In Search of Anna

by Valerie Volk

  They were active children, not so much naughty as eager and adventurous, and Lobethal with all it offered was a favourite place to come. And to go yabbying in the dam with Carl was the best of all. They were quick to beg.

  He shrugged resignedly. ‘Come, Fritz, let us get the nets and buckets. Anna, can you find us meat for bait? And string for the lines?’

  It did not take them long to set up the long sticks stored for yabby catching, or to check our nets for holes. The wire hoops with their discarded net curtains were getting worn. Still good enough, said Carl, for a few more uses. We did not know they would never be used again.

  ‘Be good, boys, and mind what Papa Carl tells you.’ I can still hear Kurt’s voice as he bent to hug his sons. Dieter, now six, complained. ‘Are you not coming with us, Vati? You always catch big ones.’

  Kurt ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘No, I am going to stay to talk to your Oma. Look after your little brother, and bring back lots of yabbies. We will have a feast tonight.’

  A feast meant work. I started to get out the big iron cauldron for the stove, and the piles of newspapers to cover the long table. A yabby feast was a messy affair, and it had taken me many years to get used to throwing the clawing wriggling creatures into the boiling water. The sight of the crowded family table and the sound of happy laughter could quickly blot out that memory.

  ‘Who is home tonight?’ asked Kurt, as Carl and Fritz shepherded the two little boys out the back door and toward the gate in the fence. I watched idly as Carl turned to wave goodbye before starting the trek across the long dry grass to the home-paddock dam.

  ‘Almost everyone. Except Elsa—she will be in Albury with friends.’

  ‘Is she still enjoying teaching so much?’

  ‘Yes, but I think at twenty-three she is starting to have other things on her mind. I would hate to lose her. She is a great help to me here when she is home from school for holidays.’

  ‘What about the boys?’

  ‘Wonderful. Although Hermann is only twenty, Carl says he could not do without him. He could almost run the farm himself. And even Willi is a very capable sixteen-year-old. They work well with their father. I am more concerned about Lena. It is hard to get her to do anything except read or play the piano.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling, ‘she is fourteen. What do you expect?’

  ‘More than I get. Although, when I think of myself at that age, and the way I read my way through the Chateau library, I can scarcely complain. Though I am sure my mother did.’

  Kurt shook his head. ‘She will enjoy going away to school.’

  ‘Yes, Carl and I have come to feel this is the best future for her. These children are so dear to me.’

  ‘Any news from Hanna?’ As always, a pang when I realised how much less I was involved with her wellbeing.

  ‘A letter this week, and I’m concerned. Franz has not been well. I think she is seriously worried about him. And she keeps asking if I intend to come home. She cannot seem to understand this is my life now.’

  We smiled at each other. It was a pleasant feeling, to have this son I could talk to while knowing my life no longer revolved around him.

  ‘Anyway, tell me what you are working on these days. You are getting to be so well known. There was an article in the last Banner about a new engine you have installed.’

  ‘I have almost more work than I can manage. We have put four new men on in the blacksmith’s; it makes things easier there.’

  I cannot believe, when I recall this casual chat, there was not some hint to me. Some shiver in my spine. A trembling of my body to warn me. Nothing.

  Nothing until the door was flung open, and a dripping Fritz screamed at us both.

  ‘Mutti. Kurt,’ he was gasping. ‘Come. Come quickly. Vati—’

  ‘Where are my boys?’ Kurt was ashen.

  Fritz pointed. ‘There. Outside.’ Rolf was sobbing, his sodden clothes horrible to see. Dieter stood at the gate and wailed.

  I swallowed and tasted bile rising. ‘Where is your father?’

  We were running toward the dam, and I cursed the long skirts that slowed me. I could see nothing, for the high ramp that circled the dam hid it from view. Before I reached the top and looked down, I knew what I would see.

  Fritz had managed to pull him from the muddy water, and he lay at the edge, face down, his body sprawled defenceless near the kicked-over bucket. A last yabby crawled doggedly back to the safety of the dam.

  ‘He was too heavy,’ sobbed the boy. ‘I could not get him out in time. I tried, Mutti. I tried.’

  Kurt was busy at the body, leaning, pumping, cursing. It was no use.

  ‘He could not swim.’

  It had been a joke between us, every time he took the children yabbying. A regular farewell joke. ‘Don’t fall in the dam.’

  Today I had not said it.

  Later they told me about it. The deep waterhole at the side. Yes, I nodded. I know it. Rolf had wandered off and fallen in. Yes. That would be typical. And when Dieter yelled, Carl had rushed to get the little boy out.

  It was hard to understand, from the distraught Fritz, what had happened next.

  ‘I was on the other side of the dam,’ he hiccupped. ‘My lines were on the side, where I always fish.’

  I waited.

  ‘When I got round to them, he’d pushed Rolf out. But he was in the water, and he wasn’t moving. His face was down. I couldn’t see him. It was horrible.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I couldn’t get to him. I got hold of a foot, but his shoe was still on. And it came off in my hand.’

  I could see it too clearly. The panicked boy and the horror of the shoe.

  ‘But you managed.’

  ‘I tried and tried, and finally I got his trouser leg. And then I got him to the edge. He was so heavy. And the little boys were screaming. So I had to leave him there. I couldn’t get him any further.’

  I would not let anyone else touch his body when we had loaded him on the plank of wood for the older boys to bring back to the house. We put him on the bed, and I sent them away. This was my place, and no one else was going to clean away the mud and strip the sodden clothes from his dear dead body. He was mine, and I shut the door on all offers of help.

  ‘See to your sons,’ I told Kurt. ‘And report this in Jindera. I don’t know who must be told, or what happens next. But leave him to me.’

  And the whole time that I prepared his body, touching it gently in places where I knew he had loved my touch, all I could think was that I had not said, ‘Don’t fall in the dam.’

  CHAPTER 29

  Jindera, New South Wales, 1898

  We were both widowed the same week, it seemed.

  Hanna had been right to be concerned about her Franz, for the bleeding that had worried her had been only one of the signs that something was wrong. They had buried him in the churchyard at Mittelwalde, and she had settled to a life that would be much the same as what she had known for years.

  Not for me. My life was very different. I look back now on those first weeks of raw anguish, and wonder how anyone survives it. In India, they tell me, the widow hurls herself upon the funeral pyre and dies with the man she loved. I could have done that too.

  ‘Why?’ I asked bitterly. ‘So many years ahead of us to make up for the unhappiness of the past. Who is the God who has done this to us?’

  The question could not be quelled. Why us? Why me?

  Later, another thought. Instead of the accusing ‘Why me?’ perhaps it was a different question I should be asking: ‘Why not me?’ For I could see that I had been given so much. The years of happiness. They had been an unanticipated gift. Old teaching came back to me. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. I understood these words. I had learned them from childhood. I tried to cling to this acceptance, even in the times of total desolation.

  ‘It will pass,’ they told me. All those women who had loved and lost. There were many who came to comfort; in the years sin
ce we married I had made good friends in the village and among the church people. Yes, even from the two churches. They came from both, for deaths, like weddings, brought the community together. They offered me consolation. ‘It will pass.’

  I answered fiercely, ‘I do not want it to pass. I do not want to forget him.’

  ‘That is not forgetting,’ they assured me. ‘It is learning to live with the scar.’

  ‘The scar?’ My question was dull, and I did not care if anyone answered. Emma’s mother spoke, for her husband had died the year before, leaving Kurt in charge of the blacksmith’s shop. What did she know of how I felt? No one could know what I felt, or grieve as I was grieving.

  ‘Frau Bergmann, we have all suffered this.’ She laid her hand over mine. ‘An old woman in the church explained it to me. Anna, we all feel like this at first. It is like a gaping wound, and it bleeds …’

  I knew what she meant. ‘It feels like a limb gone. As if I have lost an arm. There is a hole …’

  ‘And it bleeds. I know. I remember.’

  We sat in silence for a moment, then she went on.

  ‘Like all wounds, it begins to heal. It forms a scab as the blood clots, and there is a surface over the wound.’

  She did not rush me. She gave me time to think about her words. Then she continued. ‘Like all scabs, it is fragile. Every now and then you will knock it, or be careless, and it will open a little and bleed again. And you will think: this will never heal.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘But it does. And one day you will find that the ache is still there, not so bad. It has lessened somewhat, and there is a sort of pleasure mixed with the pain. And there will be a scar where the wound was. That too will fade—but it will never go. Sometimes you will knock it by accident, and there will be a sharp misery. Other times, you will just see the scar. And you will remember. But it will not hurt the way it does right now.’

  My eyes filled with tears. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as she got up to leave.

  I thought of her words when Hanna’s letter came.

  I know things have not always been easy between us, Mama. I always knew that your feelings for Kurt were stronger than for me, and yes, I did resent that. Especially when you left us here to follow him across the world when I wanted you to stay to help me.

  Yes, God forgive me, she was right. I could not deny the truth of her words.

  Mama, I am asking you again. You went to Kurt when you felt he needed you. Now I need you. I so much want you to come home to me here. With Franz gone, my life is empty, and I find I want my mother with me. Will you come?

  There was a great apathy on me. It hurt so much to be where every moment reminded me of Carl, where Hermann seemed a younger version of the man I had loved so much, and where I lay diagonally across the bed each night trying to fill the vast emptiness that was Carl’s space. I could only cope by shutting down all feeling. Cope? No, exist. That I did not want.

  Yet I was surrounded by warmth and care. I had not realised how much I had become part of this community, where the dour suspicion that had met me earlier, and the covert wary glances that had accompanied our marriage, had disappeared with the years and been replaced with acceptance and, yes, even friendship.

  I went mechanically about my daily life. The routines of the years continued, and the rhythm of life at Lobethal resumed. It was good that Carl had worked so closely with his sons. They were able to keep going, and as we moved into harvest there were many who came to support them through that first year.

  No one to blame. I knew it. My head told me that there was no fault to apportion, yet I found it hard to look at Rolf. If not for him, would we have buried the man I loved on a grey November morning? Kurt must have sensed this. He and Emma came less often to me, and when their new daughter was born there was little comfort when they named her Carla, for him. On her baptismal day I held the baby in my arms but looked at my namesake, the little Anna, and wondered what her future would be.

  What would I have wished for her? Would I have wanted for her the life I had had?

  Yes, and yes again. The pain of losing was vast, but the joy of loving, and of being loved, was even greater. The gift outweighed even the loss. I sought some understanding in reading, some sense that I was not alone. Others had felt it, I knew—the awful pain of emptiness, of a beloved gone. What little comfort they could give, I clutched desperately. There was Lord Tennyson, whose vast poem of lost love the Countess and I had read with tears. In those days in Rauschwitz before I had known of love. His lines came back to me—to mock or to console? Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all. They offered me a mantra, and I clung to it. This I could believe, and it helped me through those moments when all I wanted was the feeling of Carl’s hand in mine, and in the long nights his body cradling mine.

  Rauschwitz, and my early life. So many years back, so far from all I now knew. Lewin, and my life with Otto. Motherhood and the daughter I had never given enough. Perhaps it was time to repair that damage, to offer now what I had denied her earlier, in those years when she had belonged to Otto as Kurt had belonged to me.

  ‘Go,’ he urged me. ‘Hanna needs you, and perhaps you need her.’

  ‘Go,’ Magda advised. ‘You need to leave here for a time. To get away. To forget.’

  ‘Do you think I could forget?’

  ‘That was foolish. Of course not. But it will help, I do believe that.’

  ‘How can I walk away from here? This is my life. I am needed here.’

  ‘They will manage. After all, Carl took over this place when he was little older than Hermann, and the boys and Adelina will manage well. And if you wish it, Lars and I will come to be with them while you are gone.’

  ‘Fritz? He is only ten, and he still has nightmares of his father’s death.’

  He woke often in the night. I heard him cry out as he struggled with tangled bedclothes, reliving those awful moments as he tried to drag his father’s body from the water. I held him close until the dream had passed.

  Magda reassured me, ‘I will care for him; after all, I have done that before.’

  She was right; she had been the first mother he had known, and I do not think I had ever taken her place in his heart. Or his in hers. The children that she and Lars had so much wanted had never come. I knew she would slip back into her old role at Lobethal as if the years between had not occurred.

  ‘You will come back, won’t you?’ they all persuaded. ‘Take some time with your daughter, then come back to us. This is your home, it’s where you should be.’

  Their vehemence was comforting. And I knew they were right. ‘Oh yes, I will be back. I’ll not even take my chest. It can wait for me in my bedroom, where it has been all these years. It is part of my home.’

  How Carl had laughed as we dragged the heavy wooden object to its position under the window. ‘I find it hard to believe,’ he commented, heaving it across the room, ‘that you managed to get this from Lewin to here.’

  ‘Ach, I had help. There was always someone who would assist me.’

  When I looked back on that journey, it was true. Always there was someone who would come to my assistance, so the long desperate search had been manageable. And yet, when I recalled those weeks, those months, of my search, it seemed another life lived in my need to find my son.

  I had found a son. But in finding him I had found so much more. A self I had never known. A new home. A new land to live the rest of my life. A new family. And now grandchildren as Kurt’s life here became established. A little Anna to watch grow up. Carl’s children, whose love for me I knew was real, and who would help to keep him close to me. As he always would be.

  Yes, the chest could wait for me. I would return.

  Epilogue

  I have sought you, Anna, over all these years, and perhaps I have found you. Your voice has haunted me, and you have looked gravely at me from the one photograph that has come to us. You sit peacefully, your eyes calm and un
troubled, your lips together, unsmiling but serene, looking out beyond the camera to someone behind the photographer.

  Who is standing there? Is it Carl, whom you loved so much?

  Your face is meditative, and you hold close the child on your knee. An infant, perhaps two years in age, his gown ruffled and a toy in his hands. Is it Fritz?

  It is a small photograph, but you are lovely. Your hair is drawn back, and the ribbons of the small hat perched high on your upswept hair are tied loosely and hang over your breast. It is no surprise that men would be drawn to you. Above the high collar, your chin is firm, and there is a sweetness in your gravity.

  You did not come back.

  I found the news of your death in a brief report. A paragraph, non-committal, in the local news section of one of the regional papers. What else could they have said? It is the pedestrian prose of a local reporter.

  Friday, 24 March 1899

  Mr Kurt Werner’s mother, who went home to Germany some time ago, had written her son, Mr Werner, blacksmith, that she was coming back again. The other day he received a letter to say that his mother was dead. This indeed was a shock, for the deceased lady lived here for some years and made many friends, who will regret to hear of her sudden death.

  We know nothing more.

  Is this what you have wanted to tell us? That you wanted to return here, where you belonged? Is this what keeps your spirit wandering restlessly in the shadowy realms where I have seen you?

  I stand and search these photographs on my wall, the dour farmers and their submissive brides. Or so they seem. They too would have their stories; perhaps they wander the netherworld wanting to share their memories.

  You are the one who came to me, Anna, asking me to search for you. Just as you yourself searched, and eventually found what you were seeking.

  Your chest is still here, where you have left it, in hope of the return that did not happen. I touch it, running my hands over the surface of the battered wood. I turn back the lid; it is empty, filled only with the memories of the gowns it contained and, perhaps, an elusive whiff of the perfume you wore.