The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  Catharina

  Papa Wolf was having a bucket wash with the men. They pulled the bucket up out of the sea on the end of a rope and threw it over each other. Papa Wolf only had his underdrawers on, he was covered all over in hair and was jumping up and down and going hoo hoo too cold! She helped Tante make breakfast in the big kitchen, Tante had to do it for Gudrun and all the others, it was her turn, Tante said, thank you Catharina for helping to stir the pot, you’re a good stirrer! Papa Wolf would be getting dressed while she and Tante made the breakfast, of course he had to cover up his hairiness because it was funny. There were people waiting to make their breakfast and some of them began to shout. Then she helped Tante carry the breakfast to their room where the others were waiting, they had to go carefully because the ship was rocking and also go carefully down the steps. Then Gudrun’s papa said a Danish prayer and they all waited. She and Gudrun were staring at each other with their secret look. Then one of the Bayern papas said one of their prayers and they all waited again and those ones all made touching movements on their fronts because they were catlickers Papa Wolf said. No one waited for Papa Wolf to say a prayer. Breakfast was oatmeal but there wasn’t any milk to drink only coffee so she had water, it tasted funny. There was also some cheese but no more oranges, they were all gone. They had to hold on to their plates to eat. The oranges were from the Canary Islands that Tante said was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, they also got some big and little goats, mostly brown and black with big bubbies hanging down, some of them were for milk but there wasn’t any yet. The goats lived in pens on the deck and had funny eyes. Then she helped tidy up their beds. Mutti could feel the baby moving, would Catharina like to put her hand on her tummy and feel her little brother or sister? It felt as though the baby was jumping around but not as much as Papa Wolf getting his bucket wash and shouting! Would the baby be hairy like Papa Wolf, she wondered. Or it could be like its big sister, suggested Mutti. With Kornblume eyes? But now it was time for her to go to school, first she must use the privy and wash her face, here was a towel and the piece of lavender soap that was almost all gone now, be careful not to drop it, now give your mutti a sweet kiss please. Mutti’s face was nice and soft but she had tired eyes, so Catharina kissed them on their lids. Have a rest, Mutti. Yes she would, but first she’d come with Catharina to the school after she’d had her wash, she’d better hurry because there would be others waiting as well. Then they were up on deck in the bright sunshine. Mutti wished they still had some oranges from the Canary Islands, and didn’t Catha also miss them? It was the smell of the oranges that she liked as well as their taste, she’d have liked to see the place where the orange trees grew on the Canary Islands, Mutti told her. Yes, Mutti’s eyes were tired, she was blinking them, but maybe that was because it was so sunny outside. The goats didn’t blink theirs, they were yellow with black stripes across them. Why were the goats’ eyes like that? Mutti thought it might be because they spent so much time looking at the faraway edge of the Atlantic Ocean, what did Catha think? Catharina thought they’d better not let the baby do that, look at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, but then Gudrun took her hand and they left Mutti behind.

  Theodora

  Thursday, 4 December, 1879, Atlantic Ocean, south of Canary Islands

  Today it is sunny and not cold even for this time of year, and so very pleasant. I was on deck early when Wolf and his newfound friends were hurling buckets of seawater at each other. Of course my brother was conspicuous in this gang as you would expect since all except for him are big loud hearty men who smack their thighs and chests and bellies and bellow like wild animals as they compete to be enjoying their drenching even more than their herd-fellows. This is a small as well as incongruous miracle I must suppose, since before now Wolf has avoided like the plague anything resembling a bucket of cold water for fear of getting a sick chest and has to my knowledge never agreed to appear half naked in public, except for a notorious incident at Uelzen when his school mates conspired to drown him like a sick cat and very nearly succeeded. But now it is as though the ship with its crowded mass of undernourished optimists has become a Sanitarium at least as far as Wolf is concerned, and he clearly fears no malice from his fellow bathers.

  Today it was also my turn to prepare breakfast for our mismatched stateroom of sixteen gaping mouths and Catharina was helping me to fill them. We were on our way to the kitchen when we passed Wolf working up his appetite for the spoonsful of oats and the measure of coffee that would be his reward for the morning’s exertions. He performed an extravagant caper for Catharina’s benefit rather than mine and made a comical hooting sound as the seawater struck him.

  Catharina calls him Papa Wolf, and Papa Wolf it was who made her laugh until she hiccupped this morning. Of course I must rejoice at my brother’s changed behaviour springing as it does from the newfound joy that emerges in disbelief from his paternal relationship with Catharina and also of course even more from his inconceivable relationship with her mother. He seems at times to be living in a space stretched between bliss and disbelief in which even his miserable little body has been renewed. That Catharina loves her Papa Wolf I don’t doubt and I am sure Josephina does too, but in her case I fear that the rewards of this unlikely love have been borrowed against compromised capital, the past that sits in her heart like a loan shark waiting his moment to call in the debt with all its scandalous interest. I see that she knows this and fears the contingency of her happiness. At the same time she is evidently glad in the clear-eyed and clear-sighted critical way of which she is capable. That her eyes are sometimes red from tears can be as much from gladness as dread. That she also grieves for her own family left behind is obvious although she refuses to talk about them, and so I see that the further we go away from the place where her map of the world was first drawn in a small space but with large consequences for her thinking about fate and the future, the more resolute she tells herself she must become. She wept suddenly and was unable to hide it when a basket of sweet oranges was delivered to our cabins in the Canary Islands. It was as though what had been presented to her was at once her hope and her grief, her hope for what might be sweet in the future and her grief at leaving what had been sweet in her childhood now long past and distant behind her.

  But now I am speculating about what I cannot truthfully know, although I see that Josephina is watching me watch her and sees that I do so with a blatancy she prefers to turn from rather than stare down, as would be her usual manner. And so we are all locked here in this floating Sanitarium in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean in which these dramas of sensibility and affection are being played out as a kind of mummery upon which the confines of the cabin press in stiflingly when the weather is bad and which inflates its absurd dramas in proportion to the bewildering expanse of ocean when the weather is benign.

  To this must be added our microcosm of the religious wars that have gone on devastating the human world ever since mankind first erected altars to gods, since we are now subjected to the glares and shrugs of Christian sects who hate not only each other but also the shipmates they believe to be Jews.

  And of course there are many degrees of simmering nationalist resentment and suspicion among the passengers, not least those in our small compound. Danes and Germans, Germans from the south and those from the north, and all and sundry looking askance at these Ostjuden whose origins and loyalties owe nothing to the Homeland and who are presumed to be opportunist beggars and pants-sellers. Where once we were parasites on the soil of Germany, now it seems we benefit from the misdirected charity of those who would like to assist our departure from that soil. In addition, of course, our immigrant nation of beggars and intellectuals has been branded unpatriotic and subversive by association with socialists and not least with that arch-communist fiend Karl Marx. What right do we have to be enjoying the privileges of our comfort on board this ship when so many are suffering between decks, and so forth!

  Though our Danish cabin neighbours are politely app
rehensive rather than hostile, those family members from the Bavarian south make no attempt to conceal their distaste for the proximity into which they have been thrust, though, to be fair, their opprobrium is directed almost as much at their Protestant Danish neighbours as at our small cell of Jewish degenerates. The worst of them are their three glowering sons and head-tossing daughter aged somewhere between fifteen and twenty, who expect to be reunited with their older siblings when they get to New Zealand, where their seniors have been preparing for them. And so the inbred hostilities of the Old Homeland have already been transplanted to the New Homeland and await the arrival of fresh recruits. Wolf, it has to be said, deflects these tiresome glowers with his usual mixture of insouciance and riposte. When asked by one of the braver lads where he came from, Wolf replied that he came from his mother’s womb, adding, with a straight face, And you?

  Two mornings ago I asked Wolf why he was so happy that morning and said I was waiting to hear why he hadn’t told me the reason for it. This is a little dialogue we’ve reprised most of our lives, but his reply on this occasion gave me a fright. He was planning to publish an on-board newspaper, he told me, to circulate the news of the ship, such as its progress and what had been reported of the world from the most recent port visit, and to include some entertainments such as stories of life on the ship ‘and so forth’.

  ‘And so forth’, I suggested to my blandly smiling brother, might not include political material, surely, given certain vulnerabilities to which he might expose us? He avoided my question by saying with mischievous convolutions that he hadn’t told me why he was happy because he didn’t at that stage know what there was to tell me, if anything. But now, I asked. Now, as it turned out, one of his bucket-wash companions was a printer called Oats who had on board the basic means to set a few pages of type, as well as a small broadsheet hand-press, and who was a nice fellow and bored enough to print anything he was given.

  Then, anticipating me asking whether ‘and so forth’ and ‘anything he was given’ included material many on board including the captain would consider inflammatory and even mutinous, he very carefully presented me with a question that I took to be rhetorical. When are men indiscriminate thugs by nature, and when is their violence politically directed and particular as to its occasion? He then at once answered his own question, as he often likes to. Our Danish companion hr Frederiksen had described to him the mutinous and violent passenger in the stockade as a thoughtless thug who would be a violent presence no matter what the circumstances. On the other hand, the good Dane believed the violence inflicted on the poor young sailor whose back had been lacerated by flogging, while horrible, had been the product not of mindless thuggery and incoherent rage but of a system of punishment enshrined in the disciplinary codes of the ship to which we all as passengers, or if you like as citizens, owed our safety and well-being in the Natural Order of Things.

  Wolf knew very well that I believe, as does he, that the man in the stockade, while no hero, appears as a violent thug only in relation to that disciplinary code and the powers it enshrines, when in fact his conditions and his relative powerlessness have made his rage not only comprehensive but also comprehensible. And so, was this the polemic with which Wolf planned to inaugurate his newspaper? Which was to be called, what? The Mutineer? No, replied my brother, whose spirits were very high, the first issue might commence a discussion of recipes for making salt beef with pickled cabbage taste like fresh baby goat stew with a carafe of good Canary Island malvasia.

  We are now making passage towards the port of Praia in Cape Verde, about two weeks distant and yet another stop at which only some cabin passengers will be permitted to go ashore, with predictable consequences. Wolf plans to buy a small stock of broadsheet paper there with which to begin his newspaper, in the first edition of which he promises a schedule of entertainments including concerts, dances, puppet shows and floggings.

  Ah my dear little brother, your happiness is almost enough to make me happy too, but the reason it falls short is constantly within your reach.

  Beth and Frank

  No point asking Frank why he turned off the main highway about an hour later – he’d said ‘Okay’ but not to her as they left Taumarunui and it seemed the turn-off further along was what he’d agreed to with himself. Singing in a growly whisper, ‘I’m an ordinary joker growin’ old before me time, ’cause me heart’s in Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line’, but when Beth joined the chorus of ‘In Taumarunui, Taumarunui, Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line’, he turned to her with a startled look and stopped singing. A campervan passed them with a cheerful toot-ti-toot; there were T-shirts and undies flapping from the wound-up windows. Frank drove at a steady eighty and not all passers were as amiable as the camper. Clouds in the sky seemed to be going too slow as well.

  They continued to dawdle at Frank’s speed for a while. Then the obscure turn-off. They dawdled on across some unremarkable deforested, chopped-up hilly country with miserly grass cover on the slopes. Some sheep. There was a Clydesdale horse stud in a greenish valley-flat. Now that was an option Grandad Wolf hadn’t considered.

  ‘Pouakani,’ Frank said, after a while. And then, ‘Sorry we never visited you that last time.’

  ‘So was I,’ she said.

  ‘There was this big tree,’ he said. ‘Helen wanted to see it.’

  ‘Bit more interesting than an old stump.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort and don’t be packing a sad, it’s not like you. It was just her thing – she was pretty crook, she wanted to look at some splendid old trees. Then we had to get home.’ He reached for her hand. ‘You up for a short walk?’

  Beth knew the big old tree called Pouakani quite well, and the short bush walk. She and Noel had tramped in the Pureora with the kids a few times. He was photographing for Nat Geo. ‘Pity I never got to meet your Helen, all the same. And I’m not packing a sad. I’d have liked to.’

  ‘Chuck a sad?’

  ‘Meet her.’ She lifted his hand back on the steering wheel, it was a twisty bit of road. ‘How come you know this way in? We always came over from the Taupō road.’

  ‘It was in that brochure back at the hotel. I was led to the page by Helen’s invisible hand. She ran out of puff when we got to the old tree, threw up at the base of it – we had a nebuliser in the car but she forgot to bring it on the walk.’ He gave the steering wheel a whack. ‘Fuck,’ he said, with venom, and then, ‘But meanwhile.’ And then, ‘I taught her that song.’

  Then the silence of the bare landscape invaded the car. Beth considered putting some music in the player. What would that be? She had the 1990 remastered CD of the 1957 Solisti di Zagreb recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the appropriate showmanship of the Argentinian Jan Tomasow’s violin, Noel’s favourite. She’d played it often after he’d forgotten who she was but recognised every note of the music. Sometimes they’d go for drives to his favourite spots.

  Of course now if she put the CD on it would inevitably begin with Spring, but the parched hills receding slowly behind them were all about late summer. Oh, for Christ’s sake. It was even tedious, the way everything couldn’t be simple. Just play the damn thing.

  And then Frank said, ‘You got the old grave, I get the old tree, we’re quits, okay?’

  She took the CD out of the glovebox and stuck it in the player. ‘Springtime is upon us, the birds celebrate her return with festive song, and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes.’ She knew the translations of the Four Seasons sonnets by heart: she and Noel would say them in unison over and over, he remembered those as well. She pushed play and Frank began immediately to laugh.

  ‘Genius,’ he said. ‘Touché!’

  Some native forest, briefly, past Benneydale, and squashed possums on the road. She was humming along with the Seasons in her head.

  It was Autumn by the time they got to the Pouakani track. Frank pulled the car over and turned off the ignition. Autumn had just begun its Adagio molto.

  �
��Everyone is made to forget their cares and to sing and dance by the air which is tempered with pleasure,’ said Beth into the silence. Frank was looking out his driver’s window at the place where the track started. The faded green sign had white graffiti scrawled across it.

  ‘Should have done that,’ said Frank.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Signed her out. She sat with her back against that tree for quite a while. Did her good, I think. Then we went back to Taupō and stayed in a motel called Chateau Suisse, she pissed herself over that. Where the fuck are we, she said. And how the fuck did we get here?’ He opened his car door. ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,’ he said, and climbed out with a grunt of discomfort.

  ‘There’s no arse left in your dockers,’ said Beth as she followed him to the track. ‘You’re way too skinny. We should have a damn good lunch after this.’

  She followed his arse-less strides the short distance to the place where the trunk of the huge old tōtara called Pouakani rose ahead like a fissured cliff. He tipped his head back to look up at the tree’s dishevelled crown. She waited for a bit, thinking Frank needed some time to himself, but then without turning around he held one arm out, making beckoning movements with his fingers, so she stepped into his hug and felt the sobs heaving in his chest.

  Then, ‘Okay, thanks,’ he said. ‘We should get that lunch.’

  Then, after a long silence in the car, ‘What’s the difference between recalcitrant and refractory?’

  ‘Recalcitrants have a bad attitude to authority, refractories can’t be persuaded. Pretty much the same.’

  ‘Helen said she was like a recalcitrant seed because she wouldn’t survive drying or freezing, but she was refractory because she chose not to believe that.’

  Beth was taking a turn driving; they were passing the gloomy pine forest that fed the Kinleith paper mill, a dreary expanse of dark trees with here and there clearings filled with the wreckage of felled timber. Then the nasty chemical stink of the mill itself.