Pietje and I held our bow. Shizuka’s black leather boots came into my view, and my stomach clutched with horror and dread when those boots stopped.
I dared not look at the commander. He had full authority over life and death in this camp, and there was no one over him to amend his decisions. As a result, we were intensely aware of his presence when he wandered among us. I could not hold my breath, as bowing took too much effort, but it still felt like I was not breathing.
Shizuka had the habit of men in power throughout history who were small in stature; he did not walk but strutted. He also smelled of cologne, a distinct lavender that I suspected was instead perfume, and grew his hair longer than his soldiers and held it in place with scentless grease. Mrs. Vriend had reported the source of a horizontal scar across his left cheek as a sword duel. The rumors said he had twenty sets of uniforms in his closets and changed three to five times per day, which I believed because of their crisp appearance.
The boots moved closer, now almost beneath our heads. I knew Pietje would say nothing. He was justly terrified of the man and had seen Shizuka slap an elderly woman for not bowing correctly, then slap a mother because her little girl had failed to hold a bow long enough.
One of the boots nudged Coacoa’s still body.
Another nudge, closer to a kick.
Pietje fell to his knees and put his hands out to protect Coacoa. I envisioned soldiers dragging Elsbeth into the street and holding her as Shizuka beat her across the face. But I dared not speak because it would make her punishment worse.
I heard a snort of laughter, then a few Japanese words. Such was the concentration of my fear that I memorized the sounds of the words. Later that day, I searched for Mrs. Vriend, who translated them but would not believe that I’d heard correctly, not if Pietje had dared cover the puppy to protect it and Shizuka had let that action go unpunished.
Soon it will be gone.
I watched the boots withdraw, and once I was certain that Shizuka was far enough away, I yelled out the third command. “Naore!”
This was the signal that we could all resume our activities. Kiotske. Kere. Naore. Every child old enough to walk had practiced again and again how to respond to those words. Then I heard a shout from around the nearest corner as someone else saw the commander and gave the obligatory alert. “Kiotske!”
“You could have had mother killed,” I said to Pietje.
“No. Today Coacoa is protecting us.”
How could I respond? I asked a different question.
“Where are we going?” I asked Pietje. He had never led me anywhere before. “The doctor?”
“Coacoa is not sick,” he said. “He is sleeping.”
Pietje took us to the house where Mrs. Schoonenburg lived. She was older than most of the women and wasn’t part of the labor duties in the camp because of her age. She walked slowly and heavily with a cane, and her gray hair was always in a bundle atop her head. She contributed to camp life, however, as the de facto pastor because her husband had been the pastor of one of the largest Dutch Reformed Churches in Semarang. Sunday mornings, Mrs. Schoonenburg led the church services and preached a sermon, drawing on her memory of forty years of listening to her husband’s preaching.
Mrs. Schoonenburg sat in a chair on the shady side of the house, napping, with her hands in her lap, her glasses on her deeply wrinkled forehead.
“Goedendag, mevrouw,” Pietje said. Good day, madam.
I was impressed by Pietje’s behavior. Not once had I seen him speak to an adult without being addressed first.
With a startled snort, Mrs. Schoonenburg awoke from her nap. “Eh?”
“Coacoa is sleeping,” Pietje said. “Can you talk to Jesus and ask Him to wake my puppy?”
She blinked a few times as she focused on him and the puppy in his arms. Her eyes were pale blue and grew larger when she pulled her glasses onto her nose.
“Sleeping?” she said.
“Yes.” Pietje set Coacoa on the ground at Mrs. Schoonenburg’s bare feet. I was amazed at how blue her skin was, how crooked her toes and how yellow her toenails. “Coacoa sleeps with me every night and keeps me safe from the soldiers that took my father. Jemmy told me Coacoa is dead. But that’s what people told Jesus about the little girl. Jesus said she was asleep and everybody laughed at Jesus, but He took her hand and asked her to stand and she did. Remember?” Mrs. Schoonenburg’s confused blinking resumed again, yet Pietje was so earnest that she did what any decent human would do. She reached down and stroked the puppy. “Sleeping?”
“You know Jesus,” Pietje said. “I listen to you each Sunday morning when you tell us about Him. Ask Jesus to wake up my puppy.”
“He wants a miracle,” I explained. So did I. I promised God right then that I would never doubt Him if He would just wake up Coacoa. Maybe Pietje was right and something had made the puppy unconscious. If that were the case, it wouldn’t even have to be a real miracle, just a good healing.
Mrs. Schoonenburg took Pietje’s hands into her own aged ones where veins popped out of parchment skin. “My poor, poor little boy. I can’t call up Jesus and expect Him to change the world for us.”
He took her hands and placed them together, palms inward. “Pray,” he said. “Talk to Jesus.”
She gave him a slight smile, but her eyes looked sad. “I cannot do that,” she said. She pulled her hands free. “For if your puppy doesn’t stand, you will think that Jesus can’t do miracles.”
“You don’t believe?” he asked. “I do. Every day, our mother reads us stories about Jesus. Wake up my puppy, and tomorrow maybe you can tell me how come five men can stand on a roof and not fall through but then can dig through it and put a man through the hole.”
Mrs. Schoonenburg looked at me. I knelt beside my brother. “Pietje. You must stop fooling yourself. Coacoa is not asleep.”
He turned again to Mrs. Schoonenburg, who said, “Coacoa will be waiting for you in heaven. That’s the best miracle of all, that Jesus made sure we can all go to heaven.”
If she had intended this to comfort Pietje, it had the opposite effect. It forced him to realize that all hope was gone for Coacoa, and he collapsed into my arms and sobbed.
No matter how close one human is to another, we are still separated by flesh. I could think of no words to help him with his grief. All I could do was keep him from falling and hold him as he wept into my chest.
Mrs. Schoonenburg reached for him too, and he slapped her hand away. She had the sense to leave us, and it took a half hour for Pietje to become too worn out to continue crying.
I held his puppy as we walked back to our house in the corner of the camp. Elsbeth had already dug a hole and made a cross of two sticks of wood tied together. I could not help but note the proximity to a small tree, the spot where I had buried her eight bottles of gin.
How much better would it have been if I had not stopped that August afternoon and risked my marbles to save the puppy? I could not shake our mother’s words that day: “If you really cared about Pietje and cared about the dog, you would have walked away and let that dog die a merciful death.” I alternated between grief and anger at myself.
Elsbeth, Nikki, Aniek, and I sang hymns for Coacoa, but Pietje only stared at the fresh dirt. Watching him while I sang, I said horrible things to God for taking away Pietje’s friend and guardian and for breaking all of our hearts. I doubted God even cared to listen to me.
The next morning, I prepared for Pietje’s grief by thinking of ways to distract him. I was explaining to Nikki and Aniek a new game I’d invented for Pietje when Mrs. Vriend came to the house.
All forty of our house’s inhabitants gathered to hear what she had been telling the rest of the camp. Commander Shizuka had ordered that all families with dogs must bring the dogs to the gate, for dogs were no longer allowed in camp. It was—we were told—to prevent rabies.
I stood and absorbed the news for a few moments. We did not have to leave the house. Coacoa was already safe from t
he Japanese commander.
“He’s in heaven,” Pietje said as Mrs. Vriend left the house, showing the first bit of a smile. “The soldiers can’t take him away from me! God has Coacoa already!”
Later, I heard what it was like. All the dog owners had lined up at the gate, and one by one, they were forced to hand over their pet to an Indonesian waiting outside. An old woman, whose dog had been with her for more than a decade, had pleaded to be allowed to give her dog to the lone Chinese man among the Indonesians, as she cried out, “Andjing baik … bagus.”
This dog is good … magnificent.
She wanted her dog to go to the Chinese man because she knew, as did all the others, that the native Indonesians would eat the dogs or, if they were Muslim, would kill them like vermin. It would have been unthinkable for Pietje to give up Coacoa and watch someone else walk away with his puppy, and even more terrible for him if he discovered what would happen to his lop-eared protector in the hands of an Indonesian.
When I knelt at Coacoa’s grave later that day, thinking of Pietje’s joy that death had rescued Coacoa from the Japanese, I was still angry at God, but not so much as the day before.
FOURTEEN
Each week, food rations had shrunk a little bit more. While we had not reached starvation levels, too many of the children in camp were beginning to show bellies as swollen as my mother’s. I could not know it then, but the lack of protein was beginning to crumble their bodies, giving them stick arms and legs and flaky skin.
By now, those who developed diarrhea or worse, dysentery, could not recover because their bodies were too weak. Elsbeth, my sisters, brother, and I had been spared thus far, primarily because of my father’s foresight. We each swallowed a half teaspoon of cod-liver oil, rich in vitamins A, D, and K, protein, and omega-3 fatty acids. Naturally, we hated the taste, but because of the lack of meat in our diet, it didn’t take long for our bodies to crave the daily dose.
A few days after Shizuka had culled the camp of dogs, I heard groaning in the early morning. Elsbeth was sitting with her back against our bedroom wall, her arms limp and forearms exposed. I could see the tremble in her body from chills, and with her eyes closed, she was breathing so rapidly that she seemed to pant.
Her skirt reached only to below her knees, so I had full view of her shins. I knew enough about death to feel my heart lurch when I saw red streaks extending from two lines of scratches on her left leg.
“Moeder!”
She opened her eyes and tried to smile. I rolled off the mattress.
“Moeder.” I lowered my voice so that the others would not waken. Sleep was a mercy.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just that the baby inside me makes me tired. Give me a few minutes.”
It was not all right. The red streaks going up her leg were ominous signs of blood poisoning. Children much younger than me understood that kind of danger.
“We are going to the doctor,” I said. I leaned over and woke Nikki. “Take care of Aniek and Pietje until Moeder and I get back.”
Nikki was so sleepy that I was glad I didn’t need to give more explanation. I would worry enough for all of us.
I dressed in my shorts and shirt, then reached for my mother to help her stand.
“Not Dr. Kloet,” she said, hardly able to speak.
Except for the Japanese soldiers, he was the only adult male in the camp, spared from the work camps because of the shortage of physicians, but nothing about his bedside manners suggested he was grateful for it. He was tall and heavy and young for a doctor. He liked to stroke his thick reddish beard in idle moments, and it had been noted early and commented upon that his bows to Shizuka were the deepest and longest.
“Dr. Eikenboom,” I promised. We had seen her treat the younger women like she was a hen gathering them under her wings, and she dispensed advice with the same compassion that she dispensed the limited medical supplies.
The two of us struggled down the hallway. Every few steps took us past another open door frame and the family crowded into that room. I’m sure our progress was noted, but no women came to help. I already knew that my mother had no friends in the house. Or elsewhere. But I did not know why. Whenever I saw her in the kitchen, she was working alone, while other mothers shared duties and laughter.
Somehow we managed to hobble several blocks to the open-walled tent set up outside a former schoolhouse. The school building was our makeshift hospital. I’d been told the inside rooms were crowded with cots for patients, and two closets had each been converted into a residence for the physicians. The outside tent was set up to deal with those not sick enough to require a stay, and already, there was a line beneath the tent.
“You are too sick to wait,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “We ask for no favors.”
At least we could wait in the shade of the tent. I made frequent trips to bring Elsbeth water and purposefully walked past Dr. Eikenboom’s line of sight each time. She stood behind one table, waving new patients forward when she was ready, and farther down, Dr. Kloet sat behind another. I made sure I put very little water in each cup that I carried so that it doubled the frequency of my trips. Finally, Dr. Eikenboom stopped me.
“Bring your mother to the front,” she said. “If she is that thirsty, the others can wait.”
I rushed to get Moeder and ignored the snide comments as I helped her to the front of the line. I glanced up and saw that those remarks had not left her unscathed, for she blinked away tears.
“Her leg,” I said to Dr. Eikenboom.
Dr. Eikenboom was barely taller than I was, and I was not tall for my age. She had wavy brown hair, cut short. She wore a white jacket, much grimier than the immaculate attire of Dr. Kloet. Normally I would have respected the one with presentable attire over the one without, but here it was evidence that one was willing to get hands dirty and the other not.
“Please,” Dr. Eikenboom said to my mother. “Sit.”
Elsbeth lowered her body into a cane-backed chair, something made more painful by her pregnancy, and Dr. Eikenboom sat in the chair next to it and took my mother’s hand.
“How long have you had the fever?” she asked, examining my mother’s left shin.
“Since yesterday,” Elsbeth said. “I thought it might be the pregnancy.”
With a gentle touch, Dr. Eikenboom traced two long scratches from my mother’s ankle to her knee. “Infection. How did you get these?”
“I scraped it in the kitchen,” Elsbeth said. “There are always things in the way.”
“This is an easy diagnosis,” Dr. Eikenboom said. “Blood poisoning. And, with luck, we will stop this early enough.”
She called to the other table. “Dr. Kloet, this woman needs sulfa.”
She consulted her colleague, I would later find out, because of the protocol the two had developed. Sulfa was in short supply, but at that time, it was the only way to stop bacterial infections. The two doctors would confer on any prescriptions of the miracle drug because the limited supply meant that at times they were choosing between life or death for their patient. Here, Dr. Eikenboom saw that without sulfa, my mother would be dead within days.
Dr. Kloet stood over my mother and spoke sharply to Dr. Eikenboom.
“No sulfa for this case. Liquids and bed rest. She is young enough to pull through without any other help.”
“Two lives are at stake,” Dr. Eikenboom said.
“Yes, I’ve noticed she is the only pregnant woman in all of camp,” Dr. Kloet said, not bothering to lower his voice to match Dr. Eikenboom’s near whisper. “I’m assuming her husband was taken to work camp with all the others after the surrender. Count the months. Do you think the child will be born with white skin and blue eyes?”
I was trying to understand what he meant. Judging by the murmuring behind me, obviously it had significance. One word reached us, and I realized it had forced my mother to lower her head in renewed shame even as she panted to find her breath.
H
arlot.
Even though I didn’t know what the word meant, I knew what it had done. I turned and faced the women in line behind us. I was cold with my anger.
“Who said that?” I asked. My fists were clenched. “Who?”
“Why don’t you return to our children all the marbles you have robbed,” answered a woman halfway back in the line. “And let your mother tell you what it means.”
I heard a small sob from my mother, like it had been wrenched from her despite a struggle to hold it in.
I marched toward the woman who had answered my challenge with a reply. She had long, stringy hair and wore a filthy dress. My first impressions of people often were based on whether they took care of their appearance. Shallow perhaps, but that was how I was. So even without her insulting words, I would have disliked her. She also held the hand of a boy my age, a boy I had played in marbles and whom I knew had a tendency to cheat. Another strike against the woman. Still, among children it was too deeply ingrained to treat adults with respect, so I shifted to an easier target.
“You, Albert, are a snot-nosed brat, and I’m not surprised your momma is holding your hand. If you’ve lied to her about how you lost your marbles to me, you probably cried about it too.”
“You impertinent boy,” his mother said. “I’ll turn you over my knee and spank you, since your mother obviously knows nothing about what is acceptable behavior.”
Giggles from other mothers, combined with the direct insult aimed at my mother, drove me past the point of social convention, and for the first time in my life, I spoke disrespectfully to an adult.
“If you had done that often enough to Albert,” I said, “perhaps he wouldn’t be such a girl.”
Albert ducked his head. I hated myself in that moment, but I wanted to lash out on my mother’s behalf.
Thief of Glory Page 9
