In Search of Anna

by Valerie Volk

  I examined myself carefully in the cabin mirror. My skin was still clear and unlined, my dark hair not yet shot with grey, and the eyes that Kurt had admired were bright and alert. The long neck that Lydia had so surprised my daughter by admiring had an elegance that surprised me. It was many years since I had taken an inventory of my appearance, and now I found I wanted to look as good as possible. The sea air was putting colour in my cheeks, and I blessed Lydia for the care she had taken in selecting clothing for this trip.

  But for what? Or for whom? I laughed at myself, worse than those silly vain young things. Not for Herr Eberhardt, good friend as he had become. And not for Captain Sass, though he had taken to speaking to me with a sort of gallantry that was enjoyable. Nor for the doctor, who was a frail-looking character, subject to fits of depression, and clearly reserved for the first-class ladies. Anyone else in my age group was firmly attached to wives and offspring. It was no wonder that Frau Wandel and her sister Ursula were so proprietary about the few available men.

  We had settled into a harmonious way of life, and as I joined in deck games and watched the dances at night, or promenaded with Margarethe in the late afternoons on the poop deck, I realised with surprise that I was happy. A feeling I had not known for a long time.

  It was not to last. Captain Sass had explained our route. We, like the mail steamers, would be travelling through the Suez Canal, that miracle construction that had so shortened sea journeys.

  ‘The costs are high,’ he told us. ‘But the time saved, especially for ships with mail contracts, justifies the expense.’

  Good in theory, but not for the Elberfeld. We had no swift efficient journey through the Canal. As we reached Port Said, one of the screw propeller blades broke off and disappeared into the waters. This time it was retrievable by the divers employed to find it. But Port Said had no docking facilities to enable repairs so once more we were towed, now to Suez where repairs could be made.

  ‘A new propeller has been ordered,’ boomed Captain Sass. ‘It will be sent to Sydney and the whole unit will be replaced. Meanwhile we continue!’

  More delays, and this time the ship seemed to seethe with discontent. There was no chance of going ashore, unlike Cardiff where it had been possible to visit the town and feel again the strange sensation of walking on solid ground. There, the repairs to the Elberfeld had seemed almost a brief holiday time, and we had explored the flourishing coal port.

  ‘Research for our newspaper,’ decreed Herr Eberhardt, as he escorted our group through the city centre and the ancient Cardiff Castle, built over the ruins of an early Roman fort.

  I found so much pleasure in talking to this man, who knew about these places and was willing to share his knowledge. I wrote under his guidance, and took pride in finding my accounts of our visits and explorations in print. I had never known that writing could become a satisfying activity—I was learning new things about the world and myself.

  The stop in Suez was different. Unlike Cardiff, where even the most impatient grumblers could find activity to compensate for the lengthening of their voyage, at both Port Said and during the Suez repairs we were confined to the ship.

  ‘Too dangerous.’ Captain Sass was decisive. ‘There have been cases of cholera in these ports, and I cannot afford an outbreak on the Elberfeld. There will be no shore leave, and we will take precautions with contacts during the repairs.

  So we watched enviously as swarms of little boats circled our ship and eager faces tried to sell us grapes and watermelons and lemons. Meanwhile our refuelling took place at Port Said, with coal shovelled from the barges by men who ran up and down planks, their brown bodies glistening with sweat under the loads they carried. During the scorching nights, many of our young men slept on deck. Captain Sass, always inventive, had a swimming bath erected on the deck, and after dark even ladies could swim on our allocated nights. It gave some relief, but not enough.

  Our closed world now seemed a prison, in which the steamy heat of midsummer became a breeding ground for resentment and hostility. Frau Wandel’s cartoons assumed a vicious streak, and the children complained and whined through their daily lessons.

  In our cabin, Ida’s petulance drove us to seek other areas of the ship. Even the most casual of remarks could lead to a tirade of annoyance, and she took the fact that we were confined to the ship as a personal affront. In many ways, she and Frau Wandel made a good pair, for neither could brook delays or the curbing of what they wanted. I wondered if Klaus would have the patience to deal with his new bride. Even Clara’s tolerance was tried, and Margarethe and I would glance at each other and roll our eyes in exasperation.

  ‘This will be a swifter repair,’ Captain Sass assured us. But some muttered that disasters came in threes, that there would be yet another breakdown, an ominous idea. Because we had taken in coal at Port Said, there would be no need to put in at Colombo, as ships on this route so often did.

  Clara sighed. ‘I had hoped that we might see something of the native life there. I have read about it—it seems most colourful.’

  Ida could not resist a comment. ‘Oh, you’ll be seeing enough native life where you are going, I should think. You don’t need to start so early. You’ll get enough dark-skinned people before long!’

  I could see Clara biting back a sharp retort. A peacemaker by nature, she had the right temperament for the way of life she had chosen. Or the way of life that God had chosen for her, as she explained to me. I found her simple faith touching, envious of the certainty of her belief.

  ‘Too much reading,’ my father had said, when I tried to talk at home of some of the doubts that troubled me. When I tried to involve our good Pastor in discussing matters of faith, the sheer panic on the good man’s face had left me unwilling to distress him. Now I felt the same with Clara. I did not want to raise issues that might lead to trouble between us or, worse still, infect her with my doubt.

  At least with Herr Eberhardt I could talk honestly, knowing he shared many of my concerns and would not be shocked. With him I learned of the problems of varied translations of texts that had puzzled me, and of ways of considering the contexts in which the scriptures had been written.

  ‘Metaphor?’ a perturbed Pastor Liebelt had shaken his head. ‘Ach nein, Anna. Such thoughts will lead you astray. One must have simple faith in every word as it is written.’

  It was good to find that there were other positions between Otto’s blanket denial of all that religion stood for and the blind accepting faith of my family. But I did not speak of these things to Clara, for I felt that she would view me as on a primrose path to damnation. There it was again—the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire—and I was back once more in the Chateau library, reading Macbeth with the Countess.

  Spirits revived as we steamed out of Suez, the canal now well behind us. Through the Red Sea, and as I recognised places with familiar names my thoughts turned swiftly to biblical lore and the stories from my childhood of fleeing Israelites and pursuing Egyptians. Soon the Red Sea too was behind us, and before us lay the Gulf of Aden and at last, again, the open sea—and then the vast Indian Ocean.

  Early in the morning we could see the peaks of the far-off island of Socotra, and another small island behind it. We knew, from Pastor Krause and our captain, that this isolated place, with its fierce heat and strange and wonderful plants, would be the last land we would see for many days. The morning prayers on deck that day seemed a feeble effort to propitiate an uncertain deity.

  For a moment, a sense of panic seemed to wash like a wave over the Elberfeld. We were such a frail vessel to be setting off across this expanse. What matter our carefully repaired propeller and our double bottom with its seven watertight steel bulkheads? What value our steam winches and windlasses and steering gear? (By now I had a fair understanding of the vessel we were on, and all its features!) More relevant, at worst, would be the six boats we carried in case of disaster … But we did not wish to think of such things. It was mid September, and we
knew we had at least another five weeks ahead on this perilous sea.

  CHAPTER 16

  In the tropics, Elberfeld, 1889

  Captain Sass had been right to keep us occupied. Little had he realised that this apparently straightforward voyage on a new ship would turn into a wandering of the seas to rival opera! A month longer than anticipated, already. And even though I wondered about the pressure mounting on our supplies, the food continued to maintain the standards set when we left. There had been much re-stocking at Suez, for even the animals on board would not have been sufficient for our needs with these delays. Without refrigeration life would have been more difficult.

  How grateful we were that our craft had been equipped not just with the generator for electricity but also the water condensation plant, ensuring our supplies of fresh water. We had all heard the stories of the drinking water on the old clippers, so foul by the end of long voyages that it was nearly undrinkable, and the way in which disease, once unleashed on these sailing ships, could run rampant. And of the daily funerals, especially when large numbers of children were on board.

  It was harder for the children. Even though there was ample space on the promenade decks for children’s games, and space made in the saloons for their schooling, once we reached the tropics the high temperatures led to many problems. The hospital rooms were often crowded. Frau Wandel and her sister saw less of Dr Menz than they had hoped for; the poor man was kept busy with children’s fevers, debility, diarrhoea, jaundice and all the other ailments that now seemed rife. The doctor, always a gloomy man, now seemed permanently harassed and miserable.

  He conducted the regular musters of children on deck, and carefully checked throats and ears for signs of disease, while counselling mothers on the need to bathe their little ones each week and to make sure that the children, like the rest of us, drank their daily ration of lime juice. Examination over, he would give a rare smile as he doled out sweets to the children he had seen. I was amused to see that he had refused Fraulein Ursula’s offer to help with the sweets distribution—she was not volunteering assistance with the medical checks.

  Our funeral for the newborn off Gibralter was the first, but not the only sad ceremony. We grieved most, I think, at the funerals of children, and Clara and Margarethe took hard the sight of two of their schoolchildren consigned into the waters after brief farewell services. There was no laughter in our cabin those nights, nor when the mother of one of those little boys could be found nowhere on the ship one morning and we came to realise that she must have joined her young son.

  ‘I should have foreseen it,’ wept Clara. ‘I knew how hard it was for her. She said, she actually told me, she would be happier to be with him.’

  ‘But you could not know what she meant,’ I tried to reassure her but she would not be comforted.

  ‘No, the way she sobbed. It was more than just grief. She was brokenhearted, I should have seen what she had in mind.’

  ‘Even her husband did not know—how could you?’

  ‘He is a man. I should have known.’

  I was surprised at how deeply Captain Sass felt for the loss of life during the voyage. It was, I suspect, almost a personal reproach to him. He consulted long hours with Doctor Menz, especially when two sailors who had been in Suez sickened with symptoms that were worryingly like typhoid fever.

  ‘It was expressly forbidden,’ the doctor assured the captain. ‘They were told to eat or drink nothing while ashore.’

  ‘It may not be the typhus,’ Captain Sass ruminated. ‘But they do show red spots—and some other familiar symptoms. We must keep them isolated.’

  When they died there was a hasty disposal of their bodies without the usual ceremonies, and only Pastor Krause was on the deck in the early hours of the morning to speak a rushed prayer before they went to the deep. If it was indeed typhus, it did not spread.

  It was different when two elderly ladies died. Both of them matriarchs of their families, both of them widows, and one as much feared as loved, I suspected. But this voyage and its seeming endlessness had taken its toll on aging bodies. Even with the air ventilator, so much the pride of the Elberfeld, the steamy heat of the equator left us lethargic and irritable, and older people at greater risk. Their families wept as they said their farewells in that sad week when both left us. Our captain took these deaths deeply to heart. You could see him thinking that if the voyage had gone to plan, they might well have survived the trip. His ship; his responsibility. Without the delays, they might have reached the new land their families sought.

  The middle cabins were quieter those days, and noisy children were hushed and sent to play on deck. Even that was to prove hazardous. As we moved south, we steamed steadily towards the South East Trades, hopeful there would be no further mishaps. No one had warned us of the impact of these freshening winds on our journey.

  ‘It is the English name for them,’ Herr Eberhardt explained to me. We were walking, with some care, bracing against the gusts that came. ‘Trade. It comes from an old English word meaning a path or track.’

  ‘Why a path?’

  ‘It was how the sailing ships found a way across the great oceans. Without the winds they would be becalmed. Unable to sail on. The Portuguese sailors who opened the new worlds understood this. We have all learned from them.’

  ‘But today in English that word, trade, has a different meaning?’

  We had slipped into a pattern that we both enjoyed, of speaking English together in preparation for our own new world, ignoring Frau Wandel’s scathing comments about the ugliness of this language.

  ‘True—but the meaning of ‘trade’ today comes directly from that past. The trade winds made trade possible, trade with the new lands across the seas.’

  He was, as always, formal and at times irritating in his pedantry, but I valued the wealth of knowledge he brought to all topics. I valued also, I confess, the sense of being cared for and admired by this man. What woman would not have been flattered?

  So when I stumbled in a sudden gust of wind, I was not offended by the protective arm he placed around my shoulders, even though he removed it the next moment with careful apology.

  ‘Forgive me, Frau Werner. I did not wish to see you fall.’

  ‘Or even,’ I said, laughing, ‘be blown overboard!’

  But we sobered quickly at the memory of all the bodies already departed by that route.

  ‘Thank you for your care,’ I added quickly. I did not want to admit, even to myself, how pleasant it had been, even that brief moment of a man’s arm around me.

  ‘We should indeed be grateful,’ he pointed out, ‘that our ship is steam. In the old days we could have been becalmed for days, even weeks, near the equator in the doldrums.’

  I looked up with interest. This was a new word.

  ‘That is the area where trade winds from the south-east meet the trade winds from the north-west; where they collide the air is forced upwards. So there are few surface winds, and ships have no way to move.’

  ‘And these are the doldrums.’ I rolled the word experimentally on my tongue.

  ‘It has come to have a more general meaning in English. It means a state of apathy, of misery. Like being becalmed in life, unable to get free.’

  ‘I think my life has been like that for a long time. In these doldrums. It’s useful to have a word to describe it.’

  He glanced at me quickly. ‘I would hope that your future life may be well away from the doldrums,’ he began, but I cut him off quickly, suddenly afraid where this conversation might go.

  ‘Oh look, Herr Eberhardt, Fräulein Margarethe is coming to join us.’ And so the moment passed.

  We had worked together so closely that at times I was tempted to ask him to call me Anna, but such a degree of familiarity would have raised the eyebrows of the others in our group, so we maintained the proper distance that custom decreed.

  Since Margarethe’s warning I had been careful to give no occasion for gossip, or for rekindli
ng the hostility of Frau Wandel or her sister. But I was honest enough to admit the enjoyment I had in the company of a man whose interests and values were so similar to my own, and who gave me the sense of being appreciated. Did I want more than that?

  Our deck walks were no longer possible as the winds increased in intensity, and swelling seas made even short promenades hazardous. Violent waves could come with unexpected force, as we found one day. The boy was only seven, but Gunther Kowald was often in trouble. Somehow he had managed to let a chicken out of its coop, and was now fearful of punishment. As well he should have been. No wonder he tried to chase it across the deck and back to its quarters, but when the ship bucked at a sudden onslaught he was hurled to the side.

  ‘He could so easily have been swept over,’ reported Clara, who had heard it all. ‘But one of the crew managed to grab him before the next wave and pull him back to safety.’

  ‘But the boy was screaming, wasn’t he?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Well, that was understandable. But it was just then the First Officer came by and thought the man was maltreating the child. He knew what the Captain would have said and wouldn’t listen to a word but clapped him in irons in the hold to wait for punishment.’

  ‘Surely the child could have said something?’

  ‘He was frantic, just sobbing, and his mother whisked him away, shouting abuse at the sailor as she went for what he had done to her son.’

  ‘How totally unjust!’ Margarethe was flushed with indignation.

  ‘No, it was cleared up,’ Clara continued. ‘One of the passengers at the other end of the deck had seen it all and went to Captain Sass to explain. It’s been sorted out.’

  ‘I think the mother should apologise, don’t you? After all, he probably saved her son’s life.’

  ‘To a sailor?’ said Ida dubiously.

  ‘I doubt it.’ Margarethe was regretful. ‘You know how some of those cabin ladies view the sailors.’

  But she was wrong, and an emotional Frau Kowald brought Gunther to thank his rescuer in front of the whole crew at the next Sunday service. I was left wondering the next time eggs appeared at our breakfast whether the chicken had also been saved.