Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

be even more worried and anxious than myself.
    I have already been to Amsterdam and protested to Mrs. Amelia Mellema-Hammers. Engineer Mellema wasn’t to be found at home that day. That woman only hunched her shoulders and then said: “There is no need for you to involve yourself. There is already somebody taking care of the matter.”
    At that moment I came to understand how one human being could murder another. But Christ still guided me. Nothing happened.
    I explained to her that I had been looking after Madame Annelies ever since she set sail from Java.
    “Are you demanding to be paid?” she asked.
    “If it was only a matter of being paid, Madame Annelies’s husband and mother would be far more able to look after that than you,” I answered, infuriated. “Are you not her guardian? At least you could visit her while she is so ill.”
    She told me to leave. I threatened that I would take the whole affair to the liberal press. She became even more fierce and slammed the door shut in my face. I had no formal rights in any of this; I knew that, so I could do nothing else but go away.
    Amelia Mellema-Hammers never did come to Huizen, let alone that three-house village. She owned a dairy business, but it wasn’t so big as your business in Wonokromo.
    I returned to Huizen without being able to get in contact with
Speceraria.
I was lucky that the old woman looking after Annelies still allowed me to come and visit each day. I made up a flower arrangement and placed it on the bedside table, near Annelies’s head.
    Madame Annelies herself is no longer conscious of anything.
Only God knows what her condition really is at this moment.
    Just a few hours after we received this last letter, a telegram arrived.
    MY DEEPEST AND SAD CONDOLENCES ON THE PASSING AWAY OF MADAME ANNELIES. PANJI DARMAN.
    And so the tension of all this time, which had utterly destroyed our nerves, reached the moment of explosion.
    And Mama looked calm, though of course I knew that inside she would be feeling the same as me. She had lost her daughter, and was soon to lose her business. I had lost my wife.
    After reading the telegram she covered her face with both hands. Her cries were stifled by her palms. She groaned and ran upstairs. My head collapsed upon the table as if a sword had cut through my neck. How cheap was life. We will never while away the time talking as we used to. You will never again listen to my stories. Between us there is only a cluster of beautiful memories, and they were all beautiful.
    Her smile, the light from her eyes, her voice, her sometimes childlike words—all were now lost forever, to me, Mama, and to the world. Mother, your daughter-in-law is no longer with us. You will have no grandchildren from her. You will never attend their wedding.
    I don’t know how long my head lay on the table. Rapid footsteps from behind startled me. Mama was standing there, still overcome: “It’s as I predicted, Child, they set out to destroy her and for no other reason than to obtain this company. They have murdered her in the manner available and permitted to them.”
    “Ma—”
    “The same as Ah Tjong, but more vile, more cruel, more barbaric.”
    “Ma,” and I could say no more than that.
    “And there is nowhere we can turn.”
    “Ma.”
    “A satanic alliance more evil than Satan himself. Everything has come to pass.”
    “That a human being could be treated that way, Ma.”
    Mama stroked my hair, as if I were her own small child, and as if I were the only person in the world in mourning at that moment.
    “Ya, Child, this is what they have been doing all along, only now it is our turn to experience it.” She spoke again but as if it had nothing to do with her own grief. “Three years ago neither of us knew the other existed; we had never met. In just a little while we have become friends. Now this grief we shall bear together forever.”
    “Ma.”
    “My two children have gone, and this business too will soon go. I do not