by Ian Wedde
But of course her granddaughter Greta’s uncertain health at age two was also a worry to Hugo, her daughter insisted, continuing to commit herself to her husband’s defence while leaving Freddy outside the perimeter of their mother’s silence.
Mutti’s tone was droll. Of course, and how was the Professor these days?
Or for that matter, they could deflect the absence of Freddy by complaining in chorus about the despicable Councillor Hasty whose recent elevation to the position of mayor enraged the professor and his mother-in-law in equal measure, because the pompöser Dummkopf had grossly insulted his wife and her daughter – and unfortunately ‘the pioneer’ Wolf had not felt it necessary to make the full extent of the man’s gross discourtesy clear to him in a traditional way.
But then neither had the professor.
Ah, but the pioneer was a very different kind of man, they all agreed about that, though without agreeing entirely on what constituted his difference.
But wouldn’t Catharina’s mother Josephina – Hugo had only recently gone so far as to call her Josephina – like to come and live with them, he asked rather dutifully, but also, his wife suspected, because in the twenty-five years her mutti had lived in the little cottage in Bute Street its environs had become more and more run down and disreputable, to the point where having chickens to keep in the small back yard might even be construed as a mark of affluence in that neighbourhood though perhaps quaint elsewhere in the town, for example in Karori. And perhaps unsanitary, from that lofty quarter’s point of view?
But no, she would not prefer to move to her daughter’s and the Professor’s house, much as she was grateful for the thoughtfulness of the invitation. And so there she remained, with her Chinese scroll that Wolf had mounted for her in a long frame with glass to protect it from fly spots, and her dirty bookish chickens. But she would come over to the house with its fine wrought-iron palings to look after Greta whenever they needed, and sometimes Greta could be left with her in disreputable Bute Street, where she liked the chickens very much and could sometimes even hold Emma, the quiet one, in her lap and let it peck at grains in a tin or even in the palm of her hand, although that made her shriek.
Her grandmother had had a favourite chicken when she was little, Josephina told Greta, it was called Puck Puck, she had loved Puck Puck passionately and had carried it everywhere, it was an especially brave chicken and if Greta liked she could tell her some of Puck Puck’s adventures. The adventures had happened a long way from where the chicken called Emma now scratched and pecked around in a little back yard in Bute Street in this town on the other side of the world.
But why the Professor as well as the chicken called Emma Bovary lived in this town on the other side of the world was a question that also preoccupied Mutti with that sharp look for Catharina from behind her spectacles. They had gone back and forth with this topic many a time. Mutti had not had a simple life when it came to the stories of her men and her children, but that did not mean she was of right her daughter’s confidante in all intimate matters. Catharina would not be telling her mutti about the time some years ago when Hugo had wept copiously upon the smooth, stretched pale dome of her swollen belly with its protuberant button and said that yes, it was true what she had, not suspected, no, what she had intuited, it was her intuition that he had seen and admired, that this was indeed not the first time he had expected the birth of a child aus seinen Lenden – which had sounded so comically like something to do with loins of pork or other meat that she had burst out laughing, which had transformed his tears into a huff.
But that was the truth of the matter – he had then taken the opportunity to enlarge upon his peccadillo as he liked to call it – Hugo von Welden had indeed impregnated a young woman in a rash moment of youthful indiscretion, not his first it was true but his most foolish, and had been banished along with his modest degree and equally modest entitlements to a place as far away from the young woman’s respectable family and the town of Giessen as his family could find by consulting maps and the accounts of the town’s somewhat famous explorer Ernst Dieffenbach, who had been to New Zealand in the earlier years of its development as a civilised country where a youngish man (such as himself!) might make something of himself (as had Dieffenbach!) – and had she by any chance read Dieffenbach, because if not he could give her the Travels in New Zealand? He had made a famous ascent of a mountain, for example? And had been enchanted by the songs of the birds of the forest?
Ah well, Hugo, she had said quite gently, lifting his heavy moist face from her stomach, now you have the opportunity to show yourself to be the better man your family hoped you might become. And no, she had not had the opportunity to read Professor Dieffenbach’s account of his mountainous conquest, perhaps she could do so while she was laid up with this gigantic mountain of her stomach that Hugo rather liked to occupy the summit of.
But the issue of Greta’s health. Despite the mountainous dimensions of her mother’s stomach, which was after all usually rather small, the little girl had been born somewhat prematurely and was a weak, fractious baby whose despairing yowls had driven her papa into a frenzy of vacillation between anxiety and impatience, for which the remedy was mostly found in his study with the door shut. Mutti’s response to this information was that the Professor was probably more use there. They would take Greta for walks in the Botanic Garden where a cavalcade of prams circulated around the ornamental lotus pond on fine days, or paraded through the rose garden, and then sometimes Mutti would wheel the child back to Bute Street for an hour or two. But Greta was thin and often vomited her milk because of the colic, and once she was grown enough to crawl around began to sneeze and wheeze and have a runny nose.
Now, it was the chicken called Emma that made her sneeze – but what was the point, Mutti said, of keeping her away from all the things in the world that might affect her? She was almost four years old and look what her mother had come through by that age, and ‘the pioneer’ also, including a long journey by sea!
Of course the issue of Greta’s health, to Hugo’s way of thinking, had something to do with the miserable conditions at Bute Street. Of course, to Catharina’s way of thinking, he had no right to imply that her mother’s house was unhealthy.
But there was a silent emptiness at the centre of this little politics as it revolved around the child who was prone to sneezing, and of course the silence and emptiness were where Freddy existed but existed through the incontrovertible fact of his absence. Yes, of course his Ma would keep the house from which he had been absent going on two years, the house that was filled with his absence, and of course she would seek to occupy that empty space with the sound of Greta’s sneezes and the need to discuss what the sneezes meant. And of course the discussion of the sneezes animated what would otherwise have been the resolute glinting unsmiling impassivity of her expression when the absence of Freddy was either apparent or perhaps about to be discussed.
*
What Professor Hugo von Welden had preferred to call their nuptials had been celebrated modestly, first of all in the same little church as Wolf’s and Ettie’s and then, also modestly, at the Deutscher Verein. Her brother Wolf, whom Hugo referred to admiringly as the giant Rübezahl who walks with such a heavy tread that the earth shakes, walked her with restrained strides to the altar but was distracted by the mews of his new-born Agatha and kept glancing over his shoulder. The modesty of both the nuptial ceremony and the Hochzeitsessen at the Verein owed something to the unmentioned non-attendance of Councillor Hastings and his immediate family – the councillor’s generous patronage of his niece’s marriage to the giant Rübezahl had included the dainty sandwiches with little flags that Freddy had so relished along with his pal Will.
But the councillor’s niece Ettie was there with her babe in arms, along with her brother Will, and their mother the widow Francis, and their uncle who was Wolf’s former forge master Mister Kelly, and half a dozen of Hugo’s colleagues from the university college, and a dozen of Cathari
na’s friends, and Mutti’s best friends Victoria and Arabella – and so the councillor’s non-attendance passed without comment except by Freddy who lamented the lack of those special little sandwiches they’d had at Wolf’s and Ettie’s wedding. He pulled a sad face and turned his hands palm-up and asked where were the sandwiches with flags? And especially the ones with egg and olive, so delicious?
Of course he was just being naughty – she saw Will give him a sharp rebuking poke with his elbow, and then saw Freddy squeeze the elbow against himself before he moved it away, and saw that Mutti was watching them from the corner of her eye. Perhaps she feared that Freddy would embarrass the family with one of his ill-judged pranks. But then there was dancing to a violin and an accordion, and Hugo swept Frau Wenczel away. Her mutti was still very light on her feet and daintily graceful in the way she moved, and Hugo complimented her with a bow and took her to the refreshments table for a glass of his favourite Rhinegau – the wine was a contribution from his department at the university college.
They drank some more of the wine at his house that was already somewhat familiar to her after leaving the Verein through a ribald guard of honour from ‘his department’ – at the last minute she saw Mutti turn and take Freddy by the arm, because of course now it would just be the two of them in the house in Bute Street, she and her youngest, her baby Freddy – but, after the wine, Hugo was not able to accomplish much in the way of love-making and fell sound asleep, while she lay awake for a time with that dissatisfaction mingling with the image of her mutti taking Freddy’s arm, and his head tousled from dancing bending down so he could kiss his mother’s cheek, and then kiss her again so sweetly when she turned to smile up at him.
But now three years later Freddy was gone, his abrupt departure a horrible counterpoise to the happily anticipated arrival of the second child Adam in their giant brother’s house on Mount Cook. The counterpoise had a grotesque quality, like a mechanical device that jerked one character out of sight behind a slammed door, pursued by the jeers of the mob, while another was thrust forward to welcoming applause, the apparatus managed by some kind of malignant puppeteer.
That was how it seemed to her, she told Hugo, disliking how her voice trembled – it was like a horrible mechanical nightmare that repeated itself over and over, she could not get them out of her mind, the jeers and the cheers, over and over, and what was it that had given these events such a horrible persistence, and was it this persistence or something like it that had sealed her mother off within a fortress of not-talking about what had happened to Freddy or what Freddy had done? While at the same time not wasting any opportunity to talk about Adam? As if talking about Adam, who had as yet done nothing more than be born and shit in his napkins and puke, was more important than talking about what had befallen Freddy, or for that matter about Greta’s health and her sneezes, or her cousin Agatha’s health and her complete sneezelessness! – the infant Adam who, after all, had been named after her mother’s father Adam Hansen, the same Adam Hansen who had banished his pregnant daughter to her sister’s place in Sønderborg, where she, Catharina, had been born and spent the first years of her life? Something her mother had not wished to dwell on but had nonetheless talked about frankly when she considered her daughter to be old enough to understand the concept of necessity?
Her mother had borne the brunt of cruel family judgement; she herself had lived alongside her mother as she made her way into a life of her own despite that judgement or even because of it – she could hardly be seen as a model of respectability in the eyes of the classes that were even now erecting pretentious mansions in the outer suburbs of this wretched town where respectability was bought at any cost. Why could her mother’s compassion learned at great cost not decant her own experience of banishment into the plight of her own child Freddy? Whom of course she loved despite all the obdurate signs of her rejection. And chiefly her silence?
Ah, but of course she could tell by Hugo’s silence that he knew she, like her mother, had worked hard for a quota of respectability, so who was she to judge?
Oh, but she was sorry, so sorry, she told Hugo, who was holding her rather carefully against his side in the lounge where they liked to sit together peacefully for a while after Greta was asleep, and would usually read and even sometimes read to each other – really and truly she had not meant to talk in such a confused way, nor to burden him with her confusion not to mention her memory of the time Mutti threw poor Freddy’s things into the street outside the little house they had shared for those few years, but what could she do?
Ah, necessity! Hugo was breathing slowly and calmly as he drew the word out into its four parts, and she liked the quiet vibration of his voice against her, even though for a moment it seemed he was about to commence one of his philosophical disquisitions, in this case on the subject of necessity, and she began to prepare to move free of his comforting embrace because really she would not be able to bear the tone of a lecture at this moment, his condescension that was all the more irritating for being unintentional and even well-meaning.
But no, he just suggested rather simply that the time for necessity had perhaps passed and what was needed – again, only perhaps – was for Catharina to find a way to free her mother from the anguish of her denial, since the poor woman was clearly suffering from a grief that had turned in upon her and was wounding her from within, all the more painful because there was no doubt that, in spite of everything, she still loved her son!
And then, reverting somewhat to his usual enjoyment of ‘following a train of thought’, he added, with a little chuckle, that as for ne-ces-si-ty, had that not been a factor in the way their lives, his and hers and Greta’s, had been shaped, as well as by contingency and chance? And had they not embraced the necessity with open arms – so to speak! – having already welcomed the embraces of contingency?
No, of course he could not help himself, but there was some truth in what he had said.
Well, of course he was perfectly right, she said, but what was she to do?
‘You must insist on talking to Josephina about Freddy.’ He gave her a squeeze and pressed his lips against the side of her head. ‘You must talk to Josephina,’ he said into her hair, and then kept his mouth there with its warm breath.
And that was the first time he had easily spoken her mother’s given name, her mutti’s name, Mutti’s name. It was as though at that moment, with his warm breath in her hair and his nose breathing in its scent that he always said he loved – at that moment he stepped inside the misshapen perimeter of her family’s story and was there in it.
And after all, he added, while the sound of his voice speaking her mother’s name was still a kind of shock or gasp in her thoughts, was it not also true that Wolf had just days ago won a farm ballot somewhere in the wilderness and had begun to make plans to leave the city, and then would not Josephina be even more bereft?
And besides, he added after a short pause that seemed to be making a space for her to speak, but she could not do so at that moment – was it not true that the sexual behaviour that some regarded as beastly and indeed against the law was only natural for Freddy? And could the acts of which he had been accused be treated as a category in themselves, when they were in all likelihood inseparable from the nature of the man himself? And therefore natural in their way, however beastly a man like himself might find them? Moreover, Freddy was not the only man he knew whose nature was that way inclined. Even Goethe, whom of course he knew only by his works! – even Wolfgang von Goethe had clearly been indifferent to the kinds of laws that had driven Freddy into exile god knows where.
‘Even Wolfgang von Goethe,’ she said, and was able to laugh before kissing him. ‘We shall see how Mutti responds to that.’
But of course Hugo was right, if not about Goethe then about the necessity of talking to Mutti, because only she could do so. And it was true that within the year or thereabouts Wolf would be gone somewhere into the wilderness, along with Ettie and Agatha and, now, Adam �
�� and then Mutti would indeed be more alone than ever with the grief that Hugo imagined devouring her from within, and then might be the moment when Mutti could be helped to find the way to speak Freddy’s name again and bring him back by at least that much.
It was Ettie who had run in breathlessly to say that Mrs Wenczel had thrown all of Freddy’s things into the street outside the house. Wolf had tried to collect them up and speak to her, but she wouldn’t listen, and could Catharina please come quickly and try to talk to her mother? Wolf had gone back again to Mrs Wenczel’s house and was staying there with her, but could Catharina please come? It was to do with Freddy and the police and Wolf said it was the last straw.
The housekeeper was there preparing dinner and so they left Greta with her, and could she please tell the professor they were at Mrs Wenczel’s, and hurried to the tram. On the way Ettie said Freddy had been reported to the police because he had been discovered by Will’s landlady performing an indecent act with Will in that boarding house on Cuba Street where Will lived.
She said ‘performing an indecent act’ as though copying an official account, and that the policeman had called at their house where Wolf was having his tea and asked Wolf to accompany him to ‘the miscreant’s place of residence’, since Wolf was ‘the senior male relative’. Nobody knew where Freddy and Will were now.
Then it wasn’t far from the tram stop to the house in Bute Street where a small muttering crowd had gathered in the gloom a few houses down from Mutti’s. A dog ran yapping at them as they went through the gathering and a man kicked the animal against a fence. Its yelps followed them into the room where Mutti and Wolf were sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Mutti was gripping a cup of tea and looking at it as if mesmerised.