Thief of Glory (4 page)

It snorted and lowered its head and charged.

I didn’t bother trying to hit it between the eyes as I’d done the previous summer with the sow. I’d already learned the hard way that there was a reason
billy goats used the top of their skulls as battering rams. Instead, I stepped sideways and grabbed one of the horns with my left hand, then used my right hand to swing the rock as hard as I could across the side of its head. The goat toppled with a strangled bleat.

I watched to see if it needed another clout, but it remained on its side, blinking and panting for breath. I brought my face down to its yellow eyes and spoke to it again. “There’s more of that if you don’t leave us alone.”

The goat squirmed and managed to get its hind feet on the ground, then its front knees. I grabbed its horns and yanked it upward so that it could find its front feet.

It swayed. I watched and waited. Finally, it turned away and staggered back toward the salt block.

I walked back to Georgie and retied myself to the rope. I had hoped my nonchalance would form an impression upon Georgie and was glad to see horror on his face. He now knew what he was up against if he wanted to fight a Dutchman.

“We should be okay now,” I said. “So if you don’t mind swinging at me, we can get started.” I could be casual about this because I’d been in many fights. The first few times, it’s all about breathing in gulps of panic as time rushes in a whirlwind about you and you madly swing in all directions. By now, I’d had lots of experience and could remain relaxed.

“Sure,” Georgie said. He reached behind his back with his left hand and pulled out the piece of rebar and advanced on me.

“Hey,” one of the boys shouted. “Not fair!”

“Fair fights are for losers,” Georgie said. He took another step.

I have often wondered if his initial intent was to scare me into an immediate surrender. Had I been prudent and done as he’d hoped, the fight would have been over. I could have even claimed the moral high ground. But I had
the confidence of a ten-year-old who had yet to meet an opponent he couldn’t quell.

My own blood lust—cold and calculating yet white hot—prevented a peaceful solution. The sight of that rod of steel in his hand snapped the switch inside my brain, and I wanted nothing more than a chance to get my teeth into his ears or nose and rip flesh away from his head. I grabbed the rope that attached Georgie to the fence post and jerked on it as hard as I could, hoping to cause him to stumble. Technically, he hadn’t yet attempted the first swing, but I was confident that if I had to justify my actions to my father, he would deem them reasonable.

Georgie lurched toward me. Instinct kept me from diving for his legs, for that would have exposed my head to a blow with the piece of deadly rebar. Instead, I rushed at him and stayed as vertical as possible, hoping to bring him into a clinch that would make it impossible for him to swing with any force.

But he was fast. Faster than I expected. He swung the rebar toward me, and I felt, rather than heard, the crack of steel across the bone of my right arm as my momentum carried me into his body. My chest crashed against his, and he fell backward. I slid forward and pinned his arms to the ground with my knees. With no hesitation I pounded my left fist into the right side of his face. Once, twice, three times. So hard that my knuckles would remain swollen for days afterward. I leaned in and chomped my teeth on his ear.

I expected him to scream, but he did not. It was eerily silent, and into this silence broke a commanding female voice.

“Stop immediately!”

Adult authority was simply not something to be questioned, and the voice rang so clearly that both Georgie and I froze. As I released his ear from my teeth and looked down on Georgie’s face, he smiled, then spit upward, covering
my eyes with phlegm. Of all the things Georgie has done, this single act is the one that conjures up instant hatred in my soul. His act of spitting had been hidden from the female voice, and if I responded by smashing his face, he would look totally without blame.

I did not move off his body until a hand yanked my left arm, near the shoulder. I stood and wiped the spit off my face with the biceps of my left arm.

Georgie stood, leaving the steel rebar in the grass at his feet, where it was invisible. “He started it,” Georgie told the woman. “If his friends say differently, they are lying and they are lying because they are his friends.”

“Georgie,” the woman answered in a flat voice, “it’s time to go home. Laura is waiting for us at the market.”

This was Laura’s oma then.

Children have no sense of the age of adults, except within a decade or so, just as adults can usually only guess a child’s age within a couple of years of accuracy. Couples back then married young and had children young, so on that morning, Laura’s grandmother, Sophie, was yet years away from her sixtieth birthday. That wasn’t something I knew then, nor cared about on that morning, but even at age ten, it didn’t escape me that Sophie was amazingly beautiful, set apart from Dutch omas who tended to wide hips and heavy busts as life wore them down. Sophie was wearing a yellow dress from her neck nearly down to her ankles, and her blond hair was pinned back.

There I stood, in my underwear, tied to a rope that was tied to a post. Sophie glanced at me, and then her gaze moved back to Georgie, who had begun to untie himself while keeping his eyes on me.

I became conscious of how badly my right forearm hurt just above the wrist. I lifted my arm slightly and fought back a scream at the bolt of agony I felt when bone grated against bone. I let my arm drop again. It wasn’t an injury that would appear immediately obvious, but Georgie’s right eye was already turning purple. Blood dripped from the obvious tooth marks in his ear.

I expected to be immediately harangued and decided I would not make an excuse or try to justify my actions. But when Laura’s oma spoke, her Dutch was elegant and enunciated with the assured clarity that comes with inherited wealth.

“We’re going to need to do something about your ear,” she told Georgie. “In this climate, infections can be very dangerous.”

She looked at me. “I trust you’ll stop this imitation of a savage and dress yourself at your earliest convenience?”

I nodded, too surprised at her calmness to speak.

She addressed the rest of the boys. “All of you, back to your mothers.”

They scampered off, probably as shocked as I was at the lack of reprisal. She led Georgie away through a nearby gate, leaving me alone in the pasture.

I fainted twice as I struggled to untie myself and woke the second time with the billy goat’s nose only inches from my eyes. It bleated something that sounded like triumph, but it spared me further battle, as all decent opponents will do when victory is assured. I might have fainted again, except by then the stinging ants had found me and I had good motivation to get back on my feet.

When I finally found my mother in the market, I was looking as good as I always did, in my freshly pressed linens. Enough time had passed that my right forearm, however, had swollen to grotesque proportions in the rising temperatures. I told her I had fallen from a tree. She was accustomed to my injuries and responded to them as I had learned to respond to a fight. Panic the first few times, but after that, as long as she was not entrenched in one of her dark moods, she responded calmly and efficiently. In this case, it was a trip to the doctor—after she completed her shopping list.

A boy falling from a tree hard enough to break both the radius and the ulna should be wearing dirty clothes and should not bear the scraped mark of a steel bar where the skin had almost split. My lie should have been obvious. But my lie was safe since before presenting myself to my mother, I’d first
tracked down the other boys and forced them to agree on a story that would be presented in common to any inquiring mothers.

The doctor did not speculate about how my arm got broken, and I didn’t see him again until weeks later, when he gave permission for the cast to be removed. That was the day before three Japanese soldiers pushed open the front door to our home and, armed with authority and a machine gun, they began the invasion of our lives.

F
IVE

In early 1942, during the six weeks it took for the bones in my right forearm to fully knit, I struggled to write and mail a sonnet to Laura Jansen, continuously irritated that I was forced to use my left hand to put ink on paper. This was the worst of my concerns, for I was innocent of the impact the Japanese Imperial military forces were having on the world in the midst of a war I knew very little about.

Not until many years later would I understand that from the day my arm was broken in late January, to when the cast was removed in early March, how much their forces accomplished in such a short time. The Japanese began and completed the siege of Singapore by forcing British troops to surrender, completed an air raid against Australia, invaded Sumatra and Java of our own Dutch East Indies, forced American President Roosevelt to withdraw American forces from the Philippines, and invaded Burma and New Guinea and Bali and North Borneo. En route to completing the takeover of the Dutch East Indies and forcing the surrender of the Dutch Governor-General on March 9, they inflicted a series of major defeats against the combined Pacific naval forces of the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Not to be overlooked is that in the same six weeks, they also attacked the American mainland by sneaking a submarine in close enough to the California coast to shell an oil refinery in Santa Barbara, and also make a return to Pearl Harbor for another bombing attack.

This impressive display of military prowess may seem like more than what I accomplished in laboring over every word of my eighteen-line sonnet and going back and forth a dozen times to the kampong post office to mail it. I
would change my mind and, with stamp still in hand, return home to work up enough bravery to go back again another day. It wasn’t until the thirtieth copy of the sonnet that I was satisfied it was good enough for Laura, both in content and appearance. The Japanese Imperial forces may have been motivated by oil, but my quest was one of pure love.

Yet, strictly speaking, the Japanese were motivated by a devotion to the Emperor Hirohito, whom they considered to be a god, a god who had been facing an oil embargo imposed on him by the Dutch and British and Americans since July of the previous year. The only way for more oil to reach Japan was if Hirohito relinquished decades of hard-won territory in Asia—including significant control over China—and gave up on the cherished ideal of a “New Order” where the Japanese, as the supreme nation, were entitled to rule all of their part of the world.

It was a profound dilemma for a proud warrior nation. There was no honor in bowing to the West, and Japan was nothing without honor. But it would also be nothing without the oil it desperately needed to import. There was oil for the taking in the Dutch East Indies—refined and stored in quantities sufficient for any war machine—but it was protected by ninety-three thousand Dutch troops and another five thousand American and British soldiers. Furthermore, it was protected by a ring of destroyers and other naval ships that formed the Malay Barrier.

If the notion of a nation of racially superior people seeking dominance by war sounds familiar, that’s because Hitler, as an ally to the Japanese, was an inspiration in ideology, practicality, and treachery to Hirohito and his military. Shortly after signing a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, Hitler surprised his relaxed Soviet allies in June of 1941 by launching a gigantic blitzkrieg assault against them that seemed certain of the success he’d had in crushing and dominating mainland Europe. This would give him the resources he needed and help maintain Aryan purity.

The Japanese, then, resolved to move forward with the same audacity. They planned for the bombing of Pearl Harbor even as negotiations with the Americans continued. With the naval resources of Pearl Harbor destroyed, Japan intended to be free to move across the Pacific into the Dutch East Indies, islands that held the richest oil reserves in all of Asia. And thus, the first military action of Japanese aggression that would lead to my entry into a concentration camp some four months later began on the infamous morning of December 7—December 8 in Japan—as the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service attacked a harbor in Hawaii.

Let it not be said that the Dutch easily gave up control of a colony that had been theirs for nearly 350 years and had become a second homeland. In mid-February of 1942, as the Japanese invasion looked inevitable, the Dutch began destroying storage tanks and oil fields and refineries at the river port city of Palembang on the island of Sumatra. Even when hundreds of Japanese paratroopers floated down onto the city, the destruction was delayed only long enough to engage in battle. When the Japanese tried sending a full infantry division up the Musi River from the delta city of Sungsang, we Dutch refused to be cowed and poured a flood of oil onto the river and, with the touch of a lit match, turned the surface of the water into an inferno that destroyed hundreds more soldiers. But, as we were to learn, the numbers of the Japanese seemed limitless, and Palembang fell within a day. We were also to learn that the Japanese were vicious in reprisals—those involved in the demolitions were executed by bullets or sword, and the wives and daughters violated.

As a boy, living what would later become the largely ignored war history of our islands, my concerns were not on the planes marked with large red circles on the fuselage that circled our valley or on the emotional distress in our home caused by those unfolding events. I didn’t give much thought to the air-raid sirens that had proved to be false alarms again and again. Since I was accustomed to my mother’s mood swings and her fights with my father, I mistakenly
believed this tension was just another swing of the pendulum. Most of the Dutch elite were blinded further to the looming threat because they believed the Japanese would need them to maintain the colony.