“Katrien! Come back!”
“No,” I screamed. “I have to get to Vader.”
“Katrien!”
A streak of bright orange lit the sky. It arced overhead and fell with a thud in the center of town. Flames leaped into the sky and sparks flew into the air, fizzling out in the darkness. I cried out in fear, skidding to a halt. What was happening? My stomach clenched. I couldn’t breathe; the ash was too thick.
“Katrien!” Tante Greet grabbed me and dashed back under the porch.
More balls of fire rained down, some extinguishing before hitting the ground and others setting more buildings alight.
Mrs. De Groot had not mentioned anything like this. This was more like stories I had heard of Pompeii. All those people who died there. Was that going to happen to us? Were these my last few moments on Earth? Standing under our porch with Tante Greet’s fingers grasping mine? Vader in his office, so close and so far at the same time?
No!
I ran back inside. Tante Greet followed me and shut the door. She took a sharp breath and coughed. When she looked at me, she had tears in her eyes. I had never seen my aunt cry, and the sight unnerved me. Suddenly I felt like tiny insects were crawling all over me. I scratched my arms and my neck and my fingers and my head. My hands would not stop moving.
Tante Greet shook me, and I stilled. “Calm down, Katrien.” Her voice was firm. “Stay here, and do not move.”
I did as she said, watching as she stepped back outside and stood on the porch.
“Are they still falling?” I called.
She didn’t answer. The clock chimed eight times. I did math in my head to distract myself. It had been seven hours since the eruption, five hours since we made it home, and four hours since Indah and Slamet left.
I gasped. Indah and Slamet! They were walking to the mosque. They might be out there in this rain of fire. “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Tante Greet?”
She came back inside and shut the door again. “I think it’s over.”
I collapsed, shivering, against her. “What about Indah and Slamet? Did you see anything falling toward the mosque?”
She shook her head. “We’ll pray that they are safe.”
Chapter 26
The night dragged on. Tante Greet and I stayed in the parlor where the glow from the fires was now visible through our front windows. Eventually they died down. The only good thing about the heaviness in the air tonight was that wind couldn’t blow, and flames couldn’t revive and spread.
This knowledge eased my fears about our house catching fire, but it did little to calm my nerves about Vader. His office was so near the first fire. I hoped with all my might that he had been able to get to safety in the hotel. He could still send telegraph messages from the hotel’s machine. He could still do his job from there.
My stomach rumbled like Krakatau, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since before the eruption.
“Are you hungry?” Tante Greet asked from her seat on the sofa.
I rubbed my arms. I was hungry but didn’t know if I could bring myself to eat anything.
“We may as well eat,” she said. “Perhaps then we can try to get some sleep.” She trotted to the kitchen.
She expected me to sleep in this? Krakatau grumbled in reply. I couldn’t sleep now. Too many fears and worries rushed through me anew. My mind wouldn’t quit churning up images from Mrs. De Groot’s story and my own imagination.
“Katrien,” Tante Greet called, “come help me, please.”
I dragged myself down the hall, wondering if food would help ease my fear.
My aunt rummaged through the shelves in the pantry before popping out with a wax-covered wheel of Edam in her hand. “Cheese!” She set it on the table and returned to the pantry. “Is there any volkorenbrood left?”
“Ja, I can tear the loaf in half.”
“Do that, please.”
After breaking the bread into chunks, I stared at the cheese.
“We’ve also got belimbing,” Tante Greet said, coming back into the kitchen carrying two star fruits. “That will work.” She plucked the cheese from my hands. The knife went through the waxy surface with only slight force. Then she sliced the star fruit while I grabbed a wooden tray.
“I think we still have tea in the pot,” I said.
Her face wrinkled in disgust. “It will be cold.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
She shrugged and poured the tea into two cups. Each of us had bread, cheese and star fruit—the only stars visible on Java, I imagined. The thunder from Krakatau rumbled in the distance, drowning out the sounds of our chewing.
“Do you think Oom Maarten is safe?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m sure he is.” She didn’t sound sure.
“We should have left.” Even to my own ears, I sounded shrill, and my hands shook. “Like the De Groots. We should have listened to them. We’re not going to make it.” Then my voice broke like a shattered cup.
“Shhh, Katrien.” Tante Greet patted my hand. “Shhh. Don’t think like that.”
The tea did nothing to wash the grit from my mouth, and the food tasted like it had been sprinkled with dirt.
It made me think of the earth and worms, of rotting flesh and death. “Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we involve cataclysms to desolate the world, or invest laws on the duration of the forms of life.” Cataclysms. I was in a cataclysm now. Had Mr. Charles Darwin ever been in such a cataclysm? Would I escape this one? Was the world headed toward extinction? Or just me?
“The ash was piling up when we were outside,” Tante Greet said, worry filling her voice. “It’s probably higher now.”
I shrugged, unsure why the ash was worrying her. It was messy and choked the breath out of you, but inside the house, breathing was much easier. As long as we didn’t disturb the piles of powder.
“If it keeps up, the roof could collapse.”
“What?” I cried. “It’s ash! It weighs no more than a feather!”
“Ja, but think of how the ash bent your hat earlier.” She glanced at the window. “Now it’s piling up like snow.”
“I don’t understand.” I pushed my spectacles up. “What does it matter if it’s like snow?”
Tante Greet reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Snow can collapse roofs when it gets too heavy. It happens, and it can be deadly for anyone inside the building.”
I stared at her. Could this be true? I had never seen snow. I had read about it, of course, but it never snowed in Java. “Should we leave the house?” I asked.
“No. We’ll take our chances. Better to be inside and able to breathe than outside and struggling.”
I was now consumed by this new worry. I thought I heard the roof groan with the weight of the ash, but I knew it was only my imagination. I hoped it was only my imagination.
We finished our meal. Tante Greet dusted again, and I stood by the parlor window. My reflection in the glass didn’t look like me. My hair was even more of a mane than before, and fear filled my red-rimmed eyes. The rumbles from Krakatau reminded me of a rampaging rhinoceros. What if it never stopped? What would happen to us? Would it be dark forever? Was it dark in Batavia? Was Oom Maarten safe? Had Indah and Slamet reached the mosque? Was this the end of the world?
“I don’t know, Katrien.”
I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud. Tante Greet and I stared at each other. Her lips trembled, but she didn’t cry. She enveloped me in her arms. My face squashed against her shoulder, and my spectacles floated up to my forehead.
We stood there a long time. Clutching each other. She had never held me like this before. I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t fall. “I’m scared,” I whispered.
Her arms tightened around me. “I am, too, Katrien. I am, too.”
The clock in the hall ticked louder and loude
r, but the two of us stayed together, wrapped in each other’s warm embrace.
Chapter 27
Despite the incessant rumblings from Krakatau, Tante Greet said we should try to get some rest. “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” she said.
After pulling on some nightclothes, I crawled into bed and stared at the stars Vader had painted on my ceiling years ago. On the Origin of Species lay on my bedside table, but I couldn’t read it. Not tonight. I had too many thoughts and worries dancing through my mind.
Was Vader safe?
What about Indah and Slamet?
Did Oom Maarten know what was happening?
I blew out my candle and tried to calm myself by naming animals I had seen in the jungle. “Silvery gibbon. Javan rhinoceros. Javan lutung.” It was difficult to remember them all. “Dholes. Oriental whipsnake . . . wanderer butterfly . . . long-tailed macaque.” I yawned. “Flower pot toad . . . black giant squirrel.” I yawned again. “Hexarthrius rhinoceros rhinoceros . . .”
I must have fallen asleep because I was groggy and disoriented when a loud explosion shot me right out of bed.
“I think that one was louder than yesterday’s.” Tante Greet stood in my bedroom doorway holding a candle.
“It sounded like it was.” She was blurry, and I reached for my spectacles. “Is it morning?”
“Almost. It’s early. You ought to get dressed.”
“Ja, Tante.” The cold, scary darkness still cloaked Anjer and I lit the candle on the bedside table.
Ash, seeping in through the windows and the cracks around the doors, coated the furniture again. The pyramid under my bedroom window had grown.
Tante Greet met me in the hall and handed me a banana. “It’s still falling,” she said with a glance to the ceiling.
Monsoons were never this terrible. Even those rains came in ebbs and flows. This ceaseless torrent would bury us. “Like Pompeii,” I whispered.
“We shouldn’t talk about that,” my aunt said. “Come here.” Leading me into my room, she brushed my hair off my shoulders, pulling it into a tight braid. “Much better. It won’t fall in your eyes.”
“Dank u, Tante Greet,” I whispered. The arrival of a new day did little to quash my fears.
She smiled. “Come along, Katrien. Eat your banana. We need to keep busy. Let’s sweep this new dust into piles. It will be that much easier to straighten when this is all over.”
“But what—”
She whipped her head around and gave me a glare that would have stopped a Javan tiger in its tracks. My mouth snapped shut.
“I left the broom in the pantry,” she said. “I’ll brush off furniture and you can sweep the floors. We’ll start in the parlor.”
Gulping down the banana, I tossed the peel onto the kitchen table, along with the remains of last night’s pathetic meal. The clock chimed six. So early. Yawning, I went to get the broom.
As I swept, the powdery ash swirled around the floor with my thoughts. Tante Greet had been worried about the ash last night. I rubbed some between my fingers and decided it was like beach sand mixed with flour. It still seemed strange to think that something so fine could damage a roof, but if Tante Greet was worried, then the possibility must exist.
Tante Greet stared out the window. The sun must have risen somewhere on the other side of all that filth because the sky had lightened a bit. Now the dark was gloomy but no longer oppressive. Not that it mattered. We still needed candles and lamps to light the room.
Half of the parlor had been dusted and swept when another eruption shook the house, rattling the windows. One pane cracked but did not shatter. “Why won’t it stop?” I cried.
Tante shook her head.
More rumbling from Krakatau. But under the thunder, another noise started. The dark haze of smoke kept me from seeing anything. Racking my brain to figure out what it sounded like, I dropped the broom and pushed my spectacles up.
“Katrien, please get back to work. We have oth—”
“Shhh!” I thrust my finger in front of my mouth to hush her.
“Is that rain?” she wondered.
In that moment I knew. Mrs. De Groot’s story echoed in my memory. My mouth went dry. My stomach clenched. “Oh, God. It’s the ocean.” Grabbing Tante Greet’s hand, I yelled, “RUN!”
Chapter 28
We tore out of the parlor doors and whipped around the house. My aunt, whom I half dragged behind me, cried, “Careful, Katrien! The rosebushes!”
I swerved to avoid crashing into the spindly things, but my skirt snagged on some of the thorns. I did not stop moving and heard the fabric rip.
The thick blanket of powder slowed us down. It was worse than trying to run on the beach. We pushed our way through the drifts and the falling ash.
“Keep running, Katrien,” Tante Greet panted behind me, her hand slipping in mine. I tightened my grip.
Our slog through the ash was taking too long. I could hear the ocean roiling behind me, and I pictured a wall of clear blue water coming to sweep us away.
Tante Greet stopped in the cemetery by the Dutch Reformed Church. She leaned against the side of the little wooden building. “I’m not going to make it, Katrien.”
“Ja, you will,” I insisted, reaching for her hand. “I’ll carry you into the jungle if I have to.”
She brushed me away. “No, Katrien, you keep going. I’ll wait here.”
“I’m not going to leave you.” The rushing sound got louder, more distinct, over the rumblings of Krakatau.
“Your father will have to come this way. I’ll rest, and he and I will join you.”
“Vader—” I stopped. Vader would never leave his post. She was making excuses.
The thunderous roar of the ocean grew even louder. I couldn’t hear my own breathing.
We couldn’t hide behind the tombstones. They weren’t tall enough.
But the trees could work. They were tamarinds with solid trunks and thick branches. Perfect for climbing. “We have to get up there.” I pointed to a low-hanging branch.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“It’s our only hope.”
“I can’t climb a tree.”
“Your life may depend on it.”
“You climb. I will cling to the trunk.”
“No—”
“Do it, Katrien!” She shoved me toward the tree.
The ash still fell like rain. I shimmied up the trunk, my feet slipping numerous times on the powder-coated tree. But my experienced fingers clung like a house gecko crawling up a window. They sifted through the grit and gripped the rough bark. I had just gotten my legs and arms over the lowest branch when the giant wave attacked Anjer.
Crack!
As the water smashed through town, the sound of splintering wood was the first noise I could identify above the roar. Then a sharp crash followed as glass shattered, and a grinding screech as metal buckled, and heavy thudding as large objects shifted from their foundations.
The wave itself was worse than I imagined. Much worse. It was not a clear blue, but a roiling gray-green mass, as tall as the tree I clutched. It washed over buildings, casting them aside like houses of cards.
“I love you, Katrien!” Tante Greet cried from below.
She flung her arms around the base of the tamarind as the water washed over us. My body lifted off the branch, and I held my breath. I squeezed my arms and clung with my fingertips.
The water pummeled the tree, whipping me around and around as objects banged against my legs and side. My hands stayed glued to the branch. My chest ached.
Keep holding your breath. Keep holding your breath. Oh, God, please let me keep holding my breath! I had never prayed so hard.
My fingers began to ache as the bark bit into them and the water continued to gush. But I vowed not to let go, even when the salty, dirty sea seeped between my clamped lips and my legs caught the current, making my body shift. I was pinned to that tamarind tree like my stag beetles were pinned to the cork in their ca
ses.
Just when I thought I could stand it no more, when I was sure I would have to open my mouth out of desperation to breathe, the water receded. My legs dropped against the tree, and I wrapped them around the branch.
I gasped and began gulping long, deep breaths. Air never felt so good.
Then I started coughing, for the air was still thick with grit.
The water had shoved me farther out on the branch, and I crawled toward the trunk. My arms felt like stone. My legs were raw. The bark poked and scratched me all over. Half of my skirt was missing, torn straight from my body by the force of the water.
A long, thin gash in my leg oozed a small trickle of blood. Not too deep, but I would have to try to wrap it back at the house.
“Tante Greet!” I called. “The water took some of my skirt!”
But Krakatau’s rumblings were the only reply I heard.
Chapter 29
The little wooden church? Gone. Only a pile of broken boards against the base of the tamarind tree remained.
The tombstones in the cemetery? Ripped from the churchyard. They lay in a trail, leading to the ocean as if a giant Hansel and Gretel had dropped them for guidance.
Tante Greet? Vanished.
No.
No, that couldn’t be right. She had to be there—the saltwater must have affected my eyes. I reached to push my spectacles up, but my finger didn’t hit the familiar metal band that bridged my nose.
The wave had stolen my spectacles. “Tante Greet!” I cried.
No answer.
I shimmied down the tree. The bark scratched my calves and thighs all over again and tore more of my skirt.
Where was my aunt? She had been right here, clinging to the trunk. She couldn’t have disappeared. I had clung to the same tree. I was still here.
Then I noticed that somehow, the top third of the tree was gone, and even the large statues in the cemetery had been moved by the powerful wave. Big, imposing stone monuments weighing many tons had shifted as if they were made of nothing more substantial than paper. The Rutgers Monument—a marble, life-sized angel standing on a meter-high base—rested next to the Groesbeck statue.
After the Ashes Page 12
