“I know,” the doctor replied, “and we may well yet have to amputate it.”
The doctor shot local anesthetic from a syringe into Andrew’s lower leg, and slowly the pain in Andrew’s ankle began to subside as the doctor set to work on the injured ankle.
When his yellow straw hat fell off during the operation, Andrew asked the nurse to pick it up and put it back on his head. As she did so, he thought about how unlucky he had been. He had worn the hat so that someone would shoot him in the head and kill him. But instead he had been shot in the ankle, and at twenty years of age he would most likely spend the rest of his life crippled. In an instant, and without any fanfare, Andrew’s war was over—but not his life.
Chapter 7
Home at Last
One day turned into another and then another as Andrew lay flat on his back in a Franciscan hospital in Jakarta. The plaster cast on his right leg stretched from his toes to his thigh, immobilizing him. The Catholic nuns who took care of him said that he should feel blessed because the doctor had been able to save his leg. But the word blessed was not in Andrew’s vocabulary; cursed was a better choice of words for him.
Just as he had felt when his brother Bas was dying, Andrew now wished that he could die, but he seemed cursed to live the life of a cripple. Worse still, the war was winding down, and the Dutch were on the losing side. Indonesia, with the backing of the newly formed United Nations, was to become an independent nation. This was a bitter pill for Andrew to swallow. As he lay on his back in bed during the day, he thought about his grand adventure and what a nightmare it had turned into. And at night, when he could sleep, Andrew dreamed of the dead woman and her baby lying in a pool of blood.
A week after being injured, Andrew received his first visitor, Jan Zwart, a soldier from his company. The visit was supposed to have lifted Andrew’s spirits, but it had the opposite effect. Jan explained how the Communists and PNI were using every tactical advantage in the fighting and that many soldiers from their company were being killed. In fact, Jan recounted, only eight soldiers were left of the original ninety men who had made up the company. But this was not what threw Andrew into deep despair. It was a letter he had written.
In the last few weeks before he was wounded, Andrew had taken up the habit of writing to Thile, telling her his deepest thoughts and describing the most vile things he had done that day. The list was sometimes long and disgusting. Even as he wrote the letters, Andrew knew that he would never send them. They were too horrible to show to anyone. Instead, he kept the letters in his duffel bag for a day or two, and then he would take them out and burn them. But one of these letters was still in his bag when he was shot in the ankle. And now he lay in agony in bed, listening to Jan cheerfully telling him that one of their friends had found the letter in his bag, looked up Thile’s address in Andrew’s address book, and mailed it off to her. Andrew was appalled. He could not imagine what Thile would do when she read all of the things he had written. He wanted to roll over and die.
“And I brought you this,” Jan concluded. “It was in your things too.” He pulled out Andrew’s mother’s Bible and laid it on the night table beside the bed.
“Thanks,” Andrew muttered, sure that he would never open it.
Jan was one of the few visitors Andrew had in the hospital. Through the long days of recuperation, Andrew grew lonely and found himself thinking often of home. How was his sister Geltje? She had recently married, and Andrew tried to imagine the wedding without him or their mother present. Ben had written to say that he also was engaged but was postponing the wedding until Andrew got home.
The only ray of sunshine in Andrew’s world was the Franciscan nuns who ran the hospital and nursed the patients. The nuns laughed and sang their way around the wards, even when they had to do the most disagreeable duties, such as swilling out the bedpans or changing soiled bandages. Andrew watched and waited to catch one of them in a bad mood, but he never did. One day he asked Sister Patrice, who was tending to him, why the nuns were so happy all the time.
“Andrew,” Sister Patrice replied with a twinkle in her eye, “you are a good Dutch boy. Of course you know the answer. It’s the love of Christ. Why, it’s right here in the book beside your bed, isn’t it?” She patted the Bible.
Andrew gulped. Sister Patrice sounded just like his mother used to sound.
Later that day Andrew was so bored that he decided to open the Bible and read it. He started reading at the very beginning, with God creating the heavens and the earth. It was the same story he had heard as a small boy in Sunday school, but now somehow it seemed different—alive, real. For the first time in his life, Andrew could not put the Bible down.
From then on, Andrew spent each day reading the Bible until he had made it all the way to the end of the New Testament. Some of the things that he read were mind-boggling, and he wondered whether some of the events had really happened and what it all meant to his life if they were true.
Such questions bothered Andrew, and even though he doubted that Thile would ever write to him again, he wrote to her, asking for answers to some of his questions. Much to his surprise, Thile wrote back telling Andrew that she had received his letter about the terrible things he had done and urging him to ask for and accept God’s forgiveness for doing them. On one level Thile’s letter made sense to Andrew, yet he could not bring himself to believe that if there was a God, He would be willing to forgive him for killing innocent women and children. It just did not seem possible.
Two months rolled by as Andrew studied the Bible and waited for his cast to come off. When it finally did, his right leg was shriveled and useless. The doctors tried to encourage Andrew by telling him that if he worked really hard on his exercises, one day he would be able to walk with a cane. But all Andrew could think of was running over the polder as a teenager. Now those days were gone, and at twenty years of age, he felt like an old man whose best days were behind him.
Andrew was fitted with a pair of crutches, and as soon as he could hobble around, he found the only comfort he knew—a bottle of gin at the nearest bar. For several weeks he stayed in the hospital during the day and went out drinking at night. Then, in May 1949, Andrew received word that the army was ready to ship him back to Holland. The idea of going home filled him with dread. What would people think of him, with his crippled leg and his cynical view of life? They had no idea what he had been through in Indonesia, and he did not know how to explain it to them.
On the afternoon before he was to be discharged from the hospital, Sister Patrice came to wish Andrew a happy twenty-first birthday and to tell him a story.
“Do you know how the natives catch monkeys out in the jungle?” Sister Patrice began.
“No. How?” Andrew replied.
“Well, a monkey won’t let go of something he wants once he has grasped it, even if it means losing his freedom. The natives know this, and they exploit it. They take a coconut and make a small opening in it, just big enough for a monkey to slip his hand through, and then they drop a pebble into the coconut. They place the coconut by a bush and wait for a monkey to come along.
“When a monkey finally comes by, he is so curious that he picks up the coconut and shakes it. When he hears the pebble inside, he peers in and then slides his hand through the hole to grasp the pebble. When he tries to pull out his hand wrapped around the pebble, it will not fit back out through the hole. But the monkey will not let go of the pebble, even when the natives approach and capture him.
“Andrew, you are a little like that monkey. You are holding onto something—something that is keeping you from your freedom—and you will not let it go.”
Andrew stared blankly at Sister Patrice. He had no idea what she thought he might be holding onto, and he didn’t care. Instead, that night Andrew celebrated both his release from the hospital and his birthday the same way he celebrated most things, by drinking until he forgot who or where he was.
The voyage home to Holland was very different from the trip out to the Dutch East Indies three years before. Many of the men traveling on the ship were badly injured, and hardly anyone spoke during mealtimes. Andrew understood the silence. The men did not have much to talk about. He was sure that, like him, they were all thinking about how they had failed in their mission to keep Indonesia a Dutch colony. In fact, just four days before they set sail from Jakarta, the Dutch government had bowed to pressure from the United Nations and agreed to create a free Indonesia. As a result, General Spoor, the Dutch commander of Indonesia, had resigned his position.
Just as the ship docked in Rotterdam, the news was released that General Spoor had died of a heart attack. It seemed ironic to Andrew that on the same day that he was coming home as a “proud” soldier, the general’s death was focusing the nation’s attention on the humiliating defeat in Indonesia.
Upon his arrival in Rotterdam, Andrew was given leave to return home to his village before reporting to the rehabilitation unit the army had assigned him to for therapy on his wounded leg.
Back in Sint Pancras, everything was much as Andrew had left it, although a new row of elm trees was sprouting along the dike road. The first person Andrew saw was his sister Geltje. When Geltje spotted Andrew through the window, she rushed out across the little bridge to meet him. Soon Andrew was in the van der Bijl house, surrounded by his family and being introduced to his new brother-in-law Arie and to Ben’s fiancée.
After everyone had welcomed him home, Andrew’s other sister, Maartje, nudged his arm and asked, “Do you want to see Mama’s grave?”
Andrew nodded. It was the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else, but his leg hurt so badly from walking from the bus stop to the house that he was afraid that he would not be able to make it to the cemetery.
“We can use Papa’s bike, if you like,” Maartje suggested.
Andrew nodded, stood up stiffly, and followed Maartje outside, leaning heavily on his cane. He wheeled the bike out onto the dike road. He threw his right leg over the bike so that it rested on the crossbar. Then Andrew hopped along on one leg, letting the bicycle carry the weight of his injured leg. It was not an elegant way to travel, and Andrew was glad that it was only five hundred yards to the village cemetery. He did not want to meet anyone along the way who would see him using the bike in this awkward manner.
At the cemetery the grass covering Andrew’s mother’s grave had not yet completely grown back, and a small vase holding fresh flowers sat on top of the grave. As Andrew stared down at the grave, he thought of the last time he had seen his mother. Was it possible that he had been that young man full of hope and bravado, imagining that war—any war—was some kind of grand adventure?
Andrew had so many things that he wanted to say to his mother, but he felt uncomfortable saying them in front of Maartje. He promised himself that he would soon return alone to the gravesite. That night, when Andrew had answered all the easy questions about living in Indonesia and Cornelius had pumped him about the habits of the gibbon, Andrew set out by himself for the cemetery. When he got there, he sat down and wept.
“I did things I will never forgive myself for—things you would not think your boy was capable of,” Andrew said. “Mama, help me. I need to find my way back, but I don’t think I can. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
Somewhere in the back of his mind Andrew had hoped that this moment sitting beside his mother’s grave would bring him peace and answers. But he soon discovered that there were none. An hour and a half later, he wiped the tears from his eyes and half rode, half walked home again.
