by Ian Wedde
Greta
Dear sisters and also Papa
And also Catharina, perhaps we shall see you again before too long sweet child, I hope you remember your cousins Finn and Otto and your Tante Greta.
This is a short letter because I will write something like it twice and send one copy to Josie in Hamburg with your letter Elke and your bad and good news.
I have to start with the good news. Of course we are all grieving for the loss of our dear Mutti but we have to go forward with our lives and the lives of our children and now Elke has a path to happiness with this Johannes Somebody, please tell us his complete name! Elke I hope this man will make you happy, he had better do so or he will suffer the wrath of your sisters! I kiss you Elke and hold you close for a long time, you have borne much of the grief and work caused by our poor Mutti’s sickness, but now that is over and you can begin another part of your life. Danne wishes you well also but he says that man Johannes Somebody had better know what he is doing because our sister Elke is like a squall, she will tip him over if he doesn’t watch out.
I was very sad to hear of Mutti’s death and that she is now buried down at the old graveyard, please kiss Papa for me and tell him we are very sorry for the rift that has come between us, it meant he and Mutti would not come to Otto’s baptism and christening but also that Danne and I and our children were not near Mutti as her sickness got worse, and could not be at her side at the end or at her funeral, we didn’t know until too late. Papa of course we will all come to your daughter Elke’s wedding and to visit Mutti’s grave, I hope that the wound between us will heal then, please do not forbid this, you cannot, we have lives to get on with and enjoy including the lives of all your grandchildren Papa.
Josie has written to say that she has left the house of Danne’s uncle Herr Aksel Andersen in Hamburg and is now living at what is called the Bloch House also in Hamburg, she is happy there and so is Catharina, but she will write to you about her situation I am sure, and perhaps we will see her and Catharina at your and Johannes Somebody’s wedding Elke, it’s surely not hard for her to catch the train. It would be such a joy for us all to be together again. Josie’s address in Hamburg is Haus Bloch, An der Alster, St Georg, she can tell us all about it when we meet God willing.
As for us here in our nice Sønderborg, we are all well thank God, no one got sick this winter past, it was a hard one again with too much ice in the Alsund. The Bückling yard has gone at last thank God I say but Danne is grieving for it, poor man, but other business is good enough, Finn is beginning to learn reading and writing over at fru Jepsen’s, he doesn’t like it but too bad!
And now I will stop and send this to my lucky sister Elke with many kisses, and will write another one like it to send to our little Josie in Hamburg, together with Elke’s letter sent here just days ago. Elke kiss Papa for me and give my best wishes to Johannes Somebody, remind him that I am the eldest sister and he will have to answer truthfully the questions I am preparing for him!
Daughter and sister
Greta
Beth and Frank
None the worse for wear, Frank, and back in his last-night’s possie with its view across the plateau to Ngāuruhoe, a well-cleared breakfast plate pushed to one side of the trestle table with flickering sunlight on it this morning because of clouds racing across the sky, and his sparse hair blowing about as well. The lips that he extended in a cautious, trembling tube towards his coffee were determined, nonetheless, as were the glasses halfway down his nose – he was trying to read a newspaper folded against the breeze and held down on the table with his saucer and free hand.
‘Bloke here reckons all immigrants should be sent home, name of McGregor, couldn’t agree more, bloody Celts!’ He held his cheek up sideways for her kiss – he’d shaved, and there was a hint of classic aftershave, bit like the one Noel used to have – Tabac? ‘Cona coffee,’ he said, making a show of smacking his lips, ‘god it’s good, and plenty more where it came from, have you ordered? They do a bloody excellent mushroom omelette.’
Beth was having English Breakfast tea with some Vogel’s toast and marmalade. ‘Tea and toast,’ she said. ‘Creature of habit.’
‘Did you know,’ Frank said, sipping and swallowing with a lip-smack, ‘that Cona coffee with a “c” comes from Kona coffee with a “k” which is an arabica from the slopes of the Big Island of Hawaii? Behold our multicultural immigrant breakfast, the humble Italian frittata, the arabica via Hawaii, and the Cona vacuum brewer from our always ingenious Germans, your tea from the imperialist British, your marmalade from a place where oranges grow – Portugal let’s say, or the Mediterranean via Arabs, Islamists for sure – and your fermenty toast the bloody Germans again, Herr Vogel.’ He made a show of folding the newspaper shut across McGregor’s letter-to-the-editor. ‘Back home where you came from, McGregor!’
Frank’s mock-pedant routine was probably to wind her up because of her own tendencies, so she didn’t bite.
But he’d spotted her notebook. ‘Travel diary?’ he said, creeping his fingers towards it. ‘Give us a look?’
‘Family reunion notes,’ said Beth, and he withdrew his fingers as if from something red-hot. Then a cattle truck tore past on the highway, leaving a whiff of sheep shit in its wake.
‘Off somewhere they hadn’t counted on called lamb shanks. Bad karma,’ Frank said, but then put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. ‘We can stop doing this now if you like.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Obsessing on about all that reunion stuff, families, who was what to whom, etcetera, you know. Guess what I did last night?’
‘You went out more or less completely pissed, as I recall.’
‘Yes, I did. I went and sat with the dog back there. He was glad. We shared the moon, and an occasional fart. We were just in the moment. He moved his nostrils and ears a bit. After a while I told him about Lizzie being pregnant and that she knew who the father was, young guy called John, she thought he’d be a good enough dad. Then we just sat there a bit more. Then I came back and had a damn good sleep. Your light was still on.’
‘Good enough?’
‘It doesn’t matter. She’s a smart girl, Lizzie, she’ll love the kid and it’ll have a great young mum for a long time, how lucky is that. Maybe young John will be in the picture and maybe not, let’s hope things go well for him too.’
In the notebook by her elbow were the twenty-five stanzas of the German poet Wolf Bloch’s Zum Gedächtnis memorial to the martyrs of the 1871 Paris Commune’s final bloody paroxysm in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a ‘(very) rough translation’ filled with hyperbole and words like ‘dismal’, ‘crazed’, ‘despair’, ‘place of death’, ‘sweat and blood’, and ‘longings of mankind are awakened/ In the fresh bosom of youth’, as well as ‘valiant courage’ and ‘ultimate beauty’ and quite a bit of ‘third estate’ – stirring stuff but also, this morning, next to Frank’s night with Hotel Dog, a bit dispiriting.
Beth left the notebook shut where it was.
‘Heard you having a good laugh on the phone before you went out,’ she said. ‘Not that I could hear what you were saying or who to. But was that your granddaughter? Lizzie? Must be a hard case.’
Frank took a careful sip of his Cona from Kona and shook his head. His smile was careful and almost tender.
‘I was talking to Helen.’
Helen was his wife of some forty years, a librarian in Rockhampton – Frank used to skite about her passion for native plants, she’d written an often-reprinted field guide to the northern end of the Great Dividing Range. They had three kids and one more each from previous marriages that went phut early; she’d died ten years ago, heavy smoker, lung cancer.
He wasn’t kidding.
‘I don’t need a phone to talk to her, Beth.’
Josephina
‘We zigzagged,’ said Herr Bloch, making a zigzag movement with his palms joined together – his hands ended up to the left of his head, pointing at the cei
ling. ‘Like perverse Ostjuden, from east to west and a little bit north as well, zig-zag-zig-zag, from the stetl to the boulevard, as we say, from Moravia to Freiberg where our beloved Kinderfrau turned back. We never saw her again – my mother said I cried for weeks on end.’ He took his spectacles off with a flourish to wipe imaginary tears from his eyes.
There were tall windows overlooking the little garden – Catharina and Alex ran past with muffled shrieks, and then Signora Martignetti, more slowly, with a parasol, as Josephina bent to take away Herr Bloch’s soup plate. The signora paused and gave a wave at the window, and shrugged – surely she’d like to come inside again soon, for some more lunch?
‘Then after a while rather suddenly to Leipzig,’ Herr Bloch continued his story, ‘where we learned proper German and in my case how to cough politely in company’ – he coughed politely with a rattle into his napkin – ‘then to Hanover where our dear papa lost all his money as usual, then to the charming unknown town of Uelzen where he began all over again as a clothier out of sight of his creditors.’
Signor Martignetti was a nice-looking man with grey hair at his temples and a neat beard that he held in one hand while listening to Herr Bloch’s story, which he seemed to be enjoying. With his free hand he was crumbling a bread roll and making a pile of the pieces without looking at it. He’d told his and Signora Martignetti’s story first, in strongly accented German with quite a lot of Italian words that he asked for help with, while they all ate their Schnitzen and drank a glass of white wine. He seemed to be a more serious man than Herr Bloch, who was telling his story as a series of self-mocking jokes – he kept his eyes on Martignetti, and Josephina already knew from experience that they were what Elke called ‘laughing eyes’ because he crinkled them up at the corners, the kind Elke always liked best – she always said never to trust a man whose eyes don’t crinkle, little sister, never, it’s the best rule, but what would she know.
‘And Uelzen was where our mother decided, again perversely, that she would never speak German, only Yiddish, and where, in spite of that, Theodora and I finally finished our schooling, because our father had moved with the times as he said, being the son of an enlightened Haskalah and by learning about capital the hardest way, by bankrupting himself.’
Herr Bloch raised his glass to Theodora who was putting pieces of the cook’s Sauerbraten on plates and passing them to Josephina to take around the table. There was also a potato casserole and some braised red cabbage with onion and apple which the guests could help themselves to – surely now she should go outside to mind the children while Signora Martignetti returned for her lunch?
‘Fräulein Bloch was the top of her class,’ said Herr Bloch. ‘Her little brother, however, preferred the safety of mediocrity – also wise because, as you can see, whereas my sister is a beautiful woman, I am not sportlich and the Lutherans liked to draw attention to their superior health by pushing me over into puddles.’
‘I was top in Latin,’ Theodora said with a tsk tsk. ‘Nobody else was interested.’ She wagged her finger across the table. ‘It’s not true that Wolf was mediocre, only that the Rektor would not permit a Jew to take first places.’ She blew her brother a kiss. ‘Also, he was disrespectful.’
Now Josephina was filling new glasses with the Italian red wine that Signor Martignetti had brought four bottles of – she thought she might try some later, with the cook, to see what it was like.
Herr Bloch took a sip and lifted his glass to Signor Martignetti this time. ‘Il sole del sud!’ Then they all raised their glasses and repeated what he’d said, it was Italian.
‘Ai compagni!’ said Signor Martignetti with enthusiasm, and they all repeated it, more Italian, and drank again, and then one more time as Signora Martignetti had come in and demanded to raise her own glass – the two little girls were having their lunch with the cook.
‘And now,’ said Herr Bloch, ‘to finish my story, which has gone on too long, you must know that a famous poet was born in Uelzen, his name was Hermann Hölty, a Lutheran pastor – his terrible poems about nature were sticky like Schnecken with extra syrup. It was because of him, and being pushed into puddles, and my father’s thorough researches into the pitfalls of capital, and my Haskalah grandfather’s desire to go west and a bit north, that I became a socialist.’
Everybody except Josephina laughed heartily at Herr Bloch’s story, especially the ending. Signor Martignetti drummed on the table with both hands, making the crockery rattle, but Theodora was looking at her with a little smile.
‘Sit down, Josephina, please,’ she said. ‘Please have something to eat. And please, tell us your story.’
What do I know and how do I know it?
All the eyes around the table had been fixed on her. They were so clever, those people, their stories were the stories of clever people, they understood each other’s stories and especially the jokes, and they had ways of knowing that she didn’t know about. She knew that when she shut her eyes into Catharina’s hair what she saw wasn’t the hair but the song she sang about it and into it, ‘Die Lorelei’, the same one Papa had sung into her hair when she was a little girl – but how was it possible to see a song? What kind of knowing was that?
But that was where she’d begun her story back in Hamburg at the lunch table – begun with Papa singing into her hair, in the Bauernhaus, where it was warm by the fire in winter. That was where she’d begun to know. It was that place, with her papa’s growly voice in it and the story of the girl with beautiful hair and the poor sailor on the river below, that she saw in her own hair when Papa sang, and now in Catharina’s hair when she sang to her, with her eyes shut, about Die Lorelei.
But now her papa was kneeling in front of her and pressing his head against her. His arms hung down, and it was his thick grey hair she was looking down into – he’d washed it at the pump not long before but it still had some bits of straw in it and she picked them out while he wept against her.
‘Get up, Papa,’ she said. ‘Here is your granddaughter, here is Catharina.’
Catharina was hiding behind her, and the others were all looking on. Elke had big tears rolling down her cheeks but a wide, quivering grin in the middle of them, Tante Elizabeth had a scornful expression for her brother even though she too was crying, Mathilde was holding Tante Elizabeth’s hand tightly and looking serious and grown-up because she’d been taken out of school for the day, and the tall man with long black hair was standing somewhat away, looking at his feet, Johannes Somebody.
Yes, she knew everything here except Johannes Somebody – the gentle fall of the land away down to the marshy reeds by the Schwentine, the trees with fresh new green leaves further up where the mill was, the water of the fjord that had a quivering pattern on it, the pattern that seemed to be at once moving and without movement, a shimmer, always a wonder in her childhood, the high streaks of mare’s-tail clouds in what was called a mackerel sky above the sea down beyond Laboe that meant it would get windy later, the nearby puck-puck of the hens picking around the yard, the people, the musty smoke smell of her papa’s hair as he began unsteadily to stand up while holding on to her arm – she knew everything but as if it was a memory and not as if she was there inside the knowing, inside the now place of it.
Papa had wiped away his tears and now he was holding one of Catharina’s hands between both of his – he was very pleased to meet her at last, he told her, did she know that this was where her mutti had lived when she was a little girl the same age as her, she had a favourite chicken that she liked to carry around and the chicken let her do it but sometimes it gave her a peck? Had her mutti told her about the chicken? Catharina shook her head, she was keeping a close watch on this man who had just been kneeling in front of her mutti with his head against her – Ah, he said to her, opening his red eyes very wide, you have a direct look just like your mutti’s, and Kornblume eyes as well, the same as hers!
And then Tante Elke was scooping her up and telling her and her mutti that this was Johannes F
ranzose, and Herr Franzose kissed her on the cheek and Mutti as well, and everybody began to clap – But where was Mutti’s favourite chicken, Catharina wanted to know.
Had it been a happy childhood, Theodora had asked. Oh yes, she had two big sisters and an oma who showed her how to make Strikkelise, and she’d had a favourite chicken – when she’d learned the stitches well enough after she was older she’d embroidered a picture of the chicken on a linen scrap and kept it for a long time. She used to give the embroidered chicken roles in stories she made up for her little cousin Mathilde, the chicken was called Puck Puck, and then one day she gave Mathilde the embroidered chicken when she asked if she could have it – but she still thought about it sometimes, the embroidered chicken, it was one of those little things that you remember, yes? That was how her childhood seemed to her now, the story of many little things, they were how she began to know.
And school? Was there a school when she was a child back at the Bauernhaus, with all the animals, Signor Martignetti wanted to understand, struggling with the word Bauernhaus. Oh yes, there was a school she and her sisters went to, and some other children from around there, it was the school of Pastor Köhler, they learned to read and write, and numbers, and also about the Bible, but she stopped when she was twelve and had to work with Mutti on the linens. The linens? Yes, her papa was a Meister, a cabinetmaker, he made very fine coffins, and she and Mutti did the linens for them, as well as the special clothes.
It had become quiet in the lunch room, even though the children were clattering about with kitchen things nearby – had she said something strange? Or wrong? She took a swallow of the red wine from Signor Martignetti and then said aloud, quickly, the thought that had come suddenly into her head at the same time as the wine reached her stomach with a nice warm sensation – that the Bauernhaus was a good place to learn about many things, from Pastor Köhler’s school of course but also from her papa, Meister Hansen, who knew everything about making fine furniture and about the trees the wood came from, from watching the animals and how the cows had their calves, from the garden that Mutti taught her to look after, and the orchard that was also Mutti’s domain, and, of course, the chickens, but most of all from her oma who taught her a great many stitches, hundreds probably, she’d never counted them, but each one had a story that explained why it existed and what it was for.