homemade wooden spoon waiting for her tiny portion of all there was to eat, grey tapioca cooked over camp fires in huge vats. ‘You grew anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s how it works, the baby inside takes all the goodness it needs from the mother and the mother starves and gets sick.’ He saw his mother dressed in a tattered dress and wooden clogs, her taut belly as round as a basketball, matchstick arms and legs, cheeks hollow, hair falling out, and him curled up inside her, feeding off her, eating away at her internal organs. ‘And then, when I was at my biggest, when you were taking your time deciding you were ready, it was getting close to the rainy season. Man, that was the worst. I thought I would die. I thought I would just melt like an ice cream. My waters broke the same day the skies opened and the monsoon began. Water ran down my legs, baby boy, and down the sides of the buildings at the same time, and then it started pouring in through the roof where there were holes in the palm leaves. The road outside the shack flooded – I won’t call it a clinic or anything, it was just a shack with six bamboo bunk beds. They put the sickest on the lowest bunk so it would be easier to take the corpse away when they died. It was the filthiest place you can imagine, cockroaches and leeches, and I was screaming and screaming as I squeezed you out and outside there was a river where the dirt road had been and then pretty soon a river inside as it was only a dirt floor. Seriously, I thought I would die, and you would die with me, and the water would wash the shack away and we’d both be carried away on that river and after what I’d been through that seemed like it would be a pretty good thing to happen to both of us.’ Harper saw himself as a newborn baby, lying on his back on top of a brown river, waving his arms as he bobbed and floated and was carried away.
He and his mother had not been carried away by a flood. They had stayed in the shack with the palm-leaf roof and she had nursed him until she had fallen ill with an infection and nearly died, apparently, had come within an inch of it, ‘As any girl would giving birth in those circumstances, baby boy,’ and when he was badly behaved she liked to remind him how close to killing her he had come, just by arriving into the world. The ways in which he had nearly killed his mother seemed impressively various.
You had to bow to the Japanese soldiers whenever you saw them. You had to bow so low your nose was lower than your waist and you had to stay that way for a good few seconds and if you tried to straighten up too quickly, they hit you with a cane across the shoulders. ‘Happened to me once when I had you in my arms, just ’cos I didn’t bow quick enough on account of holding a baby. When he hit me my knees gave way but I managed to get a hand out in time to stop my fall before I fell on you. You were such a skinny little thing, you’d have snapped like a twig. Plenty of babies born in that camp didn’t make it, you know, that’s why you’ll always be my miracle .’ The emphasis on the words ‘my’ and ‘miracle’ was always the same. His mother, it seemed, had kept him alive by the sheer force of her love, all on her own. Perhaps that was where the mothers of those other babies, the ones that had died, had gone wrong. Maybe they just hadn’t loved their babies enough.
There were competing stories about how his father had actually met his end. His mother always said that his father had disappeared into the hills to fight for the Dutch army, and that he had been decapitated during the course of a fierce battle when eight gallant officers and men had held out against a whole hundred Japs. After their return to Holland, his aunt Lies, his mother’s elder sister, who featured in their lives both before and after Los Angeles, told him that his father had tried to save himself and his pregnant wife from the camps by hiding his uniform beneath the
He and his mother had not been carried away by a flood. They had stayed in the shack with the palm-leaf roof and she had nursed him until she had fallen ill with an infection and nearly died, apparently, had come within an inch of it, ‘As any girl would giving birth in those circumstances, baby boy,’ and when he was badly behaved she liked to remind him how close to killing her he had come, just by arriving into the world. The ways in which he had nearly killed his mother seemed impressively various.
You had to bow to the Japanese soldiers whenever you saw them. You had to bow so low your nose was lower than your waist and you had to stay that way for a good few seconds and if you tried to straighten up too quickly, they hit you with a cane across the shoulders. ‘Happened to me once when I had you in my arms, just ’cos I didn’t bow quick enough on account of holding a baby. When he hit me my knees gave way but I managed to get a hand out in time to stop my fall before I fell on you. You were such a skinny little thing, you’d have snapped like a twig. Plenty of babies born in that camp didn’t make it, you know, that’s why you’ll always be my miracle .’ The emphasis on the words ‘my’ and ‘miracle’ was always the same. His mother, it seemed, had kept him alive by the sheer force of her love, all on her own. Perhaps that was where the mothers of those other babies, the ones that had died, had gone wrong. Maybe they just hadn’t loved their babies enough.
There were competing stories about how his father had actually met his end. His mother always said that his father had disappeared into the hills to fight for the Dutch army, and that he had been decapitated during the course of a fierce battle when eight gallant officers and men had held out against a whole hundred Japs. After their return to Holland, his aunt Lies, his mother’s elder sister, who featured in their lives both before and after Los Angeles, told him that his father had tried to save himself and his pregnant wife from the camps by hiding his uniform beneath the
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