The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  ‘The encouraging German professor,’ said Beth.

  ‘Ah yes, the encouraging German professor.’ Frank was getting the barman’s attention. ‘Grandma Cath was by now in her late twenties, unmarried, a strikingly beautiful woman by all accounts but don’t take my word for it. She may have done some encouraging of her own because – The crumbed calamari with the tomato and basil salad please, and chuck in a few extra squiddy bits for my companion.’

  ‘Do you want two servings, sir?’ asked the waiter. He was now withholding his charming smile.

  ‘Not really,’ said Frank. ‘My companion doesn’t feel hungry, but she’ll probably want some when she sees mine. Pretty sure she will.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the waiter. ‘Let’s call it a serving and a half.’

  ‘Why don’t we do that,’ said Frank, and as the waiter left, ‘Charming man.’

  ‘The German professor?’

  ‘You’re remorseless. No, the waiter. Where I come from now in the redneck north of Australia he’d be called a wog. My mother Greta’s father would have been called a Hun, except he ran away to South America long before the First World War broke out.’

  ‘The German professor.’

  ‘My grandfather, the nameless German professor.’

  ‘I think I knew that.’

  ‘So no surprises there then.’ Frank’s face was contorting with the pressure of a forced smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the waiter.

  ‘Okay, make it two servings then.’

  At the far end of the room, half the corporates were singing something in Chinese, each line followed by the other half singing what Beth guessed was the English translation. They all kept cracking up. I never knew . . . to forget a person

  . . . it’s so difficult . . . I never knew . . . to forget that feeling . . . isn’t that easy . . .

  ‘They’re singing our song,’ she said.

  Frank gave her a look that said he was pretending he couldn’t hear it. ‘And as for Greta, our mum, she was closing in on forty when she had us. Dad came back from the war early, he was a nervous wreck and minus a leg, there was ongoing pain. We were his last accomplishment. Pretty much drank himself to death by the time we went to primary school. He left us in the car a few times while he went into the pub for a couple of quick ones. He brought us out Cokes, they were the thing. Then we’d go and get the fish and chips he’d been sent out for. There was always a little pack of hot chips for us to have in the back seat while he drove home. He drove with immense, deliberate care. With one real leg, mind you. I can picture the back of his head and the smell of the chips. Ruth and me had burping competitions with the Cokes.’ He tried to fill her wine glass, but she put her hand over it. ‘Once he fell forward at the table and put his face in his dinner. Greta gave us a look so we just kept on eating while he stayed put. They had big rows. Afterwards he sometimes took his prosthetic off and sat outside and smoked. We knew he wasn’t really there any more than his leg was, just the breathing thing that made smoke come out of his nose. Other times he’d pretend to be a three-legged sheep dog and round us up – we loved it when he did that kind of stuff. He could be pretty funny. He did a great Oliver Hardy impersonation with a little stove-black false moustache. We saw Laurel and Hardy in Busy Bodies at the RSA, they had a 16-millimetre projector for family nights. Bert would be sneaking drinks with his mates.’ Frank’s grimacing smile as the calamari arrived. The waiter said you’re welcome even though Frank hadn’t thanked him.

  ‘Didn’t get a mention at the reunion,’ said Beth. ‘Bert, I mean.’

  ‘Albert Didn’t-get-a-mention Parks,’ said Frank. He bit a calamari ring in half. ‘Poor bugger. Poor bloody Oliver Hardy impersonator.’

  ‘Just a half, please,’ said Beth. Then she raised her glass. ‘Albert Parks.’

  ‘Otherwise known as the Parks Department,’ said Frank. He waved his glass at her plate. ‘You should try them.’

  The waiter was back. ‘And how is everything?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Frank. ‘Bloody marvellous. Ripper.’

  So that was going to be that, then. She sampled a crumbed calamari ring. It was horrible, oily and limp. Time to go. It was clear Frank wasn’t going to talk about his mother Greta, or her ‘fresh start’, not this time.

  But then he said, ‘I’ll send you some things of Greta’s when I get home.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘She was a journo, remember? Guess where Ruth got the bug.’ He poked his fork at her calamari. ‘Disgusting, eh. Time to get home for some bloody big Dingo Beach tiger prawns. You should come over.’

  His body was very thin and bony, and he held her tightly. She sat in the car for a while before taking the exit to the motorway. There were processions of headlights in both directions, coming and going, impossible to tell which was which.

  Josephina

  It was even a rather silly poem, but Josephina couldn’t say that to Catharina, who had asked her to read it again many times in the days after Mister Oats politely handed it to her and gently shook her hand. Catharina’s expression was solemn and tragic whenever she heard the poem read again, and it was easy to see that the poem Papa Wolf had written for her mutti had become a magical object. Josephina was now Little Bird! – but Little Bird couldn’t tell Catharina that she was not completely happy with Papa Wolf’s intention to publish his intimate name for her, especially as it was about the shoulder blades he’d liked to stroke.

  And who was Reichskanzler Dismay, Catharina wanted to know, and asked to be told again, and then again. Josephina would explain that he was the Chancellor of Germany and was called Bismarck, he was a very powerful man who had made it dangerous for all of them to stay in Hamburg, and had also made it dangerous for Alex and her mutti and papa to stay there, but Catha already knew that, didn’t she?

  So was he a monster? Catharina made her fingers into claws and bared her teeth.

  Yes, he was a kind of monster. But not like that.

  But did the Chancellor eat children, like Krampus?

  No, he didn’t eat children. But he was very cruel to people he didn’t like.

  And was Papa Wolf fighting him?

  Yes, Papa Wolf was fighting him, but he was fighting with words, not with a sword.

  So he was fighting with words like the ones in the poem?

  Yes, like the ones in the poem.

  So around they went, around and back again. Soon Catharina knew the poem by heart. The sun will rise beyond the gaze of Reichskanzler Dismay. She and Josephina would say the words together, looking at each other’s lips as they made the shapes of the words, and Catharina would widen her eyes as far as they could go. Sometimes Catharina would put one finger on her mutti’s lips as she said the magic words. Then Catharina would say, ‘Brave Papa Wolf!’ and shake her fist in the air.

  Brave Papa Wolf!

  What Josephina could not explain to Catharina was that this monster Reichskanzler Dismay was a man Wolf had in his thoughts all the time, but he wasn’t someone Catharina’s mutti thought about as much, and so the poem was perhaps not so much about her, but even a bit more about what Wolf had in his mind when he wrote it, which was what he usually had there, the things he thought about all the time, including the Chancellor.

  And of course he had meant the lines about the Chancellor, and about ‘our tired, poor, huddled masses’, to be read by others on the ship, not just her. In fact, mostly by others on the ship.

  And of course he would have done that.

  And what she could not explain to Catharina, nor even very well to herself, was that she didn’t mind knowing that Wolf had almost published his intimate name for her and her shoulder blades so that everyone on the ship could read it, and that the poem addressed to Little Bird was as much about what he always had in his mind and often talked about with Theodora, and had talked and talked about with the visitors who came to the Bloch House. Because that was who he was, that was her Wolf, t
hat was who he always would be for ever, and the things that were not quite right about the poem were what allowed her to have him, but also allowed her to let him go a little, little by little. Really it was because the poem had made her laugh at Wolf, at her Wolf, and then the laugh had opened a gap in her grief and the world had begun to come back in, just a little bit at a time.

  Now the weather was cooler and there were strong steady winds blowing from behind the ship. In the evening, Josephina liked to stand by the rail and turn her stomach with the heavy child in it towards the wind and the sunsets. Sometimes she did this with Catharina when she wasn’t playing with her friends. Then they’d be sailing into the future and towards the next day’s dawn – she and Catharina and the baby were going there – but she could see the past sliding slowly away along the hull of the ship and getting left behind. It was always there, like the sea, and always sliding away at the same time. And Wolf was always there, and always sliding away.

  And what she could perhaps never say to Catharina, or only when Catharina was much older, and could only now think to herself, was that what had woken her up to being back in the present, on the deck of the ship the day she came up out of the cabin with Catharina, had been the almost-silliness of Wolf’s poem – how it was about her and how he loved her but also about what Wolf could never get out of his thoughts – that was what had made her laugh, the Wolfness of it. It was the laughter that had surprised her and woken her up as if from a long dream in which time had just stopped or didn’t exist.

  Catharina had seen her laugh, the first time for weeks, and had at once looked across at Theodora who was watching from the shade by the afterdeck while some of her pupils made rude gestures behind her back. Yes, Josephina had seen Catharina look across at Tante Theodora and claim her mutti’s laugh for herself, and stare down the rude gestures of the children. Then they had hugged each other with the Wolf-poem pressed between them, and Theodora had seen that too.

  Now Catharina was going to school again in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoon after their lunch. Sometimes Theodora was at the school, and when it wasn’t her turn to do that she would often sit by herself in the stateroom or in a sheltered place on the deck and write in her book. Sometimes they talked about what they would do when they got to New Zealand, and they agreed that they would have to get some work. For example, Josephina could do sewing and Theodora could be a tutor to the children of well-off families – a suggestion that made her say ugh. But this conversation they could really only have once and then repeat. It was the same when Theodora would ask how was Josephina feeling, was the baby moving around a lot? To which Josephina could reply that she was feeling fine, but very heavy and tired now, it was difficult to sleep, she was looking forward to getting the baby out, and it was going to be a running and jumping child, of that she was certain. There was nothing else for them to talk about, and it seemed to Josephina that Theodora was keeping her distance – she made it clear, for instance, that she didn’t want to talk about Wolf and their lives together. Josephina would have liked to hear about Theodora’s experience of Wolf, but she turned her face away when Josephina asked and said, only, that Josephina had known one Wolf and she another.

  Of course, Theodora was always thoughtful and ready to help. But that made no difference to the loneliness Josephina had begun to feel.

  And now there was no Wolf to talk to and play with – none of the funny stories he made up, or the ones he told about what he’d heard was going on in the ship, because he was always talking to people, that was how he behaved. He told her the story of the young men from the single men’s quarters who, one night, took a small pig from its pen on the deck and put it down the hatch of the single women’s quarters, where it ran around squealing until one of the women took hold of it and threw it out on the deck for the night watch to chase. Another time some women stood outside the captain’s cabin and wouldn’t let him out until he agreed they could hang their washing in the rigging to dry, including their undergarments – then she’d understood why the sailors were always saluting the washing. And of course she no longer had Wolf’s tender touch, on her big stomach or on the shoulder blades he loved.

  Josephina was sitting outside with her sewing when fru Frederiksen sat down beside her. She spoke Danish carefully, with some German mixed in, as if she was trying to translate for Josephina’s benefit. And what was the meaning of the little birds that Frau Hansen was embroidering on the front of the baby nightgown? And where had she learned to do such fine work? And then, after a pause, before Josephina could reply, she said carefully, as though her words were memorised, that all her family were very sorry about Herr Hansen’s death, she hadn’t wished to approach Frau Hansen at first to say that, or at least not until she had come out from her mourning, not that there was an end to mourning, of course. And then she stopped, as if she had kept going past the end of her prepared speech.

  The little birds were Rohrsänger, perhaps fru Frederiksen knew them? Perhaps they had them where her family came from? They lived in the reeds close to the sea. In the autumn they all flew away to somewhere warm, perhaps the places where oranges came from? Like the Canary Islands? Did fru Frederiksen remember the oranges they got there, in the Canary Islands? She herself had always loved getting some of them when they came in to Kielerhafen, that was where she lived as a child. Her papa used to bring them home.

  Then Josephina couldn’t talk anymore.

  The fat tears just came and would not stop, they were falling on the baby’s nightgown and on the back of Josephina’s hand there. Fru Frederiksen’s hand came over and rested on top of Josephina’s – some tears fell on it but she left it there, on top of Josephina’s.

  Yes, she said after a while, they had those birds where their Frederiksen family came from – it was up at Haderslev, the birds nested around the lake.

  Fru Frederiksen’s hand was warm and her fingers a little swollen and purplish. A glove was tucked under the wristband of her sleeve. The sleeve had a narrow crochet lace trim, the pattern like one Greta had on her church dress, very plain circles and squares.

  Josephina put the forefinger of her free hand on the lace trim. She needed to make her speech work again.

  Her sister Greta had that one, a trim like that one, it was a present from her family in Sønderborg.

  Ah, so quite close to Haderslev, and was Sønderborg where Frau Hansen’s family lived now?

  Now Josephina’s tears had stopped. She wanted to wipe her eyes but left her hands where they were, with fru Frederiksen’s slightly swollen purple one and the baby’s nightgown with its unfinished pair of Rohrsänger.

  Her sister was married to a Danish man. That was why she was in Sønderborg.

  But Frau Hansen spoke some Danish? And her daughter Catharina also?

  Yes, she had visited her sister there and stayed for a while.

  And would fru Frederiksen now ask if her sister in Sønderborg knew Pastor Jepsen? But she did not. Fru Frederiksen carefully took her hand away from Josephina’s and dabbed at the tears on it with the glove she took from her sleeve with its Danish lace trim. Josephina, too, wiped her tears and her nose on an offcut piece of muslin from her sewing bag.

  Did Frau Hansen know of women who could help her with the birth of her baby? Because there were midwives on the ship, the matron knew who they were, there was a list. The baby must be quite close now? She herself had three children, as Josephina knew, and . . .

  Josephina guessed fru Frederiksen had been about to tell her that she had also lost some of her babies. She heard it in the little silence after her cabin neighbour’s unfinished sentence.

  And yes, they were neighbours, after all.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Call me Josephina. We have been neighbours for a while now, after all. And thank you for your kindness.’

  ‘And I am Ada.’

  ‘Thank you, Ada.’

  Yes, naturally it had made her weep after being alone, when Ada spoke kindly to her and touched
her hand. But now Josephina could picture Pastor and fru Jepsen from the Saincte Marie church in Sønderborg; they were perched up on the spar above her and were looking down at Ada whom they certainly recognised because the Frederiksens were good church people, and of course at Josephina who had arrived in Sønderborg as a young widow pregnant with her first child, whom the Pastor had christened Catharina Elke Lange Hansen – and now here was Josephina again, widowed and pregnant again, but still called Hansen?

  And over there was Ada’s friendship group. They were three women about the same age, they often sat together.

  Would Josephina like to join her friends, Ada wondered. There they were, Josephina probably recognised them, they often sat together? They would certainly be interested in the embroidery work she was doing, so fine and pretty. Sometimes they sewed together, but just mending and so forth.

  Josephina put the baby’s nightgown in her sewing bag. It was quite difficult to stand up from the hatch cover; she had to press down hard with one arm, and her dress tightened uncomfortably against her stomach. She would have to let the gathers out again.

  Ada was looking at her with an encouraging expression. Her friends were also looking in her direction.

  Josephina thanked Ada but said she needed to have a rest now, she was going to lie down for a while.

  Pastor and fru Jepsen were creaking and flapping up on their spar. But of course they were far away now, all of that was very far away.

  But had she made a mistake to babble about Kielerhafen, and Sønderborg, and the Rohrsänger?

  No, of course she had not. The ship was going on into the future.

  The air in the cabin was a little close and smelly; it was much nicer and fresher outside. She took her dress off and lay down in her shift.