Thief of Glory (9 page)

Then another sketch caught my eye. It was me, with my mother. We were holding hands, and her dress swirled at her ankles as if the wind were flirting with her. She and I never held hands. In this sketch she also had a smile on her face that I’d never seen before, and nothing about my eyes in that sketch looked as intense and cold as the eyes I sometimes saw in a mirror. Instead, happiness shone from my face.

It was the first sketch I took down, ripping it loose from each corner, which left an empty square where the tacks had held it to the plaster.

“Lekas! Lekas!” The voice was louder, angrier, and it came from inside the house. As fast as I could without ruining the sketches, I pulled down paper after paper and tossed them onto the mattress where I intended to stack them before taking them with me.

“Lekas!” I froze as the voice came from inside the bedroom. I looked over my shoulder at a bayonet on a machine gun held by a Japanese soldier whose eyelids were slitted in anger.

I risked pulling down the last of our family sketches. When I heard
nothing from the soldier, I turned and saw that he was at the far wall, staring at the sketches of life in the village.

“Lekas!” Another soldier now stood in the doorway.

As I scooped up the sketches from the mattress, I saw the edge of a pad of paper sticking out from beneath it. I pulled it out and used it to cover the sketches, then slid it inside the front of my shirt.

The second soldier did not have the same reaction to the drawings. He yelled at his companion, who responded in an angry tone of his own, gesticulating at the drawings on the walls.

The second soldier screamed again, then lifted his machine gun and fired at the wall that held still-life images of the village. I was deafened as plaster sprayed everywhere and bullets shredded the drawings that remained. In the silence that followed the aftermath of the blast, the first soldier spat out one word in Japanese that later I would learn to understand.

“Jackass,” the first soldier had said.

The second soldier laughed. Then he pointed his machine gun at me and gestured that I should exit the room. I made my way down the hall with him shouting “Lekas!” at my back.

When I stepped out of the house, I discovered that every woman and child on the truck was staring with horror in my direction. My mother was already halfway to the house, her suitcase abandoned back at the truck.

“Jeremiah!” she said, but stopped from running forward and hugging me.

It hadn’t occurred to me that they would think I’d been shot, but when I realized their perspective, hearing machine gun fire from the street, I understood why. With all those eyes upon me, I resorted to my normal swagger as I walked toward my mother, wishing that I’d had a chance to shake off the plaster dust from my shirt and shorts and sandals.

“Everything is all right, Moeder,” I said in a voice loud enough to reach the other women and children in the truck. “I decided to let them live.”

Timing is everything. Just as I finished saying this, the soldiers stepped out of the house. Giggles burst forth from the truck.

“Lekas! Lekas!” the second soldier shouted again.

I was already tired of that word.

T
EN

We were the last family to be loaded onto the truck before it joined a convoy parked a few miles down the road. A half-dozen or so trucks were loaded with more women and children and were heading south. Volcanic mountains, draped in thick jungle growth, framed the valleys. The lushness was deceptive, though, since the valley we drove through had no shade. The tires kicked up dust that loomed over us like the monsters in my mother’s sketches, and the heat bore down on us. The dust clogged our breathing and formed into clumps on our sweaty bodies as we stood cramped together with no space to stretch.

Our family seemed to be the only one on our truck who had not brought containers of water, and I was furious at myself for not anticipating the need for it. While many of the younger children cried as the day grew hotter, Nikki and Aniek and Pietje did not complain. Their thirst was so obvious, however, that a couple of families took turns sharing water with ours, even as some women glared at my mother for her obvious incompetence in her care for us.

Early in the trip, when I felt the sweat begin to drip down my chest and onto my belly, I surreptitiously removed the sketch pad from under my shirt and slid it into Pietje’s cloth sack. I would have loved to have placed it in my own suitcase for safekeeping—I was burning with curiosity about its contents—but I’d promised my father it would not be opened until we were in a Jappenkamp. After keeping my word this long, I would not break it now.

We passed through tiny villages strung along the road like horse droppings, the huts squalid and tiny and primitive. The natives would come out and stare at us as the trucks churned almost at a walking pace down the rough
roads, the disrepair of these roads evidence that the Dutch had not been in administration in this region. Some natives jeered as mothers on the trucks begged for water. Others rushed up with buckets of water only to be waved away by the Japanese soldiers. If I hadn’t already begun to hate the soldiers, this would have been reason enough to start. What danger was there in letting a container of water reach little boys and girls who were passing out in the heat?

Finally, just as dusk descended, lessening the unrelenting heat, we reached Ambarawa. It was a market town, about halfway between the port city of Semarang and the town of Magalang, and an important rail link of the Semarang-Ambarawa-Magalang line.

One by one, the trucks in the convoy stopped at the open gates of a newly constructed barbed wire fence. In the gloaming, the fence appeared a harmless dividing point between houses on one side of the street and those on the other. As we looked into the neighborhood behind the fence, some of the women began to chatter with optimism. Other camps, I had learned through overheard conversations, were formed in institutes for the insane, or in barracks surrounding parade grounds. Here, we would have houses!

Ours was the second truck of the convoy to stop at the gates. The translator, a heavyset Dutch woman in a gray formless dress, with features difficult to distinguish in the growing darkness, gave orders through a megaphone. We were told to take all of our belongings out of the truck when we dispersed and find a room in a house, one room per family. We could see people from the first truck still streaming down the streets in the neighborhood.

Our family was fortunate to have been on the second truck in the convoy; families in the final four trucks would have fewer choices of houses. We also had been the last to load onto the second truck, which meant we were the first family to get off, and that put us ahead of all the rest in the race for lodgings. And my choice to take the sketches instead of a mattress meant that we had less to carry.

Because my father had given me the responsibility of taking care of our family, I determined what to do next. On the ground, I whispered to Mother, “I need you to carry Pietje’s sack while I take him. I’m going to go ahead and when I find a room that’s good, I’ll send Pietje back to you so you will know where to find me.”

I hoped I didn’t have to explain anything else. Most families, I guessed, would be so tired that they would want to travel the minimum distance. There would be crowds in the nearer houses, but in the farther houses, the choices would be better.

My legs were cramping from dehydration, but nothing in the last few months had shown that my sisters and brother and I could depend on Mother to look out for us. Her sagging shoulders and indifference to my instructions proved that, so I pushed forward with the suitcase that father had packed for us months earlier. Later, I told myself, I could rest.

Without taking any detours to consider houses close to the main gate, Pietje and I and Coacoa made a line straight to the end of one street where a two-story house backed up against the barbed wire fence. By my count, we were four residential blocks from the main gate.

The Japanese had obviously confiscated all of the houses and sent the residents of this previously Dutch enclave elsewhere. Before exploring the inside of the house I had chosen, I sent Pietje and Coacoa to tell my mother and sisters where we were.

I roamed the empty rooms and saw that all the interior doors in the house had been removed. A large bedroom on the upper floor looked to be a good choice for us, but it occurred to me that it could be too large. What if we had to share it with another family? Other rooms seemed to be too central; if the house were crowded, people would walk past us constantly, making it a noisy location. I settled on a room on the main floor at the back of the house where foot traffic would be minimal and where we would have the most privacy. It had been a
storage room, lined with permanent shelving, and I considered the disadvantage of such a small room against the advantage of having shelves when all the other rooms were empty of furniture. I decided to go with the shelves.

The room did not have a mattress, but a neighboring room did. I was still alone in the house, so I had no hesitation in dragging the treasure to our room. The large mattress almost covered the entire floor, but that didn’t matter. At least we had a secure and private place. With my suitcase in the room to establish ownership, I roamed around in the dark. In the kitchen, a battered pan had been left behind in a cupboard. I took it to the cistern and pumped water into it, then splashed the water on my face. I drank so deeply that it felt like my belly would burst. I refilled the pan for the rest of my family when they arrived a few minutes later.

These houses of the Dutch—confiscated by the Japanese as ours had been—had the bathroom and shower area set outdoors, with water fed to the faucets from cisterns that collected rain. The water was always warm and fresh and clean, and in better days, the brightness of the sun combined with the shelter of the privacy walls gave the bathroom area the feeling of a resort spa, complete with friendly geckos that patrolled the area and kept the floors clean of insects.

Our first few moments here alone would be the last of any pleasantness, however, for as the house filled with one family per room, the bathroom area would too soon become a dank area of backed-up sewage.

Pietje insisted on letting the puppy drink before he did, and none of us complained about Coacoa’s slurping tongue. It was a good forty-five minutes before other families began to enter the house, long enough that Pietje and Nikki and Aniek had fallen asleep on the mattress, and Coacoa slept on the floor nearest to Pietje.

One woman after another stopped and peeked inside our room, then turned away after seeing it already occupied. One woman returned a few minutes after she’d left and, holding a lighted candle, stepped inside our room.

“Allemaal opstaan!”
she said.
Everybody up!

Coacoa growled at the tone of the woman’s voice, but my sisters and brothers were too exhausted to be roused.

She was an inch taller than my mother and perhaps a few years older. Her hair was dark with streaks of gray, and its short style matched the expensiveness of her clothing, which I couldn’t help but admire. This lady, I thought, had not been depending on church charity when the Japanese arrived at her house.

My mother seemed to shrink.

“It is not fair that some families had first choice,” this interloper said. “All of the rest of us latecomers had a lottery in the kitchen, and my number was drawn to give me this room. Take your children and go to the kitchen to find out where your family belongs.”

This could be nothing but a bluff, and it clearly came from a person accustomed to having her way with shopkeepers and servants. I searched for the words to protest, but children did not disagree with adults.

“So,” this woman told my mother, “off you go.” She reached down to shake Pietje awake, but Coacoa’s growl deepened, which caused her to hesitate. In the next instant, Elsbeth, my mother, exploded with unexpected fury. As if the shell of despondency that had built up around her suddenly fragmented, she took a single step forward and slapped the taller woman hard and flush across the face.

“Do not,” my mother said, “touch my child.”

She spoke as if she was barely restraining herself. Coacoa, too, was on his feet and rumbling with a deepness I could hardly believe came from the chest of a puppy that young.

Still holding a candle in one hand, the interloper raised her other to strike back.

“I hope you hit me,” my mother said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Because that will give me the justification to kill you.”

The woman froze.

“I have not agreed to any lottery,” my mother said. “I doubt any of the others here have either. I don’t hear them leaving their rooms. So your lies will not work with me.”

“You must clear the room,” the interloper said, sounding unafraid and matching my mother’s anger. “This room now belongs to my family, as does the mattress.”

My old friend, the cold rage, began to build. I debated with myself the ethics of fighting a fully grown woman. It would be unthinkable to attack a girl, but perhaps this woman’s size and age would offset her gender and allow me to fight with honor.

“What is your name?” my mother asked.

“Hilda. Hilda van Stromst.” The woman squared her shoulders and straightened her back. “And yours?”

To me, this charade of civility after that first slap gave me a new insight into the nature of how women sometimes fight.

“Elsbeth Prins,” my mother replied. “Are you prepared to fight me right now to try to take this room from me? Because if you do, I will scratch your eyes out. And if somehow you manage to outfight me tonight, tomorrow night, when you are asleep, I will sneak into the room and slit your throat and let your blood flow onto your children.”

“You are making an enemy,” Hilda hissed.

“You made one when you tried to steal this room from my children. What you don’t know is that until a year ago, I was kept in a mental institute for outbreaks of violence.” My mother paused, probably letting the other woman consider what she’d said—a nice touch to give credence to my mother’s lie. “I would advise you to not only keep your distance from me but also not to provoke me again in any way. So let me ask again, am I clear?”