A ukulele started up, then another, a jews’ harp, a counter current, ironic, playful, like a voice from another world, another layer of existence rising up as if from the earth, and there was movement again, people dancing. Sam and Wana swayed softly against each other. Tessa took Milton by the hand and let the moon do the rest. When the drums started, Laedi and Tamba tapped out the rhythm on the veranda. Rika moved, weaving through the dancers, letting the music enter her, swaying with the trees that moved against the sky. When she came to Aaron, who was making his way towards her, she asked him who was right, Eremiah or Milton.

‘Both,’ he said. ‘Both hot-headed.’

‘Who would you trust to tell your history?’

Aaron laughed. ‘Neither.’

‘Then you should do it,’ she said. When he smiled, a slight shrug, she turned it into a question. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘it should be you?’

Still he didn’t answer, there being no answer, not easily, not that night. Instead he told her that when he was a child, he’d had an uncle who’d been a bird-catcher, a man who could think like a bird. There in the garden with the ukulele playing, he held out his hand, moving his fingers as if drawing a bird towards him, and Rika felt something move deep inside. He swayed, and she swayed, not dancing exactly, not together, but close, until she continued towards the veranda, where Martha was sitting with Laedi, watching.

‘Look at her,’ Martha said.

‘She’ll get over it,’ Laedi said. ‘She’ll have to.’

In the garden, Rika and Aaron might sway, but they never quite danced. When Martha asked her why not, she shrugged and said she wouldn’t dance, not with Leonard on the mountain. Martha danced with Jacob so she knew the stab of disloyalty, with Pete only a few houses away marking essays. She also knew that the person Jacob wanted to dance with was not her, but Rika, and that too she experienced as a stab. Still, it was the end of term, the winds would soon start, and everything would change. So Martha danced, and Rika stayed with Simbaikan by the fire, or talked to Milton and Jacob, or to Eremiah and Aaron, who’d arrive together discussing politics. She wasn’t interested in the politics of independence. She wasn’t uninterested, she just accepted that history would sweep them along and required no help from her. When the arguments started, her mind would drift into that expansive space that opened to the night sky, until Aaron came with her to the steps of the veranda. She dabbed herself with citronella and leaned into the smoke from his cigarette.

For a while they’d sit there quietly, until they turned to each other, their words floating up towards the house, or out into the night air, so that anyone who passed could catch a fragment of their stories weaving together, and Rika’s first hesitant attempts to learn his language. She learned to call her string bag jávo. She learned that the word for breath also meant emotion. To breathe was to feel. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, breathing the soft garden air and looking up at the stars. She learned the word for story, kiki, listening as Aaron spoke of the fjords, the home he hadn’t seen for two years.