

  “Ah!” Dr. Kloet said. “You’re the American boy. So nice to meet you.”

  Dr. Kloet said to me, “He and his mother are new arrivals. His mother is very nice. When I met her today, she’d said she heard I liked to play marbles and wondered if Georgie could join us.”

  I recalled without any effort the final exchange I’d heard between Dr. Eikenboom and Mrs. Smith.

  “And Jeremiah, when you hoodwink Dr. Kloet into a marble game this afternoon,” Dr. Eikenboom had said, “ask him to put disinfectant on those scratches. We can’t be too careful, you know.”

  And Mrs. Smith had responded with a single word. “Hoodwink?”

  That told me several things. First, that Dr. Eikenboom was far more observant than I’d estimated. Second, that she’d probably shared—in the presence of Georgie—the nice little scam I had going. Third, Georgie had recruited his mother to angle his way into the scam and take advantage of Dr. Kloet or simply find a way to spoil it for me.

  Dr. Kloet continued in his oblivious way, for any other adult would have caught the nuance in Georgie’s opening remark about whether I was chicken.

  “Jeremiah, Mrs. Smith said if we allowed Georgie to play, it might be a nice way for him to make friends because he is so new to camp.”

  Georgie smiled and offered me a handshake too. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

  Hypocrisy can only go so far. I ignored his hand. “We’ve met before. Don’t try to fool anyone here.”

  Georgie maintained the smile. “You mean like you’ve been doing to a doctor who only cares about helping people in this camp?”

  I had set my own trap and stepped in it too. Dr. Kloet stopped stroking his beard in self-pleasure and frowned. “Someone’s been fooling me?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say anything more,” Georgie said. “That just slipped out of my mouth.”

  “No,” Dr. Kloet said. “Really. Go on.”

  I could see how it was going to unfold—Georgie about to take my
spot at this buffet table, and me with nothing to do to stop it.

  “It’s not me saying this,” Georgie said, “but Dr. Eikenboom.”

  A well-played move. He had put the blame on someone with impeccable credentials that Dr. Kloet disliked anyway.

  “Dr. Eikenboom?”

  “She was telling my mother that Jeremiah stops by every day because he gets a free meal to take home to his family. It’s all around camp, I suppose, how he loses on purpose until he’s almost out of marbles and then goes ahead and wins them all back at will.”

  The touch about having it all around camp was masterful, especially adding the I suppose as an unproven qualifier.

  The skin on Dr. Kloet’s face grew almost as red as his beard. I could see that he was thinking through all the patterns of our wins and losses. Would any kind of protest erase his suspicion? I doubted it.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked me.

  My rage met with bitter revenge and I spat out my words. “I say that I owe Georgie something for breaking my arm.”

  I remembered how Georgie had secretly spit on my face when Sophie broke up the fight in the goat pasture. I stepped over and punched Georgie square on the nose. He dropped to his knees and howled with his hands over his nose, and it felt great to see blood running through his fingers.

  Dr. Kloet was too flabbergasted to say anything. He opened and closed his mouth several times. I didn’t care.

  “Come on, Pietje,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Pietje kicked dirt on Georgie and then marched away with me.

  Because I hadn’t won back all my marbles on the upswing cycle with Dr. Kloet, I was leaving behind all my wealth except for my final seven warriors. Good thing there were a lot of new boys in camp to help me replenish my supply.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Within days of Nakahara’s arrival, we realized that our former commander, Shizuka, had been a benevolent dictator in comparison. Each morning, wailing sirens would rouse us for tenko—roll call—and families would stumble to the street to line up and bow as he surveyed us from his Jeep. On sunny mornings, he would stand in that pose from the passenger side, his dog beside him. When it rained, he would get out and walk, with one soldier holding an umbrella for him, and another soldier holding an umbrella for the German shepherd.

  Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Roku. Sit. Hat. Ku. Juu.

  Each afternoon would end the same way.

  Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Roku. Sit. Hat. Ku. Juu.

  Immediately, Nakahara tripled the patrol duties around the bamboo curtain perimeter, and a half-dozen women were caught trading. They received a public beating during tenko. When another half-dozen were caught, it became apparent that the attempts would not end, so by the fourth day, he assigned permanent shifts of guards at the corners of the fence and every hundred yards or so down each wall. When one woman died during a beating, Nakahara had touched the blood coming from her face, then had tasted it on his finger and smiled.

  Nakahara also began sending guards into houses for surprise inspections. The soldiers upturned suitcases, dug through clothing, and tore up children’s toys in an effort to find food, jewelry, and money. Then they seized the items and placed them into supposed storage on behalf of the owners.

  Rations at the central kitchen were reduced by a third, bringing us even closer to starvation levels. Cutting rations was an obvious move to ensure rice could go to Japanese soldiers, but it also meant fewer mouths to feed. When women and children died because of malnutrition and a growing inability to fight off infections and disease, the Japanese found it less costly to keep us in the internment camps. The Nazis, we would learn later, set up killing factories, but the Japanese, whether it was an official policy or not, favored death by attrition.

  More than ever, our ears would strain to hear the boys who would be sent from the kitchen to call out that food was ready.

  “Broodjes halen van de plaats! Pisang halen van de plaats!”

  Get your bread at the place! Get your banana at the place!

  The “place” was the long row of benches that had been set up outside the kitchen after the newcomers had arrived. Women in twos or fours carried vats of prepared food to the benches behind which women and children stood in parallel lines to be served precisely measured portions.

  At the kitchen, I’d seen fistfights between women over an extra spoon of rice. That’s why I began to watch Mrs. Aafjes closely at her vat. I noticed that she had found a way to give her friends special treatment, and she was doing it openly but in such a way that no one else suspected what was happening.

  I kept watch to confirm my suspicions, even as the women carried on conversations in the lines in front of and behind me. All the lines generally advanced one step at a time in unison with the others.

  “Corrie Houtkooper wants her hair done,” Mrs. Tenhove told my mother, who was standing behind me. Since Dr. Eikenboom had defended my mother, women had begun talking to her again, as if they’d never shunned her. “It’s so sad.”

  This told us that Corrie Houtkooper had given up. She was in the hospital, fighting a cancer in her lungs. While this, at least, was not a death that could be blamed on the Japanese, it was no less difficult to watch. It had taken awhile for me to notice the pattern. When a woman requested that someone help her put on makeup and style her hair, she usually died the next day. Once decided, rarely did any amount of encouragement or begging change that woman’s resignation and lack of willpower to fight. She only wanted to look nice when she died.

  “At least she doesn’t have children,” Elsbeth said. She paused and took a deep breath, which she’d been doing all morning. “How horrible to go, wondering who will take care of them.”

  I had my eyes on Mrs. Aafjes, the one with a ruddy face and a mole on the side of her nose. There. I saw it again. It looked like she had just used the serving spoon to tamp down the rice she’d put into a cup for another woman who shared her house.

  “I heard that Nakahara has put out orders for the Dykstra house to be emptied for soldiers to use,” said a woman in front of me. Houses were named for the designated leader of each house. Families in each house reported to a spokeswoman, who also listened to any complaints. These spokeswomen in turn reported to a block representative, and the block representatives reported to Commander Nakahara via translator. The Dykstra house was closest to Commander Nakahara’s residence. “Nakahara wants to build a walled private garden between the two houses.”

  “Where will the families go?” the woman across from her asked. “It’s already too crowded as it is.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” the first woman said. “I hear he wants to make the Dykstra residence into a teahouse.”

  “Teahouse!”

  A part of my brain wondered why someone would be so horrified at a teahouse, and the other part was focused on Mrs. Aafjes. There! She’d done it again for the next person in line.

  “Teahouse,” the first woman confirmed. “And I’ve also heard that Nakahara does crazy things every full moon.”

  “Ha! You can’t believe all rumors. It’s probably not even true about the teahouse. What does he expect? Dutch women to line up to keep his soldiers happy?”

  I didn’t hear the answer because I’d watched Mrs. Aafjes put rice in a bowl and moved to the front of the line to confront her. I kept my plate behind my back so it would be clear I hadn’t moved forward to get food out of turn.

  “I see what you are doing,” I said to Mrs. Aafjes. “I don’t think it’s right.”

  She looked down her nose at me. I hoped she could see me past her monstrous mole. It was a strange time for me to notice a fine hair growing from the center of it.

  “You get back in line,” she said. She set the bowl down on the table and placed her hands on her hips. “Everybody takes their turn.”

  “When I get back in line,” I said, “I’m going to keep watching you. And after I get my rice, I’m going to stand here and keep watching you.
Because I know what you are doing, and it’s not fair.”

  “You are making no sense,” she hissed. “Stop your rudeness or your family will get nothing. Go back to your mother.”

  Sophie, whose face was now showing only faint bruises and no longer needed a sling for her arm, came to the front of the line. “What is happening here?”

  I pointed at the woman. “She uses her spoon to press down the rice for people she likes.”

  It seemed like such a minor accusation, but around me, it became quiet. Food was so precious that it was like accusing her of robbing a bank.

  “Ridiculous,” Mrs. Aafjes said.

  “There is one way to find out.” I grabbed the bowl and turned it upside down. The contents held and not a single grain dropped.

  Sophie said, “Please take off that apron. I will serve at this position now.”

  “I will not,” Mrs. Aafjes said. She lifted her spoon.

  “Are you threatening to hit me?” Sophie asked. “Go ahead. Your actions will condemn you.”

  Two women moved up beside Sophie. “If you hit her, we will make sure that you go without food for the next week.”

  Mrs. Aafjes glared. As she untied her apron, cheers and applause came from behind us.

  Then it was interrupted.

  “Jeremiah!” There was such a piercing quality to my mother’s voice that I spun around, half expecting to see soldiers at her side dragging her away.

  Instead, she was standing out of the line. Alone. With the dirt between her ankles turning dark from water that coursed down her legs.

  TWENTY-TWO

  To no one’s surprise, Jasmijn Grace Prins was born with a mop of dark hair and soft amber skin. After watching my mother endure twenty hours of labor, I was not allowed to be involved in the delivery itself, no matter how hard I pushed at the women to let me be near as I heard the screams.

  Jasmijn’s weight deficiency, Dr. Eikenboom said, could be helped by condensed milk, which would replace the milk that she could not get from my mother, who was recovering slowly from the delivery. Dr. Eikenboom further explained that while fruits and vegetables would help Elsbeth, a baby’s digestive system was not capable of dealing with any of the extra rations that my brother and sisters and I would gladly set aside no matter how pinched we were by our own hunger.