The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  They could all do with one of these, she reckoned, and they should raise a glass to the poor old bloody professor over there all by himself in Buenos Aires or wherever he was while they were at it, and wish him all the best.

  Ma’s loud sigh was between a laugh and something else less amused. She lifted her glass two-thirds of the way to her lips and paused it there while giving him that direct look her daughter Catharina had inherited, direkt in die Augen schauen! as Ma had told him her grandmother instructed her many years ago back in Germany when she was a little girl.

  ‘Wolf Bloch whose first name you have was planning New York when we left Hamburg,’ she said, looking him in the eye. ‘Or Argentina, perhaps, God knows. Not Wellington in New Zealand that we had never heard anything about as though it didn’t even exist. But even so here we are. Wir sind alle Reisende, also, prost! I hope the Professor will be happy somewhere or other near Chile or Uruguay or wherever he ends up, who can tell what will happen.’

  Then they all began to raise their glasses, but Ma stopped them with one finger lifted off the side of hers and a sharp tut of her tongue. Catha was looking at her with a grin instead of the almost-tears as if she had guessed what was coming next, which was that they should also be remembering those such as her own mutti and papa who had only ever travelled as far as the old graveyard down by the Schwentine, and her sister Elke who had only ever gone as far as the town of Kiel that could be reached by train in less than an hour, and her sister Greta who had gone as far as Sønderborg just across the border in Denmark but whose name at least had travelled all this way to become this lovely one here in Wolf and Ettie’s valley, and then there were her grandfather and two uncles who had gone as far as the burial grounds at Dybbøl just across the water from Sønderborg – there were many ways of travelling aside from crossing oceans in ships, she said, and so once again now: Prost!

  And so finally as directed by Ma with that glint in her eye they all raised their glasses and said Prost! and drank off their brandies while the young ones watched in bewilderment and then Catha let out a loud impolite guffaw that startled her polite daughter, but for the life of him he couldn’t understand exactly why his sister was so entertained if that was even what described her mood, nor could he fathom what exactly had happened at that moment when the patterns in Denis Badem’s carpet seemed to have been rearranged on their loom.

  Agatha

  Dear town cusin Greta

  Now it is getting reely cold here in the valley and I wish I cood be in town were you are with some lights and peeple like the time I visited wen we went on the boat to Day Bay and had an icecreem I ofen think of that day even tho we were just little girls then. Well not any more becos of my news which is that I had a baby a little wile ago here at Smiths place were I have been living, the baby is a girl and becos our granny Josie told me to I have called her Elke wich is the name of one of grannys sisters back in Germany, I dont even now her but thats alright I dont care, and anyway you got the name of another granny sister and you didnt turn in to a strange german girl unless you just did. Mum and granny came to help with the baby beeng born, one day you will have to do that and so I wont tell you about it becos it wood scare you off having a baby that is certin. Dad came a few days later he held the baby and then he and Smithy had a talk outside you can probly guess wat that was all about. Well then here I am in this valley at the End of the World and perhaps I can come and visit you agen in town with baby Elke wen she is a bit more growd. I do like her but perhaps I will like her even more after a wile. Anyway that is my news wot else cood there be to tell you about down here and so goodbye until we meet agane

  your cusin Aggie

  Greta

  Dear Cousin Aggie

  Well my goodness, first of all congratulations on having baby Elke, I hope you and the baby’s father will be very happy and that baby Elke will be healthy and happy as well. Mama told me that you were going to have a baby but of course the news that you have given birth is very special, especially as it comes directly from you the actual mother! I can clearly imagine you and the baby in a cosy chair looking across the dear old river from the porch at the back of your house and I think it must be a kind of heaven. I can tell from your letter that you are not so happy with life in the Valley, but I am sure that you will love it again when you have recovered from the pains of the birth which I understand to be severe. I would love to see you and baby Elke here in town one day and I am sure Mama will be glad too. I will certainly ask her if you can come to visit us. We are moving house soon because this one is too big and so I will write to you when we are in our new one.

  My news is not very exciting compared to yours. Mama made me stay in school until the last year which was mostly very boring but now I have begun to be trained as a journalist at the Evening Post Newspaper which is not boring at all, in fact it is exciting and sometimes frightening as well. I am a cadet and mostly am required to write news stories for the Women’s Pages, but what I like most is writing reviews of the films that are showing here in town. Some weeks I even go to two or three of them and then have very quickly to write reviews or I get told off by the editor! I think my favourite so far is ‘Salome’ by William Fox starring Theda Bara as the beautiful and seductive Salome. It was at the Queen’s Theatre last week and showed the glory of Judea forty years before the time of Christ, although there were some representatives of the churches in Wellington who protested that the story was untrue and blasphemous and forbade their congregations to see it! I am sure that many of them went anyway because the season was extended by a week. One of the sensations in the film is the Dance of the Seven Veils. Some of the people in the audience when I was there got up and left when Theda Bara was doing her dance, but I thought it was wonderful even if quite revealing sometimes! There is a moment where Salome even shows a part of her naked bosom, and at that moment the sound of the audience gasping (before they left!) could even be heard above the sound of the pianist trying her best to imitate the choreography of the Seven Veils!

  Anyway that is enough about me. I can add that Mama is well and very busy with her teaching, but I hope she will be able to rest a bit more soon because I can see that she has begun to be tired more often than she used to. She has begun to play the piano more often too, mostly in the evenings, I think it’s because she is finding it harder to read as much as she likes.

  I will write to tell you when we have moved to our new house, and meanwhile please send us news of baby Elke and yourself, and of course also of Granny Josie and everybody at Uncle Wolf’s and Aunty Ettie’s place.

  With love from your cousin Greta, and a kiss for baby Elke

  Beth

  Rangamati Hill District, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal, April 26th, 1937

  This is my Cool the Snake Entry as I shall explain in due course though not before prolonging the mystery for a few more sentences, my apologies Dear Reader!

  The end of Basanta is nigh, so says Dulal who is writing this for me. I will explain this too, in a while. It should be cool but this morning the sun rose above the river in a thick cloud of its own dry heat. The heat cloud was smouldering dully as if reflecting the ghastly cremation ghats smoking on the riverbank. Now that the spring dysentery season is in full plague cry my entire picking workforce has fled to the Upper Hill Tracts where they believe the air is clean, though it is not the air that infects them as we now know. Well I can only wish them a safe return when the dry season has passed and hope that the fresh tea tips wait patiently for my people to come back and pick them. Meanwhile I must live in peace and boil my water since that is where the good doctor at Chandraghona believes the plague resides and God knows he has evidence enough befouling his compound!

  Beth was following the clear and even fastidious handwriting on the page with one hesitant finger, as if the writing itself was hard to grasp and not what it was telling her. So then with a sense of having been caught out struggling to understand what was writ plain, she tucked her anxious finger under
the cover of the notebook and read on.

  When Dulal brought our tea to the veranda this morning he said he had found a large snake in the dry monsoon drain behind the kitchen. It was cool in the drain he said, and so he left the snake there, what harm could it do. It was a striking image at this time of peril. If this peaceful snake is an omen I wonder what we should call it: Cool, the snake, perhaps. Yes, let us all Cool The Snake I suggested. Dear Dulal was perhaps somewhat alarmed by my suggestion as I think he took it as a reference to my wretched leg.

  The diary was the last one of a dozen or so cheap A5 notebooks in plain brown cardboard covers packed by someone, she thought Frank’s granddaughter Lizzie, in their own dedicated foolscap box and labelled FREDERICK with a hand-drawn smiley-face emoji. The sense of order in the box seemed to come from the uniform notebooks themselves as much as from the way they’d been packed. She’d picked the last notebook by date out of those neatly organised in double rows with a couple of envelopes, one large and one small, on top, and opened it about two-thirds through. A bad habit of wanting to just get a glimpse of how the story might end before starting at the beginning – she’d always done it even as a kid. She still remembered the ending of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter: ‘I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter! “One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.” But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.’

  Saying the words aloud reminded her that she had always insisted Elke read that bit first because it made whatever had caused Peter Rabbit to need the chamomile (whatever that was!) tea into a secret she already gloatingly knew the meaning of.

  But of course as yet she had no idea what Freddy meant by ‘my wretched leg’, nor what being the last diary in the box meant, although that meaning was perhaps bleeding obvious if ‘bleeding’ was the appropriately sympathetic expression at the juncture of the ‘wretched leg’, which could have been bleeding uncontrollably for all she knew or just a bit overheated like the poor snake, and she would have to restrain herself for the time being.

  But why did or should she even care? She had so far read with curiosity and bewilderment but little interest in Freddy, whom she had encountered previously only in one brief schoolboy diary note that it had even shamed her to have intruded on. She had no special sense of duty to either Frank’s mother Greta who had first taken responsibility for the materials in her mother Catharina’s care, nor to Frank’s sister Ruth who had got them from their mother Greta. Even thinking about the ‘tree’ of these relationships was a bit of a chore, let alone visualising where her own mother Elke fitted in, if she even did, or if she had ever known or cared about Freddy, and certainly not about his Cool Snake!

  But all right, fine! – she could at the very least be doing this for bloody old Frank who might be spooked by his sister Ruth’s presence in the stuff.

  She could at a stretch think of the two-thirdish ‘Cool the Snake’ diary entry in April 1937 as a kind of prologue to the tragic finale that she would encounter in due course after she had dutifully begun again at the beginning – but then, as if prompted, the phrase ‘a stitch in time’ popped up in her head. It was a phrase that her dear disorganised Elke-mum used to utter from time to time with a bewildered expression, as if the segue to ‘saves nine’ was beyond her, as it probably was, but it aptly enough described the reading methodology that she, Beth, had preferred for most of her life. And save nine what? Other stitches? Sutures? Lives?

  Her own grandma the legendary Aggie Wenczel had taken in quite a few stitches-in-time by popping Elke-mum out at barely eighteen, and then wasting no time or stitches by leaving her in the care of the kindly Smiths in the Kaitīeke valley and vanishing without trace via the main trunk line. And then there was the summer visit down the valley ‘that time forgot’ when Elke had appeared intermittently between the trees on the other side of the Retaruke River, barking like a dog, but why? It had something to do with the fact that ‘the bastard’, whom she, Beth, as a child barely remembered except as a thick moustache that always seemed to be raised a fraction on one side above a thin show of teeth, had buggered off with the woman known as ‘the flutterer’ on account of her eyelashes. Of course ‘He was all a-flutter’ etc, which at age six or was it seven meant she’d pictured her father fluttering away somewhere like a big moustachioed semi-smile, a kind of Edward Lear illustration that she had nurtured into adulthood and understood there, though not with the mercilessly surreal truth of a child.

  Frederick – Freddy, rather – continued his ‘Cool the Snake’ entry for ‘April 26th, 1937, Rangamati Hill District, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal’ by describing in quite elegant prose the ‘rhythmical creaking and plashing’ – plashing! – of the long twin dripping oars of a riverboat going downstream ‘with an overload of argumentative passengers destined perhaps for the filthy entrepôt of Chittagong and away from the relative sanitariness of the Rangamati’ – adding ‘poor devils’ in a tone that seemed at once sweetly sympathetic and patronising, rather like the ‘my people’ earlier in his account.

  There was a yellowed envelope on top of the diaries that, since it was in fact on top, was perhaps the true beginning of the ‘Cool the Snake’ narrative, so perhaps she should begin there, having quickly put it aside at first.

  It was impossible to tell if the yellowed envelope had been opened before because the gum had lost its stickiness and the envelope flap was unsealed. The neat, faded writing on the front of the envelope addressed it oddly to Mrs Catharina Hansen, Please Care Of Marlborough College, In Stephenson Street, In Blenheim, In New Zealand – the town in which her great-aunt and Frank’s grandmother Catharina had ended her days about 1956, if she remembered the reunion’s tree correctly, but not before taking certain erratic girls under her firm but kindly educator’s wing for summer holidays – for example, her brother Wolf’s granddaughter Elke, who had in due course occasionally reminisced about ‘Aunty Catha’s’ kindly orderliness and how she liked to play the piano after supper, which had not increased Elke’s own orderliness nor curtailed her propensity to do weird stuff like run along the bank of the Retaruke barking like a dog.

  Perhaps the true-to-self honest hand-on-heart reason she’d quickly put the letter aside at first and also ignored the second, larger official-looking one and fled to the last diary in the box was because she guessed the personal-looking letter would open a portal to a whole lot more stuff than she wanted to deal with just now under the knowing, one-eyed squint of Frank’s galah head, not to mention the bit-too-patient tone of Joe’s voice when he asked how was it going with the tomb-raider stuff, meaning what about the present with him and her grandkids in it?

  What indeed. Good question.

  However.

  The thin double-sided lined paper inside the first, ‘Please Care Of Marlborough College’ envelope was folded very carefully in three, with writing only on the hidden, folded-over side, and did indeed look as though it had never been unfolded – at any rate, the envelope had not been slit open in the conventional way. Either that, or the letter inside the already unsealed envelope had been refolded with care and put back.

  She was dithering. Read the damn thing.

  The paper looked like the kind in cheap school exercise books and had a carefully torn-out margin. Its appearance was already another little story-mystery – whose exercise book had it been torn out of? And come to think of it, the letter might well have been written last, after the diaries had been organised as a consignment. So the letter could be the end, not the beginning, of this story in which a snake lay cooling itself in a dry storm drain while people’s corpses went up in smoke on the cremation ghats and while her great-granduncle Freddy Wenczel lay nursing his ‘wretched leg’ in a tea plantation somewhere on the banks of a river upstream from ‘the filthy entrepôt of Chittagong’ and somewhat below the ‘upper hill tracts’ deemed healthy by the
locals – ‘my people’ – in somewhere called Rangamati.

  The ending that was in fact located at the beginning was in the same well-schooled, old-fashioned handwriting as the notebook entry she’d read first. It too was in what would once have been dark-blue ink, now a bit purplish, and faithfully followed the lines on the paper, with the tails of such letters as ‘y’ curled precisely below the line and the tops of such upreaching letters as ‘l’ stopping just a tiny bit below the line above. She was struck by the responsible pattern of the written sheet, without yet considering what was written there. It was like the careful handwriting of a well-schooled, diligent student, not of a grown or even ageing man used to writing quickly and unceremoniously with his thoughts trying to outpace his pen.

  But then.

  Below a traditionally formal letter-heading that identified the writer as Mister Frederick Wenczel and his place of residence as Waggachara Tea Estate, Rangamati, Bengal, appeared the date of the letter’s composition, July 5, 1937.

  A kind of hiccup or gasp of grief surprised her at that moment – the Freddy who had remarked so beautifully if also terrifyingly on the thick cloud of the sun’s own dry heat and the peaceful snake in its cool drain had perhaps consigned his diaries to the person the letter was addressed to, Mrs Catharina Hansen, not long before his death?

  My Dear Sister Catharina

  I have obtained your current address through the kind offices of your old school in Wellington which of course shamefully dates my attempt to find you again after all these years. And so first of all I must ask you to forgive me for disappearing so completely from the world in which we began to grow up happily together even allowing for the fact that from early on I inhabited a different world from yours as if I had shaken the poisoned dust of that place off my shoes and set out to find another different place beyond its ken and the gaze of those who had to all intents and purposes banished me.