Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  As I studied the open area below, I took a deep breath and noticed the sweet perfume of the small white flowers of the melati. The rough plaster of the wall of the house at my back was still warm from the day’s heat, adding to the moistness of the skin of my neck. The shrieks of distant monkeys seemed to tunnel directly into my brain. It was the type of moment, I would learn later, that soldiers share when the body is at full alert for fight and the senses are hyper. It’s the knife-edge moment when life on one side of the blade is most vivid because death on the other side of a razor-thin margin is so near.

  I blinked a few times. I delivered a silent prayer. Then, using the handholds and toeholds of the outcroppings of mortar, I descended into the private garden. I took a few steps, then froze. The straw mat!

  I had left it on top of the wall. What if a soldier saw it there?

  I climbed up again, retrieved the mat, and climbed down again. I tucked it into the back of my shorts and stayed along the wall as I moved toward the rear door of Nakahara’s house. I had to trust that it was unlocked; otherwise, all of what I had planned would fail.

  The pig caught my scent and grunted. Geese, I knew, often served as sentries. I’d wondered if pigs were the same, so I’d brought the bag of peelings just in case. I tossed the bag into the enclosure, trusting if it could smell me, it would also smell the scraps.

  The grunting ceased.

  I moved to the door. I had an extra surge of adrenaline at the thought of Nakahara walking toward it from the other side, awakened from a drunken stupor and wanting fresh night air. I could see his hand reaching for the doorknob as I reached for it from my side, and for a long period of time this fear paralyzed me.

  I told myself that I was too far to turn back. I gently turned the doorknob slightly, and it slid easily. But was it bolted on the inside? I pulled, then pulled harder. It remained in place, not even the squeak of a bolt holding it in place. I felt the sag of defeat and let out a deep breath. It wasn’t until I let go of the door handle that I felt it shift and realized how stupid I had been.

  I turned the doorknob again, and this time pushed the door instead of pulled. It opened. Here was my Rubicon. I was still not committed to the theft. I could still pull the door shut and sneak back out of the garden and return to the tiny safe haven that was my family lost in their dreams for the night.

  I almost succumbed to the temptation to leave. But I remembered Nakahara’s satisfied sneer as he rolled my two marbles in his hand. I remembered how he had kicked and beaten Sophie and Dr. Eikenboom and my mother, and that renewal of cold rage was enough impetus for me to continue.

  I had done intelligence work ahead of time, asking the Dutch ladies who cleaned the house and cooked for him to describe the interior for me, so I knew it was designed much like most of the other houses of the camp. The rear of the house contained rooms on each side of the hallway, and the front of the house had a sitting room and the kitchen and dining room. I’d been told that the Red Cross boxes were in a room ahead on the right-hand side, two doors down the hallway, and opposite the room where Nakahara slept.

  Yet as I took the first step into the house and into a soft light, my chest felt like it would explode at the surge of my heart rate. A lamp was on in the sitting room, around the corner from the end of the hallway, so it gave enough glow to show the hallway was clear. But was someone in the sitting room? My mouth open, I listened as intently as I could for any signs that my entry had been detected.

  The house remained still. I tiptoed past the doors on each side of the hall. When I reached the final door, I heard irregular snorts, the sound of a man too drunk to sleep soundly. Still, was there a soldier in his sitting room? I dropped to my knees to peek around the corner. The furniture was arranged with the delicacy of balance that I’d seen in the homes of our Dutch friends before the war; it had a woman’s touch. Nice prints on the walls. Doilies on the backs of chairs. A fine rug on hardwood.

  It was also empty of anyone to enjoy it, so I crawled across the room to the front door with the intent to unlock it, making it an escape route should I need it. I had been told by the Dutch women that there was a bell on the front door, and I had no intention of triggering it. But if Nakahara caught me, the noise of the bell would be the last of my worries.

  With my hand on the lock, I felt, rather than heard, the creak of the floor of the sitting room. I turned my head.

  I’d made a huge mistake. The sitting room had not been empty. Rather, from the hallway, I could not see the person in the armchair because that person’s head had not been high enough to be visible.

  It was Georgie’s mother. Mrs. Smith. Rising from the armchair. Wearing a silk robe, tied around her waist. A nearly empty glass of red wine was on the small table beside her, a wine glass that the chair had also screened from my view when I had first looked into the sitting room.

  Her expression was unmistakable fury. Muted fury. She had a forefinger to her lips to indicate silence, and she pointed with her other hand to the bedroom door. I understood the message completely. Not a sound.

  I complied, trying to grasp the situation. She was the mystery woman I’d seen through the peephole? But she and Dr. Kloet …

  Although her robe clung to her in a way that I’d never seen with the big towel robes my mother had worn before the capitulation, I was incapable of giving any realistic imagination to what happened between her and Nakahara or between her and Dr. Kloet. Still I had absorbed enough hints from other sources to know it was not good. Even the story about King David in the Bible said that after he knew Bathsheba, they had a baby, and whatever they’d done that consisted of a man knowing a woman, it was not good.

  She motioned for me to rise. I did. Then she walked over to me and leaned in so close that I could smell wine on her breath when she whispered. “Garden.”

  She kept a hand on my shoulder as she guided me down the hallway, past the room where Nakahara was snoring, out the door, and back into the night air. She shut the door and pushed me to a spot beneath the banyan tree.

  “You stupid, stupid child,” she hissed. Her nails dug into my shoulders. She was holding me there with both hands, looking into my face. “What has possessed you to go into the house?”

  I could have asked her the same question, but she had strength I would have never guessed.

  “Red Cross boxes,” I said. “They belong to the camp.”

  “You thought you could steal them?”

  “He is drunk,” I said.

  “And he wouldn’t notice in the morning?”

  “I would take the boxes from the back.”

  “And every woman and child in this camp would suffer.” Her fury was rising, not abating. “Is that what you want?”

  “I would take the boxes from the back.”

  She slapped my face. “You stupid, stupid child.”

  I dared not slap back. At least not with my hands. I said the worst thing I could think of from the Bible. I knew it was a woman who did bad things.

  I spat back at her, “Whore of Babylon.”

  She slapped me again.

  I was glad to see that she didn’t like what I’d said. Since Babylon had been a city in the Bible, it must have been the other word.

  I refused to rub my face and give any satisfaction.

  “You have no idea what I go through!” she said, leaning in so close I could smell the alcohol again. “No idea I’ve already saved your life once! Nakahara was going to have you shot for the peepholes in the wall, and I convinced him to take your marbles instead.”

  As I tried to absorb this new information, an indistinct shout came from Nakahara’s house.

  She hissed at me. “If you tell anyone about me, I will make sure that you and your family are destroyed by him. Understand? And from tomorrow on, you will protect my son. Someone hurt him bad and he can hardly walk. But he’s too scared to tell me what happened. You will protect him. Do you understand? Or next time you will lose more than those precious marbles and you
r mother her precious drawings.”

  What was this? My mother had been punished too and had said nothing? I was given no time to grapple with it.

  The shouting from inside became louder.

  “Do you understand?” As she hissed again, she squeezed my shoulders so hard that it forced a yelp from me. “You tell no one! You protect my son!”

  The door opened, spilling soft light into the garden area.

  She pushed me away. “Hurry. Up the tree. Or he will kill you.”

  I scrambled to the first low branch and was pulling myself upward as Nakahara lurched into view below, wearing only a towel around his waist.

  I climbed higher, terrified that I would be caught.

  It was an unnecessary worry. He had other things on his mind, and below me, in the darkness, soon came sounds that I’d never heard before.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Much later, when it became apparent that Mrs. Smith was pregnant, the whisperers passed around with certainty that Dr. Kloet was the father. Because Mrs. Smith was a widow and Dr. Kloet a single man, opinions were divided. Some passed no judgment and said that in these circumstances, each was entitled to find comfort. Others took the middle ground and said if the two performed a marriage ceremony before the birth of the baby, none should see this as scandalous. At the far end were those who clucked their tongues and wore the self-righteous satisfaction of all those who are first to cast stones.

  I heard the conversations in the lines at the kitchen or on the porches, but despite my hatred for her and her son, I found no difficulty in keeping secret what I knew about Mrs. Smith and Nakahara and who the real father might be. Had I passed along the story of how she spent evenings with the Japanese commander, she may well have been lynched as a focal point for how much Nakahara was detested. But she would have known the one source of the information, and she had the power to send Nakahara and his soldiers directly to our family’s room and punish us beyond my worst imaginings.

  I also knew that when her baby was born, if it had Japanese features—not reddish hair—then everyone would know what I’d known all along. My silence was delayed gratification. It would be all the more satisfying for the camp to be astounded in that manner rather than by a story from me that would hurt my family. When that vindication came, I would no longer have to go from block to block, threatening anyone against mistreating Georgie.

  As the weeks passed, though, the camp became more decrepit and the people more destitute. Hundreds of families were packed into an area that should have only held dozens, and hundreds of families lived off rations that could only sustain dozens. Nakahara managed to make the filling of the death wagon an ordinary part of life. Those who wanted to survive learned vigilance, for as the saying went, een ongeluk ligt in een klein hoekje, or accidents were waiting in the smallest corners. One of Laura’s friends received news that her father had died on the railroad project in Borneo, but she told Laura she didn’t know if she was crying because of that or because she was worried about her toothache.

  Even something as simple as not promptly closing the front gate behind the daily bread truck held dire consequences. I was farther up the street as it entered the Jappenkamp. In each hand I carried a bucket of raw sewage to be dumped into the collecting pond. Pietje and Nikki had been racing toward the bread truck, along with many other children, because occasionally a loaf of bread spilled off as it turned and backed up to the kitchen area.

  From behind me, I heard screaming at the gate. “Andjing gila! Andjing gila! Andjing gila!”

  Mad dog! Mad dog! Mad dog!

  I could not see beyond the bread truck until it finished backing into position, but when the view came clear, there was a dog nearly as big as the one that had been Nakahara’s running in a staggering gait that betrayed the later stages of rabies. It drooled and growled so loudly that I could hear it fifty yards away. And the nearest children to it were Pietje and Nikki.

  When the first camp commander had cleared the camp of dogs, cruel as it was, it had been an act of prudence. Rabies was common in the Dutch East Indies, and even prewar, the vaccine for it rare.

  Nikki reacted first. She shrieked and fled, trying to catch up with the other children. The three guards at the gate reacted nearly as swiftly. Not since the revolt of the women against teahouse girls had any soldier in camp been forced to unsling a weapon from his shoulders, but they were able to train their sights on the lurching dog within seconds. Behind it, though, were children and the too-real danger of hitting one of them.

  Pietje had not moved. He was as transfixed with fear as a rabbit facing a cobra. The soldiers began to run to find a better position to shoot the dog, but the animal’s movements were unpredictable. As it neared Pietje, they couldn’t risk a shot. At that moment, Nikki turned her head to make sure Pietje was still with her. When she saw Pietje still behind her, she stopped and screamed for him to bolt.

  As did I.

  I began running toward Pietje.

  As did she.

  The Japanese soldiers were screaming at her, but she ignored them.

  As did I.

  I had closed the gap to under ten paces when she reached Pietje and shoved him away from the dog. That broke his paralysis, and he stumbled into a full run. When she tried to follow, the dog had gained on her. Seconds later, the soldiers’ gunfire bowled the dog over, and I welcomed Pietje into my arms. Nikki was close behind, and her impact into us almost knocked the three of us onto the road.

  “Pietje,” I said. “Pietje.”

  I had one arm around his frail and shaking body, and I reached for Nikki with my other arm.

  “Nikki. Nikki.”

  As I said her name, she began to sob. Both of them clung to me, and I drew in a deep breath of relief that we were all safe. It took a few more seconds to register the other noises around us, and a few more seconds to notice the soldiers pointing at the back of Nikki’s leg.

  I peeked over her shoulder and saw the gash in her ankle where the dog had managed to nip the skin. And my world seemed to shrink to silence again.

  The next hour passed in a disjoined series of events. As Dr. Eikenboom closed the small wound with a couple of sutures and bandaged it, first Elsbeth wept over Nikki, then Sophie, then Dr. Eikenboom. Aniek, Pietje, and I were told to hug Nikki and say good-bye. She would be put in a small room away from others in the camp, and when it appeared that there was no danger to anyone, she would be let out again to play with us.

  We were too young to understand that rabies generally has an incubation period of two to twelve weeks. It was probably just as well. If we had known that this was the last time we would hold her while she was alive, those moments would have been far too painful to bear. It was just as well, too, that Nikki had no idea of the fate that was awaiting her.

  Our reprieve of false hope lasted several weeks, and we were allowed to come to the door and open it and talk to her from the hallway. Then, she became ill with what seemed like the flu. My mother’s artificial optimism on our behalf crumpled, and that was the last we heard my sister’s voice.

  Not until I became a father could I fully comprehend the horror that those final days were for Nikki and for my mother. Fully incubated, the virus is untreatable and the progression of symptoms as predictable as the fatal outcome. From the first shaking of her body—well after the sutures had been removed and the skin of her heel completely healed—Elsbeth and Sophie knew they would have to watch Nikki’s fever worsen to the acute pain of headaches, violent spasms, and mania, to hallucinations and delirium, then paralysis and coma. Each day, the two of them would enter the room and face this with Nikki, watching her endure the agony of one stage and knowing the next would be worse, until they were forced to keep her bound to the bed so that she could not attack them. Elsbeth could not walk out at the end of the day without Sophie’s support, her arm on Sophie’s shoulder, grief sagging her body almost to collapse.

  It took ten days of suffering for Nikki to die.

  TH
IRTY-SEVEN

  In her final month of pregnancy, Mrs. Smith, along with Georgie, vanished from the Jappenkamp. Left behind were most of their belongings, except for photographs and any personal mementos.

  This should have fueled massive and delicious speculation. After all, if she and Georgie had escaped, where would they go? A white person would not be able to travel unnoticed, and collaborators in any village would have immediately turned them in to Japanese authorities for a reward. She and her son could not have escaped either. The perimeters of the Jappenkamp were secure, and the gates guarded. At the very least, gossip should have focused on the significance of taking photographs and mementos but leaving behind straw mats and clothing.

  I was bursting to tell someone, anyone, about Mrs. Smith and Nakahara, but that would have involved confessing to my invasion of Nakahara’s residence and bearing witness to what I had seen. I remained afraid of reprisals against our family, especially after Nikki’s death had made Elsbeth so fragile.

  This time, however, my mother’s withdrawal into darkness did not have a detachment that made us invisible to her. Instead, she would not permit us to be out of her sight. Her fear was that she would be taken away while we were gone and that Aniek and Pietje and I would be left behind in a camp full of children guarded by Japanese soldiers, or worse, the fence around the camp would be taken down and all of the children would have to fend for themselves among the natives. Her efforts to keep us in her sight at all times should have been seen by Sophie and Dr. Eikenboom as a warning that the agony of the darkness in her soul had grown too large, but unfortunately, her fears were not irrational.

  Rumors had again reached camp that the Japanese were going to send women to work the mines of Borneo and there would be such a shortage of food that children would not be allowed to stay with their mothers. We should have seen this as a sign that the Japanese were losing the war. Otherwise, their resources would have been ample. We didn’t have a radio, and in the camp it felt as if the world had forgotten about us. We didn’t even know that the Americans had joined the battle against Germany, or that it was pouring men and planes and ships into war at such a great rate that no matter how well Japan fought, an eventual bankruptcy of resources would doom them.