The Reed Warbler Read online

  Victoria University of Wellington Press

  PO Box 600, Wellington

  New Zealand

  vup.wgtn.ac.nz

  Copyright © Ian Wedde 2020

  First published 2020

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  A catalogue record is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  ISBN 9781776563005 (print)

  ISBN 9781776563494 (EPUB)

  ISBN 9781776563500 (Kindle)

  Published with the assistance of a grant from

  Ebook conversion 2020 by meBooks

  To my children Carlos, Conrad, Mischa,

  Penn and Jack, and grandchildren Sebo, Stella,

  Bella, Cara, Lenny and Banjo;

  Gute Reisen!

  Contents

  ___________

  Part 1

  ‘a mind of her own’

  Part 2

  ‘what choice do we have?’

  Part 3

  ‘the fresh airs of time to come’

  Afterword

  Part 1

  ‘a mind of her own’

  Beth and Frank

  On the far distant horizon, down the long parched view shaft of the Kaitīeke valley and across the grey-blue ranges, shimmering and ghostly with heat and distance, almost indistinct, was the tiny, remote cone shape of Mount Taranaki.

  ‘Can’t you see it?’ asked Beth.

  Frank was squinting. ‘Nah, you’re imagining it.’ He’d made an ironic point of pushing his glasses up on his forehead. ‘Like much else just lately.’

  ‘Great-grandad Wolf reckoned he could still see it without his glasses when he was eighty.’

  ‘Your great-grandfather was full of shit.’

  ‘Yeah, but it was Wolf shit.’

  At the reunion, the sensational exploits of Great-grandfather Wolf had been much repeated.

  A mob of panting sheep was sweltering in the yard by the shearing shed up the hill from the graveyard.

  ‘Hope they’ve got some water,’ said Beth.

  ‘Hope there’s still a pub down there.’ Frank took Beth’s elbow to help her over the roadside drop. ‘Why would anyone still bother running sheep here, look at it, talk about shit country.’

  ‘Old man Wolf flagged it, so not all that full of shit, maybe?’ Beth lifted the latch to the cemetery gate, which swung open on one rusty hinge. Someone had driven a mower among the graves when the grass was long, and swathes of yellowing stalks and dry seed-heads lay across some of the concrete slabs. A slapdash spraying of weedkiller around the edges of the graves had given them all a dead-grass border.

  They recognised Josephina Wenczel’s grave by the wrought-iron railing around it. As well as everything else he was famous for being good at, including his decision not to run sheep on the shit hills he’d cleared of forest, her son Wolf had been a competent blacksmith. His decorative wrought iron featured a pyramidal tip on top of each twisted stanchion, with bent eyelet wings below, and the top horizontal was a chain braided in three strands like the trim on some kind of uniform cuff. It looked carefully planned, even coded, the work of a thoughtful, methodical mind. But the grave was in a terrible state of disrepair – the concrete slab was cracked in two places and covered in a thick reddish moss through which the river-worn gravel in the concrete showed here and there, and the plain granite headstone had fallen over so that its inscription faced upwards and had become waterstained and lichened. Weeds were growing in the cracks of the slab, including a couple of stalky ragworts like those on the nearby hillsides. Frank yanked them out.

  ‘Never once came up here when we were kids, disgraceful, or did you?’

  ‘Never,’ said Beth, though she thought she might have. If so it was the bleating sheep she remembered, not the grave.

  He gave her a sceptical look and used the ragwort stalks to scrub at lichens on the headstone. ‘Josephina Christian Wenczel 1858 to 1938. Hello old girl.’ Then his scrubbing uncovered some German words. ‘Okay, help me out here, genius.’

  ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen, Wo meine Wiege ging,’ read Beth. ‘How cosy was the little spot where my cradle went, or rocked, or something like that.’ Her eyes flooded suddenly with tears. ‘Christ, Mum used to sing that. She learned it from her grandad Wolf, and he learned it from . . .’ She got a tissue and gave her nose a good honk. Wolf, of course, had learned it from the woman whose decrepit grave they were looking at. ‘Mum and her grandad used to sing it. Nice baritone, old man Wolf, and Mum played the piano accompaniment. Brahms, apparently.’

  But there was a second inscription below it that didn’t ring a bell: Zum Gedächtnis. There were two initials on the line below: WB. Zum Gedächtnis in italics, like a quote, but WB not italics. It was a careful detail, like the wrought iron.

  ‘The first bit’s from that German song, was it called “Zum Gedächtnis”? Can’t remember,’ said Beth to her cousin’s back – he was staring moodily down the valley in the direction they planned to go next, to where her great-grandfather Wolf had established his orchards and beehives, where he’d left the bush to regenerate, where Beth’s and Frank’s families had sometimes gone for summer holidays when they were kids, where Josephina Wenczel had ended her days. ‘And I don’t get the initials.’

  Frank was pretending to be bored by her commentary – he tossed his ragwort brush over his shoulder. ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ he said.

  Then he was walking to the car. A couple of magpies were making a racket in the scruffy macrocarpa at the edge of the graveyard – one of them dive-bombed Frank at the cemetery gate and his yell caused a jostle among the sheep in the yard.

  As he opened the driver’s door, Frank looked back at the graveyard. ‘When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm, Elizabeth’s lips were red, and quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle the magpies said. Someone should fix the poor woman’s grave up,’ he said. ‘Imagine coming all this way and ending up here. What a tragedy.’

  ‘Zum Gedächtnis means something like “in memoriam”. Could be the title of the song? But then “WB” should be “JB”, Johannes Brahms?’ Beth was fishing but Frank didn’t respond. He was driving carefully down the steep, winding incline. The verges and scruffy overhanging scrub on the passenger side were grey with dust, and the eroded, clay-scarred pasture fell away on Frank’s side. ‘Can you even imagine what this was like when Great-grandad Wolf first came in? And Great-granny Ettie?’

  ‘Different,’ said Frank. ‘And no, I can’t imagine it, Beth.’ He said ‘imagine’ with the hint of scorn she remembered from way back, when they were kids, when his scorn was part of the game they played, of him being the big cousin who knew stuff. But was he playing, now? He couldn’t really look at her because he was concentrating on the twisty road, but she caught his quick sideways glance. ‘But what if “WB” is short for Wolf Bloch Wenczel?’

  ‘Great-grandad Wolf?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Beth. You’re the one who’s been reconstructing. Use your imagination.’

  Everybody at the reunion knew, or knew now, that Josephina arrived in Wellington a widow, with a five-year-old daughter, Catharina Hansen, who would be Frank’s grandmother, and a new baby boy who would be Beth’s Great-grandad Wolf.

  ‘Everybody knew that Wenczel was the married name she took in Wellington, and that the boy she christened Wolf Bloch Wenczel was born on the way over.’ Beth knew that phrases like ‘everybody knew’ would provoke her cousin, but what other way was there to describe the speculative chatter of the reunion?

  ‘So poor old He
inrich Wenczel wasn’t the wolf child’s father. Next?’ Frank’s hands on the steering wheel were speckled and dark from years of Queensland sun. She and Frank had written letters to each other for a few years after he left, and he’d always included a bad Aussie joke. She remembered the one about why so many Australian men suffer premature ejaculation (because they have to rush back to the pub to tell their mates what happened). She hadn’t understood it at the time, but her mother had laughed a lot, without explaining the joke except by saying it was ‘inappropriate’. Beth would have been about fifteen, her big bad cousin about twenty-five. She liked ‘inappropriate’ because her cousin was including her in something secret, and she liked it even more once she found out what the joke was about.

  ‘Are you suggesting that a bloke called Wolf Bloch was Great-grandad Wolf Wenczel’s father?’

  ‘My grandmother Catharina née Hansen never explained why she had her mother’s maiden name. And why the fuck would you call one of your kids Wolf Bloch dot dot dot name of stepfather? You should have heard them going on at the reunion. Talk about string theory. Woman of mystery, your great-great-grandmother Josephina Hansen Bloch Wenczel Whatever.’ Frank’s hand reached across and gave hers a squeeze. ‘Didn’t your mum ever tell you anything?’

  ‘She told me what a premature ejaculation was. Eventually.’

  Frank gave a bark of appreciation. Perhaps he remembered the joke.

  If ‘WB’ was Josephina Wenczel Whatever’s way of commemorating Great-grandad Wolf’s real father, why had Beth’s mum never told that story? After all, she was named after one of Josephina’s sisters called Elke back in Germany – Great-great-grandmother Josephina had ‘requested’ it. And Frank’s mother was named after another of Josephina’s sisters, Greta. Clearly, a ‘request’ by Josephina was not to be ignored, and so Elke and Greta it was for those granddaughters. Beth has seen only one photograph of her great-great-grandmother: straight back, nice trim on her blouse collar, direct gaze staring down speculation about the fathers of her children before she became Mrs Wenczel.

  Frank was driving carefully down the winding hill road but Beth felt a bit sick from the winding around of names. She opened the window to let some air in despite the dust.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Frank.

  ‘Does it ever occur to you,’ asked Beth, ignoring his pretend rudeness, ‘that some of this same dust may have been blowing around when Josephina was here, when her son Wolf was cutting the road?’

  ‘Are you telling me he did that as well as everything else?’ Frank was kidding. Of course he knew about Wolf’s famous one-man-band reputation, his homemade Peloton-wheel generator in the feeder creek, the wooden body he made for a Model-T truck chassis, his concrete-slab honey house.

  ‘He built the bridge, Mum told me.’

  ‘I know almost nothing about them,’ said Frank. ‘And I hardly knew a soul at the reunion. Bit late now.’

  ‘And here’s me pushing sixty,’ said Beth, ‘and what do I know? Just the oft-repeated, memorable DIY bits. It’s sad. Mum was always vague about the old stuff. But then she was pretty vague about most stuff. I didn’t know about the ancestral sewing-sampler thingie that was there at the reunion – it was pretty amazing I thought. That woman who brought it said she’d heard Mum say that Josephina was reciting poetry in German or Danish or trying to sing on her deathbed – I’d never heard that story before, maybe that’s why that little song verse is there on her headstone – but Mum was only about eight or something when the old girl died.’

  Frank’s silence suggested he didn’t want to talk about the sampler, nor about the headstone verse, nor the improbable memory of Josephina singing in either Danish or German or even both on her deathbed.

  They crossed a one-lane bridge at the bottom of a long incline.

  ‘That one,’ said Beth. ‘He built it, he surveyed the incline so the road would get to the river at the right height, and he built the damn thing. Imagine that. And then his mother Josephina came across it in a buggy or something to the house he’d built for her, from the timber he’d cut and milled. She’d have been just a bit younger than me, probably. Imagine that.’

  ‘Please stop saying imagine that,’ said her best cousin Frank. ‘Especially since you’ve just told me you know sweet fuck all.’ When they were kids down the Kaitīeke for the summer camping holidays he used to like chucking her into the river near the old Wolf homestead, and she loved him doing it, which is mostly why he did. ‘Please, I beseech you, Beth. It’s beyond me. All the imagining.’

  But then neither of them had come back down the valley, all those years, until now.

  Josephina

  A little weak evening sunshine splashed across the flagstones. Josephina stopped mopping and listened. Yes – this time it was true. The birds had gone. She stepped outside and looked towards the town. The warblers weren’t swirling around in crowds over the fjord. Their fussy little songs weren’t coming from the reeds at the bottom of the slope by the river mouth. All she could hear was the whispering sound of wind in the dry stalks. The whispering sound had a swirling rhythm because of gusts blowing down the fjord towards the sea. The reed stalks had a rhythm, too, a ripple that went along the shore and repeated itself, over and over. In the pale blue sky above the fjord, also, it was as though the streaky clouds moving away in the direction of the sea at Laboe were making a whispering sound, like the wind. They made the blue-green Nikolaikirche steeple over the other side of the fjord seem to be toppling across the sky. A score of small coasters were anchored along the channel, along with two broad larger vessels waiting for lighters. They were all pointing up into the wind, and the small ones were nodding a little together as the waves pushed their bows up and down. What would it feel like, one day, to turn with the wind and the tide and go easily down the fjord, almost silently, once the sails were set and had stopped snapping at the clouds beyond Laboe?

  She wiped away the loose strand of hair that had blown across her cheek, and with it the tears. The little Rohrsänger had gone, the twittery songs of their hundreds had stopped; they weren’t there in the sky swooping about in formations, they weren’t in the reeds by the marsh, their songs had gone away with them for the winter.

  ‘They practise,’ her mother had told her. ‘They come and go for a while. Then, one day, they don’t return and so you know that winter’s coming certainly.’

  ‘Where do they go?’

  ‘Somewhere nice and warm, so the sailors say.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Do oranges come from there?’

  ‘So they say.’

  That was when she was a child.

  Now Mutti was standing in the doorway, narrowing her eyes against the late sunlight so that her expression said, But now you’re not a child anymore. ‘So, have you finished?’ Mutti said. She had on the faded blue cotton cap she liked to wear when washing new linens; her hair was all drawn back, and her face looked pale and severe.

  Josephina could tell that her mother had seen she’d been crying. She still had the salty taste of the tears in the corners of her mouth and perhaps their snail-trails were still on her cheeks. But why should she hide them? When they were true?

  ‘Yes, finished,’ she said, and turned back to the view across the fjord. Finished what, exactly? Mutti’s silence was stiff, like the freshly washed linens that would freeze if you left them out too late in the coming months.

  Below the meadow the evening train tooted three times as it slowly approached the mill station. Its smoke was blowing away in a long streamer in the same direction as the clouds. The stationmaster would already be getting important and putting his official cap on. This he did three times a day. He had his whistle, of course, and his flag.

  *

  Yesterday as usual there was time for her to run down the hill to catch the morning train before it went back to the town. She’d passed her sister milking the cow, her face red with displeasure.

 
‘Spoiled brat!’ shouted Elke. Really, she didn’t mean it, only the other cow was waiting with its bulging udder. It lifted its tail and, with a flopping sound, released a pile of shit. Josephina’s mother had allowed her to wash with the lavender soap, and she was wearing the blouse with Bohemian buttonhole stitching at the neck. The pattern was of a vine with leaves and flowers, and it went all the way around. Josephina didn’t mind that it was a little scratchy because it reminded her to hold her neck up straight, and so her hair too, under her ‘town bonnet’. As well as that, it was her own work. She held her bonnet straight with one hand and in the other gripped the bag with her finished work for Junkfrau. The nightgown had a high neck with the same Bohemian pattern as her own blouse, long sleeves with cuffs embroidered in pink silk thread, and a button-up front scalloped like a waterfall. The cloth was fine white cotton but the buttons were stitched over with the same pink silk thread as the cuffs. When she’d wondered how anyone could sleep in it, Elke made the scornful clucking sound that meant, What do you know? But what Josephina meant was, How could anyone sleep in something that fine?

  The stationmaster had his cap on, and his blue uniform jacket as well, and was standing in his best cavalry manner, his legs bowed as if he had just dismounted from a horse; he had his furled flag resting on his right shoulder like a sabre.

  ‘Good morning, Lieutenant,’ said Josephina, knowing he liked to be called that.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Josephina,’ said the stationmaster, clicking his heels. ‘And what is the purpose of Fräulein’s town visit today?’ His smile was false as usual because, she supposed, he was jealous of her visiting the wives of ‘die adelige Preussen Offizieren’ over there by Kieler Schloss, as he liked to say in his best ‘proper’ German. Also, she was standing too far away for him to bow and kiss her hand, as he rather liked to, pretending she was still a child.

  ‘It’s something for Junkfrau von Zarovich.’ Josephina was looking past the stationmaster’s red ear where it stuck out under his cap. Over by the station gate the mill owner’s portly wife was advancing along the platform. She, too, had her ‘town hat’ on, but hers was black with a fancy lace trim around the front, some ostrich spads angled backwards and a great pile of black chiffon cascading past her shoulders from the crown. Behind her came one of the mill-hands pushing her trunk on a squeaky barrow. Frau Tiesel was out of breath and Josephina knew better than to delay her meeting with the stationmaster. Also, she would look at Josephina’s embroidered collar with her sour expression that meant, And who do you think you are? ‘Just into town,’ said Josephina, so the stationmaster would know what ticket to put on her father’s account, as her mother had instructed her. Also, here she was, going to town by herself, for the first time – the stationmaster had surely noticed that. She was going to stay the night with her aunt and come back with her papa in the sprung cart in the morning. She liked staying with Tante Elizabeth because they would all sing together after supper and then she would sleep with her little cousin Mathilde who said she loved her ‘more than stars’ but that she also loved the stories about Puck Puck the special chicken, could Josie please tell her one?