Thief of Glory (7 page)

I pondered this and had no reason to disbelieve it. It was strange how quickly I had accepted what was happening around us.

“Simon is only fifteen,” I said.

“The Japanese count ages differently than we do. On a day that a baby is born, it is his first year, and the baby is considered to be one. The Japanese will consider you to be eleven years old, not ten. I’ve changed your birth certificate so that it looks like you were born a year later. You are not tall, and they will believe you are younger.”

“You want me to be a nine-year-old?”

“A ten-year-old to them,” my father answered. “We don’t know how long this war will last. I need you to stay with your mother and Nikki and Aniek and Pietje as long as possible.”

Pietje let go of my hand.

“I know how you are,” my father said. “I don’t need to ask you to keep
taking care of your younger sisters and brother. But I ask anyway, because it makes me feel better. I am already helpless in protecting my family.”

Now I was afraid. My father, admitting weakness?

“What I’ve heard,” he said, “is that when the soldiers order you from the house, you are given one hour to pack and you are only allowed to take what you can carry. I’ve already packed a suitcase that you must make sure to take. It’s the big brown suitcase with a red ribbon tied around the handle, and I’ve put it in your room. Don’t open it until you get to where they are taking you. Don’t let your mother open it either.”

I knew exactly the reason for this. My mother was not a practical woman and wouldn’t know what to pack. My father, on the other hand, was practical to the point of denying the existence of emotion. I was still reeling from his earlier admissions.

“I’m also asking you to have patience with your mother,” he said. “The way she is, is not her fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you must do everything possible to help her in everything. And when she is cruel or seems uncaring, don’t blame her for it. Her illness is no more her fault than catching a fever.”

“Illness?” If it was true in some way that my mother was not to blame for the way she was, perhaps it wasn’t my fault that she often ignored me.

My father reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled something out that I could not see and left it curled in the center of his closed hand.

“You may think that I don’t know you that well,” he said. “But that’s not true. It’s just that …” He took a breath. “Sometimes a man has to put so much energy into one area of his family that it appears he doesn’t care for other areas. When I’m gone, it will be your turn to watch over your mother.”

That seemed to satisfy him, for he left it at that.

“Your fishing rod,” he said. “It’s stopped moving.”

“Eventually it does,” I answered. “But a mouse can live for a lot longer time than you would expect.”

It was his turn to wait for more explanation, but two can play that game. Besides, I wanted to know what was in his hand.

“When the soldiers come for me and your brothers,” he said and looked back and forth between Pietje and me, “I will not give them the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurts to be taken away from you and how afraid I am for what will happen to you when I am not there to protect you. I don’t want you to cry, for we will not show them any weakness. Nor will I say good-bye then or how much I love you, and I won’t even look back. So I’m saying it now.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t need to—”

Father moved to Pietje and pulled him in close, and to the astonishment of both Pietje and me, Father said,
“Dag, lieve jongen.”

Good-bye, my loved little boy.

He released Pietje, then put a hand on my shoulder. “I love you. I will miss you.”

He leaned back. “More importantly, I respect you for who you are and what you’ve become. And I dread getting on the truck and leaving you behind.”

He opened his other hand and what I saw made me gasp far louder than the hardest of his spankings ever had.

It was a sulphide marble. Transparent green glass. With a miniature statue of a rearing horse in the center.

“I played marbles when I was a boy too,” he said. “This was given to my father by his father, and not once did I ever risk it in a game. It is yours now.”

He didn’t add that it would be something I would have to always remember him, but I could hear it unspoken in the tone of his voice. This was as difficult for him as it was for me.

“I expect,” he said, “that you will add it to the pouches you hide in your shorts.”

I was astounded. How did he know about my other marbles?

He stood.

“Good fishing,” he said. He was making a point that I understood. By not asking about why I had a fishing rod with a dead mouse at the end, he could be as stubborn as I was.

“Yes,” I said.

As he walked away, Pietje tugged on my hand, giving me no time to absorb what had just happened. That would come later, when I realized I’d just had my last real conversation with my father.

“Now?” Pietje asked.

“Now,” I said, turning my attention to my little brother. I gave him the fishing rod, and he began to reel in the line. I wasn’t worried he would get hurt. A poisonous snake would have killed the mouse within seconds before swallowing it, and a bigger one would simply regurgitate the mouse as the line pulled. The fight between our bait and the snake that had taken it had lasted five minutes, so whatever we had on the line hadn’t been able to kill the mouse immediately and was so small that the mouse couldn’t make it back out past the inward facing bones of its throat.

To the satisfaction of both of us, we had landed a small python.

I gave the machete to Pietje and let him do the honors of chopping off the snake’s head, unaware of how that species would later take revenge for this act.

E
IGHT

Days later, the Japanese arrived as my father had predicted. On the street between our house and the muddy river, soldiers jumped out of a large truck. Holding machine guns, they marched to the door and pointed bayonets at my father, screaming in Japanese.

Again, we didn’t need a translator. Their orders were obvious, for the open back deck of the large truck was already near filled with men and teenage boys, each clutching a suitcase and staring at the road.

In less than fifteen minutes, my father, Niels, Martijn, and Simon were on the lawn in front of our house with their own suitcases. The rest of us stood on the steps. Pietje held my hand, and Nikki and Aniek crowded my other side, finding shelter beneath my other arm. I can only guess at the farewell that my mother had given the other males in our family. She remained inside the house.

It was clear that my father had given my half brothers firm orders to remain stoic in front of the conquerors. None of them looked back as they walked away, even with Pietje biting his lip to keep from crying and Nikki and Aniek begging for them to stay.

The four of them joined the other silent men and boys in the truck, and with the crunching of gears and a belch of diesel exhaust, the driver took my father and half brothers out of our lives.

It wasn’t until the truck rounded the corner that I remembered I had forgotten to thank my father for the sulphide marble. I turned to Pietje and told him I would be back as soon as I could. Then I ran after the truck, hoping to catch it so I could shout to my father.

But it was too late. When I reached the corner, I saw nothing except
cracked pavement and silent houses where all our Dutch neighbors had retreated into their shells in the face of the Japanese invasion.

I refused to weep in public, and I didn’t want Pietje to see me cry, for that would have made him afraid. I managed to hold back my tears until I was on the other side of the house in the shade. Then I began to sob in gasping spasms that drove me to my knees.

For the Japanese, it had been urgent to eliminate any threat posed by Dutch males. A scattered guerrilla resistance managed to form over the next weeks, but to no real effect. Dutch overlords like my father had been a minority to begin with, and where possible, the Japanese appointed non-Dutch replacements for the newly vacated positions. That meant the rest of the country continued in its usual economic fashion, subsisting on plantations and oil—except that the Japanese were not paying for the oil they used. They merely paid wages to those who kept the wells pumping crude and the refineries converting it.

Without the male income-earner, Dutch households began to struggle financially, and since the Netherlands was under siege by Nazi Germany, distant relatives were of no help. Many of the matriarchs sought ways to make money by sewing or baking or other odd jobs. Then when textiles became scarce, the women sold clothes, bedding, and other fabrics to Indonesians who would pay good money for them. My mother, who did not sew or bake, dug into our trunks and linen closet. Piece by piece she also sold our remaining household furniture, paintings, kitchen items, and other knickknacks. Eventually, our house was bare except for the basics we needed to live and sleep each night.

As it turned out, selling our possessions was not unwise because young Indonesian extremists had begun looting Dutch homes. One evening, a gang of them pushed open our door but then burst out laughing at the bare interior already scavenged by our mother. They thought it not worthwhile to search the
house and never found the suitcases that were packed and ready for the anticipated
Jappenkamp.

In no time, our household money had run dry, and we were depending on church charity for food. To complicate matters, there came a day when I realized that the swelling of my mother’s belly meant that she was pregnant. I began working for an Indonesian launderer. Pietje did what he could to help too, but that was not why he came with me every day. After our father was taken away, he refused to leave my side. The sound or sight of Japanese vehicles—which, unfortunately, were far too frequent—would cause him to freeze, for as much as he wanted to hide and bury his face in my side, he never stopped looking to see if our father might be in one of them.

The Indonesian who hired us—a greasy-faced man with a drooping, thin moustache—paid us half of what he would have had to pay locals, partly because he could but partly because he’d always hated the Dutch. It gave him satisfaction to calculate down to the penny the dividing line between what was enough to make us servile to him and what kept us from seeking employment elsewhere.

Except for Sundays, Pietje and I began at 6 a.m., washing clothes by hand in large barrels with soapy water, then rinsing and hanging them to dry on lines that stretched beneath the tin roofs of an open shelter meant to keep the clothes from rain. One day in early August, with our fingers wrinkled from hours in wet laundry, Pietje and I were walking through the village on our way home after a full day’s work. It had been an afternoon punctuated by brief thunderstorms. Our destination was the baker’s stall where the elderly baker’s equally elderly wife had made a habit of setting aside two-day-old bread for our daily purchase. Unlike the launderer, this was not a petty act of revenge against the Dutch. The selling of our household goods was well known in the village, so the husband and wife understood our family was desperate for anything to supplement what the church could give us. Theirs was the cheapest bread available.

Any older than two days, the bread would grow mold in the humidity.
During a particularly rainy time, it could emerge in one day. What the baker might not have known was that our family was at the point where I’d scrape away the first traces of mold that had appeared and not tell my siblings as I gave them their meals.

Just before the baker’s stall, Pietje and I happened upon a native teenage boy kicking at a skinny black puppy that he was dragging by a rope around the puppy’s neck. The puppy had braced its feet in the dirt and was gagging with each kick, the rope tightening around its throat.

“Hey!” Pietje yelled. He let go of my hand and burst forward as the older boy lifted his foot to deliver another kick. “No!”

I was surprised by Pietje’s reaction, for it was difficult for him to overcome his shyness. The puppy’s owner looked as surprised as I was.

“Go away.” The boy was barefoot, in shorts so old that dirt had become their color. Bare chested with protruding ribs that looked as if they were drawn by an anatomy student. Nut-brown skin. Head shaved, a sure sign that his family had been infested with lice.

Pietje knelt and placed his hand on the shivering puppy. One of its ears stood up, and the other was folded into a lop ear. It wasn’t the cold that caused the puppy to tremble; it probably had a sixth sense about the native boy’s intentions. Or maybe we were close enough to the restaurant that it detected the copper smell of blood from previous dogs who had been butchered in the alley and became the dishes of the day. While the Muslims feared and hated dogs, partially because of religious beliefs and partially because of the danger of rabies, the non-Muslims enjoyed
rintek wuuk, sengsu, sate jamu
, and
kambing balap
, all rice and spice dishes with chunks of cooked dog.