by Ian Wedde
And so now late at night with Josephina and the children sleeping peacefully in their little room, I close my entry for this day, unable to dispel the unreasonable and anxious premonition that invaded my thoughts as we celebrated the turn of the seasons. I fear unreasonably and humiliatingly that the departure bemoaned by Josephina’s poet of homeliness may in the end have to be mine, that Groth’s homely little spot is now none other than this chilly, rattling wooden cottage at the edge of the world where a frugal kind of love has been able to bind our bereft family. I am angry and fearful to the point of trembling, and would like to seize Herr Wenczel by his throat and choke the plausible courtesy from his disagreeable smile. But even worse, I resent the no doubt innocent impulse that made him give Josephina the Chinese scroll, since the very innocence and kindness of his gesture mark my repugnance as unworthy of the enlightened woman I pretend to be. I have no reason to believe that this man will infect our ‘homely spot’, and yet I do. I would say that I fear this fear.
Now it is late and I will extinguish my lamp and attempt to sleep, though I doubt my rest will be peaceful or free of the jeering thoughts that continue to circulate in my body and mind.
To Friedrich Engels, in Primrose Hill, London
Friday, 8 October, 1880
Respected Comrade Engels
Today I am sitting with your letter that has come to my brother Wolf Bloch here in Wellington care of the Deutscher Verein. It is clear from a number of letters forwarded in the same way that friends and colleagues have become anxious at the absence of news from Wolf, usually the most reliable and sociable of correspondents.
It is therefore my sad task first of all to inform you that my dear brother Wolf died of food poisoning on the twenty-third of December last year, shortly after our ship left Cape Verde. He was buried at sea the following day. You have yourself experienced the anguish of losing a dearly loved companion and so I do not need to describe the grief that I felt as his sister, nor the suffering of the young woman who was shortly afterwards to be the mother of his child, his beloved Josephina.
Now, almost ten months since Wolf was ‘consigned to the deep’, we are established in a small worker’s cottage in this town of Wellington, an unusual little family of mother, daughter, infant son and sister-in-law. At Josephina’s insistence, the infant son has been named Wolf Bloch, and so my remarkable brother may live on in this new life and in this new place. We are able to support ourselves, Josephina by her seamstress skills and I by tutoring the children of more well-to-do households, but our life is frugal to say the least and I for one miss the fervour of conversations at our dear Bloch House in Hamburg, itself a distant memory.
It will not surprise you to know that the familiar class template of workers and landowners has been faithfully imprinted on this town, though there are signs that the enterprise of artisans and small businesses may yet establish a bloc capable of challenging the hegemony of landed privilege and capital. Even so I chafe, as I know Wolf would have, at the disproportions and exploitations that govern how the majority must live. I am therefore grateful, dear Comrade Engels, for the information you sent Wolf and that I may presume to benefit from. I am referring to the establishment in Brisbane in Australia of the Social-Democratic Vanguard Party by Hugo Kunze, our fellow German exile. With your blessing I am sure, I will contact Herr Kunze and see what we might do in concert.
Now I will close this short letter in the hope that my contact with you and Wolf Bloch’s many valued comrades will be sustained, as I am determined to continue in the work my brother and I were committed to for many years together.
With respect and in loving memory of our comrade Wolf Bloch
Theodora Bloch
Please continue to use the address of the Deutscher Verein in Wellington as I cannot be sure of our continued place of residence.
To Herr Aksel Andersen
Deichstrasse 31
Hamburg
Friday, 8 October, 1880
Dear Herr Andersen
I am writing first of all to thank you for so kindly organising the remittance that came to us at the Deutscher Verein here in far-off Wellington, New Zealand, not long after our arrival here.
Secondly, since your recent anxious letter was addressed to my brother Wolf Bloch and was responding to one of his sent back to Hamburg from Cape Verde some ten months ago, I have to explain why it is I and not my brother who is now replying to you. Sadly, my dear brother died from food poisoning on the voyage, not quite two weeks after writing to you, and was buried at sea not far on from Cape Verde where his letter to you went ashore.
You and I am sure also Frau Andersen will be glad to hear that the young woman Josephina Hansen who, together with her daughter Catharina, was in your care for some months in Hamburg, and who had joined our family on its voyage, has recovered from a long period of miserable grief and is now the mother of a robust baby boy, my brother Wolf Bloch’s son, born towards the end of our journey.
I am aware that Wolf had requested you to act as our discreet agent in Hamburg, and had provided details of our arrangements with Behrenberg-Gossler there. Would you now be so kind as to send the materials stored at the bank to the Deutscher Verein address you have used already. You should continue to use the name Hansen as that is how we are known here in Wellington. Please address the materials to Miss Theodora Hansen. I will inform you as soon as possible should this address change. At present the four of us, myself, Josephina, her daughter Catharina and infant son Wolf, are quite simply and safely accommodated here.
I thank you again for your kindness and in advance for acting on our behalf at Behrenberg-Gossler.
With respectful greetings also to Frau Andersen
Theodora Bloch
To Signor Pasquale Martignetti
c/o Banca Malzone
88 Mulberry Street
Manhattan
New York
America
Friday, 8 October, 1880
Dear Signor and Signora Martignetti
Or, I would rather say, dear Pasquale and Maria
It is now many weeks since your letter to my brother Wolf, with its kind greetings also to myself and to Alessandra’s special friend Catharina, was delivered to the Deutscher Verein here in Wellington, New Zealand. You will be wondering why that enthusiastic letter writer Wolf Bloch has been so slow to reply, and so I must be the one who responds with the sad news that our dear friend and brother died as a consequence of food he ate at Cape Verde. He was buried at sea on 24th December last year and it will not be long before we mark the anniversary of the tragedy from which I and Josephina are still recovering.
You will, however, be happy to know that Josephina gave birth to Wolf’s son, named Wolf Bloch after him, and this child has without doubt been the chief agent of our recovery from grief.
We are living frugally but securely in a small cottage in the working part of the town, which is divided along lines familiar to us but perhaps no longer to you in ‘the land of the free’, as Wolf liked to describe America. I hope his optimism has not been disappointed. For my part, though I am grateful to have arrived safely after a long and tedious voyage and after the tragedy that seemed to prolong it, I long for the conversations we had at our dear Bloch House in Hamburg, and for the company of others committed, like us, to the causes of equality and public good.
You should tell Catharina’s friend Alex that Catharina can now speak English quite well and is going to a school where she has some new friends, but that she always speaks of Alex as the special one she will never forget.
For reasons that I believe Wolf explained to you, we are living under the name Hansen, and so letters should continue to be addressed to me as Frau Theodora Hansen, or perhaps more appropriately now, as Miss Theodora Hansen, at the poste restante of Deutscher Verein. It is possible that my address will change, and I will inform you as soon as possible if that happens.
One evening soon I will sit Catharina down with paper and pen and have her
write a letter to her special friend Alex in New York, America. We will see if we can find a picture of where we are to send you. There is a photographer named Bragge who lives here, I will see if we can purchase one of his prints. What you will see in it will be very different from the surroundings of a metropolis such as Manhattan. The town we live in has barely begun to establish itself, and it may be that I, or Josephina, will one day decide we must move on. Perhaps New York will return as a preferred destination.
For now I will end my short and unfortunately sad letter with affectionate greetings to the three of you, Pasquale, Maria and Alessandra. I will always have fond memories of our time together.
Theodora Bloch
Josephina
A single large tear fell on the scroll and Josephina quickly pushed the old thing away before another tear could wet it, and then covered her face with her shawl, why? – it was not so much to mop the tears and stop them falling on the scroll, nor so the sailor called Wenczel with the broken smile wouldn’t be able to see her tears, but because she didn’t want to see in his expression the reflection of herself crying.
Because why was she crying? What was in the old scroll with its yellowed paper and the strange writing beside the pictures – what was in there that had suddenly made her eyes flood with huge heavy tears, though no sobs came with them?
When after a short while she took the shawl from her face, she saw that the sailor sitting opposite her at the table was looking with cautious courtesy past her at nothing in particular – there was nothing else for him to look at besides her, and the chattering crowd of guests, and it was as though he’d seen her wish not to be reflected in his expression.
But perhaps he was just shy and awkward, a man unused to the company of women?
To reassure him, and perhaps to explain to herself why the sailor’s old yellowed and greyish pictures and foreign writing had affected her so strangely, she was telling him that it was because of the tiny people and animals in the pictures, and the little horses and tilled fields among trees, all seeming to be so far away, like her family, tiny, as if about to disappear . . .
(. . . but no, it was because of the clear, calm empty spaces where a kind of silence was in the picture . . .)
(. . . and also that the writing, though she couldn’t read it, was uttering with bold strokes what she was unable to express as words . . .)
(. . . there was a thin, low, dim peninsula reaching out across a pale, slightly soiled emptiness towards some columns of intricate black lettering. A tiny bridge reaching across another hazy void. The piled-up hills were crowned with weathered miniature trees – above them was the soiled silence of the sky. The bold marks of the writing were like pictures or the score of some kind of music. She saw a peaked shape like a roof above black bars that seemed to thump down upon each other. There were tiny people in industrious groups, and a solitary person sitting motionless under a tree – the person, an old woman perhaps, seemed to be gazing into an emptiness beyond which some delicate writing fell like veils of rain from the pale sky. There was a tiny house with animals – horses, perhaps? – and the doors of the house were open wide and its interior was empty. People in narrow boats floating on emptiness. A pale ribbon of road with laden donkeys making their way towards a cluster of farm buildings – a large one and some small structures like animal stalls. Many of the low, fading peninsulas seemed to be pointing away from the land, the farmhouse, the laden donkeys, the solitary person looking across a space that was like silence . . .)
(. . . the old person in the scroll could be her oma sitting under the pear tree above the Schwentine. The old lady had often seemed to be looking further away than Kieler Förde and the ships or the mill where the river ran out past the marshy reeds with the little twittering Rohrsänger – looking away into a space that made her face go silent even when Josephina reached up and touched its soft dry crinkled surface carefully with the tips of her fingers. Was she looking at ghosts, at her husband and foolish sons in the ground over there in a place she’d never seen, at Dybbøl, near Sønderborg? Was she trying to go there in her mind? . . .)
Yes, the simple answer was that the little rustic pictures in the sailor Wenczel’s old scroll reminded her of the childhood home she’d left, and both Herr Wenczel and Theodora were nodding sympathetically – but what she couldn’t say to them was that it had mostly been the smudged spaces of silence and emptiness in the scroll that had made her eyes flood unexpectedly with big tears. But why was that? What did she want or miss that was in those empty spaces? And how could she want emptiness?
The scroll made her think of her grandmother, she told them. That was at least partly true.
Then she must take it, please, she could not refuse. The sailor Wenczel bent politely over his cautious smile. Please. He held the scroll out to her.
Then they were trundling Wolf home. Catharina was tired and her feet hurt.
‘We are nearly there,’ said Theodora encouragingly, in very careful English, but her displeasure at the sailor and the scroll entered the cottage with them. Her goodnight kisses were abrupt – she was tired, she said, Josef Lichtscheindl was so exhausting – and she went to her own room without offering to read Catharina some stories. Last night she read ‘The Story of the Wild Huntsman’ and ‘The Story of Johnny Look-in-the-Air’ from a book called Der Struwwelpeter – it was one of Papa Wolf’s favourites when he was at school in Uelzen, but Josephina could see that Catharina was already starting to forget about Papa Wolf.
*
There he was again, the thoughtful scroll sailor, smoking and laughing with some other men outside the Empire Hotel where she had spent those strange weeks she now thought of as being about her study of the harbour and Doctor Lichtscheindl’s many ways of making her eat watercress until she almost turned green. That had been hers and Theodora’s joke, for a while. She had noticed the sailor there two or three times on her way to the draper’s in the weeks after the Verein, and once he had saluted her rather cheerfully and made a bow like the one from the ship’s rigging. But why was he no longer on a ship? What was he doing?
Now she was on the other side of Lambton Quay with her new sewing friends Arabella and Victoria. The small, quick one called Victoria reminded her of the little quail that used to bob their heads while running along the margins of the path that led to the pastor’s school by the Schwentine, and she was named after the living Queen of England, ‘an old pudding’. The big one, Arabella, was named after her late father’s favourite thoroughbred breeding mare in Ireland, and it was their joke that Josephina was without doubt named after the son her father had hoped for, with -ina added at the last minute when he saw what he had accomplished.
Arabella’s father had been a rich landowner’s stable master in a place called Kildare. He was trampled by a horse startled in its stall by the sound of a shotgun fired at starlings.
Josephina withheld her thought about von Zarovich being crushed by his horse.
That was very sad, but what were starlings?
They were nuisance birds. They liked to come after the spilled feed grains, and they raided the grain fields.
That was another new word, starling, but not very new, in German almost the same, Star.
So now Arabella and her brother were in Wellington to see what kind of life there might be here. Her brother was good with horses, he was a skilled groom.
Groom?
Arabella made some broad combing gestures and did a comical neighing sound – she was a strong young woman with large white hands, and her miming reached up and drew the shape of a horse’s flank.
Ah yes – Josephina herself had a favourite horse once that she liked to grooom, he was called Gunnar. He aufstöhnte his liking of her groooming deep in his – neck?
She made a groaning noise.
Ah, yes! They were laughing at her impersonation of old Gunnar’s pleasure.
And Arabella’s mother?
She would not leave, she had remained behind, the wealth
y horse breeder was providing for her.
Providing?
Yes, she had somewhere to live, and enough to eat.
And so the talking moved along in a jerky way, with new words, it was enjoyable.
And Victoria’s story? Victoria’s story was cholera, she too had come with her brother, they were the only ones left from their family. Her brother was a blacksmith, did Josephina understand, horses’ shoes? There was plenty of work here, they would do well, better than in Liverpool. People got sick there.
Yes, Josephina knew about cholera, it had happened in Hamburg where she lived before coming to New Zealand.
But no, not while she was there, fortunately.
It was good to laugh at misfortune, Arabella thought, and after all what was wrong with being named after a thoroughbred breeding mare, where she came from it was considered a great honour. All that was missing was a fine stallion of equal merit.
Arabella’s laughter suggested that she would rather look forward to the future than dwell on the past.
Yes, of course, they were both on the lookout for good husbands who would provide for them and their children, and their brothers would be casting around for their future wives, though they pretended they weren’t interested – and Josephina? Victoria asked in a sympathetic tone.
Josephina began to pay attention to Wolf’s bonnet, which had slipped over one eye.
They were walking on the other side of the road from the hotel because they preferred to avoid the men smoking their pipes in the sun there. She was trundling Wolf towards the junction at Customhouse Quay where, around the corner from the bank, was the sailmaker and draper’s that had some bolts of heavy blue cotton. It was good for making the plain men’s shirts that sold well ready-made from the sailmaker’s shop, and Catharina could already sew on the buttons. The sailmaker added his sale commission to the cost of the cloth. Wolf would have to share his cramped pram with the bolt.
