After the Ashes (2 page)

My aunt wanted me to be friends with those girls, but I found I had less and less in common with them. They talked about boys and bustles and babies. I wanted to talk about animals and science and natural selection. They giggled a lot, and always seemed to be looking at me when they did. I felt like a zoo animal on display in their presence.

Still, my aunt kept singing their praises. “Brigitta Burkart is a wonderful girl,” she often said pointedly. “She's polite and kind and respectful.”

But Brigitta Burkart was the worst of them all, and I hated her. Truly hated her. My aunt knew this perfectly well, and it infuriated me that she ignored my feelings and spoke so admiringly of someone I despised.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I would have agreed with my aunt's opinion. Brigitta and I had been friendly once, thanks in part to our fathers. We were introduced years ago, as small girls, when Vader began working as the controller for Anjer and Brigitta's father assumed the higher-ranking government position of assistant resident. Vader explained all this very carefully to me one day when I asked him about his job. He sat me down at a table and sketched a simple, but accurate, map.

“You see, Katrien, the Dutch East Indies are divided into provinces, like so, then divisions, and then departments,” he said, making each section smaller and smaller. “Assistant residents, like Mr. Burkart, are in charge of divisions.” He pointed to an area that included Anjer and a few other towns. “Part of the job of an assistant
resident is to oversee the regions' controllers. My responsibility as Anjer's controller is to carry out the administration of the department, which includes overseeing the police and collecting taxes.”

I understood this to mean that Mr. Burkart was Vader's supervisor, and I was glad of it. Now that our families had begun visiting with each other, I had found Brigitta to be a fun playmate. For several years, the two of us passed those visits playing happily while the adults talked about grown-up things like the fighting in Aceh or other news they read about in the
Java Messenger
. Once we started attending school, Brigitta and I spent even more time together.

But all that changed on the day of Brigitta's tenth birthday party. Every girl in our class had been invited to celebrate at the Burkart family's fine brick mansion on the water. I knew already from my playdates with Brigitta that a small army of native workers was responsible for keeping the home immaculate and the grounds well manicured, but as I stepped onto the Burkart property that day, everything seemed to look even more spectacular than usual. Even the Dutch flag that always flew tall and proud from the pole on the luxurious lawn seemed to be flapping extra hard for Brigitta, and the assistant resident's boat that Mr. Burkart kept tied to his private dock bobbed merrily in the waves. I hoped he would take us all for a ride. What a birthday treat that would make!

I began to feel shy as I approached the house and a housekeeper ushered me inside, but in no time at all, I was on top of the world. Brigitta greeted me with a warm smile and soon made it clear that she was singling me out as special. She insisted I sit beside her at the table. She seemed to prefer the gift I brought her over all the others. And when we went outside to play windmills, Brigitta honored me again. She was the berger, the head of the game, and she picked Rika and me to be team leaders. All went well as we selected teams, but when the time came to begin, I happened to spot a stag beetle climbing on the side of the house. I could not believe my good fortune. In a way, the discovery felt like a present for
me
on Brigitta's special day. I plucked it off the wall and ran to show my friend.

“This is the fourth one for my collection,” I said breathlessly, waving my prize under her nose. Brigitta's eyes grew wide in shock. She screamed and rushed into the house. Everyone else came over to see what the commotion was about, and when I held out the insect for them to see, they all backed away in horror. Rika even started to cry, and I started to get angry. I tried to make them understand there was nothing to fear, but their shouting drowned out my words.

Brigitta's father came onto the porch with Brigitta trembling beside him. She pointed at me and cried, “Katrien has ruined my party with that disgusting creature! She's disgusting, too! I never want her here again!” The other girls gathered around her in support.

Moments later Mr. Burkart was escorting me home. I cradled the precious beetle in my hands the entire way, all the while wondering how everything had gone so very wrong.

To this day I didn't know why my beetle collecting disturbed Brigitta so, but one thing was certain: our friendship ended the day she turned ten. And from that moment on, I would have given anything—maybe even my now-sizable beetle collection—to never see Brigitta again.

But of course, I couldn't possibly avoid her. I still had to face her in school every day, and worse, our families continued to see each other socially. Brigitta's and my relationship may have turned frosty, but the adults' was as warm as ever—which is why I was still subjected to monthly Courtlandt-Burkart dinners at the Hotel Anjer. How I dreaded those gatherings! I would rather spend an hour in a pit full of poisonous blue kraits than dine with the Burkarts. But, like so much else in my life, I had no say in the matter.

All these thoughts of Brigitta Burkart were making my head ache. Rubbing my eyes, I forced myself to think about more pleasant things. Today was a lovely day, after all. I had three stag beetles in my net, which increased my collection size to three hundred five, and I needed to prepare them for mounting. With a little hop, I hurried toward home.

But my eagerness vanished when I heard familiar laughter in
the air. Within moments, whom should I see up ahead but Brigitta, Rika and two of their friends, Maud and Inge, sitting on Inge's porch eating ginger buns. Rika was tearing bits of the bread and tossing them to the ground several meters away. A long-tailed macaque sat nearby and scurried over to grab the food.

Inge pointed. “Look how long his tail is.”

“It is, however, possible that the long tail of this monkey may be of more service to it as a balancing organ in making its prodigious leaps, than as a prehensile organ,”
I thought.

“It's a good thing you're tossing those scraps so far,” Brigitta said, patting her perfectly styled blond hair. “I wouldn't want him coming any closer to us.”

“He wouldn't hurt us, would he?” Rika asked, her eyes wide.

I shook my head. This was ludicrous. Why was she giving her ginger bun to a monkey? “You shouldn't be feeding him at all,” I said, walking up to the steps.

Brigitta turned her catlike eyes on me with a scornful glare. “You're one to talk, Katrien. Don't your neighbors feed the monkeys?”

Our neighbors, the De Groots, were an older couple who danced outside under the full moon. They also mashed bananas and smeared the paste onto sticks. Then they placed the sticks in their tamarind tree and encouraged the long-tailed macaques to enjoy a free meal. I loved the De Groots. They were eccentric, but kind and wonderful neighbors. “They feed them what they eat in the wild,” I said. “Not ginger buns.”

“But he likes the buns,” Rika said, pointing to the monkey. He had run under a nearby tree and was clutching the bread tightly in his hand.

I shook my head. Poor thing. Of course he liked the buns. He would probably start raiding people's compost piles and trash now. Vader always said not to feed wild animals. He even tried to get the De Groots to stop, but they refused.

“When he has to be killed after he invades someone's kitchen looking for scraps, you'll only have yourselves to blame,” I said.

Brigitta stomped halfway down the front steps and looked down her nose at me. “For goodness' sake, Katrien, he's only had a few bites. Don't take it so seriously.”

“It is serious!”

She rolled her eyes. “You're so melodramatic! Not everything is about you.”

Flummoxed, I stammered, “M-me? I'm not making this about me.”

“If you say so.” She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows.

My arms tingled as if worms were crawling on me, but I couldn't move. All I could do was stare back at Brigitta and wonder how I had ended up in this situation. Tante Greet would not consider accusing people of indirectly killing monkeys a strong foundation to renew a friendship. But I didn't want to be friends with these girls. I only felt sorry for the macaque.

“Why are you even here?” Brigitta asked.

“I'm on my way home.” I jiggled my net full of giant stag beetles in her face. “I have work to do.”

She let out a little cry and jumped back, tripping over her skirt and landing with a thud on the dirty step. Dusting herself off, she glared and said through clenched teeth, “If you keep playing with bugs, Katrien, you might turn into one.”

I responded by dangling the net until it touched her hair. She screamed, and Maud, Rika and Inge tossed their ginger buns aside to drag Brigitta away from me. The macaque dashed over and stole the sweet treats.

Safely back on the porch, Brigitta huffed and shuddered. “Are any of them on me?”

Her friends shook their heads, and I counted the beetles in my net to be sure. Three.
Whew!
“Stupid thing to do. Could have hurt the beetles,” I whispered to myself.

“I hear you muttering over there, Katrien,” Brigitta spat. “You are so strange. Go home and play with your stupid bugs. Leave those of us who have respectable interests alone.”

My hands trembled with anger and tightened around my funnel
net, but I only retorted, “They are insects, Brigitta, not bugs. Try to learn something for once,” before I resumed my journey home.

I had comported myself with as much restraint as possible, but inside, my anger shook me with a force that rivaled the tremors in Batavia.

Plop!

I dropped the last of my newly deceased beetles into a pot of not-quite boiling water and listened as some of the liquid splashed over the sides and sizzled on the hot stove top. In the pot, the water undulated with enough motion to cause the insect—about the size of a deck of cards cut lengthwise—to dance and shimmy across the surface, softening its limbs.

On a piece of wood near the stove sat the stag beetle I had just removed. I carried it from the kitchen into the parlor where I had better natural light. With tissue paper, I carefully dried the specimen's spindly legs, powerful mandibles and other delicate parts, drinking in the details as I worked.

I pushed my spectacles up. This stag beetle had orange eyes. Not so unusual. The darker orange flecks were different, though. I hadn't seen those before.

This beetle also had a solid black body. All my other specimens had brown heads and thoraxes with abdomens that appeared more like polished walnut. Was this a mutation? Or something more important, like an incipient species? I would have to collect hundreds more samples to determine that.

I pinned the unique stag beetle onto the cork and glanced at my watch-pin. Less time had passed than I thought. The insect in the
kitchen still needed a few more minutes to soften, so I had time to attack the next step in my stag beetle display, which I happened to dread most: the labeling.

Killing the beetles didn't bother me. That was simply a matter of placing each one in a glass jar with the lid tightly closed, which suffocated them. I explained this process to Oom Maarten once and he was horrified, but then, he didn't even like watching cats chase birds.

Boiling the beetles didn't bother me either, nor did pinning them to the display backing. But writing their names perfectly on those minuscule slips of paper with no drips, splotches, or spills? I shuddered.

It was then that I saw the sunlight was shining onto the varnished teak desk, lighting up my work space as if trying to encourage me. So, with a deep sigh, I set to work. I wrote as neatly as I could, but before long, the wooden pen began to shake in my grip, and black drops of ink splattered across the blotter and onto my fingers. Frustrated, I set the pen down and rubbed my face.

Drat. I forgot the ink on my fingers. I licked my upper lip and sure enough, a bitter taste filled my mouth. I hastily wiped at the ink smears that I knew were decorating my cheeks, and resumed scratching tiny letters onto the tiny paper:
H-e-x-a . . . 

On my sixth piece of paper, which would yield my second successful label if I managed it, I was startled by a sudden thump at the front door. Seconds later, Mrs. Brinckerhoff whirled through the double doors of our parlor, reminding me of a pink-headed fruit dove with her green skirts and pink hat. Mrs. Brinckerhoff never knocked. If I ever walked into someone's home unexpected, my aunt would have torn into me like an angry Javan tiger.

But Tante Greet considered Mrs. Brinckerhoff a friend, and that made all the difference, apparently. I didn't understand how. Mrs. Brinckerhoff was the type of person Brigitta would grow up to be.

“
Goede dag
, Katrien,” she said, patting her brow with a gleaming white handkerchief.

I walked over to greet her, my aunt's reminders about courtesy
ringing in my head. She kissed me three times on the cheeks—right, left, right—as was customary.

“Good day to you, too, Mrs. Brinckerhoff.” I tried to sound polite, but I think I sounded more irritated. “How do you do?”

She let out a breath of air so massive that even her stiff hat moved atop her head. “The trip across the strait from Ketimbang was quite rough today. May I sit?” Before I could even nod, she eased into the overstuffed chair. “Is Greet home?”

“
Ja
, she is. I'll get her.”

Horrid woman. As I left the room I thought of a quote from Mr. Charles Darwin: “
It would, indeed, have been a strange fact, had attention not been paid to breeding, for the inheritance of good and bad qualities is so obvious
.”