Then came the letter from Borneo that made for our mother’s final undoing. Aniek and Pietje and I learned about it when Elsbeth gathered us in our room and pulled out the large envelope she had kept in her suitcase since the day we moved into the Jappenkamp. “This,” Elsbeth said in an eerily calm voice, “was something that I hoped would remain sealed until we were reunited with your father.” With the tip of a kitchen knife, she cut the top of the envelope. She poured loose smaller letters from the inside onto the straw mat at our feet.
The one on top had a name printed in my father’s strong and clear handwriting: Nikki.
Elsbeth lost her eerie calmness and swallowed down a sob. She held the letter to her cheek for a few moments, then with tenderness, she placed it back into the larger envelope.
There were three other letters on the straw mat. Jeremiah. Aniek. Pietje.
“Pietje,” she said, “you are too young to be able to read. So you and I will find a private spot and I will read to you the letter from your father.”
She handed Aniek and me the letters that were addressed to us. “Your father asked me to give these to you if he never had a chance to speak to you again.”
“Moeder?” Aniek said, not understanding. She was coughing because of a stomach virus that gave her skin a fevered pitch, and beads of sweat ringed her forehead.
I did understand, and I had that same horrible silence in my brain that had come when I’d noticed the bite of a rabid dog on Nikki’s heel. The shift of a world tilting and with nothing to hold on to as I slid into the abyss.
“Moeder?” Aniek said again.
“Your father has died,” Elsbeth said. Then her face contorted. “Haven’t you children faced enough? He is dead and I don’t know how much longer I can continue.”
Sobs wracked her. She shook off the arms of comfort that Aniek and Pietje tried to place on her shoulders, so violently that Pietje began to cry.
I could only stand there, holding the letter unopened in my hand.
Our father was dead. He and my half brothers had joined the thousands and thousands worked to death, or beaten to death, or starved to death on the construction of the Borneo railway. What hurt me the most was that I had not thanked him for the marble he had given me, that I had not been able to catch up to the truck for a final shout of good-bye.
I left Aniek and Pietje with Mother and walked out of the house with the letter. I sagged back against the wall and sat there with no focus on the other houses or the bamboo fence behind them that kept us away from the world.
As I read my father’s simple letter of love to me, I tried to cry when I realized I could not picture his face anymore. But I could not find tears.
Looking back, it is plain that Elsbeth lost her will to live because of the accumulation of tragedies: Nikki’s horrible death, followed by the strain of Elsbeth’s terror of the Borneo plan, the news that our father and half brothers were dead. To add to it, that night, Aniek succumbed to her infection as we slept. I woke to see Elsbeth holding Aniek’s lifeless body, weeping tears that rolled across Aniek’s face.
There was nothing left of my mother, and she died too, the next night.
All of this devastated Pietje, and instead of those events drawing us closer as the two survivors in our family, it was as if I became a reminder to him of all that he had lost, and he fled from me as if I were the dog with rabies that had begun this recent chain of events leading to my mother’s passing.
For refuge, he clung to Sophie. Literally. There would be hours when he would not let go of her hand, almost catatonic in his grief. He moved in with Sophie and Laura, and after curfew, I was alone on the straw mat in our tiny room.
I would lie in the dark and count time by the seconds. Each heartbeat brought a literal squeeze of emotional pain, and I would find myself on my back on the straw mat, my spine rigid and arms pressed to my side, hands in fists and eyes closed as tight as possible while I waited in vain for tears to run down my face.
Do not cry.
I hoped that I would die too as I slept, but each morning my traitorous body would begin to stir and sunlight would bring me back to the reality that I had no family.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Within weeks of the passing of Elsbeth and Aniek, I, too, joined the dead.
It began with the usual commotion around the arrival of the bread truck, the same truck that had driven through gates that had once opened to allow a rabid dog into the Jappenkamp.
I was among the women who were unloading rectangular bamboo baskets filled with the round loaves of rough-grained bread. The driver never stepped out of the truck; he was lazy and knew that dozens of volunteers were waiting for the precious cargo. To feed a camp with hundreds upon hundreds, it took much of the back of the flatbed truck to hold the baskets. One tumbled, and several loaves rolled onto the dust beneath the truck.
When portions were cut in exact amounts and doled out to women and children who would take minutes to chew each bite, it was unthinkable to throw away the bread. I got on my belly and rolled beneath the truck to gather the bread.
Had I crawled instead of rolled, I doubt I would have noticed. But I didn’t want to hit my head on the underside of the truck. As I rolled, for a moment I was on my back, staring upward at the drive shaft that ran lengthways down the underside, connecting the engine up front to the rear axle. The wood planks of the flatbed above the drive shaft were ninety degrees to the drive shaft and were supported by beams parallel to the drive shaft. There were gaps in the wood planks, and it struck me that the gaps were enough that I could have reached up and grasped the top of the planks with my fingers. And that if I held on and waited, as the truck pulled away, my heels would drag on the ground and I could escape camp hidden beneath the underside of the truck. Or, better yet, if I could fasten a strap and tuck my heels into the strap, I would be unseen with nothing to drag. That wouldn’t be too difficult. The driver just sat in the cab, oblivious and uncaring of what happened behind him. The greatest danger posed by the driver was getting splattered by the juices from the leaves of the betel nut that he spat out of the open window.
A few days after that, I was sitting with Dr. Eikenboom, Laura, Sophie, and Pietje on the porch of Dr. Eikenboom’s residence. It was the time of day, a little before curfew, when the heat had faded just enough to make the approaching dusk comfortable.
“I don’t know what we can do now,” Dr. Eikenboom said to Sophie. “We have nothing left for sulfa and disinfectants. Nothing. I used the last of what we had this afternoon.”
The image I’d formed of me clinging to the underside of the bread truck remained in my brain like a burr.
“We trust in God,” Sophie told Dr. Eikenboom. “We take comfort knowing that our life on earth is only an eye blink.”
I snorted. It was an accident, but it drew her attention.
“Jeremiah?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Jeremiah.”
I’d been hiding anger. There was no doubt of that. I woke up angry and I fell asleep angry. It was a blessing of sorts, because I was so angry I didn’t even want to eat.
“I don’t need those lies,” I said.
All eyes turned on me.
“Jesus loves us? God loves us?” I snorted again.
Had Sophie admonished me for my doubts, she would have turned me forever away from any hope of returning to faith. Instead, she nodded.
“I understand,” she said. “It is sometimes difficult, with evil around, to believe in what is good.”
“It’s not that,” I said, although, of course, it was. “The Bible is filled with lies.”
Again, had she admonished me for this declaration, I would have entrenched my position and fought for it. I was Dutch, after all.
“I suppose,” she said, “there are parts that seem difficult to believe. Sometimes, it takes effort to understand what is not plainly spoken.”
“It’s plain to me,” I said, “that Jesus was a liar. The mustard seed
is not the smallest in the world.”
“In His world, it was,” she said. “And those He spoke to in that world understood what He meant.”
“Well, I know that men cannot stand on a roof that will easily break apart when they want to lower a friend.”
“What’s this?” She was genuinely curious, and because of it, I did not feel threatened, and because I did not feel threatened, we were able to explore my question.
I explained to her that I did not believe the story where men lowered their paralyzed friend into a crowded house for Jesus to heal.
“Ah,” Sophie said. “Isn’t that strange.”
“Not strange. Simply a lie.”
“No,” she said, smiling. “Strange that I had often asked myself the same question, among others. So I was relieved when I finally found the answer to this one. You see, Jeremiah, in the time that Jesus lived, the roof was made flat and sturdy so that families could spend time on it as extra living space. It was supported by frames to make it sturdy, with materials laid across the frames that held the weight of the people above it. Yet all one needed to do was lift off those materials, and there would be space between the crossbeams to lower a friend.”
I blinked. The explanation was simple. And years later, as an architect, I easily verified it.
“Yet,” Sophie said, “that does not mean I am telling you that you should live without doubts. Jesus Himself doubted the Father, on the night before He accepted death on the cross.”
I think she knew me well enough to know I would give this serious thought.
“It still does not bring back my family,” I said. It was one thing to answer the question about the roof, and another to rid me of my anger.
Her response was to try to hold me to comfort me. I pushed her away.
Probably to break the awkward silence, Dr. Eikenboom spoke again. “All the new Red Cross boxes—a soldier confirmed that Nakahara’s been selling them on the black market.”
At the time, her statement seemed of no significance, and I gave it the lack of consideration it apparently deserved, because I was seeing a different solution.
“Can we still find money and other items to trade?” I asked. “Like before, when Adi found what we needed?”
“Sure,” Dr. Eikenboom said, “but none of that stuff has been able to leave camp since Nakahara closed the drainage pipe.”
“I found another way,” I said. I told them about the delivery truck.
Dr. Eikenboom’s smile was the kind reserved for a boy with silly dreams.
“Tell me why it wouldn’t work,” I said. I knew that if I could convince her it was sustainable, she would consider it.
It should have also occurred to me how strange it was that she had taken this long after the drainage pipe had been sealed to remark on the desperation of supplies.
“Where would you stay at night?” she asked. “You would be forced to live outside the camp.”
“Sleeping in the streets is no worse than where I sleep now.”
“You could only come and go with the delivery truck each morning,” Sophie offered. “While you are gone in the evening, it will be discovered during roll call.”
“You are the one who makes up death certificates,” Laura said to Dr. Eikenboom. “That would take him off the list and he wouldn’t be counted anymore. Then, if he only leaves with the truck every second day, he could stay in camp and hide in the house during roll call at least some of the time.”
“Look at his skin,” Dr. Eikenboom said. “No one would mistake him for a native.”
I thought again of the driver of the bread truck, spitting out his window as he chewed on slices of betel nut wrapped in betel leaves.
Pinang. The combination of betel nut and betel leaf, sometimes sprinkled with cardamom or clove or other spices. For the driver of the truck had without intention reminded me of what Dr. Eikenboom had said when she’d slyly encouraged me to go out of camp following the python attack … “unless somehow some very smart Dutch children found a way to stain their hands and faces with a dye made from the juice of a betel nut.”
The betel nut is a seed of the areca palm. Fresh, the husk is green, and all it takes is a soft knife to cut it. When the fruit has dried, it takes a special cutter to slice it like almonds. When chewed with leaves, the combination of nut and leaf gives a mild stimulant, like a strong cup of coffee. This had been a tradition in South Asia and the Pacific for thousands of years. Swallowing a few teaspoons of powdered betel nut removes tapeworms and other internal parasites. It was also used to freshen breath.
More than that, it deadens hunger and gives energy, and it’s a social glue, with households owning beautiful and ornate pots of silver or gold to hold the juices. It was a common sight to see a person with what looked like blood gushing from his or her teeth dribbling the juices into a shared container.
The nut was also used to make a brown dye.
“Remember?” I asked Dr. Eikenboom. “You once suggested the juice of a betel nut. If I rubbed it on my skin and in my hair, I would look like a half breed. There would be no danger.”
She gave that serious thought. “But then you couldn’t return to the camp. The dye doesn’t wash off easily, and here, the soldiers would see you sooner or later and ask why you are dyed brown.”
“Then,” I said, “I would just live outside the camp. I would sneak beneath the bread truck and ride into camp under it. Laura could crawl under the truck and take the supplies that I’m delivering. And while she takes the supplies, she could give me a new list, along with money and what I can use to trade. I would leave with the truck again. Each day I would make new deliveries.”
“No,” Dr. Eikenboom said. “That is entirely too risky.”
“Where are the risks?” I asked.
“It is unfair to ask you to live on the streets outside our camp.”
“Sophie and Laura already take care of Pietje,” I said. “Think of the extra food and medicine I could bring you every day.”
“And if you are caught?” she asked.
“How would I get caught?” I answered.
“No,” she said again.
But a week later, when a dozen children had died from lack of a simple sulfa pill to stop the spread of infection, she changed her mind. And by then, I had already rigged the truck with straps beneath the flatbed. I’d done it partially in case she changed her mind, and partially to prove to myself how easy it was to remain unseen beneath the truck as the bread was unloaded.
Because it was parked there for at least a quarter of an hour each day, there had been no difficulty not only preparing three straps that sagged like hammocks but also finding ways to securely attach them to the support beams of the flatbed. I was even able to prove how simple it was to get into the straps. On my knees beneath the truck, I would lift my feet and slide my lower legs into the rear strap, almost to my thighs. Once my feet were in, I pulled myself into the middle strap and wriggled forward so that the weight of my upper body was supported by my chest, with the straps running upward around my armpits, and the rear straps supported my knees. Then I would reach for the forward strap and hold it with my hands stretched in front of me. It converted me into an arrow, hanging below the truck, facedown and looking at the road. I knew that I could hang the bags from my arms and travel like this for miles.
Dr. Eikenboom spoke to me about it again at the end of a day. Sophie and Laura and Pietje had joined us on her porch.
“There is a problem with writing a death certificate for you,” she said. “I hadn’t given it much thought until now, because things have been so desperate. The soldiers count the bodies at the end of the day to make sure the number matches the amount of death certificates that are turned into the commander.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “It would mean that you would have to be placed among the bodies on the death cart and you would have to stay there until the count is complete.”
I nodded. “After soldiers count the dead bod
ies, I will sneak out of the death cart, hide in camp, and not report for roll call. And the next morning, I’ll leave with the bread truck.”
This was possible—I wouldn’t be noticed among the children who always ran when the bread truck arrived. If my skin was dark, I would be part of the town, not the camp.
It was her turn to nod. Her face was solemn.
“I will do it,” I said.
Yet nothing in my imagination could have prepared me for the sensations and smells that came the next afternoon as Dr. Eikenboom and Sophie lifted me into the death cart. They placed me near the top, knowing three more bodies remained to cover me. This way, even a sharp-eyed soldier wouldn’t notice the movement of my ribs as I breathed. The slightest of mercies was that they waited as long as possible to add me to the dead, so that I had only a half hour among the corpses.
There are times I still wake from nightmares with the stench in my nostrils. Of bodies riddled with gangrene and pus, of bodies not cleaned of the vomit or diarrhea. The flesh was not cold or clammy but instead warm from the sun, and gasses inside the bodies shifted, giving a sensation of life. I had to hold myself still for that eternity, until I felt the touch of a soldier’s stick on my heels, for the bodies were all stacked in one direction, exposing our feet for the count.
When it was over, and Sophie and Dr. Eikenboom returned to pull the bodies off of me, I was shaking in tight spasms.
They rushed me away from the death cart and into Dr. Eikenboom’s residence, where they had prepared buckets of hibiscus water to cleanse me of the filth.
My spasms would not ease.
“Jeremiah, Jeremiah,” Sophie said, stroking my forehead. “This is such a brave and noble thing you’ve done. You are now a lifeline for the women and children of this camp. I have no doubt that God will be with you as you save so many lives.”
Thief of Glory Page 22