Thief of Glory (20 page)

I straightened and pointed again at the dog.
“Kirih. Takut! Takut!”

Takut.
The Indonesian word for fear.

For a tipping point of about a second, my fate hung on whether Nakahara would first understand that I was trying to tell him that the fear of the dog had made me mix up my words, and second, if he did, on how he would react. But at least it was my fate in the balance, not Pietje’s, for Nakahara’s entire focus was on me—not Pietje or the wall behind us.

I wondered if he would motion for the dog to attack. The tipping fell in
my favor. The time of the full moon had made him crazy, for Nakahara began to laugh like a maniac and even slapped my back in glee.

Some of the children began to laugh with him, but he cut them off by screaming, and when their eyes widened with fear, he lifted his hands and said, “Boo!” When they jumped back, he burst into more maniacal laughter.

He was still laughing as he walked away from us, and because he forgot to shoo us away from the wall, I made sure from that day on to play marbles there as frequently as possible. That would make it all the more natural, I knew, for the times we wanted to peek through the holes in the concrete.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

Jasmijn worsened, despite the condensed milk and other supplies we had found for her, and after examining her at the hospital, Dr. Eikenboom gave her pronouncement to me and Elsbeth.

“All the symptoms lead me to believe that Jasmijn has developed diabetic ketoacidosis,” Dr. Eikenboom said. “This happens when a baby has so little insulin that the calories from milk can’t be used for energy, and the body starts to burn fat. It makes the blood acidic, and as she burns up her fat reserves, it leads to all the other difficulties.”

I was holding Jasmijn, as Elsbeth seemed to be giving up the fight and the hope. My tiny sister had been vomiting constantly, and any touch on her abdomen led to sharp cries of pain. She didn’t seem alert—her black eyes were a dull gray and failed to watch me with any intensity as I held her. When she breathed, it was a deep sighing respiration that was so unnatural, I had to fight tears as I listened to it.

“Then there is nothing we can do,” Elsbeth said, settling deeper into her depression.

“Not without insulin,” Dr. Eikenboom said. “And with the camp up in arms and ready to revolt against Nakahara because of the deadline he has given for us to choose the teahouse girls, I can’t see any way he would let us go outside of camp and purchase some.”

“There is insulin outside?” I asked. I kissed Jasmijn’s hot forehead and she stirred slightly in my arms.

“If you find the right person,” she answered. “And you have something worth trading.”

Sophie had already done trading for me, but not for insulin. Beneath the bush at the drainage pipe were four remaining bottles of Bols sloe gin, and a fifth partway down the pipe were I brave enough to retrieve it.

“If we find the insulin, will it save her?”

Dr. Eikenboom nodded. “I don’t want to give you false hope because there is no way to get insulin, but the answer, if this were a normal situation, is yes.”

Right then, I told myself I would find the courage to crawl through the pipe.

But I was wrong. That afternoon, when I snuck toward the bush, I wasn’t even given a chance. Guards had been doubled along the fence. Then, after curfew, when I returned in darkness, no matter how hard I tried to push myself into the pipe, I could not do it. I loathed myself. And worse, the next morning, I had no choice but to admit it to Sophie.

“I’ve heard from Dr. Eikenboom about Jasmijn,” Sophie said when Pietje and I stopped by the house to see Laura. “We’ve been praying for you.”

“Pray instead for insulin,” I said. “And pray that I won’t be such a coward.”

She knelt and put an arm around my shoulder, and I couldn’t help but break down and tell her of the drainage ditch and my fear. As I explained the situation, I didn’t even notice that Laura was listening. But when our trio walked away from the house, she looked over her shoulder to make sure that we were out of earshot of Sophie and said two simple words.

“I’ll go.”

“No,” I said. “You’re a girl. It would be too dangerous.”

“I can do anything a boy can do.”

“That’s not what I meant. The Indonesians on the other side. It would be dangerous for you to wander the streets at night. If they see that you are a girl, it will be very bad.”

Laura spun and ran back to the house, leaving me speechless. Pietje and I
looked at each other in mutual puzzlement over how I could have possibly insulted her enough to make her that mad. The mystery was explained when she returned fifteen minutes later with short-cropped hair.

“Huh?” I said.

“It was getting to be a bother,” she answered. “I didn’t like my hair anyway. Now if there is mud on my face, people will think I’m a boy.”

“You can’t do it,” I said. “Sophie won’t let you.”

“Does Elsbeth know when you sneak places? Did she know you were going to go through the pipe to outside?”

I didn’t answer. It would incriminate me and prove Laura right. But, of course, so did my silence.

“We are not going to let Jasmijn die,” she said. “I’ve already cut my hair. If you don’t help me, I’ll find a way to do it by myself.”

She put her hands on her hips. “So. What’s your decision?”

A Dutchman can be stubborn, but even he knows he will not prevail against a female of his nation.

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

It was a couple of days past full moon, but the natural light of the waning moon was sufficient illumination for escaping notice of the guards. I hid under the bush as Laura crawled into the concrete pipe toward the bottle of Bols sloe gin I had left behind, and the hope that somehow, on the other side, she could trade it for insulin that would save my sister.

She had bravely wriggled into the darkness, wearing pants into which she had tucked a rock to use for communication. I held a similar rock.

It took only a few minutes. From my side of the drainage pipe, I heard two quick raps of stone echo against concrete, the signal that she had made it to the other side. I, in turn, was to signal twice to let her know that I’d heard, but before I could do so, I heard a brief scream roil toward me through the pipe.

I froze, then whispered, “Laura?” We were past curfew. I could not be loud. “Laura?”

She did not answer. She was supposed to rap three times if she encountered trouble, but she’d rapped only twice upon making it through. I rapped my rock against the concrete three times.

“Laura!” I hissed.

I peered into the drainage pipe, hoping for some kind of miracle of vision.

“Laura!”

In daylight, I could see bushes silhouetted against the opening at the other end, but now in the darkness, I could see nothing. And I could not shake the terror I’d heard in that brief scream. I squirmed into the tunnel, carrying the
rock in my hand. I was overwhelmed by panic and every cell in my body revolted. For a moment, I was so terrified that I was unable to move.

“Laura!” Now I was pleading. I moved a few body lengths into the pipe so that I had no choice but to move forward. I squirmed and slid, fighting a sensation of drowning.
Forward! Forward!
My knees scraped against the rough concrete but I didn’t notice.

Finally, my hand felt the scratch of bushes. I flailed through the end of the pipe, landing on my stomach in soft dirt, then rolled over and sucked in a gulp of air. As I scrambled to my knees, I began to call out her name, but then my eyes locked on a nightmare before me. My throat closed. I couldn’t even whisper.

Pythons don’t hunt. They ambush. Some, like the reticulated python, ambush from trees near a water supply. The geometric patterns of their scales make them near impossible to see among the branches and leaves.

In the light of day, I would later learn that this drainage pipe directed water that collected in a low spot of the Jappenkamp down a hillside to the other side of the fence. There, it was held in a pond that fed a banyan tree near the bank. Although I was aware that a venomous snake like a cobra could be a danger if it was resting in the cool shade of the pipe, it had not occurred to me to give any thought to the banyan on the other side of the fence, that I could see from inside the Jappenkamp.

Pythons of staggeringly large size lived in the Dutch East Indies, but they stayed invisible. The Burmese python used water to hide and was able to submerge a body up to twenty-five feet long, leaving only eyes and nostrils above the surface. While it was rare that a python would enter a hut in pursuit of a child, it had happened. Much less rare were ambushes from trees by reticulated pythons. We would discover later that in the town outside our Jappenkamp, two Indonesian children in the previous year had disappeared. While the Indonesians had been unable to find it, they suspected a massive python somewhere was responsible, for the snakes are capable of taking down small deer.

It had been three months since the last child outside our fence had vanished.

In the moonlight, I stared at a tableau of horror, the figures set in a Dante’s Eden painted by a madman, the girl child and snake in a bizarre embrace of death.

All I could see of Laura was the pale of her upper face and the shine of the moon reflected in her terror-stricken eyes. A coil of the python draped her lower face. Had she not instinctively ducked her head and pinned her chin to her upper chest, that coil would have already crushed the bones of her throat. The snake had struck by grasping the top of her head in its backward-pointing teeth. It had rolled the upper third of its body into a ball around the rest of her, pinning her arms against her body. She was on her knees, legs braced apart to keep her from falling, and the lower coils of the snake were tightening and curling toward her in preparation of dragging her sideways, then down to the ground.

I had a rock in my hand. Almost as a reflex, I smacked the python’s head, hoping to dislodge it or distract it, but that only created a dull thud and made no impact on the snake. How could I smash the python’s skull without hurting Laura? What if one of my blows missed the snake?

I ran behind and grabbed the python’s neck, just below its head. It was so massive, even at the thinnest point I couldn’t fully get both hands around it and, even so, didn’t have the strength to strangle it. The python wasn’t crushing her, but with each breath that she exhaled, it squeezed tighter, making it impossible for her to get more air into her lungs.

When the cold rage began to build, I shoved aside my panic. I jammed my fingers into its upper jaw line, searching for leverage. The pliable flap of skin that could stretch wide enough to allow it to swallow an adult goat easily gave way, but I could not fit my fingers between its jaw and the top of Laura’s skull.

I felt my foot hit something hard, and registered that it was the bottle of gin that Laura had dropped when the python struck.

I grasped the neck of the bottle and raised it, ready to swing down like an ax. I saw the terrible risk of missing the python’s skull and hitting Laura, or of the bottle sliding off the python’s skull and directly into hers. But what choice did I have?

Then I remembered the burning taste of the gin on the day my father had given me a sip and I’d run to spit it into the sink.

I gave a shove against the coils, and as Laura fell, I tried to scrape the seal off the top of the bottle, tearing my thumbnail in the process. I ripped at it with my teeth and finally managed to pull away a strip so that I felt the top of the cork. But the cork was too tight to remove.

With each new constriction, the snake sucked her life’s breath. My rage intensified, giving me clarity. A coil of the snake brushed against my ankle, and I stepped over it to find the rock that I’d dropped. It took two hard blows to snap the top portion of the glass neck. Then the sharp sting of alcohol hit my nostrils.

The python held its grip on Laura’s head, and with her now on her side, the python’s throat was in a position where I could pour the gin inside. I peeled away the skin that covered its jaw line, tipped the bottle of gin sideways, and poured the liquid against her skull so that the alcohol could find its way into the python’s mouth.

Electricity could not have jolted the snake into a faster reaction. The head snapped backward and a rasp seemed to come from somewhere deep in the snake, a rasp of the same rage that I felt. Just as its jaws released Laura’s skull, that massive head struck my left arm, and I felt searing blades bite into my flesh.

Had it struck my right arm, it might have jolted loose the bottle. But I was
able to tip the bottle and jam the broken neck into the snake’s mouth, ripping my own skin against the jagged glass. Gin poured freely into the snake, and as it lessened the grip on my left arm, I grabbed the snake below the neck. With my right hand, I shoved the bottle down as deep as it would go and tilted the remainder of gin down its throat. By then, the coils had slipped from Laura, and she had rolled clear of the snake.

The burning of the alcohol must have put the snake into a panic. With a deceptively fast rolling of those massive coils, it reached the banyan tree and began to climb up into the shadows.

I felt something touch my arm and I flinched.

It was Laura. She was trying to speak. She stared at me as she drew sob after sob into her lungs and shook so hard she was going to fall. I pulled her against me and we clung together, shaking, until finally, when she could make noise, she wept.

That’s how we were found—a minute later or a half an hour later, I couldn’t guess—by an Indonesian teenage boy, who spoke with difficulty.

The words he forced out were accompanied by a high-pitched nasal grunting.

“What is going on here?” he asked.

Laura let go and took a step sideways. I became aware that blood was running down my arm. Laura’s hair was stained too, from my tears as I held her and from the blood that seeped from dozens of puncture marks where the snake had held her in its jaws. We both needed disinfectant badly.