Thief of Glory

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Rachel arrived at my hotel room at 9 a.m.

  Her look of concern frightened me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said from the doorway.

  “Okay,” I said. I shrugged.

  I saw her battle with thoughts. Then she said, “Okay, it’s not okay. It’s not nothing.”

  I shrugged.

  “See,” she said. “That’s how you and I have lived our lives. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. All the time. Speak of nothing that’s inside.”

  She stepped inside and shut the door. I backed away.

  “A daughter should hug a father,” she said. “A father should hug a daughter.”

  As she moved closer, I fought the impulse to keep the space between us.

  She reached up and put her arms around my shoulders. She put her chin on my chest and spoke into the bathrobe that I was wearing.

  “Do you know how much courage it took me last night to ask for what happened to you as a boy? How vulnerable that made me feel? That’s not how it should be.”

  She trembled in my arms. Or was it my arms trembling, my own tired flesh and skeleton betraying me?

  Hesitantly, I patted her on the back.

  “More!” she demanded. “Hold me. Squeeze me. Like you love me.”

  I did. I felt like a tin soldier, but I waited until she broke the embrace and stepped back.

  “Why is that so difficult for us?” she asked.

  “Does this dress make me look fat?” I countered.

  “No.” She became angry. “No deflections.”

  She grabbed my hand. That was twice. Once the night before. And now. She led me to the mirror at the hotel closet.

  “Look at yourself,” she said.

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  My gray hair was limp and messy. There were patches of stubble that I’d missed when shaving. A stain of egg yolk on the robe. My neck was wattled, and my face sagging.

  “I don’t want to see you like that,” she said. “You are the rock. Invincible to erosion. That’s the way I want you. I don’t want to see you and know that too soon—”

  My own face must have shown horror. Why was she sharing this?

  “Don’t run from my feelings,” she said. “At the same time, I don’t want you to be the rock and invincible. I want—”

  She closed her eyes and I saw a familiar set of her jaws as she squeezed the muscle at the joints and took control of herself. See, she was my daughter. She opened her eyes. “What I want is room service.”

  She marched to the phone and made an order.

  I took a set of ironed clothes from the closet, went into the bathroom, and shut the door. I shaved again and wet my hair and combed it and dressed and stepped outside in a suit and tie. I was a new man.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Just forget my outburst,” she answered. “Hormones.”

  “Okay,” I said. But was wise enough not to shrug.

  She said, “I have good news. I wanted to deliver it in person.”

  “Another future ex-husband lined up?” Perhaps now was the time for artful deflection to be welcomed.

  She answered, “I’ve heard from the senator’s office. There will be no criminal charges.”

  I sat on the chair beside the small couch at the end of the small room. I pointed at the couch. She sat.

  “Have I ever lied to you?” I asked.

  “My entire life, you have withheld information, continuously deflected my questions, ignored me, and in many senses, abandoned me. To the point that I just made a fool of myself.”

  “Who I am to you is something I grieve every day,” I said. “Next time, perhaps, I will be the one to step forward and hug you.”

  “You don’t need to force yourself. I’m over whatever flash of hormones it was that hit me.”

  I was surprised to feel a nudge of disappointment. We both let a few moments pass in silence.

  “Have I ever lied to you?” I began again.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Even if someone wiped my memory clear of what happened, when I tell you the senator assaulted me, that is the truth. Not once in my life have I instigated a fight. He assaulted me. Ensure that charges are filed. If not, then ensure that the press hears about an attempt to cover up charges against a United States lawmaker. I will have my day in court.”

  Was the surprise in her face at the sudden strength in my voice, or my unexpected demand?

  “The press won’t care about two octogenarians engaged in a pillow fight,” she said after some thought. “Neither do the police. No one assumes you are a threat to homeland security.”

  “If you won’t do it, you are obligated to put together a file that another lawyer can take over. I expect you to do so by the end of morning. Send me a bill.”

  “Just so I understand. I drop all my appointments to fly to Washington because the police arrested you, and now that you are clear of any trouble, you want to—”

  “How much clearer can I make this? I was assaulted by a US senator. I will not let this injustice go unpunished unless you arrange for me to privately meet the senator.”

  “Is this somehow related to your time in the Dutch East Indies?” she asked. “And the legal investigation into war crimes that you spent the better part of the 1970s trying to establish? What was the name of the Japanese commander you tried to track … Nakahara?”

  Even to me, my voice sounded like a croak. “You …”

  “Learned enough to track it down with LexisNexis. It only took a few hours. Your name is everywhere. If you had done this a few decades later, Google would have flagged it for me.”

  “Laura told you,” I said. I was so intent on this, I didn’t think of how it would look as I fished for Journal 35, flipped through pages, and found what I needed between pages 17 and 26. I spoke without looking up from my notes. “Laura vertelde jou dat ze jou ontmoed had in haar hotel kamer voor dat ze naar het politie station ging.”

  When she didn’t confirm, I glanced up.

  Rachel was weeping in silence, eyes wide open as she stared at me.

  “Hormones?” I offered, knowing it was weak. Why couldn’t I move myself closer and hold her? Her divorce had broken her; not once during the months it had taken for her to piece together her life had I consoled her by holding her.

  “You were just speaking in Dutch,” she said.

  “No,” I said, a reflexive denial. But I realized she was correct.

  I cleared my throat and said it in English. “Last night you said you met Laura in her hotel room before going to the police station.”

  “And you had to confirm that by looking at notes.” Tears glistened. “This is what happens. Lapsing into your mother tongue. The journal. Stickies …”

  “Stickies.” My voice was flat. If she suspected what was happening to me, it explained the demand in the holding cell for me to share my story before I was gone.

  She took a deep breath.

  “When I was in your condo yesterday, I looked through your office.”

  The tears flowed, and she was barely in control of her voice. “I thought maybe I could find something there that would give me a hint as to why you would be in jail for attacking a United States senator.”

  “My office. That’s private.”

  “Under the circumstance,” she said, “I’d say that I was justified to disregard your privacy.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a black-and-white photo and handed it to me. “While I was in there, I took this from a photo album that I’d never seen before. Who is it?”

  I glanced at the face in the photo and had to look away. This was not the time or place to become weak with emotion.

  “Not only this,” she continued, “the album had dozens of black-and-white photos. Family, I’m guessing. Don’t you think I have a right to know? Was it you, the little blond-haired boy on a horse with palm trees and a volcano mountain in the background? He looked s
o happy, with the man beside him. Was that my grandfather?”

  After the war, a cousin in the Netherlands had given me a package with those photos, sent to his father from my father during happy years in the Dutch East Indies. Aside from memories, it was all that remained of my family.

  “I made my promise to you last night,” I said. “I have already begun to journal my childhood for you. My promise should be enough for you until you get those journals.”

  I remembered that day with my father when I was on a horse. Just as I remembered standing beside a white wooden cross long after the war had ended.

  I’d flown back to the islands to search for Adi and had also sought out my father’s grave site in Burma, one of thousands who had died as the Japanese pushed them to build the railway and the bridge over the River Kwai.

  To emphasize my point, I continued. “You will get my story. It’s not something I can write in one day.”

  “That man,” she said, pointing at the photo I still held. “I only brought that photo along because somehow, I know I know him. Didn’t he visit us once when I was a little girl? Tell me that’s true. Tell me I’m not imagining it.”

  “He did,” I admitted. “His name is Adi.”

  “And he is …”

  “Was,” I said. “Two years ago, I went to his funeral.”

  “In the United States? He looks Indonesian to me.”

  “He was buried in Batavia,” I said.

  “Batavia?”

  I corrected myself and spoke formally. “My apologies. It is now called Jakarta.”

  “Indonesia, then. I didn’t know you’d gone there. Why do you make me drag information out of you?”

  I shrugged.

  She said, “Don’t you think I saw the other photo of him in that album?”

  “Some things I want to keep to myself.”

  “Some? How about all! Tell me about the surgery.”

  I shook my head. It was already difficult for me, being in Washington for the purpose that I was. Too many memories to fight. Too many memories I was afraid of losing.

  She grilled me as if I were an opposing lawyer in court. “Adi, you said. The first photo, that poor man. Where did you meet him? How did you know him? And this photo …”

  She reached for the photo and took it from my unprotesting fingers, then examined it again and, as if she could not help herself, smiled. “Look how happy he is. Total reconstruction of the mouth and nose. Why would you have kept the photo of him before the surgery if you had not been involved in some way?”

  “He was a friend,” I said. “Can that not be enough?”

  “How can you pretend to be untouched by this? On your office wall, a framed photograph, this same man, much older, white hair against his dark skin, surrounded by people who are probably his children and grandchildren. I know it means something to you.”

  “It does,” I said. “Please let that answer be enough of a satisfaction to you.”

  “You arranged for the surgery?”

  “Do you share all parts of your life with me?” I asked. “No, you don’t.”

  “I would like to,” she said. “You are my father. I am your daughter.”

  What answer could I give to that? I kept my silence.

  “I don’t want it like this,” she said. “Here we are. You know I’ve been in your office, yet still you say nothing about the elephant in this room. The same elephant in your office. You want both of us to pretend it doesn’t exist?”

  “Do not cry,” I could hear my mother and the other mothers say. “Don’t let the soldiers see you cry. We are Dutch. We are strong. We will not give them the satisfaction. Do not cry.”

  “Then I will talk about the elephant,” she said. “The stickies on the walls. Different colors. Like you were keeping track of your life?”

  “Private.”

  “A stack of journals.”

  “Private.”

  My obstinacy served to drive her to irritation, which gave her strength, and the tears stopped. “When I saw all that, I realized what I’d known for a while but didn’t want to admit to myself. So why not tell me yourself?”

  “Private.”

  “Let me ask,” she said. “Just now, why did you have to go to that journal to learn what I had said last night?”

  “I like accuracy,” I said. If I remembered correctly—irony, I thought—there had also been a stack of nonfiction books on how to deal with Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t needed the stickies and journals to point her to that, but I had taught her well to come at things obliquely.

  “Who is the president of the United States?” she asked.

  So typical. And unoriginal. I could remember the physician asking me the same question. But when I tried to answer, I found myself stuck. The contemptuous tone I’d started in my thoughts vanished. My mind said Reginald Reagan, but I sensed it was the wrong answer.

  “Your poor clients,” I said. “How much do you charge them per hour when you need help with a question like that?”

  She took a breath. A quivering breath. “How long have you known?”

  “Private.”

  “There it is,” she said. “You and me. In a nutshell. You’d think a daughter would have a right to hear it from her father. Just as she should have known what happened to him during the war.”

  She began to weep again. I was angry that she had invaded my office, but now the timing of her request to learn my boyhood made sense. She knew too soon I wouldn’t be able to tell her anything about my past. To tell our story makes us human, and to be human is to tell our story. If she didn’t know my story, when my memory was gone, her father would be gone. My golden bowl would be long empty before it broke, my pitcher long dry before it shattered; she had just discovered how I was destined to spend my last years. There wasn’t much time left to find out who I was, and whether I was worth mourning.

  I moved to the couch. Beside her, I reached with one arm and drew her close and held her tight as she shook with the fierceness of her grief. I wanted to weep too, not for myself, but for all that I’d failed to give her and what I had lost for myself because of it.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Laura and I had agreed to meet for a late breakfast, and that gave me time to leave the hotel around 9 a.m. by taxi. The driver had agreed to wait while I went into a jewelry store, and it hadn’t taken long to find what I needed.

  At the hotel again, I pushed open the rear door and eased out of the cab. I didn’t feel the usual twinge in my right knee; I felt eighteen again.

  “Fifty-five bucks,” he yelled to my back as he leaned across the front seat to speak through the open passenger window. “Don’t think you can outrun me, Gramps.”

  Gramps—spoken like that—is a word that can spoil your mood in a hurry. I understand why it’s insensitive to mock or criticize obesity; it’s now been classified as a disease and gets treated accordingly. But why are wrinkles open game for anyone who wants to be a comedian?

  I wasn’t going to let it spoil my mood. I had a diamond ring in my front pocket.

  “Fifty-five bucks,” he repeated. “You deaf?”

  Again, deaf is not something you have much choice about, so to pose the question as an insult is just another example of blatant ageism. But personal hygiene? That is a choice. Taxi Driver was unshaven—in a patchy, greasy way, not in the Hollywood style, where shavers are set at the correct length to give a suitable virile look. He smelled too. I’m not cranky about this—okay, I am, but I won’t apologize, as the formative years of my boyhood were spent in a concentration camp where dozens shared one house and overflowed one toilet, so I think I have a right to be sensitive about the issue.

  I walked back to the cab.

  “I’ve got your money,” I said. “And I apologize. My mind was on other things.”

  I wasn’t going to propose to Laura immediately. But I wanted the ring with me, if there came the moment I could do so with honor.

  I was carrying my leather satchel, the one
I’d had since architect school, battered and comforting. I set it on the hood of the taxi.

  I unzipped an outer pocket for my wallet. It wasn’t there. I unzipped the larger pocket inside. Not there either.

  “Hurry up, old man!” Taxi Driver shouted.

  I pulled out the contents, carefully setting articles one by one on the hood of the cab. Two moleskin notebooks. A camera. Some paper novels. Folded city maps. I didn’t feel a sense of panic; I had put a system in place that I knew I could rely on. These days, I was all about backup systems.

  I carefully placed each article back into the satchel and zipped it closed.

  Ah, yes. The outer zipper pocket. That’s where my wallet was. No, it wasn’t.

  All right. The larger zipped inner pocket. Not there either.

  Maybe it was inside the satchel. I carefully pulled out each article. By then, Taxi Driver was standing on the other side, strumming his fingers on the hood, beaming hostility in my direction.

  I vaguely remembered why I didn’t feel a sense of panic. Travel and unfamiliar surroundings made me anxious these days, so I had begun the habit of wearing a money belt instead of a wallet that could be easily misplaced. The money belt held cash, a credit card, my government-issued identification, and the key to get me into my condo. I reached for the small of my back and was comforted to feel the slim pouch in the center of the money belt when I patted my shirt.

  I began to lift my shirt to turn it around where I could reach the pouch, but somehow time slipped past my awareness and when I returned from the reverie, I was looking at my satchel, thinking that the wallet was in the outer zipped pocket. But I also noticed that someone had pulled out the notebooks and city maps and paperback novels, so I carefully placed each piece inside the satchel.

  “If you weren’t so old,” Taxi Driver said, “I’d pop you in the face.”

  “That wouldn’t help you get your money,” I said. “How much do I owe your?”

  “Sixty-five bucks,” he said. “A drive to L street, a half-hour wait with meter running, a drive back here. And just now I turned on the meter again so I could enjoy this little charade of yours.”