Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Everyone commented on Jasmijn’s happy nature. When I held her, her beautiful black eyes steadfastly gazed at me with such apparent wisdom that they seemed to contain all the mysteries of the universe. I felt protective as a magnificent love grew for my little sister. I decided that her health—and perhaps her life—depended on my getting the supplies described by Dr. Eikenboom, so I took one of Elsbeth’s sketches from their hiding place and made a list on the back of it. Paper was scarce, but the fear of forgetting something important for Jasmijn drove me. Then I went out to the bush near the small cross that marked Coacoa’s grave. I made sure that I was unobserved as I dug out one of the eight bottles of Bols sloe gin I had stolen from my mother. I planned to go through the drainage ditch that only I knew about, but I would go alone, not wanting Pietje as an extra risk.

  It took a slow hour to clear the way to the drainage pipe, pulling out the chocks of firewood that I’d used to block a chicken from returning, and checking for soldiers each time to make sure it was clear to crawl beneath the bush that had grown over the entrance. When I crawled beneath the bush again, holding the bottle of gin, it was around three in the afternoon. The parrots and warblers filled the air with cheerful notes meant to disguise their desperate pursuits of food, territorial rights, and mates. I was equally desperate as I crawled into the pipe headfirst, far enough for my shoulders to squeeze inside. The light at the far end may have only been twenty or thirty feet away. I knew an Indonesian might decide to take me back to the Jappenkamp for a reward instead of trading my gin for the supplies I wanted, but I was gambling on greed for the other seven bottles to guarantee I could trade with impunity. I was also gambling that there would be no snakes in the drainage pipe, or that if they were in the pipe, my approach would cause them to flee.

  What I had not calculated was the effect of the tube of concrete around my body. I had my arms out in front of me, one hand on the bottle, with plenty of room to wiggle forward. But I couldn’t. I began to hyperventilate, rasping in a fear that possessed me like claws of a monster. Sweat ran like thick blood into my eyebrows and dripped onto my cheeks. I wanted to scream in terror but was too frightened to do it only because I thought the sound itself might cause the pipe to collapse on my body and bury me alive.

  Somehow I managed to push myself backward, and when I scrambled out from under the bush, all I could do was push my knees to my chest and hold my knees tight with my arms, until all the trembling in my body subsided. The bottle of precious gin was still in the drainage pipe, but the thought of going back in to retrieve it sent my body into more spasms. I knew it was lost to me and to my family. I was a coward, so ashamed that in the evening, when Elsbeth asked me to hold Jasmijn, I refused because I was unworthy of it and asked for Nikki to take my turn.

  I could see only one solution. The next morning, in a light rainstorm, I walked a street over and visited Sophie for the second time. Her bruises had completely faded, and the beating had done nothing to diminish her aura of dignity. When I arrived, she was sitting on the porch, beneath an awning. With Laura in a chair beside her. At my approach, Laura stood and walked into the house, a pointed way to ignore me.

  “Hello, Mrs. Jansen,” I said.

  She pointed at the chair that Laura had vacated. “Please sit. But don’t expect any conversation unless you call me Sophie. I told you, I am a friend.”

  The usual noises came from inside the house, sounds of conversation, some crying, occasional clanking of pans. Ten or twelve families lived inside and were sheltering themselves from the rain in the stink of body odors and the mingling of bedbugs and lice. Others also sat under the awning looking for fresh air and relief from the crowding.

  “Well,” Sophie said, “there have been interesting conversations in this house about you and Georgie. His mother wants to hunt you down for what you did to his nose. And Georgie keeps saying he did nothing to deserve it.”

  “If he wasn’t a sissy,” I said, “he’d find me during the day and we could talk about it. But I noticed he gives me plenty of distance.”

  “I wish I could tell people about your broken arm,” Sophie said.

  I shook my head otherwise. “I prefer to keep things between me and Georgie.”

  “But that’s not why you are here, right?”

  I pulled a folded piece of paper from under my shirt where I had kept it away from the rain. “I wrote down a list of things that Dr. Eikenboom says my baby sister needs.”

  I caught Sophie’s glance at the pencil sketch on the paper as I had unfolded it. This was one of a train, smoke flattening behind it, looking as if it were going to rumble off the paper and onto her lap. She made no comment about the sketch but gave her attention to the supplies.

  “Jeremiah,” she said, “it looks like many of these things can’t be found inside the camp.”

  I nodded, then said, “I would like to ask a question, but it is only a make-believe question because, of course, a boy like me would not have a bottle of Bols gin. But if somehow I could get such a bottle, would you help me with the trading for it for things we can find in the camp? Condensed milk. Soap. I don’t think it would do me any good to be caught with the gin, and since you are new to camp, others might believe it actually got here with you.”

  This time, when she tried to hide her smile, I could see the slight curving of her lips, as most of the swelling of her face was gone.

  “I suspect that you would be able to get Bols gin, and I suspect that some of the mothers here would break another woman’s bones for that gin. So perhaps, yes, some of the items on the list might be found within the camp. But not all—keep that in mind.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “If somehow I manage to find a bottle, I will be back in the afternoon. And it will always be our secret, right?”

  “Of course.”

  I rose.

  “Would you mind waiting for a moment as I go inside?” she asked.

  I nodded and sat back down.

  Sophie limped into the house, taking my list with her. I had assumed she was going to make some immediate inquiries, so I was surprised when Laura returned in Sophie’s place, holding the sheet of paper with my list.

  “I suppose,” I said, before I could stop myself, “you were told I would be found on the porch.”

  “No,” she answered. “I was told you wrote this list.”

  She gave it to me and I took it. Up and down the porch, women in their own chairs were sitting out the drizzle, involved in their own conversations or simply just staring at the gray.

  Laura had another piece of paper. This one, too, was folded. She opened it and stared at whatever was written on it. Then she folded it backward in such a way that I could see only the top third, which was the beginning of a letter, dated in February of 1942. Just before the Dutch capitulation.

  “Read this,” she said. “Not out loud. I don’t want anyone else to hear.”

  I shrugged, not sure, of course, for the reason for the request.

  It began with these words. Dear Laura, you are very beautiful. Someday when there are no parents around, I would like it if we could find a private spot. There is a game called doctor and nurse, and …

  I gasped at what followed. Then became outraged and barely coherent.

  “This … this … is … horrible.”

  “It gets worse,” she said. “That’s why I kept it folded, so you wouldn’t read the rest of it.”

  “Who … Who …?”

  She took the letter from me, then folded it so that I could only peek at the bottom. Where my name was clearly written: Jeremiah Prins.

  “I didn’t—”

  “This letter made me feel filthy,” she said. “I was so ashamed that I cried for days. I didn’t dare show it to anyone because they might think that I said something to encourage you to write this. And I didn’t throw it away because I wanted someday to show it to you and make you eat this piece of paper and beg for forgiveness.”

  “I didn’t—”

&nbs
p; “Oma doesn’t know what was in the letter, and although she has asked many times, I’ve never told her. And I always kept it hidden from her.” She doubled the folds of the paper so that it compressed into a small square that fit into the palm of her hand.

  “All she knew was that after I opened the envelope you had mailed, I was miserable. A few days ago, she told me to ask you to tell me what you had written. I refused. Why would I want to hear this again?” she asked, briefly opening her palm where I could see a glimpse of the paper.

  Laura continued. “Except just now when she found me inside, she asked me if the writing of this letter looked like your writing on the list. It doesn’t. That means someone else wrote the mean and nasty letter.”

  She took a deep breath. “What was in the letter you sent me?”

  My mind was reeling from the contents of the letter in her palm, especially my forged name at the end. I wanted to be acquitted. “I am embarrassed to tell you. It was easier to send than to think I might have to say it in front of you.”

  She lifted her hand again and opened her fingers so that the paper was clearly visible. “Would you rather I believed you mailed this, even if the writing looks different than yours?”

  Without hesitation, I began. “Memories drift like leaves, blown by winds gentle before a gale heaves.”

  I was not going to repeat the next line of my sonnet. Not to her. Tears grace my cheeks, burning of love unspoken and deeply yearning.

  I stopped, but the next lines were spoken. By her.

  “Tears grace my cheeks,” she whispered, “burning of love unspoken and deeply yearning.”

  I was beyond comprehending. “Did Sophie repeat that to you? She made me tell her what I’d written. Did she pass it on to you?”

  Laura shook her head. Her face flushed.

  “Someone else told me,” she said, and I saw her fists ball into knots.

  “But nobody in the world knew I wrote it,” I protested. Then it dawned on me. “Someone took my sonnet out of the envelope and put in that nasty letter and sealed it so it looked like that’s what I mailed you! Someone stole my sonnet and—”

  I stopped. Even though I didn’t fully believe it, all I could think of was that one of my half brothers had done it in another attempt to torture me.

  “And that someone gave the sonnet to me as if it were his,” she said. “Our families shared the same post office, you know. He often delivered our letters to our home if he and his mother went to the post office first. I am sure now that he thought that once we were on the ship and away from the island, he would never be found out for taking your letter out and putting in another.”

  Laura’s barely contained rage was frightening.

  She stood.

  I stood.

  “No,” she said. “You stay here.”

  A grown man would have been a fool to defy her. I stayed.

  She marched into the house, her back ramrod straight, while I tried to comprehend. Someone had put in a letter to make me look bad and had taken my sonnet and pretended it was his. And that someone had pulled out my return envelope and mailed it to me empty. His name entered my thoughts at the same moment I heard the thud.

  Georgie.

  I heard a responding scream of outrage to the thud, followed by high-pitched wailing that preceded Laura’s return to the porch by only a few moments.

  Now she stood at my side, her arms crossed, ignoring the curious glances from those up and down the porch. The wailing inside the house continued.

  “My oma was right about what it does to a boy if you kick him between the legs,” she said. “And I don’t care how many spankings I get. That was worth it.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I was glad that there was no gin for Elsbeth to worsen the monthly mood swings that Pietje, Aniek, Nikki, and I had faced before the Jappenkamp, swings as predictable as a pendulum. Still, the first full moon of Nakahara’s command showed it possessed him to a far greater degree than it did her.

  Howling drew families to their windows. Those in houses closest to his clearly saw Nakahara outlined against the rising moon, standing on a thick branch of a tree in the center of his garden and clawing at the moon as if trying to pull it down from the sky. Many of the women prayed that he would fall from the branch, but God did not answer those prayers in the way they asked.

  The next morning, Nakahara—his normal foul mood worsened no doubt by a hangover—called the block representatives together and declared, through a translator, that Japanese camp commanders were the head of a single military unit and could deal with prisoners as they pleased. No higher authorities would oversee the commanders’ actions. Then he explained that he wanted the block representatives to choose a dozen dark-haired Dutch girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty for the privilege of serving teahouse duties in the Dykstra residence.

  It was a morning I didn’t have kitchen duty, so I learned about the teahouse from Laura, who’d learned about it from Sophie.

  “A bad thing happened this morning,” Laura said. She explained Nakahara’s demand involving young women selected for his teahouse.

  “What is bad about serving tea?” I asked. “Especially if Nakahara is promising they will be fed well.”

  “Oma told me that the soldiers will expect the girls to be like wives to them.”

  When I didn’t respond, she added, “Like in Georgie’s letter.”

  I stilled. “That’s … that’s …” Again, I was at a loss for words, because in my naiveté, those things were not only utterly senseless but went well past a basic invasion of privacy and vastly overshadowed the humility of living in such close proximity at the Jappenkamp.

  “Oma said all the women have to stand up for the sake of those girls. All the mothers, not just the mothers of the girls. Someone said that Nakahara might begin killing mothers who don’t obey him, and Oma said then that Nakahara could begin with her.”

  I detected the fear in Laura’s voice.

  Pietje must have sensed it too, for he put his head against my side. He said, “I don’t want him to kill Moeder.”

  “I won’t let it happen,” I told Pietje. “Nobody is going to kill her. I promise.”

  Those were words that would torture me later.

  A single tear rolled over the dirt on the left side of Pietje’s face, and he squeezed me as a thank-you.

  “I don’t want it to happen to my oma either,” Laura said. “But she looks like she is ready to make it happen.”

  I couldn’t think of any way to console her that wouldn’t sound like a falsehood. The reality that we understood as children was that Nakahara was far worse than a vicious headmaster who could and would do as he pleased. So I chose a different subject to distract Laura from her fears.

  Construction.

  By then, Nakahara had begun building the walls that would connect his residence and the former Dykstra house. Inside the walls would be his private garden. It was a simple design, ensuring that access to the enclosed space between the houses came only from the rear doors of either house.

  The walls were built of concrete blocks, mortared in place by his Japanese soldiers. The work had gone slowly because Nakahara refused to hire Indonesians who knew the craft, and the soldiers were learning by trial and error how to mix cement and sand and water and stone so that it would set properly.

  But, the world over, children usually gather to watch construction projects. Especially when there is nothing else to do.

  “Look at the walls,” I said to Laura, pointing at the soldiers who were at work. “I bet a person could climb them.”

  As sloppy workmen, the soldiers failed in many places to scrape the mortar away from the blocks. The curled slop provided footholds and handholds that would have made climbing a fun challenge for any boy.

  “How would a person get over the top?” Laura asked.

  Jagged broken glass jutted upright from mortar that had been set on the top blocks.

  “Sneak at night and brea
k them,” I said. “Just in one place where it might not be noticed.”

  “Soldiers would hear you,” she answered. “Anyone caught after curfew will be beaten.”

  “What is Nakahara going to do behind the walls?” Pietje asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Laura said. She shuddered.

  “Hey,” I said, as an idea occurred to me, one to take her mind off the teahouse girls, “we should make sure we can always know. Let’s poke some holes.”

  I explained my idea. If the soldiers had been experienced in masonry, my idea would have been as ludicrous as it sounded. But they weren’t.

  During my architecture courses long after the Jappenkamp, I would learn that, after water, cement is the most used human product on earth, dating back to well before Roman times. Cement and water and sand and stone produce concrete. Aside from reinforcement with rods of steel, two important factors make the difference between a finished product that is one of the strongest structures engineered, or something that appears strong but will crumble under pressure.

  The first factor is the correct ratio between cement—a binder that sets and hardens because of a chemical reaction with water—and the water and sand and stone. The second factor is how evenly these components are mixed. A rotating barrel will do a much better job than humans with shovels, especially if these humans are soldiers far from home and resentful of their job.

  I did not know all of this when Laura and Pietje and I were watching so many years ago, but we did know that the concrete was watery because we watched it ooze from between the blocks. Cement is the expensive portion of the mix, and diluting it meant that less was used, something that I’m sure Nakahara encouraged. This also meant the concrete wouldn’t set as quickly as it should have, something I also didn’t know then but proved to be a lucky accident.