Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Only one person could have confirmed to Nakahara my story about using the peephole to see a Dutch woman in a robe in his private garden. Someone who heard me tell Dr. Eikenboom about it himself. The same man who knew about my pouch with the china marble and where I kept it hidden at all times. The same man, of course, who had lusted after that marble and felt he’d been made a fool over his desire to win it from me.

  The round-faced, well-fed Dr. Kloet.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Dr. Eikenboom struggled to push away a wet cloth in my mother’s hands. “Elsbeth,” she said, “you have used too much. I’m not the only one in this camp who needs this.” She rested in a tattered armchair in the schoolhouse hallway, just outside the large closet that was her residence. The beating she’d received had been so bad it had taken her four days to be able to leave her bed. During that time, Sophie and Laura had tended to her in one shift, and my mother and I in another.

  Elsbeth held the wet cloth above a pan where it had been soaking. The pan of lukewarm water also had pieces of torn leaves from the hibiscus plant. We’d harvested the leaves from the area of camp that Dr. Eikenboom had set aside just to grow the flowers. A vegetable garden would have been unthinkable, as the crops would not have served more than a handful of people. But it was understood that medicinal plants would be useful for everyone in the camp, and the patch had flourished under careful tending.

  The largest percentage of the garden held hibiscus plants because of all of its uses. Tea made from the leaves was not only a natural diuretic that relieved swellings of the limbs, but it also contained vitamin C and many minerals. More importantly, the slimy water that was produced by soaking leaves was a natural disinfectant, and Dr. Eikenboom prescribed it for those with skin diseases. Like everything in camp, however, it was a limited resource.

  My mother dipped the cloth into the pan and admonished Dr. Eikenboom. “You need to look out for yourself first. Until you recover, we are down to one doctor. If something happens to you, it won’t make a difference how much extra hibiscus is left for the others, because we need you far more than the camp needs the hibiscus.”

  Elsbeth squeezed drippings from the cloth onto Dr. Eikenboom’s nearer arm and cleaned the skin.

  “Dr. Kloet,” I said with loud derision. I was holding my book, Ivanhoe, that Pietje had stored in his bag the day the soldiers had arrived at our house. I’d been reading it to Dr. Eikenboom, and we were at chapter fifteen. “We’d be better off without him.”

  “Hush,” Dr. Eikenboom said. Her forehead was mottled with bruises, and every time she shifted in her chair, she winced. “He may complain at times, but the poor man has been doing the work of two for a week now.”

  “I’ve been saying nothing so far because I wanted to wait until you were better,” I said. “But he’s the one who told Nakahara about the drainage pipe.”

  “What?” This came from my mother, and I felt satisfaction that both my mother and Dr. Eikenboom gasped.

  “Moeder,” I said, “did you know I’ve had two marbles hidden in a second pouch beneath my waistband since we came to camp?”

  “No,” she answered slowly, trying to figure out how this had anything to do with the discussion.

  “No is correct,” I said. “The other pouch has always been my secret. From everyone. Except Dr. Kloet. He knew about it because once he saw me take a marble out of the pouch and then return it.”

  “Yes?” Dr. Eikenboom said.

  I described how, after orders from Nakahara, his soldiers had known exactly where to find those marbles.

  “Dr. Kloet,” I pronounced, “is the only person who would know that somehow the camp was not running out of medical supplies. He’s the one who could spy on you and see that I was delivering those supplies. I’m sure he told Nakahara. He probably told Nakahara about Sophie and Mrs. Schoonenburg too.”

  “Just to get two marbles?” Dr. Eikenboom asked.

  “He’s been furious with me ever since he found out that I could beat him at any time,” I said. “I bet if I searched his room right now, I could find them both.”

  It was a tempting thought. Dr. Kloet was at the medical tent and his door was only down the hallway.

  “So,” Dr. Eikenboom said, “you think that doing something wrong like sneaking into his room is justified?”

  This was such a silly question that I couldn’t even find an answer. Dr. Kloet had stopped the entire camp from receiving the supplies Adi found for us, simply because he wanted to punish me and get the china marble. Of course I thought that stealing back the marbles was justified.

  “As soon as you are better,” I said, “we need to tell everybody what he did.”

  “Can you prove it?” Dr. Eikenboom asked.

  “It’s plain for anyone to see,” I said.

  “You think it’s right to destroy a man’s reputation without proof?”

  “It’s plain for anyone to see. I don’t need proof. But if I go into his room and find those marbles, I’ll show you the proof you need.”

  “So again, it’s okay to do something wrong to fight what is wrong?” Dr. Eikenboom sighed. “Then you have become the same. Remember Mrs. Aafjes and how she was stealing food by tamping the rice for her friends? Would you steal rice for your family to get back at her?”

  “That’s different,” I said.

  “How?”

  “It just is.”

  Another sigh from Dr. Eikenboom. “And if you proved Dr. Kloet is reporting to Nakahara, what then?”

  “He gets a beating,” I said. “From the block representatives. As bad as the beating you got. And I get my marbles back and everything is even.”

  “How does that help all the people who depend on him every day?”

  I could see that I was making no progress in trying to convince Dr. Eikenboom of the error in her thinking. Some people can be too stubborn for their own good. Also, it struck me that I shouldn’t make too big a fuss. I would just wait awhile, then sneak into his room during the day and find those marbles. Then we would see who was right about all of this.

  As my mother dripped hibiscus water into Dr. Eikenboom’s hair, I asked, “Would it be wrong to steal the Red Cross boxes that Nakahara keeps from us?”

  My mother mopped water from Dr. Eikenboom’s eyebrows.

  With her eyes closed, Dr. Eikenboom said, “I need to give that some thought. You are right that, in a sense, it’s no different than you stealing back your marbles.” She paused and I waited impatiently. “But it would be impossible. And if Nakahara caught you, all of the camp would be punished.”

  My mother said, “You heard Dr. Eikenboom say it would be impossible to get those boxes. I forbid you to even think about it.”

  What they didn’t know was that not only had I snuck out of the house to climb the privacy wall the night before, I’d done so with a straw mat to put on the jagged glass. With it protecting me from the glass, I had discovered it would be very possible to sneak into Nakahara’s garden, then through the door that led into his house. There was only one problem. His dog. It knew I was there. It had not barked but only stared upward at the base of the wall directly below me and whined slightly, wanting me to descend into its jaws. Nakahara had the perfect sentry. Someone who would not fall asleep, and someone who would take care of intruders without waking Nakahara.

  “Even so,” I said, “I would like to know if Dr. Eikenboom thinks it would be okay to steal those boxes from Nakahara.”

  Not only did I want revenge on Dr. Kloet but Nakahara too. It was time someone taught him a lesson, and stealing those boxes would suffice.

  “It would save lives,” she said. “Your marbles would not. And I make no apology for the distinction. Someone with higher standards than I would insist that if something is wrong, it is wrong in all situations. I, however, would lie if it meant protecting someone from the Japanese, even though it is wrong to lie.”

  “It doesn’t matter, though, does it?” Elsbeth asked with artificial brightness
. “Because no one is going to risk going into Nakahara’s headquarters to steal those boxes.”

  She, of course, meant me.

  “That would be crazy,” I told my mother. So I waited until she departed to read another chapter of Ivanhoe to Dr. Eikenboom. Before beginning, though, I asked, “Dr. Eikenboom, what’s the best way to poison a dog? Rosary pea?”

  Poison would complete my revenge. Dr. Kloet. Nakahara. And the monster dog from hell that was in the private garden at night, stopping anyone from dropping down inside.

  “I won’t answer that for you,” she said. “Unless the dog was poisoned slowly, Nakahara would know someone in camp had done it, and I don’t want to think about the consequences. Always, Jeremiah, we must think about the consequences of our actions.”

  She was absolutely right.

  I began to read chapter fifteen to her. “No spider ever took more pains to repair the shattered meshes of his web, than did Waldemar Fitzurse to reunite and combine the scattered members of Prince John’s cabal …”

  The next day I read aloud chapter sixteen, and I continued to read to her day by day until she was able to return to the table in the medical tent. That gave me many days to think about the consequences of sneaking into the house to find my marbles. Consequences for Dr. Kloet.

  So I did it, and it was as simple as I had imagined. Dr. Kloet was busy at the medical tent just after the lunch break. He had just returned to the lineup of women and children, so I knew there was no chance of getting caught.

  Except when I opened the door to his room, Georgie’s mother was there. Mrs. Smith. On his bed.

  “Back so soon?” she asked in a drowsy voice, rolling over on the bed to turn toward the door. That’s when our eyes met.

  And I fled.

  THIRTY-TWO

  In a place where no fathers lived to impose discipline, some of the older boys had become wild, refusing to fulfill camp duties, forming gangs, and often hassling or threatening older women. The risk to his men also apparent, Nakahara decided to send all boys over the age of thirteen to a men’s camp. This sent a seismic wave of grief through camp with mothers clinging to their boys and boys trying not to weep in return as soldiers loaded them onto trucks.

  Before then, Georgie had existed among the fringe of boys that exist everywhere. Some live a solitary existence without enough courage to form their own group or the courage to stand up to older boys. Others are invisible to the ringleaders and, like geckos, scurry away from the moving shadows of danger. I always tried to earn enough respect from older boys to be left alone. Then finally, there are the Georgies. They need attention, and probably because a mother or aunt excessively doted on them, they expect to be treated like royalty their entire lives. They have a stench of obnoxiousness and bluster that serves well to push around younger or smaller boys, but it also draws the predators above them in the food chain. Georgie’s only refuge had been Dr. Kloet, and he often spent hours at the medical tent with him, sometimes running errands Dr. Kloet requested.

  In the space of hours after the last of the trucks transported the older boys out of the gates, Georgie’s role shifted from that of one bullied by his elders to one of an elder happy to bully those beneath him. After the culling of the older boys, he could dare to form his own group and was delighted to leave Dr. Kloet’s protection. He led this uncivil group of five or six boys as they took marbles and dolls from younger kids, taunted them to the point of tears, and punched and hit at whim. He’d seen me in line at lunchtime and promised to make my life miserable as soon as he could catch me away from adults. I think he thought that would make me afraid. Instead, I looked forward to it and wondered where and when would be the best time for it.

  In the meantime, and ever since Dr. Eikenboom had returned to her table under the medical tent, I had begun collecting seeds from the rosary pea plant. Like a weed, it would twine around shrubs and trees as it flourished in the tropical conditions of the Dutch East Indies. Because none of the plant was edible, though, no one in camp bothered it for anything except the seeds, which were like hard beans the size of ladybugs and used for jewelry. The seeds were colored like ladybugs too, with most of them a shiny red with the top tip black.

  Small children in camp would occasionally swallow the attractive seeds, but mothers would not be worried. The shell of the seed was too hard to be digested, and the seeds would pass through in normal fashion. I did know, however, that sometimes a mother would get sick after making jewelry with the beans. Using a needle to bore holes through the seeds, she would string them together to make bright ankle or wrist bracelets. But if a woman pricked a hole in her skin while boring the seed, the toxin inside could enter her bloodstream. All it took was a minute amount of abrin—the poison inside the seed—on the tip of the needle to bring on the fever and cough and nausea, but that small amount wouldn’t lead to death. I needed to gather enough seeds to crush and mix into meat to poison Nakahara’s dog. It would take days to die, which meant that long after the animal had eaten it, the evidence would be gone.

  I was deterred from that plan, however, because as in all of life, good fortune and timing were what truly mattered. One morning, our little group had gathered beside Laura’s house. Pietje, Nikki, and Aniek sat in a small circle with us because Laura was trying to teach them to read.

  Laura noticed them first, climbing down a tree trunk. “That’s a long caterpillar! Really long!”

  She walked to the tree for a closer look, and I followed. The front of the caterpillar looked like it had almost reached the ground.

  “It’s a bunch of them,” she said.

  Indeed, an unbroken vertical line of caterpillars stretched down one of the few pine trees in camp. Each was only an inch or so long, with orange-brown backs and bands of blue-gray, and covered with soft-looking blue-gray fuzz. They had formed a parade, with the nose of one caterpillar touching the tail end of the one in front of it.

  I moved beside her. “Those are called processionary caterpillars. You can see why. We need a marching band for them. This happens only once a year.”

  High up in the tree would have been the remnant of a nest built of white silk to protect them as they ate pine needles and patiently went through the stages of molting and growing. When ready to leave the nest, they paraded down the tree to look for a place to dig underground and pupate, emerging at the end of summer as moths with cream-colored forewings and white hind wings.

  “They look cuddly,” she said, reaching out to stroke the blue-gray fuzz.

  I snatched her wrist and pulled her hand away. “Not a good idea.”

  She giggled. “They bite?”

  I shook my head. “There’s a reason they are not afraid of birds or animals. You’ll see lines of them crossing open ground and nothing touches them. All that fuzz is poisonous. When I was eight, a boy from the Netherlands visited my dad’s school …”

  My pause wasn’t for effect or because I was searching for words. It was just that I had been struck by an image of myself at the school at the end of a day, sitting by my father’s side for what seemed like hours as I sketched out buildings of all shapes and sizes and he graded papers. I fought off the sadness. “This boy didn’t know about the caterpillars. Just like you. He began to play with them. Then his face swelled up and his hands got blistered and …”

  My voice faded as another, much less sad, vision struck me. Of Georgie reaching into a bag of marbles stolen from a little kid only to discover the processionary caterpillars and their thousands of follicles like poison darts.

  “Hey,” I said to Laura. “I want you to watch something. Pietje, where’s a stick?”

  Dutifully, he went running. By the time he returned, the line of caterpillars had flowed from the tree onto the ground. Sometimes the procession would be over a hundred feet long.

  “Thanks, Pietje,” I said. His obedience and worship of me was something I gave little thought to. With Laura and my sisters watching, I used the stick to flick aside some caterpilla
rs about six feet from the front of the line and form a gap. Now there were two processions—the short one at the front, and a second one that continued unbroken all the way back to the trunk of the tree and up into the branches where it had started.

  I nudged the lead caterpillar of the short line to change its direction. The caterpillars behind it remained in the nose-to-tail formation. With a series of these nudges, the lead caterpillar was taking all of its followers in the beginning of a circle, and soon enough, it had reached the tail end of the final caterpillar and the circle was complete.

  This was a parlor trick I’d learned from my half brothers. Before the capitulation, I’d watched them do it one afternoon in our own yard. The next morning the caterpillars were still moving in that circle in the same place. They did that for two days before succumbing to starvation.

  “You try,” I said to Laura.

  She used the stick to get another circle started of the same size. I allowed Pietje to form a third circle. Nikki and Aniek made a fourth and fifth circle. Even so, the line from the tree continued to move forward, and when the final caterpillar descended, the straight line that departed from us was still twenty feet long.

  As their comrades marched away, we were looking at five circles of caterpillars, their backs undulating as they crawled nose to tail, nose to tail.

  “They are not going anywhere,” I said. “Now we need some bags to hold them.”

  I stood guard as my henchmen ran to various places to find any remaining bags that the women once used to carry goods from the markets—before the Jappenkamp had become the only way we were allowed to live.

  When they returned, we put marbles in each bag, enough for the clunking sounds to be heard. After that, it was simple to guide the caterpillars into the bags. We finished with three bags full. It was deliciously satisfying to hold the top of the bag open and see the curled masses of caterpillars writhing inside.