This was the truth that I had been incapable of seeing as a boy. Georgie’s mother was a heroine, not a whore of Babylon.
“Make no mistake,” I said to him. “I do not see some kind of maudlin reconciliation between us. It would be a pretense by both of us. But I am the one who owes you an apology for the words I said to you about your mother when we last faced each other in that village in the Dutch East Indies. I am sorry. Very sorry. You did not deserve that, and I feel shame for the years you lost when you should have been able to love and honor your mother as she should have been loved and honored by you as her son.”
In the candlelight, tears ran down Knight’s face, sliding in and out of deep wrinkles in his skin. I didn’t like him, but in that moment, I could feel love for him. It would be wonderful if we could always see that what we have in common as humans outweighs our differences.
“Don’t you tell me how and when I should love and honor my mother.” He spoke as if fingers were squeezing his throat. He was angry. “Don’t assume I didn’t love and honor her no matter what she appeared to be. Can you say the same about your mother?”
“For that too,” I said, knowing that with Rachel in front of us, my answer would be and had to be ambiguous, “I am sorry.”
Senator Knight made the waving motion of someone indicating it didn’t matter. “If your apology is finished, then go. I will make no pretenses about reconciliation either.”
Rachel said, “Not yet. Laura gave me another letter. Both of you need to know about it too. She told me, Senator, that she wanted you to be with Jeremiah when he learned of it.”
She pulled it out of her purse. “In recognition of the sacrifice and risks that Jeremiah Prins took to ensure that food and medicine reached those in desperate need of medicine and food, I declare, as the Queen of the Netherlands, that royal recognition should be bestowed upon him for—”
“Enough,” I told Rachel. This letter was a surprise to me. “That changes nothing for me.”
“Or me,” the senator said to Rachel. “Your father as a boy wanted all of camp to know that my mother was a whore. And you know what stopped him from telling?”
He turned to me. “I knew the truth about your mother. And so did you. And you knew I knew the truth from Dr. Kloet. Your mother did what she felt she had to do to help her children. That makes her no different than mine. With one difference. I am alive. My mother could live with what she did. Yours could not. Does Ms. Prins know what happened at camp?”
I had been prepared for this. I didn’t want it. But I had owed him an apology and had no choice but to risk this when my leverage over him was gone. The consolation was that he did not know how accurate it was to say that my mother could not live with the choices she had made.
It was a horrible secret that I had kept. Conscious that Rachel was at the table, I tried to convince him there was no need to continue our war. “I wish you peace, Senator. It’s something that will always escape me. Can’t we stand and shake hands and agree those were terrible times?”
The senator sneered. “You’ve always sickened me with your self-righteousness. You didn’t come here to apologize, but to trade. You knew if you didn’t deliver the letter, Laura would. Think I haven’t thrived in this kind of politics here for decades? Your bet was that a pretended act of nobility, in front of your daughter, would serve to keep me quiet after I learned this about my mother.”
I had guessed correctly, then, about the marble. Had it been in his possession now, it would have remained there.
Still sneering, the senator turned to Rachel. “When it’s convenient for you, ask Jeremiah about how his baby sister really died. About a feather in her mouth that Dr. Kloet observed, an observation he later shared with my mother. Jeremiah knows the truth. But I doubt he’ll tell you.”
Knight waved for a waiter’s attention and pointed at the mess.
As the waiter walked away, Knight said to Rachel, “Thanks for the letter. In these patriotic times, it will make a wonderful campaign prop for my son. And if your father tries to go public with the details of how the letter was earned, then the world can find out that Jeremiah’s mother murdered her own children.”
He gave me a cold smile. “You and I, we are finished here, are we not? I hope I never see you again.”
I held the marble in my hand and let Rachel lead me out of the restaurant.
FORTY-NINE
I paced the sitting area of the hotel room. The curtains were open, and it was a sunny morning. I did not feel sunny. I had slept less than usual. It had been painful adding to my journal the conversation in the restaurant the evening before. But if I had not included it, I would have been lying to myself. It’s one thing to hide a secret. It’s another to deny it.
“Will you sit?” Rachel asked me. She was in an armchair, opposite where Laura sat on a sofa. They’d ordered coffee from room service, and the empty cups were on a table, the pot untouched. I was very conscious that Laura had not given me any indication of whether she had the courage to live with me as my identity left me. I didn’t blame her. It was one thing to prop myself up by believing I could read my journals in an effort to hold on to who I was. She would need more than memories as I grew older; why choose for future companionship a body that would eventually carry an empty mind?
I looked at her, and she must have sensed I needed strength. Laura stood and walked to me and held my forearm and stroked my hand.
I could not allow myself to learn to lean on her. I disengaged myself, moved to the window, and stared at the parking lot that was becoming as familiar as a friend. “I can’t sit down because when I say what needs to be said, I want to be able to look away from both of you. If I am trapped between you, that won’t be possible.”
Some of the lines painted on the pavement were crooked. I would have rather made that my focus. I said, “His mother spent nights with the camp commander. But my mother …”
I shivered as if fighting malaria. Not once had I spoken of this. The growing suspicion after Jasmijn had died in her sleep. Then, at camp, tracing the memories of those months. Still not believing it, pushing away the thoughts.
Yet …
After rumors had reached the kitchen that all the dogs would be removed from camp, eaten by the Indonesians, Pietje had woken up with his black puppy Coacoa dead, a blessing, we all believed, because Pietje had buried his friend, not watched it be taken away.
What had my mother said? “If you really cared about Pietje and cared about the dog, you would have walked away and let that dog die a merciful death.”
And in the days that followed, my mother had nearly died from blood poisoning from long scratches down her leg. The scratches of a dog’s claws as it fought suffocation, not scratches from the kitchen as she’d said.
Then Jasmijn. Sweet, sweet Jasmijn. Almost dead and certain to die soon. A mercy. Then I had brought her to life again by finding the insulin, which was only prolonging the inevitable. So cruel. And then the blessing returned. She was lifeless the very next morning, a feather in her mouth. The feather from a pillow.
Later, the rumors of the Borneo plan grew stronger, that the mothers would be taken with none left to care for the children. With Aniek growing weaker and weaker from hunger until a fever attacked her. So weak that death would be a mercy. A mercy that my mother bestowed.
Georgie knew too. His words from the previous evening were already transcribed on the pages of Journal 35. “Your mother did what she felt she had to do to help her children. That makes her no different than mine. With one difference. I am alive.”
“Elsbeth,” I said, willing myself to breathe out the words, “my mother, Elsbeth, killed Jasmijn and killed Aniek.”
I’ve often wondered if Mrs. Aafjes’s rants about Masada and Jews committing mass suicide on a mountaintop had planted the idea in the mind of a woman with an existing mental illness, or if it had been a natural progression of mercy killings from a dog that was going to die anyway, to her suffering baby who wou
ld not be able to receive adequate treatment, and then Aniek.
It was quiet behind me. I stared down at the crooked white painted lines of the parking lot and the dusty black roof of a compact car. I spoke, needing to get it out. “My mother tried to kill Pietje. That’s what broke him. Broke us. She wanted to protect Pietje by killing him.”
I turned to both of the women I loved. “Tell me. My mother murdered two of her daughters and nearly killed Pietje. How could anyone expect me to fix that?”
Hidden in a drawer in my office is a sketch I take out occasionally to remind myself of a time in my mother’s life when demons were not clawing at her soul.
It’s the only sketch that survived the Jappenkamp, the sketch she had drawn that showed me as a boy, the two of us holding hands, her dress swirling as if the wind were flirting with her, the smile on her face showing the joy of a purity of love.
I am glad it survived to remind me of a happier time in her life, because something remains to be told. As I admitted in the hotel room, Jasmijn had not died peacefully in her sleep and Aniek had not succumbed to infection. As promised, I did write the journals for her, over the course of a year, upon my return from Washington. They have been stacked in chronological order, and these pages will be my last for her.
In these final pages, I confess it was a deception earlier in the journals to suggest that Elsbeth lost her will to live because of the accumulation of tragedies: Nikki’s horrible death to rabies, followed by the strain of Elsbeth’s terror of the Borneo plan, the news that our father and half brothers were dead, and Aniek succumbing to her infection that night as we slept.
Pietje knew better. That is not why Elsbeth died.
It was a lie in the Washington hotel room to tell Rachel and Laura that Pietje’s knowledge of Elsbeth was of a mother who believed it would be a mercy to suffocate her children. It was the opposite. Pietje did not know that she had killed them, and when I tried to tell him, he wouldn’t believe it.
Pietje never saw what I saw in the dark hours before he woke that morning to find Aniek dead in Elsbeth’s arms. I had lain awake in the dark for hours, trying to comprehend what I had witnessed—Elsbeth’s choice to end Aniek’s suffering.
A slight mewing sound had woken me. Half-asleep, in dim light from the moon through the small window high in the wall, I had seen Elsbeth straddling Aniek. I had seen Aniek reach up with both arms, as if imploring. I had seen Elsbeth lean down and Aniek’s arms wrap around her mother’s neck.
I had heard my mother half sob as the strange embrace continued, until Aniek dropped her arms from my mother. I had seen my mother stand and leave our small room. I had heard my mother vomit as she fled down the hallway.
I had crawled over to Aniek, to ask if she knew why our mother had fled. I had pulled the pillow off her face, still not realizing what had happened. Aniek hadn’t answered, no matter how hard I tried to shake her awake.
I’d crawled back to my sleeping pallet and pretended not to notice when my mother returned. She had lifted Aniek’s lifeless body and taken it into the corner of the room to huddle against a wall, cradling the body and continuing to weep.
In the dark, that’s when I’d begun to understand. How Pietje had been spared the pain of giving up Coacoa with all the other dogs taken from the camp. How the scratches had appeared on my mother’s leg. How Jasmijn had died in her sleep and why the feather had been found in her mouth.
I still agonize over the choices I faced. What was I to do? Tell Sophie or Dr. Eikenboom that Pietje and I could not live with our mother because she might kill us? That would mean telling them what only Dr. Kloet suspected. That would mean betraying my mother by declaring to the world that she was far, far worse than a whore of Babylon.
I couldn’t flee with Pietje. There was no place to go.
I couldn’t ask to live with another family.
I couldn’t tell my mother what I’d witnessed her do.
I could only do what I’d vowed to do since the soldiers had taken away my father and my older brothers. Carry on and protect my family.
The next night, I’d tied a string from Pietje’s wrist to mine because I was afraid I would not be able to stay awake to protect him. The string had woken me. There she was again, in that same embrace with my brother, his arms up around her shoulders as she straddled him and he fought to breathe against the pillow against his face.
In the warm tropical darkness on that night in the camp, I could not see the future. I could not anticipate that no matter how I tried to explain, Pietje’s memory of that night would drive him away from me and to the amnesia that came with opium. I could not anticipate how my own insulation against the memory would turn my heart into a hard and tiny kernel, what it would do when I became a father myself, how guarded it would make me in showing love to my own daughter. I could not know the night of my mother’s death at the internment camp would send me into the dark for decades after, isolated on the other side of the fence from the campfires of humanity.
Yet had I known, it wouldn’t have mattered. What choice did I have? Pietje needed my protection.
I am grateful, beyond anything that can be expressed by words, that the undiminished love between a boy and a girl, which began seventy years earlier at a marble game beneath the banyan tree, eventually became an open gate to bring me back through the fence, to those campfires.
For in my twilight years, Laura decided to stay with me.
I am also appreciative that circumstances thwarted our marriage for sixty years, for her time in the Jappenkamp had done something to her body, and she was never able to bear children. If I hadn’t fled to America and married another, I would never have received the greatest gift in my life, my daughter, Rachel.
It is with the same breathtaking gratitude that I realize I have been rescued from my past and present and future by my daughter, who did so by granting me our reconciliation.
Thus, in solitude one night all these decades later, while still cognizant of the words I spoke, I found the strength and courage to fold my hands together and bow my head and finally ask His mercy.
I etch these last words not from a need after my death to share and dissipate the shame of what I did on the night my mother died at the internment camp, but from a desire to comfort Laura and Rachel, who led me, for the first time since that horrible night, to find the courage in that solitude and pour out my soul in prayer and finally weep with all the anguish I had denied myself for far too long.
In telling what remains to be told, I want my daughter and my one true love to know that they helped me find a way to defeat what I thought could never be defeated: the boyhood memory of the resolute action of protecting Pietje from our mother by pushing a pillow down on my mother’s face and holding it there while she clawed at my arms and thumped her feet on the floor until her body stopped quivering, with me unaware that Pietje had returned to the room and was transfixed as he watched every cold moment, fleeing in silence, and even through opiates unable to escape that memory until his own death years later.
For as I near my end, I understand.
Against any horror that we may face in this world, and in the face of knowledge that for each of us time is a thief of glory, what matters most and what gives meaning to our lives and deaths is love and hope, if we are willing to share and accept.
When time comes to take me, I will go in peace.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Growing up, what I mainly knew about my grandfather, Simon, a headmaster in the Dutch East Indies before the capitulation to the Japanese, was that as the first born, I would have been named after him. But my mother, new to Canada and the English language, had found out that “Simple Simon” was a nursery rhyme, and she didn’t want me teased for that name.
Because Willem, my father, spoke so little about his boyhood time in a Jappenkamp, I only knew that Simon had died during the war. Simon Brouwer had joined the army and was taken prisoner of war when Japanese forces were victorious. His fate can only
be gleaned from a single letter, written to my grandmother, Grietje, from someone who did survive.
The letter is haunting to me in its sparseness of detail: “In November of 1942 we were transported to Soerabaia. There we had a bad time … later that camp was named Camp Makassar. Not a very good camp.”
(The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia gives this description of Makassar: “The camp commander, Yoshida, was a sadist who engaged in frequent beatings and other abuse of the prisoners. Prisoners were forced to climb trees full of fire ants and were beaten unconscious for the least infraction.”)
From Makassar, my grandfather was sent to Singapore, where he first contracted dysentery. And from Singapore, as told by the letter, “In the middle of April we were sent to Siam. In Ban Pons we started a march through Siam. But after two days of marching, your husband had to stay behind in Non Pladuk.”
No details, either, of the march.
But even a cursory reading of any material about the Burma Railway paints a horrible picture, for my grandfather had become one of tens of thousands of prisoners of war forced into slave labor on what became known as the Death Railway. The building of it took the lives of 356 Americans; 6,318 British; 2,815 Australians; and 2,490 Dutch. Simon Brouwer was among those Dutch soldiers who perished.
Simon carved his own chess pieces and was a chess champion, as the letter informed my grandmother, and he was a man of strong faith and excellent spirits, leading fellow inmates to the same faith. This, in essence, is all that I know about his character.
My father was fortunate. Unlike so many children, he survived the war with his mother and all of his sisters and brothers. They returned to Holland, where my grandmother tried to rebuild a family life without her husband. My father dated my mother while he was in the army and she was a nurse, and he would have to bicycle for miles for the chance to spend time with her.
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