The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  Josephina rebuked herself for imagining these questions, but she couldn’t help doing it. There they were, the kind friendship group women with their heads together while they talked, and she saw that they sometimes glanced in her direction as she crossed the deck, or when she was talking to Mister Oats who was helping her with English.

  It should be Hanson not Hansen, Theodora had objected when Wolf brought the papers from the agent in Bremen. Because Hanson was a Jewish name. She exaggerated the different shapes of the Jewish and the German names with her lips.

  Ah, what a tremendous historical difference it made, an ‘o’ or an ‘e’, Wolf had teased his sister. But it was his married name now, with an ‘e’, wasn’t that true?

  But these were the questions Josephina guessed Ada’s friendship group asked among themselves when she wasn’t with them, and also, why was she talking to that man from the steerage accommodation?

  She had learned to sew from her mother, who had learned from her mother, Josephina told Ada’s friends, because this was the safe question. And she had her grandmother’s sampler with her. It was in their trunk in the ship’s hold. It had hundreds of stitches in it, many shown in little pictures and stories. Perhaps it was even older than her great-grandmother.

  And the Rohrsänger?

  No, the Rohrsänger were her own invention.

  So clever!

  The question about where she had watched the Rohrsänger coming and going with the seasons pressed in. It was a question about how a young woman from the marshy edge of the sea by Kiel could have met and married an older Jewish man.

  (An older Jewish man with an ugly crooked back! Called Hansen!)

  (From Sønderborg?)

  These questions were not asked when Josephina was with them, but she felt their pressure, and sometimes also the presence of Pastor and fru Jepsen from Saincte Marie in Sønderborg, perched up on one of the spars above the friendship group.

  The tall sailor with the strange German accent passed by and touched his brow respectfully to Ada’s friendship group. They were not happy with his familiarity, nor with the respectful attention of Mister Oats. Josephina was sitting with them and holding Baby Wolf on her lap. His head was on her knees and she was squeezing his little feet in her hands. It was as though she was steering him towards the future through the squally, unasked questions of Ada’s friendship group.

  Yes, it was the future his father had dreamed of, but now it was hers.

  Of course she could always sew, she replied in answer to their question about how she would be able to look after the baby when they got to Wellington, and of course her sister-in-law was an educated woman, she could teach.

  Ah yes . . . of course. An educated woman. (There she was, over there, writing something, as usual.)

  (But without a husband or even a brother?) That was the question the pause before ‘of course’ concealed when Elizabeth and Ada and the others agreed with Josephina and her answer to the question, How would she be able to look after the baby?

  But the answer was simple, surely? And so was the question, What choice did she have? And the answer, Her own choice? Was that not also simple?

  ‘What choice do we have?’ Josephina asked the companions and friends of Ada’s friendship group, looking from one to another and seeing their nods begin. She was gently squeezing Baby Wolf’s feet and steering him towards the future. It was a question that answered a question the friendship group had not asked, and that they could not answer except by remaining silent and nodding that they understood! – Of course, they nodded, of course, what choice did she have?

  But then it was clear that Baby Wolf was not interested in the future but in his hunger, so Josephina took him towards their cabin past the men playing cards, including Mister Oats who acknowledged her by lifting his cap.

  Theodora

  Saturday, 28 March, 1880, Port of Wellington, New Zealand

  Our ship went back and forth in blustery conditions for the better part of a day, keeping its distance from the land. We were between one and two weeks on from our arrival at Sydney where a number of the ship’s passengers had disembarked in lighters, many of them singing and cheering as they left their prison of some four months, and who could blame them for that. The ship remained at anchor out in the harbour, perhaps to discourage crew deserters. It was clear that a close watch was being kept on the crew, some of whom perched themselves high in the bare rigging and gazed at the busy signs of life on the shore. Others, however, ran away while getting the passenger baggage ashore, and so we were delayed while replacements were brought on board. Now, within sight of our destination, the word went around that we were delayed yet again because the winds and the tide were not right and the ship was unable to take the Wellington pilot on board. You see how I have begun to adopt an easy familiarity with language that had only ever seemed metaphorical before.

  In the distance from time to time we could barely see an inhospitable rocky coast and beyond it some vague misty hills, everything very windswept and a thin line of white breaking water at the land’s edge. Black, grey and dirty green-blue were not the obvious colours of a new paradise, nor were the sullen oppressions of the sky, but their grim palette at least carried no hint of false promises such as those flaunted at us in pestilential Cape Verde. Though the ship was rather unsteady and seemed to be going back and forth between two landmasses separated by a wide choppy maelstrom, none of the passengers who had stayed on deck were any longer prone to sickness. Even so, there were some shouts of dismay when the captain and officers ordered all passengers to their quarters as the ship then prepared to make its final approach to our destination. Were we to be denied the reward of a first sighting after so many long weeks, indeed months? But down we sullenly went as if well schooled in the behaviour appropriate to this New Land. Catharina was following with the other children under the firm Danish hand of fru Frederiksen.

  In the hour or so before we went below, Josephina had been with her friends, the women associated with fru Frederiksen, all of whom had been unfailingly kind to her in the time after Wolf’s death and the birth of his son. I was grateful for their kindness on her behalf and thought it generous rather than charitable, a judgement I confess to arriving at against my own familiar prejudices. At no time did I have any particular wish to join them but, more to the point, I had for some weeks thought it best to treat this opportunity for sociable warmth as being in Josephina’s best interests and the best interests of her baby, and so hers to own. My best interests, after all, have become those associated with solitude on the one hand and the company of a speechless infant on the other. It has comforted me perversely since my poor dear brother’s death to know how much he would have enjoyed the apparent absurdity of this space of opportunity and choice in the life of his always critical elder sister! And yet it has become a nearly perfect life for me, in which grief can be encountered and measured rather calmly whenever it returns to my thoughts. It has also been a practical life, combining my regular obligation to prepare unappetising food for appropriately ungrateful travelling companions and my attempts to retain the intellectual attentions of children bored to the point of moroncy. My own intellectual stimulation comes to me second-hand from Josephina, who shares the notes on English she gets from Wolf’s friend Mister Oats. These permit me to supplement what I have previously been tutored in by the likes of Engels’ Conditions and Paine’s Rights in their daunting English editions. And so, in time, as well as startling the baker with an assertion that men are born free and equal, I may be able to ask for a loaf of bread and get one.

  And of course, despite the circumspections of our relationship as sister and lover of the little man we had both adored in our different ways, and the close confinement of our living conditions, here I have been now for some strange weeks in the inescapably intimate circumstances, at once blissful and intolerable, of living with the young woman whose claim on my heart I cannot disclose, and the child whose claim I cannot conceal.


  Given the habits and expectations into which all of these contingencies had moulded me, it was with a shock as we went below that I heard Josephina mutter under her breath, with a venom in her tone that was unlike anything she had said in my presence before, that she was sick to death of the whispered judgements and suspicions of fru Frederiksen’s friendship group, and the sooner we could all go ashore and never see them again the better she would be pleased! There was much noisy clattering, shouting, blowing of whistles and snapping of sails as she said this, and so it was only after the hatch cover had been closed and we were in the stateroom with our neighbours that I found myself having to suppress an angry rebuke. Then, leaving Catharina with her friend Gudrun, we went through into our sleeping cabin, where Josephina sat on her bed and began to feed the baby, something both of them had begun to find difficult. What was the reason for the malice in her tone, I asked her. What had happened to turn her against those well-meaning women whose company she regularly sought and seemed to appreciate?

  Little Wolf had learned to tangle one hand in a strand of Josephina’s hair as he fed and after some initial outcries his cheek was flushed with the work of suckling. Seeing this tender tableau, which I had witnessed often without appearing to seek it out, was as close as I could ever hope to get to a reconciliation of the erotic claim on my heart that I cannot disclose and baby Wolf’s claim that I cannot conceal, and my irritation melted away in a sweet warmth. But then Josephina looked over at me with a piercing expression of frustration. It was none of my business, she said coldly, but since I had asked, her anger was precisely because she had no choice but to sit with those women, as the alternative was to add fuel to their suspicions by appearing to avoid their company much as I, Theodora, had chosen to do, as they noticed. Hadn’t I seen how they liked to discuss her and indeed me, Theodora, as well, when we weren’t listening?

  But what suspicions, I asked her. And how could she know what was in their minds or what they were talking about when she wasn’t listening? And then she dictated, in a dull staccato, as if from a remorseless, repetitive, inquisitorial voice that played over and over in her mind, a list of things she believed the women were discussing. Most of these seemed harmless to me – for example, how was it credible that a young woman with a German or Danish name could have married a considerably older Jew who could hardly be considered a compelling prospect for such an attractive young woman? I didn’t say that the same question had occurred to me, the Jew’s own sister, but then I had seen how that unlikely story had unfolded in ways that overruled my own mental whisperings. They were convinced, hissed Josephina with, now, tears in her eyes, that the kindly Mister Oats and even one of the sailors were making improper advances. What could I say to her? That a man’s most kindly and generous attentions might become the advance manoeuvres of seduction, as she herself knew well, and this was not such an unreasonable suspicion for the women to have, since they had made caring for Josephina their responsibility?

  But then I saw, as baby Wolf began to complain loudly about the agitated messages in his mother’s voice and body, that the space left in Josephina’s heart by Wolf’s death had become a horrible echoing vacuum that had filled up with these imagined whisperings endlessly repeated. She had been locked up with them on this ship where no escape or relief was possible. The wide horizon on all sides had never ceased to be other than a stifling encirclement towards which the ship’s grudging movements were endlessly inconclusive. What was driving her mad was this, but also her stubborn refusal to abandon the resource of her own strong will which was itself like a horizon that confined her.

  This could have been the moment when I crossed the short space between us in the little cabin and took her in my arms to say that I loved her and Wolf’s baby, that we were nearly in a new place where those whisperings would soon blow away, that they didn’t matter, that we would do whatever we had to, this was now our choice to make. This was the recitation with which we had lately often encouraged each other. But I did not cross the cabin because Josephina gave a great sigh that was almost a laugh, and said, Well Wolf, here we are, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking to her baby or to her dead lover, nor who were the subjects she meant by saying we.

  And then, after an hour during which Josephina knelt in silence by the sleeping baby Wolf and looked out the little spray-smudged window as the daylight was beginning to fade, we were allowed back on deck while the ship went very slowly with almost all its sails furled into the broad expanse of a harbour encircled by hills. In the distance was a meagre scattering of lights, with a few more flickering across the slopes. Though it was forbidden to do so, some of the young men climbed up the ladders of the rigging to get a better look at what these lights revealed. There seemed to be a town, they shouted, there were chimneys and smoke, and a number of other ships at anchor. But not much of anything! An almost full moon had begun to rise above the long, blunt mound of a hill below which a line of lights seemed to indicate a foreshore. The evening sky was clearing and the misshapen moon was swept by dark clouds. The air was fresh but not cold.

  Josephina was standing next to me with the baby wrapped in a special warm shawl that she treasured. Catharina was nearby, riding aloft on Mister Oats’ shoulders, but complained she still couldn’t see anything much but hills. There was a great rattling of chain as an anchor was let go. Then I felt Josephina’s hand reach very gently around my waist, and her head leaned against my shoulder for a brief while. There is hardly anything here, she said. Her tone was more of wonder than disappointment. Perhaps she meant that there was still room for something, though of course I cannot know that. I was touched by her gesture, which may have been in part an apology for her earlier outburst about fru Frederiksen and her friends. A fiddle and some other instruments had started up and people were dancing. Josephina persuaded Catharina to come with her and I saw them join a circle. Josephina was holding her baby close with both arms but her feet were skipping quickly below the hem of her skirt. Then I was alone again as usual, in the crowd that remained gazing in perplexity towards the strange chimera of our arrival.

  And now it is morning. Everybody else is on deck waiting to be told what will happen next. I do not need to be there to know that our instructions will contain little information of any substance about that. What I do know is that this may be the last time I wait for a few seconds in this small room for my breath to dry the gleam of wet ink and then close my journal.

  Beth

  Really, Noel had liked the appearance of order more than order itself, though his containers of 35mm colour film were an exception of sorts. The containers he liked were flat grey metal Brumberger cases with six slotted rows for twenty-five mounted slides in each row. Always the same containers, he got them from America. So, one hundred and fifty slides in each container. The containers had quite a nice marbled effect on their surfaces and they were definitely stylish industrial modern, the way Noel liked his world. They had metal handles that folded up so you could carry them like a briefcase or a safe-deposit box perhaps. Each container also had a pre-prepared index sheet under the lid. Noel had always filled these in with place, date and, if published, the initials of the magazine. He was finicky. He used a fine-nib Parker fountain pen, nothing else would do. He also wrote the information on the cardboard slide frame, until they became plastic. He complained bitterly when magazines didn’t return his slides, which happened regularly. So out there somewhere, in the vaults of forgotten or anachronistic pre-digital publications, without the benefit of Noel’s neat index entry, were a whole lot more of the slides, unnamed, out of time and history, undocumented, unloved. The ‘orphans’. This much she knew before breaching Noel’s barricade. Then, too, there was the way he’d picked a slide out of its slot with elegantly fussy finger and thumb, and the way he’d bent over it on his light table with a magnifying glass.

  Behind what was surely the artfully contrived carelessness of the warped and cast-aside Cherub mast’s untidy tangle of wire and wood was a ce
iling-high rack of blue metal industrial storage shelves. The Brumberger cases were in there, about forty of them at first sight, stacked quite neatly on top of one another in lots of four. So, ten lots with about six hundred 35mm slides in each. So, something like six thousand 35mm colour slides in all.

  There was just so damn much of it, no, just too so damn much of it, viewed from a safe distance, from the outside of Noel’s barricade. The other barricade, the one she’d constructed every bit as carefully as Noel’s crafty one, was the one in her head that kept at bay the thought and, inevitably, the sad/comical image of Noel over the years scrupulously extracting six thousand colour slides and looking at each one on his light table – his rather dandyish long hair, black and then grey and then mostly white, held off his face and the magnifying glass by the spectacles he pushed up above his forehead. Every so often they’d fall off and land on the light table. Sometimes he’d used a rakish blue-and-white spotted bandanna knotted at the back of his head, and sometimes even a pair of his Skants because they had good elastic. He didn’t like the hair clips she offered him any more than the flash digital camera he got about the same time his Cherub mast barricade went up and he stopped using Kodachrome film.

  The word ‘Kodachrome’ and the sexy way he’d said it with his lips pushed forward a bit was also kept behind her barricade, or had been until now. They’d joked that he had an erotic relationship with ‘Kodachrome’, which he’d confessed, serially. The warmth, the glow, the capacity for soft textures. The relationship hid in the camera until he took the shot and then . . . in full sight as he pored over the results of their affair, his and Kodachrome’s. Noel with his Skants on his head to hold back the now somewhat straggly hair: ‘Can’t you see I’m with K’chrome?’ One of the last of his many jokes, endlessly repeated. Was that because he didn’t remember telling the jokes, or because they just kept repeating themselves to him? Then there were the lunches. Once he got up to three – it was tomato and cream-cheese sandwiches with glasses of the Astrolabe pinot gris he ‘insisted on’ – and she and ‘Sonnyboy Joe’ sat in the garden and ate all three without comment. Then Noel washed up for the third time and came back down with his glass of wine. Joe asked him what he thought of the new digital Hasselblad H he’d just bought, and he gave a detailed technical answer. A beautiful machine but he didn’t like the relationship it asked him to have with the world.