Thief of Glory (3 page)

Before Georgie could do what I was essentially commanding him to do, Klaus Akkermans stepped onto our stage. Klaus was one of the older boys, almost thirteen. Slicked-back hair and a gap between his front teeth. Twenty pounds heavier than I. During our fistfight a few months ago, he’d hit me so hard in the belly that I had thrown up on his feet.

“I wouldn’t ask,” Klaus told Georgie. “Jeremiah doesn’t lose fights.”

“He’s fast,” Timmie the Toad said. If Timmie was publicly choosing sides this early, then the invisible opinion of the group had shifted in my favor. “When Jeremiah was four, a cobra crawled into his bed. He grabbed it by the neck and went into the kitchen and cut off its head. Right, Jeremiah?”

I shrugged. Truth was, I couldn’t remember it, and family stories, I’m sure, have a way of getting exaggerated with each retell.

“It’s not that he’s fast,” Klaus told Georgie. “Although he is. He just doesn’t lose fights.”

Georgie looked back and forth between Klaus and Timmie the Toad, trying to evaluate this new information.

“Not even the teenagers fight him,” said Alfie Devroome. He had the slightest of a clubfoot on his left side. When we chose teams for races, I always made sure he was my second or third pick. First would look too patronizing.

“He can’t win fights against teenagers,” Georgie said. “Look at how little he is.”

Klaus shook his head. “Nobody said he
wins
fights. He just doesn’t lose them. We’ve just about all had our turns against Jeremiah.” He glanced around, then looked back at Georgie. “When I fought him, I hit him so many times my hands hurt, and he was bleeding everywhere. He even threw up on my shoes. It only ended because I had to tell him I was tired.”

Klaus put his hands on his hips. “Like I said, he didn’t win. But he didn’t lose. Older boys know they would have to kill him to end the fight, so they leave him alone.”

“You also lost some teeth,” Timmie the Toad reminded Klaus. “He did hit you a couple of good ones.”

“I’ve told you,” Klaus answered. “Those were loose anyway.”

“And don’t forget about how he whacked a sow in the head with a hammer and killed it,” added Simon Leeuwenhoek, a chubby kid and the only one in
the bunch I had not fought. Simon was too good-natured for that. And his parents were rich so he didn’t care much about how many marbles he lost. “Jeremiah was only nine.”

This I did remember.

“I didn’t kill it,” I said. “I just hit it once. Because it was attacking me.”

The previous summer, we had been visiting a plantation of a family whose children attended my father’s school. I had ignored my mother’s warning to stay away from the sow and piglets inside the pen, and the sow had torn a chunk out of my left calf as I was scrambling to climb out.

As happened when I was threatened physically, a switch inside of me had flipped on and numbed my body to anything except cold and calculating rage, accelerated by all the benefits of accompanying adrenaline. It means that when I fight, I still have clarity of thought, and I’m aware that this is a rarity of inheritance in which I can and should take no pride.

I’d returned to the pigpen with a hammer found in a nearby shed. When the sow charged me again, I had brought it down with both hands and solidly struck it between the eyes. Knocked it cold. The fathers had not chosen sides, but an argument escalated between the mothers. Mine made the accusation that dangerous animals should be controlled, and the other mother suggested that I, not the sow, was the dangerous animal and that I was a bad example to the other children. Even though the sow only swayed sideways when it got up and walked, and I needed thirty stitches to pull together the ragged skin and muscle of my calf, the other mother insisted I was to blame and we hadn’t been invited back. I’d promised not to do something like that again because it had upset my mother. She spent hours alone in a dark, cool room when things upset her. Her spells frightened all of us children in the family.

“I’m not scared,” Georgie told our audience. To his credit, he didn’t sound scared. He wanted to fight me as badly as I wanted to fight him.

“Then ask,” I said. I could sense the coldness at the edge of my gut, and I
wanted to feel his nose crack against my fist. “I’m not allowed to ask for a fight. And I’m not allowed to take the first swing.”

Those were my father’s rules. He said Jesus had not been one to fight. However, Father allowed that it would be impractical to live without any kind of self-defense. His corollary advice was that if you had to strike back, do it far out of proportion to the attack because that will discourage future attacks. This counsel had a certain kind of logic if you were hoping to be able to settle back to living like Jesus, but Georgie, as I would learn in the coming years, was just as determined to escalate his hatred against me as I was against him.

There was silence as Georgie realized that asking me to fight would be his first defeat, but he had no choice.

“Will you fight me?” Georgie finally asked. His tone suggested that he was stunned to find himself in the position of a supplicant, and still trying to figure out how it had happened.

“Yes,” I said. “But first I’d like to ask Laura if she will leave and shop with her oma in the market. This will be ugly.”

“I’m not afraid of ugly,” she said. “I’m not a sissy.”

A slight flicker of indignation crossed her face. This girl, it was obvious, did not like being told what to do. That simply made her Dutch. I recovered with an immediate explanation.

“I just don’t want you to have to lie about it when the mothers ask later,” I said. “If you don’t see anything, you won’t have to lie. It’s a way of protecting me.”

Lots of unspoken assumptions in there, all favoring me, like the assumption that she would want to protect me, even enough to lie for me. What was artful was that nothing in my request suggested she should protect Georgie, even though his father was the boss of her father.

“Oh,” she said to me. “Since you asked. Yes.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would give any other answer.

I turned to Georgie. “We’re going to need to find a place where mothers can’t see us. Just past the village there’s a stream and a small fenced pasture for goats. The boys will take you there and I’ll have both pieces of rope. I know where I can find some in the market.”

“Rope?” Georgie would have been inhuman not to ask.

“I don’t want you running away,” I said. The cold inside me was mushrooming, and horrible as it is to confess, I was savoring the sensation and the chance to inflict punishment on him. I had no concern about the punishment I’d have to endure for that chance. “The pasture is fenced. We tie our own waists to a fence post with enough slack in each rope that we can reach each other. Once we are tied to the fence posts, one won’t be able to run away from the other. Then we fight.”

I grinned at the taller and broader boy in front of me.

“Unless,” I said, “you are chicken.”

F
OUR

What I didn’t know was that while I was escorting Laura to her oma, Georgie had procured a weapon. Later, any of the best guesses from the other boys was that he’d accomplished this as they passed a construction area. A concrete pad had been freshly poured for the foundation of a small house at the edge of the kampong, and a spare piece of rebar must have been lying handy for him to pick up, then tuck into his pants at the small of his back, hidden by his shirt.

Rebar is made of steel. It’s a rod about the thickness of the shaft of a golf club and varies in length. It’s used to carry tensile loads in concrete, because concrete is a material strong in compression, which is a pushing force, but weak in the opposite force, tension, which is a pulling force. As I would learn in my first-year engineering course on my way to becoming an architect, rods of steel embedded in concrete compensate for concrete’s lack of tensile strength. This near-perfect marriage is of little fascination to anyone, I suppose, except to engineers and architects. When temperature changes, steel and concrete expand at roughly the same rate. This makes steel the best material for reinforcement. If one material expanded with heat or shrunk with cold at a different rate than the other, the steel would eventually shred the concrete around it. But the marriage, like any other, is not immune from external threats; the biggest risk of compromise between steel and concrete happens from rust, which, as I would discover later, is also a relevant threat to marriage between humans. In a perfect symbiotic relationship between the concrete and steel, there is enough of a concrete cover to prevent rust. However, without enough concrete, the
rusting of the steel takes up more room than the steel, which causes severe pressure that can eventually lead to internal structural failure. On the other hand, if there is too much concrete around the rebar, it loses tensile strength, and the concrete cracks, also leading to structural failure.

Too often we fail to look deep enough. Our buildings and bridges remain stable because of internal structural details that have taken centuries for mankind to understand. As for mysteries of the heart, it would have never occurred to me to use a weapon in a fistfight against another boy. Likewise, it would have never occurred to Georgie to manipulate and humiliate someone with words the way that I had done to him in such a casual manner. Had I not been so cruel beneath the banyan, he may not have escalated the fight beyond the regular aggression of boys. Perhaps a mere fistfight would have resulted in grudging mutual respect, each of us remaining wary of the other. Instead, the escalation from that piece of rebar would follow us into the concentration camp, leading to consequences that would take seven more decades for him and me to resolve.

Just inside the market, Laura told me good-bye, insisting she could find her oma by herself. I made her giggle by kissing the top of her hand, as any chivalrous knight would do. Before leaving, I stopped at a nearby stall and used some money given to me for my birthday to obtain two stretches of rope. I carried both the quarter mile or so toward the goat pasture, picking up a rock twice the size of my fist along the way.

When I arrived, the boys were leaning against the outside of a wooden rail fence, without much conversation. I tossed the rock just inside the fence, where it landed with a thud in the thick grass.

“You’re going to fight with a rock?” Georgie asked. “Is that what you think you need?”

“Not against you,” I said. “It’s for the goat.”

Fifty yards or so away, a billy goat and a half-dozen nannies were gathered near a salt block, feeding on a particularly tall patch of grass that had grown lush and deep green in the tropical heat and moisture.

I unbuttoned my crisp linen shirt, then began to remove my shorts, taking care to keep my two marble pouches secret.

“What is he doing?” Georgie asked, refusing to address me directly.

Timmie the Toad was quick to answer. “He always fights like that. It keeps his clothes clean. So his
moeder
won’t know he was in a fight.”

In only my sandals and underwear, I placed my clothing on the fence post, satisfied that I wouldn’t spoil any of the material with bloodstains.

“He’s crazy,” Georgie said.

Such statements have been made about the Dutch for generations. Stubbornness is often confused with craziness. The Dutch will not quit, even when we have begun something that makes little sense in the first place. This obstinacy makes us swell with pride, even as we freely admit the senselessness of it. Yet without such stubbornness, a fifth of our country would not exist, for in battling one of the greatest forces of nature, we have carved out our land in continual defiance of the entire North Sea.

“Roman gladiators fought like this,” I said. I had no idea if that was true, but it was a suitable romantic vision for me, even if I lacked a gladiator’s glistening skin and rippled muscles. My arms and neck and face and lower part of my legs were darkly tanned, yet the remainder of my body, which had been covered by clothing, was pale and skinny. My hair, near white from exposure to the sun, gave no suggestion of Roman heritage either.

I climbed over the fence, then tied one end of the rope around my waist. I tied the other end to a fence post. I held up the second piece of rope and spoke as I tied it to the same fence post.

“This is called a strangle knot,” I told Georgie. “My father taught it to me.”

I looped the working end around the post and left a small gap. After that,
the important point was to cross the second turn over the first turn, then pull the end under both turns. Much easier to show than to explain.

I tugged on the rope. “You don’t need to worry that it will come loose.”

I tossed the other end of the rope into the pasture, where it appeared to snake across the grass.

There it was. An invitation in the form of that rope, as dangerous as an actual snake. Once he accepted it by tying the other end of the second rope around his waist, we would be intertwined until one or the other surrendered. We didn’t know then how our lives would remain like that, long after that rope rotted.

Georgie climbed over the fence. He kept his clothes on and stayed at a distance, as if he expected me to jump him while he was preoccupied with securing the loose end of the rope around his waist. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? We believe others will behave the way we would behave.

He stared at me, still a respectful distance away.

“You have to take the first swing,” I explained. “My father won’t let me fight otherwise.”

“A goat,” Georgie pointed. “Coming our way.”

I glanced over my shoulder. It was the billy goat. Black all through, even the spare beard that held broken blades of grass. Its horns curved back over its skull.

“You think it would learn,” I said. “Wait a minute, will you?”

I untied the rope at my waist and took the rock and paced toward the goat. Its shoulders were about waist high to me. Yellow eyes.

“You must be very stupid,” I told the goat. I showed him the rock. “You don’t remember this?”