by Ian Wedde
Of course to all intents and purposes shake the dust off my shoes is what I did but my banishment was never something I felt you were party to Catha, may I call you that again after all these years my dear sister, and so it is you that I wished to find again and to make the consignee and guardian in whatever degree you think appropriate of these few records of my life which has been one lived without regret except for the absence of you my big sister and indeed also of that enigmatic brother of mine, Wolf. I long ago forgave our mother for turning her back on me and I hope her life has been a happy and fulfilling one as I hope have those of my sister and brother.
This letter is being dictated to my dear friend and companion of many years, his name is Dulal Tarafdar. The reason for the dictation is that I am sick with an infection in my leg that together with its remedies including the poppy that is abundant in these hills have rendered me more or less paralysed or prone to ghastly tremors, and so with many a break for refreshing cups of the tea that is also rather abundant hereabouts Dulal and I are progressing slowly and carefully through this letter in which I want first and foremost to send you all my benighted love, and secondly to give a brief account of what I have been doing for thirty or so years God help us, and thirdly to make some provisions if not exactly in the form of a will then in an expression of wishes and hopes.
Let us not dwell on the events that led to my friend Will and myself making ourselves scarce to Sydney before Will’s cruel uncle Mayor Hastings could press charges, what a quaint expression. We occupied the ship’s rail for most of our squally five bob deckside passage. Will went to seek his fortune in the goldfields of a place called Coolgardie, the name I have never forgotten nor have I ever forgotten my dear pal, though I never heard from him again.
Dulal and I are going very slowly as I have to spell out some of the words he does not know, our progress resembles that of the turgid river below our hill as it meanders imperceptibly towards the ancient effluent city of Chittagong and into the Bay of Bengal where its filthy corona extends in an arc for many miles out to sea. It was this discoloured embrace that welcomed me to the place where I have now resided for close on a decade and where I expect to end my life’s journey – but let me retrace my steps.
In Sydney I worked in an excise office where my adequate knowledge of German was appreciated and where I bored myself into departing as soon as I had the means to do so. Had I gone to Coolgardie with Will I might have picked up a nugget of gold the size of my foolish brain and retired in luxury as I hope he did, but I doubt it.
My next port was Bremerhaven, the one from which our mother fled, whence out of curiosity I made my way via Hamburg to the town of her birth, Kiel, from which I too fled in haste without attempting to find remnants of her family anywhere in the environs of what the boring boastful townsfolk called the Kriegshafen, its streets filled with strutting marines and its harbour with boastful flags and bunting fluttering above the grey befunnelled hulls of warships. It was the Flaggengala I was told proudly, we would call it the flag dressing I think. To me it had the simple brutal meaning of a hostile animal enlarging itself and baring its teeth in order to appear terrifying.
I fled from this display back to Hamburg where there was much talk of the injustice of the defeat of the majority social democrats in the elections due to the over-representation of the landed gentry, which reminded me of our mother’s scanty accounts of the reasons she and the man she called Wolf Bloch left in the first place on what has now begun to resemble an uncharted dynastic exodus.
Thence to San Francisco thanks to the patronage of the businessman I shall call Uncle Joe, and here I resided quite happily for some years and learned the ‘Uncle Joe’ ways of money and how not to push too much of it ahead of oneself where it might become prey, but on the other hand how to push enough of it ahead into places where it might become bait and thereby catch some more of itself. Not to mention how to stuff some of it into cave vaults and the grinning pockets of lawyers.
Time for my pipe, that can be written and I shall explain.
Thence in haste to London after the war where Uncle Joe’s war gains found profitable opportunities aplenty, whence quite soon at my own whim into the fragrant embrace of the budding Good Will Tea Company, the name of which reawakened my affectionate memories. In addition, Good Will Tea being new to the game of attracting the interest of investors in the capital city of its war weary colonial administration, found my by now well practised ‘Uncle Joe’ skills useful.
Now I think we should speed up Dulal, please write that down in case my poor sister is about to throw my letter out the window.
My nearly seven years of dutiful Good Will passed within walking distance of the British Museum where I fed my boredom to the arcane fires of cosmological scholarship and got a succession of telescopes none of which could often see through the vile smog that was named after London itself.
I cannot in honesty pretend that London was without pleasures of a less cerebral kind but I shall move past them to the next stage of my life so ho ho. And then my telescopes and I were invited to manage the Good Will estates in Bengal from a base here on this river and under these gorgeous skies that are as clear as any in the universe except when the rains come or the cut and burn tribespeople further up set their fires, and consequently I have spent much of my time in this remote place where the plague seasons come and go with the placid fatalism of centuries, with one eye at my telescope and the other making a show of observing the seasons of plants, people, trade and capital investments.
I came here towards the end of nineteen twenty eight and have never wished to be anywhere else since, and so will now begin to finish my letter to you my dear sister though I am unwilling to do so as this has been as close as I have come to talking to you for the better part of thirty-two years, can either of us believe that! None of what I have written may be of any interest to you of course but I hope the small cosmological document I have included with this letter may tell you something about the strange little brother you lost that will be more enduring and perhaps also endearing, what a marvellous word, than these brief notes.
Now to explain about the pipe. It is the product of the poppy that I inhale from it as that is the only relief I can have from my leg up which the infection rot climbs no matter what I or the good doctor at Chandraghona do, and so it must part company from the rest of me or I from it, who knows which of us will win the race, and in any case the pipe has been my other dearly loved companion for many years here in this place that resembles paradise in many ways not least of which is the snake that from time to time these past months can be seen cooling itself or perhaps lying in wait patiently in a drain not far from where I lie, a man possessed of more knowledge than was ever good for me perhaps but with no regrets.
And so farewell my dear sister Catharina! I always loved you very dearly and believed your life would be a rich one in the best sense of that word if not the sense beloved of Uncle Joe.
And now here are my few wishes. I hope they will not trouble your time. Please believe that I trust you to respect them.
Frederick Wenczel’s signature here.
And there the signature was, but only just, F Wencz, with a shaky entwining of the ‘c’ and ‘z’ and an ink blot at the end.
Oh lord. She went to the loo and blew her nose into a good handful of toilet paper and then flushed it away with an immature sense of performing a meaningful ritual. How could it be that the dictated message from her great-granduncle could have put the sound of his voice so clearly in her mind?
But there he was, and so was this unexpected grief that seemed to reach out to her own mother Elke, who hadn’t even known Freddy, and even to Ruth, whom she had never known except in the life-fragment Frank had told her about.
The next part of the letter, the one with the ‘few wishes’, was written in a different hand, fluid and unfussy and she presumed Freddy’s own from an earlier time in his decline, on a plain unlined sheet of good-quality cream paper.
This sheet had enfolded the lined ones that had first captured her interest with their oddness. The plain cream one now seemed bland by comparison and without the presence of Freddy’s voice, perhaps because that voice had been preserved in its intimate engagement with his friend Dulal while dictating?
She read the four brief and to-the-point sentences without any particular emotion. Their implications did not seem profound or problematic. They were, in fact, somewhat clerical, as if the work of a man used to keeping his reports short and unambiguous.
1.I appoint Mr Dulal Tarafdar to be my legal executor as certified by my signature below and notarised by the legal representative of the Christian Hospital Chandraghona and witnessed by the hospital’s Director Dr. George Orissa Taylor.
2.All my personal possessions including furniture not the property of the Good Will Company I leave to Mr Dulal Tarafdar in recognition of his loyal service.
3.My personal cash reserves held at the National Bank of India Chittagong Branch I require Mr Tarafdar as my appointed executor to administer for the settlement of any outstanding debts, the balance to be retained by him, again in recognition of his loyal service and friendship.
4.My stock holdings in the Good Will Tea Company registered at the Central Exchange Bank of India, London, I leave to my sister Catharina von Welden of Wellington, New Zealand, to distribute to my family at her discretion.
There remained the other, larger manila envelope, also ambiguously opened or not on account of its loose flap, and of course what also remained was the duty of starting at the beginning. But no, she would not, or not now.
The letter and the expression of last wishes were not in any convincing sense the final word from Freddy, since they were, rather, postscripts to his narrative. And so, with a sense of trembling in her chest rather than in her fingers, she turned to the final entry in the 1937 diary of Frederick Wenczel of Waggachara Tea Estate, Rangamati, Bengal, and read his brief, erratic, barely comprehensible account in the second week of October of how
When one first arrives at this place via the jetty on the other side of the river from the tea garden, where a busy little market thrives under many clustered bamboo shops designed to blow or be washed away and then rebuilt with little effort, one encounters what the new arrival cannot hope to find words to express, the smell of fish drying on racks in the sun combined with that of human excrement squirted out along the marge of the river, and the other ingredient, that of rotting fruits of which the ripe and fit to eat aroma is already of vomit. Already sick and weary from my long journey and its several mishaps, this welcome was enough to empty what remained of my desiccated reserves into the river that itself had the pallid appearance of a fever patient. But then, after several weeks, a strange and marvellous thing happened. I began to long for that mélange of smells and to relish it and even regard it as the emanation of an unforgiving but truthful and indeed loving divinity that knew the world and the creatures that lived upon it as the eflux of a great cosmic life-force, indeed I am sure the very breath of the forces that we call the gods. And so after many years in the presence of this familiar atmosphere I have lived my last days in a state of bliss knowing that what I am breathing in will be what I enter into at the moment when I contribute my last breath to it. And so,
তুমি শান্তিতে থাক
Peace be with you.
Outside it was almost dark and she sat with the diary in her lap and listened to the small, settling-down sounds of the neighbourhood – intermittent traffic on the bypass road, some kids on scooters calling out shrilly from someone’s driveway, clattering plates and the sound of hesitant piano scales from next door as early dinner was prepared, the young solo mum who had recently moved in there calling out almost unintelligibly above the clatter and the piano scales, something about Did you remember to? – the annoyed clang of a piano key and a girl’s voice calling out, Oh shit, no, sorry Mum.
Wolf
Her body was smaller somehow like one of the poplars after the autumn gales had taken away its leaves, or the river when a summer drought exposed more of its stones than usual, or even like the sky when it was clear and simple and of course blue like Ma’s eyes – he pressed their lids unwillingly shut with his thumb but could not quite close her poor mouth and then knelt by the bed with his head against her hard little shoulder. There was still just a very little warmth remaining in the bedclothes, he thought, he was almost sure, but not enough and no breath from her open mouth. Three great sobs entered him from across the river, they struck him below his ribs and then burst out of his mouth like shouts. It was still early and the grey warblers that Ma loved so much were trilling in the manuka he’d allowed to grow back along the riverbank over there below her open window, to hold the bank together but also for the blossom. Because it was early summer the manuka flowers that she also loved were still abundant and so were the bees that shared her affection for them. Few things had made her happy these past months but the warblers and the manuka flowers were among them and now there they were as was appropriate.
No more of the sobs struck his body below his lungs, winding him and demanding to be let out – he began to breathe slowly as if resting after a steep climb and after a time there was Ettie’s hand on his shoulder but then she went away again and closed the door. He could hear them all being quiet on the other side of the door, and the careful clinking of cups being got ready. There was no need for him to go out there until he chose to and anyway Ma would have to be washed and dressed and her bed changed before anyone could visit her, she had always been particular. Her hair would have to be done neatly as she liked, it would have upset her to know she was being seen with it bedraggled out across the pillow. She always took particular care with her hair when Denis Badem was coming for his cup of tea and their chat on the veranda but of course that hadn’t happened going on four years now. Was it about the time he died that she began to be a bit quieter?
Of course it was mostly after she heard from Catha about Freddy last year.
But there was the time back then a while ago when Ettie came in to where he was having his own cup of tea in the kitchen – she had her hand over her mouth but her grin escaped around it and crinkled up the corners of her eyes. His ma and that old rogue Denis Badem were making kissing shapes at each other with their lips stuck out, she said. No, he didn’t believe it! Well then, go and have a look for yourself, said Ettie in a huff. He went out to the veranda pretending to ask if they wanted more tea but what he heard was the little experimental whistling sounds of their stuck-out lips trying to imitate the twitter of the little grey warblers that Ma loved.
Oh yes, Ma and Denis Badem were two little old lovebirds, was the joke he and Ettie shared for a while, they were two warblers in the bush! But then when he asked Ma to demonstrate the warbler twitter she and Denis had been practising out on the porch that time she said that no, it wasn’t the bush warbler from round here they were trying to imitate because the ones from round here never left to go anywhere else! – no, they were birds called roar singer that lived in the reedy marshes near where she was born in the north of Germany.
A roar singer?
She made an impatient face and said the words slowly, roar senger, ‘Auf Deutsch, nicht wahr?’ They lived in the reeds down at the mouth of the river Schwentine, in English a reed warbler or something like that nicht wahr and when the weather began to get chilly in late autumn all the little birds would begin to gather in crowds and fly away as if they were testing their wings, and then one day they would all be gone. Her mutti had told her the roar sengers all flew away to somewhere warm and when she was a little girl she had always imagined that the warm place where they went had many sweet orange trees, because she had loved the special treat of oranges that sometimes came ashore from those warm places over there in the merchant ships at Kielerhafen. It was the twitter of the roar sengers that she and Denis had been trying to imitate because he remembered them and their song as well.
But
how could that be, when he didn’t come from that place she remembered?
Ma had a certain wicked look then as if she had won a victory, but what kind of victory would that be? She made her lips into the kissing shape and managed to do a little whistle-trill that did not really sound very much like the warblers down in the manuka by the river but also it did somewhat. But then she said that where Denis Badem came from at Iskenderun in the Levant the roar sengers were well known, they arrived in flocks every year, people said they came from where it was too cold for them at that time of year, and what was more, where Denis and his family came from there were many very old orange groves, he told her, his family had one, they ate the oranges all the time and also made sugared sweets out of the rinds, and orange blossom water to perfume certain kinds of food and refresh the air in a room. Women would also refresh their skin with the orange blossom water, and some people would sprinkle it on their pillows at night because it would help them to dream sweet dreams!
Ah, said Ma, how she would have liked to experience that, even putting the orange blossom water on her skin, but especially to sprinkle it on her pillow.
All her life she had believed this was the truth about the roar sengers and their journey away from the frozen marsh at the mouth of the Schwentine, but she had only now found out that it was true, what she had always believed was true, because Denis Badem was from that place and he had seen them arriving year after year after their long journey, those brave little birds that especially liked catching insects off the orange trees, and especially a certain beetle that would otherwise damage the trees, and so the little birds were always welcomed and it was forbidden he said to kill and eat them, unlike many other ones that boys would sell strings of on the roadsides, sparrows and suchlike that they trapped in nets, people liked to grill them on skewers, they were delicious he said.