The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  There’d been no pub in Kaitīeke, so they shared the last of Beth’s bottles of ‘pretentious fizzy water’ by the honey house. He blamed foreign ‘Lord of the Rings tourists’ for contaminating the rivers with Giardia. He reckoned that back in the day they’d practically drunk the river dry on a daily basis, and then pissed it all back in again, no trouble.

  ‘Kind of you-could-not-piss-twice-into-the-same-river,’ Beth said.

  ‘Here we go again,’ said her cousin.

  ‘Feels like time doesn’t flow, it just waits for the now to make space for it.’

  ‘Holy hell,’ said Frank. ‘What happened to good old you’re born, they rip out your tonsils, most of your teeth, your spleen, your man’s foo-foo valve, and then you die?’

  ‘You left out the bit where they cut off your tits,’ said Beth.

  ‘Old-fashioned good manners. I was raised proper.’ Frank tipped up his bottle of fizzy water and she watched his Adam’s apple go up and down in his skinny neck with its folds and creases.

  She put her finger on it. ‘You used to chase me with that lumpy thing when it was brand new. You said it was your dragon tongue coming out to get me.’

  ‘I always swallowed it, though,’ said Frank, who seemed sad all at once. ‘Always did, eh.’

  And the melancholy river, too. ‘Wolf Bloch’ circling back in that eddy by the far bank. The river’s placid surface below the shallows silent, like Great-great-grandmother Josephina on the subject of the time-eddy.

  ‘Always did, Frank. I’ll give you that.’

  Josephina

  Catharina was asleep on her breast and Josephina had been asleep, too, perhaps, for a while – her neck ached. The baby’s warm mouth still made weak sucking movements. Josephina put her finger in a corner of the little mouth and removed her nipple. Please let the child not cry. And she didn’t – her face clenched in annoyance and a thimbleful of sour milk spilled down her chin, and then she slept on against Josephina’s chest. Perhaps in a while she would move the baby to her crib and make shoosh-shoosh sounds like waves sloshing against the harbour wall where the fishing boats were knocking on each other’s hulls just across the quay, and this would soothe Catharina, like the rocking of a little boat, and then she wouldn’t wake the others. The small room at the top of the house was too warm and there wasn’t even enough breeze through the window to flutter the candle flame; the creases in little Catharina’s neck were moist. Josephina liked how the air smelled by the window when a breeze came up off the fishing boats and she could unravel the threads of fish, sea and tar, and sometimes the delicious tang of the Bückling smoking-yard further along the quay; but tonight there was only the sour stink of the baby’s little puke and of her own sweat.

  She lifted Catharina into her crib below the window – perhaps a breeze would come down along the harbour later – keeping the baby’s body close to her own until the last minute, keeping her face and breath against the moist little head, making the shoosh-shoosh wave sounds and rocking the little boat with her foot, and when the baby didn’t wake up, stepping back until her calves met the edge of the narrow bed and then folding herself down across its coverlet. The salt cart rattled past on the cobbles below; so, it would soon be dawn.

  It was cool outside under the pear tree that didn’t have any leaves yet; the sunshine came down on Oma’s cap that looked like one of the big brown mushrooms she found where the old trees grew on the hills above the river and where Papa, in his growly voice, said there were wolves. But if there are wolves, why does Oma go there? Ha! said Oma, I have a trick, see? She turned her back on Josephina and bent over, holding her skirts out to make herself huge and jumping backwards, which made Josephina scream where she was sitting on the pinewood stool Papa had made for her with the big skein of rough grey woollen yarn across her held-out hands while Oma wound it into a ball. Papa’s stool had pictures of deer on it made with a hot poker; they had antlers that were like Josephina’s hands held up with the yarn across them. When you wound the yarn around the nails at the top of the Strikkelise it came out the bottom as a tube. If you make yourself very small, said Oma, that tube becomes a tunnel you can crawl into. And what happens then? said Josephina, knowing the answer already. You come out where everybody has funny little faces, they all have two blue dots for eyes and another red dot for a mouth. And do they have arms and legs? No, the poor things have no arms or legs, instead they have round bodies like the legs of your stool, only hollow, they have a little grey wooden scarf around their neck and a little red wooden belt around their tummy where their legs should start, only they don’t. But how do they move around? Ah, said Oma, they move around by doing a little dance, they hop around each other like this, they go around this way and then around that way, they turn themselves around and around. The skein of grey wool danced back and forth between Josephina’s antler-hands and went across the space between her and Oma, who was winding and winding the wool into a big ball. When the ball was big enough it would roll away from the pear tree across the cow meadow and down the hill to the sea where a giant herring would snatch it up and swim away unspooling all the way to where the little Strikkelise people were waiting to wind it into a tunnel for Josephina to come home through.

  Danne was laughing and shouting loudly at his wagoner in the street, his voice booming and hoarse – ‘Fuck dig! ’ The man whistled and the horse clopped away. The front door slammed and Danne’s voice was vibrating in the room below. Then her sister was laughing and telling him to keep his hands to himself. There was a long streak of sunshine across the wall, it seemed to be slowly widening, but perhaps that was just the effect of waking up and coming out of sleep. Oma was there, not quite in the dream but not quite out of it either. The baby was still asleep in her crib, but Josephina hadn’t even got properly into her own bed or taken her day clothes off. If she hurried now she’d be able to go to the outside privy and also have a wash before Catharina woke up.

  Greta and Danne were sitting at the table having coffee and talking in Danish with their heads close together – when she came in there was a little pause before they smiled at her. Finn had his beak-clacking wooden duck on the floor and was pulling it around on its string. When he saw Josephina he said, ‘Catha, Catha?’

  ‘She’s still asleep,’ Josephina said, as much to her sister and Danne as to the boy. Then she went quickly out to the yard. Greta had already hung out some washing – that was Josephina’s job now the maid had gone. Big glittery flies were buzzing in the light that came through the fish-shaped opening Danne had cut in the privy door, and when she clapped her hands the pitch of their buzzing rose shrilly as if they were terrified of the light-fish. The bucket of ash by the lavatory seat was full – that was her job too. She washed at the pump and dried herself with one of Catharina’s damp napkins on the line. It smelled of the yellow laundry soap and the verbena leaves that Greta liked Josephina to throw into the copper, only she hadn’t done that this morning, Greta had. We were getting short of napkins for Catha, Greta told her, so, well, little sister . . .

  ‘Danne’s just gone off to Flensburg to talk to the Germans.’ Greta said this with a smirk; it was the joke she and Josephina liked to share, since the smoked herring Danne took south came back north as the rum he tested diligently for quality before selling it to the good Danish citizens of Sønderborg. Now the baby was crying upstairs. ‘Go on, go on, bring her down,’ said Greta impatiently.

  ‘I’ll feed her first,’ said Josephina. ‘And change my clothes.’

  She was filling a jug with warm water from the kettle to wash the baby when she felt the huff of Greta’s breath on her cheek as her sister’s hand reached past and took the jug from her.

  ‘Bring her down, Josie, for the love of God, please,’ said Greta. She was standing the way she more often did these days, a little lopsided, one hand on her stomach. The other hand holding the jug she waved at the room without her big booming husband in it – some water splashed out on the table. ‘Nice and quiet,’ sh
e said. ‘For a week, imagine that.’

  The hand that Mutti put on Josephina’s where it rested on the packet-boat’s rail wasn’t like the hard bony one that had struck her on the face. Mutti had taken her glove off and Josephina thought her thin white hand was like one of the little terns that were chasing behind the ship as the sails began to fill and stop snapping at the pale sunrise where the fjord flowed out at Laboe. It was foggy and the place where the sea began and the sky stopped was blurry and pink – you couldn’t really see what was water and what was air. The little terns were catching the breeze that had begun to spill from the sails, they were playing joyfully in the gusts, turning and dipping and skimming the ship’s wake, but Mutti’s hand just rested quietly on Josephina’s. She began to feel its warmth through her glove, and the tapping of Mutti’s fingers that meant she wanted to comfort her but couldn’t make the tapping obvious like a pat, or even put her arms around her, because there were other people from Kiel on the Flensburg coaster, successful men, they knew Herr Mayer certainly and Tante Elizabeth as well perhaps, some might also be going on from Flensburg through the Bugt to Sønderborg, and they would notice. They would notice something and then the purpose of the voyage would be spoiled and wasted. We’re going to visit my daughter in Sønderborg, was what she had been telling people and, depending on who she was talking to, Her husband’s doing very well, they have a house right next to the harbour, he comes down often to Flensburg.

  That was perhaps why Mutti suddenly began to sing the song that had always meant they were having fun when Josephina and her sisters were children: Backe backe Kuchen, Der Bäcker hat gerufen. Her voice was a bit strained and squeaky, and what did baking cakes have to do with being on the ship, and the lines about Eggs and lard, sugar and salt, milk and flour made Josephina feel sick. But when Mutti sang the last line about Push it into the oven Josephina began to laugh, she was laughing and laughing but almost crying.

  ‘But I’m not a child, what do you think you’re doing, Mutti?’ She wasn’t going to cry, even though her heart was breaking in half in her chest as the ship slowly approached the Schwentine and the mill that was there above the estuary, and the railway station, and the hillside where Elke might even then be going down through fog-dewy grass to milk the two cows, and her home among the apple and pear trees that had only just got their first pale-green leaves – she couldn’t really see any of it because the ship was on the far side of the fjord and there was fog. But also she could see it, she could see all of it, the picture in her mind saw right through the fog. There was Elke walking past Oma’s old pear tree with her milking stool in one hand and a milk bucket in the other, she was calling Bossy Bossy, and the two cows were running to get their handful of oats from the bucket, the fog was coming in clouds from their grassy mouths, it was their sweet breath.

  But then it was Mutti who was crying, she was doing it very carefully and quietly with her face turned away towards the pink sky above Laboe so that the other passengers on the packet-boat wouldn’t see her tears. But what did they care, they didn’t know Mutti. When Josephina put her arm around her mother’s shoulders she didn’t pull away, but Josephina could feel how hard she was trying not to shake with her sobs. She seemed to have become smaller suddenly, or else Josephina hadn’t noticed her getting smaller and thinner during winter, and the little tern-hand on the rail was so thin and bony that Josephina put hers on top of it.

  ‘We used to sing it all the time when you and Elke and Greta were little, really when you were just a baby, and Greta used to sing it to you, you liked it, you liked it when Greta sang to you.’ Mutti’s shoulders were firm again, so Josephina took her arm away. ‘You liked it then,’ Mutti said. Then she took her hand from under Josephina’s and felt in her sleeve for a handkerchief. She had steadied herself. ‘I was just remembering,’ she said. ‘Because we’re going to Greta’s, after all, are we not?’

  Remembering what? Everything to be remembered began before Hauptmann von Zarovich. Even before Mutti’s first daughter, clever Greta, left to live with her new husband, a big Dane from Sønderborg? He was becoming rich, said Mutti sometimes, as if that was a cause for complaint; they had a maid. Tante Elizabeth had a maid, too, after all, in Gaarden, they didn’t spend the winter like peasants in a Bauernhaus with the animals inside and their piss running down the slope-floor, didn’t they deserve to have a maid?

  It was snowing outside; Mutti had come in from the pump with a bucket of water to sluice the slope-floor and seen Josephina being sick inside old Gunnar’s stall. She was holding herself steady with one hand on the horse’s warm flank – Gunnar didn’t notice what was happening, he just kept grinding away at his feed of oats, she could feel the vibration of his grinding teeth under her hand. That was when Mutti struck Josephina on the face and Gunnar lifted his head suddenly and stamped one hoof when she cried out. No, indeed, it was true, she hadn’t bled for two months, she said, and Mutti hit her on the mouth with the bony back of her hand. Papa and Franz were there, they were cleaning out the stalls, and Elke was pushing water down the slope-floor with a big willow broom. Everyone stopped what they were doing when Josephina cried out and Gunnar blew a startled gasp from his nostrils.

  What was the matter with her, Elke wanted to know – she was wringing out the rags in their ‘blood bucket’. Because, you know, they always went together, in the same week, but now, twice, no little sister with her in the bucket? Elke was looking at her with that expression that meant she thought she knew more than Josephina did. There was a nasty smell of chlorine coming from the bucket but that didn’t explain why Elke was wrinkling her nose; it was Josephina’s silence that made her do that. The silence hid Hauptmann von Zarovich shouting ‘Ah!’ and then pushing her away sideways across the back of the sofa. ‘Get out of here you little whore’ – wasn’t that enough? His face was crimson and he was wiping snot from his whiskered lip with the back of one hand. No, she wouldn’t talk about it, not to Tante Elizabeth who was the kindest person she knew, not to her mutti because she was already angry, not even to Elke who thought she knew everything but she didn’t.

  Yes, it is true, she said to Mutti, holding herself steady against Gunnar’s warm flank, no bleed for two months, yes, now I feel sick when I wake up. That was when Mutti hit her on the mouth, as if she wanted Josephina to shut up, as if she preferred her silence of the past weeks. Josephina’s lip was cut, she had the taste of blood in her mouth, and when she shouted right into Mutti’s face that yes, Hauptmann von Zarovich stuck his big thing in me, it was as though the words tasted of blood, as though the little sprays of blood and spit that landed on Mutti’s cheek were the words Josephina had not spoken from the moment she walked back across the town from the hissing swans at Ratsdienergarten and couldn’t make herself sing ‘Wie traulich war das Fleckchen’ at Tante Elizabeth’s house – as if at that moment when she shouted the bloody words into her mutti’s white face the Strikkelise tunnel opened before her and she went through it and came out in the Bauernhaus with Mutti and her papa and Elke and Franz all staring at her while old Gunnar ground away at his oats. And then Elke put her big strong arms around her and walked her away from the slope-floor to where the fire was burning in the living space and it was warm, and held on to her until her papa and mutti got there.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Papa, putting out his hand to touch her but from a distance, ‘that bastard shithead Junker!’ But if that was true, if it was true that he knew it, why didn’t he do anything the day he came to get her from Tante Elizabeth’s, why didn’t Tante Elizabeth say, ‘I knew it, that shithead bastard,’ and make her papa do something, why did Mutti agree to be silent when she, Josephina, decided to stop talking? And anyway, it was her big warm sister Elke who said it first when they got to the fireplace – ‘I knew it, Josie, I always knew it!’ – even if it wasn’t true that she always knew it, how could she have always known it? But her strong arms and the warm smell of her working body and her tears that smeared together with Josephina’s on t
heir pressed-together cheeks were true; and then the others were there, and they all started to talk at once, all saying they knew it, all except poor Franz who went out into the snowy morning and didn’t come back until evening to get his things from his crib next to Gunnar’s and leave for ever without talking to anyone.

  How beautiful her big sister was – Greta’s cheeks were flushed with anger or impatience, but that just made her more beautiful. No wonder Danne couldn’t keep his hands to himself, he especially liked to rest one open palm on Greta’s stomach just where it was starting to swell out below her apron bib. Little Finn noticed that his mutti was talking in an angry voice; he pulled his clacking duck across the floor towards her, calling ‘Mor, mor,’ and for just a moment it was as though Josephina didn’t know where she was – of course this was his dänisch home and Greta was Mor, not Mutti.

  Then Josephina put her arms around her beautiful mor sister and said, ‘I’m sorry, I was tired,’ into her hot cheek.

  ‘Mor!’ Finn was tugging at Greta’s skirt and preparing to cry.

  ‘We’re all tired, Josie,’ Greta said. ‘It’s normal.’ She picked the child up and jerked her head at Josephina: it meant go upstairs and get the baby, right now.

  When she came down again Greta had made some chamomile tea and they sat outside in the back yard while Josephina fed the baby. The day was hot so they sat in the patchy shade of the napkins on the clothesline. Bees were humming in the purple verbena flower-heads along the wall by the privy and there were big slow flies to wave off the baby’s face. With one hand Greta wiped at a line of sweat above her top lip and with the other she tried to restrain Finn. Danne was looking for new opportunities, she said. He wanted to sell the Bückling smoke-yard because the fisheries were not so good anymore. She thought that if her new child was a girl she’d call her Ayla after her oma back at Kiel and because it was an interesting name, but Danne wanted to call her after his mother who lived way up north in Skagen, God knows why. Now was a good time to dry the verbena for tea, they should hang some bunches. Most Danes thought the Germans in Sønderborg should have packed up and left after Dybbøl but after all her and Josie’s opa was buried over there poor foolish man, and the two uncles as well. In November when it was getting cold Catharina would be able to eat a warm spoonful of stewed apple with honey.