Thief of Glory (39 page)

Rachel said quietly, “Senator Knight, this letter is written in Dutch.
I’m glad Washington hosts so many nationalities, because it was a simple matter to find a translator on short notice. I had it done in case it’s been too long since you’ve used your Dutch. It’s a letter that never reached your mother.”

He had his glass halfway to his mouth, but those words stopped him and he set the glass down.

“My mother.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her camp years?” she asked.

Knight gave Rachel a challenging look, someone too proud to acknowledge an act of shame. “My mother gave birth to a half sister who was half Japanese. My mother raised the child in a village outside the camp, because she would have been ostracized by the Dutch for becoming impregnated by the commander’s rape of her.”

“Dr. Eikenboom’s account of the situation is different from that, Senator Knight. Dr. Eikenboom’s testimony is that it wasn’t rape, but consensual. Over a period of weeks.”

She’d spoken gently, but he slammed his glass down, shattering it across the table. He ignored the shards. As did she.

“If you are now threatening me with—”

Rachel reached across and put her hand on the senator’s wrist. The waiter had come to the table. With her free hand, and without looking up, Rachel waved him away.

“Senator,” she said, “Jeremiah hasn’t shared much with me about his time in the Dutch East Indies. I only know enough to have wept on your behalf when I learned the truth. I could only imagine how you would have fought to understand what your mother did, and how a part of you must have been aware of her nightly visits to the commander.”

“Enough!” He began to slide out of the booth.

She did not let go of his hand. “I am begging you, read the letter.”

“We are finished here.” He was now standing, his voice almost choking.

I could not pretend that I liked him now any more than when we first met. Even so, I ached with his pain.

“Your mother,” Rachel said, “saved hundreds and hundreds of lives. God Himself only knows the price she had to pay for it. Read the letter, Senator, and find the peace that you deserve after all these years.”

She pulled on his wrist, and he sat, grudgingly. He did not reach for the letter, but struggled to keep control of his emotions.

“Then let me read the letter to you,” Rachel said. “The translation.”

He didn’t protest, so she unfolded another piece of paper. I could not imagine how I would have found the strength to do this, and I felt gratitude wash over me for my daughter’s strength on my behalf.

She read to Knight, lifting her eyes occasionally. “In recognition of the sacrifice and risks that Georgina Ruth Smith took to ensure that Red Cross supplies reached those in desperate need of medicine and food, I declare, as the Queen of the Netherlands, that royal recognition should be bestowed upon her for—”

“Red Cross supplies,” Knight said, with vague bewilderment.

She gave him the original, and the translation.

That’s when I spoke. “Georgie—”

“I am Senator Knight.”

“Senator Knight,” I said, swallowing a prideful reaction of anger at his admonishment, “I have been wrong for seven decades. I am ashamed of that, but I will not be ashamed of what I must say.”

Knight’s hands, on the table, were trembling. He did not pull them away from the spreading puddle of gin and tonic among the shards.

“Senator Knight,” I said, “there was a night that I snuck into the commander’s house. I was determined to steal the Red Cross supplies that he had been withholding from the camp. Your mother caught me and prevented me from doing so. I thought she was collaborating with the Japanese. I was wrong.
She was using her time in the house to pull medicine out of full boxes in such a way that Nakahara wouldn’t realize she was stealing medicine for the doctors in camp.”

Rachel continued for me, “Each dose of sulfa that saved a life was a dose of sulfa that your mother had to risk a beating or possible death to steal. Doctors Eikenboom and Kloet knew this but had to pretend that, indeed, she spent evenings with the commander for her own benefit. No one knew that much of what Nakahara gave her for food and luxuries to be his mistress was what she in turn gave to the doctors to distribute.”

This was the truth that I had been incapable of seeing as a boy. Georgie’s mother was a heroine, not a whore of Babylon.

“Make no mistake,” I said to him. “I do not see some kind of maudlin reconciliation between us. It would be a pretense by both of us. But I am the one who owes you an apology for the words I said to you about your mother when we last faced each other in that village in the Dutch East Indies. I am sorry. Very sorry. You did not deserve that, and I feel shame for the years you lost when you should have been able to love and honor your mother as she should have been loved and honored by you as her son.
”

In the candlelight, tears ran down Knight’s face, sliding in and out of deep wrinkles in his skin. I didn’t like him, but in that moment, I could feel love for him. It would be wonderful if we could always see that what we have in common as humans outweighs our differences.

“Don’t you tell me how and when I should love and honor my mother.” He spoke as if fingers were squeezing his throat. He was angry. “Don’t assume I didn’t love and honor her no matter what she appeared to be. Can you say the same about your mother?”

“For that too,” I said, knowing that with Rachel in front of us, my answer would be and had to be ambiguous, “I am sorry.”

Senator Knight made the waving motion of someone indicating it didn’t
matter. “If your apology is finished, then go. I will make no pretenses about reconciliation either.”

Rachel said, “Not yet. Laura gave me another letter. Both of you need to know about it too. She told me, Senator, that she wanted you to be with Jeremiah when he learned of it.”

She pulled it out of her purse. “In recognition of the sacrifice and risks that Jeremiah Prins took to ensure that food and medicine reached those in desperate need of medicine and food, I declare, as the Queen of the Netherlands, that royal recognition should be bestowed upon him for—”

“Enough,” I told Rachel. This letter was a surprise to me. “That changes nothing for me.”

“Or me,” the senator said to Rachel. “Your father as a boy wanted all of camp to know that my mother was a whore. And you know what stopped him from telling?”

He turned to me. “I knew the truth about your mother. And so did you. And you knew I knew the truth from Dr. Kloet. Your mother did what she felt she had to do to help her children. That makes her no different than mine. With one difference. I am alive. My mother could live with what she did. Yours could not. Does Ms. Prins know what happened at camp?”

I had been prepared for this. I didn’t want it. But I had owed him an apology and had no choice but to risk this when my leverage over him was gone. The consolation was that he did not know how accurate it was to say that my mother could not live with the choices she had made.

It was a horrible secret that I had kept. Conscious that Rachel was at the table, I tried to convince him there was no need to continue our war. “I wish you peace, Senator. It’s something that will always escape me. Can’t we stand and shake hands and agree those were terrible times?”

The senator sneered. “You’ve always sickened me with your self-righteousness. You didn’t come here to apologize, but to trade. You knew if you didn’t
deliver the letter, Laura would. Think I haven’t thrived in this kind of politics here for decades? Your bet was that a pretended act of nobility, in front of your daughter, would serve to keep me quiet after I learned this about my mother.”

I had guessed correctly, then, about the marble. Had it been in his possession now, it would have remained there.

Still sneering, the senator turned to Rachel. “When it’s convenient for you, ask Jeremiah about how his baby sister really died. About a feather in her mouth that Dr. Kloet observed, an observation he later shared with my mother. Jeremiah knows the truth. But I doubt he’ll tell you.”

Knight waved for a waiter’s attention and pointed at the mess.

As the waiter walked away, Knight said to Rachel, “Thanks for the letter. In these patriotic times, it will make a wonderful campaign prop for my son. And if your father tries to go public with the details of how the letter was earned, then the world can find out that Jeremiah’s mother murdered her own children.”

He gave me a cold smile. “You and I, we are finished here, are we not? I hope I never see you again.”

I held the marble in my hand and let Rachel lead me out of the restaurant.

F
ORTY
-N
INE

I paced the sitting area of the hotel room. The curtains were open, and it was a sunny morning. I did not feel sunny. I had slept less than usual. It had been painful adding to my journal the conversation in the restaurant the evening before. But if I had not included it, I would have been lying to myself. It’s one thing to hide a secret. It’s another to deny it.

“Will you sit?” Rachel asked me. She was in an armchair, opposite where Laura sat on a sofa. They’d ordered coffee from room service, and the empty cups were on a table, the pot untouched. I was very conscious that Laura had not given me any indication of whether she had the courage to live with me as my identity left me. I didn’t blame her. It was one thing to prop myself up by believing I could read my journals in an effort to hold on to who I was. She would need more than memories as I grew older; why choose for future companionship a body that would eventually carry an empty mind?

I looked at her, and she must have sensed I needed strength. Laura stood and walked to me and held my forearm and stroked my hand.

I could not allow myself to learn to lean on her. I disengaged myself, moved to the window, and stared at the parking lot that was becoming as familiar as a friend. “I can’t sit down because when I say what needs to be said, I want to be able to look away from both of you. If I am trapped between you, that won’t be possible.”

Some of the lines painted on the pavement were crooked. I would have rather made that my focus. I said, “His mother spent nights with the camp commander. But my mother …”

I shivered as if fighting malaria. Not once had I spoken of this. The growing suspicion after Jasmijn had died in her sleep. Then, at camp, tracing the memories of those months. Still not believing it, pushing away the thoughts.

Yet …

After rumors had reached the kitchen that all the dogs would be removed from camp, eaten by the Indonesians, Pietje had woken up with his black puppy Coacoa dead, a blessing, we all believed, because Pietje had buried his friend, not watched it be taken away.

What had my mother said?
“If you really cared about Pietje and cared about the dog, you would have walked away and let that dog die a merciful death.”

And in the days that followed, my mother had nearly died from blood poisoning from long scratches down her leg. The scratches of a dog’s claws as it fought suffocation, not scratches from the kitchen as she’d said.

Then Jasmijn. Sweet, sweet Jasmijn. Almost dead and certain to die soon. A mercy. Then I had brought her to life again by finding the insulin, which was only prolonging the inevitable. So cruel. And then the blessing returned. She was lifeless the very next morning, a feather in her mouth. The feather from a pillow.

Later, the rumors of the Borneo plan grew stronger, that the mothers would be taken with none left to care for the children. With Aniek growing weaker and weaker from hunger until a fever attacked her. So weak that death would be a mercy. A mercy that my mother bestowed.

Georgie knew too. His words from the previous evening were already transcribed on the pages of Journal 35.
“Your mother did what she felt she had to do to help her children. That makes her no different than mine. With one difference. I am alive.”

“Elsbeth,” I said, willing myself to breathe out the words, “my mother, Elsbeth, killed Jasmijn and killed Aniek.”

I’ve often wondered if Mrs. Aafjes’s rants about Masada and Jews
committing mass suicide on a mountaintop had planted the idea in the mind of a woman with an existing mental illness, or if it had been a natural progression of mercy killings from a dog that was going to die anyway, to her suffering baby who would not be able to receive adequate treatment, and then Aniek.

It was quiet behind me. I stared down at the crooked white painted lines of the parking lot and the dusty black roof of a compact car. I spoke, needing to get it out. “My mother tried to kill Pietje. That’s what broke him. Broke us. She wanted to protect Pietje by killing him.”

I turned to both of the women I loved. “Tell me. My mother murdered two of her daughters and nearly killed Pietje. How could anyone expect me to fix that?”

Hidden in a drawer in my office is a sketch I take out occasionally to remind myself of a time in my mother’s life when demons were not clawing at her soul.