Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  Days passed, and it was becoming obvious there was something more than shyness amiss with Eveline.

  “Is it that she has no English?” I asked Piet, wondering if she understood what I said.

  “She speaks some English,” Piet said.

  “Pardon me for asking, but did she speak—you know—before?”

  “Uncle Henri—he took us in after our parents died—said she never shut up. She and Marika...” He pressed his lips together. “They were twins. It’s hard to lose a twin.”

  “It’s hard to lose a sister,” I said.

  His eyes teared up. I wanted to hug him, but at the age of fourteen he was desperately trying to be the man of the family.

  Days passed. Eveline still made no effort to speak, and whenever I asked her a direct question would only nod or shake her head.

  One morning I woke early. I thought I was the only early riser, but when I arrived downstairs I saw Eveline, still in her nightdress, sitting on the floor crooning softly over something cradled in her arms. She heard me and started visibly. Tears ran down both cheeks and I swear she looked guilty. She leaped to her feet. I heard something clatter as she ran past me. As her footsteps retreated up the stairs I realised that the object of her sadness and guilt was the carved violin head.

  After breakfast, while Eveline visited the necessary, I asked Piet what was upsetting her.

  “She misses Marika,” was all he would say. By the look on his face she was not the only one.

  “Your parents?”

  “Died when we were young, and our uncle was killed in the shelling,” he said. “He was a good man, and kind to us in his way, though never like a father, if you know what I mean.

  Days passed. My refugees settled into a routine, helping with housework and cooking while I was at work.

  When the influx of Belgians slowed to a trickle I stopped going to the station and resumed my job with Mrs. R. She and Mr. Brotherton had a new project—equipping the Leeds Pals regiment to go to the front. Perhaps if Tommy had not been so eager to join up, he could have joined the Pals instead of the KOYLI, but it was too late now. I’d had one letter from him so far, complaining about the food and Sergeant Atkinson, but saying he’d made some good mates and they were looking out for each other. They were behind the lines, waiting to be called to the front. I checked the date on the letter. It had been written nearly four weeks ago, so he could be anywhere by now.

  Piet made several visits to the first aid station set up for the refugees, but simply shook his head when I asked him how his hand was doing. One week later they sent him up to the hospital and he returned with a grim expression. He’d been told to go the following morning prepared to stay in overnight so they could amputate two of his fingers before he lost his whole hand to infection. I looked at the sad remains of the violin, still on the sideboard. He’d never play again.

  Maybe it was time to see if I could acquire an instrument and see if Eveline would play. The broken violin was a focus for her grief. Until she came to terms with whatever was preventing her from speaking she would never begin to heal.

  Eveline made no fuss about staying with me while Piet went to the hospital, but in the middle of the night her screams woke me. I called out to her and then finally lit a candle and opened the door to her room. She flung herself into my arms, almost knocking the candle holder from my hand.

  “Come on, then.” I took her to my room and drew her into bed with me.

  Throughout the night she fretted and turned, speaking in sleep as she never did during the day, though I didn’t grasp a word of her Flemish.

  Piet returned the following afternoon, pale-faced and with even more bandages around his hand.

  “They’ve said it should heal much more cleanly now they’ve removed two fingers.” He stared at the dressing. “I hope they’ve cut off the right fingers. I can still feel them. I swear they hurt more than they did before. How can they hurt when they’re not even there?” He looked at the violin head and shrugged. “We should get rid of that,” he said, and picked it up as if about to cast it into the fire.

  Eveline flung herself at him screaming. There were no words but her intention was obvious.

  The following Monday morning I caught the omnibus to Roundhay Hall. With Piet’s permission I took the violin head to show Mrs. R. She had friends who were artists, writers and musicians. I wondered whether she might be able to conjure up a violin, maybe one the Verlindens could borrow.

  “That’s a lovely carving.” Mrs. B. held the broken piece to the light of the window and turned it all round, scrutinising it carefully. “It’s unusual. What a shame the rest of the instrument isn’t attached. It must have been very fine. What happened to it?”

  “I don’t know. It means something to both of them, but especially to Eveline. Piet has had two finger amputated, so he’ll probably never play the violin again.”

  “I used to know a piano player who lost his index finger. He learned to play again. He said it’s simply a question of retraining the fingers you have left. See how your boy is when he’s had the dressings removed. In the meantime let me think about finding another instrument.”

  Two weeks later I saw Piet’s damaged hand for the first time. It made me a bit queasy to look at it, at first, but eventually I stopped noticing the fading scar and the missing fingers. He flexed his remaining fingers one morning, a week after his bandages had been removed.

  “It’s time to get a job,” he said. “We have taken advantage of your hospitality for too long already I believe you said there was a job on a farm where we might both go. I think my hand is good enough to hold a hoe or drive a plough horse.”

  I’d grown accustomed to having the Verlindens around. I didn’t want them to go, but I knew if it was me in their position I would want to make my own way in the world and not rely on charity.

  Mrs. R. arranged it. Organising was what she did best. She knew of a farmer out Rawdon way, who would give Piet and Eveline a place and a small wage. The day before they were due to leave, she gave me a violin case.

  “For your Belgian friends,” she said. “A gift. In exchange for their story.”

  “It may take a while to get that,” I said. “Eveline can’t speak about whatever happened, and Piet doesn’t want to.”

  “I’ll wait until they are ready,” she said. “It’s been such a short time. It may take months, or even years.”

  I opened the case on the omnibus on the way home. It was a beautiful, instrument with the patina of age, and instead of a scroll there was a carved horse’s head. Only Mrs. R. could come up with something so beautiful and so unusual in such a short time. I gave it to Piet, explaining that Mrs. R. would very much like to know what had happened to their own violin, but if he didn’t want to tell her, that was all right, too.

  He opened up the case and simply stared at the lustrous instrument, complete with bow. He stroked it with the fingers of his good hand.

  “You might be able to play it again.” I told him about Mrs. R’s pianist friend with the missing index finger.

  “I was never as good as Eveline, and Eveline was never as good as Marika,” he said. “They always competed against each other for use of the violin. It was a special one. It had been in the family since our grandfather made it for our grandmother to play. We only had the one instrument, you see, so they could never play duets.”

  “Did the violin get crushed in the bombing?”

  “No,” he said. That was it. No further details, but he ran his thumb across the finger-stumps of his left hand, and I could see he was close to tears. Then he kissed the damaged violin head and laid it in the case alongside the new instrument.

  “There,” he said. “They will make friends and soon the new violin will learn from the old.”

  Mrs. R. had given me permission to go with Piet and Eveline to their new home the following morning, and she had even sent her own car for us, a Renault, driven by the immaculate, but taciturn Mr. Kay, who was almost a
s silent as Eveline. It felt very grand to ride in a chauffeur-driven car, but though Kay managed to convey that all three of us were beneath him, he conducted us there in safety and waited while I spoke to the farmer’s wife.

  Mrs. Goody was a welcoming soul and saw Piet and Eveline to two tiny attic rooms, their new home. Piet would work on the farm and Eveline could attend the village school until she was old enough to work in the dairy. Mrs. Goody’s son had joined the Leeds Pals, and her daughter had recently married a young farmer and moved to the next village, leaving the rooms empty.

  “It’ll be right grand to have youngsters about the place again,” she confided in me. “I’ll look after ‘em, miss, and you can come and visit whenever you like.”

  As I was about to climb into the Renault, Eveline ran across the yard and flung herself at me. I hugged her, thinking how quickly these two had begun to feel like my own family.

  In the weeks that followed I received diligent letters from Piet, always with kisses from Eveline tagged on to the bottom of the page. She still wouldn’t speak, but she was getting on well at school, he told me, and there were three other Belgian refugee families in the village.

  I visited once a month, on a Sunday, pleased to see that Piet hardly favoured his damaged hand any more, and the fresh air and Mrs. Goody’s cooking was starting to put some meat onto his skinny body. Eveline looked the same as ever. Mrs. Goody had taught her to milk already, on the principle that cows always behaved better for women than for men. I don’t know if it was truly the case, but I think it gave Eveline a certain pride.

  “What job would you have had if you had still been at home?” I asked Piet.

  “My uncle was a builder. I would have gone into the family business.”

  “How about the violin? Is the new instrument learning from the old?”

  He winked at me, a genuine sparkle in his eye. “Of course.”

  “Has she played it yet?”

  “Not yet, but she has looked at it, and I think she wants to. She needs to know Marika has forgiven her.”

  “For what?”

  But he didn’t reply.

  One Christmas came and went, and another. Life settled down. The Belgians in our city and our countryside became a fact of life and we almost ceased to notice them. I walked out with a young man called Edward for a few months. He had not volunteered for the army because his eyesight was poor, but he talked all the time of how glorious it would be to shoot Germans. I’d had letters from Tommy at the front and knew that he was finding it anything but glorious in the trenches, so Edward and I didn’t suit each other. We parted amicably, and I concentrated on working for Mrs. R.

  In July 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, tragedy stuck the Leeds Pals, which had by now become the 15th Battalion (1st Leeds) The Prince of Wales’ Own (West Yorkshire Regiment). That was such a mouthful that locally we still called them the Pals. “We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying,” one of the few survivors wrote in the Yorkshire Post. Naturally the mood at Roundhay was sombre. So many young lives gone to waste. I was thankful Tommy had joined the KOYLI instead of the Pals.

  I kept in touch with Piet and the silent Eveline, of course, though through the later part of 1917 and 1918 my visits to the farm became less frequent. I had a new task—looking after my brother. Tommy had been wounded at Passchendaele in July 1917, half his calf torn away by shrapnel. For some months he stayed in a hospital in Scotland. Towards Christmas they sent him home, limping badly, and suffering from shell-shock. He didn’t want to talk about his experiences and sometimes he was silent for so long that I was reminded of Eveline.

  At first he could only hobble about on crutches and he had to shuffle up and down the stairs on his bottom, but gradually he improved. He learned to walk on two sticks, and then one, and by October of 1918, no sticks at all, though his middle toes crossed over themselves and his scarred calf wobbled as if it was empty of muscle. He would limp for the rest of his life, but he was alive and he was home, even though he was not the carefree young man who had set off so enthusiastically in 1914.

  I had taken Tommy to visit Piet and Eveline a few times and they had developed a cautious friendship. All three of them had seen things which I had not, and I sometimes felt like an outsider in that little group.

  Finally, in November 1918, the war that was supposed to be over by Christmas ended—four years and thousands upon thousands of lives too late. Bells rang and newspaper headlines were full of the Armistice, signed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The end of the ‘war to end all wars’ brought a mixture of emotions. Joy and sorrow ran hand in hand—joy that it was over, and sorrow for all those who had died, been injured or suffered bereavement and displacement.

  Mrs. Goody wrote and invited me and Tommy to a concert in the village hall, to celebrate the armistice. Eveline was playing the violin.

  I told Mrs. R. that her violin would be featured in a concert and she insisted on coming herself, so Tommy and I were privileged to ride to Rawdon in the Renault with Mrs. R., and with Kay at the wheel as usual.

  Before the concert started I took Mrs. R. backstage and introduced her to Piet and Eveline. She shook hands with Piet and then took Eveline on one side. I didn’t hear what she said except for her opening gambit. “You owe me a story, young lady...”

  We returned to our seats and sat through the church choir’s rendition of soldiers’ songs. I felt Tommy shaking with silent laughter by my side.

  “They’ve cleaned that one up a bit,” he whispered.

  Then it was Eveline’s turn. She looked lovely in a white dress as she walked out on to the stage with her violin.

  She came to the front, took a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak. I reached out and gripped Tommy’s fingers, squeezing them so hard that he winced. I saw Piet in the wings, his eyes wide in surprise.

  “My... my brother and I... would like to thank you all for taking us in and making us welcome.” She spoke hesitantly at first and her accent was much more pronounced than Piet’s. “We wish to thank Polly for her kindness and friendship, and Mrs. Goody for giving us a home. But I especially want to thank Mrs. Ratcliffe for the gift of music. And I owe her a story.

  “When we fled from our home, we walked for miles and miles to the coast. The only way we could reach the big ship was by crowding into the little boats rowing out from the beach. It was cold and dark. The waves tossed us about. There were hundreds of us and not enough boats. My brother Piet held my hand and I should have held my sister’s hand, but we had our violin to look after, so Marika and I each held the neck, our fingers touching. It was a shared instrument, you understand, and we both squabbled over it endlessly before... before the Germans came. Our boat was too full. In the darkness and confusion Marika fell into the water between our boat and the next. I let go of the violin.”

  She blinked very slowly.

  “I let go.”

  She took a deep breath. “Piet leaned over the side and grabbed for my sister. He grasped the violin and pulled it up, but she was no longer holding on. The two boats crunched together, the violin and my brother’s hand were trapped, and... and... Marika was gone.”

  The audience sat in total silence, almost as if they held their collective breath.

  “I am going to play a tune for my sister.” She looked up. “I’m sorry, Marika. I should have held on tighter.”

  Then she began to play.

  I don’t know if the new instrument had learned from the old one, or if it had always sounded so lovely, but when Eveline played it all the sorrows of the world welled behind the music. Some of the gruff country farmers were wiping their eyes. Then the melody transformed from unbearable sadness to joy. In it I heard two carefree sisters arguing over whose turn it was to play and their delight in the music, first from one sister and then from the other. It was as if Eveline poured her grief, held in for so long, on to the stage.

  When the last note rang
out into the hall, the audience sat transfixed, as if shocked into silence. Then the place erupted into tumultuous applause. Mrs. Ratcliffe stood, and the rest of the audience followed suit.

  After the concert, Piet and Eveline came out into the hall. Mrs. Ratcliffe leaned forward and kissed the girl’s cheek. “Thank you. Payment gratefully received.”

  “Did you know she was going to do that?” I asked Piet.

  He shook his head. “I only knew she was going to play. I never dreamed. Your Mrs. Ratcliffe is a magician.”

  “Someone once told me she was a witch.” I said. “I’m glad she’s on our side. She knows how to get what she wants, and she persuades other people to do her bidding while thinking it was their idea all along.”

  “It is a great gift.”

  “What will you do now the war is over?” I asked. “Will you stay or will you go home?”

  “Your own young men are coming home from the front. They will need their homes, jobs, space to breathe, time to forget about the horrors they have seen. I recommend a job in the country.” He glanced across at Tommy who was talking to Mrs. Goody. “Your brother could do worse than come and work here when we leave.”

  “You’re already planning to go.”

  “I am good with my hands, even though I don’t have quite enough fingers. My father and my uncles were builders. We will go home and rebuild.”

  Piet and Eveline stayed with Mrs. Goody for one last Christmas, and in early January 1919 Tommy and I went with them to Leeds Station to wave goodbye as they set out for home.

  I remembered the day I’d first seen them, such a long time ago.