Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  THIRTY-NINE

  The next day when the truck arrived, I scooted beneath it again, and in an awkward position in the shade below the flatbed as women unloaded the bins of bread, I rubbed betel nut dye on my arms and legs and face and neck and into my hair, transforming myself into a half breed. I was also equipped with a bag of currency that Dr. Eikenboom had gathered from block representatives and a list of items to return to the camp.

  As I discovered when the truck lurched forward with a grinding of gears that rattled with disturbing closeness, it was less than a ten-minute drive from the Jappenkamp to the bakery. It was not difficult to remain hidden beneath the moving truck for that journey. The swaying of the straps mitigated the jolting of the vehicle over potholes, and the movement of air swept away the exhaust. It was disconcerting to know the drive shaft was only inches from my head, whirling in a blur. Had my hair been long enough for a sideways gust of wind to blow the ends into the drive shaft, the instant wrapping of hair would have pulled my face into it and I would have died a horrible death as it continued to rotate my head. But my hair was cut to a buzz to prevent lice, and I was relatively comfortable and safe in the makeshift hammock beneath the flatbed.

  Instead, the difficulty on the first day was finding the right moment to leave the straps and crawl out from beneath the truck, something I had not given much thought to during my planning.

  At the bakery, the truck driver remained in the vehicle when it came to a stop and he shut off the engine. I saw the bare feet of boys and the sandaled feet of men who unloaded the empty bins from the back of the truck and replaced them with full bins. It was certain I would be discovered here.

  It appeared I had no choice but to go along for the ride as the truck made its next deliveries. I tried to anticipate what might happen at the next stop. What if someone there saw me on the ground as the truck drove away? When the driver heard about that, he might get curious enough to look beneath the vehicle and see the straps.

  What about on the road? I asked myself. Traffic jams were frequent, and while it was stopped, I could roll out from beneath. That too had risks. I would need to depend on luck and disinterest from those on scooters and motorcycles, and indeed on no Japanese soldiers spotting me and asking questions.

  So I remained in the straps and fought the gradual ache that came at the pressure points on my thighs and chest. I decided that when the truck was parked back at the bakery overnight, I would sneak back and add padding to those straps.

  It was fortunate then that at the next delivery, the driver needed to pull as far off the road as possible for traffic to get around the vehicle. Drivers sat on the right side of the vehicle, as the Dutch East Indies had established a pattern of left-side driving. It meant the left side of the truck was very close to the wall of the building. It was a very simple matter to work out of the straps, roll toward the wall, and sneak backward and out of sight.

  I was free. Homeless, but free. For the next hour, I fought an impulse to flinch as any of the natives glanced at me, but the dye must have been effective enough, for I drew no attention. My appearance was no different than any other poor Javanese half breed, roaming the streets out of boredom and in vain hopes of spotting anything of value.

  I roamed. Naturally, since all that the Japanese had done was confiscate homes and surround them with a fence, the nearby residential streets were identical to those of the Jappenkamp, except that the yards were much less worn because outside of the camp, one house held at most three families. None were Dutch—these were homes taken from the colonizers after the capitulation and left open to be scavenged and for squatter’s rights.

  When I reached the first market area of this unfamiliar town that I had lived in for months and months and months, I was astounded at the variety and availability of fruits and breads and butchered chickens and sheep. Did no one realize that hundreds and hundreds of women and children were in a desperate fight against starvation on the other side of the bamboo fence?

  The answer perhaps was that few cared.

  Anti-Dutch graffiti was everywhere, and I was to learn that in return for cooperation, the Japanese had promised self-governance. The war might end, but life on the colony would never be the same.

  I spent the remainder of the afternoon among the crowds in the market. If this town was anything like Sukorejo, where I had been raised, gangs of boys from homes of the poor would roam in their established territories. I had been given permission by Dr. Eikenboom to use some of the money to feed myself, and the glorious taste of fresh cantaloupe nearly brought me to tears that leaving Pietje behind had not done. I didn’t know if it was the taste or the wish that somehow I could get some of the slices to the brother who was now lost to me.

  When the shop owners began to empty their stalls, I hung around the periphery, waiting until darkness provided a blanket of safety. And when the night insects began to call from the trees, I made my way toward the Jappenkamp, sealed by that bamboo fence in the center of the town.

  I came to the drainage ditch and the familiar tree that had hidden the python that attacked Laura. I sat against the trunk of the tree and waited.

  Was Adi even still alive?

  I could not know. I could only take the chance that his life was still one of solitude because of the cleft lip and palate that disfigured him. I could only hope that his habits had not changed. I needed him. The women and children of the Jappenkamp needed him.

  The breeze shifted and brought the stench of open sewage from within the Jappenkamp. With that came memories that I wanted buried, the funerals of Nikki and Aniek and Elsbeth, the last night that Elsbeth was alive, how morning had shown Pietje the lifeless body of his mother and his reaction of horror to me.

  Our bodies are the carriers of our souls. Too often we get lost in the physical world when our souls should focus elsewhere. Just as often, we get lost in the darkness of our souls when our bodies can so easily provide escape and distraction.

  Sitting against the banyan tree, I banished my melancholy by listening to every night sound, trying to sort and categorize each one, plucking them out of the cacophony. Shrieks of monkeys, the hoot of an owl, the slamming of a distant door, the roar of a motorcycle. I examined each new scent, from the perfume of the flowers to the vague sulfur smell of the bog that was formed by the water from the drainage ditch. I let my skin tingle for the sensation of ants that crossed my bare shins, allowed grass to itch at my thighs where my shorts touched the ground.

  I managed to make time pass by getting lost in each moment of the present, and when my mind was tempted to stray into the future or the past, I pictured Laura on the first day I met her, radiant in a dress, her long blond hair clean and bouncy. I pictured her on the porch of Dr. Eikenboom’s house, solemnly listening to the plans for me to become a way of getting medical supplies back into camp. I imagined photos of Amsterdam and placed the two of us there as a young couple, beneath streetlights along a canal.

  This was how I banished my demons until Adi arrived.

  I didn’t want him startled into fleeing, so I called out to him.

  “Adi, it’s Jeremiah. From the camp!”

  He ran toward the banyan tree, and I heard joy in his voice that brought a lump to my throat.

  “Jeremiah!”

  Thus began my final months of the war, as a half-native trader and Dutch boy smuggler.

  FORTY

  A few weeks passed without mishap or any real danger. Adi and I would do our trading with those he carefully selected, none of whom gave me a second glance, as Adi did most of the speaking and negotiating. Every day or every second day I would enter camp hidden beneath the bread truck with goods for Dr. Eikenboom and leave with what she had collected for me to use to barter. At night I stayed with Adi’s family, pretending I was happy not to be alone.

  Then came the morning at the market when I heard my given name and surname called out from behind me. Had I been more alert, I would have pretended not to hear. Jeremiah Prins, after
all, was supposed to be dead and certainly not supposed to be wandering the village with his face darkened by the brown dye from nut juice.

  I couldn’t help myself. For I knew the voice. I turned to see the smug and triumphant face of Georgie. He held a canvas bag filled with fruits and breads, obviously the results of his own market shopping.

  “I knew it!” he said in clear Dutch. His voice rose above the din of the crowded market. Adi grabbed my hand and tried to pull me away. He, too, understood the danger if I was recognized.

  It was enough of a warning that I didn’t reply in Dutch to Georgie, for my articulation in that language would have drawn attention to me from the Javanese.

  Georgie pushed in close. “I knew it. I knew it. You’ve run from camp, haven’t you?”

  I could see by the expressions across his face that he was calculating how best to hurt me.

  Adi stepped in.

  “You,” he said to Georgie. “You’re the one whose mother was given a house and servants by the Japanese. The one whose mother had a Japanese girl. Everyone knows who the father is.”

  Adi spat. “And the commander still visits every few days, that’s what I hear. If you say a word about my friend to anyone, you won’t spend a safe moment outside the house. There are gangs, you know, that will kill you for whatever reward I offer.”

  Georgie backed away slightly, enough of an indication that I knew the leverage was back on our side, and the hatred spilled out. “After the war,” I said, “everyone will know what I know about her and the commander.”

  It hit him like a punch. But I didn’t expect the counterstrike.

  “And I will be happy myself to spread the word about your own mother,” he said.

  “She is dead,” I answered, closing my heart to any emotion that came with memories of her.

  “That won’t matter,” he said. “Will you want everyone knowing what she did to Jasmijn? I know about the feather in her mouth. From a pillow.”

  If I didn’t stagger physically, whatever showed on my face was enough to goad him.

  I didn’t answer.

  “See?” he asked. “See? The commander told my mother if she doesn’t do what he wants, he will kill me. At least my mother does what she does to keep me alive. Your mother—”

  I punched him square in the mouth, and he dropped to his knees.

  Adi scrambled forward and pulled him back up again. Adi hissed at me. “No fighting! We cannot draw attention to ourselves!”

  Adi put his arm around Georgie’s shoulder like they were friends. “Both of you. Stop. You must each pretend the other does not exist. Then you will stay alive. Understand?”

  “I understand.” Georgie wiped blood from his split lip. “I understand that if Jeremiah ever speaks a word about my mother, the world will learn about his.”

  Georgie smiled at me, the smile of a victor. “Am I right, Jeremiah?”

  “The same in return,” I said. It was the best I could manage. “If you ever speak of my mother, the world learns about yours. And remember, I was the one who got in the last punch.”

  That didn’t diminish his smile as I had hoped.

  “And you remember,” he said, “that I’m the one who has the green statue marble that I stole from Dr. Kloet’s collection. The one with a tiny horse statue inside. Didn’t it once belong to your father? I think I’ll go home now and throw it in the sewage.”

  Before I could take another swing at Georgie, Adi pushed me away and propelled me forward, through the throngs of shoppers at the market.

  From behind me, I heard Georgie’s vindictive laughter, much more painful than any punch he could have thrown.

  FORTY-ONE

  I was fortunate that Adi’s family was Protestant, as it prevented some of the awkwardness that came as they sheltered me in their home. I had had little exposure to Muslim or Hindu traditions. What I did know about the native Indonesians I had gleaned from my time at the laundry, watching closely as someone invisible to them. Understanding the social customs helped considerably when Adi first brought me to the small thatched structure that was his home, at the far edge of the town, with rice paddies behind, stretching to the distant volcanoes that ringed the valley. It was hardly larger than a hut, with a single room, a dirt floor, and a smoke-leaking stove.

  When he introduced me to his father, Sukurno, I was prepared to show respect by performing salim, touching the top of his hand with my forehead as we shook hands.

  Sukurno was sitting on a bamboo chair outside their home when Adi led me there, and he surprised me by remaining seated and opening both hands, palms up, in his lap.

  I looked into his wrinkled face. I would find out later that he was only in his midforties, but labor and constant cigarettes had added a decade to his appearance. I think he understood my hesitation, for he nodded.

  I bowed and put my nose deep into his hands, almost placing my head on his lap. He was greeting me as if I were his son.

  What I didn’t know was that Adi had spent long hours describing me to them, and describing the previous nights where I’d passed the hours lying on a thick branch of the tree outside the drainage ditch that had once held an ambushing python. I also didn’t know that his mother, Utami, who ruled the household, had forced Sukurno to accept my inclusion on the mats that served as their beds.

  She was a short, squat woman, with thick calluses from the basket handles used to carry rice. Yet I would learn that her touch was velvet. Adi was her only child, the one who had been born last. All the others before him had died before reaching school age, and she adored him, often kissing him lightly on his nose and lips, as if to tell him that she found his deformity to be beautiful to her.

  Sukurno had argued against my presence among them because of the risk and the need to hide my true identity. There was no reason to not fear punishment for treason against the Japanese war efforts. Rumors of my existence would surely spread once even a single person outside the family knew, but long before such news reached Nakahara, the family would have been attacked by the older teenage sons of their neighborhood friends, the radical and independence-minded pemuda, the youth groups, who wanted neither Japanese nor Dutch rule on the island and, like the Hitler youth groups in Europe, were barely more than thugs who roamed unchallenged by their elders.

  Why had Utami fought on my behalf?

  The trading that Adi and I accomplished did have economic benefits to the family, but I doubt that is why I was accepted into their home. I had co-opted Adi into my cause of helping the women and children of the camp survive with our daily delivery of food and medicine, and most of our profits went to those rations. And even if we had been driven by the greatest gain for ourselves, our increased earnings would not have been worth the risk his parents took in pretending that I was a cousin from Semarang, staying after I’d become orphaned.

  Instead, I believe she was driven by love for Adi. I was his first and his only friend, someone who accepted him as they did.

  I could never forget the moment, on the evening that I trusted him to bury her, when Adi stroked the perfection of Jasmijn’s face, when he believed that she’d been asleep. Nor could I forget his words and the sorrow in his words. “Don’t let her wake. Sometimes the little ones see my mouth and they don’t understand I am not a monster.”

  He was not a monster. I would never have known that, had not circumstances put us together long enough for me to no longer notice his horribly distorted face and the peculiar noises he made and the high nasal tones of his speech.

  As I would learn in adulthood, with no separation between his nasal cavity and mouth, it was physically impossible for Adi to accomplish what the rest of us take for granted, indeed what takes no thought during the process of forming our words as we speak. To make our sounds, it requires air pressure in the mouth; correct speech requires the soft palate at the back of the mouth to lift and move toward the throat so that air and sound can be directed outward. We also require the area of hard tissue at the roof
of our mouth for our tongue to tap and touch as we articulate different sounds. Adi’s soft palate was incapable of closing off the nasal cavity through his mouth, and the cleft of his palate had robbed him of most of the surface area for his tongue to deliver consonants with any precision. Worse, as a little boy still unaware of his handicap, for years he’d strained without success to mimic those around him and had learned grunts and growls that had become an unconscious habit he could not escape.

  It is not difficult to imagine Utami’s anguish in the months after he was born, her attempts to suckle him as he vainly tried to create a vacuum with his mouth against her breasts. Later, his isolation as a child, bewildered at his differentness, would have torn her heart, and when he learned to understand the words he struggled to speak, the taunts of unkind strangers would have been barbs piercing her just as deeply as they did Adi. To watch him step out of the hut in the evenings, when darkness would protect him, would have been gut-wrenching, to know that he would be unlikely to share a first kiss or hold hands with a young woman, to understand he would not be able to whisper poetry in the ear of a woman to take as his bride. All of that because of a genetic aberration seemingly placed upon him with arbitrary indifference.

  To someone, however, who believes that good comes from bad, who believes in divine purpose, Adi was paying the price for the dozens of lives that were saved by the food and medicine we brought into camp. Had he not been disfigured, he would have not been at the drainage ditch on the night that Laura was attacked by the python; had he not been disfigured, he would not have been willing to join another outcast, me, in those efforts.

  If this is true, it would mean that I, too, had paid a price to be in the same position. If my sisters and mother were still alive, I would not be strapping myself beneath a bread truck on a daily basis and roaming the village like a native to procure those supplies.