Thief of Glory (32 page)

I looked at my arms and hands, and Adi understood.

“Come home,” he said. “My mother has prepared the bath for you.”

We ran and found that the hut was filled with smoke. Utami had filled pots with water and had warmed the water on the stove. On the floor were the rinds of the lemons that she had squeezed into the water.

She handed me a small stack of rags cut into squares. My modesty to them was amusing, but they had always respected it, and both of them left me alone with the water.

I soaked the first of the cloths in the water and squeezed the mixture of water and lemon juice on my other arm and wiped with vigor. The rag absorbed a hue of brown, leaving my skin mottled.

What was more important was my hair, and the lemon juice cleaned it almost completely of the betel nut stain. I was Dutch again. Utami had foreseen the danger in that too.

The neatly folded clothes did not consist of shorts and a shirt, but a dress. And somewhere, somehow, she had found me a wig.

Perhaps we could have had the luxury of waiting until nightfall before sneaking me back to the camp, but it wasn’t a certainty. Nothing had been certain for a long time. Rumors had swirled as the war neared an end, rumors about the arrival of British and Australian soldiers, about whether the Dutch would fight back against the Indonesian rebels. It had been no different with speculation about when the women and children would be escorted from the camp to ships on the coast, or indeed what would happen once we were on the ships.

It could easily happen that the train would be loaded in a matter of hours, and that by nightfall, the camp would be empty.

Utami knelt in front of me and inspected my appearance.

“Very attractive,” she said. “Don’t get in a fight on the way.”

“Yes,” Adi said. “There are dangerous attackers armed with cricket bats.”

He knew.

“I will be back,” I said. I was sad. Very sad. I should have been fighting tears. But most emotion had already been squeezed out of me. “Someday I will be back. I promise.”

“Of course,” she said. She straightened. It was obvious that she could not speak without bursting into tears.

“Come on,” Adi said. “But first, this.”

He drew me in and hugged me. I wanted to push away, but sensed that would be far too hurtful for him.

“Only here could I do that,” he said. “Not at the camp gate. If anyone saw me close to a girl, they would wonder who you really were.”

It would have been patronizing to deny that. No girl would allow Adi near. My sorrow for his future overwhelmed me.

“If that is the case,” I said, “then I shall do this here too.”

I hugged him in return. Less from my own need than what I knew he needed.

That’s the closest I came to breaking down since the death of Jasmijn. Holding him, smelling the garlic of his skin and the adolescent tang of hormones, understanding that when I let go and when he walked away from me at the gate, he would be alone again.

But then, so would I.

And it’s a feeling that never left, through seven more decades, and a feeling that still shrouded me in the holding cell in DC where, at age eighty-one, I faced my daughter, the lawyer.

F
ORTY
-T
HREE

Journal 35—Washington, DC

“One. Question.” This came from my daughter, Rachel Prins. Divorced and back to her maiden name. I’d expected more anger. But instead, she sounded sad. She was across from me in the holding cell. It had come full circle, just over an even three score and ten years after the marble game beneath the banyan tree that had led me here.

She was in her late thirties, and thus you can conclude I was past forty when she was born, late for first fatherhood. I looked at her, wondering if there really had been a time when she fit in the crook of my arm and I’d wept with joy at holding her. Time heals all wounds, but it also wears away at some of the best memories a man can have.

“Just one question?” I asked. I kept my hands on my knees. Best way to hide a tremor that came and went with unsettling unpredictability. “It must be said. You do have a habit of poking around.”

I tried to breathe through my mouth to avoid the odor of vomit and urine in the holding cell.

“I do have a list of questions,” she answered. Her hair in no-nonsense corporate business style matched the blandness of her expensive pants and jacket. A strand of hair had fallen across her forehead and was stuck in place by the humidity. It, like the rest of her hair, was ash blond, the way it had been since her childhood, and I didn’t think she needed to assist it yet with coloring. My own hair had resisted gray until my late fifties.

She gave me a resigned smile. “You have a habit of avoiding most of them. So for now, I’ll stick to the most important and salient question for this situation.”

She was unaware of how deeply I grieved my inability to open up to her. I studied her and marveled that she was my child, grown or not. I’d never lost that sense of wonder, just as I’d never been able to express it.

“One, you fly out of town and fail to tell me,” she said, holding up her index finger. Then doubled it with the second finger. “Two—”

“I suppose,” I interrupted, adding disdain to my voice to conceal my anxiety, “next you’re going to tell me this police station is in the Capitol Hill precinct?”

I wasn’t near the point where I couldn’t recognize people or where I would mistake someone for another person and, for example, blissfully chatter to Rachel, thinking that she was my long-gone sister Nikki. When I arrived at that stage, I would be so far gone that I wouldn’t realize I was at that stage. Would that be a blessing? Or a snake eating its own tail?

No, my problem was that the episodes were more frequent. It would feel as if I had snapped out of a daze, with no recollection of the immediate time span before it, or even how long I’d been in the daze. With Rachel across from me, my last meaningful short-term memory was sitting for tea in a hotel with Laura, but the agony was in trying to recall what city. Washington, DC, I hoped.

The room I was in didn’t have any windows. A police officer had just escorted my daughter in. Good evidence of the kind of room that held me, just not the geographical location of the room. If this was Washington, DC, nothing good could have come out of it. At least in my daughter’s eyes.

I waited, trying not to show that I waited.

“As if you don’t know where we are,” she said. “I’m not going to fall for your distraction techniques.”

I took that as a yes. Capitol Hill. If I was here, something had happened, then. The police had confiscated my moleskin notebook, so I couldn’t be sure. Hopefully what had happened would have been worth recording in my daily diary, and more hopefully, I would have logged it in, or at least logged in my intentions.

“Two,” she continued, “the phone call that I get isn’t from you, but a woman I’ve never heard of before. Who expected me to jump on an airplane and fly across the continent merely because she asked.”

“Her name is Laura Jansen,” I answered. Good. Laura had not abandoned me. Yet. “I had hoped, eventually, to introduce her to you.”

The hope was probably overly optimistic, given my situation. There wouldn’t have been any point in an introduction if Laura decided to go back to the Netherlands.

“Yes, I know her name is Laura,” she said. “She told me over the phone when she asked if I would fly all the way here to DC to help. If she hadn’t described the interior of your condo and her large suitcase that was sitting in the hallway, I wouldn’t have believed her story.”

In the spider webs of my memory, I was able to pull forth the recollection of my own flight to DC from Los Angeles the day before, with Laura and I each taking only a carry-on for what was supposed to be a short stay in the capital. The large suitcase is what she’d taken from Amsterdam and left behind. That had given me satisfaction, knowing the suitcase had anchored her enough that she would at least return to Los Angeles.

“You went to my condo?” I asked.

“On the way from my office to the airport,” she said. “For all I knew, someone had stolen your identity and it was some kind of scam. If you ever
bothered to answer your home phone, or if you had a cell phone, it might help.”

“I don’t think they allow cell phones in here.”

“They allow one call,” she answered. With me too ashamed to admit to the police in Laura’s presence that I couldn’t remember my daughter’s phone number.

Rachel continued, exasperation obvious on her face. “And who the woman is should be at the top of my list of questions.”

She challenged me with another stare and it took effort for me to maintain eye contact. Any reaction from me except studied indifference would be like a poker tell that Rachel would immediately spot. I was an expert at studied indifference.

“I met her at the hotel before taking a cab here,” she said. “After all these years of your self-imposed monkhood, she’s the one? I’ve seen them much younger show some real interest in you.”

“She is the most beautiful woman I know,” I said. “And I resent your obvious ageism.”

I wasn’t going to share how my heart had thumped like an adolescent boy, earlier in the week, when I’d opened the door for the totally unexpected sight of the return of Laura into my life after more than a sixty-year absence.

“If that’s the case, why separate hotel rooms? At the least, it would save money.”

“That would not be proper,” I said. “Nor would I ask her to be improper on my behalf. What time is it? As much as I resent your ageism, I resent it more that I have to admit I’m tired because of my age.”

“Time for you to tell me why you are here,” she said. She did something out of character for her. She reached across and placed a hand on mine. I did something out of character. I allowed the touch.

I tried to piece it together. I was in DC. That had been established. I’d made it to Capitol Hill. With that to jog my memory, I could picture the Rotunda. There was a long underground hallway that led from the Rotunda to the offices of the senators.

I didn’t remember much after showing my visitors pass to the female guard.

Rachel removed her hand from mine and took a breath. “Please. Tell me. Why?”

“Do you ever listen to yourself?” I asked. I needed more deflection that might bring out more clues. “Why is the scariest question in existence. Why does the earth exist? Why is there evil on this earth? Why—”

“You are truly a horse’s ass. Why would you tackle a senator and try to pull his pants down?”

Aaah. There it was. The detail I needed to open the floodgates. Much of the day’s earlier events swooshed back to the front of my memory. I had tackled the senator; but a man had to defend himself against injustice.

“I did not try to pull his pants down,” I said with dignity. That had not been my plan. “I’m sure that’s been misinterpreted. I was trying to pull his pants cuffs upward. To expose his calf. That is only possible when you are sitting on a man’s back, looking downward at his shoes. You grab a foot and bend it toward yourself and hold with one hand while using the other hand to pull the pants leg and expose the calf. Doesn’t that sound much more like the truth?”

I held my breath and waited for her answer. Not everything had swooshed back into my short-term memory. I wondered if my plan had succeeded and hated the need for a third-party confirmation.

“I suppose it could have happened,” she said. “Although witnesses have conflicting reports. That still begs the question. An eighty-two-year-old senator and you attack him in a hallway outside his office. Why?”

“For the record, I did not try to pull his pants
down.
Please clarify that wherever and whenever possible.”

“He walks with a cane,” she said. “His partial flew twenty feet down the hallway when you tackled him.”

My own teeth are all in place, I would like to mention. No bridges. No partials.

“I asked him politely to show me his calf,” I said, more of the memory emerging from my cobwebs. “I even warned him of the consequences if he didn’t.
And
he had the audacity to swing at me with said cane. Again, I was not the bully in this situation. I was firmly taught as a child that I was not allowed to fight until someone took the first swing at me.”

This was something my father had been adamant about, and, with the exception of attacking Georgie, I’d not once broken that rule since my first fight at age seven. Yet, in reflection of my own ageism, it had not occurred to me that someone as old as the senator could swing so fast. My ribs ached where he’d made contact with his cane, and I’m sure the bruise was already black.

“Why?” Rachel asked. “Why did you fly from Los Angeles to DC to try to pull down the pants of a senator from Wyoming?”

“Up,” I corrected. “I tried to pull his pants up. Did the cops mention if there was anything on his leg?”

“The senator from Wyoming?”

“Like I pulled someone else’s pants up? Who else would I mean?” I had set aside my recent fear of travel and flown a long way to find out. Hadn’t risked much, though, in attacking the senator. What were they going to do, give me a life sentence? If you get to the point where you can’t remember why you are in jail, how remedial is that?

“Let me make sure to put that at the top of my legal inquiries,” she said. “Check the senator’s leg for birthmark.”

She was fishing.

“Tattoo?” she asked.

I didn’t reply. That would require explaining that I had been looking for the scar of teeth marks. My teeth marks from nearly seven decades earlier.

“Let me get right on this birthmark-tattoo question,” she said, defeated but not prepared to admit it. “First thing, say, next decade?”

So no marks reported on the senator’s left calf. I sure hoped I’d remembered to pull up the pants on his left calf. Be stupid to come all the way here and grab the wrong leg. That left three alternatives. I’d grabbed the wrong leg, or there was nothing on his left calf and I was wrong about his identity, or no one had cared to watch closely during the commotion.