The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  Of course he remembered that plumps game from Bute Street – Papa Hein had played it with Freddy and had dropped him on the floor between his legs by accident once or twice at the plumps moment. When that happened Catha always said he had been drinking brandy. Ma might think she had left almost everything behind, but most of what she had brought would not be in the old trunk or the carpetbag for that matter.

  How many birds there were! she remarked later when they were sitting together on the veranda and looking across the river at the trees and at the part of the hillside he had cleared and sown. Was it always like this in the evenings? And what about the part without trees?

  Yes it was, he told her, and after rain even more so. After rain at dawn and just before sunset, that was the time. He especially loved that time. He often sat here to listen to them, there were many kinds. And he would not be cutting more trees. The grass that grew afterwards did not last well. One day there would not be enough for the sheep. Ettie would say that he had spent a lot of time looking, and it was true, but there was a reason. He was also watching to see what was happening. He saw that it was the same as with her. When she got sick the baby could not survive.

  He had told her this, but not the other part of the story, which was that when the bees’ nest was destroyed they could not keep their queen warm.

  And then after a while she had told him about Catha and the man she always called the Professor, how Catha was now teaching at the girls’ college and how that annoyed the Professor almost as much as the fact that Catha seemed not to be able to have another baby after Greta – which of course was her fault and not the Professor’s, she added with that quick bark of a laugh.

  They were going around but not arriving.

  And then there was a silence that the birds filled up.

  ‘And Freddy?’ asked Wolf. ‘Has there been any word from that boy?’

  ‘No,’ said his Ma, and took hold of his hand. ‘He has taken himself away. And now so have I, from that house.’

  Her meaning was clear.

  ‘So west is that way,’ she said, looking westwards and lifting his hand to point at the red tinge in the sky above the range with its dark spikes of treetops. It was an unnecessary thing to say but necessity was not why she had said it, which was obvious.

  Yes it is, he told her.

  As if she did not know already in what quarter the sun would set tomorrow and the days after that.

  Catharina

  ‘Alles zu seiner Zeit,’ had been Mutti’s answer to Hugo’s polite question about when she was planning to leave her house ‘over there’. ‘All-in-good-time!’ she added unnecessarily but in order, perhaps, to give herself the chance to emphasise the simple meanings of the words in case the Professor found them difficult to grasp.

  The polite scorn of Mutti’s smile was familiar to those, including Hugo after several years of observation, who knew well her habit of leaving unsaid what she considered obvious.

  He had not found the words difficult to grasp, clearly, and had soon busied himself with preparing for the birthday toast, now that ‘the ice has been broken’. Would Catharina like to help him?

  She had directed a frown at Hugo to indicate that his ice-breaking choice of phrase was perhaps inappropriate under the circumstances of her mutti’s birthday, as had been his question about when she would be leaving the house ‘over there’, and he had rewarded the frown with a nice smile. He had recently cultivated a beard and enjoyed smiling through it.

  Then they had saluted Mutti’s fifty-first birthday with glasses of champagne all round. Arabella and Victoria, and herself and Hugo, and Greta, and of course Mutti who had stepped down from the hired trap wrapped against the chill in her favourite Danish shawl.

  For some months now Mutti’s moods had often been thoughtful and withdrawn, but the toast and the glass of champagne had brightened her.

  The room had been full of beautiful winter camellias in vases, some of them borrowed for the occasion. The secret purpose of the profusion of camellias had been to emphasise that Mutti could not hope to grow flowers ‘over there’ in Bute Street. Greta had tried a chaplet of bright cornflowers but was sure they increased her sneezes – the chaplet had been used instead as an additional ornament for the birthday Kirschtorte.

  After lunch and slices of the Kirschtorte, and some coffee and chatter – Hugo was especially charming – she and Mutti had taken Greta to the Botanic Garden to meet her school friends and have even more cake at the kiosk. There the now famous ‘Goethe was a bugger’ moment had taken place – famous in her and Hugo’s discourse but needless to say not further afield.

  ‘You don’t have to believe everything the Professor tells you,’ had been Mutti’s crisp parting advice as she stepped up to the tram on her way back to the house ‘over there’. But of course she had never believed everything Hugo told her; they often had quite long discussions over his ‘trains of thought’, enjoyable discussions for the most part that sometimes became flirtatious and only occasionally turned into arguments, and the sting of Mutti’s remark had lingered for a long time after her fifty-first birthday and long after the camellias in vases had been thrown away, having failed to lure her from the house ‘over there’ in Bute Street.

  But now here they were again a year later, planning the occasion of Mutti’s fifty-second birthday, which would be without the useless camellias and also, at Mutti’s request, without her best friends Victoria and Arabella.

  But why no Arabella or Victoria?

  She and Mutti were drinking verbena tea at the table in the house in Bute Street. There was also one of Vicky’s nice custard tarts. The interior of the little house was especially neat and tidy, and she had remarked on that when she first came in – had Mutti been getting rid of some old things in anticipation of spring cleaning?

  There was something she wanted to show her family, was Mutti’s response to the question about Arabella and Victoria. It was a private family matter. And Catha would just have to wait like a good girl until her mutti’s birthday next week, because that would be the appropriate moment, it was decided, no argument.

  Mutti had a certain wicked pleased look about her that she had not seen for a long time.

  And then it was the nearest Saturday after Mutti’s birthday, as it had been the previous year, when both she and Hugo were free from teaching and when Greta was not at school, exactly as had been agreed the year before; and in a strangely disconcerting reprise of that event Mutti stepped down nimbly from the hired trap with the Danish shawl around her shoulders and with the help of the coachman – but this time the coachman reached back into the trap and brought out a parcel that he carried in through the wrought-iron gate with its ‘pineapples’ and up the path to where Greta was waiting with a bunch of flowers for her grandma. She was in her best dress with cuffs and a collar embroidered by Grandma, standing quite straight on a step two down from the top, with her mama on the one above her and her papa above her on the threshold.

  How nice they all looked! was Mutti’s opening remark, to which she added that they were arranged rather like the little puppets that came in and out of the clock on the Rathaus in Kiel, which of course was a reminder – as if she needed one! – of how many years had passed since she last saw that funny old clock!

  It was a little odd that Mutti should at that moment have remembered the old Rathaus clock.

  Then Hugo gave the coachman his fare and carried the parcel inside. The others but especially Greta were looking at it – where should he put ‘this mysterious object’?

  The table was already set for lunch and there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket. It was a cold lunch this time, with some pastries and sandwiches and of course the requisite Kirschtorte. She had already seen what was in the parcel, Mutti said, but she had wrapped it up again so it could be a surprise. So would Hugo mind putting it out of the way somewhere while they had their lunch and then she would unwrap it for them?

  So Hugo put the parcel on the li
ttle occasional table at the end of the room by the bay windows where it was lit by pleasant winter sunshine coming in there – it was a sunny day with no wind, unlike the previous year’s. And there the well-lit parcel sat tantalisingly while the conversation around the table tried to ignore it.

  But then perhaps it was the distracting presence of the parcel that caused the conversation to take an unwelcome swerve towards her work at the Girls’ High School, something she and Mutti talked about sometimes at the house in Bute Street.

  Yes, thank you Mutti, she was still enjoying teaching very much indeed. It was a pleasure to be engaging with young minds, not to mention engaging with her own.

  It was her remark, intended lightly, about engaging with her own mind that caused Hugo’s frown to persist for as long as it took him to eat two of the sandwiches with a good swallow of his wine and a brusque napkinning of his moustache – she saw the frown there and saw that her mother had noticed it as well.

  Ah yes, said Mutti, who as usual was eating very little and taking only small sips of her wine, perhaps she could be forgiven on her birthday for reminiscing a little, something she usually did not like to do, about how – she paused, searching for a word, and looked at Catharina as if for help – how befreiend, was that the right word? How freeing it had been when she was still young to meet Wolf’s father Wolf Bloch and his sister Theodora, whom Catha of course would remember from Hamburg and sadly also from their voyage, who had encouraged her to engage with her mind and had insisted that it was hers, that ‘she had a mind of her own’.

  This, again, was a topic usually confined to Bute Street.

  Hugo was looking down at his right forefinger and its nicely trimmed nail that was scratching quickly at the tablecloth in front of him as if trying to erase a spilled dot of mayonnaise.

  And she had learned a lot from the talk at Bloch House, as Wolf and Theodora’s house in Hamburg was called, not just from what was talked about by the many visitors there, though that had been full of interest and she had learned much by listening to it, but also from the way in which the talking took place, which involved as much if not more listening than talking, and so involved both passion and patience.

  ‘Oho!’ exclaimed Hugo. ‘Passion and patience! And was that the motto of Herr Bloch’s socialist politics?’

  He enlisted his beard’s help to send a quick, roguish look at his wife. He had views on the subject of Bloch’s politics, which he had learned about while enquiring after the ‘circumstances’ of her interesting family.

  ‘No, Hugo,’ said the woman he now called Josephina. ‘That was just what it was like in that Bloch house where I, although very young, was also invited to sit and talk and where I was listened to.’

  There was a silence in which Greta was lifting the top slice of a sandwich and peeping to see what was inside.

  ‘Please, Greta,’ cooed Hugo with a smile and a little shake of the busy forefinger, ‘you know it’s bad manners to look inside your sandwich like that, what do you expect to find, a socialist?’

  ‘But I’m just trying to see what’s in it,’ said Greta, and added quickly, ‘in case it doesn’t agree with me.’ Then she sank down in her chair and waited.

  ‘And besides,’ said Catharina as Hugo’s mouth began to open again, ‘I enjoy getting out of the house and I like the company of the other teachers and especially of the principal, Mary McLean, a very interesting woman.’

  ‘And without children to take care of,’ said Hugo. ‘A bluestocking.’

  The term ‘bluestocking’ had recently become a favourite of Hugo’s.

  ‘It’s cucumber,’ said Catharina, ignoring him. ‘You like it.’

  Then she stood up from the table. There were topics she could sense approaching that she would not allow to spoil the birthday lunch, however much Mutti’s special little smile suggested she had enjoyed the passion and patience of their conversation up to that point, and would willingly have continued it a while longer. But after all it was not entirely Hugo’s fault that he felt his standing as the household’s breadwinner and as a salaried professor at the university college were challenged or even discredited by his wife earning money as a teacher at Wellington Girls’ High School; nor entirely his fault that he believed her freedom to do so was the consequence of their not having more children, which was also noticed and not just by Mutti.

  But was it fair that the reason for this sad reproductive state of affairs should be implied in her direction rather than in his? This had been the theme of Mutti’s contributions to conversations they had been repeating for some months at the house in Bute Street.

  Now perhaps was a good time for Mutti to open her surprise parcel, and then they could have the cake? What did they think?

  That was when Mutti, as she stood up quickly and agreed about the parcel, and perhaps also with her daughter’s adroit management of the passion and patience, nonetheless remarked in an offhand way that it was no doubt helpful that Catha could contribute to the family’s income, especially as she and Hugo no longer had a small child to take care of, which gave her more time.

  And then she went straight to the parcel in its appealing patch of sunlight and brought it back to the table.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a little space.’

  Hugo had abruptly excused himself for a moment.

  By the time he came back the parcel had been unwrapped and its contents laid out on the table. Greta was gazing at them in dismay, but her mama and grandma were still laughing with their arms around each other’s waist. Was it tears of laughter that were running down their cheeks, or were they sad in some way that the laughter could not explain?

  The objects were an apple, a hank of fresh shorn wool, a jar of honey and a slender black iron nail. They were laid out on a long rectangle of bleached canvas. There was also a letter written in a careful, upright script with strong downward strokes and delicate upward ones. It was on two sheets of plain white foolscap paper torn from a pad like those used by surveyors for sketching maps. The sketching pad had been Freddy’s and belonged with his theodolite and compass.

  Would Greta like to read him the letter, asked Hugo. It seemed to have come from a fairy-tale place with some magic objects included, so she would no doubt understand it better than her papa!

  He was looking at his wife and mother-in-law as he spoke, as if he rather suspected their strange laughter was at his expense.

  ‘Dear Ma,’ Greta began, and then looked up anxiously because was she allowed to call her grandma ‘dear Ma’? But then after a little cough she continued in the special voice that was needed for standing-up recitations at school.

  Now after almost four years it is time for you to come to your home in this beautiful valley. There is no longer any reason for you to delay. You must come once winter is over and can do so on the train that will stop for you at Raurimu station.

  Greta had some difficulty with ‘Raurimu’ but, having got no help, went on a little more quickly.

  The canvas that I have sent a piece of was once stretched down the wall of our first home that was more a tent than a house. Ettie bleached the canvas with lye and washed it in the river below our house . . .

  ‘They have a river?’ Greta was astonished and had begun to enter the marvellous valley near the place called Raw-ri-moo – but then,

  ‘Continue, darling!’ said Hugo a little curtly.

  . . . and then spread it over bushes in the sunshine so you could see that this place is fresh and clean and also that the tent walls have now been replaced with good tight timber milled from our hillside.

  ‘They have a hill?’ But by now Greta in her wonderment had entered the secret beautiful valley with the river and the hill, and the ‘go on’ nods of the grown-ups made no impression – she continued to read in a tone of entrancement rather than with her special recitation voice.

  The apple is from a neighbour’s tree but those I have planted will bear fruit in five more years. Though many in this valley a
re clearing land for sheep we will have fewer than them as I do not think the soil will last well. But there will be more than enough good thick wool for yarn.

  The thick hank of wool had a sheepy smell but seemed not to affect Greta’s tendency to sneeze – she picked the wool up and gave it a sniff.

  The honey we will have from our own hives soon now that they are established. One of our neighbours is a beekeeper from the Levant and this jar is a gift from him. His name is Denis Badem which means almond in his language, and he looks forward to meeting my Anne, that is their word for mother, as do others in our community, you will be welcomed.

  At ‘Levant’ Hugo’s lips became pursed within the neat frame of his whiskers.

  The nail is from my own forge and others like it have fastened our house together. It is warm and will be a secure home for many years. In the morning and at evening the sound of the birds in the forest is enough to make us believe we are in paradise though the journey to get here has been a hard one. There is a room ready for you, please come. Ettie and the children will be glad to see you. Your loving son, Wolf.

  ‘Oh please, can we go? Please, please?’ pleaded Greta, gazing in wonderment at the mundane objects on the plain piece of bleached canvas.

  ‘You can come and visit me after a while,’ said her grandma, ‘because I am going, yes, I am going there as soon as the weather warms up, and now you all know.’

  Of course ‘after a while’ and the kiss Mutti bestowed on her sneezy granddaughter’s head of clean, brushed, shiny hair suggested that the house with the wrought-iron palings with pineapples on top and the housekeeper who was even then clearing the lunch things from the table on which they had been pushed aside to make way for Uncle Wolf’s magic objects – the kiss and the ‘after a while’ implied with Mutti’s familiar wry humour that Greta might find the actual situation in the magic valley with its river and hillside, its honey and strange language and intriguing thick wool and its apple which must certainly have special properties, and the nail from a forge on the same page as Vulcan in her schoolbook of famous stories! – that she might find the magic valley to be more like the place her grandma had come from a long time ago, where the cows and horse had pissed and shat inside the Bauernhaus in winter, than the house in which she lived with her papa the professor and her mama who taught at the Girls’ High School not far from the Botanic Garden and the kiosk where there was always cake.