Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Had it struck my right arm, it might have jolted loose the bottle. But I was able to tip the bottle and jam the broken neck into the snake’s mouth, ripping my own skin against the jagged glass. Gin poured freely into the snake, and as it lessened the grip on my left arm, I grabbed the snake below the neck. With my right hand, I shoved the bottle down as deep as it would go and tilted the remainder of gin down its throat. By then, the coils had slipped from Laura, and she had rolled clear of the snake.

  The burning of the alcohol must have put the snake into a panic. With a deceptively fast rolling of those massive coils, it reached the banyan tree and began to climb up into the shadows.

  I felt something touch my arm and I flinched.

  It was Laura. She was trying to speak. She stared at me as she drew sob after sob into her lungs and shook so hard she was going to fall. I pulled her against me and we clung together, shaking, until finally, when she could make noise, she wept.

  That’s how we were found—a minute later or a half an hour later, I couldn’t guess—by an Indonesian teenage boy, who spoke with difficulty.

  The words he forced out were accompanied by a high-pitched nasal grunting.

  “What is going on here?” he asked.

  Laura let go and took a step sideways. I became aware that blood was running down my arm. Laura’s hair was stained too, from my tears as I held her and from the blood that seeped from dozens of puncture marks where the snake had held her in its jaws. We both needed disinfectant badly.

  “Two boys?” he said. “What is this? Holding each other?”

  There was enough moonlight to make Laura and me distinguishable, but I hoped it was still dim enough to conceal the paleness of our skin and our Dutch features. My hopes were dashed immediately. Bright light hit our eyes from the flare of a match as he lit a candle.

  “You are Dutch!” he said, holding the candle toward us and as far away from his face as possible. In the brief flicker of light, however, I’d seen a glimpse of his face and understood why he sounded the way he did. His face was deformed by an upper lip and palate that were completely cleft. It seemed to form a fissure between his upper lip that cruelly twisted all the way to his nostrils, revealing gums that formed a V and teeth that pointed horizontally.

  “From the camp!” It came out as a near squeal in raised nasal tones. “How did you get here?”

  Vegetation obscured this side of the drainage pipe, so I wasn’t going to tell him. Not yet.

  “Not so loud,” I answered. Enough light reflected off his skin that I could see his upper body was bare, but this was not unusual when fabric was so scarce for the Indonesians. He was about six inches taller than I was, but his shoulders were hunched in what looked like a perpetual cower. It was cruel, but instinct told me that I could use that to my advantage.

  “Please, blow out the light,” I said. If I did it, we would be opponents. If he did it, that would be the first step toward becoming allies. “It will be worth it for you, I promise.”

  A second later, it was dark again. He whispered with suspicion, “How?”

  “Python,” I said.

  “Python! How big?”

  “Big enough to kill a human.”

  “The elders have been hunting that snake for months,” he said. “Where is it?”

  There was a heavy thump behind us. We all turned. The bottom half of the python had fallen from the tree. The gin, Dr. Eikenboom would decide later for me, had worked with spectacular swiftness. The snake had been hungry enough to feed, and on an empty stomach, the alcohol would have spread quickly through its body.

  The boy groaned and stepped back, as if the snake would give chase.

  The remainder of the python’s body fell.

  I walked to the banyan and grabbed the snake by the tail. I tried to drag it toward the Indonesian, but it was too heavy.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Adi.”

  I would discover later he preferred to walk the streets of his town at dusk and evening, when anyone he passed had difficulty seeing his deformity. That he spent most daylight hours inside the family hut while his parents worked as laborers, an only child who preferred solitude to mockery and trusted only a handful of people with a full view of his face.

  “Adi,” I said, “imagine how much meat and skin will come from this snake. If you are smart, you could help us do some trading for it.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The next morning, my arm had already started to swell at the puncture marks where the python had clamped onto my arm. After the wailing siren for tenko, I took a place in line at the crowded hospital tent. Two boys, Pietje’s age, were trying to console their mother, who was hunched over in agony and clutching her stomach, and an elderly woman kept trying to pull her blouse away from her body so that the fabric wouldn’t touch her skin. We all understood why, as the rash of dengue was obvious on her shoulders and upper arms. Her expression was stoic, however, as she bore the muscle aches of what we called breakbone fever. When all of her pain passed in the next week or two, she at least would be immune to further attacks. This couldn’t be said for the unlucky ones who shivered with malaria.

  There was no question that I needed medical attention or that I needed to line up for Dr. Eikenboom. I waited an hour for my turn at her table. My arm was throbbing, and I rested it on the table so she could examine it. Blood seeped from the deepest gash of the broken bottle.

  “Aside from these cuts, those marks are in a peculiar pattern,” Dr. Eikenboom said as she examined the series of dots in a U shape on the top and bottom of my arm. It didn’t take much imagination to see that it was an animal bite.

  “I don’t want it known,” I said. “But Nakahara caught me at his wall again, and as punishment, he ordered his dog to bite me.”

  Dr. Eikenboom let out a deep sigh. “You are not the first patient to lie to a doctor, Jeremiah. But that doesn’t make it acceptable either.”

  She called for Dr. Kloet. He saw that it was me at her table and gave a slow shake of his head.

  “Frederick!” she said in a raised voice. “Do not ignore me.”

  Enough patients in line heard her that it made it embarrassing for Dr. Kloet to submit to her sharp tone. In my mind, he walked over as if he were wearing a skirt.

  “Remember the girl you asked me to check earlier?” she asked him. “The dozens of marks on her skull that you treated with iodine?”

  With Laura’s hair cut short, I’d also had a chance to look while combing aside her hair with my fingers as if looking for lice. Many of the small punctures showed the first signs of infection, so there had been no choice except to send her to Dr. Kloet.

  “Of course,” he said. Irritated.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” she told him. “I wanted you to compare those marks to this.”

  She ran her fingers lightly over the bite marks, ignoring the deeper gash where I had slashed my arm with the broken bottle neck.

  “Similar,” he said. “Satisfied?”

  He did not look at me.

  “Dr. Kloet,” I said, “just so you know, Georgie lied to you. It was my secret. Nobody at camp was talking about our marble games.”

  That was the only part that bothered me. I deserved the shunning by Dr. Kloet, for I had played marbles for no other reason than food. He didn’t deserve to believe that the camp had been laughing about it behind his back.

  “Except for Dr. Eikenboom, apparently,” he said. “Besides, can you expect me to believe anything you say? Georgie, I have learned, is not the type of boy to punch another boy without warning. He is just like I was as a boy. Sensitive and brilliant. And misunderstood.”

  Dr. Kloet stomped back to his table.

  Dr. Eikenboom gave me a thoughtful gaze. “I’ve noticed he’s been particularly unhelpful to me lately. Can you explain what that was about?”

  “Georgie told him that you told his mother I was hoodwinking him at marbles. So I punched Georgie.” Then I continued,
almost to myself, “Less for that than for something else.”

  Dr. Eikenboom’s gaze remained thoughtful. Then she said, “I’m sorry for that, Jeremiah. I thought my funny little story to her was harmless, but in this camp, I need to learn better that tongues will wag. Will you forgive me?”

  I stared at her for a moment, unfamiliar with the wonderful feeling of an adult actually owning up to a wrongdoing, much less offering me an apology for it. I nodded.

  Dr. Eikenboom unwrapped the dirty cloth around the tip of my finger. She inspected where I had torn the nail loose in my frantic attempt to take the seal off the bottle of gin.

  “And this?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Don’t bother thinking of an excuse,” she said.

  She leaned forward. “Jeremiah, if I were a detective, I would suggest the puncture marks on your arm came from the bite of a large snake. I would also suggest that a blond girl with short hair had the same bite on her head. I would have expected that Laura would come to me for medical help, but instead she chose the other line. Almost as if the both of you didn’t want the same doctor comparing the wounds.”

  She took out a curved needle and some black nylon thread. She coiled the thread in an open dish of disinfectant to let it soak. She paused, holding the needle above the dish.

  “And if I were a detective,” she said, “I would do some deducing, like Sherlock Holmes. I would first suggest that a snake big enough to leave bite marks of this size does not exist in the walls of this camp. Otherwise, I would have heard about it by now. We are far too crowded for a predator like that to move about unseen, and the soldiers would have taken great pleasure in shooting it and cooking it.”

  This was true. It was no secret that the soldiers were facing their own shortages. Snake meat would have been a tremendous luxury.

  “There is something else strange,” Dr. Eikenboom said. One of the drivers who delivers the rice said he heard about an Indonesian boy who found a python last evening, just on the other side of the fence. He said that somehow the boy had managed to kill it and made a good trade for the skin and meat. He said he heard it was twenty feet long and hundreds of pounds.”

  “An Indonesian boy,” I echoed with relief. So Adi had lived up to our bargain. After claiming the snake and showing him the bite marks that proved Laura and I deserved our bounty, I’d promised him that tonight I could deliver excellent gin as a commodity for trade. But, I’d said, if word got around town that it came from a Dutch boy, the Japanese commander would turn the camp upside down to find out who that Dutch boy was and seize the gin.

  “That boy must have been very brave,” she said. “It’s a good thing the python didn’t kill him. Or at the least, give him trouble. Because if it did, you would expect to see the same kind of bite marks on him that you seem to have.”

  I maintained an innocent expression. I believed I was very good at that.

  “An Indonesian boy,” I said. “It couldn’t have been anyone else but an Indonesian boy. Otherwise the commander would hear about it from the delivery drivers, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Aaah,” she said. “That’s true. Unless somehow some very smart Dutch children found a way to stain their hands and faces with a dye made from the juice of a betel nut.”

  It was my turn to give her a thoughtful gaze. That was an excellent idea, and I stored it, thinking that someday it might come in helpful. But why was she suggesting it to me?

  She dipped the same needle in disinfectant.

  “You know I have to stitch the deep cut beside the bite mark, right?”

  “Yes, doctor,” I said.

  “Some children cry or pull away,” she said. She handed me a small wooden dowel. She didn’t have to explain why. “But that’s not a worry with you.”

  She threaded the needle, and I put the dowel crossways in my mouth. Not much of a painkiller, but it was the best available. Morphine was saved for more severe pain than a minor thing like stitching a wound.

  I bit the dowel hard between my teeth, and with sure and steady movements, she sewed the gash in my arm. I breathed so hard through my nose that my jaw muscles began to ache. I wanted to cry, but she had predicted that I wouldn’t. I wanted to live up to her expectation.

  When she was finished tying off the final knot, she dabbed iodine on the punctures and pulled out a container of sulfa tablets.

  “Perhaps you should save that for others,” I said.

  “We are so short on supply that it almost doesn’t matter,” she said. “Any day now, what we have will be gone. Nakahara doesn’t care. He wants more of us to die so there will be fewer to feed. And that is the bigger worry.”

  She patted my good arm. “If you hear of anyone who has somehow found a way to sneak out of the camp at night, will you let me know? If that person would be willing to help trade for medical supplies, it could save many lives. There is money in this camp, you know, money that Nakahara hasn’t found. I think I could convince the block representatives to find some of that money to purchase more sulfa and other necessary things.”

  She looked away to count out the sulfa tablets, then back at me.

  “Naturally,” she said, “I would be very worried that the person might get caught, but if it was a smart boy, he probably knows how to stay safe. And, so far, the Japanese have not yet started executing children. Normally, I’d hate for that smart boy to take a risk like that, but I see no other choice. Of course, this arrangement would remain between me and that boy.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Well then.” She stood. “Is that it?”

  I stood too. I pointed at my knees where I had scraped them along the inside of the drainage pipe. “Do you have some disinfectant for this? Any boy smart enough to get out of camp to help a doctor better be smart enough not to get blood poisoning.”

  “Of course,” she said. Her smile was all I needed.

  “At the end of the day,” I said, “perhaps Pietje and I could come back and talk about this with you?”

  She nodded agreement.

  “And perhaps,” I said, “you might be able to bring along some cheese or sweets? Dr. Kloet always did when we met with him.”

  “I have none,” she said.

  I’d expected that answer, but it was still worth a try.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  With Dr. Eikenboom’s help and using Adi as an intermediary, trading with the world outside the Jappenkamp held little risk. We managed to do it without breaking curfew, and that saved trying to consistently sneak out at night where dozens of families could observe us and ask questions.

  Without Laura’s involvement, the system would have failed. The irony was that we discovered our roles had been reversed. When I’d heard Laura’s scream that night, I’d been able to make it through the drainage ditch, and having conquered it once, I no longer felt claustrophobic. For Laura, who woke from nightmares believing she was still in the snake’s coils, the drainage pipe became an obstacle of fear. The only way she’d been able to force herself through to get back inside the camp after the python attack had been the overwhelming need for comfort in Sophie’s arms.

  Dr. Eikenboom agreed that if only four of us knew about the drainage ditch and how we were trading, the secret would survive. The fourth was Sophie, of course, for Laura had had to answer to her the mystery of the puncture wounds on her skull. I hadn’t needed to involve Elsbeth. The months of happiness under the care of a bright, cheerful, and affectionate mother had swung back the other direction, and rare was the day that I did not think about the dark, brooding sketches I had seen on the bedroom wall of the house we had lost to the Indonesians. Elsbeth was largely unaware of her family’s activities, and even her breast-feeding of Jasmijn seemed like an absent-minded task, for my sisters had to remind her again and again to tend to the baby.

  The night after the python attack was the only night I had to break curfew again. I crawled underneath the fence to the outside and found Adi waiting. My currency
for him was only a small jar of gin that he could trade for some coconuts and vegetables for our family. It had seemed wise to stretch out the remaining supply of Bols by dividing it this way. But to Adi’s surprise and delight, I also had money for him to purchase medical supplies.

  During this meeting, Adi and I agreed on the system that Dr. Eikenboom had suggested. The foundation to it was that as a middleman, he would be able to take a consistent profit. I showed him where to find the drainage pipe hidden on his side of the fence. In the mornings, with enough sunlight filtering through the bushes covering both ends of the pipe for me to see that it was clear of snakes, I would crawl through. On the other end, just inside the pipe, I would leave a list of items for Adi to obtain, along with the necessary goods or money for his exchanges.

  He would make sure that no one observed him as he took the list and goods from the pipe, and then he would wander around town to barter with people who had been exposed to Adi’s appearance long enough to look past it. In the evening, Adi put his spoils inside the end of the pipe, and I would retrieve them the next morning when I brought a new list and goods and money. This meant that Laura and I would need to go to the drainage pipe only once a day and that neither of us needed to dye our skins with betel nut juice to go into town ourselves. Laura would play dolls on the ground near the bush that hid the drainage pipe. She watched for soldiers and let me know if it was safe to come out.

  The system seemed like it depended on trust, but it didn’t. Adi knew that if I returned the following morning and the goods weren’t in place, there would be no list and no goods or money waiting for him until he delivered on the previous list. The first time he wasn’t able to find what I needed, he had been waiting in the vegetation at the end of the pipe the next day so he could explain why. By the following morning, what I needed was there.

  It was a good system. Adi, as it turned out, was an adept trader, and he procured the insulin that Jasmijn needed to survive. Within days, she became healthy again, and as I held her, her eyes would search my face and she would respond to my smiles. My sisters took turns trying to teach her the names of different parts of the body—elbow, hand, nose, ear, fingers—giggling and singing, although we all knew it would be a while before Jasmijn would be old enough to talk. Now, at least, we could look forward to that day.