by Valerie Volk
Wakefield Press
Valerie Volk is an award-winning Adelaide writer of poetry, verse novels, short stories and longer fiction. A self-confessed voyeur of other people’s lives, she is fascinated by the perennial question ‘What if …?’ Valerie loves travel, opera and cats—not necessarily in that order. In Search of Anna is her ninth book.
Wakefield Press
16 Rose Street
Mile End
South Australia 5031
www.wakefieldpress.com.au
First published 2019
This edition published 2020
Copyright © Valerie Volk, 2019
All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE
Edited by Julia Beaven, Wakefield Press
ISBN 978 1 74305 647 9
‘We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.’
Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas
For my grandchildren
James
Alicia
Madelaine
Ellen
Isabella
Poppy
in the hope they will allow those who have gone before them to live on, as loving presences, in their minds.
Prologue
Let the dead rest in peace.
It’s a fine sentiment. But they don’t. Rest, I mean.
My dead hover around me. Almost like a flock of Giselle’s Wilis, wraith-like, transformed into the sylph dancers of the night. I’ve never forgotten that ballet, or the night when my father took me to see it at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre. Twelve years old, an eager child. Way up in the gods—there wasn’t money for dress circle tickets.
I have never forgotten those dream-like characters who floated across the stage, creatures from another world, fragile, ephemeral, restlessly seeking spirits, doomed to dance forever. It comes as no surprise when I find ghost-like faces from the past drifting in and out of my life. Especially now that I’m getting on in years. Perhaps we become more receptive.
I reach out to them, to see what my past has been. But they laugh lightly as they float away. Who am I? they mock me. I am Anna.
Which Anna? There were so many. How maddening—that old German custom of using the same name over and over. A nightmare for the historian. Generations of them with the one name, even within a family they’re often called the same. Anna Amelia, says the first. Anna Kristina, smiles her sister. And then, laughing at my confusion, comes the third. I am, I was, Anna Helena.
So when an Anna comes to me I have to first look closely to see which one she is. Now that I’ve got to know them I can see how many Annas I could be searching for.
I stand in the stairwell and look at the gallery of photographs. The old ones go way back, well over a hundred years, in fact almost a hundred and fifty. They’ve hung there ever since we moved into this house, and they’re company when I go up and down the stairs. Not that I do that too often these days. Too hard on my legs. The days of bounding up and down are well and truly over.
Now I just stand at the bottom and study their faces. They look back implacably. There were no smiles in the photos taken in those days. No ‘Say cheese’ and none of these modern contraptions, like the one my niece uses in her obsession with her own image. I wonder what Anna—what any of the Annas—would have made of her selfie stick. I think my grandfather’s phrase, ‘Bloomin’ nonsense’, might have summed it up.
I can see them now, dressed in their best, off to the nearest big town to a photographer’s studio with its potted palms and ornate chairs. They were usually cane, with elaborate curved arms and curlicues on the back rests, and most often the men were seated, staring at the photographer. And at us, several centuries later, scrutinising them.
The men sat, all those big burly German farmers, slightly uncomfortable in their Sunday best, legs crossed and heads held high, an odd curl to the lips, almost supercilious, you could say. This was their day, after all, their wedding clothes marking a move into a new status in the community.
No sitting for their brides. They stood, just a little behind. Symbolic? I think so. Those women, gazing out unsmiling, knew that their lives too had altered. Hair drawn tightly back and frizzed on top, in the fashion of the era, an orange blossom wreath holding the filmy white veil cascading to the floor. Wasp-waisted, some of them, though that fashion was just starting to pass, the era of the black wedding gowns not yet over. They look strange to us today. These women, married not in our traditional white, but in the conventional elaborate black gowns that even the shrouding pale veils did not relieve. Was it the granting of sober matron status that they denoted? Or just something more practical for the life to come?
I consider the photographs in their oval frames, trying to identify the Anna I am seeking. Here is one, an interesting face, my grandmother Emma. She fascinates me, and she too is an Anna, Anna Johanne Emma—but always known as Emma. No, she is not the one, though I study her as she stands, one hand resting lightly on Kurt’s shoulder, looking at me to see what I make of it all. Is hers a proprietary hand? ‘This one is mine, and don’t you forget it.’ Or is it for support? ‘I am your responsibility, and I can depend on you.’ Or is she reminding herself that this is now, and this man is her husband, and he’s not the one she was expecting to be joined with in holy wedlock. It’s not the way it was meant to be.
And what about him, about Kurt? A smaller man than all those other hulking farmers. A different man, not part of this close-knit inbred community. Maybe that was his appeal. Or was it just that she was twenty-eight, and her younger sister wanted to marry, not possible until the older one was safely matched? There were unspoken rules, and if it wasn’t the marriage she’d expected nine years earlier, at least he was a newcomer, a touch of glamour about him too.
I shake my head. These two can wait; their time is still to come. They are a part of this story, and they will have their place—but not yet. This Emma Anna is not the woman I am searching for. I move a step higher among these pictured faces, all offering themselves and their lives, all wanting the immortality they are hoping I might give. Not you, I say, and step up, one further.
Finally, I find it, another photograph, tiny, really just a miniature. It’s slightly tinted, and she looks not at me, but past me, to someone else. She is the one I really want; that wandering spirit, the woman who gave birth to my grandfather and could not let him go, even when he had separated himself from her, from the land of his birth, and from all that he had known.
His mother, this older Anna, the one who came across the world in pursuit of her missing son, roams restlessly through the blur of these past faces as I reach through the fog of years. For they are me, and I am how they might still live. They call to me, their hands outstretched, begging for life. Take me, each says. Take me, and let me return through your words.
I search among the wraith-like figures, seeking her, seeking Anna. She passes through that ghostly company, and yearns towards me.
Take me, she says. Then perhaps I will rest in peace.
Part One
CHAPTER 1
Lewin, Silesia, 1886
The fire is burning low, and outside a light snow is falling. On the other side of the wall I can hear the soft snuffle of the animals safely housed in their winter quarters in the long low room next to me. Sometimes I think that they are better off, better cared for, than we are. Certainly by Otto, anyway.
He would not miss the birth of their offspring, and his huge workman’s hands would be strange
ly gentle as he cradled a newborn lamb or calf. Much more gentle than his hands ever were with me, or with our children.
I look back on the days of our courtship, and even further to our childhood together, the days before Lewin and the life we now lead. Even then, at the little village school, Otto knew what he wanted and few would dare cross him. Not the other boys in Rauschwitz, our town, the place where we were born and where we went to school. The school was so small that there could have been little satisfaction in being the schoolmaster there. Herr Ladner must have looked back on his days in the teacher training institutions and wondered how he had come to this place. Even without Otto, it would have been a miserable job.
We straggled out each day from the little cottages around, few of us valuing those hours in the schoolroom, with our slate pencils scratching in their spine-shivering way over the flat slate boards. For me it was easy; I could copy the line of copperplate letters quickly. I would sit, perhaps a little smugly, and watch the others. Amalia, her straggly long plaits always escaping the crown around her head, her pink tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, labouring at the letters. And Jacob, feet scraping on the wooden floor as he toiled.
I would look at Otto, and he would smirk back at me. We were the quickest in this mixed group of village children, and Otto was not going to make the teacher’s life an easy one. Even when his insolence and misbehaviour had finally driven poor Herr Ladner to his last resort, the cane, Otto would smile through the performance, as if daring the ineffectual teacher to draw blood from his outstretched hands. And at the end he would laugh, and Herr Ladner would know who had won.
I could not understand why Otto persisted in the school. It might have been compulsory, but if he had not wanted to stay he would have defied parents and village leaders and gone his own way. I doubt his parents would have cared, anyway. The small plot of land his father had use of in the Count’s estate was not enough to support them, and his mother spent long hours knitting the worsted stockings that she would take each week to the traders in the market square. Then to hastily buy what was needed before her husband appeared to seize the few coins she had before setting off to the market tavern.
I knew how Otto hated his father and when I looked at the bruises on his mother’s arms and blackened eyes I could see why.
‘This is not going to be my life, Anna,’ he brooded. ‘I am going to do something different.’
Another reason I am so often surprised when I watch him today. When he beats our son for some tiny fault, or pushes me to one side when the meal displeases him, I see again that he is the father he did not want to be. Yes, well, we know not what we may become … That line comes back to me from something I once read.
It was escape we all wanted. Otto sought it through the new railways beginning to criss-cross our land. He was fascinated by the power of these huge metal beasts, and they gave him a reason to continue at the school he hated, where his only pleasure was to torment the mild and helpless master.
‘Why do you treat him like that?’ I asked one day, when I had seen the effort the poor man was making to suppress humiliated tears.
‘Because he’s weak!’ was the scornful response. ‘Anyone as feeble as that should learn to take his punishment.’
‘Why stay then?’
‘Because one day I am going to drive those trains, and for that I must go to the technical school in Glatz.’ Otto knew that to be accepted into the training college in the town he would have to complete the work at our village school.
‘Besides, the more Herr Ladner wants to see my back, the more he will try to get me a place at the college.’ Otto knew how to manipulate people.
‘You will see,’ he spoke with confidence, ‘that railway line in the north will be brought first to Gorlitz, and then to Glatz.’
It took longer than he had thought, but he was right. Soon after our children were born, the railway line reached us. The Silesian Mountain Railway they called it. And Otto, who had anticipated so well, and worked on so many other lines, now became one of its first drivers.
I did not think, in those early years at the little school, that one day I would be his wife. I would not have wanted it. Perhaps I would have been happier if I had stayed at that school and learned to know my place in the world. Yet who can judge this? Our life becomes what we make it—or, truth to tell, what others make of it.
If the Countess had not looked on my mother with favour, my life might have been very different. But she was a kindly woman, and also, I now think, a lonely one with her husband, the Graf von Striebenow, so often away from home. His palace in Berlin saw him more often than the hunting lodge in the mountains here, south of Glatz. Was it his political life that kept him so long in Berlin? Or did it suit him well to leave his wife and daughter here, many days’ journey away?
There were few companions for Christiana, the Countess. For all that she had her painting and embroidery, her music and books (she was a great reader, and rarely to be seen without a book in her hand) and, of course, her daughter, there were no others she could talk to. Perhaps this explains her kindness to the servants, for they at least were company. And my mother seemed her special favourite; they were close in age, and both had daughters.
‘Johanna,’ she would call. ‘Leave your work and walk with me in the garden while I gather flowers.’
So my mother would put aside her mending or polishing, and wander through the grounds, holding the basket for the Countess’s flowers. Later those flowers would brighten the rooms of the dark and forbidding lodge, and the two women, so alike and yet so different, would have spent a happy hour.
What did they talk of, I wonder now. I suspect the Countess talked, and my mother simply followed and listened. And absorbed. For the Countess was an educated woman, who read widely and thought about issues of the day. While my mother, who knew nothing beyond a few years at the village school, still had a fund of commonsense and a willingness to think.
Later, when I was older, I came to love those gardens, and learned to bury my face in the heavy-scented roses that were her special delight. Imitating her? Yes, for by then she was the model of all I wanted to be. Today I tend the single rose bush I keep alive outside our cottage; breathing its perfume takes me back to those happier times. I stroke the softness of the dark red petals, and remember the softness of the Countess’s hands. For I was often with her, and felt her touch.
‘You may bring your Anna when you come.’ This gracious offer was a relief to my mother, who would otherwise have been forced to leave her new baby with a neighbour for long hours each day while she trudged the two miles to the chateau. It would be well after nightfall before she returned home to prepare my father’s meal. He would be back from his small plot of ground where he spent most days, and hard at work with his carving.
The land was too small to provide for us all, already a family of six when I was born. So he continued at his trade of spoon carving, just as my mother spent long weary hours in the evening spinning thread for the linen lengths she would take to the weekly markets. I accompanied her at times, and watched as she sighed, accepting whatever small sum the Breslau traders gave her for her work. A small reward for her weary hours.
At home we watched my father until it was time for us to tumble into the big bed we children shared. My brothers were helping, learning the trade. One day they would be apprenticed to the guild, already partly skilled. I wished that girls might be permitted to learn this work. But no, our place was the home, where we learnt the womanly arts that our minister, Pastor Liebelt, praised so highly.
But even when I was a child this trade was falling away. All those lovely crafted spoons, started as a hobby by herdsmen in the fields and growing to become the export trade that took our spoons into countries far across the seas, were no longer needed. Replaced by earthenware and metal. Practical, and the wood was giving out, it’s true, but nothing will take away our simple pride in what we created by the single lamp in our cottage.
We knew that my mother’s work at the chateau was a necessity for us. Also for the Countess, as it turned out, because her child, only a little younger than I was, needed a wet nurse when her mother’s milk failed. Lydia and I were as close as sisters. In a strange way we were sisters, suckled by the one mother.
The Countess was a second mother to me. She treated me just as she treated her own daughter; we shared our playtimes, our sleep times, our meals as if we were of the same blood. I loved Lydia dearly, more in fact than my own sister Gertrud, and I enjoyed my time at the chateau more than in my father’s cramped house.
When did it begin to bother my mother? Was she jealous of the way I loved the Countess and her daughter? Or was it because my father growled one night when I refused the food at our table, and told me I was getting to be too like the fine ladies on the mountainside?
‘Ideas above your station!’ he roared. ‘You eat the food we provide here, and no more airs and graces!’
Even as a small child I could see the differences in our tables. There the fine china, embroidered cloths and delicate food; in our home the rough wood my mother scrubbed with her reddened hands and the stewpot from which she ladled our evening meal. Mine was an observant eye, even then.
But schooldays came, and it probably relieved my mother to see the pattern of our lives changing. I could only be at the chateau when there was no class for me. I laboured at the slate, perfecting my letters, and grappled with the simple number work, which soon was too easy. Only Otto could equal me. We were the same—we both wanted more.
I missed Lydia, who now had a governess as her teacher. But more than that, she had the Countess, who took a major part of her daughter’s teaching.
‘Why can’t Anna come more often?’ my friend lamented. ‘It’s so lonely without her here.’
I suspect her mother felt the same; perhaps she had come to think of me as another daughter. It was a logical suggestion: rather than the inadequate village school, let Anna come each day to share lessons with Lydia …
