Thief of Glory (26 page)

This was a parlor trick I’d learned from my half brothers. Before the capitulation, I’d watched them do it one afternoon in our own yard. The next morning the caterpillars were still moving in that circle in the same place. They did that for two days before succumbing to starvation.

“You try,” I said to Laura.

She used the stick to get another circle started of the same size. I allowed Pietje to form a third circle. Nikki and Aniek made a fourth and fifth circle. Even so, the line from the tree continued to move forward, and when the final
caterpillar descended, the straight line that departed from us was still twenty feet long.

As their comrades marched away, we were looking at five circles of caterpillars, their backs undulating as they crawled nose to tail, nose to tail.

“They are not going anywhere,” I said. “Now we need some bags to hold them.”

I stood guard as my henchmen ran to various places to find any remaining bags that the women once used to carry goods from the markets—before the Jappenkamp had become the only way we were allowed to live.

When they returned, we put marbles in each bag, enough for the clunking sounds to be heard. After that, it was simple to guide the caterpillars into the bags. We finished with three bags full. It was deliciously satisfying to hold the top of the bag open and see the curled masses of caterpillars writhing inside.

I explained my plan. We would go through camp and give the marbles to some of the younger boys, sternly warning them not to reach into the bags themselves. Sooner or later, Georgie would try to take away the marbles, and when he reached into the bags, he would pay the price. He was an American. He wouldn’t know the danger.

“Please don’t,” Laura said. “Maybe Georgie will get really sick.”

I understood the implication. If he got really sick, he likely wouldn’t be able to get the medical help he needed. Medical supplies were getting scarcer and scarcer, and mothers were terrified that something as minor as a scraped knee could lead to something far worse. That fear was also matched by anger; despite the continuous incoming of Red Cross supplies, none had reached us.

“All the better,” I said. I would not mind if Georgie became so ill that he lost his swagger. Neither would all the younger boys he constantly bullied. “
We’re
not making him reach into the bag. And we won’t be hurting him. The caterpillars will do the work for us.”

“If he gets blisters, they might get infected,” she said, sticking to her argument. “He could die.”

That was more difficult to argue against, for I had to consider how much trouble Georgie’s death might make for me and maybe my family.

I’d been so proud of coming up with a way to turn the caterpillars into weapons, but now I had three bags of caterpillars that would live for at least two days without food, and nothing to do with them except turn them loose.

Then came my next flash of insight. Nakahara’s dog.

T
HIRTY
-T
HREE

In terms of excitement and adventure for me, the rest of the day rivaled any day in all the pages of
Ivanhoe.

We heard the bell from the kitchen area, signaling that it was time to prepare the lunch rations of rice and mystery meat. Even though Elsbeth was in good enough health to do her chores at the kitchen, Laura and I had made it part of our daily routine to help her and Sophie.

“I will see you there,” I told Laura. I needed to run to our room at our house a block over so I could tie the bags shut and hang the bags on a hook. There, they would be safe until evening.

I left Pietje with Aniek and Nikki and began carrying the bags weighted with marbles that clanked with each long step. I rounded the corner of a house and saw a blur of movement, but too late to react.

Georgie and his gang had been waiting for me. One of his friends blindsided me with a tackle. I fell sideways, landed with an
oomph
, and let go of the three bags.

In a flurry of action, two more jumped on me, pinning my arms and legs to the ground so that I was on my back, helpless.

Georgie, bare chested in sandals and shorts like all the other boys, stood over me.

“I told you this day would come,” he said. He kicked me in the ribs with the side of his foot. Then he kicked me three more times, each blow a heavy bounce that lifted me off the ground, despite the boys holding me down.

Another boy handed him the three bags that had fallen. It was a diversion that gave me a momentary reprieve.

“What have we here?” Georgie asked.

Now I was torn between several outcomes. If I let him reach inside and touch the poisonous caterpillars, I would have the satisfaction of seeing his pain, and I was so angry I didn’t care about any other possible consequences.

But if that happened, I had no assurance as to the fate of the caterpillars. If Georgie and his friends took the bags away or dumped out all the caterpillars and stomped on them, I would not be able to use the poison against Nakahara’s dog. There were so few pine trees in our Jappenkamp, I didn’t know if I would be able to get any more caterpillars.

Yet if I warned Georgie about the caterpillars, he might still destroy them, and I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of at least seeing Georgie suffer.

I waited too long. The decision was taken out of my hands.

Georgie looked inside the bag. “Caterpillars?”

He showed it to one of the boys standing beside him.

“Don’t touch,” the boy said. “Those ones have a sting to them.”

“These?” Georgie asked. “Really?”

Another of the boys looked in and confirmed it for them. “Poisonous. Very poisonous.”

“What would he be doing with them?” Georgie asked. “With those marbles?”

Georgie kicked me again. “What are you doing with them?”

I hardly felt the kick, although I was sure my ribs would ache later when my cold rage dissipated.

He kicked once again, harder. “What are you doing with them?”

I could come up with no answer that seemed like it would stop him from doing what he chose to do with the bags and the contents. It seemed like my silence infuriated him, and since I was helpless to strike out in any other way, I kept that silence as he kicked my thigh.

“What are you doing with them?”

“Maybe that’s enough,” one of the boys said, the one pinning my left arm to the ground. Georgie’s savageness must have been frightening to him.

Georgie sneered. “Poison caterpillars. We’ll see about that.”

He turned one of the bags sideways, and marbles rained on my chest first.

“Hey,” one of the standing boys said. “You don’t mess with those kinds of caterpillars.”

“I do,” Georgie said. “How bad can a caterpillar be? That’s what I’d like to see.”

Georgie tilted the bag more and a few caterpillars plopped onto my neck and lower face. Although I felt an immediate sting, like a light dusting of hot embers on my skin, I wasn’t going to give him satisfaction.

“You guys are wrong,” he said with a continued sneer. “They’re not poisonous.”

He plopped a few more, then shook the entire bag free of caterpillars. His mistake was that some of the caterpillars landed on the bare shoulders of the two boys pinning my arms. As native Dutch boys to the Indies, they knew exactly how much those caterpillars should be avoided. They yelped in outrage. And frantic, they released my arms to dust themselves of the caterpillars.

My legs were still pinned, but that gave me a chance to half turn at the waist and grab Georgie’s legs with my free arms. There is no sense trying to describe the depth of my fury. My hands were no weapons because my fists against his legs would have done no damage, but I had teeth.

Georgie struggled to slide loose. He twisted to keep from falling backward on his head and landed stomach first. The back of his calves were exposed, and I bit into the meat of the calf muscle on his left leg and held on as he screamed.

Blows landed on my head and my shoulders from the other boys, but I was locked on. I tasted his blood flowing from his leg out of the sides of my mouth. Because my arms were wrapped around both his legs, Georgie couldn’t try to kick me loose. I had become his lamprey.

“Get him off me!” Georgie screamed.

I endured more blows and kicks but it took two hands around my throat to pry me loose; one of the boys finally realized the only thing that was going to stop me was cutting off my airflow.

I fell to the side, gasping for breath. When I found my feet, the boys stepped back, staring at me with awed horror.

Georgie was still on his stomach. The gash in his calf showed tangled bits of muscle fibers. I thought that was why they were staring. I wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and blood streaked my skin. Georgie’s blood.

So that explained the horror. I must have looked like a monster. Georgie’s blood was probably staining my teeth.

“I’ve marked each of you,” I said. I spit blood and wiped my face again and saw more of Georgie’s blood across the back of my wrist. “If I hear of any more children crying at your hands, I’m going to hunt you down, one by one. What he got, you’ll get ten times worse.”

I meant it and they knew it.

Georgie rolled over and hopped onto his good leg. He lifted the back of his other leg and looked down at the wound and groaned. “Look … look …”

He didn’t get a chance to finish.

“No, you look at this,” one of the boys said through teeth gritted with pain. He held out his arm where narrow and inch-long angry red welts already were pushing up from where caterpillars had landed. “We told you the caterpillars were trouble but you were too stupid to listen.”

“You dumped them on us.” The other boy who shared the rain of caterpillars swung hard and punched Georgie in the belly. “Here’s what you get for that.”

Georgie clutched himself, his wind gone.

The boy who punched him said, “Not a word about this to any of the mothers, understand? Or it will be much, much worse when we find you.”

They walked away.

So did I, in a shamble that betrayed how much my body hurt. I had two consolations. The aches distracted me from the severe stinging of the caterpillars. And I was able to pick up the remaining two bags.

Maybe there was a third consolation.

My wounds, I believed in
Ivanhoe
fashion, were the wounds of a man who had survived an injustice. Not so much for Georgie.

T
HIRTY
-F
OUR

Before going to sleep that night, I drank as much water as my stomach could hold. I did this so that my bladder would wake me in the early hours of the morning. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution, however, because I was unable to fall asleep.

I had used a narrow stick to move marbles out of the bags without touching the caterpillars. My weapon was ready.

In the dark I listened to the sounds of my family and squeezed the occasional bedbug. I needed to take shallow breaths because if I inhaled too deeply, I’d feel a stab by my ribs where Georgie had kicked me. Dr. Eikenboom had washed my caterpillar stings with hibiscus water, which reduced the swelling. But the aches of the blows to other parts of my body would not let me relax.

Dr. Kloet had tended to Georgie’s wound. Rumor had gone through camp that Nakahara’s dog had bitten Georgie. That told me he had chosen to believe the threats made against him if he told any adults.

I had no way of counting time in the darkness, and I tried to keep my mind on the task ahead. I did not want to think about the letters that had reached the camp earlier in the day. For weeks there had been no correspondence, and today, a bag full, as if Nakahara had been hoarding letters to release all at once. Family after family had rejoiced to hear from fathers and older sons who were working on the construction of a railway between Bangkok in Thailand and Rangoon in Burma. No letters had come for Elsbeth, though. She told us that she was sure it was because of how much my father hated writing. I had my doubts. A headmaster who hated writing?

I knew the truth but didn’t want to admit it. If he could have written a
letter, he would have. Even Pietje saw through my mother’s lie, and I reassured him by pointing out that some letters contained news of the deaths of fathers and sons. So really, no news was good news, I told him, something I couldn’t quite fool myself into accepting.

To avoid wondering about my father, I focused on what I planned to do with the two bags of caterpillars that still hung in our room. I visualized the route I would take and the likely places where Japanese soldiers might patrol. Finally, when my bladder ached to the point of bursting, I decided it was late enough to sneak out. I rolled my straw mat into a tube and took it, along with the caterpillars, outside where I first knelt to empty my bladder.

Clouds blocked the moonlight, and I was grateful for that. When I reached the wall of Nakahara’s garden enclosure, I crept over to where it connected to the old Dykstra house. I hung the bags from my neck, letting them rest on my back so that I wouldn’t squish the caterpillars between me and the wall. I slipped the straw mat tube down the front of my shirt as I’d done the first time I’d climbed the wall.

The curlings of dried concrete made the climb simple. Just before reaching the top of the wall, I grabbed a goodly piece of concrete with my right hand and reached for the tube with my left hand, balancing on my footholds. This was not a complicated balancing act, but my sore ribs protested.

I put the mat across the top of the wall, covering the shards of glass that had been embedded in more concrete. Then I shinnied up and found my balance, straddling the row of glass by placing my feet in the narrow space on each side. I shifted the bags from my back to my chest, then pressed my back against the Dykstra house. I hoped it melted my silhouette into the structure.

It gave me a view of the open space where we played marbles during the day. Beyond it, I saw a small flare of light. A match to a cigarette.