The Reed Warbler Read online

  She would join Ada’s friendship group but not yet, not today.

  And what about her sisters?

  It was uncomfortable lying on her side and she wasn’t really tired. She would get up and write to her sisters. She didn’t know when the letter would be able to go to them, but writing it would be like talking. She could easily imagine what they would say, and the different ways they would do it, when she told them what had happened. The big strong hugging arms of Elke’s speech, the clear thought of Greta’s eyes slowly blinking her words.

  Wednesday, the 21st of January, 1880 near Cape Town

  My dear sisters Greta and Elke

  I am writing to you first of all because I miss you very much and have no one I can talk to the way I can talk to my dear sisters. I can almost hear your voices when I think of you and I can see you when I shut my eyes, but you are not here, that is the truth I have when I am alone.

  It is now two months since I wrote my last letter to you, it went ashore at the Canary Islands and so you will have it now I hope. To me the Canary Islands seem much longer ago than they really are, though long enough ago even so. That is not just because time passes very slowly on this ship but because of the terrible thing that happened a few weeks after the Canary Islands. No, my baby is still growing well and Catharina is as well as can be expected in this situation, and has learned to read a little and even write her name, I know you will have worried about them at first when you read that something terrible had happened. What happened after the ship went in to the place called Cape Verde, where we went after the Canary Islands, is that my dear husband and friend Wolf Bloch died from something he ate and his body was slid down into the sea, that is what they do on these ships.

  It is now about a month since I saw my beloved husband and kind companion go into the sea for ever and out of my life for ever. I have only just begun to come back out of the grief that was like a fog or a storm that filled up all the time around me. I had Wolf’s sister Theodora and of course Catharina with me but they could not take the place of my dear sisters. Now at last I can again go back out into the fresh day, and so my life will begin to go forward again after a long time in which it had stopped completely. I can hardly even remember that time.

  So now you know what has happened and that Catharina and I are travelling on alone to New Zealand and must make our new life there by our own efforts. They speak English there and so we must learn that new language. There is a kind man on the ship called Mister Oats who had become one of the many friends my husband made on board the ship. Mister Oats was a journeyman in years gone by and spent some of his travelling time in Germany, and so can speak some German although with a very strange accent. I am going to ask him to teach Catharina and me some English so that we can be better prepared when we get to New Zealand. Catharina has learned a little bit of English at the school they have on the ship, for example how to say hello my name is Catharina and how much does this bread cost, but we will need more than that.

  It is very hard to be writing to you without hearing anything back except in my thoughts, where your voices are as clear as if you were with me in this little cabin, but of course you are not here. Please write to me and to Catharina and to our new baby son or daughter who will now certainly be born before we get to New Zealand as the ship has been delayed more than could have been expected. Write some long letters and tell me everything that has been happening where you are there next to the good old Schwentine and the harbour at Sønderborg, which I can still see when I close my eyes. When I know where you must send the letters I will write to you again, but next time it will be from our new home.

  Catharina and I send many kisses to my sisters and her aunts, and to my nephews and her cousins Finn and Otto, and to my dear papa and Catharina’s grandpapa, and perhaps also to someone Elke will write about when she sends her letter to us in New Zealand.

  Now I am going to help Catharina to write you a letter by herself, she can write her own name at the end!

  Your sister Josephina

  Dear Tante Greta and Tante Elke and Cousin Finn and Cousin Otto and Grandpapa Hansen

  Now I can write my name Catharina. Today we saw a big albertoss. Our lunch was soup with biscuits. Mutti is better her baby will come soon.

  Catharina

  Catharina’s kiss is here

  Wolf Bloch

  Bloch House, Hamburg, April 20th, 1879

  It had never occurred to me, before Josephina (over my protestations) opened the fastening of my shirt and put her face against my wretched chest, that there could be any conceivable connection between carnal desire and philosophical thought. Can there be an erotics of thought? The question could never, before that moment of Josephina’s insistence, have entered my mind let alone the life in which carnal desire was an affect I could only locate in the base kingdom of cravings such as gluttonous hunger and avaricious greed, neither of which I welcomed in to my nature. Such carnality as I did experience, therefore, I relegated to a vault deep within the fortress of my sensibility, where it mostly declined and wasted pitifully away, uttering only the most feeble of pleas for liberation from time to time, and with ever decreasing frequency.

  I knew that there could be an erotics of action, since the hysterias and excitements of combat are plain for all to see when the angry mob rises up or when an army rushes to penetrate the defences of its opponents; tales of such encounters are always swollen with the hyperbole of erotic enthusiasm. Equally hyperbolic are the high colours and rousing music and rhythmical exertions of military parades, which have always dismayed me as false charades of true feeling; they are, in fact, no more than obscene theatres of engorged power in which the rapes committed in the name of nationalism are costumed in the regalia of patriotism, their end purpose being the adoring submission of the cannon-fodder masses.

  The exulting rhetoric of those who urge action, for example upon the hesitant among their conscripts, is yet another sign of the primal forces that bind carnality and action; but since I have never had the capacity for exciting action of any kind whatsoever, my experience of such an erotics has been limited to the vicarious emotion aroused by writing about it, and never more so than in poetry, and never more than in the poem I wrote during an unsleeping day and night occasioned by the tragic defeat of the Paris Commune in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise in May 1871.

  But the emotion I experienced while writing this poem does not begin to compare with the gratitude I felt as Josephina very tenderly and gently released my wretched carnal prisoner from his pathetic dungeon, thus allowing me to experience, for the first time in my life, a freedom that rose up through my whole body and person and mind. In the days that followed, this liberation was not always so gentle; but however it was enacted, the freedom it generated was a life force that transformed not only how my body felt but also how my mind thought. Furthermore, the two were united or placed in a kind of ecstatic realm of exchanges, a sharing of powers and sympathies that utterly transformed how this poor, deficient creature called Wolf Bloch could now know his own nature and consciousness.

  The great French writer Gustave Flaubert, author of the ‘Madame Bovary’ through which I struggled like a blind man with the aid of my inadequate French and my even more inadequate understanding of human passion, is said to have thought that physical and intellectual gratifications have nothing in common and that the former merely corrupts the latter and is a sin against the Idea. His stern predecessor, the philosopher René Descartes, came early in his life to the conclusion that the mind and the body are separate, and yet in asserting that ‘I am’ because ‘I think’ he seems by implication to have insisted also on a space of mental embodiment. Our own Idealist, Friedrich Hegel, bewildered me, but my dear sad sister less so, with his dialectical diagrams of the interactions and interrelationships of spirit and phenomena. With her help, which she tired of offering, I could have thought more productively about the example of our own dear mentor Engels and his discussions of the unity and conf
lict of opposites. But before that moment when Josephina quite literally opened me to the possibility of a transforming reconciliation between the mind that seemed to animate me and the miserably inadequate body that transported it like a dutiful porter, I had no conception whatsoever of the possibility of an existence vivified by robust conversations between the porter and his mental or spirit burden.

  Now, the question that a new Wolf Bloch wants to ask is not, Can there ever be an erotics of philosophical thought, but rather, How can there be any thought worth having that is not produced in the unity and conflict of mind and body, that is to say, through the erotic power of their intercourse?

  This was not a gift I expected, nor one I sought, and I can see that my astonished gratitude for it has affected my sister who, while evidently happy for my happiness, may feel herself denied the gift I was so freely given. I know that the possibility of her receiving a gift like mine was not something she could realistically have expected of Josephina, and that her own meagre experiences of an equivalent if different happiness have been few and often short-lived, with one sad exception. But I see now what I was unable to see during the happy years of our household before Josephina joined it, that my sister Theodora’s lively equanimity and energy during those years were the rewards of her relationship with the friend who shared our house; and I see that now her existence in the dreary, barren, disappointed space between body and mind is the consequence of her friend and lover Annushka’s death, in the same terrible year that our dear friends Aksel and Rana Andersen’s daughter Isolde died.

  And so for ten years since Annushka’s death I have lived obliviously in the unsympathetic space of my own shameful inability to understand or even notice what truly made my dear sister’s life joyful, and what infused with intellectual joy the ways she spoke her mind. Now I see that her thought, for all its fiery conviction, seems distant from her heart; and her poor heart distant from the lively world, except that dreadful aspect of it which contains pestilential diseases like the one that took her lover and that prey with catastrophic prejudice upon the defenceless poor.

  Theodora

  Sunday, 8 February, 1880, Indian Ocean, somewhere between Mauritius and Fremantle

  I have two events to record at this juncture, which I will do in a corner of the crowded deck since our space below has been occupied by one of the events. The occupying event is the second of the two that I shall record here not just because the first precedes it in time but because the first one has cast its shadow of significance across the second.

  Once again our meandering, slothful ship was required to stop over at another port, a place called Mauritius this time. Its charms seemed Edenic when viewed from the deck, where a muttering crowd idled away the three days of our sojourn. Some of the fresh food that came on board might likewise have been plucked from the trees of a paradise beyond the wildest dreams of the porridge-bloated and unhealthy crowd whose garments were by now infested with persistent vermin. Rather than add my eyes to those that roamed with helpless longing across the charming vista of the harbour and its backdrop of palms and steep mountains where, no doubt, torrents of sparkling fresh water fell in cascades to cooling pools; and rather than dwell again on the culinary seductions that had brought about the death of my poor little brother, I decided to unpack at last some of his belongings that neither I nor Josephina had wanted to look at up to that point.

  my dear sad sister . . . her help, which she tired of offering . . . her own meagre experiences . . . her existence in the dreary, barren, disappointed space between body and mind . . . her poor heart distant from the lively world . . . These were but some of the observations I read in the first entry of my brother’s journals, the first one I opened and the first and therefore the most recent of the five that were stacked neatly together and bound with a ribbon in the old English valise where he kept them, together with his few most precious books. The valise was a gift from Engels and had arrived with several books in it, including The Condition of the Working Class in England with Engels’ inscription to his ‘dear Comrade Wolf Bloch’. Wolf had long treated the valise as if it were an outsize teffilin for what had become his sacred texts once he renounced religion. It was of course the first time I had opened this special, private bag, intending only to see what he kept in it and what might be done with its contents. The same question had to be asked of his other frugal possessions, his shoes and clothes, the hat that he always replaced with its exact replica when it got too shabby or when I told him it had become so, the neat kit of his medicines and toiletries, the writing utensils he maintained with obsessive care, and not much else.

  But my practical if sad task was stopped by the grief and anger I felt after reading these few pages, before closing the notebook and holding it shut tight against me as if to stop it adding to my confusion. I felt grief, of course, because there in these pages were the unmistakable traces of my dear brother’s presence and the tireless energy of his thought and speech. But my grief was confused together with anger at my brother’s presumed wisdom and misplaced sympathy, and by the question, Why had he never shared these tender concerns with me?

  His announcement of the part Josephina had played in what he saw as his transformation did not surprise me, but it wounded me too against my wish not to be affected in this way. Needless to say, I was also affronted by his unlicensed summoning up of my dear friend whose name I have refrained from saying either aloud or in my thoughts, needing to move past that time in my life and make something fruitful out of my loss. Yes, I may have been changed by that loss, but my brother’s patronising summary of its effects made me angry with him at the very time such anger was the last emotion I wanted as I surveyed the few material remnants of his short life.

  It was at this moment, as I sat weeping with a mixture of grief and rage, that Josephina came in to the cabin and found me surrounded by Wolf’s things. I saw at once that this shocked her, even more perhaps than the sight of my tears. She was standing in the doorway with her hands clasped beneath her stomach and her legs braced apart, and from this strong platform she pierced me with the look I have seen only intermittently these past months. Catharina was just behind her, and she turned and very firmly told the child to go outside and play with Gudrun, which she did at once, as if stung by a rare sharpness in her mother’s tone.

  What was I doing? she demanded to know, in a tone not so different from the one that had made Catharina turn quickly and leave. She continued to fix me with that stare I had once admired for what it seemed to convey of this young woman’s clear purpose but that now seemed unsympathetic and even hostile to me, indeed towards me. Her gaze shifted from my face to the journal I was holding tight, and then back to my face. I knew at once that I seemed to her to be clutching the journal possessively, as if to keep it or its contents from her. I put it on the bed beside me and said that I was preparing to look at Wolf’s possessions, to see what should be done with them. But why did I think I had the right to do this, Josephina demanded. Was it not appropriate for her, as Wolf’s wife, to have a say in what should be done, and to see what might have special meaning for her?

  And what was this? she wanted to know, picking up the journal. Wasn’t it where she’d seen Wolf writing down his thoughts? Didn’t she have the right to read what he’d written there, before any decision could be made about what to do with it? Of course, I said, and there were four more of the journals in Wolf’s special bag, she should read all of them if she wished. She sat down opposite me on her bed and opened the journal to its first pages, the very pages I had just read. After a while she put the notebook down beside her and once again confronted me with that clear look. And so, she said, what about the other things? They could be offered to the other passengers, those who might need them? What did I think? But she made no move to return the journal to its bag or to me. And so we proceeded to sort through Wolf’s mundane things together, and made a pitifully small pile of what seemed useful, while the journal we had both read some pa
ges from remained where she had put it, on her bed, together with the only other thing she wanted for herself, which was my brother’s apothecary’s bottle of syrup of violets and almond oil.

  The clothes and other things that had once been Wolf’s disappeared into the lives of those who took them, the English valise with its books and four of the five journals remained with me, the writing materials Josephina kept for Catharina who now knows how to write her name, and the fifth journal and the bottle of syrup of violets and almond oil Josephina kept for herself, though neither of us ever spoke of the arrangement in such terms. Nor have we ever talked about what we had read in the journal. What was written there, whatever it meant in different ways to either of us, was hidden in the circumspect relationship we then maintained until the second event about which I will write now, remembering still the shadow of circumspection that was present at this moment and clouded the event like an approaching squall.

  The birth of Josephina’s baby was completed in the very early hours of Saturday morning, on the seventh of February, 1880, apparently with relative ease though after a long labour. It is now Sunday late in the afternoon, and she and the baby have been back in our cabin since just after midday, together with fru Frederiksen and Catharina. The birth took just under a day altogether, beginning with the moment when Josephina came in to the cabin where I was resting. I saw from her expression that her labour had begun, and that her dress was soaked below with that commencement. She very calmly went to wet a towel in the washroom and came back to our cabin to wipe herself clean and change her clothes. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and seemed to retreat into herself. Her eyes were closed and a little smile was the only sign of any emotion.

  She had been with the women who associated with our neighbour fru Frederiksen, and this woman, who had recently ingratiated herself to Josephina, knocked at the cabin door and, when admitted, asked if there was anything she could do to help Josephina at this time. The implication of her kind enquiry was that I was not the person with requisite experience in these matters, and of course she was right to suppose so. Josephina, however, declined the woman’s offer and said only that she preferred to walk up and down on the deck for as long as possible, and to rest from time to time, and to be alone, but that when the time came she would ask me to find the matron who could then summon the midwife, if that was necessary.