Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers

Author:Aidan Chambers [Chambers, Aidan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781862302846
Google: C4x1uzZLdVUC
Publisher: Definitions
Published: 2007-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

GEERTRUI

MRS WESSELING WAS so deranged by her son’s action that she would not leave her room for days. It was as if Dirk had died. She kept repeating, like a mantra, that she would never see him again. In her grief she blamed Henk, saying he persuaded Dirk to leave. She blamed me for coming to the farm and unsettling her son. She blamed me too for bringing Jacob with me and putting her family in even more danger than they were before. She blamed her husband for not being more firm with their son. Worst of all in its vehemence, she blamed herself for allowing this to happen. She should have sent Henk away the first day he and Dirk decided to go into hiding; she should have sent all three of us away the night we arrived; she even said she should have let the Germans find Jacob instead of hiding him in the bedstee, because at least that would have saved her son.

Her torment was painful to behold. And nothing Mr Wesseling or I could do soothed her anguish. It was a shock to see an adult who I had known only as a strong woman, controlled in every way, indomitable, so suddenly crumble, becoming almost infantile in her distress. Another lesson, one of the most affecting of my life, in how fragile is human nature. In the moment it took to read her son’s letter this mature, experienced, dominant woman disintegrated as if the yarn that held the garment of her self together had been pulled out and she had unravelled into a tangle of twisted thread. And though Dirk did eventually return, she never completely recovered her former self, never became the confident, imposing person she had been, but for the rest of her life was a nervous, uncertain woman, withdrawn, hard to amuse, always expecting the worst. Her one constant pleasure, and I often thought her only consolation, was playing the harmonium, an instrument she had learned as a child, but had given up in her teenage years, and now took up again as if she had never left off. She played it only for herself, sometimes for hours on end, never liking anyone else to listen, and invested in her playing all of herself that before she had poured into her son. It was as if, while playing the harmonium, she lived another life, an alternative life that did not fail her as her other everyday life had failed her. Until in the end, before she died, playing the harmonium and listening to records of other people playing it, became her world, and there was nothing besides. All else had vanished, her husband, her son, her previous life forgotten. She remembered only music and the logic of the keyboard. She died of cancer in her early sixties while fingering on the counterpane of her bed the notes of some composition only she could hear.

But I have reached ahead of myself. Let us go back to the days after Dirk and Henk disappeared.

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