“No.”
“Please . . . imagine the keys. . . . They felt so smooth and cool whenever I touched them. . . . I can only guess how wonderful they felt to you. The way they responded to your touch, the way you controlled the mood of everyone in the room with just the touch of your fingertips.”
“Ma, please,” Willem said.
“It was always so perfect, even when you didn’t have music . . . like your fingers had their own memory. . . . You must have played for a long time, since you were young. . . . Do you remember, Ma?”
She put her hands out in front of her, fingers bent, so thin now.
“Play it, Moeder, I want to remember the way it sounded in the parlor. . . . Only you can do that.”
She moved her head with the silent beat. And then hummed softly.
“I remember those nights, Ma . . . the hymns and the other songs you played afterward. . . . I loved them most in the evenings when it rained and the house was cool and smelled fresh . . . or when we could smell koeksisters and were waiting to eat them once you finished playing. You had such power to make us happy.”
She moved her feet now, up and back, as if on the bellows pedals. I hummed breathy notes along with her.
“I remember once . . . when the men were gone, Moeder . . . you played a song you loved. . . . You leaned against the edge of the organ, your stomach against the keyboard, and it looked like you were a part of the instrument, like you were taking the music in, feeling it deep inside you.”
She stopped. I had said the wrong thing. I was trying to help, to take her mind from the tent, and I had said something wrong.
She opened her eyes; they were gray again and cold.
“Ma . . .”
“Ja.”
“Close your eyes a moment.”
She looked, closed them, opened them suspiciously, and then closed them. I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead, exactly in the middle, and then once on each cheek.
I HAD BEEN A woeful big sister to Willem. I think I was jealous of him and whatever that quality was that sometimes allowed young boys to have the strength of grown men. He was so absolutely fearless. Fearless and defiant. He made such an effort to be a man that I came to expect it of him, even though he was so young. I’d seen him stand up to British rifles, and later he never complained even when teeth fell from his head. But I was so impatient with him whenever he acted as he should, like a little boy. He had always been thin, but now he’d become prickly as a sweet-thorn branch, and it seemed he forever speared me with his elbows and knees, and the bone-against-bone contact was painful enough to bring tears.
But when he was defiant on my behalf . . . I loved him so, and never more than the night he tore into Mevrou Huiseveldt in a way we all wished we could. It was so inappropriate and disrespectful, and all the more glorious because of it. The little man rose up for us all.
At some point in the usual hour of crying and sobbing before Mevrou Huiseveldt commenced her noisy sleep, Willem walked to her cot and shouted one word: “Stop.” He could not have yelled louder; it might have awakened those sleeping in tents several rows away.
I could see only shadows from the moonlight seeping through the canvas. I saw Mevrou Huiseveldt sit up, curious and then stunned.
“What?”
“Stop . . . woman . . . stop . . .”
“Who do you—”
“We’re all sad . . . we’re all tired . . . but none of us can sleep because of you.”
She slapped his face.
Willem laughed. He tilted his head back and laughed as if roaring.
She slapped him again, with her palm cupped, so that it sounded even louder. It knocked him back a step, but he laughed again, equally loud, and stepped back within her range to invite another.
Moeder was there before a third slap could land.
“Don’t you touch my son.”
“He can’t speak that way to me.”
“No . . . he can’t . . . but I’ll take care of that . . . not you.”
Mevrou Huiseveldt began shouting incoherently, waving her arms at Moeder. “Hunger . . . Klaas . . . my Jan . . .” Words emerged between wails and violent inhalations.
Rachel backed away from her mother.
“Beef . . . mealie . . . you . . .” She pointed at me repeatedly, as if with a knife, shouting nonsense. “You . . .”
Moeder lowered her volume but hardened her tone.
“If the men were this weak, we’d have lost the country in the first week. . . . Don’t you think the rest of us have suffered?”
“Suffer . . . suffer . . .”
“A year in this tent . . . when have you ever thanked Aletta for carrying your water every day? Not once. Not a single time. If you’d even said a word one time about it, that would be enough.”
“Lettie . . . water . . . photo . . .” She held both arms open to me now. Her mind was gone.
“It’s hard enough . . . without your crying and snoring,” Moeder said, cutting with controlled comments. “Praise God, your snoring could shake him from his holy throne. Roll over. Roll over, woman. I pray at night for you to roll over.”
Moeder sounded like Oupa, so stern she overpowered the woman’s wails. It was the only way to get her attention.
“But he . . . he can’t talk . . .” Mevrou Huiseveldt pointed at Willem.
“Willem, come here. . . . Apologize,” Moeder said.
“Will not.”
“Willem . . . now!” He looked so tall as he strutted to her cot again.
“Sorry.”
Mevrou Huiseveldt broke out sobbing again.
“Now . . . don’t touch my son again,” Moeder said. She moved Willem directly in front of the woman’s cot and slapped him hard across the back of the head. And then did it again. His head snapped back on his reedy neck both times. I knew that Willem would not allow himself to cry. It must have embarrassed Mevrou Huiseveldt to see him take the beating without a sound.
“And don’t think you got away with it,” Moeder said, causing the woman to soften her cries. “I had been so sure my brother-in-law was the informant that I overlooked the obvious. I should have known from the start.”
“What?”
“It was you lying to the guards . . . the informant . . . the one who made up the stories for the commandant that we were sending letters to the men. That Willem was making plans to kill guards. . . . He was just playing with Klaas.”
I leaned as close as I could. I needed to hear this.
“What?” Mevrou Huiseveldt said.
“It was you . . . trying to get us shot or hanged or at least taken out of this tent,” Moeder said.
“No . . . I wouldn’t . . . why would you think—”
“Because the commandant said an informant told him that letters to spies were coming from this tent.”
“Ja . . . but . . . I didn’t—”
“But they only searched through our things,” Moeder said. “They didn’t touch a thing of yours or your family’s.”
The woman answered with a series of coughs.
“So be quiet . . . and go back to sleep,” Moeder said.