“So you’re alive! Thank God, you’re alive! Oh God, oh God!” and Julius sank onto the bed and looked at his wife, who was sitting in a stupor on the floor.
Kwasiba dumped the wailing child in his father’s lap and, throwing herself onto the bed, cried, “Oh my God, my masra, oh my father,”211 and began weeping and shouting uncontrollably.
Julius looked from the one to the other, but it was as if he didn’t really see anything. He was conscious of only one thing: they were alive, his wife and child were alive. All those hours since three o’clock that morning when there had come a knock on the window in the Saramaccastraat and someone had shouted, “Masra, get up, the bush-negroes have raided Klein Paradijs,”212 from that moment on he had expected nothing other than to find his wife and child murdered. He had left the town immediately, had made the oarsmen row against the tide, had himself rowed, and always with the one thought going through his head: what would he find when he got there? “God,” he had prayed, “Let them live.” It did not matter to him if his plantation was burnt out or destroyed, if only they survived. God had heard his prayers. But how? What had happened?
“Kwasiba,” Sarith barely managed to whisper, “Kwasiba has saved us; it’s thanks to Kwasiba that we’re alive.”
And now that the reality of what had happened penetrated her consciousness, she began weeping, not rebelliously and obtrusively, as she did when she wanted to get her own way, but softly, silently the tears dripped from her eyes. Mini-mini wept, too. She had drawn Jethro to her and held him fast with both arms while rocking her body back and forth.
“If Kwasiba hadn’t been here, we would no longer be here, either; it’s all thanks to Kwasiba,” was all that Sarith could manage to say, and Julius looked at Kwasiba, still straddling the bed, shouting, “Those wretches, those devils!”213
Then everyone began talking at the same time. Jethro wanted to say something, Sarith wanted to say something, Kwasiba got up to make sugared water to calm everyone down. When they opened the door Julius suddenly noticed a foot belonging to the body that lay there on the passage. That young man, what was that man doing there? And suddenly everything welled up inside him, everything that in his anxiety had been suppressed. All the tales, all the gossip about his wife, and now that man, lying dead in the passage.
“Sarith, that lad, what was he doing here?”
“What lad?”
“That Andersma, the lieutenant, who’s lying here dead.”
“Dead, is he dead?” Sarith put her hand in front of her mouth. Rein was dead, and it was her fault. Oh, what should she do? What could she say?
“Yes, he’s dead, and what was he doing here?”
Sarith gulped, “He was here to protect us.”
Julius stood up and went to the door, asking, “Protect you, in his pyjamas?”
What he saw in the passage filled him with disgust. Three vultures were sitting on the window-sill near the corpse and two others were picking at it. One had an eye in its beak. Julius was about to go into the passage when he heard a thump behind him. Sarith, who had got up and was just behind him, had seen the same thing. Then she had fainted.
An hour later, Julius sat with Jethro on his knee in his office downstairs. He had called the soldiers to take the body away and bury it.
When Sarith had fainted, he had asked Mini-mini and Kwasiba to take care of the misi. He himself had gone downstairs with Jethro, covering the boy’s eyes with his hand so that he would not see the disgusting spectacle. Kwasiba had gone to look for something edible. Almost everything was gone, but she could pull up some cassava somewhere and cook that. Jethro had lapped that up. Julius now understood that Sarith, Mini-mini and Jethro had sat for more than twenty-four hours in that cupboard while Kwasiba had kept that terrible Agosu talking and put him at his ease. That had meant that he had not searched any further.
But that other man, that gnawed at him. What he had heard in town. He had gone to Abraham and Rebecca’s. By chance the previous rabbi was also visiting. He had asked where Julius’ wife was. When he had answered that his wife had remained at Klein Paradijs, the rabbi had asked whether that was not dangerous. Julius had answered that Sarith herself found it not dangerous and above all there were so many soldiers in the area.
“That’s precisely where the danger lies,” the rabbi had answered.
Julius had looked at him incomprehensibly, and, noticing this, the old rabbi had said, in fatherly fashion, “My dear friend, I don’t want to meddle in your affairs, but don’t you know what the whole of Paramaribo is saying about your wife?”