The Reed Warbler Read online

  ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ she said. ‘You love me more than stars, remember?’ The child was quiet. ‘How shall we begin?’ whispered Josephina. The story was there in her mind, all joined up in a pattern, like the cascade of vines and flowers down the front of Junkfrau’s nightgown. ‘Once upon a time there was a cosy spot where a child lay sleeping in her cradle. By day, the trees and flowers and vines sheltered the child from the rays of the sun. Beautiful songbirds perched in the branches of the trees and sang to each other about the child who was laughing with pleasure to hear their songs. Beautiful butterflies . . .’

  ‘You’ve already used that word,’ said Mathilde, but she was almost asleep.

  ‘. . . colourful butterflies alighted on the flowers and vines and fanned their wings above the child in the warm breezes. In the evening, when the stars began to appear in the sky and a big yellow moon floated up out of the sea, dragging her shining sleeve across the water, the child would sometimes spend an hour before bedtime looking up at the stars and the heroes and animals twinkling in the heavens.’

  ‘Tell me a hero,’ murmured Mathilde, ‘or a Puck Puck story,’ but then her voice turned into some lip-smacks and she began to snore.

  One night, as the child lay looking up at the stars, a hero with a sword came down from the sky. He chopped away the vines and branches that were protecting the child and pushed his way into the cosy spot. And then he shouted in a terrible voice, Ah . . .

  Elke was pulling her clothes on in a huff. ‘Please yourself,’ she said. ‘But he did something, that Junker, otherwise why all the fuss and bother?’

  ‘He told me not to come back,’ said Josephina.

  Now Elke was giving her that big-sister look. ‘But why? Why would he do that? If he liked the work?’

  Josephina wanted to say, Why don’t you go into town all by yourself and drink a coffee with Hauptmann von Zarovich and ask him why he said that, but she didn’t. She turned her back on Elke and put her bare feet on the chilly floor.

  From the kitchen their mother called out angrily that they were late. Josephina knew Mutti blamed her for spoiling their chance to go ‘upstairs’, but did she also feel bad about not going with her to the von Zarovich house? Well, if Mutti wouldn’t say so, why should Josephina talk? She’d gone into town on the train by herself, she’d walked from the top of the harbour all the way over to the Hauptmann’s house in Faulstrasse, she’d shown him the nightgown, she’d got the money, she’d gone all the way back to Tante Elizabeth’s house over towards Gaarden, now she was home again. That was all.

  Josephina put her chilly feet and legs back under the eiderdown. So, are you finished? Yes, she was. Now she was finished. When her mother didn’t call her again, or come angrily to the bottom of the loft ladder – or come up the ladder to say she was sorry and give her a hug – Josephina closed her eyes.

  Finished.

  *

  The ships lined up out in the harbour roadstead all had long cords stretched fore and aft from their masts, with dozens of pretty flags strung along them. Josephina went fast along the harbourside where the lighters came in to unload at the jetties – it was rough and noisy, but couples were promenading there and looking at things some of the sailors were offering for sale. One of the sailors was about Josephina’s age; he looked as though he’d been baked, his hair was almost as white as Mutti’s sun-bleached linens, and his face and arms were as dark as coffee. On a dirty blue neckerchief by his feet was an enormous trumpet-shaped shell with whorls going around it. When he saw her look at it, he picked the great shell up and held it out to her. His smile was terrible, with only a few black teeth left.

  ‘Hold it to your ear, Fräulein,’ he said in thick Lübsch dialect. ‘This one can talk. It can tell you where it came from.’ He put it to his ear and stood with his head on one side and his eyes closed. The fourth finger of his right hand was missing and so was the lobe of his ear not covered by the shell. ‘Ah, what a place,’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘So beautiful. Like you, Fräulein.’ He held the shell out again.

  Josephina hurried on. She’d have liked to listen to the wonderful shell but the young sailor frightened her – he looked half crazy. What would he do when she told him she had no money to buy his treasure?

  Some of the well-dressed townsfolk were exclaiming over a new three-masted steam-yacht with two slender funnels on top and mighty paddle-wheels on either side, like hips. It was just launched, people were saying, it was for the King of Portugal. It was steaming slowly down harbour as if being displayed. The crew, dressed in white uniforms, were lined up along the deck facing the town. One of the well-dressed spectators watching the King of Portugal’s steam-yacht with its well-turned-out crew would surely buy the young sailor’s beautiful shell. And one day they would surely want to buy her embroidery, which they would have heard about from Junkfrau von Zarovich, or seen, perhaps, when Junkfrau was looking at a royal steam-yacht while wearing an outdoor promenading outfit with a high-collared blouse embroidered in the Bohemian manner by Fräulein Josephina Hansen.

  Josephina looked back as she turned away from the harbour towards Rathausstrasse and Nikolaikirche and the streets that led on down to Kieler Schloss and the garrison houses, but she couldn’t see the young sailor. The old church sat weightily on the ground and it was hard to imagine how its tall green spire could seem to fall so lightly across the sky as the clouds went past. It was like a signal, and Josephina sent a message through the open door asking that Junkfrau would please admire her work on the nightgown, adding could someone please buy the poor young sailor’s wonderful shell. Then she closed her eyes and imagined the tall steeple pointing to heaven and waving her message.

  It was as if she then opened her eyes again to find that the Nikolaikirche steeple had indeed sent her message, because there was Hauptmann von Zarovich smiling at her with his big teeth stained from cigars, in his shirtsleeves and riding breeches and, which gave her a shock, on his feet a pair of embroidered green tapestry-cloth house-slippers with red and white roses done in cross-stitch – she saw the slippers as, following Clara’s hand signal behind her back, she bent to curtsey, and as she straightened and met the officer’s examining stare she saw the ends of his moustache twitch and knew that he’d seen her noticing his slippers. Her heart was beating quickly, at first because she was nervous, but next because the Hauptmann’s unexpected embroidered slippers were like another encouraging sign from the steeple.

  He had thick fair hair and a moustache turned up at the ends Hussar-style; when he showed his big teeth in a grin the waxed ends of the moustache stood to attention.

  ‘Very comfortable slippers from Gujarat,’ he said, barking the strange place-name. ‘Do you know where that is, Fräulein?’

  ‘No sir,’ she said, feeling the blush rise up out of her collar.

  ‘Nor do I, Fräulein!’ He was laughing at his joke and waving for Clara to leave the room. There was a careful clatter as she put the extra cup on the tray with the Hauptmann’s unfinished breakfast, and then an equally careful click as she closed the door behind her. ‘Nor do I,’ repeated the man, ‘my wife chose them as a present, she loves that sort of thing,’ adding ‘Gu-ja-rat’ with exaggerated movements of his lips. ‘But then,’ he said, continuing to stare at Josephina, ‘everything beautiful comes to Kielerhafen in the end, wouldn’t you say, Fräulein?’

  Josephina thought of the poor young sailor’s great whorled shell that could speak where it came from, but instead she said, ‘I like the sweet oranges, sir.’

  ‘Ah, the sweet oranges! I too like them.’ There was a silence while he continued to look at her. What was she expected to do? Then, inclining his head at a chair by his breakfast table, he said, ‘And the stupid girl didn’t even pour our coffee – would you mind, Fräulein?’

  Outside by the main door, Papa’s journeyman Franz was planing coffin planks. The regular panting sound of the plane came into the house and as far as the back where Josephina and her mother sat at op
posite ends of the big table with the shroud between them. It was one of the fresh new linens and smelled of sunlight. They were doing a border of blue crosses. Because they were not talking to each other anymore, the sound of Franz planing was like words going back and forth, mixed up with the clucking of hens looking for grains near the fodder stall. Mathilde now had Josephina’s old linen scrap treasure with the picture of Puck Puck the special chicken she’d embroidered on it, but Josephina sometimes told herself Puck Puck stories in the silence of her work with Mutti, and remembered the warmth of her special chicken against her chest when she was little, and its occasional pecks. When Mutti wanted to move her section of the border she rapped with her knuckles on the table. Soon it would snow, and Papa and Franz would keep their work inside for winter. Then they would all be there together: the two cows and old Gunnar in their stalls, the chickens, Franz or whichever worker stayed long enough, Josephina and Elke in their little loft, the trestles with unfinished coffins and tabletops on them in the space between the stalls, and Papa and Mutti by the fire arguing about how to get established in the town.

  But ‘the Oma’ wasn’t there – her grandmother’s sampler that was Josephina’s now, covered all over with stitches making pictures of flowers and houses and animals in different coloured threads, and a snowy mountain with a little deer on top, that spoke the names of the stitches and also had Oma’s voice in them, in the stories that each stitch told – little words for big stories that Oma told over and over and especially in winter, starting when Josephina was too small for sewing anything but Strikkelise, and when the birds made footprints that were like stitches on the snow by the big door and told the stories of the birds’ songs, how they were cold now, not like those lucky ones that knew how to fly away somewhere nice and warm. Oma died after her husband was killed in the Danish war at Dybbøl Mill – he was buried over there by the marshes, along with the other ‘fools’, including two of his sons who thought it was a great thing to shoot at Danes with wonderful Prussian rifles because otherwise they would take all the farms and smallholdings like theirs. Josephina was seven when Oma fell down dead after making a sweep of her arm to scatter grain for the hens outside in the yard – she heard the old lady shout ‘Hein!’, which is what she called her husband, and then she fell down flat on her face like a plank. She was too angry was what Mutti thought, angry with the ‘fools’ who marched off to get blown to pieces for the Prussians, it was anger that killed her. But Josephina could remember Oma’s stories, which were not angry; and when she was twelve Mutti gave her ‘the Oma’ to look after so she could properly learn the stitches that told the stories that told the stitches and that, after a while, began telling Josephina who she was: that she was a young woman now, that she could be proud of her skill, that she had value. But now the Oma was locked away in the big dark chest in her papa’s and mutti’s room, and Josephina couldn’t have it back until she began to talk again.

  Mutti rapped her knuckles on the table and then gave the shroud cloth a yank. Josephina was snipping a thread and the yank made her hand slip; the scissors pierced her thumb and some blood flicked on to the white linen.

  It wasn’t her fault, and when her mother said, ‘Now look what you’ve done you stupid girl,’ Josephina stood up and walked down between the stalls and out the big door past Franz who stopped planing to smile at her and make a little bow – it was going to rain, he’d be coming inside, he said – and down the hill as far as the gate. An inky black storm cloud quivering with lightning was stalled out over the sea. She stopped and let the great sobs burst out.

  When as requested she came back into the Hauptmann’s breakfast room with the nightgown on over her shift ‘to show off your handiwork’ – was it wrong to do that, it wasn’t proper, she was ashamed, but perhaps it was what was expected? – she didn’t know he would at once open the front of his breeches where his hand was already busy inside to make his big thing jump out, that he would push her face into the back of a sofa and tear at her undergarments, thrusting himself against her and then with a loud Ah! into her. There was blood on the nightgown when she changed back into her street dress; she left it on the floor and went out by the front door as ordered to. And don’t come back you little whore – he threw some coins on the breakfast tray and left the room, and she just went out and walked. First she walked the wrong way over towards Ratsdienergarten, but there weren’t enough people and voices to hide her, the lake was full of glaring light like a mirror and the hissing swans had left their filth all along the bank, so Josephina walked back across the town to the harbour. It was crowded and noisy so she stood near the place where the young sailor had been, she could buy his shell with the Hauptmann’s money, but he’d gone, and so had the King of Portugal’s grand wide-hipped steam-yacht. When a man came and stood too close to her for a while and then said, ‘So, Fräulein?’ she walked away quickly and kept going all the way until she got to Tante Elizabeth’s place and the huddle of houses, workshops and gardens there at the edge of Gaarden. This was where her papa planned to be ‘established’, but Josephina wanted him to come with good old Gunnar and take her away back down to the Schwentine where the town looked small and distant across the other side of the fjord and where the sky spread out and was almost white like silence above the sea beyond Laboe.

  Mutti was excited and happy the day she and Josephina went to show samples of needlework to Junkfrau von Zarovich; she was imagining when they’d all move into a proper house in the town or at Gaarden – maybe even a house like the one on Faulstrasse where the Hauptmann lived, it wasn’t so grand after all. The housemaid Clara didn’t go hmm-hmm or make her thick eyebrows go up and down that time, because she was respectful of Josephina’s mother – but, before opening the door to Junkfrau’s bedroom, she put a finger on her lips and whispered that the Hauptmann’s wife was not feeling well this morning, she’d had peppermint tea but nothing to eat for breakfast. Mutti nodded as if she understood the significance of the peppermint tea. Then they went in.

  The large bed had a canopy supported on dark wood-turned spiral columns that Josephina thought her papa would very much like to see, and perhaps he would, one day soon; and there was a fine chaise longue with a lion’s head carving on the back and tapestry covers depicting colourful birds where Junkfrau von Zarovich lay shielding her face from the windows. She was wearing a loose, long-sleeved dressing gown in a lightweight material the colour of pale milk-coffee; it had ruffles down the front and pale-blue bows at the cuffs. A pair of embroidered slippers peeped out from the hem. She had a childish triangular mauve crochet shawl with slip-stitch edging around her shoulders and some strands of fair hair hung below her small white lace cap. She didn’t get up to greet them, not even Josephina’s mother, who spoke to her in her best German, calling her ‘gnädige Frau’ even though she was not much older than Josephina. She liked looking at the samples, though, running one finger over the stitches while looking at Josephina; but she didn’t talk to her, only to Mutti. She especially liked the Bohemian vines and flowers, and she held out the ruffled cascade on the front of her dressing gown for Josephina to look at. Then she lay back and turned her face away; she hadn’t once spoken to Josephina.

  Clara was waiting outside the door and Mutti said nothing to her but in the kitchen she proudly told the cook that Junkfrau liked Josephina’s work very much and wanted her to make a special ‘lie-in’ nightgown. The Stork was busy and in an irritated tone told Clara to show them the door.

  ‘Old vinegar-face,’ said Mutti once they were outside, but she and Josephina sang on the way home from Tante Elizabeth’s with Papa in the cart; she’d told Tante how much the very beautiful young Frau von Zarovich (Mutti was no longer calling her Junkfrau) had loved Josephina’s work and how she’d asked for a special lie-in nightgown to be made with a cascading ruffle front, which meant she was probably going to have a baby and there would no doubt be special baby clothes and comforters to make, and word would get around when other officers’ wives saw
what Josephina had made, they’d be jealous of Frau von Zarovich, and they’d also certainly hear about the fine wood-craft work of Meister Hansen – and that night at home everyone was so happy, even Elke, who still had to get up and milk the cows after Papa said Josephina could leave the coffin cloth work for a while and make the special ‘lie-in nightgown’ for Junkfrau von Zarovich. He was smiling at her and his eyes had filled up with tears – from too much brandy perhaps but also because he was proud of his youngest daughter; he was very proud, very proud, he said so several times before it was time to go to bed, and he kissed her on both cheeks before she went up there with Elke. Then Elke was snoring a little; it was nice and warm; there was an owl.

  Beth and Frank

  There was no one around at the river bank by Great-grandad Wolf’s old abandoned slab-concrete honey house, so they took their clothes off and hung them over a mānuka branch. Little dark native bees were busy around flowers higher up in the tree. The river flowed quietly along in a deep section before the pebbly shoal at the bend where their families had camped on the grassy flat a few times in the summer. There used to be a rope swing by the pool beyond the bend, and Frank would do his ‘Ayiiiyah!’ Tarzan-ape-yell when he swung out and splashed into the water.

  ‘Couple of scrawny bloody old ragworts,’ he said before doing his Tarzan yell and jumping. When he came up again and spouted a mouthful of water, it was the same Frank-grin Beth had known meant mischief a bit over fifty years ago. Then she was six and the big cousin she worshipped was the magic age of sixteen, which meant he could make his Tarzan voice do a kind of yodelling thing when he mimed Elvis Presley singing ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog’.

  Then she jumped. The delight of the cool water wasn’t even a memory, it was as though her skin had gone on being in the same present as when she was six. She floated downstream a little inside her delight, and there was her cousin Frank drifting headfirst beside her. They floated together for a bit. Then she turned and swam back against the gentle current. She could sense Frank trying to catch her feet but she didn’t let him.