Tamar by Mal Peet

window. Dart was dumbfounded: how could things change so quickly? His spirits dimmed.
    They walked around the farm silently, checking the buildings. When they reached the bench outside the washhouse, Tamar sat, the Sten angled across his chest, his legs stretched out in front of him. Dart remained standing, his hands in his coat pockets, gazing at the moon. It was high and almost full now, with the familiar startled expression on its face. Below it, against the level black horizon, distant orange and white lights flickered and died, again and again. Faint booms reached them, soft as footfalls on a bedroom floor.
    “Good night for a drop,” Dart said. “Do you think there was that much antiaircraft fire when we came in?”
    “I don’t know. Must have been, I suppose.”
    Tamar’s voice was flat. Obviously this was not what he wanted to talk about. So Dart tried again.
    “I’m beginning to work out what Oma is saying. Sorry, that’s a stupid way of putting it. You know what I mean. I suppose that after a while it becomes natural. It must have been hard for Marijke, though, don’t you think? No parents. Growing up with a grandmother who couldn’t speak.”
    “She didn’t.” Tamar crossed his legs and clasped his hands over his knee. He didn’t look up. “Julia wasn’t born dumb,” he said. “She stopped speaking just over two years ago.”
    “Really? What was it, cancer or something?”
    “No. Shock, trauma, whatever the proper word is. Nothing physical, anyway.” He lifted his face now, looking past Dart, half his face in moon shadow. “This is something you should know, I suppose. The Maartens have relatives, sort of cousins, who’ve got a farm near Loenen. The two families always helped each other out at busy times of the year. So in late September ’42, Johannes, Marijke’s grandfather, took his wagon and one of the horses over there to help bring in the sugar beet crop. The field they were working in was a fair way from the farm, and by the time they’d picked up the last load, it was almost dark. Johannes and a boy who was on the wagon with him were about halfway back to the farm when they ran into a German ambush.”
    Dart waited, silent, while Tamar lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands.
    “The Germans had intercepted a signal from London about an arms drop. They were reading all our radio traffic back then. Christ, they were sending most of it. But you know all about that. Anyway, they’d set up this ambush for the reception committee. They were expecting our men to move the guns on a couple of farm carts, probably under a load of sugar beet or whatever. Which is exactly what happened, as a matter of fact. But unfortunately for Johannes, the Germans had read their maps wrong. They should have been on a road three kilometres to the east. When Johannes came along, they didn’t bother asking questions. He took a bullet through the throat and another in the right lung. When the horse panicked, the boy was thrown onto the ground. He broke an arm and a leg. He was still screaming when a German shot him in the head.”
    “Shit,” Dart said. He reached over and took the cigarette from Tamar’s fingers, dragged on it, and handed it back.
    “Johannes’s cousin, and his daughter and another boy, were on their own wagon a way back down the road. They took off into the fields when they heard the shooting and screaming. The Germans didn’t find them; I don’t suppose they were that keen on looking too hard. They still thought they were dealing with armed members of the resistance, I imagine. The Germans didn’t find any guns, of course, so they cleared off, leaving the bodies where they’d fallen.
    “The three people hiding in the fields stayed there a long time. They suspected a trap, which was fair enough. When they eventually crept up, they found that Johannes was still breathing. They carried him to the farm, and the daughter cycled over here to fetch Julia and Marijke. It was the