The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  ‘She’d have preferred to be a tree, for sure, but not one of those poor wood-pulp buggers. She was always taking the kids to look at trees – they used to say you like trees better than us. Not true of course, but still.’ Frank was squirming around in his seat, checking out the surroundings. ‘I worked here in the holidays after my first year at uni, before we went to Aussie. Boy was I green. A foreman had a log dropped on him because he got offside with a certain work gang. On paydays a bus used to pull in to the work camp with a bunch of prostitutes on board. The place was full of fucked-up guys with maintenance orders out on them, lots of keep-your-head-down crims. Lots of PI overstayers lying low and trying to save some money to send their families in town – these days we’d call them refugees. In the pub on Fridays there’d be jugs flying across the room and big brawls in the carpark. I met this old guy called Hick, he wasn’t allowed to see his kids because he was a drunk, he had a hermaphrodite pal called Joey, talk about an odd couple. We used to go for Sunday drives to places like Mangakino – they’d get completely pissed on Waikato Draught and I’d drive their clapped-out Ford Popular home to the camp. We’d stop on the way so they could spew or get their strides off to beer-shit by the side of the road. I hitched back to the city when the plant shut down at Christmas and the night I got home with my hard-earned cash Mum told me and Ruth we were going to Australia, she’d scored a subeditor job in Brisbane, time for a fresh start. She’d been a widow for thirteen years, had a couple of see-ya-later boyfriends, never stopped working, stayed in the same house. Ruth and me were nineteen. She was pushing sixty. You can stay here if you like, she said, but what were the chances?’

  Beth knew some of this but not the sordid Kinleith part. It was way more than Frank had said all week except for the story of Ruth getting killed in Jordan, as if both were his ways of telling her or himself about something else. The stories were like semi-transparent wrapping. ‘I remember Mum threw a goodbye party for you guys at our place,’ she said. ‘You told me not to cry. Fat chance. You promised to send me stuff.’

  ‘And I did, didn’t I? Heaps of it.’

  ‘You sent me jokes and photos of koalas and later on girls in bikinis – your girlfriends you said, but I never believed you.’

  ‘You were what, about ten?’

  ‘It lasted quite a few years.’ Beth drove through Tokoroa without stopping for their lunch, no way, it was a ghost town.

  ‘Still got any of that stuff?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Frank didn’t answer – he thought not was her guess, that was what his silence suggested. But those letters might still be there somewhere in one of the boxes under the house. What did it even mean to say she couldn’t remember? Quite a bit of the junk was Noel’s. Boxes and boxes of full 35mm colour-slide containers. She’d been meaning to have a cleanout ever since he died. There was a warped mast for an old Cherub sailing dinghy. That was what always made her turn around and go back up the stairs. He’d dumped the useless thing in front of her racks of stuff. The hull it belonged to went long before Noel did. She’d have to get around to chucking it.

  Wolf Bloch

  To Herr Aksel Andersen

  Deichstrasse 31

  Hamburg

  Friday, December 12, 1879

  To my respected colleague and friend Herr Aksel Andersen, greetings from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

  My sister Theodora and I also send our greetings and best wishes to Frau Andersen.

  Dear Friend, I am writing to you in the hope that you and Frau Andersen have not yet joined the exodus to America, as you sometimes spoke of doing in the months before the Bloch House was obliged to pack its remaining belongings and leave Hamburg. This letter will be returned from Cape Verde along our journey’s path and so will not reach Hamburg for some weeks. If you have not departed and do receive it, may I ask you to circulate its contents to those friends of Bloch House whose names are familiar to you. You were not a member of our circle but your sympathies were appreciated since we, like you, care about the conditions of workers who contribute to Hamburg’s prosperity but share little of it.

  You will know better than me by this time that those of us identified as seditious face dangerous consequences if the Chancellor’s networks of spies, agents provocateurs and interrogators notice our communications and meetings. I am therefore taking the precaution and liberty of sending this letter to you, my respected friend. There is no reason to believe you will have joined the list of those whose communications may be investigated, as was the case with my colleagues Signor Martignetti and Herr Johannes Paul, whom you knew at arm’s length so to speak, and who like Fräulein Bloch and myself have had to seek a safe haven elsewhere.

  First of all, would you be so kind as to pass on, to one of the friends of Bloch House, Theodora’s and my grateful thanks for the generous support we received from that circle. Any one of them will be able to circulate this message, which must reach as many as possible. Without their support we could not have afforded papers with which to travel safely, nor could we have afforded the accommodation we now have on board our ship. Though not luxurious, it is better than the conditions shared by the majority. Therefore, our friends should know if they do not already that we are safely on our way to New Zealand.

  They should also know that we are travelling under the name of the young woman who joined our household, whose identity is known to you. You may communicate this identity to the person of your choice, but please ask them not to record it or the use to which it has been put. It may seem melodramatic to say that we wish to disappear ‘without trace’, as hunters say of their elusive prey. However, until we are able to scrutinise the conditions of immigration at our destination, and the kinds of official record-keeping that pertain in New Zealand, and indeed the political temper of the country, we prefer to be new people coming anew to a new land. As far as the authorities in Hamburg are concerned we will still be in Germany, though like the clever little speckled partridge of my childhood we will be presumed to have merged with the autumn margins of the wheat fields in some obscure place like Uelzen where we can hardly be expected to trouble the status quo, thus thwarting the hunters eager for our blood.

  The following information is also important and, like our innocuous grey partridge plumage, must be kept hidden from all except those I am, with emotion, calling the friends of Bloch House. All significant records of our dear Bürger Zeitung are now in the vaults of Behrenberg-Gossler, a place unlikely to come under the gaze of the Chancellor’s agents. The bank has an affiliate in America, which may be useful to us in future. The records are deposited under the name of the young woman mentioned earlier, and once we are settled in New Zealand either I or one of our colleagues in America will be able to provide letters of authority to a secure party. In the deposit there are also journals and research diaries made by Theodora and myself which, all being well, we may be able to make use of in future, once we have recovered them.

  Finally, my kind friend, a very brief description of our situation here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We are sharing space with thirteen others in four sleeping cabins arranged as pairs, with a common stateroom and washroom. A similar arrangement exists on the other side of the ship. We are lucky to be where we are, and are thought to be so by those who live in crowded conditions. There are accommodations far superior to ours in a closely guarded compound at the back of the ship, where those with the means to afford it are served the food and drink prepared for them from livestock penned on deck and from a store of superior wines and the fresh produce taken on board at ports-of-call. This manifest privilege, while familiar, has caused unrest among those denied access to its fruits. It seems probable that this diagram of class will be transplanted to, or will conform with, conditions in the place we will soon be calling home. Thus, the work with which we have engaged these past years seems likely to continue on new soil in which we may be able to sow some seeds of change.

  With this hope in mind, I wil
l close by wishing you and Frau Andersen good fortune on whatever path you choose to take. I have no doubt your generous and progressive instincts will win you friends wherever you decide to settle. You may even decide to join us there in New Zealand. If you do, you can be confident of a warm welcome and all assistance possible.

  Finally, please urge the friends of Bloch House to remember us and be prepared to re-open the channels of communication that will be our means to advance our causes in the furthest parts of the world.

  I am and will remain

  Your grateful and devoted friend and colleague

  Wolf Bloch

  To Friedrich Engels, in Primrose Hill, London

  Friday, December 12, 1879

  My dear Engels

  Unlikely as it may seem, I am writing to you from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between the Canary Islands and Cape Verde. The distant horizon encircles us like the future we seem fated to approach by imperceptible degrees, though always with hope.

  Like your Anti-Dühring that I was lucky to read and admire on the eve of its persecution, we were banned by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws as I intimated we might be in my last letter to you. We have escaped with very little, but thanks to the generosity and bravery of our comrades in Hamburg have been able to get passage on a ship bound for New Zealand. It was our wish to go to America, following not only Germany’s own ‘Forty-Eighters’ but also our contemporaries including, as you know, the Martignetti family, now resident in New York. However, given the need to move as quickly as possible, we have had to commit ourselves in good faith to this interesting alternative.

  New Zealand is a place about which I know very little except that the ‘New’ in its name I read as a promise, whereas my dear sister Theodora, who I admit is wiser than me in most respects, utters the word with a prudent shaping of her lips. However that may be, the purpose of this short letter is to inform you of our status as refugees from the Chancellor’s stool pigeons and agents provocateurs.

  I also want to express my sincere hope, dear Comrade, that our exchanges of information will continue in the future about which we know little except that it may contain useful challenges to the old orders against which we have struggled. That both Theodora and I hope to lend our voices to these challenges goes without saying.

  For reasons that you will understand well, we have found it necessary to obtain new identities. From henceforth, and until we see how these matters are treated in the New place, we are a family of Hansens. I am Herr Wolf Hansen, my sister is Fräulein Theodora Hansen, and our beloved travelling companion and her daughter are Josephina and Catharina Hansen. It is their name that we have adopted, and it will be to that name that you must address any future communications. As we do not yet have an address in what will become our new home, it will be best to send letters to an appropriate agency in the town called Wellington, until we are able to give you an address. That there may be a Deutscher Verein or consulate in a remote town named after the English duke may speak to the break-up of Old World hegemonies, and I look forward to writing to you if that is so. I am mindful, however, that it was Wellington who organised counter-revolutionary forces in London as protection against the expected uprisings of 1848, and perhaps, some thirty years later, the shadow of his name now lies upon the distant town named after him.

  I have learned that the late Duke’s courts were for some years sending their unfortunates with the abbreviated stigma of ‘convicts’ to New Zealand’s neighbour, New South Wales, a practice that has only recently ceased. This information was provided by an on-board acquaintance from the ship’s mass accommodations, a printer by profession, whose skills may be useful to us in future. He is English with the wholesome name Oats but speaks some German, having been there as a journeyman. The man’s brother was deported to a convict settlement some twenty years ago on a charge of forgery but has since moved to New Zealand, and my new friend hopes to be reunited with him. I do not believe our destination has ever been a penal colony. Rather, it is clear that a proportion of those passengers confined ‘between decks’ are the victims of what you have called social murder. A presumption that boredom is the prerogative of the idle rich is soon overturned by the rebellious expression of this underclass, confined as it is both by its cramped quarters and by the tedium of its daily disciplines. Perhaps this repressed mutiny will find its appropriate outlet once its cadre has been released into a new place of fresh opportunity.

  Now I must end my letter with a promise to send bulletins from the front line where our rebellious travelling companions coming ashore in Wellington confront the ghost battalions of the Old Duke.

  We must live in hope, my dear Comrade, and so I close with that and with the additional hope that you are well and busy at Primrose Hill and recovering from the loss of your beloved Lizzie.

  Ever your admiring disciple and colleague

  Wolf Bloch

  Catharina

  Papa Wolf was sick in the morning, he made a funny noise like a goat and fell out of his bed. There was a bad smell because he’d messed in his bed. He was lying on the floor making the goat noise. Then Tante came back with some men and they carried Papa Wolf away. She and Tante went outside with Mutti. The sun was just coming up over the edge of the hills on the island. Look, said Mutti, the trees are. But she was just looking at them. Her mouth was moving but no more words came out. Then she said that the trees were waving at the sun, could Catha see them? Some people were washing the deck with buckets from the sea – was that because of Papa Wolf, Catharina wanted to know. Silly Papa, said Mutti, he ate some bad fish and shells on the island, also something squishy called papaya and some drink called grog. But they weren’t washing the deck because of Papa Wolf, they did that every morning, Catha knew that didn’t she? But where was Papa Wolf? He was in the infirmary. And what was the infirmary? It was where you went if you were sick so the doctor could look after you. But why didn’t they go there when there was the storm? Because too many people were sick, there wasn’t room for everybody. But why was Mutti angry, was it because of Papa Wolf? No, it wasn’t because of Papa Wolf, and she wasn’t angry, it was just because she was worried about Papa Wolf, wasn’t Catha also worried about her poor papa? There were some other men who went to the island, two of them hadn’t come back, but her papa did! Then Gudrun and her mutti came out, they were going to make their own morgenmad, Gudrun told her with a special look. Then Gudrun’s papa and her two silly brothers came out, one of the brothers held his nose and made a rude noise and his papa gave him a push. They went and stood on the other side of the ship with a big crowd waiting for breakfast. Don’t worry about them, Mutti told her, they are just silly boys. Would Catha please come with her, they could make their breakfast and also for the Bayern while Tante was cleaning up their cabin where Papa Wolf had been sick. But then all the Bayern that Papa Wolf called catlickers came out and stood near Mutti, and one of their papas asked what was the matter with Herr Hansen? It was nothing, Mutti told them, the silly man ate some bad fish stew on the island, and he had some of their strong drink. And was the doctor examining him now? And he was quarantined? Yes, Herr Hansen was in the infirmary. Mutti expected that he would be out again in a day or two, the sickness would pass quickly. She and Catharina could make their breakfast now if they were ready – there were some fresh fruits from the island, they were called papayas, would they like some? Was that what Herr Wolf ate, asked the catlicker papa. Yes he ate some, Mutti told them, but so did she when he brought them back, she didn’t like them, they were too soft. Well, serve him right, said one of the big boys, not everyone was lucky enough to go to the island. Then the catlickers were going to make their own breakfast just like Gudrun’s family. Would Catha mind waiting until they’d finished, asked Mutti. But when could they see Papa Wolf? Could Catha please stop asking questions? Because she didn’t know when, Mutti told her. She didn’t know, perhaps tomorrow? Then she’d see, Catha would see her Papa Wolf having the buckets of seawater thrown
at him again! He’d be jumping up and down like a fuzzy Papa Monkey! Going hoo hoo!

  Josephina and Catharina

  Oh my dear little Wolf.

  Oh Wolf.

  The sailors tipped the plank and Wolf went down into the sea. He was wrapped in sacking with thick jute cord ties, the cords were choking him.

  Oh my fuzzy Monkey.

  But he couldn’t swim. Those boys tried to drown him.

  Theodora snatched the bible from the doctor. Don’t you dare read that shit to my brother!

  Give me the bible please ma’am, it’s the way we do it here, I’m sorry. Please don’t do that.

  She was going to throw the bible into the sea.

  Papa Wolf had gone.

  Josephina took the bible from Tante and gave it back to the doctor.

  Thank you, Frau Hansen. Then he went away to the afterdeck. No one was coming near them.

  I wanted to unwrap him, said Josephina.

  I wanted to see him.

  They went down to their cabin. No one else was there. The cabin smelled of chlorine, not syrup of violets and almond oil.

  It was the stink of Wolf gone into the sea.

  I wanted to see him.

  Come here, Mutti. Lie down.

  Catharina lay down close beside her.

  At first he wouldn’t let me take his clothes off. He was afraid I wouldn’t like him, poor little Wolf. He was ashamed that time. But then he let me and I did it.

  And you did like him, didn’t you, Mutti?

  I loved him very much.

  Catharina’s little bony chest going up and down with the life in it.

  Theodora was sitting up straight close by on the other bed.