by Ian Wedde
The young woman’s name was Maria. They had met her the day before when they came to see the nursery and make arrangements. Maria was from quite far away in Magdeborn, her husband had died in a mining accident, now she was living with her sister and husband in Dovenfleet, their child was also at the nursery, her sister was upstairs in the sewing room – it was all right, she said, the children were all right there. Maria was wearing a plain pinny, it looked quite clean, and although she talked very fast and seemed jittery, Josephina was comforted to know that her sister’s child was also at the nursery because that surely meant she would take care of Catharina.
An older woman asked only if Catharina knew how to relieve herself. Then she went back to a corner with a stove in it and a table where she was chopping vegetables. There were about a dozen children in the room and, on the side away from the grimy windows, some cots for babies. A boy was riding a horse-trolley fiercely towards other children who seemed to like running away from him – Josephina hoped he wasn’t too rough – and in one corner some girls about four years old were sitting on the floor in a cluster, playing with something she couldn’t see that was making a clattering sound. And then one of the girls stood and ran with the thing in both hands while the others chased her. She was the winner – she was holding up a large painted wooden farm-girl doll, like the old one at Greta’s place with brightly painted girls that went one inside the other. Then the victorious girl was caught over by a stack of little pallets, and they all sat down in a circle and started again.
The room was warm but not too stifling or smelly, and there was a comforting aroma of the soup that the older woman was preparing – Josephina could smell kohlrabi, and she hoped there might be a meatball in it for each child as well. The stack of little pallets was pushed against the wall near the cots, for the children’s midday sleep, said the young woman called Maria – usually it was quite peaceful then, did Catharina like to have a nap? Yes, usually she does, Josephina told her, and she likes this special shawl, as you can see it’s got a sucky corner, may I leave it here for her? When we come back tomorrow? And an orange?
And now they had done it, she and Catharina, and she was going up the next flight of stairs while Catharina continued to shriek on the floor below.
The sewing room was up two more flights from the nursery, which was one above the street. Each step up took her further from Catharina, but at the same time closer to where they were going together, it was a place but it was also the future and she had its fresh smell on her fingers, it was the smell of an orange.
But no, she had to go back – how could she leave Catharina there?
But then Catharina’s shrieks stopped, and Josephina went on quickly, before her dread of what had caused the shrieks to stop made her turn and run back down and snatch her away from the young woman with the nervous, babbling manner. It was her ‘situation’ that she was inside as she climbed the stairs; it was her ‘situation’ that made her attentive and polite as her day’s task was explained to her. She was inside her ‘situation’ like the painted toy Bauernhaus farm-girls inside versions of themselves as she began, with downcast eyes, to sew buttonholes on a man’s four-button twill jacket.
There was a stack of twelve jackets in a basket on the floor beside her, she should finish them before going home – it was piece-work, yes, but there was a quota she was expected to complete, if she was unable to there would soon be another young woman in her place, did she understand that? Was that clear?
Yes, she told the supervisor, who leaned in close to her and had obviously had a smoked herring with pickle for his breakfast, and who watched the workroom from a raised platform where he made notes in a book and picked at his teeth – yes, she understood perfectly well, thank you, the nature of her situation, it was quite clear. And then, when she’d finally finished the jackets, she and Catharina went two-stitch-stepping down the mountain from the nursery where the little deer had a new friend called Alex, who talked funny.
Josephina’s back and sewing fingers were very sore, she was hungry and thirsty, the street was dirty, it was a long walk to the horse-tram, and Catharina had to be carried the last half of it. But now she was happy – it was as though she’d caught up with the future, and that was even what she saw when she and Catharina entered the kitchen at Herr Andersen’s house, and Catharina told Schmidt One that she had a new friend called Alex and the old grump smiled at them both.
Why had she wanted to go into that room, why had she, why that room? This was what the woman who Josephina knew to be Frau Andersen was asking. Not who was she or what was the beautiful child’s name. They were now in the gardenia bedroom and Catharina was sitting on Josephina’s lap in a comfortable chair with padded arms. They were both looking across at Frau Andersen in another nice chair.
‘Why?’ asked Frau Andersen. ‘Tell me.’
Was she angry? Her tone was calm, and her face, dimly lit by the lamp, seemed also barely lit by any clear emotion from within. Her hands were folded in her lap – she’d taken off her gloves, and her entwined fingers were white and thin. Josephina had yet to speak, she was holding Catharina close and breathing in the warm smell of her hair. The woman had handed Catharina to her on the landing and then gone into the room and lit a lamp, trimming the wick to a soft glow, and then, while Josephina stood hesitating outside on the landing, had called out, ‘Come!’ and pointed to the chair.
My name is Josephina Christian Hansen and my daughter is Catharina Hansen, my sister is Greta Andersen and her husband is Herr Andersen’s nephew, Danne Andersen. Even so, we are forbidden to go upstairs in this house. Why does what happened to me in the past continue to close the doors to my future? Do you want to know what happened? The Junker made me put on the nightgown I’d sewn for his wife, he stuck his cock in me, he threw some money on the breakfast tray and said Don’t come back you little whore.
But Josephina didn’t say any of these things. She looked across the dim room at Frau Andersen and saw that she already knew all about it, so why should she say everything again and again, since every time she did it, those things – the nightgown, the Ah! and the snot, the money, her own silence – every time she said them again, to herself or somebody else, they just pushed her future further away, they closed the doors to it? And what was going to happen then, would she become like Mutti, always longing unhappily for a future that had a house in Gaarden or even in a street like Faulstrasse in the town, without animal piss running down the slope-floor, and with the respect that was due to Meister Hansen?
‘You don’t want to talk to me, Fräulein Hansen,’ said Frau Andersen, whose fingers were now twisting themselves together in her lap. ‘That’s a pity.’
‘I’m very sorry indeed to have offended you, Frau Andersen,’ said Josephina as politely as she possibly could, wanting now more than anything to be out of the room with its sad perfume of gardenias and the woman whose fingers were knotting and unknotting in her lap. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I should put Catharina to bed.’
Because if she stayed any longer, how could she stop herself from asking the woman whose emotions were hidden in the dim shadows of her face but whose hands were restlessly signalling them why she and Catharina couldn’t have used the room at the top of the stairs? But of course she knew the answer, because it was her ‘situation’ and she was familiar with that.
‘I can see that you’re a good young mother,’ said Frau Andersen, ‘and of course the child must get her sleep. But first there is something you should know.’
Josephina had begun to stand up from the comfortable chair with Catharina whose weight was now that of a sleeping child – her arms hung down and her head was lolling against Josephina’s shoulder.
But she sat down again and listened as Frau Andersen’s almost monotonous voice explained that Fräulein Hansen may have thought that she had left the opera because the music was bad, but that wasn’t the case. The music was excellent. No, she had left because she couldn’t endure the sympathy of
the people she met there. Even when they only gossiped the sympathy was present, the sympathy was always there, in what they didn’t say. When would it end?
Now Josephina was sitting very still within Frau Andersen’s gaze, because she was hearing what her own anger and resentment had almost pushed to the side of that look at once without emotion and yet pitiful.
Their only daughter was seven years old when the cholera killed many in the city, Frau Andersen told her. That was almost ten years ago. Did Josephina know what cholera did? It emptied the body and burned it up with fever. That was something you didn’t forget. And now Herr Andersen would not permit anyone to enter the room that had been their daughter’s. Her name was Isolde. Did Fräulein Hansen think it had been easy to go to an opera with that name in its story? Did she think it had been possible for people at the opera to be unaware of her situation? Their friends? To conceal their unspoken sympathy? But her husband, Herr Andersen, had insisted.
And now, of course, Fräulein Hansen should take her beautiful child off to bed.
But Josephina knew clearly, as she went carefully down the three flights of stairs to the kitchen with the breathing weight of Catharina in her arms, that it had not been Herr Andersen who had forbidden anyone to use Isolde’s room at the top of the house, it had been his wife, and what could he do but try to protect her?
Now Josephina remembered the tenderness with which Herr Andersen had picked up Catharina at the train station, how he’d held up his arms to her as they got down from the horse-tram, and the care with which he’d handed her down to Josephina in the boat that took them under the dark arch of the bridge and along the river to the back of the house on Deichstrasse, which was the way to enter the house at the bottom level without going in through the front door. Because the front door was the entrance to the story that Danne’s uncle Farbror Aksel didn’t want Josephina and Catharina to be in.
And what had it been like for poor Frau Andersen to come home alone from the opera with her dead daughter’s name in it and go up the stairs and see, above her, a sleepy little girl sitting on the top step next to her daughter’s room?
And now, how could she and Catharina stay a moment longer in this house?
Friedrich Engels
My dear Pasquale, or let me rather say Dear Citizen Martignetti
I’m glad to tell you that my efforts in your matter have not gone without success. Wolf Bloch, editor of the ‘Bürger Zeitung’ in Hamburg, writes to me that a local businessman (in the cotton business and also runs a sewing room for young ladies in distressed circumstances), a personal friend of mine, political without prejudice, perhaps has a task for Martignetti, if at first just a modest one. It is however desired that M first send his photograph. It’s funny, this – my friend himself finds it so – but necessary for practical reasons. It would be good if M could even send the photograph to the gentleman with a letter of recommendation. His name is Johannes Paul, in Paul & Steinberg Company, Alterwall 58.
If you want to find out if a position can be found here you would do well to send Herr Paul your photograph. From my side I will provide you with the outline of a letter of recommendation to the same gentleman, such as is commonly used in commercial situations in Germany. In this matter, I draw your attention to the need to keep away from ostensible political activity in Hamburg, as you will otherwise absolutely be expelled. The situation of Socialists in Germany gets worse by the day, and new coercive laws are in view. On the other hand, you have been offered an opportunity to take on a commercial activity and through that enter into a new carriera as you say in Italian.
My eyes are recovering finally, so it seems. But I cannot as yet think about serious work, and so the manuscript of your Italian translation of Marx’s essay ‘Outwork and Capital’ is still resting.
I attach my draft letter from you to Herr Johannes Paul in Hamburg and wish you success.
With best wishes
Yours, F. Engels
To Herr Johannes Paul in Hamburg
Through Herr Wolf Bloch I learn with pleasure that there is a prospect for me to find employment with your worthy company, but that you first require my photograph. I will provide you with this, and note that I have worked here for [insert number of years] years in the royal Notary Office. If you would have the goodness to inform me as to the nature of the activity and the other conditions I can expect, I will be deeply grateful and in your debt. Should the opportunity on offer be realised, I will gladly do everything to fulfil my new obligations in accordance with your wishes, and sign with sincere thanks for your sympathetic approach
Respectful and devoted P.M.
And the external address:
To Herr Johannes Paul
Herren Paul & Steinberg
Alterwall 58
Hamburg
Germany
Beth and Frank
Frank was groaning in the next unit – should she check if he was okay? Then he was talking loudly on his cellphone. He’d always shouted on the phone back when they still did their ‘cooee’ calls.
‘The Great Galah here, how’s my favourite Kiwi?’
Ages ago.
Then he was laughing. He laughed for a long time, with joy and abandonment. What would it be like to hear him laughing like that from far away in Townsville or somewhere like that perhaps? If it was pregnant granddaughter Lizzie who was listening? Or her mum, whose name was? Who lived where? How could she be expected to remember? If she’d ever known? Then it sounded as if he was saying goodbye. Then his door shut firmly and his footsteps crunched away on the gravel path.
Then Beth closed the door in her mind that had opened for her to go outside to keep an eye on her pissed great-grandfather cousin. At the top of a fresh page in the A4 notebook she’d girly-swottishly named Reunion Notes, she wrote, Wolf Bloch (1843–?1880): Zum Gedächtnis. A (very) rough translation.
It was in the churchyard Père Lachaise/ On the fourth last day in the month of May/ There fell the last Kämpfertrupp [?fighter squad?]/ Crushed by fire, steel and lead/ The last proud Kämpfertrupp/ That these hordes resisted resisted these hordes/ The [?Die=plural?] Mac Mahon, the [?singular?] hero of his order/ Bloodhound equal, out of Bolt [?placename? family name?] sent.
If that opening stanza was anything to go by, Wolf Bloch’s memorial poem was going to be a long retreat across the rubble of historical cliché. But inside this stuff, like a ghost summoned up by scraping lichens off Great-grandma Josephina’s headstone, was a German man whose inspiration had been the French Commune and its martyrs. The same mystery German who may have been Grandad Wolf’s father.
She rather hoped so.
No sound from next door. Frank was still out there somewhere.
One down, twenty-five verses to go.
And as banged, echoed now was/ The shotgun [?musket?] noise, the fury shouting/ And as the place of graves did/ From the swarm of soldiers become free/ There one heard from afar still/ The long [adjective], dismal streets long [adverb]/ Always duller, further, dying/ The battalion seriously went.
‘The battalion seriously went.’ Laboriously? Heavily? When Marx and Engels wrote about the Commune in their introduction to The Communist Manifesto they didn’t say ‘The battalion seriously went’. Professor Schreiber gave the Introduction as a translation exercise back in the day – he got covered in red paint at the anti-Vietnam War demo in Auckland in 1971 and was a bit of a long-haired radical sex symbol, but then got busted for inappropriate relations with students and went back to Germany. She’d given the opportunity some thought herself, but nah. And now Prof Schreiber was just another ghost out here on the margin of State Highway 3 with moonlit Ngāuruhoe like a white-faced spook. Maybe he’d meet Frank wandering around laughing his head off in the headlights of speeding cars – they were both mad buggers, they’d probably get on fine.
Clearly, WB was a mad bugger too, in his day, maybe even a sexy radical firebrand. What he seemed to be saying in verse two was that it was all over for the Communards,
the Mac Mahon Kämpfertrupp, the echoing noise of muskets and furious shouting was gone, the swarm of soldiers had left the graveyard and, in the distance, for a long time along the long, dismal streets, the sound of the departing battalion could be heard as it seriously/laboriously/heavily went.
Yes, true, she had somewhat fancied Schreiber, quite a lot actually, before he seriously went, the way his nice teeth bit off the words of Brecht’s ‘Five Theatre Poems’, especially the ‘Zeigen’ and the ‘gezeigt’ of Das Zeigen muss gezeigt werden: ‘The showing has to be shown!’
‘Das Zeigen muss gezeigt werden!’ she said to the ghosts in the room, the old shawl, the garbled text, her old body with no tits. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to talk to on the phone at night about those times, to have some of that back – now would be good, to have a laugh about it, to show the showing.
The Great Galah and his bad Aussie jokes?
No, probably not the Great Galah.
Josephina
Would she and Catharina like to ride to work with him in the cab this morning – it was a long time since he’d seen them or spoken to them, it would be nice to have a chat?
Tall dark Schmidt Two was surprised on the other side of the kitchen; she’d been grinding some coffee and telling herself what to do about the oven pancake mix that needed to be ready in ten minutes, was the oven hot enough, and so forth? And now Herr Andersen, who never came down to the kitchen, had come there before breakfast was even ready. Schmidt One, whose manner towards Josephina had warmed somewhat over the past weeks, hadn’t yet arrived at the house, and it was still too early for Josephina and Catharina to take their breakfasts up to the street door and along Deichstrasse to the horse-tram.