The Reed Warbler Read online

  This was where many of the city’s workers lived – Herr Andersen told Josephina this through Catharina, who of course didn’t know what he was talking about and was falling asleep against Josephina’s chest – but soon they would come to a better part of the city and then they could go on a little canal boat to the house, to his and Frau Andersen’s house, they would go on the canal so he could show her the waterway, it was in a good part of the city, often there were ducks.

  ‘I know you’ll like it,’ said Herr Andersen to the sleeping Catharina, and he looked at Josephina with a sideways twitch of his head, and the smile inside his beard seemed to get stuck there. Then he closed the smile and turned away while Josephina was thanking him again for meeting them and saying that yes, she was sure she and Catharina would like Herr Andersen’s house, she looked forward to seeing it and also to meeting Frau Andersen.

  She was about to say, ‘And the children,’ but stopped herself, because Danne and Greta had never mentioned any children at Herr Andersen’s house.

  The buildings became grander with large shop windows, and the street wider and well paved; there was no longer such a smell of shit and rubbish. Josephina held Catharina close to stop her from slipping from her lap, and looked around from the tram window. There were boys and men sitting on the seats on the tram’s roof, they were shouting and singing, perhaps they were drunk? They all climbed down at a quay with a landing for small river craft, where gypsies were playing a violin and a drum – they had a monkey on a rope, it was dancing, and the drunk boys pretended to dance for a while and then went off singing along the quay. Herr Andersen hadn’t spoken again since Catharina had fallen asleep, and now he simply lifted up his arms for Josephina to pass her out of the tram. Then he was holding her quite easily as though he was used to doing it. There was a boy waiting for the tram and he held a bucket of water for each of the horses to drink from. Herr Andersen made a sad face as if to say what a shame Catharina couldn’t see the horsies getting their drink, but he still didn’t speak, not until he shouted down to a boatman that they needed to go around to Deichstrasse. Then she climbed down into the boat, and Herr Andersen passed sleeping Catharina to her, and her bag to the boatman, and off they went, again without speaking.

  But then, ‘He’s like a son to me,’ said Herr Andersen abruptly as the boatman rowed through a long dark bridge underpass – his voice echoed under the stone vault, it was mixed up with the splash of the oars, it was as though he was talking through water, and his face was submerged in rippling shadow. Then they nudged out into the grey, cloudy light. ‘My nephew,’ he said. ‘My nephew Danne. A good boy.’ Clear of the dim underpass, his gaze was fixed so intently on her that at first she was unable to respond that yes, Danne was a kind man, he’d been kind to her and to Catharina, she was grateful that he’d agreed to be Catharina’s godfather, and her sister Greta of course Catharina’s godmother, they were good people, she was grateful.

  Still he kept his eyes fixed on her – he wasn’t smiling or frowning, his face was quite impassive, he didn’t even seem to be expecting a response. And then the tic jerked his shoulder and head and it was almost as though he woke up. Yes, he agreed, they were good people, he was so happy that their little family was growing, the times were not easy but Danne was prospering, he was a good provider, a hard worker, he had a wise head on his shoulders.

  And then he said, ‘And your papa and mutti? How are they? They still have the smallholding? Meister Hansen is still making those fine things, the furniture and so forth?’ His fixed look. ‘Of course they will miss their beautiful new granddaughter.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they will,’ said Josephina, smiling very calmly, hearing another meaning in her words. Then, as if she was sitting beside a puppet of herself, she made the puppet tell the story she’d rehearsed for this moment. ‘Mutti is not well and can’t do much anymore, and so Papa has to look after her and do some of the work she used to do, the gardens and so forth, and even the linens, but they have my sister Elke to help them, and also Tante Elizabeth over in Gaarden, not so far away, so they will manage.’

  Still he kept his direct gaze on her, and still she returned it. Perhaps this was impolite of her.

  Then, finally, he smiled again – the smile-in-his-beard that was very like Danne’s, a nice one, though now she didn’t quite believe it. ‘You are a very brave young woman then – Josephina Hansen, isn’t it? – to go out on your own, to not overburden your family in their hard times, to trust the talents that God has given you.’

  Josephina was facing the stern of the boat where Herr Andersen was sitting. Behind her, the oars creaked rhythmically in their rowlocks, and past Herr Andersen’s smile she could see the oar-dip ripples receding on the surface of the dirty water – like days and months, perhaps, or like the events in her life that kept moving her on to where she was going. She kept on watching them, and him, waiting for Herr Andersen’s smile to close and for him to say something more, but the smile stayed there and he said nothing until they reached the landing below his house.

  ‘Here we are, at last,’ he said. And then, ‘Danne was right, you are a determined young woman, Fräulein Hansen.’

  He used ‘Fräulein’ not ‘Frau’ and emphasised ‘Hansen’, and she easily guessed what he was doing, and that it might not be simple, after all, living in the protection of Herr Aksel Andersen, who’d made it clear that, although he thought Catharina a beautiful child, and Josephina lucky to have her, and determined as well as lucky, he was, in respect of Fräulein Hansen, only doing a favour for the nephew he thought of as his son. And so it was once again the consequence of her past that arrived first at the threshold of the future that kept moving her on, and when would she overtake that past, she and Catharina, and go beyond it?

  The rain was falling steadily and almost straight down through a thick sea fog when the packet reached the entrance to Kieler Förde. It was now dark, and because there was so little wind and visibility was bad the boat dropped anchor below the lighthouse across the water from Laboe. So, they would go on when the tide turned and when there was a breeze, perhaps in the morning – the young sailor who shouted this down into the cabin was soaking wet, he had the meagre beginnings of a beard and water was dripping from it. They’d been sailing for twelve hours and it seemed as though the boat had gone backwards from morning into night.

  It would surely be nicer up on the deck where the air was fresh, but Josephina didn’t want Catharina to get wet, so she played piggy-toes with her and gave her the last of Greta’s stewed fruit and the last drink of milk with a little honey in it. The elderly woman called Olga who was going to her grandson’s wedding in Kiel, and who had made herself very comfortable in a large woollen shawl, offered Catharina a piece of her cake, but Catharina turned her face against Josephina’s chest. Earlier the woman had asked Josephina if she was going to Kiel because she had family there, and Josephina had said that she was continuing on the train from Kiel to Hamburg to introduce Catharina to her uncle, which was partly true and partly the story she needed to be confident of in order to tell it. She was glad the woman was there, because she rebuked one of the men in the cabin for lighting his cigar – the place was too close, he should take his smoke outside, didn’t he think, like a gentleman?

  When the woman first introduced herself in Danish, and said that Josephina should call her Olga, that was enough for a short trip, and when Josephina replied that her name was Josephina Hansen, the woman knew at once from her accent that she was Holsteine, and so they spoke in German. Of course, said the woman, Josephina’s name, Hansen, could also be Danish, it was common enough in the north. It was possible that at some time her family had come down from Denmark to Hamburg? Yes, it was of course possible, Josephina agreed, feeling the names Hansen, Andersen and Mayer shift about anxiously in her mind as if trying to evade the pleasant conversation she was having.

  And what does that tell us about the wars, the woman wanted to know. ‘When a lot of the time, for all our d
ifferences, we can hardly tell each other apart? And now, look, here you are living in Sønderborg with your family? You see what I mean?’

  Josephina knew that a gentle investigation was under way. No, she corrected the woman, she was only visiting a sister in Sønderborg, but sadly she agreed about the wars – her opa and two uncles were buried at Dybbøl.

  The woman tut-tutted and took Josephina’s hand. ‘Men go to war, we bear children,’ she said. ‘That is their power, this is ours.’

  Two men in respectable merchants’ coats on the other side of the cramped cabin then began a mocking conversation in Danish about the nonsense the woman had spoken and what they thought of Germans. That was when Olga asked one of them to take his nasty cigar outside at the same moment the memory of von Zarovich’s ‘Ah!’ and the rope of yellow snot on his moustache returned suddenly to Josephina’s thoughts – something she didn’t ever want to see again and had successfully banished from her recollections of that day on Faulstrasse, but there it was, the sound of his loud ‘Ah!’ and the shameful and disgusting sight of the Hauptmann’s snot on his fine adelige Preussen Offizier moustache with its ends turned up and still wet with his coffee, but also there again was his scorn and the way he threw some coins in a scatter across the breakfast tray. If she could have shown the two smartly dressed Danish merchants this picture she would have done so, but instead she calmly thanked the woman for banishing the man who wanted to smoke, because it would have made Catharina cough.

  Her memory of Hauptmann von Zarovich and even of his name had made her shiver, the shivering was perhaps connected to her going backwards from morning to night and backwards in returning however briefly to the place she had left behind her. But then she felt completely exhausted and, after helping an unwilling Catharina to use the stinky latrine, went suddenly to sleep curled with the child on a banquette, and when she woke to the sound of the packet’s anchor being rattled up at dawn she found the woman’s wide shawl across her and Catharina. It had a Danish pattern in its weave, a widely spaced knit of good heavy grey-blue wool, with pyramid-peaks around the border and a broad-leaf motif in the body.

  She went up on deck and found the elderly Danish woman called simply Olga standing at the rail somewhat away from the other five or six passengers, including the two scornful Danish merchants who were smoking cigars and talking as if sharing secrets. The little packet was once again following the filling-up of its sails with a good breeze into the long defile of Kieler Förde. Josephina tried to give Olga back the fine warm shawl, but the kind woman told her to keep it, she suggested that Josephina and Catharina had a long way to travel yet – yes, they had that look about them, they would be needing a good warm shawl more than her, much more than her, after all she was going to a wedding, the wedding of one of her favourite grandchildren, such a good young man, she was the lucky one, she wished Josephina well and her child also, she hoped that the child’s father was a kind man and not one who would hastily go off to war, but meanwhile would they like to share what was left of her cake, it was a special one for travelling, it had six eggs in it, could you believe that?

  Then, two or three hours later, as the early mist lifted and bright sunlight struck through the clouds that were already blowing away from the shoreline that was steaming on the Schwentine side of the fjord, where Elke might even then be taking her two buckets down through the wet grass to the impatient cows – if she, Josephina, could only see her, somewhat grumpy probably, but good with the cows who also knew her and the familiar tug of her hands – the packet easily, with its sails once again full of her future, passed the place where Josephina had been born and that she was now about to leave for ever, perhaps; and as she wept the elderly Danish woman whose name was Olga pulled the shawl with its peaked, pyramidal border more closely around her and Catharina, and said, in her not-quite-right Holsteine German, that Josephina should take good care of this little girl, because she would be the future, not those men who thought only of whom they should overcome.

  And there waiting for them at the familiar wharf, where the young sailor with a piece bitten from his ear had shown her his wonderful whorled shell, were Tante Elizabeth and Mathilde, who was now a big girl – they had come back when the packet didn’t make harbour the night before. Elke would come to the house later, when she’d done her work, Mathilde told them with a serious expression because this was important information. Catharina was looking at her with shy hope and was happy when Mathilde took her hand and walked with her to the little buggy where Herr Mayer’s stable-boy was waiting. And no, Tante Elizabeth informed Josephina without being asked, her papa and mutti would not come to see her, they ‘didn’t wish to know’, and Herr Mayer was, as it so happened, ‘away on business’. But Elke would come later, she repeated.

  So Josephina was both there and not there, she was both ‘back’ and in the future that was pausing while Elke’s kisses drove her down into a chair; she was watching Mathilde help Catharina to eat her special supper as if this little cousin ‘who loved her more than stars’ wasn’t really the same one who’d jabbed her with a sharp elbow when she wouldn’t sing ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen’ or tell her a Puck Puck the brave chicken story – only this time, in this ‘now’ that wasn’t securely fixed, she was indeed happily singing the song about a cosy spot written by the poet in the flapping coat from over in Schwanenweg, a place that already sounded foreign, and Mathilde was clapping like a little grown-up, not like the querulous child Josephina had cuddled in bed on that night three years ago while trying not to shiver and wake her up, the shivering that wasn’t on account of the cold, because Mathilde’s warm little body had been there close to her, as well as her warm breath that smelled sweet from her bedtime cup of elderflower dreaming-milk.

  And then, before she was really awake in the moment when time moved forward again, they were rattling along through early-morning noises of people shouting, squashed together in the buggy with Catharina on Tante Elizabeth’s knee and Mathilde on Josephina’s. And soon Tante Elizabeth was weeping and Mathilde also because her mother was. The train to Hamburg tooted three times just like the smaller one that came to the mill on the Schwentine and went back to the station at Kiel that you walked from along the harbourside to Nikolaikirche and the streets around Kieler Schloss, such as Faulstrasse, only this time it was a different train. It was beginning to speed away from those places and the times they were stuck in. Josephina and Catharina couldn’t see Tante Elizabeth and Mathilde anymore, so Josephina lifted her daughter down from the window. She would soon be almost a big girl like Mathilde, but in that moment she was still too young to understand that a moment had passed, and so she began to wail, because she liked waving goodbye and didn’t want to stop.

  Beth and Frank

  Yes, Frank could see the mountain ‘perfectly well, thank you Beth, yes, amazing!’ – looking east past the three-quarters-empty bottle of ‘pretty average Aussie red’, rather than west down what he called ‘the bleating wilderness of the Kaitīeke place-that-time-forgot, god, Beth, doesn’t it depress you just a little, could hardly miss the famous cone shape of Ngāuruhoe, and the full moon, nothing like a full moon viewed through claret, and those wind-bashed trees leaning away from the prevailing?’

  ‘Feeling a bit poetic this evening?’ suggested Beth. She put her iPad down on the table next to his plate.

  He’d gone ahead without her as instructed and the remains of his dinner were pushed aside on the trestle table. The restaurant patio was dimly lit, but she could see that he’d barely picked at his lamb shanks. He filled the glass she’d brought with her from the bar, and his own. The bottle was now empty.

  ‘Poetic, no,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy, who said that? Tom Waits?’ He stood up and walked steadily back in to the restaurant.

  Was he going to tell her what was bothering him? Or rather, when was he going to do that? Because even though they hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, s
he still knew him well enough to read those mood dips, from sardonic fun to melancholy, and his silences – he’d always done them, those silences, even as the sometimes glum hero of her childhood, sitting on the riverbank in a ‘don’t talk to me’ cloud – but now they seemed to conceal stuff that was getting closer and closer to the surface where words would break through. But until they did she’d just have to wait – so long as he got around to telling her what was up with him before they finished their trip and he went back to whatever his life was about these days over there in Queensland, something obscure to do with soil.

  He came back with a fresh bottle of wine and a plate of bread and dips for her: ‘Remember when a dip was what grown-ups did in the river?’

  ‘Your mum always said, I’m just going for a little dip, nur ein kleines Bad, and then she’d immerse and sit on the bottom, waving her hands about to frighten imaginary fish away. Nur ein kleines Bad was what your Grandma Cath used to say, evidently.’

  Frank lifted his glass to his lips and waited, looking at her. Then he took a good swallow. The ‘dragon tongue’ rose and fell back. ‘Your point?’ he said. He tapped her iPad. ‘Been dipping again?’ He leaned close and pushed his glasses down to the end of his nose.

  Beth opened the screen – on it, backlit as if by moonlight, like the dark glyph of Ngāuruhoe to the east, as if portents were being highlighted everywhere she looked, was a blocky column of blackletter text.

  ‘You can read that stuff?’ Frank’s breath was a bit winey.

  ‘It’s blackletter Gothic. The Germans kept using it after everyone else had stopped. Typical. But it was standard in the nineteenth century. This text was printed in Hamburg in about 1876.’ Then Beth stopped, not because she anticipated her cousin mocking her little lecture, but because she had a lump in her throat and because the typography on the screen had bled out into the nightscape, into what Frank had called the ‘wind-bashed trees’, the askew signage for the restaurant lit from time to time by speeding cars on the highway, the big moon, hauntings.