Thief of Glory (14 page)

Braving the bedbugs of those mattresses seemed a worthwhile sacrifice, as we were able to trade for any type of food, including coconuts and mangoes and large grub worms to toast over our secret twig fires. The food was necessary to protect our mother. Even though the women in the kitchen had made a collective decision to let me work in Elsbeth’s place, which still allowed her the extra rations that came with kitchen work, she desperately needed extra calories in the late stages of her pregnancy.

Pietje and I also had discovered
agaatslakken
—agate snails—living in the shaded outside walls of some houses. Each new find became vital protein. Before the war, Pietje and I would find them among the shrubs around our house and salt them with careless cruelty, imagining we could hear their screams as they withered. But in the Jappenkamp, as soon as we woke, Pietje and I would rush around to gather as many of the scarce mollusks as possible. Then we came home and gathered twigs for a small fire. Even though families weren’t allowed to cook privately, we put the snails and a little bit of water in the bottom of a can, then heated it until the snails could be easily pulled from their shells. We cut them into small pieces and hid the pieces in our pockets until lunch. It was Pietje’s job to distract our mother so that I could sprinkle the pieces into her watery soup. If she had known that the mystery meat was snail, she would have refused to eat it.

Pietje and I continued our marble games with Dr. Kloet too. He would win almost enough of my marbles to force me to pull out the china marble and then, from his perspective, hit an inexplicable losing streak that brought me back from the edge of bankruptcy. Pietje was a silent spectator with bread and cheese in his pocket to constantly take home.

As Dr. Kloet had foretold, these routines changed with the arrival of our new commander. On the first morning of his reign, we were roused from sleep by guttural screaming from a bullhorn on the street outside our house.

“Tenko! Tenko!”

This was a Japanese word I didn’t yet know.

Then came the wail of a siren, rising and falling with the urgency that reminded us of the many times we had dived into makeshift bomb shelters before the capitulation.

Then it came in Dutch. Our translator had sent women out to run from house to house to give the instructions.

“Allemaal naar buiten! We gaan julie tellen!” All outside! Head count!

Head count? Who would try to escape? Except for their willingness to trade, many, if not most, of the natives were openly hostile. All our radios had long been confiscated, but the truck drivers who brought daily supplies were happy to gossip, and the outside situation was clear. The natives called us
blandas
—whites—and now that every
blanda
on the islands was imprisoned, rebels had begun to form bands with the intent to make sure that centuries of resented Dutch governance remained overthrown after the Japanese were gone. It was doubtful any
blanda
would receive help outside a camp, and even so, there was nowhere to go. The Dutch East Indies was an archipelago; the nearest refuge, across shark-infested seas, was Australia. Anyone trying to escape would be killed by the Japanese if captured, and likely killed by Indonesians if not captured by the Japanese.

“Allemaal naar buiten! We gaan julie tellen!”

Families disgorged themselves from houses up and down the street. We milled in confusion and stood in tired family groups until Japanese soldiers moved up and down the streets barking out another word.

“Lekas! Lekas!”

This we knew.
Hurry! Hurry!

Kicking and pushing the groups into lines along the streets, it still took the soldiers twenty minutes to complete the organization of making sure that every woman and child faced the street, forming a solid parade line on each side of the street as far down as I could see.

Then the soldiers pushed and shoved long enough for us to understand we were to remain in assigned groups of ten. That took another twenty minutes in the heat.

Then we were forced to count out in Japanese.
Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. Roku. Sit. Hat. Ku. Juu.
Each group of ten would be ticked off against the total until the count was complete.

In places, some of the children urinated where they were standing. They had been rushed from the houses with no chance to stop at the toilet first. I began to feel dizzy from the heat, and I saw my mother swaying on her feet. Yet I did not hear a single child crying in front of the Japanese. The Dutch had too much pride, and the mothers would not permit it.

When all the counting was finished, we were given a real surprise. Dozens and dozens of more women and children walked through the gates of the camp. We did not know that the trucks with new arrivals had arrived just before dawn and that the new arrivals had been forced to stand in lines until sent to join us.

We could not gawk, however. As the first of the newcomers entered our street, soldiers bullied them into groups of ten and made them do a count as well. The single lines on each side of the streets became compacted, and any accidental jostling was immediately noticed and silenced by beatings and screams from the soldiers.

When the new count was finished, the soldier with the bullhorn yelled a single word.

“Kiotske!” Attention!
The newcomers straightened instantly, as did we. So they, too, had been taught the same at whatever Jappenkamp had been their previous home.

Within seconds came the expected order to bow.

“Kere!”

With my upper body forward at the proper angle, arms straight back, and
eyes at the ground, I heard the approach of a Jeep. I tilted my head slightly, hoping that a soldier wouldn’t notice, and I caught my first glimpse of Commander Isamu Nakahara.

He was standing on the passenger side of the open Jeep, holding the top of the windshield to steady himself. Sitting on the passenger seat, head at the height of Nakahara’s hip and nose almost into the windshield, was a German shepherd, nearly black. Nakahara’s shiny black visor and the sword strapped to the side of his uniform were clearly visible, even with the short glimpse.

The Jeep came to a stop, and, pointing his sword at a woman, Nakahara screamed a string of words at the nearest soldier, who in turn slapped a woman across the head for an infraction that I could only guess was an improper bow. I decided it would be prudent to keep my chin straight down and smother my curiosity. When the Jeep rumbled forward again, I relaxed slightly. That’s when Elsbeth fainted, falling into the street just before the Jeep passed us.

I acted without thinking. I broke from my bow and hurried to her. Dimly, I was aware of screaming from Nakahara, but I was focused on trying to get my mother upright again. I heard the Jeep door click open, then saw a flash of black. I found myself pushed backward, and I lifted my arm instinctively against the monster that had bowled me over.

It was the dog, all the more terrifying for its silence. Its claws scratched my legs as it braced to a halt on top of my body, and before I realized it, it closed its jaws over my protective arm, inches away from my throat. I froze, lying on my back, with the dog’s legs caging me in a perimeter around my body.

More screaming came in Japanese from Nakahara followed by the Dutch from our translator.
This dog will kill you at my command. Don’t move.

It was an order easy to obey. Frightened as I was, a part of my brain marveled at how gentle the dog’s grip was on my arm. If it had been trained this effectively to hold without biting, I had no doubt it would do anything else that was commanded.

More Japanese words came from Nakahara, and the dog let go of my arm and backed away.

“Kere!
” Nakahara said in a voice so eerily controlled that my fear intensified.
What will he do to Moeder?
I found my feet and forced my trembling body into a bowing position, leaving my mother motionless on the ground beside me.

God, God
, I prayed in my thoughts,
please protect Moeder.

“Kere!”
Nakahara said again. For a moment I was confused. I was bowing in the perfect position, just as we’d been trained by the previous commander. Then, to my horror, I realized he was speaking to my mother. Her arm had fallen awkwardly behind her back. Her dress was skewed partially sideways, showing her lower thighs. Her belly pushed tight against the dress.

“Kere!
” Nakahara said to her. I could see it too clearly, even with my head down. When she didn’t respond, he kicked her in the side of her buttocks with such force that his sword slapped against his thigh. With the dog inches away from me, I was helpless to protect her.

“Kere!
” This time, Nakahara screamed. My mother did not respond. He raised his foot to kick her again, and in the silence of hundreds of people frozen by this horror, one clear word came out in Dutch.

“Niet meer!”

From the corners of my eyes, I saw Nakahara swivel to search for the woman who had spoken.

“Niet meer!”
the woman said again.
“Ik zal haar straf.”

Stop! I shall take her punishment.

I could not help but lift my head, and I saw that up and down the lines, others had too. No one received a kick or punch for this, because the soldiers, too, were transfixed by the sight of a woman stepping out of the line and marching toward Nakahara and his dog.

He smiled in anticipation as she neared, and I saw him moisten his lips with the tip of his tongue.

I had not seen her before in camp. She was one of the new arrivals.

Yet I had seen her before. I knew it.

It seemed like all sound in the world paused as the woman walked a straight line toward me and my mother.

The dog growled, but Nakahara silenced it with a gesture. When she was only a step away, she stopped, arms at her side, and bowed her head. I had a flash of memory that almost made me gasp.

The months had changed her, and hunger had etched out the bones in her still-beautiful face. The fabric of her clothing was faded and thinned from too many launderings, but this was the same woman who had stepped into the goat pasture and broken up the fight between me and Georgie.

Laura Jansen’s grandmother. Sophie.

Just as I realized this, Nakahara crossed the single step between them and punched her full in the side of the head. He continued in a silent frenzy of kicks and punches that only stopped with Sophie on the ground, flies already swarming the blood that oozed from places where his blows had broken her skin.

S
EVENTEEN

I did not sleep that night, such was the anguish of responsibility that pressed upon my soul for the beating I had witnessed. It was wretched in the dark. An overnight storm had blown in, but it could not mask my mother’s groans as she shifted on the floor, likely trying to escape the muscle pain from the vicious kick she’d received in the side of her buttock, much too close to her stomach. How much worse was it for Laura’s grandmother?

When the rain stopped, I tiptoed past all the other families and found my own escape outside. I leaned against the damp house and let the darkness bury my shame for failing to protect my mother. I wanted to cry, but I was arid. I had not cried since my father had been taken.

Years later, my memories of the sleeplessness of that night remained so vivid that as an adult, when I questioned how it could be possible that I had seen dawn arrive twice at the end of that night, I found it a relief to learn that it was not self-delusion. Sunlight had scattered off space dust in a diffuse white glow ahead of the path of the sun. Scientists called it zodiacal light, so faint that moonlight or light pollution renders it invisible.

False dawn. A dawn that dissipates when the light of the real dawn overpowers it.

False dawn. Just like the all-too-short time of peace that had found my mother in the days since women had begun helping her instead of ostracizing her. As the sky grew brighter with the second dawn, I dreaded what was ahead of us. My failure had caused another woman to be beaten near to death in place of the punishment that most surely would have been inflicted on
Elsbeth. Surely our family would be forced to bear that same ostracism again. Surely that ostracism would swing my mother back into her darkness.

How can we ever get through all of this?
I asked myself again and again throughout the night.
How can we keep going?

Yet immediately after real dawn came, so came those same women who had earlier helped mother in front of all the others with Dr. Eikenboom—Mrs. Altink and Mrs. Meeuwsen, hardly in better health than Mother had been before her collapse.

At the usual morning time, Nakahara made all of camp go to the streets for roll call, and Mrs. Altink and Mrs. Meeuwsen stood with her on the wet street to help her remain upright. Immediately after, when the Japanese soldiers dismissed us for our duties, Mrs. Meeuwsen stayed with Nikki and Aniek and Pietje, while Mrs. Altink stayed with me to support Elsbeth as she hobbled to the medical line. It took us such a long time to walk that already two dozen people were in front of us when we arrived. Mrs. Altink and I found a spot for her to sit.

“It’s okay,” I said to Mrs. Altink. “I can stay with her now.”

I owe that nondescript, tired woman so much for her response. But I would not have a chance to thank her. Within a week of that morning, she would die of a fever, and her body would be buried as anonymously as if I had never known her. It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized how much different the next months in camp would have been for my mother—and me—without Mrs. Altink there that morning to admonish me.

“Lift your head and look at me,” Mrs. Altink said. She pulled me away from my mother to ensure our conversation was private.

I was reluctant to do as commanded, so she forced my chin up with pressure from her hand. I looked into a face that was splotched with rash.