Thief of Glory (10 page)

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.

E
LEVEN

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 Nikki 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.

You and your brother and sisters will grow, so the needles and
thread and extra sheets will help you make the clothing fit. Don’t throw away the clothes as you outgrow them but take them apart and sew on the extra material. Ask the women in camp to teach you and your sisters how to sew.

Cod-liver oil will give all of you the vitamins you will need, and make sure your mother takes her dosages too. DO NOT trade the cod-liver oil for anything else. It is the same with the mosquito netting. You must keep it and use it.

Use the soap sparingly, but try to stay as clean as possible. When it looks like you are halfway through the supply of soap, use it to wash only your hands and face.

Use the paper and pencils to teach your sisters and brother to read and write; every day, you must have an hour of school and you must be the teacher to them.

Read to them from the Bible every night and pray the way that Jesus taught His disciples to pray. It is okay if you skip the boring parts. I know you hate the begots and begets as much as I did when I was a boy.

Do not open the sealed envelope at the bottom. That is for your mother and she is to read it without telling you what is inside.

I love you and Nikki and Aniek and Pietje more than life.

Your father

The suitcase was filled as the note had promised. Mosquito netting and steel wire and hooks to hang it above us. Needles and thread and scissors and bedsheets for clothing. Half of the suitcase was devoted to jars of cod-liver oil. There were bars of soap, some dishes and cutlery, and a first-aid kit. The family Bible, inscribed to my father and mother on their wedding day. And a large, thick envelope addressed to Elsbeth Prins.

She took it silently and held it in her hands.

“The letter in the suitcase was addressed to you,” she said. “Because he knew that you would take care of your brother and sisters, not me.”

“Where we are now is where we need you,” I said.

She took a deep breath and gave me a wide smile that made me feel as chivalrous as the bravest knight in all of history.

“See,” she said. “There you are, helping me again. I promise I will be the best mother, and I hope you never stop helping me.”

I felt a degree of hypocrisy because I had just made a decision to steal those eight bottles of gin from her suitcase to remove any temptation that might make her stray from her promise.

She held out her arms. That time, we did hug and her soft perfume was the most beautiful smell I had ever experienced. I couldn’t remember a hug like this ever happening. And so began, in the midst of accumulating hardships and struggles, the happiest months of my life.

T
WELVE

Later, at the first opportunity, I did steal and bury the eight bottles of gin. Elsbeth was furious at the theft but could complain to no one, because she knew she would get no sympathy. She kept her promise and began each day with a family prayer for my father and half brothers. We had heard no word from them, but neither had any of the other women in camp. Then she read a story from the children’s Bible with the colorful illustrations that fascinated Pietje: the animals in the ark on tossing waves, Moses parting the Red Sea, Elijah calling down fire from heaven. This all seemed a miracle of sorts, that Elsbeth would gather the four of us at her feet and take time to read to us, like she was casting a wide blanket of love no differently than the disciples had cast their nets as fishermen and fishers of men. After a week or more of mornings like this, Pietje asked a question.

“Moeder,” Pietje said, “how come they didn’t fall through the roof?”

“Pietje?” She had just read to us the story about four friends who wanted to take a fifth friend to Jesus for healing, but the house was so crowded that they had to climb onto the roof and let the friend down through it and into the center of the crowd down below.

“In the story, there were five people. Four friends and the lame one. How come they didn’t fall off the roof when they got up there?” He was stroking Coacoa’s neck, who rested happily in his arms, occasional thump of his tail.

Coacoa wasn’t the only pet in camp. Other families, like us, fed their pets by taking a little from each person’s daily portions, and like other families, we felt it well worth the sacrifice for the joy those animals gave us with their unquestioning love and devotion in the grim circumstances.

“Especially the man who was lame. He would roll off the side of the roof if they let go, but if they held him, how could they keep their balance?”

Pietje, it seemed, had no difficulty with the healing itself when Jesus told the man to walk.

Elsbeth gave Pietje’s question serious thought. This, too, was something new, that she would devote time and attention to us. “Pietje, where Jesus lived, the roofs were not pitched like ours. They were flat.”

“Flat? But in a monsoon—”

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Where Jesus lived, there was very little rain. They did not need roofs built to allow water to roll off.”

Pietje chewed his lower lip. “A flat roof. When they broke a hole in it, did pieces of the roof fall on the people down below?”

“The Bible doesn’t tell us that.”

More lip chewing. “How come they didn’t fall through?”

“Well, Pietje, it must have been a strong enough roof to hold their weight.”

“But if it was strong enough to hold them, how could they make a hole in it big enough to lower their friend?”

“Because …” Elsbeth paused. We were outside, in the shade of a banyan, grateful to be out of the sun, even though it was barely past breakfast. Late in her pregnancy, heat gave her rashes, but she didn’t complain.

“Yes?” He was expectant.

For a moment, her patience cracked. “It’s just the way it is,” she snapped.

Aniek was slow to pick up on her mood change.

“I don’t think the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world,” Aniek said. Her blond hair shone because Elsbeth had brushed and washed it again that morning. “Jesus said it was. But I’ve seen mustard seeds, and I can find smaller seeds than mustard seeds here in camp. So was Jesus lying, Moeder? Because God is supposed to know everything. And Jesus is God, so Jesus must have lied if He knows everything. But lying is a sin, isn’t it? I thought Jesus
never sinned and that’s why He was an innocent sheep and could die on the cross for us.”

I could see the furrows deepening in Elsbeth’s eyebrows, and I wanted to change the subject. I feared she might stop reading us Bible stories and stop asking us to pray for my father. Someday, she might go back to drinking gin and smoking cigarettes and to hours each day of vacancy in her eyes.

“Moeder, I think I can trade some cigarettes for canned milk,” I said. “I have been watching the soldiers. I know when and where I can go to the fence and not get caught.”

“Yes?” Elsbeth studied my face. She trusted me and often treated me like I was an adult equal to her. It was strange but enjoyable, wanting her protection and love, but also wanting to protect her.

Already canned milk was such a luxury that we all knew it was worth the risk involved in it for her. While it was a punishable offense for anyone caught trading with the natives on the other side of the fence, we had discovered that for the most part, the Japanese soldiers were reluctant to punish children. The mothers received their beatings instead.

“I promise,” I said. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”

It would take months and months for that comment to become a lie, and I didn’t know then that those months and months would be the only remaining innocent days of my life.

“Go ahead. Canned milk will be good for all of us. Even for Coacoa.” Coacoa thumped his tail again at the mention of his name.