Thief of Glory (19 page)

I stopped, but the next lines were spoken. By her.

“Tears grace my cheeks,” she whispered, “burning of love unspoken and deeply yearning.”

I was beyond comprehending. “Did Sophie repeat that to you? She made me tell her what I’d written. Did she pass it on to you?”

Laura shook her head. Her face flushed.

“Someone else told me,” she said, and I saw her fists ball into knots.

“But nobody in the world knew I wrote it,” I protested. Then it dawned on me. “Someone took my sonnet out of the envelope and put in that nasty letter
and sealed it so it looked like that’s what I mailed you! Someone stole my sonnet and—”

I stopped. Even though I didn’t fully believe it, all I could think of was that one of my half brothers had done it in another attempt to torture me.

“And that someone gave the sonnet to me as if it were his,” she said. “Our families shared the same post office, you know. He often delivered our letters to our home if he and his mother went to the post office first. I am sure now that he thought that once we were on the ship and away from the island, he would never be found out for taking your letter out and putting in another.”

Laura’s barely contained rage was frightening.

She stood.

I stood.

“No,” she said. “You stay here.”

A grown man would have been a fool to defy her. I stayed.

She marched into the house, her back ramrod straight, while I tried to comprehend.
Someone had put in a letter to make me look bad and had taken my sonnet and pretended it was his. And that someone had pulled out my return envelope and mailed it to me empty.
His name entered my thoughts at the same moment I heard the thud.

Georgie.

I heard a responding scream of outrage to the thud, followed by high-pitched wailing that preceded Laura’s return to the porch by only a few moments.

Now she stood at my side, her arms crossed, ignoring the curious glances from those up and down the porch. The wailing inside the house continued.

“My oma was right about what it does to a boy if you kick him between the legs,” she said. “And I don’t care how many spankings I get. That was worth it.”

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

I was glad that there was no gin for Elsbeth to worsen the monthly mood swings that Pietje, Aniek, Nikki, and I had faced before the Jappenkamp, swings as predictable as a pendulum. Still, the first full moon of Nakahara’s command showed it possessed him to a far greater degree than it did her.

Howling drew families to their windows. Those in houses closest to his clearly saw Nakahara outlined against the rising moon, standing on a thick branch of a tree in the center of his garden and clawing at the moon as if trying to pull it down from the sky. Many of the women prayed that he would fall from the branch, but God did not answer those prayers in the way they asked.

The next morning, Nakahara—his normal foul mood worsened no doubt by a hangover—called the block representatives together and declared, through a translator, that Japanese camp commanders were the head of a single military unit and could deal with prisoners as they pleased. No higher authorities would oversee the commanders’ actions. Then he explained that he wanted the block representatives to choose a dozen dark-haired Dutch girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty for the privilege of serving teahouse duties in the Dykstra residence.

It was a morning I didn’t have kitchen duty, so I learned about the teahouse from Laura, who’d learned about it from Sophie.

“A bad thing happened this morning,” Laura said. She explained Nakahara’s demand involving young women selected for his teahouse.

“What is bad about serving tea?” I asked. “Especially if Nakahara is promising they will be fed well.”

“Oma told me that the soldiers will expect the girls to be like wives to them.”

When I didn’t respond, she added, “Like in Georgie’s letter.”

I stilled. “That’s … that’s …” Again, I was at a loss for words, because in my naiveté, those things were not only utterly senseless but went well past a basic invasion of privacy and vastly overshadowed the humility of living in such close proximity at the Jappenkamp.

“Oma said all the women have to stand up for the sake of those girls. All the mothers, not just the mothers of the girls. Someone said that Nakahara might begin killing mothers who don’t obey him, and Oma said then that Nakahara could begin with her.”

I detected the fear in Laura’s voice.

Pietje must have sensed it too, for he put his head against my side. He said, “I don’t want him to kill Moeder.”

“I won’t let it happen,” I told Pietje. “Nobody is going to kill her. I promise.”

Those were words that would torture me later.

A single tear rolled over the dirt on the left side of Pietje’s face, and he squeezed me as a thank-you.

“I don’t want it to happen to my oma either,” Laura said. “But she looks like she is ready to make it happen.”

I couldn’t think of any way to console her that wouldn’t sound like a falsehood. The reality that we understood as children was that Nakahara was far worse than a vicious headmaster who could and would do as he pleased. So I chose a different subject to distract Laura from her fears.

Construction.

By then, Nakahara had begun building the walls that would connect his residence and the former Dykstra house. Inside the walls would be his private
garden. It was a simple design, ensuring that access to the enclosed space between the houses came only from the rear doors of either house.

The walls were built of concrete blocks, mortared in place by his Japanese soldiers. The work had gone slowly because Nakahara refused to hire Indonesians who knew the craft, and the soldiers were learning by trial and error how to mix cement and sand and water and stone so that it would set properly.

But, the world over, children usually gather to watch construction projects. Especially when there is nothing else to do.

“Look at the walls,” I said to Laura, pointing at the soldiers who were at work. “I bet a person could climb them.”

As sloppy workmen, the soldiers failed in many places to scrape the mortar away from the blocks. The curled slop provided footholds and handholds that would have made climbing a fun challenge for any boy.

“How would a person get over the top?” Laura asked.

Jagged broken glass jutted upright from mortar that had been set on the top blocks.

“Sneak at night and break them,” I said. “Just in one place where it might not be noticed.”

“Soldiers would hear you,” she answered. “Anyone caught after curfew will be beaten.”

“What is Nakahara going to do behind the walls?” Pietje asked.

“Nobody knows,” Laura said. She shuddered.

“Hey,” I said, as an idea occurred to me, one to take her mind off the teahouse girls, “we should make sure we can always know. Let’s poke some holes.”

I explained my idea. If the soldiers had been experienced in masonry, my idea would have been as ludicrous as it sounded. But they weren’t.

During my architecture courses long after the Jappenkamp, I would learn that, after water, cement is the most used human product on earth, dating back
to well before Roman times. Cement and water and sand and stone produce concrete. Aside from reinforcement with rods of steel, two important factors make the difference between a finished product that is one of the strongest structures engineered, or something that appears strong but will crumble under pressure.

The first factor is the correct ratio between cement—a binder that sets and hardens because of a chemical reaction with water—and the water and sand and stone. The second factor is how evenly these components are mixed. A rotating barrel will do a much better job than humans with shovels, especially if these humans are soldiers far from home and resentful of their job.

I did not know all of this when Laura and Pietje and I were watching so many years ago, but we did know that the concrete was watery because we watched it ooze from between the blocks. Cement is the expensive portion of the mix, and diluting it meant that less was used, something that I’m sure Nakahara encouraged. This also meant the concrete wouldn’t set as quickly as it should have, something I also didn’t know then but proved to be a lucky accident.

“Laura,” I said, “do you think you can run to the kitchen and borrow one of the wooden spoons the women use to stir rice?”

I envisioned the long handles, just the perfect diameter for my plan.

“They won’t just give it to me,” she said.

“Then borrow it. What’s the worst they will do?”

“Tell my oma.”

“And then we will tell your oma why we wanted it. Do you think she’ll like the reason?”

“She won’t like that we are taking chances at getting caught.”

“It will look like only a marble game. I promise.”

Laura thought about this. She was, I was learning, not an easy girl to push around.

“Wait here,” she said.

I had full confidence she would find a way to steal—borrow—a wooden spoon. She was back within minutes.

“We will wait until they stop work for lunch,” I said. “Then you watch. Pietje and I will do the rest.”

“Don’t make me angry with you,” she answered. “I’m not a servant girl. Treat me as you would any other boy.”

Treating her as a boy would be a good rule until Holland, after the war, when for obvious reasons, I would hold her as a woman.

I remembered her straight back as she’d marched into the house to confront Georgie. I remembered that she had not told a single adult why she had kicked him without warning because that would have revealed the shame of the letter, and I remembered how she had accepted the necessary spanking from her oma without complaint. Together, Laura and Sophie served as the first and best lessons I had in realizing that not only are both sexes equal, but it verges on idiocy to make any other point about it except quickly dismissing any suggestion of inequality.

I grinned. “Like a boy? If you are going to play marbles, it will be for keepsies then.”

“I don’t have any marbles,” she said.

“I will lend them to you. After you lose them, I will lend you more.”

“After I
lose
them? We will see about that.”

I grinned again, almost forgetting our purpose of sabotage against Commander Nakahara.

I had a sudden inspiration.

“Hey, everyone,” I said. “Laura thinks she is going to beat me in marbles!”

That drew the attention of the surrounding children, about a dozen or so.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“The more children that watch, the safer we will be.”

She kicked my shin. Hard enough to hurt.

“What?” I said. “It’s a good idea.”

“Next time,” she said, “you discuss the idea with me first.”

“Yes,” I said. She saw enough humbleness in my eyes to relax, but I made a note of how quickly she could lose her temper.

Boys and girls drifted toward us. When they were gathered, I explained that Laura and I were going to play Off-the-Wall. It was a simple game. You mark off a line about five feet from a wall. The first player throws a marble at the wall to serve as a target. To win that marble, the second player needs to bounce the shooter marble off the wall before hitting the target marble. We decided that the first one to hit five marbles would be declared the winner.

As a plan, it was more successful than I had hoped. The soldiers went for a break, and all of us drifted over to the wall. I chose a spot down from the wheelbarrow, far enough away from where the next blocks would be mortared so that any discrepancies would be invisible.

As Laura and I took turns, with the children cheering us on and full attention on the game, Pietje wandered farther down the wall and in various places, with a quick look to ensure it was safe each time, pulled the spoon out from his shirt and used the handle to poke a hole between the blocks where the weakened mortar was still setting. In some places he set the holes lower, and in others, he reached above his head. He was sneaky and did it with a smile.

We intended to daub those holes with mud that we could remove and replace anytime in the future, but the second part of the plan failed partly because the marble game was so successful at drawing everyone’s attention that no one noticed that Nakahara had turned the corner. With his dog.

“Kiotske!
” one of the boys behind us finally shouted, but too late.

Such was our conditioning to the phrase that my first reaction was to stand straight, arms at my side, before registering that the approaching
Japanese man was Nakahara himself, wearing black aviator glasses, with his dog at his side. As I was coming to attention, I gulped down a shriek. There were over a dozen of us, all literally frozen with that shared fear, rigid in the hot sun.

My fear was greater than the others’, however. If Nakahara noticed anything wrong with his wall, he’d be sure to wonder why. And if that led him to the spoon hidden beneath Pietje’s shirt, a spoon with bits of wet concrete clinging to the handle, the conclusion would be obvious.

I decided to draw attention to me.

“Kirih!”
I shouted.

Half of the children began to bow, but the other half—those who understood the Indonesian language—looked at me in confusion. I had just shouted out the Indonesian word for dog, a word similar to the Japanese command to bow,
kere.
I’d nearly made the mistake many times before, only because
kirih
came to mind so often when I saw the soldiers that I’d been tempted to shout it out as an insult.

“Kirih?”
Nakahara screamed in guttural rage.
“Kirih?”

So he did understand. He put his hand on his sword.

I moaned and pointed at the German shepherd, saying
“kirih”
two more times, making it clear I was in terror at my mistake. That took little acting.

I bowed now.
“Kere, kere.”