The Cost of Sugar(58)

After the wedding most of the guests stayed on for a week or so and Sarith enjoyed herself tremendously with all the parties that were laid on in her honour. She was afraid of the first night alone with Julius. She did not love him, that she knew full well. She had used him for her own ends. But she would do her best to be nice to him. After their first union  , when Julius had naturally discovered that she was certainly no virgin, he was of the opinion that he had the right to know who his predecessor had been. Sarith told him about Charles van Hennegouwen. She spun the tale that she was a naïve girl of fifteen, who believed that a love affair was the real thing, and Charles himself, being still young and knowing no better, had taken advantage of this. She even managed a few tears while recounting that if she had known how it would all turn out, it would never have happened, but could Julius please forgive her? That he did readily. She should quickly forget it all. He, Julius, would never lay any blame. He was just happy that she now loved him.

When Elza and Rutger arrived back in Paramaribo on 30 November, to be awaited by the rest of the family, the first news they heard was that Sarith was married to Julius Robles de Medina and now lived at Klein Paradijs on the Boven-Commewijne. Elza was astonished. Sarith married to ‘Noso’? The same Noso whom they had always ridiculed and who according to Sarith was such a bore? Well, she must have been extremely desperate to have come to such a decision.





ELZA


It was really fine to be back home again, thought Elza, and the first day she went through the whole house to see all the familiar things again. She also went in the grounds to the slaves’ huts to see Amimba’s little son, who was a chubby, sturdy baby, and she gave Amimba some of Gideon’s cast-off blouses. Maisa, Afanaisa and Alex had their hands full these early days recounting everything. The others wanted to know everything, and Elza often saw them all at the threshold of Alex’s or Amimba’s room, sitting in a circle around the narrators. The favourite topic to be recounted was how in Holland the whites actually did manual labour.

The others had not believed this at first. Maisa and Afanaisa were trying to take them for a ride! Even when Alex confirmed it, they could not believe it, and Misi Elza had to intervene and confirm that it really was the case: in Holland the whites worked. And the slaves rolled around laughing, roaring their heads off with tears in their eyes. Really true?

Did the whites actually know how to work with their hands? And time and time again Afanaisa and Maisa had to imitate the kitchen maid peeling the potatoes, the housemaid with broom and pail and how the coachman kept the stalls and the animals clean in the stables. And everyone laughed. Oh, that was a really priceless joke! Whites working with their hands. They never tired of this story, and from then on in this household whenever anyone came with a tall story, the reaction was, “Next you’ll be trying to tell me that whites work with their hands!”146

Elza’s second child, another son, was born on 17 January, just a week after his brother’s second birthday. He was called Jonathan. Just as on the first occasion, everything went fine. Elza fed the child herself and felt completely fit again after just a few days, but was kept in bed again by Maisa, who still insisted that getting up before the sixteenth day was fraught with danger. After that things got busy, for Mr and Mrs van Omhoog would leave Suriname on 27 February, and in the first week of March the Le Chasseur family would move from the Wagenwegstraat into the large mansion on the Gravenstraat.





SARITH


In the meantime Sarith was finding Klein Paradijs to be a totally dull and boring spot. She got annoyed, was surly and moody. Julius was exceptionally loving and attentive, but all that loving stuff on his part irritated her and she often restrained herself with difficulty from snapping at him. Sarith had thought that they would go to Paramaribo around New Year, so as to attend the various festivities, such as that of Esther and Jacob. But when she suggested this to Julius, it turned out that he had a totally different plan. He had had to spend so many New Years at parties. No, he wanted something different. He wanted to remain cosily with his darling little wife alone on their own plantation. And so it turned out, too. How angry Sarith was to be sitting there on her own with Julius while all those parties were going on in Paramaribo. Oh how she hoped that there would very soon be some good reason for her to go to town, urgently and for a longer period. To pass the time, Mini-mini had to give her a massage very often. Sarith noticed something about Mini-mini. Was it just her idea, or was she very much down in the dumps? And then suddenly, around the middle of January, Sarith realized what was up with Mini-mini: she was expecting!