The Reed Warbler Read online

  And yes, it was rather cool, down there, near the lake.

  But you, Josephina?

  Perhaps because she felt sorry, Theodora had washed the cups and glasses from the meeting and was no longer downstairs. Josephina closed the windows – the room was much fresher now, certainly – and she put the last lamps out. Perhaps it would even be chilly upstairs? Perhaps she should light the little stove on the landing by the bedrooms? She had set it that morning, as usual, because Herr Bloch was susceptible to chills and sometimes had the stove lit even in mild weather.

  The door to his bedroom was ajar and she could see Herr Bloch sitting up in bed reading a book. He had a shawl over his shoulders.

  ‘Are you cold, Herr Bloch?’

  ‘Wolf,’ he said, with a little cough past his teeth that Josephina could see in the lamplight. ‘Please, just Wolf, would you mind? Josephina?’

  Part 2

  _______________

  ‘what choice do we have?’

  Theodora

  Friday, 31 October, 1879, Bremerhaven

  This is my first journal entry on a momentous day. I will write it with as firm a hand as possible, though my body and my thoughts are unsteady.

  Now the days are shorter and quite cold, but that is not the cause of my unsteadiness. Nor is it because the ship’s movement is unsettling. We are told it will be some time before the ship is untethered (is that the correct word?) and begins its passage towards the open sea. Then unsteadiness will be a euphemism. I dread this moment as I’m sure do those in the cheapest accommodation. They sleep three or four in bunks stacked two high, an undesirable condition emphasised to us as we enquired after costs. No doubt we seemed good prospects. It’s easy to say that I don’t regret our privilege, just as it’s easy to say I feel for those I saw jostling at the entrance to their quarters below. A ‘familiar diagram of class and conscience’ of course, as Wolf pointed out to Josephina, whose silence was accompanied by a little smile best described as wry.

  But after all, thanks to those who contributed to our subscription, we are sharing intermediate-class quarters with a family from Denmark. Their name is Frederiksen and their children are two boys and a girl. The boys are about eight and ten years old, and the girl a little older than Catharina, perhaps seven. They are all ‘on deck’. No doubt we will be on first-name terms soon enough since our sleeping compartments adjoin with four bunks in each and a shared bathroom and stateroom that we will also share with the other intermediate passengers on our side of the ship, whom I am yet to meet. Need I say more. Josephina, Wolf and Catharina are also on deck. They are very excited, and so I have this hour or two in which to begin my account of what Wolf calls ‘our great adventure’.

  I can’t remember who wrote: ‘To live in the body is to die.’ Perhaps the same who noticed ‘my watchful self’? I am living in a body that cannot question what it knows, a helpless longing. At the same time I am living in a mind that watches that helplessness and despises it. Does it make sense to say that to live in the body is to die trapped in the body but that to live in the mind is to die liberated into the world? Wolf’s ‘great adventure’ is to go to a new world as a man filled with the naive joy of being reconciled in mind and body. I, however, cannot reconcile what I desire and what I think. And I fear we are going to a world that will soon be like the old one.

  The indelicacy of what my body knew the first time I saw Josephina in the sewing room now has another image superimposed on it, like the reflection in a window behind which an interior has become indistinct. That indistinct image is of a young woman who could almost still be a girl except for the child holding her hand. The girl-mother was slight and fair, with a piercing gaze that I will never forget. I saw it again many times. It always seemed to be looking past the present moment. The child who was holding her hand had the same intense stare, though she was only about two or three years old. The combination of the girl-mother’s delicacy and forthright look, and the pathos of her hand holding the child’s, pierced me to my body’s core. The sewing room was filled with a murmuration of voices, like a hive. For me it was the internal hum of disordered thoughts. Wolf was watching Andersen and Paul discussing the terms of the girl’s engagement. The ‘supervisor’ was perched on his dais. ‘Quota, quota, quota,’ said Wolf, and also, ‘I pity that child.’ What ‘child’ did he mean, the mother or her daughter? Now this dim interior is overmantled by an image of the young woman and her grown child and Wolf together on the wharf at the moment of their embarkation on the ‘great adventure’. This time both Wolf and Josephina are holding hands with Catharina, who is between them. It is this superimposition that unsteadies me.

  The oddness of their tableau vivant should have been lost in the crush of people on the wharf where all sorts and sizes and ages were converging. But for me the crush highlighted the poignancy of my ‘little brother’ with his crooked back and pigeon chest, the young woman with the straight back and upright head, and the lovely child between them. Most onlookers would think the child was theirs. They would also guess the young woman’s loose cloak concealed another.

  Josephina’s only experience of sex had been brutal, and Wolf’s improbable. They came to each other as distorted innocents. Perhaps they were well matched. Wolf’s kindness comes from his experience of being pushed into puddles. I doubt Josephina could be attracted to brutes who do the pushing.

  And now I can hear the happy Frederiksens returning. They are like a pretty painted toy crèche of a wholesome family and I can see there will be praying. I must steady myself, because we have a long way to go.

  Beth and Frank

  ‘Feel a bit funny, leaving?’ It was Beth’s turn to drive, so she was talking at the road unspooling towards them through scrappy, bedraggled forest and at the rear-view mirror where what had gone was constantly replenished. There were long straights on the road, with perplexing dips and rises – the kinds of articulated trucks they had seen from the National Park hotel patio at breakfast loomed suddenly over crests and accelerated with dirty squirts of diesel smoke from their exhaust chimneys. The highway crossed the railway line, and there was the turn-off to Raurimu and the world-famous Raurimu railway-line spiral, not finished when Great-grandad Wolf went into the back country down the Kaitīeke valley to the west of the line about 1908, and immediately after it the turn-off to Kaitīeke, and just down there was his mother Josephina’s grave in the Raurimu cemetery with its doleful chorus of parched sheep. ‘Think we’ll ever come back?’

  ‘Helen hasn’t, nor did Ruth.’

  ‘Can’t you stop doing that? It was a perfectly simple question. Because I do.’

  ‘You do what?’

  ‘Feel a bit funny.’

  ‘Want me to drive?’

  ‘I want you to engage in civil conversation. Because we’ve got a long way to go.’

  ‘We’ve got a long way to go, but our love will grow,’ sang Frank in a raspy voice. ‘Really bad seventies band that Ruth liked, bless her hippy heart.’

  After a while there was a place called Manson’s Siding with a turn-off across the railway line that Beth took with cursory sideways glances for trains and Frank’s hand suddenly clutching her arm, then a bit of nondescript farmland, and then the road petered out in a grassy area on the edge of big forest. She got out of the car and walked fast to where the trees began at the edge of the grassy flat. Suddenly it was very quiet, there were no trucks, just a few birds in the trees – could that be a korimako? – yes, there was a pair, they were warbling to each other that she and Frank had arrived, better look out, trouble.

  There was a stile over the fence and a track that disappeared into the trees – should she go there? Into the coolness? The dim light? But she sat down on a bench next to a slab-timber picnic table with empty beer cans scattered around it and looked over at Frank’s head dimly visible in the car window. He was staring towards her, his face a pale motionless oval partly obscured by the reflected fragments of trees.

  Then the window w
ound down. ‘Are we coming or going?’ he shouted.

  How the fuck should I know? But she didn’t say it.

  Then he opened his car door and ambled towards her with a bottle of water swinging from one hand. The korimako lifted the urgency of their conversation but their calls seemed to be belling in her head; Frank’s tall lean frame was swaying as he approached, but as though in a mirage, indistinct and unsteady and shimmering, and then she knew she was falling off the slab-timber bench and down to the ground among the half-crushed beer cans.

  There was that fresh aroma again, like dear Noel’s Tabac. She was propped against Frank’s chest, and when he spoke she felt the vibration of his voice against the back of her head.

  ‘Count to ten,’ he said. ‘Aloud. Don’t think it.’

  ‘One two three four five . . . why am I doing this?’ Her tongue felt flannelly and dry but the words came out okay.

  ‘You haven’t had a stroke,’ said Frank’s vibration against her head. ‘Lift this arm and grab my hand.’ He wiggled her left arm and then waved his own within reach. She seized his hand and held it. ‘Good as gold,’ he said. He was gripping her hand quite tightly, she could feel his bony fingers. He’d propped himself up against the bench with his legs outstretched; she was lying between them and looking past the toes of his nice brown shoes – he had on grey and red argyle socks with that lozengy pattern, his pants were khaki, what Noel used to call dockers, he could never explain why. So now she was noticing that he’d dressed quite smartly for their trip back up to Auckland, as though the holiday part of it was over. The day before when they went down the Kaitīeke and had a swim by Grandad Wolf’s old concrete honey-house he’d worn a pair of grungy shorts and well-worn sandals, as if he’d purposely dressed like the scruffy sixteen-year-old cousin who went away to Australia three or four years later with his twin sister and his mum, and kind of broke her child’s heart, except that he wrote her letters with snapshots of him and Ruth at a billabong, on a long beach with huge tangled trees behind, and snaps of road signs or Australian animals, a koala hanging on tight to a tree, a dead snake draped over a veranda rail, distant kangaroos in a red-dirt landscape with termite mounds, and the jokes, what do you call a lazy baby kangaroo? – a pouch potato! – but nearly always his twin sister in there somewhere, which she’d hardly ever been when they were camped by the river down from the old homestead. Ruth, the quiet one.

  Nor did Ruth.

  ‘Sorry I was grumpy back there,’ she said, and felt his big sigh lift her head.

  ‘Got a sore chest?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the ticker, just the packaging.’

  ‘Reckon you could stand up now? My back’s killing me.’

  The korimako started warning each other again, bell-ringing melodiously as she got up, waiting for the little surges of dizziness to pass, and sat on the bench by the picnic table, feeling a bit sick. The trees beyond the fence were mostly beech with some big tree ferns among them, and some straggly makomako along the forest edge – it was nice to be looking in that direction and not across the manky picnic ground towards the car.

  ‘You weren’t grumpy, Beth, my old mate.’ Frank had sat down facing her across the table and was holding the bottle of water out to her. ‘You were feeling funny.’ He had an expression on his face like the one she’d seen years ago when they were kids and he knew she was pushing the risk, jumping off the rope swing into the river and going in over her depth – maybe it was so he’d have to fish her out and tell her off. ‘So was I,’ he said, pushing the water bottle into her hand. ‘Feeling a bit funny. Go on, have a good swallow.’

  She did, but the water was hardly there, there was nothing to it, not like the river you never ever forgot the taste of.

  ‘Washed quartzy gravel, a hint of forest leaf mould, sunshine,’ she said. Frank still had that remembered expression on his face, at once solicitous and amused. ‘Not this crap,’ she said. ‘The river. The beautiful old river.’

  ‘A river runs through you.’ His big smile was still pretty much the same, he’d always saved it for something special – teeth not so flash anymore but there it was. ‘Nice mineral finish,’ he said. ‘A good palate-cleanser.’

  ‘You never forget it. Nothing is ever as good again.’

  ‘So, all right then, why were you feeling funny?’ He reached across the table and took the tips of her fingers in his hands. ‘You go first.’

  She couldn’t work out which her was where when. A kind of déjà vu on repeat. And those strange alternative times and places leaning in or folding themselves over what and where she was, like the WB on Josephina Wenczel’s headstone, her mother Elke barking like a dog from the trees across the river, the old shawl that refused to come with her out of the National Park hotel room, Frank talking to his dead wife.

  The simple version, for Frank. ‘I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be back. That I was leaving more than just the old places we visited.’ Frank was stroking the backs of her fingers with his thumbs. ‘That I was leaving my life back there down the valley but I didn’t even know what most of it had consisted of or what it meant.’

  ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Me, I was just remembering my sis Ruth down at the river, and feeling a bit sad.’ Then he grimaced, as if at the effort to continue his story, or to stop it. ‘Last time I heard from Ruth was June 1970, she was working as a stringer in Jordan when the strife between the fedayeen and Hussein’s mob broke out. She rang me from a phone at a joint called the Red Lion Tavern in Amman, she said it was where the correspondents gathered. I could hear them in the background, a rowdy lot – she told me they started drinking about eleven in the morning, were pissed by three in the afternoon which was when their informants arrived, they used the phones at the pub to file their stories rather than going back to their offices. She was killed the next day in crossfire in a press convoy near Wehdat refugee camp – she was one of the few who got out of the pub long enough to do her job. That was her.’ Frank had tucked his hands in his armpits. ‘She was twenty-four. We were. I’ve always remembered the names. Wehdat. Djebel Amman, where the pub was.’ He had that special smile on his face again, only this time it was wincing. ‘No need to say you’re sorry,’ he said. ‘I know you are.’

  ‘We just heard she’d had an accident,’ said Beth. ‘First I’ve heard about all that other stuff. Fucking hell.’

  ‘She used to beat me over the head with an essay by Hannah Arendt called “We Refugees”. Refugees were the vanguard of their people, she reckoned, Arendt did, back in the 1940s. I was thinking about that down there at the river, and in that sad little graveyard – you have to admit it’s pretty sad. Josephina Wenczel, the vanguard of her people.’ He was listening. ‘Are those bellbirds?’

  ‘Yes, they are – korimako.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Frank. ‘That’s their real name? Christ, aren’t they lovely? Aren’t they just? Haven’t heard anything that lovely for years.’

  Beth thought his eyes might be tearing up, but he was just squinting at her.

  ‘And what about dear old Noel?’

  Bit patronising, but never mind. ‘Dear old Noel was gone quite some time before he went, I’d have to say.’

  Frank turned away to look at the trees where the ‘bellbirds’ were.

  Let’s leave it at that, then. ‘Shall we go?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, let’s.’ Frank turned back from the birdsong. His expression said, Please don’t make me fish you out of the deep bit again. But I will.

  Theodora

  Sunday, 9 November, 1879, Bay of Biscay

  So now at last the storm is abating and I can write again with a pen that is steady and a body that has stopped contorting itself over a bucket. What Wolf was thinking about his promised land I cannot imagine, as he too gave himself up helplessly to the storm, though not for long. That fragile body is used to sickness and he was soon taking care of the rest of us. Nor can I fathom what he was thinking when he insisted we should celebrate Shabbos jus
t before sunset on the day of our departure from Bremerhaven. Of course it was about ‘the exodus from Egypt’, but how many years had it been since he and I renounced all religion? He bought some candles from the steward. They were forbidden because of the risk of fire, the man said, looking at my brother with a certain expression, whereupon the little fool gave him as much money again and the candles were delivered wrapped in a towel. Of course Wolf didn’t remember how to celebrate Shabbos properly but he lit the candles stuck into puddles of melted wax on our stateroom table and we all covered our heads with the best shawls or headscarves we could find while he wished for a safe voyage to the promised land, with the anxious Danish Frederiksens peeping at us aghast from the adjoining cabin. So we were Jews after all, non-believers – perhaps they feared we would sacrifice and devour their pretty children! But then Wolf hastily extinguished the candles and waved the smoke from them towards the windows with the towel. My dear little brother was like a naughty boy full of glee, but I believe serious as well behind his fun. Of course Catharina enjoyed the charade without understanding it, except inasmuch as Wolf told her he was making the sea calm for her, which she must have found disappointing once we got to the Ärmelkanal where the ship began to heave about and the Danes to wail and pray, and seawater to come down into our cabins. How we endured that week is difficult now to imagine and I for one plan to forget it quickly. How much worse it must have been for those piled up upon each other in the steerage. When it was over we heard that some of the animal pens on the deck above had been swept away and at times it felt as though we all would be lost to the tempest, rich and poor alike.

  But after sunset on the day we left there was a beautiful full moon that was reflected on the ocean. See how the moon is trailing her silver sleeve across the waves! exclaimed Josephina to Catharina. How often she finds these kinds of expressions in herself! But what she could not see or say was that her face was also illuminated by a kind of ecstasy that came from within, not from the moon’s light. There is surely a poet in that small body that can hardly contain what it perceives and feels. I have seen this effect often with Josephina and it has always shaken me. It is as though the space between the phenomena her body encounters and her perception of them is filled with transformations. How can I not picture the transformations that might shine on her face when what has excited them is love?