The Reed Warbler Read online

  Now I must also tell you that surely providence has brought me to the Bloch House, since I saw Herr Bloch and Fräulein Bloch at the sewing room on the day Danne’s good uncle Herr Aksel Andersen took Catharina and me there for the first time. Now I know that they were looking at the sewing room to see how Herr Paul had organised it. Herr Bloch is the editor of a newspaper called Bürger Zeitung, where the conditions of places such as sewing rooms are reported, that is what they were doing. The Bloch House is by the lake in the middle of Hamburg, there are some large houses there but the Bloch one is quite small, however it has a nice little garden where Catharina can play. Sometimes she plays with her friend Alexandra whose mother and father quite often come to visit Herr Bloch and join the gatherings that happen here, now let me write it without hesitation, in the house of Theodora and Wolf Bloch.

  It is a very busy life that I have here now, and different from life at Herr Andersen’s, there is only a laundry woman who comes every week, a man who brings the coal and a cook who comes when there are large dinners, so I am doing most of the work. But I am glad to be here and I know I will learn a lot from what happens in this house especially what visitors are talking about.

  Now I must stop because it is late and the nights are cold, the house has to be warm for Herr Bloch who has a weak chest. I need to feed the big stove and another one by the bedrooms.

  I kiss you all, yes I did cry a little but please believe me when I say that Catharina and I are happy in our new situation.

  Your sister and goddaughter Josephina and Catharina, this space is for Catharina’s kiss when she wakes up in the morning.

  Josephina

  Elke

  The clever cat that lived in the fodder stall next to the horse and killed mice and rats was sick it didn’t have kittens even once this year so she didn’t have to put all the kittens except a female in an oats sack and drown them in the stream below the cow meadow. Once she’d opened the sack and put it to dry on the gate the dead kittens would get caught in the reed stalks by the bank and in a day or two the eels would arrive and begin to eat them, it had to be done, in a few weeks the horse and the cow and her heifer would be coming inside for winter and there was the cat, it was the only one left this year, it was making a coughing sound and trying to retch up something, it was thin and there were those worm-seeds by its tail, really in winter they needed it and a couple more because mice and rats came in from outside, but it was useless now, its eyes were gummy and it didn’t even try to get away from her when she hit it with the back of the dung shovel. Then she took it outside by the tail and threw it as far as she could into the furze beyond the orchard and when she turned around Johannes was there, he was grinning at her, my God he said, let that be a warning to me!

  So then of course Elke who was quite glad that Johannes had seen her kill the cat because after all it showed that she could make a decision and do something about it, so then she demanded to know what her – he hoped! – future husband was thinking if he could even think which she doubted. He’d never seen the cats that came before this one, they just couldn’t resist those wild tomcats from the woods could they? And all her pretty kitty daughters had run away after those wild boys in the woods and who could blame them? – though they tried to sneak back when it got cold but then their mother would fight them, and he thought his life was too complicated did he, Johannes, the fool? Well, he had some learning to do and she was willing to teach him, was he ready, was he really?

  Then Johannes who was still grinning at her made his serious stop now face and she heard the cart with Lefty coming around the corner from the road and soon there it was with Papa. Of course its head was turned a bit to the left because of its missing eye and Papa dragging the reins across its neck as if Lefty needed to be told how to get to the grass in the meadow, but first the cart had to be unhitched and Johannes hurried to do that and tipped his cap at Papa who was giving Elke a look rather like Lefty’s with his face turned half away from her as he hurried inside to see Mutti, he’d been to the fat apothecary at Ellerbeck and always came back in a bad mood. She’d wait until he’d had his supper and a glass of brandy before telling him she’d had to kill the cat, they’d need to find a new one or maybe a couple before the mice and rats took over, she could walk over and have a talk to the mill people in the morning. They always had some, they were hard to catch but if she got one she’d have to keep it inside and feed it plenty of milk and fish for a week otherwise it would just run back to the mill and the other cats over there. But she wouldn’t add run back not like some people meaning Greta and Josephina, and wasn’t that why Papa said Mutti needed more of that laudanum from Ellerbeck? Even though they all knew that wasn’t the reason?

  But soon she’d have to start drying off the last cow in her stall and feeding her heifer that would be ready for the bull next spring, there had to be enough dry hay feed for them. She could measure how much was needed against the old marks on the wall of the feed bay, they had enough from cutting the orchard grass and half the fenced meadow, that was the other thing half the fence poles were falling down, and Johannes knew how to swing a scythe considering he was a cabinetmaker’s apprentice and was supposed to be doing apprentice work, he had that nice step-forward and turn of his shoulder, it could get Papa into trouble making him do that but there was only just enough grain in the byre silo or perhaps not enough and how could they afford to buy more? And Johannes would have to fix the leaky fodder-stall roof soon or the hay would get mouldy, he’d already split the shingles for it.

  But these were normal concerns and she was used to them, what she wasn’t used to was the dull soft thickness of the shovel hitting the sick cat’s body, it kept being there in her mind as she thought about the practical things, and the sound of it, not of the cat because it didn’t make any sound at all which was also horrible in a way but the dull thud of the shovel not like the sound of metal hitting something but a different kind of sound, no hard ring to it just that dead thud.

  Papa had gone inside to tend to Mutti and she should too but first she took hold of Johannes’s thick strong arm and pulled it in close against herself for a moment and breathed the smell of work on his shirt and then walked quickly away from his expression that didn’t know whether to be pleased or surprised, her husband-to-be, and he’d better have the balls on him to ask Papa soon, he’d better do that soon, remembering Papa’s Lefty horse sideways look, he might be half blind to what was going on but he could see what he could see! But where would they be the three of them without her Johannes now that Mutti couldn’t work at all and Papa had sold off all the good poplar coffin planks and was mostly doing piecework like fixing broken chairs brought home from the town, at least the silly crying boy had left and they had Johannes.

  What, so you’re back daughter you’ve come running back not like some people? was what Mutti’s expression said the first time after she came back from Sønderborg towards the end of last summer but she didn’t say it because Tante Elizabeth was with her. She’d driven Herr Mayer’s new gig and brought a gift of three freshly plucked and drawn young cockerels out to the Bauernhaus – the cook was cleaning out their little flock before winter said Tante Elizabeth rather carefully – so Mutti had firstly to ignore the new gig and secondly thank Tante Elizabeth for the chickens because to notice the gig would have meant admitting how well Herr Mayer was doing compared to the Hansens, and not to have thanked Tante Elizabeth for the leggy cockerels would have suggested she resented the hint that their own fowl run was no good even though it was in the country and four times or more bigger than the Andersens’ one over in Gaarden, and besides it would be Mutti who would make soup with the chickens, not ‘the cook’. So then her mother’s quick dry kiss and after it the quick rattle of a cough that she hid in her handkerchief. She didn’t ask about Greta and Danne and her grandchildren in front of Tante Elizabeth as they drank verbena tea by the sunny north-west wall of the house looking down Kieler Förde the way Elke had just come home. Mutti
might as well have been pretending her daughter had never left, she didn’t ask about Josephina and Catharina and of course she didn’t mention the Oma – she peeled an apple with the old bone-handled clasp knife she carried in her apron pocket and passed some slices around, she threw a peel over her shoulder for luck and laughed scornfully, the apples had been very good this year she said, looking past Elke who hadn’t been there to pick them, unfortunately there were a lot of windfalls but this was a good one for eating, would Tante Elizabeth like some? Elke could fill a basket for her? Papa wasn’t there, he’d gone with the boy to collect some furniture from the town, that’s what he was mostly doing. There were people who appreciated the quality of his workmanship in the town of course.

  Tante Elizabeth said yes she’d like to have some apples thank you, she might use them to make some sweet onion jam. She was trying not to show that she was noticing how Mutti was scratching herself and Mutti was trying not to show that she was doing it, and everything they were doing or saying including drinking their tea and looking down past the Schwentine but not at her, not at Elke who’d just come back the day before from seeing her sisters and their children and had slept that night with her cousin Mathilde, everything they were saying and doing including denying the scratching, and that she had just spent three months away in Sønderborg, everything they were doing and saying was hiding what was really happening and what really had to be spoken about. If she stayed there by the sunny wall a moment longer drinking verbena tea and talking about nothing she would begin to scream and tear the grass up by its roots!

  Yes her heart was breaking for her poor little Mutti who’d become so thin and whose cough threw her poor thin shoulders up around her ears, but she went to get a basket of apples for Tante Elizabeth who kissed her and thanked her and gave her a close look in the eyes before climbing up into the gig. And then Elke untethered the horse which was a fine young chestnut gelding with a white face and two nice big eyes, she gave it a pat on the nose and it shook its mane for her, and then Tante Elizabeth flicked it with the reins and it went off towards the road at an easy trot that was saying it was happy to be doing that, and there was Tante Elizabeth’s straight back that wasn’t saying anything.

  But Herr Mayer and I, we can’t have any more children, was what Tante Elizabeth had told her weeping the night before after Elke had walked from the port to the house in Gaarden and after Mathilde had gone unwillingly off to bed, doesn’t your mutti know what a blessing it is to have her daughters and her grandchildren, why is she making herself sick with those thoughts she has, my God, she thinks we Mayers are lucky, why can’t she see that she is blessed, she and my stupid brother both of them, how can we cleanse them of the bitter taste they walk around with in their mouths? Look at their expressions, they’ve forgotten how to rejoice and be happy, they and my husband as well for that matter, as if everything that has happened was that little Josephina’s fault, well bravo to her, she has her own mind, who knows where she will end up that one, not in this pigsty of gossip in any case, and bravo to her! said Tante Elizabeth again, bravo! with a smile that was catching the tears she had to lick away, bravo! I think she is lucky that one and I think she will be happy too.

  Well yes of course Elke hoped her little Schwesterchen would be happy, but she was lucky? After what happened to her? And was her kind Tante Elizabeth so unlucky that she measured her niece who’d been raped by the Junker to be luckier? And what about her, Elke, who had now to go back to the Bauernhaus die Suppe auslöffeln to swallow what her papa’s and mutti’s anger would put in front of her? There was a rattle of heavy rain against the windows and just at that moment Herr Mayer came in with a huff from the stable at the back of the house, he was beating his wet hat against his leg and exclaiming in a loud voice about the new gig what a fine thing it was and Elizabeth should take it for a drive in the morning so long as the rain had passed over and the new young gelding also was a good one with a calm nature! – and then he saw Elke. Well, well so you’re back he said with a change in his enthusiastic tone, and Tante Elizabeth was quickly removing the traces of her tears of happiness for Josephina or sadness for herself, who could tell? So how was everything in Sønderborg Herr Mayer wanted to know, the new baby? By which he meant Danne’s and Greta’s Otto, not Josephina’s Catharina, and perhaps Elke had met with Herr Steuerer Lande and Frau Lande in Flensburg or had she come directly to Kielerhafen? But of course he didn’t have to ask that, he knew that she’d come by way of Flensburg because Danne had made the arrangements two weeks before she left Sønderborg on that day she would never forget after the picnic at Dybbøl that she would also never forget when Josephina had said ‘I don’t know when I’ll see you again perhaps never because I have to keep going.’ Yes she said to Herr Mayer, the family in Sønderborg are well they send their love to you and Tante Elizabeth and hope to see you and Mathilde before too long, and Josephina and Catharina are well too and they send you their love also – not wishing to be disrespectful but feeling some heat rising up her neck. Herr Mayer nodded and went to pour himself a schnapps, he had his back to her so that was that, but what she knew at that moment was she had to go to Faulstrasse to the house of Hauptmann von Zarovich because nobody else would do it, not Papa or Herr Mayer and even dear kind Tante Elizabeth had made what happened there into a story about Josephina’s luck!

  But now there was Mutti at the table by the fireplace with her arm raised and the big cleaver in her hand, she still had the strength or the anger to bring the blade down with a good whack on the cockerels, she quartered all three and threw them in the stockpot, get me an onion and some thyme daughter she said, what was she standing around like that for, hadn’t she come home after all, wasn’t she here now, and some carrots? So then she went outside to get a sprig of thyme from the bush at the end of the vegetable garden, it wasn’t well kept and there were signs the hens had got into it, they’d scratched up around the carrots, that would be her morning’s work tomorrow no doubt after milking the cow, and there weren’t many bunches of onions hanging inside by the fodder stall, and so she ‘had come home after all’, she was ‘here now’ – but it was as though what she’d done by going to Sønderborg and taking the Oma to Josephina, and Mutti’s anger at that and at her returning in the Mayers’ new gig with her papa’s sister who thought herself so high and mighty, and these three miserable cockerels that were good for nothing but the stockpot, and so on and so on, daughter! daughter this and daughter that! It was as though Mutti’s anger as she stopped with the cockerels and sat in a chair breathing hard and waved her hand at ‘daughter’ to chop the onions, it was as though her anger had simply swept away the time between ‘daughter’ stealing away to Sønderborg with the Oma and her coming back, the whole three months! As though the sun had set and then risen and there was ‘daughter’ in the morning as usual to remind Mutti of all the reasons she didn’t want to be where she was a day longer, but what could she do? – only of course she didn’t say that, she didn’t really say anything, she talked about the cockerels and the soup!

  But nor had Mutti said anything nine months later when ‘daughter’ took Lefty and rode over to Tante Elizabeth’s to say goodbye again to Josephina and Catharina the night before they were to catch the train to Hamburg, after which as Josephina said back at Dybbøl in the lovely summer above the Alsund that Elke would never forget, ‘I don’t know when I’ll see you again perhaps never because I have to keep going’, and yes she did, she just went, that little one whose laughter always brought on an attack of the hiccups, but first she sang ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen’ for Mathilde without stopping, not once, and no tears.

  But after the return from Sønderborg and the preparation of the soup there came Papa with the boy, they unloaded some chairs from the sprung cart, they’d passed Tante Elizabeth in her new gig on the road but Papa didn’t say any more than that, ‘Passed my sister on the road,’ looking at Elke.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Tante Elizabeth brought me out.’ And then
, ‘They are fine, Papa,’ though he hadn’t asked and just nodded.

  But after the return from Faulstrasse, which was between coming back from Sønderborg after saying goodbye to Josephina and Catharina and from Tante Elizabeth’s after saying goodbye to them all over again, that time when she told Papa what she’d done because she had to and he had to know what he should have known by going to the Hauptmann’s house himself – how the maid Clara had burned the nightgown because it was spoiled with blood, his daughter Josephina’s blood! – she thought at first he was about to bellow like the cow when her calf is taken away and perhaps he was, but what he bellowed to her face was that now there was no chance of compensation because the evidence . . . ! But she didn’t want to ask, compensation for whom? Because it was enough that she’d seen him have the same thought himself and that he was even ashamed because he’d seen that she’d seen it, so she just added that the Junker was dead, his horse had fallen on him and crushed him to death with great pain so she’d been told, and his widow and baby had gone to Vienna – she didn’t say you could have found this out for yourself, Papa, but she saw that he’d had that thought as well. So that was when he abandoned his authority over her and left her to run the farm and so never complained or rebuked her when she took Lefty and rode over to Gaarden to say goodbye to Josephina and Catharina perhaps for the last time, and after that the crybaby boy ran away, he was useless anyway said Papa.