by Ian Wedde
The moon was obscured by dark storm clouds about midnight. Josephina was looking out the little window but closed it as the ship began to tip. It’s getting dark now, she said in a whisper, but Catharina had been asleep for a long time, and Wolf as well. I could hear the labour of his breathing and some inarticulate night-murmurs from the child. Josephina didn’t know I was still awake and watching her in the darkness. Was she talking to herself or to that transforming spirit that lives inside her?
Josephina was very pale and weak after the storm. The ship’s matron had been abrupt with her at first, disapproving of the arrangements in our cabin and threatening to ask questions of the ship’s captain and also of the doctor. The papers that Wolf arranged for us in Bremen declare that we are all Hansens, husband, sister, wife and daughter. The matron’s eyes almost parted company in her face while trying to reconcile our appearances. But she soon became Josephina’s ally, so she had good soup and clean towels and before long there were little spots of warm colour on her cheeks.
Now we are allowed on deck again where the sailors are exerting themselves with much bustling and business. They are not allowed to talk to the women on the ship but one of them called out to Josephina in Danish. What did he say, I asked her. The warm spots on her cheeks got warmer. He asked if I was called Siren, she said, and why was I hiding my tail? What is a Siren? She’s a mythical sea-woman who lures poor sailors to their doom, I told her. She has a glittering fish-tail. Oh no, said Josephina and put her hand over her mouth, at once shocked and fascinated. A kind of Lorelei, she asked herself. I could see that a transformation was already happening in the secret space of her imagination, though imagination is perhaps not the right word, since her transformations invariably involve external phenomena and not just the closed world of mental fancy.
I have no reason to believe that her transformations are always happy since she has had to endure much unhappiness and turmoil in her life. But when I watch her sewing or embroidering, or encounter her clear gaze, I see that she has a gift. What it is I don’t pretend to understand, but perhaps because of it she is able to make her own kind of sense of a fearfully incommensurate world.
My dear brother, on the other hand, came down into our stateroom yesterday pale and shaking. Josephina and Catharina were having a nap in the sleeping compartment, and Wolf looked around for them. His fingers are very thin and white and bony with thick tufts of black hair below their middle knuckles, and he had been gnawing at those knuckles on his right hand so that the hairs were wet and flattened against his fingers, like the hair of a cat that has been cleaning itself. Where were they, he asked in a hoarse voice. Where were Catharina and Josephina? Were they on deck? They were sleeping, I told him, but what was the matter? Why was he so distressed?
Then, with trembling lips, and twisting his hands on the table in front of him, he told me about the mistreatment of a young seaman, just a boy of about sixteen. Those who were on deck saw the boy being beaten with a rope end as he went to climb up into the rigging with a tar pot. The officer who was beating him pursued him and continued to beat him with the rope as he ran further out on the yardarm.
‘We were watching,’ said my brother, whose whole body shook with spasms. ‘We just watched.’ They watched as the boy missed a rope he was trying to grasp in order to slide down to the deck, and fell into the sea. From my quiet place in the stateroom I had heard much shouting and the clattering and snapping of sails as the ship changed course, but of course had no idea of the reason for it. The boy was picked up, Wolf told me, but was at once sent aloft again with the tar bucket. Some of the passengers had now begun to mutter, but no one raised their voice in the boy’s defence. Perhaps because he was shaking with cold, or because of the rolling of the ship, he spilled some of the tar on a sail. He was ordered down and the officer who had been beating him tied him to the rigging and exposed his buttocks and back. The captain then gave him many lashes with a knotted whip with several strands. Then, said Wolf, he was cut down and made to kneel before the captain and beg for mercy. And then he was ordered to lie face down on the deck with his bleeding back and buttocks exposed, while the officer dripped vitriol on his wounds from a small vial.
He screamed just once and then lost consciousness and was carried below, said Wolf. My brother’s hands were still now, and his face, though pale, was composed in a kind of expressionless, waxy mask. I know that he will never reconcile this moment in his mind but will add it, untransformed, to the archive of evidence upon which he builds his view of a world fundamentally unjust and governed by brutal power. I understand Wolf’s world and his hope that it can be changed, and of course I share many of his convictions. But unlike his bitter and hopeful emotions, which he will go on forever grooming like a diligent cat, mine will always exist on either side of a great chasm – on one side in the memory of a world made intelligible by love, and on the other in a world from which love has been removed, like the lacerated, unconscious boy to his quarters, out of sight and out of mind.
Now that is enough. I hear Catharina waking up with a little complaint in her voice. Wolf has been conscripted to a team that is rostered to organise the food rations and I have been requested to contribute to the ship’s school for children. Both are improbable to say the least but Wolf will do his best I am sure and I will try to do likewise.
Wolf Bloch
To Signor Pasquale Martignetti
c/o Banca Malzone
88 Mulberry Street
Manhattan
New York
America
Monday, November 17, 1879
My very dear Pasquale and of course also Signora Maria and sweet Alessandra:
Your letter was forwarded to us in Bremen by our kind friend Herr Johannes Paul who may be joining you in the Land of Opportunity where we are told our tired, poor, huddled masses are welcomed! I want with all my heart to believe this is possible but my always-watchful sister suggests we wait and see how things turn out for our comrades who have also taken your path. Like them Herr Paul has found the Chancellor’s oppressions intolerable and unsustainable, and writes that he can no longer continue his businesses in Hamburg let alone their progressive ancilla such as the sewing room Kita where Catharina and Alessandra became such devoted playmates! No doubt the Chancellor will be glad to see the last of him and will thank America for welcoming this socialist viper into its bosom!
One day soon you will be able to embrace him and his family on our behalf since we were unable to get timely passage from Hamburg to America, having been given too little time to leave our beloved Bloch House and its ghosts, now, of conversations past. We had to take the soonest option available to us from Bremerhaven and so we are now ‘on the high seas’ to New Zealand, a name that hints at the low country our family skirted with caution on its zigzag towards Hamburg all those years ago but which I hope will offer us a ‘new life’.
In this expression lurks the disturbing dogma of being ‘born again’ promoted with zeal by our travelling companions, a family of devout Christian Danes whose father and husband speaks fervently of this second birth as involving a combination of ‘water and spirit’, a wish that seemed about to be granted soon after our departure when we endured a fierce storm. They irritate my watchfully critical and forthright sister simply, I think, because they are both religious and a model bourgeois family, but they seem decent folk to me, and hr Cresten Frederiksen and I have managed to have some perfectly civil (though warm) discussions about his reasons for leaving Denmark, mostly to do with the rise of the Left and ‘enemies of the Natural Order of Things’. Perhaps hr Frederiksen expects to re-establish this ‘Natural Order’ in the country to which he is transporting his agreeable family, but I doubt the majority travelling in the steerage of this ship will leave him much room for his ambitions (and none at all if my sister has a say in the matter), though their (not her!) sullen docility may need to be ignited.
This letter is one of a packet I must finish to send ashore at Funchal on
the island of Madeira where our ship has been forced to go off-course, having lost provisions and water in a storm. We expect to be there tomorrow morning. I did not suffer greatly from the storm that began in what the English prefer to call the ‘English Channel’ and continued for some days into the Bay of Biscay. Theodora was very sick and so was poor Josephina. Little Catharina was miserable for a day or two but then wanted to go outside to look at the waves, which was forbidden. Our little cabin and the stateroom space we share with the hopeful Danes and two devout Catholic Bavarian families became very foul and wet, a situation not improved by the fervently vomited prayers of our neighbours. I thought sometimes of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ by your now fellow American Henry Longfellow and the terrifying translation by our German Freiligrath! And especially the part where the captain’s daughter (‘Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax’) is lashed to the mast and freezes to death before being washed ashore with hair like seaweed! Next door the born-again Danes reminded each other at intervals how their Christ had calmed the waves on the Sea of Galilee and beseeched him to do it again in the Bay of Biscay, but Jesus wasn’t listening to them.
Now I can delay my most important news no longer. You will wonder how we can travel and be accommodated together, since passenger regulations should separate me from my sister and from Josephina and her child. We are all of us travelling as Hansens with travel-passes I got made up in Bremen. I am now Herr Wolf Hansen, my wife is Frau Josephina Hansen and our daughter is Catharina Hansen. That my sister is Fräulein Theodora Hansen is a condition she will not tolerate any longer than necessary, but for the purposes of our ‘new life’ it was prudent to erase the alarming name Bloch from our records. What’s more, even my own unique physical condition passed safely below the eyes of the examining medical officers. They gave my hump a squeeze, perhaps in case it contained contraband or good fortune, they looked into my mouth, perhaps in search of seditious language, and waved me on. The youthful and healthy Josephina, on the other hand, got their full attention.
You, Signor, and Signora Maria will be happy to know that although Josephina and I are not husband and wife in the conventional bourgeois sense, we are so as comrades and lovers and will be the parents of a child soon after we get to New Zealand if our voyage goes well. My dear sister was quick to suggest this was an unexpected relationship, and I had to agree with her. However, it is one in which both Josephina and I are glad and in which I am grateful, since from a young age the likelihood of my having such a relationship has been discounted as ridiculous. But now our ‘new life’ will indeed have a new life in it.
For now I am in one of the gangs responsible for handing out provisions to the passengers from steerage. Their lot is miserable indeed after the storm, since it damaged water casks and spoiled some of their essential foods, as well as sweeping away animal pens on the deck where chickens as well as some pigs and sheep were kept. The passengers must obey rules such as getting out of bed at fixed times, cleaning their quarters for inspection and doing work such as scrubbing the decks. There are some who have rebelled against this, especially one man who has now been locked up for refusing to obey orders until the rations are improved. If fresh provisions are not to be had in Madeira we are told the ship will have to call at the Canary Islands, a journey of several days. If this happens and our journey is slowed down even more, the unrest among the steerage passengers and the sailors will certainly increase.
The discipline on the ship is a mirror of class systems with which we are familiar and where the docility of the oppressed will be proportionate to the power of those who rule. The man who currently yells curses from the stockade is a familiar defiant in this drama, though hardly a heroic one. So too was the young sailor who angered one of the ship’s officers by being slow to respond to an order. This man then beat the boy cruelly with a length of knotted rope and sent him aloft with a bucket of pitch to paint some spars, from where he fell into the sea! He was brought back on board the ship very cold and almost unconscious but was sent aloft again at once after changing his shirt. When he spilled tar on a sail the captain tied him to the rigging and flogged him on his naked back and buttocks in full view. He then ordered one of the officers to pour vitriol on the poor boy’s wounds as he lay on the deck. The crowd of onlookers was aghast at his screams but none of us thought to intervene. Am I to be ashamed that I wish above all to protect our little ‘Hansen’ family? We are at the mercy of those who own the secret knowledge that directs our path to the future. What are we to do? Perhaps in America this familiar diagram will be different. My dear Comrade Martignetti, I hope to hear from you that it is so, for all our sakes. The revolutions in ‘the old country’ seem fated to be extinguished like the bright flame of the Paris Commune, ‘that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind’.
We are between two and three weeks on our voyage. The full moon under which we departed Germany has now given way to dark nights. All being well I may send another letter to you from the Canary Islands if we stop there, and yet another from some port south of them, under a new full moon! But if not, then from the place where the ‘Hansens’ will make their new home and work to rouse Marx’s sphinx from its torpor!
‘Fräulein and Frau Hansen’ send you their warm good wishes, and Catharina asks if Alex remembers her. You will be able to reassure her once we have an address in New Zealand.
I am as always
Your respectful and devoted comrade
Wolf Bloch
Josephina and Catharina
There was Wolf by the rail of the ship, making a group of men and women laugh of course. She could just see him through the jostling crowd on deck. It was hard to stand still among them but she wanted to watch the Wolf theatre for a minute or two without making him stop, as he surely would if he saw her. She wanted to feel alone with him but without him knowing she was there. He was stretching his neck and face out with his arms at his sides, which made his little hump stand up like the one on the waterspout gargoyle on Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, the long stretched-out gargoyle with the beaky face that turned Catharina’s eyes into blue and white saucers the first time she saw it high up there where Wolf was pointing. Mutti was calling Herr Bloch just ‘Wolf’ and they had already gone for some walks.
Wolf was probably telling one of his stories to the laughing people on the deck. Perhaps he was pretending to be a fish or pretending that he wanted to jump overboard and swim beside the ship like the dolphins they had seen. He was making little paddling movements with his hands – she stood still where she was and watched him, hidden by the people milling around her.
The story he told Catharina on the day they saw the gargoyle was that once upon a time a bad man drank up all the fresh water meant for his children, so a good magician turned him to stone and put him up there under the roof of the building where the nice fresh rainwater would always just run through him and out the other side so that he always had water in his body but could never quench his thirst.
And what was the name of the good magician, Catharina wanted to know – and did he live nearby?
The good magician’s name was Friedrich Engels and he lived in a faraway place called Primrose Hill, Herr Bloch told her, leaning down close.
Josephina chided him with a nudge of her elbow.
And could the bad thirsty stone man ever do peepees, asked Catharina.
No, never, replied Wolf – he was quite startled but chuckled to conceal his surprise from her – because, because, because . . . the water always just ran away backwards, no, forwards, and out of his mouth, it never came out as peepees!
And where did this child learn about water going in at the top and coming out as peepees at the bottom, he asked Josephina out of the side of his mouth.
From me, Josephina told him, because I think she should learn about things.
But she was very young, suggested Wolf.
But what was so secret about water going in at the top and coming out at the bottom as peepees, Josephina wanted
to know. It was very simple after all and the child should understand how her body works.
Catharina was noticing that her mutti and Herr Bloch were looking at each other for a long time with funny smiles on their faces, so she began to tug at Josephina’s skirt to make them keep walking. They were going to Holzbrücke where on some days there was the band of gypsies with the dancing monkey. It was quite near to where they used to live at Herr Andersen’s house, and sometimes that reminded Catharina of the Kita where she used to play with Alex. It reminded Josephina of the woman in the pale evening dress with silk flowers on the bosom standing on the stairs of Herr Andersen’s house with Catharina in her arms, but Catharina liked to go to the bridge and so they did, sometimes, even though Josephina felt anxious about meeting Frau Andersen. On that day, out walking with Wolf and Catharina, her worry was almost hidden, like the currents that pushed the surface of the river into ripples.
First they looked over the balustrade at the brown, sluggish flow – Was it true, as written in the Bürger Zeitung, that the river water could make people sick?
Wolf was holding Catharina up so she could lean over. It was a matter of public sanitation that mostly affected the poor. This information he provided while pretending to tip Catharina over the edge so that she screamed. And children, he added.
Did Wolf know why they had left Herr Andersen’s house? Which was nearby on Deichstrasse?
