Thief of Glory (31 page)

I looked into his wrinkled face. I would find out later that he was only in his midforties, but labor and constant cigarettes had added a decade to his appearance. I think he understood my hesitation, for he nodded.

I bowed and put my nose deep into his hands, almost placing my head on his lap. He was greeting me as if I were his son.

What I didn’t know was that Adi had spent long hours describing me to them, and describing the previous nights where I’d passed the hours lying on a thick branch of the tree outside the drainage ditch that had once held an ambushing python. I also didn’t know that his mother, Utami, who ruled the
household, had forced Sukurno to accept my inclusion on the mats that served as their beds.

She was a short, squat woman, with thick calluses from the basket handles used to carry rice. Yet I would learn that her touch was velvet. Adi was her only child, the one who had been born last. All the others before him had died before reaching school age, and she adored him, often kissing him lightly on his nose and lips, as if to tell him that she found his deformity to be beautiful to her.

Sukurno had argued against my presence among them because of the risk and the need to hide my true identity. There was no reason to not fear punishment for treason against the Japanese war efforts. Rumors of my existence would surely spread once even a single person outside the family knew, but long before such news reached Nakahara, the family would have been attacked by the older teenage sons of their neighborhood friends, the radical and independence-minded
pemuda
, the youth groups, who wanted neither Japanese nor Dutch rule on the island and, like the Hitler youth groups in Europe, were barely more than thugs who roamed unchallenged by their elders.

Why had Utami fought on my behalf?

The trading that Adi and I accomplished did have economic benefits to the family, but I doubt that is why I was accepted into their home. I had co-opted Adi into my cause of helping the women and children of the camp survive with our daily delivery of food and medicine, and most of our profits went to those rations. And even if we had been driven by the greatest gain for ourselves, our increased earnings would not have been worth the risk his parents took in pretending that I was a cousin from Semarang, staying after I’d become orphaned.

Instead, I believe she was driven by love for Adi. I was his first and his only friend, someone who accepted him as they did.

I could never forget the moment, on the evening that I trusted him to bury
her, when Adi stroked the perfection of Jasmijn’s face, when he believed that she’d been asleep. Nor could I forget his words and the sorrow in his words.
“Don’t let her wake. Sometimes the little ones see my mouth and they don’t understand I am not a monster.”

He was not a monster. I would never have known that, had not circumstances put us together long enough for me to no longer notice his horribly distorted face and the peculiar noises he made and the high nasal tones of his speech.

As I would learn in adulthood, with no separation between his nasal cavity and mouth, it was physically impossible for Adi to accomplish what the rest of us take for granted, indeed what takes no thought during the process of forming our words as we speak. To make our sounds, it requires air pressure in the mouth; correct speech requires the soft palate at the back of the mouth to lift and move toward the throat so that air and sound can be directed outward. We also require the area of hard tissue at the roof of our mouth for our tongue to tap and touch as we articulate different sounds. Adi’s soft palate was incapable of closing off the nasal cavity through his mouth, and the cleft of his palate had robbed him of most of the surface area for his tongue to deliver consonants with any precision. Worse, as a little boy still unaware of his handicap, for years he’d strained without success to mimic those around him and had learned grunts and growls that had become an unconscious habit he could not escape.

It is not difficult to imagine Utami’s anguish in the months after he was born, her attempts to suckle him as he vainly tried to create a vacuum with his mouth against her breasts. Later, his isolation as a child, bewildered at his differentness, would have torn her heart, and when he learned to understand the words he struggled to speak, the taunts of unkind strangers would have been barbs piercing her just as deeply as they did Adi. To watch him step out of the hut in the evenings, when darkness would protect him, would have been gut-wrenching, to know that he would be unlikely to share a first kiss or hold
hands with a young woman, to understand he would not be able to whisper poetry in the ear of a woman to take as his bride. All of that because of a genetic aberration seemingly placed upon him with arbitrary indifference.

To someone, however, who believes that good comes from bad, who believes in divine purpose, Adi was paying the price for the dozens of lives that were saved by the food and medicine we brought into camp. Had he not been disfigured, he would have not been at the drainage ditch on the night that Laura was attacked by the python; had he not been disfigured, he would not have been willing to join another outcast, me, in those efforts.

If this is true, it would mean that I, too, had paid a price to be in the same position. If my sisters and mother were still alive, I would not be strapping myself beneath a bread truck on a daily basis and roaming the village like a native to procure those supplies.

While I had volunteered—without doubt because it didn’t matter to me whether I lived or died—it wasn’t a willing sacrifice. I was angry and depressed, which would be expected, given what had been taken away from me. But I was too young to realize that it should be expected. I had no appetite. I could not sleep and spent most of each night on the mat in their home listening to Utami’s soft snoring on the mat she shared with Sukurno. And I seethed with a rage I dared not admit, even to myself. Yet I also dared not look up from that task because it would have allowed for a sorrow that I could not bear. All that anchored me was the sole purpose of self-imposed heroics, a purpose that outweighed my rage, as I was to discover on an afternoon when three boys, barely older than Adi, managed to trap us in an alley.

It began with a barked order to halt.

Our first mistake was to look back.

We saw them at the entrance to the alley; each carried a rifle hand-carved from wood; each was marching toward us with the butt of the rifle resting on an upraised palm, the top of the rifle leaning on the left shoulder. It showed the
officiousness and self-importance of a petty bureaucrat. Worse, as we immediately discovered, it was combined with a degree of fanaticism.

Our second mistake was to ignore the order and continue walking toward the end of the alley, where it spilled out to the town square.

“Halt!”

Apparently, as soldiers in training for future battles in the independence movement, they fully believed they had authority and were irked that the authority was ignored.

We heard rushed footsteps and turned to face what was obviously a gleeful test of their military endeavors.

Naturally, Adi and I stopped.

“At attention,” the middle one stated, the commander of the small army. He was slightly taller than his companions. All three, in ragged shirts and shorts, wore shoes. This was significant. Not many natives were able to find shoes.

I saluted. It was mockery, but he took himself so seriously he didn’t understand that and gave me a salute in return.

“What’s in the box?” Commander asked Adi.

Adi and I stood side by side. I was by far the smallest of the five of us. Adi carried a small box. It held a few bottles of sulfa pills, a real score for us.

Adi didn’t like to speak. Around anyone but me or family, he kept his jaws clamped, as if somehow that could mitigate the gap of exposed upper gums and teeth. He had small balls of muscle at the joint of each side of his jaw from that continuous pressure.

As always since beginning the trading business with Adi, I focused on matching the local accent. I was close enough to be believable as a cousin from the city. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s his business.”

Commander narrowed his eyes at me. “Silence!”

“Come on,” I said to Adi. “This is a waste of time. Let’s go.”

Instantly, all three of them pointed their rifles at us, belly height.

“Please,” I said. “Be merciful. Don’t shoot.”

I was the only one who thought I was funny. Adi nudged me to be silent. He knew them. I didn’t.

“Guard them,” Commander snarled to his friends. “If they move, shoot to kill.”

Commander moved closer to Adi. “Show me what’s in the box.”

I stepped between them, and Commander swung his rifle and cracked me across the ribs.

“No!” Adi said. “Leave him alone.”

Under normal conditions, the words he forced out reached the world as a high-pitched nasal grunting. Now, under stress, it was even more distorted.

Commander imitated Adi, and his friends laughed. I saw the hurt in Adi’s eyes, and I fought a cold surge of rage and the immediate impulse to kick him in the groin. That would have diverted any further teasing of Adi and satisfied my emotions.

But I was highly aware of my status as an imposter, and I realized how any escalation of this might draw closer attention to my identity. Truly, I didn’t fear for my own safety, but I was acutely aware that no one else but me could deliver the sulfa pills and all the other supplies that Dr. Eikenboom needed so badly.

“Sing us a song,” the one on the left said, using the same nasal grunting sound and poking Adi in the belly with the end of his rifle. “We need a good laugh.”

This would have been the moment to protest on Adi’s behalf. Even if it would have been useless in preventing more mockery, it would have shown him that I was clearly on his side. That I was his friend.

“And you,” Commander told me.

“What?”

“You sing a song like he would. You know, like this.” And Commander sang a lullaby as if he too had a cleft palate.

I shook my head in protest. This was going too far.

“No?” he asked, drunk on his own power. “No?”

He cracked me across the ribs again, then grabbed my hair and pulled me down to my knees.

“And you,” he said to Adi, in the mocking nasal voice. “On your knees. This is how we treat anyone who defies our orders!”

We knelt.

The entire time, I memorized their faces.

If there came a time that the Japanese were gone, I would find them and make them pay for how they had humiliated Adi.

F
ORTY
-T
WO

Months and months before, on a warm, dark night, Adi had taken Jasmijn’s tiny and still body from my hands and promised to bury her as if she had been his own sister.

It had been no easy task. Taking her body to a priest for a church burial would have led to questions he could not answer. But a hidden and unmarked grave somewhere not easily found or disturbed—where untamed vegetation would have been a desecration in itself—would have been too disrespectful.

He’d chosen to sneak at night into the pauper’s cemetery where his own brothers and sisters had been buried. Near the small headstone of his own sister’s grave where no one would tread—she had died of influenza at age two—he’d carefully removed sod, dug deep into the moist soil, wrapped Jasmijn in a blanket, covered her with dirt, prayed over her, patted the sod in place, and carried away the excess soil in a cloth bag that had once held twenty pounds of dried rice.

Daily, I sat near the headstone and mourned her as if only the day before death had taken her from me. Daily, I would search my memory to wonder if there was anything else I could have done to keep her alive, and that would invariably lead me to grief over losing Aniek, Nikki, and my mother, thoughts that renewed my rage, not dissipated it.

Adi knew better than to interrupt those thoughts, so on the afternoon his shadow fell over me, that told me something of importance had occurred, and it was not difficult to guess.

“The trains have arrived,” I said.

“Yes.”

We both knew what that meant. British and Australian soldiers would begin the task of guarding the women and children as they marched from the camp to the train stations.

Officially, the war had ended a few weeks before. But real freedom had not come to the camp as a result. The women and children had simply woken to an unfamiliar sound. Silence. No screaming from Japanese soldiers, no roll call, no counting to ten in a foreign language.

They found the front gate open and the soldiers gone. But it had taken less than a day to realize they were not safe outside the gates, for the villagers, goaded by the young men who had carried wooden rifles and marched in formations, refused to trade with the women and were openly hostile, to the point where they soon realized they were in more danger outside the gates than inside.

The Indonesians had learned to live without colonialism, and Dutch were not welcome on the island. For them, now that the weed had been eradicated by the Japanese, they did not want roots to take hold again.

British soldiers had arrived to protect us in our prison, bringing with them food and medicine. But I was too restless to stay among them. So I had stayed with Adi and his family, acutely aware of the danger of the independence movement from all the rumors and gossip around me.

“You cannot stay,” he said.

I stood. “You of all people know I will make my own choice.”

Yet I was only delaying the inevitable. I really didn’t have a choice. While I had family through Adi, unless I was going to spend my entire life applying the dye from betel nut juice to my skin, eventually I would have to become Dutch again. And the Dutch were not welcome in this land.

“One of the boys is near death,” he told me. “It is rumored that he will live, but I have heard at the market that the police are looking for someone like you.”

It was the talk of the village, that at three separate times, just before sunset,
each of three teenage boys had been ambushed and attacked by an unknown assailant armed with a cricket bat, and each had been left battered and bleeding. It was speculated that gang members of an opposing independence squad were responsible, but apparently the police thought differently at this point.