by Ian Wedde
Ettie had been watching the nailing down and so she saw the two packets being placed on Ma’s chest and also the look that Wolf gave his sister. What was that about, she asked later once the guests had gone – what were those things you put in the coffin, Catha? But she was half looking at Wolf as she asked, because the question was really for him, on account of the complicit look she had seen.
He didn’t know and he didn’t want to, he said, and that was why he’d asked Catha to do what their Ma had asked for, which was to bury those things with her. And so they were meant to go to the grave with her and as far as he was concerned all knowledge of them was meant to go there with her as well.
But Ettie’s sharp glance at her had then clearly asked if she had seen what the things were, and so was she, Catharina, now the guardian of the secrets of them?
And yes, she had seen them, but was not going to tell Ettie or Wolf that she had unless they expressly asked her, because unlike Wolf she did not believe that Ma had forbidden anyone to look at them – she knew her little Mutti well and if she had wanted to forbid anyone to look at the special things she would have been very clear about it. Wolf was entitled to his view and she respected both his candour and his rectitude, but the alternative story and the one she herself preferred to believe with just as much candour and rectitude was that it could very well be that the objects were special ones that Mutti had wanted to take with her on her journey to the afterlife, however she characterised that in her beliefs, and why should her children and their children not know that part of their story? And it had seemed to her that her brother, with his usual way of speaking at once forthrightly and mysteriously, had not forbidden her on their mother’s behalf to look at the special things in Mutti’s tallboy – he had, rather, acknowledged by not mentioning it that his sister was entitled to her own view on their Ma’s special things, and that was her business and none of his.
And yes, in the moment she had begun to open the small top left-hand drawer of the tallboy on the morning of the burial, she was quite sure she had not conveniently persuaded herself that what she planned to do was acceptable merely to disguise from herself the fact that she was just curious and what difference could it make?
Ach! – even so, she had hesitated for a moment, but then remembered the many times she had seen and heard her Mutti’s bright sharp wit communicate clearly that yes, she had lived a life that would seem unusual or even scandalous in some respects in the eyes of more conventional members of the community, but they didn’t need to know any more about her life than she chose to tell them, whereas her children and their children had every right to know if they wished.
She remembered very well Mutti’s sharp riposte to poor Hugo when he had attempted to trump her account of life at the Bloch House and the conversations in which she had been included and encouraged to ‘have a mind of her own’.
The objects were a letter envelope and a notebook in a larger manila envelope. Both seemed quite old – the letter envelope yellowed and the notebook an old-fashioned one with Gothic lettering on the front. The address on the letter envelope was to Mrs Josephina Hansen, 4 Bute Street, Wellington, New Zealand, and inside were two pages of neat handwriting with a plain ‘Theodora’ signature at the end. The letter was dated 1908 and had a sender’s address in Brisbane, Australia. She read the letter quickly and without surprise or dismay, remembering in ghostly fragments as she did so the dark-haired woman who had lived with them for a while in the little cottage in Bute Street. She was the sister of the man she knew to be Wolf’s father but whom she remembered if at all as being oddly stooped like a goblin, as if her memory of him had been mixed up with an illustration in a children’s book – he had died on the voyage from Germany to New Zealand when she was about four or five years old. Mutti had sometimes talked about him with sadness and love when she was older, but what she envisaged from Mutti’s reminiscences were not memories.
Theodora Bloch’s letter to Mutti was written in a firm, steady hand with the careful paragraphs of someone used to organising readable pages. Its tone was quite straightforward and almost curt except for a second-to-last paragraph about first encountering Mutti and herself when they went to see the sewing room in Hamburg. This she did not remember at all, although a horse was there that was much higher than her and the sensation of its vast warm flank under her hand was there as well. Perhaps the horse was connected to the scene described by Theodora’s matter-of-fact poetry, or perhaps it was just one of the vague fragments that emerged when she tried to think about her childhood?
She was now just an old damned nuisance Quälgeist, as she heard people saying pretty often, Theodora had written. She was the loving sister of the dear little man she believed Josephina had loved more than any other. She had had a life she was happy to look back on, much of it with the brother she had loved as had Josephina, and then with her comrades in the Social-Democratic Vanguard in Queensland, including her comrade Hugo Kunze in Brisbane. It had been her work for many years to write for the Vanguard and do office work for the Party. In recent years she had done less of that work and was now living more quietly and enjoying the company of her friends and especially the women who had come together to form the Women’s Progressive Club. Perhaps the name Margaret Ogg had reached New Zealand?
Then came the second-to-last paragraph in which Theodora’s matter-of-fact tone changed.
She wanted Josephina to know that for all the years leading up to her present circumstances she had never forgotten the sight of her standing in Herr Johannes Paul’s sewing room in Hamburg with that beautiful child beside her. She remembered how the dusty light had lit their faces and the strands of fair hair that came out below their bonnets. She had fallen in love at that moment and had never ceased to love the woman she had seen for the first time in that sewing room even when it was clear her love would not be returned, and had continued to love her after she and Wolf became lovers at the Bloch House and then the mother and father of that boy child born on the voyage.
The last paragraph returned to the matter-of-fact tone of earlier ones, but the effect of the one before with its declaration of love seeped into it like the dusty light Theodora had described.
But now she, Theodora, had decided that after all these years she could not go on without telling Josephina the truth. Josephina herself should know that she, Theodora, had led a life that had rewarded her in many ways, and not least with the enduring image of Josephina and her lovely child Catharina standing lit by those shafts of dusty sunlight in comrade Herr Paul’s sewing room all those years ago.
‘And so now goodbye my dear Josephina, and may your life be as rewarding as your nature deserves, and may your children have good lives lit by the warmth of their mother’s love.’
She had quickly set aside an inappropriate sense of entitlement after reading Theodora’s letter since, although she was mentioned in it, it had been for Mutti, and for Mutti to know about that dark-haired woman’s feelings for her. She, the ‘beautiful child’ mentioned by Theodora, had been moved more by the letter’s forthright tone than by its emotion, and she had put it back in its envelope wishing she had known that woman better and as an adult, not the child lit by dusty sunlight.
The journal in the larger manila envelope was obviously one of Wolf Bloch’s – she could decipher that much from the Gothic inscription on its flyleaf, as well as the date, 1879. The journal was almost full. The first lengthy entry in it was dated ‘Bloch House, Hamburg, April 20th, 1879’, and the final brief entry in it was from ‘December 20th, 1879’. This one recorded in scant detail the fact that Wolf Bloch was sick after eating something in the Cape Verde Islands. It was possibly the last thing he had written before his death. It, and the letter from his sister, though written some thirty years apart, seemed to be joined by a kind of invisible thread. She had replaced the journal in its envelope without reading further. It was easy to guess that it had been very precious to Mutti and it was with a sense of what was respectful that she
had closed it. Perhaps Wolf Bloch had written about his and Mutti’s relationship in earlier parts of the journal, and if so she preferred to consign it to the privacy of the grave – complying with her brother’s preference or perhaps instinct by at least that much.
It was the vivid memory of Greta’s covert phew as they left on the train some days after Mutti’s funeral that had really cleared the path for the utter confusion of other memories around the events of the days at Wolf’s place down the Kaitieke back then going on five years ago! – the sight of Mutti herself in her neat blue scarf, which she could not imagine ever forgetting, the special things in her little tallboy drawer likewise, but most of all the ragged whistling of the Rohrsänger’s song by those around the grave and then her own voice saying those German words Auf wiedersehen und sichere Reise unsere liebe kleine Rohrsänger, words she had not even rehearsed to herself and might have thought unwise given time to think about them – and then a day or two later the polite handshakes of the policemen from Taumarunui.
The eldest of them was a man in his fifties, she judged, whose name was Thompson, Sergeant Thompson, with grey in his hair and moustache and a set of false teeth that she had noticed him push quickly in and out with his tongue before coming forward to shake her hand. Sergeant Thompson walked away afterwards with the slight hobble of someone with uncomfortable boots, perhaps because of bunions or corns. She had felt a pang of sympathy for him, a hobbled man consigned to the demeaning task of looking into potential enemy aliens among people he had probably known for years, while younger men with better teeth and feet were marching off to glory.
She saw the same Greta phew from five years ago but not a covert one this time as she took one of the twins from her, the thin leggy little boy called Frank, whom she tried to interest in the bottle of warm milk while he tore jerkily at his cheeks and neck and screamed until he turned crimson. His sister Ruth, meanwhile, was falling peacefully asleep with her bottle’s teat slipping from the corner of her still weakly sucking mouth, while her poor mother likewise began to fall asleep.
Of course this exhausted woman was still her daughter Greta, the clever one who occupied an editor’s desk at the Evening Post, or who believed she was expected to reoccupy that desk once her domestic situation permitted it, but for now the lank hair falling across her face was the sign of her utter surrender to exhaustion. And meanwhile she had assured her mother with that set of her jaw familiar from when she was still just a little girl proud of being able to read The Swiss Family Robinson, she and the twins would get along all right on the pension granted poor Albert.
‘Poor Albert’ the warmonger Greta had married when well into her thirties a week before he went off to camp as a volunteer, the ‘poor Albert’ who had blown one of his own legs off at training and been retired from active service six months after volunteering! Who without irony blamed his drinking on ‘the enemy’!
She understood well that there was nothing to be gained by making her opinion of ‘poor Albert’ known, although of course it was, in her silence. And as if in reciprocal agreement, Greta no longer brought up what she had once referred to as her mother’s ‘unfortunate experiment’ with Professor Hugo von Welden, the father she had revered as a martyr until he ‘ran away’. Now it was clear between them that she knew better than to provoke her mother with anything more blatant than that tilt of her jaw that her mother called ‘the look’. There was nothing to be gained from recriminations – they had agreed on that without actually doing so. A certain amount of levity seemed more reasonable under the circumstances, such as ‘par for the course’, Wolf’s oddly inappropriate comment on ‘poor Albert’ since he, Wolf, had never played golf for goodness sake let alone met the man who had subsequently succeeded in fathering the twins while ‘legless’, Albert’s own facetious term that now usually meant he was blind drunk.
Her phone calls with Wolf had not been helpful, and it was clear there was no possibility of his and Ettie’s place being offered as a haven for Greta and the twins Frank and Ruth, any more than was her own modest cottage in Blenheim with its view of the plain yellow Wither Hills that she longed for quite unreasonably whenever she was away from them for more than a week.
She herself had looked after Wolf’s odd granddaughter Elke for the summer holidays once or twice, and other wayward girls before Elke from time to time when she was still at the college. But now she preferred her own company and that of a few close friends nearby.
Albert Parks called himself the Parks Department as if the joke was fresh every time he told it, and did clumsy Oliver Hardy impersonations with a candle-black ‘Adolf’ moustache. Most of the time he just wasn’t really there, said Greta, even though at least one of his legs was.
To her credit she seldom judged him even when she was angry but what she would not tolerate was him saying that he should have known better than to marry a bloody frooline and what about that bloody uncle of hers up country giving himself airs like landed gentry.
Uncle Wolf giving himself airs! At least she, Catharina, could have a laugh of sorts with Greta about the notion of Wolf ‘giving himself airs’.
But the Wither Hills were like sleeping lions, she thought, though she had never seen one either awake or asleep, and when she had been away from the hills for a while she began to imagine their animal warmth and the peace of their long afternoon sleeps.
She needed to go home, she told her tired clever daughter Greta a few days later. She was after all just an old damned nuisance Quälgeist when all was said and done. She needed some time to herself, and to recover a sense that her life or what was left of it was her own. She was looking forward very much to the ‘what was left’. She would get the ferry back to Picton in a week or two, once the twins had settled down a bit. It was little Frank that she worried about, he had a restless spirit that one, and not because he had a colicky tummy. His twin sister Ruth, on the other hand, might surprise them all one day. A child that appeared to sleep peacefully but with those agitations of her eyelids might be the one who would have a more thoughtful and troubling vision of how the world was.
But meanwhile her own perspective was not an especially long one, and she was almost content with her view of lion-coloured light on the Wither Hills towards the end of the day, and the peace of her solitude. If Greta needed her in an urgent way of some kind she could of course phone or send her a telegram, and the ferry boat to Wellington was not so far away after all.
It had been a calm crossing for once, and the unsteadiness of the current as the ferry went in through the narrow passage at the entry to the winding waterway into the Sound barely disturbed her where she stood in the salty breeze at the rail and watched the rough shoreline with its rim of white water slide away behind the ship.
She would have a nice boiled egg for supper and then go to bed with Bovary. She was up to the section in Part III, ‘She Would and She Would Not’, where Emma and Léon careen madly around Rouen in the horse-drawn cab with closed blinds. She always enjoyed getting to this part, where the coachman’s comic frustration and despair as he is ordered to ‘Go on!’ mask but also mirror the concealed ‘go on’ passions of the couple within. ‘At about six o’clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.’
She could feel the shape of the smile on her face as she took her glasses off and put them on top of Bovary on the bedside cabinet, and then turned the light out and saw quite vividly the horse-drawn carriage tearing around the streets of the town with the sole purpose of prolonging what was concealed within it.
Afterword
This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it are invented. However, the ghosts of historical events and of people whose stories are known to me haunt the fictions. My German great-grandmother Maria Josephine Catharina Reepen came to New Zealand from Haderslev in northern Denmark, although her German family had lived in Kiel in the north of Germany. She married my
great-grandfather, Heinrich August Wedde, a runaway sailor, in Wellington in 1876. They had eight children, three of whom lived on Land Settlement farms in the Kaitīeke valley. One of them, Monty, stayed on after his brothers had walked off their land; he became a beekeeper and gave his name to a legendary apple, Monty’s Surprise. He might have been surprised to find himself haunting the fictional character of Wolf Wenczel in this book.
My great-grandmother was buried in the Raurimu cemetery in 1927, and in 2016 I visited her grave with my second cousin Peter Wedde, after we had been at a family reunion in Wellington. It was about then, after the rich but confusing conversations of the reunion, looking down the long, twisty view-shaft of the Kaitīeke valley and the equally twisty view-shaft of family history, legend and forgetfulness, that I began to think about writing a fiction with that kind of twisty structure.
The crossovers between personal memory and official history are unstable, as are those between the purported disinterest of official, ‘factual’ history, and the self-interested biases of institutional and family histories. The kinds of time they occupy differ and dither, and the documents and mementos that vouch for them have unstable provenances. The past may be vividly present in personal memory, in that shifty time when we are remembering the past while attempting to be alert in the present. What passes for personal memory may in fact consist of the stories we have been told about events and people that we almost believe we experienced. And then, little by little, over time, the attritions of personal and institutional forgetfulness begin to thin out the stories that once continued to occupy the present with their pasts and with the people whose pasts they were.
