Thief of Glory (28 page)

The door opened, spilling soft light into the garden area.

She pushed me away. “Hurry. Up the tree. Or he will kill you.”

I scrambled to the first low branch and was pulling myself upward as Nakahara lurched into view below, wearing only a towel around his waist.

I climbed higher, terrified that I would be caught.

It was an unnecessary worry. He had other things on his mind, and below me, in the darkness, soon came sounds that I’d never heard before.

T
HIRTY
-S
IX

Much later, when it became apparent that Mrs. Smith was pregnant, the whisperers passed around with certainty that Dr. Kloet was the father. Because Mrs. Smith was a widow and Dr. Kloet a single man, opinions were divided. Some passed no judgment and said that in these circumstances, each was entitled to find comfort. Others took the middle ground and said if the two performed a marriage ceremony before the birth of the baby, none should see this as scandalous. At the far end were those who clucked their tongues and wore the self-righteous satisfaction of all those who are first to cast stones.

I heard the conversations in the lines at the kitchen or on the porches, but despite my hatred for her and her son, I found no difficulty in keeping secret what I knew about Mrs. Smith and Nakahara and who the real father might be. Had I passed along the story of how she spent evenings with the Japanese commander, she may well have been lynched as a focal point for how much Nakahara was detested. But she would have known the one source of the information, and she had the power to send Nakahara and his soldiers directly to our family’s room and punish us beyond my worst imaginings.

I also knew that when her baby was born, if it had Japanese features—not reddish hair—then everyone would know what I’d known all along. My silence was delayed gratification. It would be all the more satisfying for the camp to be astounded in that manner rather than by a story from me that would hurt my family. When that vindication came, I would no longer have to go from block to block, threatening anyone against mistreating Georgie.

As the weeks passed, though, the camp became more decrepit and the people more destitute. Hundreds of families were packed into an area that
should have only held dozens, and hundreds of families lived off rations that could only sustain dozens. Nakahara managed to make the filling of the death wagon an ordinary part of life. Those who wanted to survive learned vigilance, for as the saying went,
een ongeluk ligt in een klein hoekje
, or accidents were waiting in the smallest corners. One of Laura’s friends received news that her father had died on the railroad project in Borneo, but she told Laura she didn’t know if she was crying because of that or because she was worried about her toothache.

Even something as simple as not promptly closing the front gate behind the daily bread truck held dire consequences. I was farther up the street as it entered the Jappenkamp. In each hand I carried a bucket of raw sewage to be dumped into the collecting pond. Pietje and Nikki had been racing toward the bread truck, along with many other children, because occasionally a loaf of bread spilled off as it turned and backed up to the kitchen area.

From behind me, I heard screaming at the gate.
“Andjing gila! Andjing gila! Andjing gila!”

Mad dog! Mad dog! Mad dog!

I could not see beyond the bread truck until it finished backing into position, but when the view came clear, there was a dog nearly as big as the one that had been Nakahara’s running in a staggering gait that betrayed the later stages of rabies. It drooled and growled so loudly that I could hear it fifty yards away. And the nearest children to it were Pietje and Nikki.

When the first camp commander had cleared the camp of dogs, cruel as it was, it had been an act of prudence. Rabies was common in the Dutch East Indies, and even prewar, the vaccine for it rare.

Nikki reacted first. She shrieked and fled, trying to catch up with the other children. The three guards at the gate reacted nearly as swiftly. Not since the revolt of the women against teahouse girls had any soldier in camp been forced to unsling a weapon from his shoulders, but they were able to train their sights
on the lurching dog within seconds. Behind it, though, were children and the too-real danger of hitting one of them.

Pietje had not moved. He was as transfixed with fear as a rabbit facing a cobra. The soldiers began to run to find a better position to shoot the dog, but the animal’s movements were unpredictable. As it neared Pietje, they couldn’t risk a shot. At that moment, Nikki turned her head to make sure Pietje was still with her. When she saw Pietje still behind her, she stopped and screamed for him to bolt.

As did I.

I began running toward Pietje.

As did she.

The Japanese soldiers were screaming at her, but she ignored them.

As did I.

I had closed the gap to under ten paces when she reached Pietje and shoved him away from the dog. That broke his paralysis, and he stumbled into a full run. When she tried to follow, the dog had gained on her. Seconds later, the soldiers’ gunfire bowled the dog over, and I welcomed Pietje into my arms. Nikki was close behind, and her impact into us almost knocked the three of us onto the road.

“Pietje,” I said. “Pietje.”

I had one arm around his frail and shaking body, and I reached for Nikki with my other arm.

“Nikki. Nikki.”

As I said her name, she began to sob. Both of them clung to me, and I drew in a deep breath of relief that we were all safe. It took a few more seconds to register the other noises around us, and a few more seconds to notice the soldiers pointing at the back of Nikki’s leg.

I peeked over her shoulder and saw the gash in her ankle where the dog had managed to nip the skin. And my world seemed to shrink to silence again.

The next hour passed in a disjoined series of events. As Dr. Eikenboom closed the small wound with a couple of sutures and bandaged it, first Elsbeth wept over Nikki, then Sophie, then Dr. Eikenboom. Aniek, Pietje, and I were told to hug Nikki and say good-bye. She would be put in a small room away from others in the camp, and when it appeared that there was no danger to anyone, she would be let out again to play with us.

We were too young to understand that rabies generally has an incubation period of two to twelve weeks. It was probably just as well. If we had known that this was the last time we would hold her while she was alive, those moments would have been far too painful to bear. It was just as well, too, that Nikki had no idea of the fate that was awaiting her.

Our reprieve of false hope lasted several weeks, and we were allowed to come to the door and open it and talk to her from the hallway. Then, she became ill with what seemed like the flu. My mother’s artificial optimism on our behalf crumpled, and that was the last we heard my sister’s voice.

Not until I became a father could I fully comprehend the horror that those final days were for Nikki and for my mother. Fully incubated, the virus is untreatable and the progression of symptoms as predictable as the fatal outcome. From the first shaking of her body—well after the sutures had been removed and the skin of her heel completely healed—Elsbeth and Sophie knew they would have to watch Nikki’s fever worsen to the acute pain of headaches, violent spasms, and mania, to hallucinations and delirium, then paralysis and coma. Each day, the two of them would enter the room and face this with Nikki, watching her endure the agony of one stage and knowing the next would be worse, until they were forced to keep her bound to the bed so that she could not attack them. Elsbeth could not walk out at the end of the day without Sophie’s support, her arm on Sophie’s shoulder, grief sagging her body almost to collapse.

It took ten days of suffering for Nikki to die.

T
HIRTY
-S
EVEN

In her final month of pregnancy, Mrs. Smith, along with Georgie, vanished from the Jappenkamp. Left behind were most of their belongings, except for photographs and any personal mementos.

This should have fueled massive and delicious speculation. After all, if she and Georgie had escaped, where would they go? A white person would not be able to travel unnoticed, and collaborators in any village would have immediately turned them in to Japanese authorities for a reward. She and her son could not have escaped either. The perimeters of the Jappenkamp were secure, and the gates guarded. At the very least, gossip should have focused on the significance of taking photographs and mementos but leaving behind straw mats and clothing.

I was bursting to tell someone, anyone, about Mrs. Smith and Nakahara, but that would have involved confessing to my invasion of Nakahara’s residence and bearing witness to what I had seen. I remained afraid of reprisals against our family, especially after Nikki’s death had made Elsbeth so fragile.

This time, however, my mother’s withdrawal into darkness did not have a detachment that made us invisible to her. Instead, she would not permit us to be out of her sight. Her fear was that she would be taken away while we were gone and that Aniek and Pietje and I would be left behind in a camp full of children guarded by Japanese soldiers, or worse, the fence around the camp would be taken down and all of the children would have to fend for themselves among the natives. Her efforts to keep us in her sight at all times should have been seen by Sophie and Dr. Eikenboom as a warning that the agony of the darkness in her soul had grown too large, but unfortunately, her fears were not irrational.

Rumors had again reached camp that the Japanese were going to send women to work the mines of Borneo and there would be such a shortage of food that children would not be allowed to stay with their mothers. We should have seen this as a sign that the Japanese were losing the war. Otherwise, their resources would have been ample. We didn’t have a radio, and in the camp it felt as if the world had forgotten about us. We didn’t even know that the Americans had joined the battle against Germany, or that it was pouring men and planes and ships into war at such a great rate that no matter how well Japan fought, an eventual bankruptcy of resources would doom them.

Then came the letter from Borneo that made for our mother’s final undoing. Aniek and Pietje and I learned about it when Elsbeth gathered us in our room and pulled out the large envelope she had kept in her suitcase since the day we moved into the Jappenkamp. “This,” Elsbeth said in an eerily calm voice, “was something that I hoped would remain sealed until we were reunited with your father.” With the tip of a kitchen knife, she cut the top of the envelope. She poured loose smaller letters from the inside onto the straw mat at our feet.

The one on top had a name printed in my father’s strong and clear handwriting: Nikki.

Elsbeth lost her eerie calmness and swallowed down a sob. She held the letter to her cheek for a few moments, then with tenderness, she placed it back into the larger envelope.

There were three other letters on the straw mat. Jeremiah. Aniek. Pietje.

“Pietje,” she said, “you are too young to be able to read. So you and I will find a private spot and I will read to you the letter from your father.”

She handed Aniek and me the letters that were addressed to us. “Your father asked me to give these to you if he never had a chance to speak to you again.”

“Moeder?” Aniek said, not understanding. She was coughing because of a stomach virus that gave her skin a fevered pitch, and beads of sweat ringed her forehead.

I did understand, and I had that same horrible silence in my brain that had come when I’d noticed the bite of a rabid dog on Nikki’s heel. The shift of a world tilting and with nothing to hold on to as I slid into the abyss.

“Moeder?” Aniek said again.

“Your father has died,” Elsbeth said. Then her face contorted. “Haven’t you children faced enough? He is dead and I don’t know how much longer I can continue.”

Sobs wracked her. She shook off the arms of comfort that Aniek and Pietje tried to place on her shoulders, so violently that Pietje began to cry.

I could only stand there, holding the letter unopened in my hand.

Our father was dead. He and my half brothers had joined the thousands and thousands worked to death, or beaten to death, or starved to death on the construction of the Borneo railway. What hurt me the most was that I had not thanked him for the marble he had given me, that I had not been able to catch up to the truck for a final shout of good-bye.

I left Aniek and Pietje with Mother and walked out of the house with the letter. I sagged back against the wall and sat there with no focus on the other houses or the bamboo fence behind them that kept us away from the world.

As I read my father’s simple letter of love to me, I tried to cry when I realized I could not picture his face anymore. But I could not find tears.