3
The Pebble in the Shell
I lay on the hospital bed, my right leg so encased in plaster that I could scarcely move.
At first I had visitors from my unit. But the others were getting themselves killed or wounded too. And after all, life was moving on. The doctors told me I would never walk without a cane. It was better not to think about these things; bit by bit my buddies stopped coming.
But not before they had accomplished two things that were to alter events for me.
The first was to mail a letter I had never intended mailing. It was to Thile. I had picked up an odd habit: Whenever I came back from a late night on the town or a battle that left me feeling especially dirty, I would write to Thile. I would put down on the paper all the filthy, disgusting things I had seen and done, things I could never really share with anyone; then I would burn it.
Just before I went into my last battle, I had started such a letter to Thile and had left it unfinished in my barracks bag. Well, after I was hit, a helpful buddy went through my bag for personal items before turning it in. And being a resourceful kind of fellow, he looked up Thile’s name in my address book and mailed it. You could see he thought he’d done something extra nice.
“Man!” he teased me when he visited me in the hospital. “I’ve never seen such a list of names! What do you do, write to every family in Holland that has a pretty girl? It took me half an hour to find the last name that went with Thile. You better be careful, man—this could start another war.”
Horror must have shown in my face, because he suddenly jumped out of his chair.
“Gee, Andy, I didn’t realize it still hurt so bad. And here I am making lousy jokes. I’ll come back when you feel better.”
For days I tried to remember what I had written in that wretched letter. As near as I could recall it began:
Dearest Thile,
I’m so lonely tonight. I wish you were here. I wish I could look right into your eyes as I say all these things and know that you still liked me or at least didn’t condemn me.
You wrote me once that I should pray. Well, I haven’t. Instead I curse. I know words I never even heard in Holland. I tell filthy jokes. The worse I feel the harder I can get the guys laughing. I’m not the person you think I am. This war used to bother me. But it doesn’t any more. When I see dead people I shrug. People we have killed, not just soldiers, but ordinary working men, and women, and children.
I have no desire for God. I don’t want to pray. Instead of going to church I go to the pub and drink until I don’t give a hoot. . . .”
There was more. Much more and much worse. I lay in agony in that hospital ward, trying to remember just what in my drunken fog I had written. Well, there was one friend I could say good-bye to. The trouble was, Thile wasn’t just “one friend.” She was the best friend I’d ever had—and I had wanted her to be so very much more.
I thrashed about on the narrow bed, what part of me could move, trying to shut out the picture of Thile reading that letter.
And as I flung out my arm, my hand fell on the book.
That was the second thing the boys had done for me. They had found my mother’s little Bible in the bottom of the dufflebag. It was Jan Zwart who brought it to me, leaving it rather shyly on the bedside table just before he left.
“This book was in your things,” he said. “I didn’t know if you wanted it.”
I said thanks, but I didn’t pick it up. I doubt if I ever would have, except for the nuns. The hospital to which I had been assigned was run by Franciscan sisters. I soon fell in love with every one of them. From dawn until midnight they were busy in the wards, cleaning bedpans, swabbing wounds, writing letters for us, laughing, singing. I never once heard them complain.
One day I asked the nun who came to bathe me how it was that she and the other sisters were always so cheerful.
“Why, Andrew, you ought to know the answer to that—a good Dutch boy like you. It’s the love of Christ.” When she said it, her eyes sparkled, and I knew without question that for her this was the whole answer; she could have talked all afternoon and said no more.
“But you’re teasing me, aren’t you?” she said, tapping the well-worn little Bible where it still lay on the bedside table. “You’ve got the answer right here.”
So now when my restless hand struck against it, I picked it up. In the two and a half years since my mother had given it to me, I had never once opened it. But I thought about the sisters, their joy, their tranquility: “You’ve got the answer right there. . . .” I propped the little book on my chest, and with a desultory finger I moved the pages backward until I got to Genesis 1:1.
I read the story of creation and of the entrance of sin into the world. It did not seem nearly as farfetched to me now as it had when our schoolteacher read aloud a chapter each afternoon, while outside canals waited to be jumped. I read on, skipping whole portions, flipping through to get to the story again. At last, many days later, I came to the New Testament. Lying there encased in autograph-covered plaster, I read straight through the gospels, catching dimly their terrible significance. Could all this really be true?
While I was in the middle of the Gospel According to St. John, a letter was delivered. The handwriting on the envelope was familiar. Thile! With trembling hands I tore it open.
“Dearest Andy,” I read—Dearest! The word I had written so many times to her, but never in a letter intended to be mailed—“Dearest Andy, I have here a letter from a boy who thinks his heart has turned hard. But his heart is breaking and he has shown a little of that heartbreak to me and I am proud that he has.” Then followed—when for sheer relief I could read again—of all things a study outline of the Bible! This was the only place, Thile wrote, where human heartbreak could be understood in terms of God’s love.
They were wonderful weeks that followed, weeks of reading the Bible together, on opposite sides of the earth. I filled page after page with questions, and Thile went to her pastor and her library and the depths of her own heart to find the answers.
But as the months passed in the hospital, as my cast came off bit by bit, and I saw the ugly shrunken leg and remembered the joys of running that would never be mine again, I found myself holding on to a hard core of resentment, which was just the opposite of the joy Thile and my Franciscan nuns were talking about.
As soon as I was ambulatory, I started leaving the hospital every evening after dinner to hobble painfully to the nearest pub and drink myself into oblivion. The nuns never spoke about it. At least not directly. But on the day before I was to be shipped home my favorite nun, Sister Patrice, pulled a chair up to my bed.
“Andy, I have a story to tell you. Do you know how natives catch monkeys out in the forest?”
My face lit up at the thought of a monkey story. “No. Tell me.”
“Well, you see, the natives know that a monkey will never let go of something he wants even if it means losing his freedom. So here’s what they do. They take a coconut and make a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey’s paw to slip through. Then they drop a pebble into the hole and wait in the bushes with a net.
“Sooner or later a curious old fellow will come along. He’ll pick up that coconut shell and rattle it. He’ll peer inside. And then at last he’ll slip his paw into the hole and feel around until he gets hold of that pebble. But when he tries to bring it out, he finds that he cannot get the paw through the hole without letting go. And, Andy, that monkey will never let go of what he thinks is a prize. It’s the easiest thing in the world to catch a fellow who acts like that.”
Sister Patrice got up and put the chair back by the table. She paused for a moment and looked me straight in the eye.
“Are you holding on to something, Andrew? Something that’s keeping you from your freedom?”
And then she was gone.
I knew perfectly well what she meant. I also knew her sermon wasn’t for me. The next day was going to be a great one on two counts: It was my 21st birthday, an
d it was the day the hospital ship sailed for home. To celebrate, I called together all survivors who could still walk or limp of the company I had come to Indonesia with three years earlier. There were eight of us. We had a grand time. We got roaring, shouting, belligerently drunk.
4
One Stormy Night
Andrew!” Geltje ran across the little bridge and threw her arms around me. She turned and shouted behind her. “Maartje! Go find Papa! Tell him Andy is home!”
In an instant the tiny front garden was crowded. Maartje ran to kiss me before hurrying out back to fetch Papa. Ben was there, and his fiancée. They had waited to get married, they told me, until I could be at the wedding. Arie, Geltje’s new husband, joined us. My young brother, Cornelius, shook my hand gravely. He couldn’t keep his eyes off my cane, and I knew he was wondering just how badly hurt I was. In the midst of hugs and kisses, Papa came shuffling around the house, a bit lame himself now. His brown eyes were moist. “Andrew boy! Good to have you home!” Papa’s voice was as loud as ever.
“When you feel like it, Andrew,” Maartje said after the first greetings were over, “I’ll take you out to Mama’s grave.”
I said that I would like to go right then. The graveyard was just five hundred yards from our house, but to walk even that distance I had to borrow Papa’s bicycle, throw my bad leg over the seat, and push myself along, half riding, half walking.
“It’s really pretty bad, then?” Maartje asked.
“They don’t think I’ll ever walk right again.”
The ground had not yet fully settled on Mama’s grave. There were fresh flowers in a little red vase stuck into the soil. After a while Maartje and I walked home in silence.
That night, though, after it was dark, I announced that I thought I would try taking a walk. No one offered to go with me; each person knew what I wanted to do. I got out the bicycle again and hopped and rolled up the street. The cemetery lay in full moonlight, and it was easy to find the grave. I sat down on the ground and said my last words to my mother.
“I’m back, Mama.” It seemed natural talking to her. “I did read your Bible, Mama. Not at first, but I did read it.” There was a long silence.
“Mama, what am I going to do now? I can’t walk a hundred yards without the pain making me stop. You know I’m no good at smithing. There’s a rehabilitation center at the hospital, but what can I learn there? I feel so useless, Mama. And guilty. Guilty for the life I led out there. Answer me, Mama.”
But no answer came. The cold moonlight flowed over me and the grave and the rest of us there in that cemetery: the dead and the half-dead. After half an hour I gave up trying to reach into the past. I wheeled myself home.
Geltje was at the kitchen table sewing. “We talked about where you could sleep, Andrew,” she said not looking up. “Do you think you could make it up the ladder?”
I looked at the hole in the ceiling above my head; then I made an assault on that ladder. I climbed one rung at a time, putting my good foot up, hauling the other after it. The pain made perspiration stand out on my forehead, but I turned my head so the others did not see. My old bed was waiting for me, clean sheets turned down invitingly. I lay for a long time staring at the sloping ceiling, and at last—far too close to tears for a 21-year-old man—I fell asleep wondering what had happened to my great adventure.
The next morning, taking only my cane, I hobbled out to get reacquainted with the village. The people I met were polite, but they also seemed embarrassed. They would look uncomfortably at my uniform, then at my foot. “Did you hurt yourself out there in the East Indies or somewhere?” they asked. Obviously the war was unpopular in Holland—as I suppose lost wars always are. It was clear by now that Indonesia would soon be independent, and so it was easiest to pretend that we’d always intended it that way. Returning veterans only made it difficult.
For an odd reason I could not understand, the house where I was headed was the Whetstras’. I found them at home and accepted with pleasure their invitation to a cup of coffee. We sat around the kitchen table while Mr. Whetstra asked me about Sukarno and the Communists, and at last a more personal question.
“Did you find that adventure you were looking for, Andy?”
I looked down at the floor. “Not really,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we’ll just have to keep praying.”
“For adventure? For me?” I felt the angry flush climbing up the back of my neck. “Sure. I’m a natural for adventure now. When it calls, I’ll limp right out to meet it.”
Immediately I was ashamed. What had made me answer like that? I left them, feeling I had spoiled a friendship.
Another person I’d been eager to see was Kees. I found him at home, upstairs in his room, bent over a large pile of books. After a rather strained greeting, I picked up one of the books and was amazed to find that it was a theological treatise.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Kees took the book from my hands. “I’ve decided what I’m going to do with my life.”
“You’re lucky. What is it?” I asked, hardly believing the answer I knew he was going to give me.
“I want to go into the ministry. Pastor Vanderhoop is helping me.”
Kees made me squirm, and I got out of there just as soon as I politely could.
———
The veterans’ hospital at Doorn was an enormous complex of treatment centers, dormitories, and rehabilitation units, but its chief quality was boredom. I disliked the exercises, I loathed the trade school, but the thing I hated most was the occupational therapy.
We had to make vases out of floppy, sticky clay. I just never could get the hang of it. The trick was to put the lump of clay precisely on the center of the whirling wheel, then keep the wheel turning while your fingers worked the glob into a useful shape. Somehow I could never find that center. It was so frustrating that on more than one occasion I flung my hunk of clay against the wall.
On my first weekend leave I went to see Thile. On the bus to Gorkum I kept telling myself that she could not be as beautiful as I remembered. And then I limped through the door of her father’s shop, and she was. Her eyes were blacker, her skin fairer than anyone else’s in the world. Even with her father looking on, our handshake lingered longer than was necessary.
“Welcome home, Andrew.”
Thile’s father came around the counter wiping fish scales on his apron. He shook my hand fervently. “Tell me all about the Indies!”
As soon as I could, I took Thile away from the fish shop. We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking on a large capstan on the wharf. I told her about my homecoming, about Geltje’s husband and Ben’s upcoming marriage; I told her about the rehabilitation center, how I hated working with the clay; and though I knew she would be disappointed, I told her that my religious life had come to a dead standstill.
Thile was staring out across the harbor. “And yet,” she said gently, “God hasn’t come to a standstill.” Suddenly she laughed. “I think you’re like one of your own lumps of clay, Andy. God has a plan for you, and He’s trying to get you into the center of it, and you keep dodging and slithering away.”
She turned her dark eyes on mine. “How do you know? Maybe He wants to make you into something wonderful!”
My eyes fell, and I pretended great interest in the cigarette butt I was crushing against the capstan.
“Like what, for instance?” I said.
Thile looked with distaste at the carpet of cigarette ends that I had spread on the pier around us. “Like an ashtray,” she said shortly. “How much do you smoke, Andy?”
It had crept up to three packs a day. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, something’s making you cough. I don’t think it’s good for you.”
“You’re full of plans for my improvement, aren’t you?” I hadn’t meant to say that. Why did I always ruin things? It was just that suddenly I felt so far away from everyone—even Thile. She didn’t know what it wa
s like having to bite the inside of your lip off for fear the pain in your leg would make you cry; or what it was like to have a woman get up on a public bus so that you could take a seat. I left Thile that afternoon knowing I’d said all the things I didn’t mean to and none of the things I did.
It was two months before anyone spoke about religion to me again, and then it wasn’t Thile but another pretty girl.
It was midmorning on a rather blustery day in September 1949. We were sitting on our beds, reading and writing letters after morning exercises, when the nurse came in to announce a visitor. I paid no attention until I heard a low whistle rise to the lips of twenty boys. I glanced up. Standing in the doorway, embarrassed and yet pleased, was a striking blonde.
“Not bad,” my next-bed neighbor, Pier, whispered.
“I won’t take much of your time,” the girl began. “I just want to ask you all to join us at our tent meeting tonight. There will be lots of refreshments. . . .”
“What kind?” someone shouted.
“. . . And the bus will leave here at seven o’clock, and I hope you can all come.”
The boys burst into wild, exaggerated applause with shouts of “Encore! Encore!” as the girl retreated. But when seven o’clock came, every one of us was waiting in the foyer, clean scrubbed, hair stiff with brilliantine. Pier and I were first in line. We were happy, not only because of the night away from the hospital but also because Pier had slipped down to the village and come back with our answer to the question of what refreshments would be served. By the time the bus arrived at the tent grounds, the bottle was half empty. We took seats in the extreme rear of the tent and finished the rest of it.
Most of the boys thought our antics were funny. The people holding the revival service did not. Finally, a funny-looking man with a thin face and deep-set eyes—the kind of person I disliked on sight—took the podium and announced that there were two people in the congregation who were bound by powers they couldn’t control.
And then, closing his eyes, he began a long impassioned prayer for the health of our immortal souls. We choked back our laughter till our throats ached from the effort. But when at last, in a pious singsong, he called us “our brethren over whom foreign spirits have gained influence,” we could hold it in no longer. We howled, we yelped, we whooped with laughter. Seeing that further prayer was impossible, the man told the choir to sing. The song they chose was “Let My People Go.”
God's Smuggler Page 4
