The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  Breakfast, Mutti – say it.

  Breakfast.

  Street, road, path, window, fresh air.

  No, not fresh iya, fresh eeeaaar.

  Fresh eeeeaaar.

  The warm little puffs of Catharina’s breath on her cheek as she said the words close to her in the bed. Then Wolf would be awake and hungry, so she would feed him by the bedroom window above the street where bullock wagons and some horse carriages came and went, and then take him to the balcony if the weather was fine. Theodora would bring her a glass of milk to drink, and one of Doctor Lichtscheindl’s watercress sandwiches made with very coarse yeasty bread, another of the Doctor’s dietary prescriptions.

  Their big trunk from the ship was in the bedroom – it was full of several different things, but mostly silence. She watched Theodora open it and take out clothes and also some books and other things. She put the silent household things back, the bedding and the knives and forks and some plates and cups, but no words came out of the trunk. The words for what was in it had been left behind.

  It was a nice evening, the fresh eeeaaar was blowing gently across the balcony, below it some men were standing outside by the water drinking their beer, or perhaps a couple of beers, bloody beautiful, and the mountains in the distance beyond the end of the harbour were tinted with the glow of late sunshine. Yes, it was quite a beautiful place, bloody beautiful, it was spacious and somewhat empty, perhaps that made it peaceful. But she was so wrapped up in the peacefulness, it was muffled and dull despite the noise of drinking men and the breeze, she might as well be asleep? Wolf was kicking with strong little jerks on her lap and blowing bubbles, he was certainly much stronger and happier, and Doctor Lichtscheindl thought she was too. The English words Catharina was helping her to learn and the ones she heard the drinking men saying below the balcony kept repeating themselves to her as if they were what mattered most.

  Fresh eeeaaar.

  Bloody beautiful.

  But now here were Catharina and Theodora. Catharina was carrying something and Theodora was encouraging her – they came along the balcony together, and Catharina had a special expression on her face, a little solemn and important but with a smile, it was a careful smile and so was Theodora’s.

  Mutti was holding the rolled-up cloth thing on her lap, it had changed places with Baby Wolf, who Tante carried away screaming to the end of the balcony where there was a big plant in a pot, it was called a fern. Could Mutti see how Baby Wolf was snatching at the spiky leaves of the fern? At least he’d stopped screaming. But Mutti was looking at the big cloth thing in her lap. Oh yes it is the Oma, she said, oh look, here it is! Did Catha remember how Mutti used to show her the stories in it? There was a little deer on a mountain, and some others, there were yellow ducks on a blue lake, and a little red house with a smoking chimney, and some owls, did Catha remember? Yes, perhaps she did, she wasn’t sure – Tante had thought Mutti might like to see the Oma thing and so here it was, Tante remembered it going into the big trunk, did Mutti like it? – but wasn’t an Oma a grandmother like the one in the churchyard with all the flowers and Tante Elke? She could remember that, and Tante Elke’s cow with the eyelashes. Yes it was, said Mutti, an Oma was a grandmother but she called the cloth thing Oma because her own grandmother had given it to her when she was still a girl, didn’t Catha remember that story? Surely Mutti had told her that story! Perhaps one day she would give the Oma to Catha! But imagine a grandmother being locked up in the chest, said Catharina – don’t worry Mutti, it was a joke! Or in a ship! said Mutti. But shall we look at it? And then she untied the three pieces of thick brown string around the Oma and unrolled it on the floor of the balcony. It had a funny old smell. Yes, of course, now Catharina did remember the little pictures, the red house with grey smoke coming out of the chimney, the blue lake with the yellow ducks, the white mountain with the deer on top and the little pine trees, the owls with huge staring eyes, the writing in different colours, some stars, and look! – an angel flying across the sky, yellow, red and blue flowers, some brown and black horses going around the edge, the writing going around the edge as if the letters were galloping as well, yes now she was remembering it! Could Mutti tell her one of the stories? Well, well, so here you are, here you are! said Mutti to the Oma. They were both kneeling on the floor next to the Oma and Mutti was carefully stroking her hands back and forth across it, so Catharina did that too – the Oma mostly felt thick and bumpy. But where was the little deer Mutti had told her about, the one that came down off the mountain and went looking for the place where oranges came from? Oh you clever little deer, said Mutti, so you do remember! Yes, Tante was right, the Oma was making Mutti happy. Yes, here I am, said Catharina, making her fingers into antlers on top of her head, here is the Little Deer, are you happy to see me, Mutti? And now Tante was coming back with Wolf, he had a fern leaf in his hand.

  Theodora

  Monday, 27 September, 1880, Town of Wellington, New Zealand

  Here I transcribe from Josephina’s dictation what has recently become the ambiguous anthem of our situation here in Wellington. What it might yet become the anthem for remains to be seen. This morning Josephina departed happily with Wolf gesticulating in his carriage and Catharina proudly walking to her school in the Aro Valley. In the early afternoon I went from our modest neighbourhood to the ‘official quarter’, Thorndon, to introduce the children of a well-to-do family called Cornish to the salient moments of European history and culture, and to teach them the rudiments of the German language. Sometimes before our afternoon tea at five we sing simple songs: for example, the faintly subversive one by August Mühling that we were taught by the politically tone-deaf Chorleiter back in those days of Wolf’s and my childhood in Uelzen – ‘Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig und wer froh ist, ist ein König!’ It takes very little to be happy, and whoever is happy is a king! This task requires a diplomatic circumvention of that history’s class struggles of which I mark out a simple diagram in my daily walks between the neighbourhoods of Te Aro and Thorndon. That my suppressed diagram has been transplanted from Europe to the far side of the world no longer surprises me, if indeed such a surprise was ever likely. The nostalgia evoked by Josephina’s lament for a lost childhood, in the maudlin lyrics of the song ‘Longing for Home’, are perhaps even more dispiriting. My anger is another matter, and I shall come back to that, though I cannot pretend to understand it well.

  Josephina and I used the transcript of her song as an exercise in translation. Here is the German with our improvised English appended.

  Wie traulich war das Fleckchen,

  Wo meine Wiege ging!

  Kein Bäumchen war, kein Heckchen,

  Das nicht voll Träume hing.

  Wo nur ein Blümchen blühte,

  Da blühten gleich sie mit,

  Und alles sang und glühte

  Mir zu bei jedem Schritt.

  Ich wäre nicht gegangen,

  Nicht für die ganze Welt! –

  Mein Sehnen, mein Verlangen,

  Hier ruht’s in Wald und Feld.

  How homely was the little spot where my cradle used to rock! There was no little tree or little hedge that wasn’t hung full of dreams. Where only a little flower bloomed, my dreams bloomed there too, and everything sang and glowed for me with each step I took. I would not have gone away, not for the whole world! My yearning, my longing dwell here in forest and field.

  On Saturday evening last we were gathered in the Deutscher Verein to celebrate the end of winter, a moment that could not have come soon enough for most of those in the rather austere surroundings of the ‘hospitality room’, where, however, there was an elaborate Bohemian Kachelofen to keep the guests warm, imported to Wellington at great expense no doubt. This was one of a few objects designed to remind the guests both of the homeland they had come from and that they were no longer there. There were other talismanic presences also warming this spirit of too-cheerful nostalgia. These included some apparently rustic country house-style cooking aprons
worn over dresses with puffy sleeves – it was Josephina who noticed these. Her reaction to the aprons, which were adorned with flowery embroidery, was sympathetic and interested in proportion to what I confess was my own sceptical reaction: had we come this far only to perpetuate sentimental condescension to romanticised rustic virtue by the Old World bourgeoisie? And what about the hard-working women whose broad aprons would have been filthy with the stains of their toil rather than festooned with elaborate bouquets of bright silk thread? Oh what a sour old doubter and naysayer I am becoming!

  And of course there were also the refreshments, some very good coffee, and also beer and some nice cakes. Wolf is now almost eight months old and already has a steady pair of legs that can transport him some distance in a straight line if he has a destination in view. It was Catharina who stopped him before he could pull down the cloth with the cakes on it, which might have signalled the beginnings of a subversive life, Wolf’s that is. One can only hope.

  The entertainments were also well tuned to the cheerfully nostalgic mood of the evening. A boy and a girl aged about twelve or thirteen sang a comic version of Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’ in the setting by Schubert, into which they inserted inappropriate English names and expressions, to loud appreciative laughter, since the nervous comedy of inadvertent language mishaps was no doubt a daily happening for many at the Verein. There was a halting but determined piano recital by the same girl, I think of the Allegro section of a Brahms piano sonata.

  And then came the evening’s special Brahms moment, his setting of the dreadful sentimental poem by the Holsteine poet Klaus Groth, a native of Josephina’s birthplace Kiel where, she tells me, he is much revered, not least for his association with Brahms. In this poem, in which is moaned a maudlin desire to return once again to the infantile cosiness of the childhood crib, the guests at the Deutscher Verein heard the perfect expression of their conflicted knowledge that they were now adults in a strange new place and their longing to be once again in the homely spot where their cradle used to rock, to paraphrase Groth’s tearful text. Josephina has a very sweet voice and a well-pitched intonation, and she allowed the twelve-year-old piano accompanist plenty of room for small mistakes. At the end of the song, as she smiled shyly and gave the girl a thankful kiss on the cheek, there was I swear not a dry eye in the room. The applause for Josephina’s performance was substantial and sincere but I detected a hint of restraint in it, as if too much enthusiasm would reveal the hidden narrative of the song’s conflicted affect.

  This was perhaps the next stage in the lengthy process of Josephina’s recovery from the dreadful melancholy despondency to which the portal had been her strangely restless gaiety in the last days on board ship. The melancholia’s most obvious symptom had been her preoccupation with imagined mutterings by her friends and fellow passengers. It now seems clear to me that she had locked herself in this miserable place by her own strength of nature. That clear-eyed determination I had so often admired in this young woman had been the resource with which she sustained a barricade between herself and those with whom she might have shared her suffering. Of course I must ask myself why this should seem familiar, and reply to the obvious question with the obvious answer: that in Josephina’s predicament I saw the now faded ghost of my own. The barricade of her proud strong will became thicker as we approached our destination, and when it began to crack at the sight of a place ‘with hardly anything there’ she was not able to defend herself.

  I saw how, some weeks earlier, dear Wolf’s poem began to return her from grief only for her to lock herself away from expressing it. I saw how the sight of a place ‘with hardly anything there’ made her feet skip and dance with gaiety that was the perverse sign of her surrender to the inertia of melancholy. And then I saw how the old sewing sampler revivified those dull senses. And now, six months after our arrival in this place ‘with hardly anything there’, I saw that singing the Brahms song to sentimental words by her admired poet Groth was another and, I thought at first, perhaps even the last stage of Josephina’s arrival with all her senses and capacities in the new place to which her love for my brother had sent her – away from everything she had held dear, her sisters and their children, her childhood home, indeed from the ‘homely spot’ yearned for by Groth’s narrator.

  But she was not, I believed, given what I knew of this young woman’s strong character and the way in which she had brought herself back out of a deep despondency, responding to the song in the lachrymose manner of many at the Deutscher Verein. Indeed, I have for many weeks been rejoicing in and admiring her vivacity and energy since we took up residence in our strange narrow little cottage in Bute Street, with its muddy road outside and determined beds of parsley but not much else in the yard at the back – so different, I am sure, from the idyll sketched by Herr Groth’s ‘Where only a little flower bloomed, my dreams bloomed there too’!

  Then, at the conclusion of the entertainments and when all the refreshments had been cleared from the long tables, some of those present put out items for sale such as jars of preserves, cakes and biscuits, knitted or embroidered things such as children’s garments, some male handicrafts such as wood-turned toys including little wagons and painted soldiers, and also a few curios and exotic objects perhaps obtained during visits to foreign ports on the voyage here. Josephina had some of her own work on one of the tables and was hoping not only for a little money but also to increase the number of people who would know about and might use her skills, which were already in modest demand.

  Earlier, she had whispered to me that one of the sailors from our ship was at the Verein, did I recognise him? He was the one who had thrown some of the washing from the rigging to the deck, but who had always made a point of courteously greeting her after she had remonstrated with him. He was the tall man with the yellowish beard and hair, very much trimmed since the time of the voyage, she noted, and wearing a good plain woollen suit.

  I did not recognise the man, and had never had any reason to single him out from the crew that came and went around the deck of the ship. But then I saw that he had put some objects on a table not far from where Josephina was showing her work. They seemed to be oriental in nature, and included some painted fans which he had spread partially open on the table, a pair of small portly statuettes, a brocade strip of some sort with tassels, and a paper or cloth scroll that he partially unfurled. He stood behind his modest display with a patient closed-lips smile, greeting people and explaining his objects – he fully spread one of the fans and made a little show of fanning himself before handing it to the young woman who had admired it. The older man who was with her, her father perhaps, bought the thing and they stood talking with the sailor for a while before moving away, the young woman happily fanning herself. I saw that the sailor had a certain charm and I also saw that he had noticed Josephina and touched his fingers to his brow in a respectful salute. Josephina, meanwhile, was being kept busy with people interested in her needlework, and with Wolf who wanted to throw all of it on the floor.

  Then was the time for me to intervene and offer to take the two children home, but I allowed myself to be detained by Josef Lichtscheindl who had recently been shown the bones of a giant bird of some kind, which, with his passion for diet, he believed had been eaten to extinction by the Maori inhabitants of this place. I listened with half my attention to this outlandish tale, while the more alert part of me kept watch as Josephina, having sold her little stock of things, left Catharina to play with Wolf and approached the man she had described as ‘the sailor’.

  They greeted each other very properly, but all at once I was alarmed by an absurd premonition that this man would enter the life Josephina and I had organised in the face of such adversity and which was harmonious in spite of its challenges both practical and emotional. Josephina and the sailor had sat down on opposite sides of the table while she looked at the thing in front of her. The good doctor’s tone became somewhat insistent, but I was unable to take my attention away from Joseph
ina as she bent over the scroll that the sailor was unrolling to its full extent. And then I saw that the thing had affected her strongly and that the sailor was looking away from her as if to spare her feelings. I was sorry, I told the good doctor Josef Lichtscheindl, of course I would be interested to see the giant bones, but would he kindly excuse me as I needed to help Josephina to get the children home.

  I saw when I confronted her that she had indeed been affected by the scroll, a miserable black-and-grey panorama of little scenes. We should take the children home, I suggested. This is Herr Heinrich Wenczel, Josephina informed me, he has travelled to many parts of the world, he has been showing me this wonderful Chinese scroll. Herr Wenczel and I shook hands as Josephina explained why she had found the scroll so interesting, and then he quickly rolled it up, tied it with a length of yellowed cotton tape, and handed it to Josephina. Please keep it, Frau Hansen, he said, with a carefully restrained glimpse of his few remaining teeth.

  I am sure this was a kind and sincere gesture on the part of world traveller Herr Wenczel, but now, still, two days later, there is a painful twist in my heart, the scroll remains tied with its length of old cotton tape on the dresser in our little cottage, and I fear it may be the instrument of another stage in Josephina’s journey from Groth’s ‘homely spot’. ‘Ich wäre nicht gegangen, Nicht für die ganze Welt!’ – I would never have gone away, not for all the world! cries the poet, but my darling Josephina did, and had to, and perhaps one of us may have to do so again.