Thief of Glory (5 page)

Not surprisingly, in the weeks before invasion, my mind stayed focused on the lack of reply to my impassioned sonnet. In mailing it to Laura, I’d even included a second envelope addressed to our home, making it simple for Laura to mail back to me any swooning response she might feel appropriate to my marvelous poetry.

My wait finally ended the day before my cast was to be removed. When the family gathered for lunch, one of our
djongos
bowed and set our mail in the center of the table. At the top of the stack, I saw an envelope with our address written in my own handwriting.

I dared not reach for it without permission. My father was a strict disciplinarian and needed to be, given that ours was a family that blended my three older half brothers with me, my two younger sisters, and my younger brother. I existed under a trifecta of teenage dictators—Niels, Martijn, and Simon—who formed a harmonious gang when it came to the young interlopers in their family. They had little affection for me and my lack of respect for their positions of authority.

When not at home or school, they learned street smarts and the art of inflicting physical punishment as they roamed with native Indonesians of their own ages, going to places that few Dutch boys explored.

My half brothers were the reason that I became an expert at reading moods and intentions through the slightest changes of body language. Indirectly, I would end up owing them gratitude for the training they had dispensed. It served me well during my time in the concentration camp, where I also began to realize my perception of them had been colored by my self-centered view of life and eventually came to understand I must have seemed as obnoxious to them as they were to me.

In our sprawling eight-bedroom house, I could avoid being in the same room with them most of the time and overlooked the luxuries of high ceilings, hardwood floors, and constantly turning ceiling fans. Outside, our property had finely trimmed lawns, towering palm trees, and flower beds that suggested Eden. All this would have been extravagant in the Netherlands, and far beyond the salary of a school headmaster.

Here, though, we were able to afford male and female servants for any domestic need. This was a blessing for more than me, as Mother, while movie-star beautiful, was too often frail and brittle. She was my father’s second wife. The first had dutifully delivered my half brothers, then succumbed to a bout of influenza. After my father married my mother, he moved from the Netherlands to take the job here in the Dutch East Indies. I was born soon after, followed by my two sisters—the seven-year-old twins Nikki and Aniek—and the baby in our family, four-year-old Pietje.

As we waited for our
kokki
—the cook—to finish the meal at the stove, I stared at the envelope at the center of the table, and the obvious interest was a mistake.

Simon, the fifteen-year-old, casually worked the envelope loose from the pile and examined the writing on it.

“What is this?” he asked. “A letter for Jeremiah. By the return address, it’s from someone named Laura Jansen. Who lives in Sampangan.”

The village was a few miles downstream from our village of Sukorejo, near the port city of Semarang, where the refinery was located.

Simon waved the envelope. He was big already, like our father.

“Is this your handwriting?” Simon asked as he examined the envelope. “Are you pretending to send yourself mail from a girl?”

“Jansen,” my mother said absently, as usual, oblivious to the undercurrents of strife among the children. Another reason I was inured to pain. “Isn’t he the one whose wife died last year?”

“Engineer at the refinery,” my father contributed. I knew his tone of voice. Cold, almost bitter. That told me that he and Mother were at odds again, although I never understood the reasons, just as I never understood, until later, her mood changes. “Just before Pearl Harbor, his mother had arrived from the Netherlands to help. He and his family left by boat a few weeks ago to escape the Japanese. Along with the Americans.”

Laura was gone? Left by boat? My lifelong love was no longer in the Dutch East Indies? My daydreams of seeing her at the market again collapsed. Perhaps, then, her return letter would have some answers as to how I could reach her again. This made it even more crucial to read the contents. In private.

“Did you perfume it too,
kleine snotneus
?” Simon sniffed the envelope. “No, apparently not.”

His continuous use of the phrase “little snotnose” was not meant to be endearing. Despite his admonitions that we should try to be like Jesus, Father never corrected this type of insult. He also wanted his children to be tough and had no qualms about the apparent contradiction. Piety and unemotional severity. A typical Dutch combination.

“If that letter is addressed to me,” I said, “it belongs to me.” I knew better than to appeal to either of my parents. My mother would wave it away as too minor to be of her concern, and Father especially detested whining or excuses in any form. The emotional bonding in our family—typical of the Dutch then—did not consist of open affection. Neither, at least in our family, it seemed, did a marriage.

“Let’s see what this girl sent you,” Niels said. “And then I’ll be happy to hand it across the table.”

He started to open the envelope.

I knew that my father preferred not to interfere. He liked to say that his job was not to prepare the path for us, but to prepare us for the path. But he was also fair. Surely Niels had stepped well beyond the normal teasing an older
brother was allowed. But just then the classical music on the radio stopped playing. The
Nederlands Indische Radio Omroep Maatschappi
—Netherlands Indish Radio Broadcast, or NIROM—broke in with a special news bulletin.

Halfway across the dining room, our
djongo
froze and remained motionless, tray of prepared food in his hands. The broadcaster reported that our Governor-General, the Lord Tjarda van Starkenborg—Jonk Heer van Starkenborg, in Dutch—had met the day before with the Japanese Lt. General Hitoshi Imamura and agreed to unconditional surrender and a cease-fire. What remained of the ninety-three thousand Dutch troops and five thousand American and British soldiers were to surrender at 1:00 p.m., only an hour away. This was March 9, 1942.

A brief silence followed. Then the NIROM broadcaster said, “We are shutting down now. Good-bye until better times. Long live the queen!”

The notes of the Dutch national anthem began to sound, echoing through our room.

Perhaps I was the only one to see a smile briefly flash white across the dark-skinned face of the
djongo
holding our food. He would be among those in the next few days to meet Japanese soldiers in a crowd, waving flags and crying out
“banzai Dai Nippon”
to the forces that they considered to be liberators. For me, it was my first realization that the native Indonesians were not as happy with life in the Dutch East Indies as were the Dutch. My parents had withheld the news that as the Japanese army had advanced through the archipelago, rebellious natives had also killed Dutch rulers and become reliable informers for the Japanese.

When the Dutch national anthem ended and the radio went silent, my father signaled for the food to be placed on the table.

“Even bidden,”
he said.
All pray.

It was a perfect time, I would argue, to have asked for divine help in the face of what certainly promised to be a catastrophic time for the Dutch on
these islands, but my father merely spoke a blessing over the food and, in so doing, pretended life was normal.

When I opened my eyes, I discovered that in a way, the normalcy of life had not changed. Across the table, Simon grinned at me as he finished opening the envelope sent to me from Laura. He then held it up and turned it over to shake out its contents. When nothing came out, his expression turned to bewilderment.

S
IX

Early sunlight cast horizontal shadows across my blankets where the blinds could not seal my room against the new day. I had slept on the box spring, and the mattress was on the floor. Still in pajamas, I ignored movement from inside my mattress and sat on the edge of the bed frame. I examined my right hand to gauge whether it had changed for the better during the night. The meat of my palm seemed to have disappeared. My forearm was weak and shriveled; no one had warned me that weeks in a cast would atrophy the muscles. In contrast to the tanned skin of my upper arm, the portion where the plaster had covered from my elbow almost to my knuckles was as white as spots of leprosy. Curious about pain, I curled and uncurled my fingers as I flexed into a fist. I bent my wrist forward and backward, all in efforts to gauge how far I could stretch with any degree of strength. The day before, the doctor had promised this stiffness would gradually disappear, and that soon it would be as if my arm had never been broken.

This was a ridiculous promise. Suggesting that I would forget the day I met Laura was like suggesting I would forget to breathe. Or that I would forget the day that an older American boy had broken my arm. I’d been scheming since then to arrange another fight, and now he was gone, on a ship. With Laura. Who had mailed me an empty envelope. No matter how well the bone healed, it would never be as if my arm had never been broken.

As I was squeezing my right forefinger to my thumb to test how much pressure I could exert, I heard loud thumping at the main door of the house. It was early for visitors. Still, if we had visitors, I needed to look presentable. From my wardrobe closet, I selected my best trousers and a freshly ironed shirt and
set them on the blankets covering my box spring. In my underwear, I washed my face with water from a basin on the dresser and ran my wet fingers through my hair. Then I inspected myself in the mirror.

I hid my right arm behind my back and grinned at the handsome image of myself. Because of my older brothers, I knew what body changes were ahead of me, and naturally, I was impatient. I’d seen them naked many times at the river when we swam. Still, in our contests to see who could urinate the farthest, I rarely lost. The secret is in how hard you can squeeze your buttocks and the correct arch in the back.

I moved the clothing and wrestled the mattress back onto the box spring to hide how I had slept. I dressed myself with care to avoid wrinkles in my trousers and shirt. I didn’t want to detour to the bathroom until I saw who had knocked on the door. Before leaving, though, I performed a customary check of my hiding hole behind my wardrobe. The two pouches I usually wore during the day were still safe.

In the dining room, I found my mother and father facing three Japanese soldiers, and immediately regretted my decision not to visit the bathroom first.

They were stocky and short. One carried a machine gun mounted with a bayonet and wore a dirty single-breasted khaki tunic with five buttons down the front, matching the color of his flat-topped cap with a single yellow star and neck flaps that hung down to his shoulders. The other two men wore no caps, and their pressed uniforms were darker, almost green, and double-breasted, with narrow red patches on the left shoulder. I hoped my half brothers would come down. They constantly teased me about my fashion standards, but these uniforms were more proof that the way a person dressed indicated status. It was very apparent who were the two officers.

My father, still in his bathrobe, stood stiffly. When he looked at me, I saw that his lips were tight with suppressed fury. My mother stood behind him, eyes looking at the floor, clutching the front of her robe closed.

“Return to your room,” my father told me.

“Kashira naka!”
one officer screamed, and the soldier waved his machine gun at my father.

Impossible to know the words, but the intent was easy to translate.

I decided the best response would be silence. I held my breath. The same soldier then pointed his machine gun at me. As I stared into the black hole of the barrel, I thought of the eye of a cobra.

He gestured for me to join my parents, and I could feel a cold rage begin to build. I wanted to reach across and grab the finned barrel, then turn the bayonet on him. My father’s body language vibrated with the same tension, and the Japanese soldier seemed to sense it, for he backed up a little. My mother sobbed in little hiccups, which seemed to irritate my father more.

The two officers walked over to our dining room table and inspected it. They had a short conversation, then the one that I guessed was the senior officer pulled a tag from his pocket, wrote on it, and slapped it on the table. He wrote pencil markings in a small notepad.

They moved to the cabinet at the far wall. One opened the door, and both began to chatter at the sight of bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka. The second one closed the door, and the senior officer wrote on a second tag and placed it on the cabinet, then once again wrote in his notepad.

As the two officers left the room, our guard made threatening motions with his machine gun to keep us in place. We stood before him, still listening to the casual conversation between the officers while they roamed the house. Then came unintelligible shouts punctuated by the voices of my brothers and sisters. When they reached the end of the house and Pietje’s room, we heard a wail of fear, followed by the thumping of feet as Pietje dashed around the house. When he found us in the dining room, he ran to me and clutched my waist and cried, ignoring the Japanese soldier completely.

“Pietje,” I said, drawing out his name,
Peeet-cheh
, to soothe him. I placed
my hand on his tousled blond hair. “How many times have I told you not to mess my trousers and shirt? I don’t want snot on my clothes.”

It was my pitiful effort to make him giggle at my oft-repeated and oftignored complaint, but Pietje continued to tremble.

My talking earned another shout from the soldier with the machine gun.
“Kashira naka!”

I lifted Pietje and held him to my chest. He was warm against me, and I felt more urgently the need to relieve my bladder. I wasn’t worried about Pietje speaking, for he rarely put more than a half-dozen words together. We remained like this until the officers returned.