The Reed Warbler Read online

  She then looked at me quite directly but without the challenge of our encounter over the journal a week earlier, in fact still with the little smile that had been the outward sign of her inner contemplative state, and said that she hoped I wouldn’t mind if she called the child Wolf, if it was a boy. In fact, she thought she might call him Wolf Bloch Hansen, since the Bloch name had been bartered for our safe passage and deserved to be recovered. And if the child was a girl? I asked. A sour lump had risen into my throat, but then was not the time to spit it out as words, and in any case at that moment I had no idea what the words would be, nor whether they would be uttered as a wounded cry of protest or as a grateful cry of assent.

  If the baby was a girl, Josephina told me without waiting for my dissent or approval, then she would also like to remember the name Bloch, but would add to it the name of one of her sisters, not Elke which was the one commemorated in Catharina’s name, but that of her eldest sister, Greta, the one who lived in Sønderborg, in Denmark, and who together with her husband Danne had given her shelter and love when Catharina was born. She would like to be able to thank Greta for that loving kindness in the name of the child who would be her niece in a faraway place, whom she might want to visit there one day, if that might be possible. And how did I feel about that? she asked again, using my name, Theodora.

  Ah, how did Theodora feel about that? Viewed in the kindest light, Theodora found Josephina’s suggestion to be moving, and the request for permission it entailed to be considerate. Viewed unkindly, I, Theodora, found the suggestion to be impudent and brazen, and the request for permission to be disingenuous and sly. And of course, Theodora found the Theodora who viewed the suggestion for naming the child in the kindest light to be the Theodora she wanted to be, indeed the one who mirrored the loving kindness of Josephina’s eldest sister in Sønderborg, the one called Greta who might even undertake as punishing a voyage as the one Theodora was now enduring, for no other reason than to visit the niece named after her. But also of course I, Theodora, knew that the Theodora who found Josephina’s proposal to be impudent, brazen, disingenuous and sly was the honest Theodora.

  It was the Theodora I wanted to be, and knew I had to be at that moment, who told Josephina that of course she should name her child in this way, it was a very generous and touching idea, and after all, Wolf Bloch was indeed the father of this boy or girl child, and his name should indeed travel on to the new land for which he had such high hopes.

  At that moment I shocked myself with the thought of taking the child and raising it myself, and at the same moment saw that Josephina did not entirely trust or believe the response of the Theodora I wanted to be, the Theodora who mirrored the loving kindness of her sister Greta in Sønderborg. The bitter lump of unspoken words in my throat sank back to the pit they had come from, and I said, only, that of course Josephina should let me know the moment she wanted to call for the midwife, that she should rely on me to get her anything she needed in the meantime, that I would stay close. Then she kissed my cheek and said she was going out to walk on the deck for a while, it was good to do that, she was happy to be by herself at this time, there was no need for me to stay too close.

  She did not say she wished Wolf could be there with her, though I am sure she was thinking it, and I guessed it was in consideration of her acute hearing of the dissonance between us, and her disinclination to irritate it, that she did not say she longed for Wolf’s companionship. And so, in the guise of the Theodora I wished to be, I said that it was sad Wolf could not be with her at this time, could not be the one who walked with her on the deck. But he will be, she said, if you know what I mean.

  And now there in our cabin is the child called Wolf Bloch Hansen. He has his father’s dark hair and his father’s dark eyes, and when I last saw him his father’s impatience with the tiresome business of getting food. My heart is very full of his presence, my chest and throat are swollen with his sweet smell, and the fingers with which I have written these words remember the clutch of his little hand, which will not let me go. The dark squall I anticipated after the business with Wolf’s journal has passed and the air seems brighter and clearer in its wake.

  Catharina

  Now Mutti said Baby Wolf was a week old and so was growing up quickly but he still cried a lot and made a mess. Mutti said a week was a long time for a baby. Tante told the schoolchildren that a week was seven days. Mostly there were four weeks in a month. Could any of the children say how many days there were in a month? Gudrun’s big brother Bendt said twenty-eight, he was ten years old and could read and write. Yes, Tante told the children, Bendt was right, but sometimes there were more, for example thirty days. Could the children please remember thirty days. Each day lasted for twenty-four hours. But how could Bendt be right when he said twenty-eight but there were thirty, Bendt’s brother Harald wanted to know, so Bendt poked him with his elbow and then Harald poked Bendt in the stomach. Then Tante said again could all the children please remember thirty days and that each day lasted twenty-four hours, and could any of the children say how many hours there were in a month, but not Bendt or Harald because they had to keep quiet. But none of the children could do the question, it was too difficult. Bendt and Harald were pretending to keep quiet but they couldn’t do the question, Catharina could tell, because they were making silly faces at each other. Seven hundred and twenty hours, Tante told the children. That was how many hours there were in most months, it was a lot of hours, and did any of the children know how many months the ship had been sailing to New Zealand? Two hundred, said one of the girls with red hair, her sister had red hair as well, they were called twins. Their names were Julia and Sophie but sometimes Julia pretended to be Sophie and Sophie pretended to be Julia. Was the girl who said two hundred Sophie or Julia, Tante wanted to know. She was Julia, the girl said but the other one gave her a special look. Then Tante told the children that the two hundred months Julia had answered was more than sixteen years and so now Julia would be twenty-four years old and a proper grown-up woman. Did Julia look like a grown-up woman? Then Julia began to cry and so did Sophie, they always cried together. Then Tante told them not to worry, because today was a special day. Today the ship had been sailing for one hundred days, that was fourteen weeks and two days, which was more than three months and was also two thousand and four hundred hours. Now all the children were not sitting still, they were looking around to see what was happening in other parts of the deck, and some of them were standing up. The people with violins were playing music on the high part of the deck at the back of the ship. Yes yes, said Tante, the children could go and listen to the music. But Catharina went with her to see Baby Wolf. He was sleeping and so was Mutti. He was next to Mutti on her bed. Would Catharina like to give Baby Wolf a little kiss, asked Tante, but just a little one so he wouldn’t wake up? So she did, she could smell the oil from the little bottle that Papa Wolf had. Then Tante gave the baby a little kiss as well, and they went out to listen to the music. Was Tante happy because of the hundred days, Catharina wanted to know. Or because of the music? Then Tante told her that the music was called a string tree by a man called Franz Schubert, she liked it very much, but she liked Baby Wolf even more, she liked Baby Wolf the most of everything. So that was why Tante was happy. Was that why Catharina was happy as well? Yes, Catharina liked Baby Wolf, but now he was always sleeping with her mutti and he made a lot of mess.

  Josephina

  Josephina finished embroidering the baby’s nightgown with the two little Rohrsänger on its front just a day before the baby was born. She was doing the last thread of the thin black reed-stalk gripped by the bird’s tiny claws. She drew the thread through to the back of the cloth and picked up the last couple of stitches. Then she snipped the thread and turned the nightgown right side out.

  How good it always felt, to finish something. Then there would be a new thing to start.

  There they were, the little birds, facing each other and tweeting with open beaks.

 
Shall we go? Are you ready?

  The baby was very low, now, and seemed to be squirming.

  It was a nice breezy day and the deck was very crowded. There was Mister Oats with three men playing cards – he had lifted his hat to her politely when she first came up on deck. Sometimes after she began to be out there again he had brought her a thoughtful gift, some water, for example, or some dried figs from Mauritius. He was helping her with some English words, and she could then pass them on to Catharina.

  Water. Weather. Wind. Ship. Wash. They were quite like the German words. But some were not. Fruit. Sky.

  Ada’s friendship group, by their expressions, were wondering if Mister Oats wasn’t somewhat forward?

  But the friendship group admired the finished embroidery on the baby’s nightgown very much, and especially how Josephina had left patches of the muslin free to represent the breasts of the little birds. The effect was so nice and simple and fresh!

  She had already washed the nightgown three or four times because the smell of the baby’s puke was strong in the cabin where it was very hot and close, even with the door open to the stateroom and the hatchway. The Rohrsängers’ pure little breasts were stained now, and the coloured threads unpicked from other things and used to embroider the birds were already somewhat frayed here and there, so that the outlines of the birds were becoming blurred. The tiny jet beads that one of Ada’s friends had given her for the birds’ eyes were still there, though, she had been careful with them when washing, and they looked out brightly from the little frayed faces.

  Some of Baby Wolf’s napkins were cut-up bed sheets from Ada’s friendship group. The napkins also smelled worse than Catharina’s had at Greta’s house, where Josephina could boil them up in the outside wash copper with some of the verbena by the privy and the good yellow soap that came in Danne’s boat from Flensburg. Then, she could put her tired face in the drying napkins sweet with the smell of sunshine or fresh with frost out in the yard at the back of Greta’s house, and breathe in her happiness.

  There was hardly any soap to buy on the ship, they didn’t get any more at Fremantle, and the piece she had was very hard and couldn’t work with salt water, only with hot water from their ration. The smell of the nightgown with the two little worn Rohrsänger was her grief and it would not go away, not even after she tied the nightgown and the napkins in the rigging and let them flap about in the wind that was taking Baby Wolf to his home. There was her grief, she scrubbed and scrubbed at it on the washboard with the hard piece of soap and rinsed it out with cold salt water, but it stayed, and in her heart she wanted it to stay. There were her grief’s flags like the signalling pennants that were hoisted when they saw another ship at sea or when they were going in to a harbour. There, flapping in the rigging for all to see, were the secret signs of what she hid from Catharina and from Theodora, but who could read them? Only she could read them and understand what they were signalling.

  Yes, she understood what her flags were saying, that her dear Wolf had gone, and also that she was the only one who could understand the flags, and that the meaning of the flags was her secret. Catharina could not know the meaning because it would hurt her to see her mutti’s grief going on and on after the scrubbing and the wind, and Theodora could not know it because it seemed as though the baby had healed an old wound in her, perhaps the loss of her friend that Wolf wrote about in his diary. Now, Theodora would hold the baby while Josephina attended to her own needs, she would take him out and carry him around on the deck or to sit in the shade of an awning, and she was even unwilling to give him back when Josephina asked for him. Of course she pretended it was a game, holding the baby tight and saying, No, you can’t have him, he’s mine! – but it was plain to see that she meant it in a way.

  Was this a good thing? Some of Ada’s friends liked to hold him as well, especially the one called Elizabeth who had given her the jet beads, and two of the smaller children were curious about him and wanted to poke him to see what he would do. But of course Theodora’s feelings were stronger and more real than those of Ada’s friends. Baby Wolf’s father was her brother, after all, and she sometimes cried with a trembling mouth that was holding her words together with difficulty, and said she thought about Wolf and how he would have loved to cuddle his son.

  Little Wolf had brought Josephina and Theodora together in almost the opposite way to how the grown-up Wolf had driven them apart – it was surely a good thing that they were united in their love for the baby? – and yet sometimes Josephina’s strong instinct was to snatch Baby Wolf from his father’s sister, from his aunt, which was not right or fair, but she couldn’t help it. The desire to snatch her baby back from Theodora was connected to her grief. She didn’t want or need to lose her grief, she just wanted to look after it properly and keep it to herself. And so sometimes when she was approaching Theodora and saw how Wolf’s sister was adoring the baby and looking at his face and giving him little rockings, she would have to turn away and walk around for a while on the other side of the deck, or look at the sea slowly purling away behind the ship, unhitching itself from its side and sliding away, being there and then not being there.

  Then she would go back to Theodora and say that it was time for her to feed Baby Wolf. Theodora would say of course and hold the baby up to her and they would smile at each other over the baby as he was passed between them.

  Sometimes he was asleep and it was clear that it wasn’t time for her to feed him, but she would take him away to the cabin and wait for him to wake up.

  But of course mostly she was grateful for Theodora’s help, with Catharina as well as the baby. Without her help and the kindness of Ada’s friends and especially Elizabeth it would have been difficult to manage both the baby and her grief, because her happiness and her grief became confused together at times, and then she needed to find a little space for herself, to feel that she was alone when washing the nightgown, for example, even when there were others at the tubs.

  Theodora offered to help with the washing but Josephina liked to do it herself, and there was a better supply of water and firewood after Fremantle.

  Some sailors had run away when the ship was in Fremantle and some new ones had come on board. On the first morning after they left the port, one of the new sailors pulled all the washing off the ladders in the rigging and threw it on the deck. He was a tall man with a thick yellowish beard, and when Josephina said what did he think he was doing, because the captain permitted them to put washing in the rigging, he stood looking down at her with his teeth showing in his beard.

  There were several teeth missing in his smile, if it was a smile, and he stood there pointing his gappy smile down at her for a while before asking, in a strange accent, was she German?

  Yes, she was, but what did that have to do with the washing?

  It had nothing to do with the washing, merely with how he should tell her, gnädige Frau, respectfully, in language she could understand, that the captain was no doubt a wise man, but that it was not the captain who had to climb up the rigging, where the washing would be in his way if he did try to, so he would probably break his neck and then who would steer the ship? And what was her name?

  Then one of the ship’s officers shouted angrily at the sailor, who went at once to the rope ladder and climbed quickly up. But he stopped for a moment and leaned out, holding on with one hand, and made a bow to Josephina with a flourish of his free arm. Or perhaps his bow from the rigging was a mocking one, for the benefit of the angry officer. She could just make out his disrespectful grin up there.

  Josephina began to tie the napkins and the nightgown back in the rigging but tried to keep the rope ladder as clear as possible. The sailor was too familiar for her liking, but also friendly in his way, and his mocking bow was funny. And there for a moment was the young sailor with the wonderful whorled shell and the bitten-off earlobe and the missing finger and the ruined smile on the harbourside at Kielerhafen – did he get any money for his shell, and what did he d
o with it? She could feel that her mouth was making a smile, but she hid it from Elizabeth who had come over to help her tie the washing back in the rigging.

  How uncouth and rude that sailor was, standing over Josephina like that! – where did those men come from, they were surely criminals running away from the authorities – was Josephina going to complain to the captain?

  No, she wasn’t going to complain, Josephina told Ada’s friend. It wasn’t the sailor’s fault, after all he was new to the ship.

  But standing over her like that!

  Elizabeth’s mouth pursed around her disapproval.

  What she could not know was that Josephina and Theodora and of course Wolf had also been ‘running away from the authorities’. It was clear that Ada’s friends were not quite sure about ‘Frau Hansen’ – they had befriended her when she needed help, they admired her needlework, they discussed Baby Wolf’s health at nearly three weeks already! – but Josephina sensed there were many questions about Frau Hansen that they discussed among themselves and that were not asked when Frau Hansen was with them. Their conversation bulged with the pressure of the unasked and unanswered questions, like the sails of the ship bulging and quivering with the pressure of the invisible wind.

  Why did Josephina demur when asked if she would like to join their Bible reading group? Was it because she had been married to a Jew? What had been Herr Hansen’s profession? Why did his sister keep so much to herself? Was Hansen a Jewish name as well as a German and a Danish one?