While I had volunteered—without doubt because it didn’t matter to me whether I lived or died—it wasn’t a willing sacrifice. I was angry and depressed, which would be expected, given what had been taken away from me. But I was too young to realize that it should be expected. I had no appetite. I could not sleep and spent most of each night on the mat in their home listening to Utami’s soft snoring on the mat she shared with Sukurno. And I seethed with a rage I dared not admit, even to myself. Yet I also dared not look up from that task because it would have allowed for a sorrow that I could not bear. All that anchored me was the sole purpose of self-imposed heroics, a purpose that outweighed my rage, as I was to discover on an afternoon when three boys, barely older than Adi, managed to trap us in an alley.
It began with a barked order to halt.
Our first mistake was to look back.
We saw them at the entrance to the alley; each carried a rifle hand-carved from wood; each was marching toward us with the butt of the rifle resting on an upraised palm, the top of the rifle leaning on the left shoulder. It showed the officiousness and self-importance of a petty bureaucrat. Worse, as we immediately discovered, it was combined with a degree of fanaticism.
Our second mistake was to ignore the order and continue walking toward the end of the alley, where it spilled out to the town square.
“Halt!”
Apparently, as soldiers in training for future battles in the independence movement, they fully believed they had authority and were irked that the authority was ignored.
We heard rushed footsteps and turned to face what was obviously a gleeful test of their military endeavors.
Naturally, Adi and I stopped.
“At attention,” the middle one stated, the commander of the small army. He was slightly taller than his companions. All three, in ragged shirts and shorts, wore shoes. This was significant. Not many natives were able to find shoes.
I saluted. It was mockery, but he took himself so seriously he didn’t understand that and gave me a salute in return.
“What’s in the box?” Commander asked Adi.
Adi and I stood side by side. I was by far the smallest of the five of us. Adi carried a small box. It held a few bottles of sulfa pills, a real score for us.
Adi didn’t like to speak. Around anyone but me or family, he kept his jaws clamped, as if somehow that could mitigate the gap of exposed upper gums and teeth. He had small balls of muscle at the joint of each side of his jaw from that continuous pressure.
As always since beginning the trading business with Adi, I focused on matching the local accent. I was close enough to be believable as a cousin from the city. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s his business.”
Commander narrowed his eyes at me. “Silence!”
“Come on,” I said to Adi. “This is a waste of time. Let’s go.”
Instantly, all three of them pointed their rifles at us, belly height.
“Please,” I said. “Be merciful. Don’t shoot.”
I was the only one who thought I was funny. Adi nudged me to be silent. He knew them. I didn’t.
“Guard them,” Commander snarled to his friends. “If they move, shoot to kill.”
Commander moved closer to Adi. “Show me what’s in the box.”
I stepped between them, and Commander swung his rifle and cracked me across the ribs.
“No!” Adi said. “Leave him alone.”
Under normal conditions, the words he forced out reached the world as a high-pitched nasal grunting. Now, under stress, it was even more distorted.
Commander imitated Adi, and his friends laughed. I saw the hurt in Adi’s eyes, and I fought a cold surge of rage and the immediate impulse to kick him in the groin. That would have diverted any further teasing of Adi and satisfied my emotions.
But I was highly aware of my status as an imposter, and I realized how any escalation of this might draw closer attention to my identity. Truly, I didn’t fear for my own safety, but I was acutely aware that no one else but me could deliver the sulfa pills and all the other supplies that Dr. Eikenboom needed so badly.
“Sing us a song,” the one on the left said, using the same nasal grunting sound and poking Adi in the belly with the end of his rifle. “We need a good laugh.”
This would have been the moment to protest on Adi’s behalf. Even if it would have been useless in preventing more mockery, it would have shown him that I was clearly on his side. That I was his friend.
“And you,” Commander told me.
“What?”
“You sing a song like he would. You know, like this.” And Commander sang a lullaby as if he too had a cleft palate.
I shook my head in protest. This was going too far.
“No?” he asked, drunk on his own power. “No?”
He cracked me across the ribs again, then grabbed my hair and pulled me down to my knees.
“And you,” he said to Adi, in the mocking nasal voice. “On your knees. This is how we treat anyone who defies our orders!”
We knelt.
The entire time, I memorized their faces.
If there came a time that the Japanese were gone, I would find them and make them pay for how they had humiliated Adi.
FORTY-TWO
Months and months before, on a warm, dark night, Adi had taken Jasmijn’s tiny and still body from my hands and promised to bury her as if she had been his own sister.
It had been no easy task. Taking her body to a priest for a church burial would have led to questions he could not answer. But a hidden and unmarked grave somewhere not easily found or disturbed—where untamed vegetation would have been a desecration in itself—would have been too disrespectful.
He’d chosen to sneak at night into the pauper’s cemetery where his own brothers and sisters had been buried. Near the small headstone of his own sister’s grave where no one would tread—she had died of influenza at age two—he’d carefully removed sod, dug deep into the moist soil, wrapped Jasmijn in a blanket, covered her with dirt, prayed over her, patted the sod in place, and carried away the excess soil in a cloth bag that had once held twenty pounds of dried rice.
Daily, I sat near the headstone and mourned her as if only the day before death had taken her from me. Daily, I would search my memory to wonder if there was anything else I could have done to keep her alive, and that would invariably lead me to grief over losing Aniek, Nikki, and my mother, thoughts that renewed my rage, not dissipated it.
Adi knew better than to interrupt those thoughts, so on the afternoon his shadow fell over me, that told me something of importance had occurred, and it was not difficult to guess.
“The trains have arrived,” I said.
“Yes.”
We both knew what that meant. British and Australian soldiers would begin the task of guarding the women and children as they marched from the camp to the train stations.
Officially, the war had ended a few weeks before. But real freedom had not come to the camp as a result. The women and children had simply woken to an unfamiliar sound. Silence. No screaming from Japanese soldiers, no roll call, no counting to ten in a foreign language.
They found the front gate open and the soldiers gone. But it had taken less than a day to realize they were not safe outside the gates, for the villagers, goaded by the young men who had carried wooden rifles and marched in formations, refused to trade with the women and were openly hostile, to the point where they soon realized they were in more danger outside the gates than inside.
The Indonesians had learned to live without colonialism, and Dutch were not welcome on the island. For them, now that the weed had been eradicated by the Japanese, they did not want roots to take hold again.
British soldiers had arrived to protect us in our prison, bringing with them food and medicine. But I was too restless to stay among them. So I had stayed with Adi and his family, acutely aware of the danger of the independence movement from all the rumors and gossip around me.
“You cannot stay,” he said.
I stood. “You of all people know I will make my own choice.”
Yet I was only delaying the inevitable. I really didn’t have a choice. While I had family through Adi, unless I was going to spend my entire life applying the dye from betel nut juice to my skin, eventually I would have to become Dutch again. And the Dutch were not welcome in this land.
“One of the boys is near death,” he told me. “It is rumored that he will live, but I have heard at the market that the police are looking for someone like you.”
It was the talk of the village, that at three separate times, just before sunset, each of three teenage boys had been ambushed and attacked by an unknown assailant armed with a cricket bat, and each had been left battered and bleeding. It was speculated that gang members of an opposing independence squad were responsible, but apparently the police thought differently at this point.
I looked at my arms and hands, and Adi understood.
“Come home,” he said. “My mother has prepared the bath for you.”
We ran and found that the hut was filled with smoke. Utami had filled pots with water and had warmed the water on the stove. On the floor were the rinds of the lemons that she had squeezed into the water.
She handed me a small stack of rags cut into squares. My modesty to them was amusing, but they had always respected it, and both of them left me alone with the water.
I soaked the first of the cloths in the water and squeezed the mixture of water and lemon juice on my other arm and wiped with vigor. The rag absorbed a hue of brown, leaving my skin mottled.
What was more important was my hair, and the lemon juice cleaned it almost completely of the betel nut stain. I was Dutch again. Utami had foreseen the danger in that too.
The neatly folded clothes did not consist of shorts and a shirt, but a dress. And somewhere, somehow, she had found me a wig.
Perhaps we could have had the luxury of waiting until nightfall before sneaking me back to the camp, but it wasn’t a certainty. Nothing had been certain for a long time. Rumors had swirled as the war neared an end, rumors about the arrival of British and Australian soldiers, about whether the Dutch would fight back against the Indonesian rebels. It had been no different with speculation about when the women and children would be escorted from the camp to ships on the coast, or indeed what would happen once we were on the ships.
It could easily happen that the train would be loaded in a matter of hours, and that by nightfall, the camp would be empty.
Utami knelt in front of me and inspected my appearance.
“Very attractive,” she said. “Don’t get in a fight on the way.”
“Yes,” Adi said. “There are dangerous attackers armed with cricket bats.”
He knew.
“I will be back,” I said. I was sad. Very sad. I should have been fighting tears. But most emotion had already been squeezed out of me. “Someday I will be back. I promise.”
“Of course,” she said. She straightened. It was obvious that she could not speak without bursting into tears.
“Come on,” Adi said. “But first, this.”
He drew me in and hugged me. I wanted to push away, but sensed that would be far too hurtful for him.
“Only here could I do that,” he said. “Not at the camp gate. If anyone saw me close to a girl, they would wonder who you really were.”
It would have been patronizing to deny that. No girl would allow Adi near. My sorrow for his future overwhelmed me.
“If that is the case,” I said, “then I shall do this here too.”
I hugged him in return. Less from my own need than what I knew he needed.
That’s the closest I came to breaking down since the death of Jasmijn. Holding him, smelling the garlic of his skin and the adolescent tang of hormones, understanding that when I let go and when he walked away from me at the gate, he would be alone again.
But then, so would I.
And it’s a feeling that never left, through seven more decades, and a feeling that still shrouded me in the holding cell in DC where, at age eighty-one, I faced my daughter, the lawyer.
FORTY-THREE
Journal 35—Washington, DC
“One. Question.” This came from my daughter, Rachel Prins. Divorced and back to her maiden name. I’d expected more anger. But instead, she sounded sad. She was across from me in the holding cell. It had come full circle, just over an even three score and ten years after the marble game beneath the banyan tree that had led me here.
She was in her late thirties, and thus you can conclude I was past forty when she was born, late for first fatherhood. I looked at her, wondering if there really had been a time when she fit in the crook of my arm and I’d wept with joy at holding her. Time heals all wounds, but it also wears away at some of the best memories a man can have.
“Just one question?” I asked. I kept my hands on my knees. Best way to hide a tremor that came and went with unsettling unpredictability. “It must be said. You do have a habit of poking around.”
I tried to breathe through my mouth to avoid the odor of vomit and urine in the holding cell.
“I do have a list of questions,” she answered. Her hair in no-nonsense corporate business style matched the blandness of her expensive pants and jacket. A strand of hair had fallen across her forehead and was stuck in place by the humidity. It, like the rest of her hair, was ash blond, the way it had been since her childhood, and I didn’t think she needed to assist it yet with coloring. My own hair had resisted gray until my late fifties.
She gave me a resigned smile. “You have a habit of avoiding most of them. So for now, I’ll stick to the most important and salient question for this situation.”
She was unaware of how deeply I grieved my inability to open up to her. I studied her and marveled that she was my child, grown or not. I’d never lost that sense of wonder, just as I’d never been able to express it.
“One, you fly out of town and fail to tell me,” she said, holding up her index finger. Then doubled it with the second finger. “Two—”
“I suppose,” I interrupted, adding disdain to my voice to conceal my anxiety, “next you’re going to tell me this police station is in the Capitol Hill precinct?”
I wasn’t near the point where I couldn’t recognize people or where I would mistake someone for another person and, for example, blissfully chatter to Rachel, thinking that she was my long-gone sister Nikki. When I arrived at that stage, I would be so far gone that I wouldn’t realize I was at that stage. Would that be a blessing? Or a snake eating its own tail?
No, my problem was that the episodes were more frequent. It would feel as if I had snapped out of a daze, with no recollection of the immediate time span before it, or even how long I’d been in the daze. With Rachel across from me, my last meaningful short-term memory was sitting for tea in a hotel with Laura, but the agony was in trying to recall what city. Washington, DC, I hoped.
The room I was in didn’t have any windows. A police officer had just escorted my daughter in. Good evidence of the kind of room that held me, just not the geographical location of the room. If this was Washington, DC, nothing good could have come out of it. At least in my daughter’s eyes.
I waited, trying not to show that I waited.
“As if you don’t know where we are,” she said. “I’m not going to fall for your distraction techniques.”
I took that as a yes. Capitol Hill. If I was here, something had happened, then. The police had confiscated my moleskin notebook, so I couldn’t be sure. Hopefully what had happened would have been worth recording in my daily diary, and more hopefully, I would have logged it in, or at least logged in my intentions.
“Two,” she continued, “the phone call that I get isn’t from you, but a woman I’ve never heard of before. Who expected me to jump on an airplane and fly across the continent merely because she asked.”
“Her name is Laura Jansen,” I answered. Good. Laura had
not abandoned me. Yet. “I had hoped, eventually, to introduce her to you.”
The hope was probably overly optimistic, given my situation. There wouldn’t have been any point in an introduction if Laura decided to go back to the Netherlands.
“Yes, I know her name is Laura,” she said. “She told me over the phone when she asked if I would fly all the way here to DC to help. If she hadn’t described the interior of your condo and her large suitcase that was sitting in the hallway, I wouldn’t have believed her story.”
In the spider webs of my memory, I was able to pull forth the recollection of my own flight to DC from Los Angeles the day before, with Laura and I each taking only a carry-on for what was supposed to be a short stay in the capital. The large suitcase is what she’d taken from Amsterdam and left behind. That had given me satisfaction, knowing the suitcase had anchored her enough that she would at least return to Los Angeles.
“You went to my condo?” I asked.
“On the way from my office to the airport,” she said. “For all I knew, someone had stolen your identity and it was some kind of scam. If you ever bothered to answer your home phone, or if you had a cell phone, it might help.”
“I don’t think they allow cell phones in here.”
“They allow one call,” she answered. With me too ashamed to admit to the police in Laura’s presence that I couldn’t remember my daughter’s phone number.
Rachel continued, exasperation obvious on her face. “And who the woman is should be at the top of my list of questions.”
She challenged me with another stare and it took effort for me to maintain eye contact. Any reaction from me except studied indifference would be like a poker tell that Rachel would immediately spot. I was an expert at studied indifference.
“I met her at the hotel before taking a cab here,” she said. “After all these years of your self-imposed monkhood, she’s the one? I’ve seen them much younger show some real interest in you.”
“She is the most beautiful woman I know,” I said. “And I resent your obvious ageism.”
I wasn’t going to share how my heart had thumped like an adolescent boy, earlier in the week, when I’d opened the door for the totally unexpected sight of the return of Laura into my life after more than a sixty-year absence.
Thief of Glory Page 24