Thief of Glory (33 page)

I hid my disappointment at the new realization that I’d not yet discovered what I had come to Washington to confirm and accomplish. I’ve had a lifetime of practice at hiding disappointment. And, I can say with confidence, at my age, that means much more practice than just about anyone.

“I’m here to make an offer,” she said. “I will do what it takes to rescue you from this. In return, what I want is not reimbursement for my flight or my lost billable hours.”

“What do you want?”

“I want your story.”

“Story?”

“Over the phone, Laura Jansen said she’d known you since you were children. Old flame?”

Her eyes widened as she repeated herself. “Old flame. Flying here, that’s all I could decide. There never was anything tender between you and Louise. I’m long past caring that I was born six months after the wedding. Is that it? Laura is your true love?”

Louise. The woman who had been my wife for thirty years, then left me to find a new life before she died. And died to cancer six months after that. I had a couple of photo albums somewhere to remind me of that life, if I ever wanted to find them.

Rachel leaned in and spoke in a teasing tone. “Mawidge. Twue wuv and mawidge.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“That’s because you always refused to watch
The Princess Bride
with me. Was this why you always refused? Your own heartbreak about your one true love?”

I grunted. Noncommittal. I hoped.

“See,” she said. “I want to know. Was there ever a time you had feelings? This Laura, was she your one true—”

“Stop,” I said. “You are mocking me.”

I didn’t want to be reminded of my biggest regret. Laura had agreed to meet me at the base of a statue in a square in Amsterdam, me almost twenty by then. How differently the rest of my life would have turned out had I had the courage to show up as we planned.

That feeling of regret never failed to stab me. Older memories are so vivid, it takes no effort to find them. There are times, I’ve discovered, that it seems like I am a boy, and the Jeremiah Prins at age eighty-one is a convincing dream, and that as soon as I wake, I will be that boy again, on a straw mat, pinching bedbugs, a belly aching from hunger.

Rachel leaned back. “She said that the two of you spent part of your childhoods at a camp. In the Dutch East Indies. Where you were held prisoner by the Japanese for most of the Second World War.”

I made another noncommittal grunt.

“How old am I?” Rachel asked.

“That’s rhetorical, right?” This was habit. I’d learned over the last
months that this was a wonderful evasion and often resulted in helpful answers to questions I should have easily been able to handle but couldn’t.

“I’m a fully grown woman,” she said. “I am a partner in a law practice, and yet only now do I learn you were born in Indonesia.”

“Dutch East Indies,” I corrected. The Dutch had not relinquished it as a colony until 1949. That’s how it is. The older memories are right there in front of you, yet daily events recede and return like an unpredictable tide.

“And,” she continued, “you spent time in a concentration camp? This, I had no idea of either.”

I closed my eyes, trying to push away the one memory that was my greatest shame. Losing all my other memories would be worth it if that one disappeared as well.

“Yes, I spent time in a Jappenkamp.”

“That’s what I want then. Your story. Write it or dictate it. I don’t care. I want it. That’s my price.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I want to understand you,” she said. This time, her voice was soft. I could see in her face the little girl she once had been. “When you are gone, I want to weep over what I lost, not what I never had.”

“Maybe,” I said, trying to push away that one memory, “there wasn’t much for you to lose.”

Tightness returned to her face, even as a single tear rolled toward her chin. “Then
I
want to be the one to decide if there was much to lose. Not you.”

I knew what she needed from me. What she had always needed from me. A father who hadn’t spent a lifetime resisting any kind of emotional closeness. A father who sat with his little girl to watch
The Princess Bride.

With the memory of why I had come to Washington to face the senator successfully triggered by Rachel’s presence, I realized that if I had decided to
reconcile with a boyhood enemy while I still could, what justification did I have to deny my daughter, the one I loved more than my own life?

“I will do it,” I told her, with the sensation that I was swaying at the edge of a precipice.

Still, it would be on my terms.

F
ORTY
-F
OUR

In my hotel room, my morning’s second cup of tea was cold long before the sun had risen. Tired old men wake early, even when they are exhausted. Words from Ecclesiastes about old age taunted me.
Those who keep watch over the house begin to tremble … one is awakened by the sound of a bird, and all their songs grow faint … because man goes to his eternal home … the silver cord is removed … the golden bowl is broken … the pitcher is shattered.

I looked out the window, at a parking lot. I had a notebook in my lap. Not a notebook computer. But a notebook. A journal. Number 35. It had a moleskin cover and a snug band to hold my fountain pen. I took an architect’s pride in neat handwriting and always wrote with deliberation, so on the occasions when I had to scratch out a word or a sentence, my single horizontal stroke still left a sense of tidiness that I was vain about.

When this one was filled, I would store it in the office of my condo, with the previous thirty-four journals on a shelf, surrounded by walls that were covered with the different-colored sticky notes that I also used to help organize my daily tasks. The system worked and would continue to work until my neurons could no longer piece together the reason for the stickies.

When this journal was finished, I would begin filling another. And another, until I could no longer make sense of why I was determined to store my recollections of each new day on paper as a way to ward off the growing inability to store them in my mind.

I knew why I spent so much time on journals to record the daily events of my life that would hold little interest for anyone else. To be human is to tell story, and to tell story is what makes us human. Our lives are unfolding stories,
and when we lose our stories, we lose ourselves. At this early stage of Alzheimer’s, I could not shake the terror of losing who I was. On this morning, only hours after agreeing to Rachel’s terms, I could admit to myself that I was also motivated to grant her request because of the fear that once those memories were lost, so was I, like a sailor clinging to the debris of a shipwreck finally slipping beneath gray waves.

I sipped on cold tea and studied in my notebook what I had written about my time in the holding cell with Rachel the previous night, pages 17 to 26 of Journal 35. Here, it was easier to make sense of it, because I could flip back to earlier pages and day by day retrace how the journey to Washington began, with the appearance of Laura, to our flight, to my walk in the corridor beneath the Rotunda.

There was a second notebook beside me. Every page blank. I purchased them by the dozen because I wanted them with lined pages and a page number at the bottom. Without the numbering, I would be lost.

I picked up the second notebook. On the inside cover, I gave it a label: Journal 1—Dutch East Indies.

At the top of the first page, I scratched away the emptiness and I wrote these words:
See 35, 17–26.
When the inevitable happened, and I wanted to know why I was reliving my childhood in the Dutch East Indies on paper, all I would need to do is open Journal 35 and reread pages 17 to 26, and learn that I was paying a debt and hoping to give my daughter a reason to mourn what she had lost when I was gone. And months from now, in following my own written instructions, I would be obeying someone from my past who was no longer me.

I stared out the window, not seeing the parking lot and the cars. Would it be important for Rachel to know that, immediately after the war was over, at the port of Semarang, in a holding camp as we waited for a ship, that one night
we had been woken by grenades tossed over the wall by Indonesian rebels? That Pietje still refused to sleep with me and stayed instead with Laura and Sophie? Or what it felt like in the port of Suez, lining up for secondhand clothing donated by people in the Netherlands, trying to comprehend that I would need the ill-fitting thick woolen jacket when I felt the first real cold of my life—the gale winds that swept the ship as it neared the North Sea?

Or my numbness when Sophie succumbed to influenza after days of fighting it, and how the ship’s captain ordered her body wrapped in a blanket and slipped into the water after a brief funeral, no differently than had been done for dozens of others during the weeks of travel from the southeast Pacific and the turquoise waters to the angry swells of the Atlantic? As her body disappeared into the water, I had no sense then that my last protector was gone. On our arrival to the Netherlands, Laura was whisked away by her wealthy family, her father and mother ignoring her pleas to take me and Pietje to their home. Instead, Pietje and I were put in a foster home, where the militant father was appalled at our wildness and ill manners when we snatched food and gobbled it the way our instincts had been trained to do by three years of near starvation. His solution had been to allow us one small piece of bread at a time, and not until we chewed slowly and finished it would he allow us another. I hated him for how he would watch and smile in satisfaction at the triumph of his willpower over us. I hated myself because I was so hungry I capitulated to his pettiness.

Or how my buried rage and helplessness at Pietje’s determined rejection of me led to a horrible moment on a bridge over a canal where, at age nineteen, I had struck a man so hard that I had to flee Holland as a murderer?

After long thought, however, I realized there was only one place to begin my story for Rachel. Where the circle began that was ending here in Washington, with the day that I met Laura. So on the first page of Journal 1—Dutch
East Indies, I began the transfer of memories that were preserved in protein and DNA and tiny bursts of electricity that jump from nerve ending to nerve ending, putting those memories into lines of blue ink.

A banyan tree begins when its seeds germinate in the crevices of a host tree. It sends to the ground tendrils that become prop roots with enough room for children to crawl beneath, prop roots that grow into thick, woody trunks and make it look like the tree is standing above the ground. The roots, given time, look no different than the tree it has begun to strangle. Eventually, when the original support tree dies and rots, the banyan develops a hollow central core.

In a kampong—village—on the island of Java, in the then-called Dutch East Indies, stood such a banyan tree almost two hundred years old. On foggy evenings, even adults avoided passing by its ghostly silhouette, but on the morning of my tenth birthday, sunlight filtered through a sticky haze after a monsoon, giving everything a glow of tranquil beauty. There, a marble game beneath the branches was an event as seemingly inconsequential as a banyan seed taking root in the bark of an unsuspecting tree, but the tendrils of the consequences became a journey that has taken me some three score and ten years to complete.

That took most of the first page of Journal 1—Dutch East Indies. I began the second page, but only after writing across the top of the left-hand side:
See 35, 17–26.
It might take a year to complete the DEI journals; if I failed to do this on every left-hand page of every journal that recounted my time at the Jappenkamp, the clumping nodules of my brain might have well pushed the neurons to the point where I’d forget where to look for the key to why I was writing.

I looked out the window again. How clearly it came back to me. On the second page, I continued.

It was market day, and as a special privilege to me, Mother had left my younger brother and twin sisters in the care of our servants …

I felt some comfort in the clarity of that recollection and satisfied that I’d chosen the right moment and place for the beginning of the first DEI journal. I set that notebook aside, and opening the latest page to Journal 35, I recounted my time in the holding cell and underlined the portion where Rachel insisted on this story as a condition for helping me. It was more important to stay in the present, so that at the end of each day, when the terrors of losing myself grew too dark to withstand, I could reassure myself by hearing from the pages the continuing unfolding of my life, proof that I was still a person, not a body that merely functioned as a machine.

Over the next few days, while the events were fresh in my memory, I would continue to journal this trip to Washington as the events occurred, no matter how it ended. Later, back in the safety of my condo in Los Angeles and trusting that my oldest memories would be the last to fade, I would take as much time as I needed to give Rachel my boyhood story, beginning with Journal 1 of DEI. Then, although I would have written this ending first, and would finish the beginning last, I would arrange all the journals chronologically, starting with the marble game beneath the banyan. The bundle of journals would be hers as I had promised, a drawn-out plea for understanding and forgiveness for failing her as a father. But she would not get it until I was gone.