The Reed Warbler Read online

  ‘Ah,’ said the stationmaster in a knowing tone, ‘one of those new young ones, that Zarovich.’ He knew all about the Prussian officers ‘over there’. He touched his fingers to the brim of his cap for Josephina, but he was already preparing himself for Frau Tiesel – stiffening his back and so forth. Josephina saw that he’d carefully flicked his cigar stub away. Its nasty smell lingered, though, and a wisp of smoke came out from the dark space between the carriage and the edge of the platform.

  She climbed up and took a seat facing the way the train would go when it returned to the town, on the side facing the water. Sometimes they would ask her to sing ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen’ by the strange poet called Groth who lived over on Schwanenweg. Tante Elizabeth said the melody was by the famous composer Brahms from Hamburg who was ‘one of us’ even though he lived in Vienna, and what’s more his wife was a seamstress ‘just like you’, but Josephina had seen the poet in a long flapping coat in the Schlossgarten and thought he was too odd for such a famous composer. Mathilde liked the song about a cosy spot, though, and sometimes Josephina would sing it to her very quietly once they were in bed, instead of a Puck Puck story. Then Mathilde’s breathing would begin to slow and soon she would be asleep.

  Josephina’s face was reflected in the carriage window with a glimpse of flickering water beyond, and she mouthed the words of the song about the cosy spot surrounded by leaves and flowers, thinking how nice she looked. Then Frau Tiesel heaved herself into the carriage and lowered herself with a grunt into a seat at the back. Josephina stopped mouthing the song and sat up straight, turning her profile to the miller’s wife. Beyond her nice window reflection some little Rohrsänger were flitting about in sunshine above the embankment – surely they’d be going soon? Some boys from the mill jumped on at the last minute, shouting noisily, but then began to whisper. The stationmaster blew his whistle at last, the train tooted, and the birds all fled across the fjord in a crowd. They must be happy, surely, to be going soon to the warm place that smelled of oranges and not of the stationmaster’s nasty cigar stub.

  But now they really had gone; it was almost evening and beginning to get chilly, the pretty little twittering birds hadn’t returned to the reeds along the river bank. When the evening train tooted to signal that it was leaving for town for the last time there were no crowds of birds fleeing away across the darkening water; all that remained from yesterday morning was the cigar smell, not of the stationmaster’s stub flicked away into the horrible dark gap by the platform, but of the fresh cigar Hauptmann von Zarovich was getting alight over by the tall window with tasseled drapes and pink stained glass at the top, so that his enthusiastic puffing blew a cloud of smoke across the shaft of rosy sunshine coming into the room.

  ‘Ah! Our little seamstress.’

  Her mother had gone back inside but Josephina didn’t want to follow her, as she was perhaps expected to. Yes, she was ‘finished’, but there would be more to do, though not sewing.

  There would be no more sewing, her father shouted at Tante Elizabeth. Not that sort. Who did the girl think she was? Look what she did.

  ‘And what did she do?’ Tante’s face was red, and little Mathilde was pulling at her dress and crying. Josephina wished very much she could have stayed at their house, but that morning she sat up on the sprung cart’s seat as ordered to by her papa, while he and his sister argued right there in the street. ‘She wouldn’t even sing,’ hissed Tante, pushing her face close to Papa’s, ‘can you imagine that? Our precious songbird. Yes, of course there was something wrong. What do you think I am? Stupid?’ She was trying to keep their argument quiet because the neighbourhood children were beginning to notice. ‘She won’t talk to me,’ said Tante in a loud whisper, so Josephina would hear. ‘She won’t tell me what’s wrong, but something is. This isn’t our Josie.’ High up on the sprung cart’s seat, where everybody could see her, Josephina sat very still with her hands in her lap.

  ‘Yes, Elizabeth,’ hissed Papa, also trying to keep the argument quiet. ‘I do think you’re stupid, because what if your precious songbird costs me my business?’

  ‘Ah, so that’s it,’ said her aunt, stepping back. ‘Meister Hansen!’ Then she spat right at his feet and used the bad word Josephina had heard the mill boys call each other, ‘Meister Scheisskopf!’

  Her father and Tante Elizabeth just stood there with their faces quite close together. Josephina could see them out of the corner of her eye. Then one of the neighbourhood boys let out a loud guffaw and shouted something – Josephina couldn’t hear what he said and she didn’t want to turn around and look for who he was. But then with a clatter of clogs a dozen of the children ran yelling past the sprung cart where she sat looking straight ahead. They didn’t stop where Papa and Tante were glaring at each other, because just up the hill a horse had lost its footing and the carter had jumped down to put blocks behind the wheels. The horse stood with its head down, its flanks heaving and flecked with froth and streaks of blood from the carter’s whip. It was defeated, it just wanted to stop, to be free of the cart’s weight. The cart was overloaded with barrels, it wasn’t the horse’s fault, but the carter was cursing it anyway.

  Then they were rattling along. Papa had loaded some fresh poplar planks and he would use them to make plain coffins, not the special ones that cost a lot.

  ‘Stupid,’ he said, looking over old Gunnar’s nodding mane and the wilted bunch of wildflowers under his collar. Did he mean Tante Elizabeth or the carter? Or Mutti, for not coming with her? Or did he mean her? What had happened wasn’t her fault. What happened on the hill by Tante’s house wasn’t the horse’s fault, and what happened in Junkfrau von Zarovich’s house on Faulstrasse wasn’t her fault. She wanted to lean her head on Papa’s hard shoulder and breathe in his neck-smell and the nice smell of sawn timber in his coat, and with her right hand reach around his shoulders and hold the big lobe of his ear between her finger and thumb, which would make him growl down in his chest without opening his mouth. But he sat looking straight ahead, as did she, while Gunnar clopped along as usual, as if only the horse knew how things should be and the proper way to ride home in the cart. What Josephina knew was gone; she sat there with her pain on the cart’s hard wooden seat in an awful hollow space with nothing familiar in it, and the world went past her straight-ahead gaze like a shadow play.

  ‘Did he pay you?’ said Papa, adding ‘von Zarovich’ after a cough.

  Inside her hollow space she was all at once both freezing and burning. Pay her for what? But she couldn’t say it.

  ‘For the needlework,’ said her father as if he’d heard what she didn’t have words for. And then he roared the words again, lurching forward on his seat. ‘For the needlework, girl, for your precious goddamn needlework!’ And then he did turn towards her, and she saw that her papa’s eyes were completely red and his lips were shaking. ‘Did the bastard pay you?’

  But still he couldn’t reach for her and for her misery, as if the happy loveliness she’d felt in herself the day before, and seen in the stationmaster’s eyes, and in the morning train’s carriage window, and in Frau Tiesel’s spiteful look, and in the housemaid Clara’s head-wobble and up-and-down smiling assessment of her at the servants’ entrance to Junkfrau’s house – as if the loveliness and happiness she’d felt that morning had been impregnated by a filthy smell, like a stale cigar, that everyone would notice.

  Josephina reached into the bag in which she’d delivered the fine nightgown with her best Bohemian embroidery work, and brought out her little purse with the coins in it. She put the clinking purse on the seat between herself and her father without looking at him, without moving her eyes out of the strangely echoing tunnel in which Gunnar’s nodding head was pushing forward past noisy huddles of buildings and then past silent trees and meadows that she seemed not to be among.

  ‘Hmm-hmm,’ said the housemaid Clara. Her eyes went up and down Josephina’s dress and blouse. She leaned with one arm across the doorway and wobbled her head
from side to side, taunting a little. She was a big, strong girl with dark hair and thick eyebrows – she made her eyebrows go up and down as she did her inspection of Josephina’s appearance.

  It was chilly at the back of the house, which was not one of the grand ones, since Hauptmann von Zarovich was a junior; it was a narrow four floors in a row of others curving around on Faulstrasse, with a shared yard and stables that you entered through an alleyway. That morning there was fresh horseshit in the alley and Josephina worried about getting some on her shoes. It was a good place to start, her mother had said when they came the first time; word would soon go ‘upstairs’ to the rich senior officers; best to start with clean shoes.

  Josephina liked Clara’s admiring look and even the teasing head-wobble and eyebrows, but the hmm-hmm was annoying. But then Clara stood aside with a mock curtsey and Josephina went into the kitchen. There was an appetising, strong smell of coffee and hot bread, and the cook was filling a basket with freshly baked Rundstück. A plate of sausage and cheese stood ready on the broad table.

  ‘Good morning Josephina where is your mother?’ said the cook in a joined-up way, and then, ‘Get a move on girl!’ She meant Clara, who was putting the breakfast on a tray.

  ‘Junkfrau isn’t here,’ said Clara. ‘She’s visiting.’

  ‘She’s away,’ said the cook.

  Then they were both staring at Josephina.

  The cook was a very tall, thin, peevish woman with a pointy nose at the top, strangely wide hips halfway down and, at the bottom, long, turned-out feet in felt slippers with bunion bumps – Josephina’s mother called her ‘the Stork’. On their first visit, she and Mutti had a whispering talk in a corner of the kitchen before showing Josephina’s samples to Junkfrau upstairs in her bedroom, and Josephina heard the Stork say that Junkfrau was very young and very vain and that she liked to stay in bed while Herr Hauptmann was out at morning parade, and also that she liked to go to her family in Vienna quite often, which put her husband in a bad mood, because, you know.

  But now the Stork’s mouth wasn’t in that thin, peevish line. Instead, she was trying to smile at Josephina, her mouth making different shape attempts, until she gave up and waved her big red bony hand at the breakfast tray.

  ‘What are you waiting for take the man his breakfast.’

  ‘But I’ve got the work for Junkfrau,’ said Josephina, adding, ‘the nightgown she asked for specially.’

  ‘Not you what are you dreaming?’ snapped the Stork.

  Clara made a show of straightening her apron and bodice, and of pushing her hair up under her cap. Then she picked up the breakfast tray. ‘Why don’t I ask Hauptmann von Zarovich if it would please him to see, hmm-hmm, the nightgown,’ she said, with an unkind emphasis on ‘the nightgown’, making her thick eyebrows go up and down.

  ‘Please, Clara, thank you,’ said Josephina. She was hot with blushing, but what was she supposed to do? This was her first time on her own. What would they say at home if she came back without showing the nightgown and without the money for it? This was her chance to be known ‘upstairs’. And perhaps she’d be able to tell them, after she’d told Tante Elizabeth, that she’d shown the nightgown to Hauptmann von Zarovich himself, because his wife was away, far away in Vienna perhaps, so she just had to go ahead and do it all by herself.

  The maid hooked the door shut behind her with her foot. The Stork was looking at Josephina with her lips in that peeved line. Then, with a deep sigh, she said, ‘Sit down girl have some coffee you’ll have to go soon.’

  But a shaft of bright, clear light came suddenly into the kitchen from a window high in the back wall – the sun must now be in the stable yard. It was already late morning, then; the morning muster over by Kieler Schloss was finished, the fresh horseshit in the alley meant that Hauptmann’s horse had been stabled, he was now having his breakfast – and here she was, in the warm kitchen with its nice smell of freshly baked rolls and coffee, with a cup in front of her that the cook was about to fill. Surely she would be allowed to show her work? Surely, after the parade, he would be in a good mood, and he’d be thinking about his beautiful young wife, and missing her, and thinking what a nice surprise it would be to have the nightgown ready for her when she came home from Vienna, tired after her long journey, glad to see her husband, grateful for his thoughtfulness, and loving the Bohemian needlework and the pink silk thread on the buttons? ‘So this is all your own work, Fräulein?’ he would say to Josephina, noticing also her own collar with its vine and leaves. ‘So beautiful, your mother and father must be very proud of you!’

  Josephina could see that the Stork was making a show of looking at how her hand trembled as she brought the coffee cup to her lips – her peevish mouth turned into a V-shaped grin in which her large top front teeth stuck out.

  ‘Now you listen to me girl,’ she began, but then the kitchen door banged open and Clara hurried in.

  ‘Another cup for the seamstress, and please to bring the work.’

  Then neither of them said another word. Their silence pressed in on Josephina like the narrow dark stairway she and Clara were going up, Clara in front with the fresh cup and saucer, and Josephina following behind with the nightgown in a bag. Clara’s smell was quite strong, from her morning’s work, no doubt, and Josephina was glad Mutti had allowed her to use the lavender soap that morning.

  Then Clara opened the door to a large bright drawing room into which rosy light was coming through the stained-glass panes at the top of tall bay windows, where Hauptmann von Zarovich stood puffing a cloud of cigar smoke across the shaft of sunlight.

  ‘Ah! Our little seamstress.’

  Her face was pressed into Elke’s strong, breathing back. Her sister heaved and made an annoyed groaning sound, almost words but not quite. In Josephina’s dream there had been a loud shout that woke her up – had she shouted or had someone else? She’d been trying to push through darkness that was thick with a moire shimmer. It was like a narrow alleyway or passage. Her face pressed into it. It was hard to breathe or make words. Then, suddenly, the loud shout. Then she was awake and trying to speak. There was Elke’s nice strong warm back. She could feel the vibration of Elke’s words on her cheek, and the hum of her steady breathing.

  ‘A bad dream, Josie?’ Elke was waiting for Josephina to say what the dream was about. Usually they would do this, taking turns. Last time was Elke’s turn; her dream was about a crowd of sausages marching along being soldiers while a wolf followed behind, snapping them up one by one and singing eins zwei drei! What a boring dream, Josephina had said, it just means you’re hungry.

  Early morning sunshine came into their room through the trembling leaves of the aspen – pale light flickered on the ceiling, the fluttering leaf shapes were like the signalling flags and bunting on ships coming into harbour, the flags and leaves were words the wind spoke, but in a few more weeks the yellowed leaves would be gone and the low winter sunlight would be still and silent and the ships without their talking flags would have sailed away down the fjord and then the loud shout of her dream would be gone as well.

  Soon she’d have to get up and stoke the stove fire and the one in the fireplace, and Elke would have to milk the cows. ‘We have to get up,’ she said.

  ‘What about your dream?’

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Josephina.

  Elke turned over with an angry heave. ‘Why don’t you talk to us?’ Josephina could hear that her sister was about to cry – her voice was wobbly. Then Elke grabbed her by the hair and gave her a shake. ‘Why don’t you talk to me, to me. I’m your sister, Josie, what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I told Mathilde a story when I was at Tante Elizabeth’s,’ said Josephina, taking Elke’s hands out of her hair. ‘But I didn’t want to sing. That’s why Tante got annoyed.’

  Elke sat up in bed and shook her fists in the air. It was what she did when she was fed up. ‘Tilde’s five,’ said Elke, taking big breaths. ‘And you’re my little sister. My Schwesterchen. My b�
�bé! I used to sing to you. I told you stories.’ Now she was crying – some big tears ran down beside her nose and she licked them off her lips with a quick, impatient flick of her tongue. ‘All right, then, get up. If you can’t trust me. If you’re so high and mighty now.’

  Mathilde’s little head was against her shoulder. They had a candle, and Josephina was making a Puck Puck the chicken shadow with it. Puck Puck walked across the wall and then faded away into darkness. ‘All right, now,’ said Mathilde. ‘Now you can sing it.’

  ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen, Wo meine Wiege ging,’ began Josephina very quietly, but then her voice just stopped. A big lump rose up in her throat and choked the words. Mathilde poked her with a sharp, bony little elbow and then gave her a kick. But she couldn’t do it.