The Fire Blossom
Page 11
“Mr. Beit assured my father that it would only be necessary to have one for every fifty passengers.”
Karl grinned. “Then we’re lucky,” he remarked sarcastically. “You aren’t seasick?”
Ida shook her head. “No. But all the others are. Elsbeth thinks she’s going to die. Will the entire voyage be like this, Karl?”
She stumbled as the ship was caught by another gust of wind. Karl caught her—and held her for the length of a heartbeat in his arms.
“Excuse me.” Ida freed herself immediately and blushed as though God had whispered a warning to her. “I have to get back. Someone else has probably thrown up since I left.”
The young woman was finally able to empty her bucket, and then made her way along the dark corridor. Karl followed, ready to catch her again if she fell.
“I’m here if you need me,” he said softly before she disappeared behind the makeshift door. “If—if I can help you with anything . . .”
Ida bravely said no, but her refusal didn’t last very long. The conditions in her family’s quarters were simply too much for her to handle alone. The children were crying, and they vomited every few minutes. Anton was no help. He, too, lay whimpering in his berth—whether from pain or fear, it was impossible to say. Even her father was unable to leave his bed. When he wasn’t vomiting, he was praying in a weak voice. So, Ida swayed back into the corridor immediately with the next stinking bucket, and this time she didn’t protest when Karl took it from her.
They both passed a hellish night. Karl wordlessly accepted the buckets that were filled first with vomit and then with excrement, because little Franz had been so scared he had loosed his bowels in his pants. Karl found another bucket and brought it back filled with water so Ida could mop the floor. Then came the deluges Beit had predicted. The waves had to be extremely high in order to flood the deck, and the water forced its way through badly sealed hatches. Karl attempted to keep back the water from the corridor in front of Ida’s cabin. The crew had provided them with sponges and bailers. But soon the brew of seawater, dirt, and vomit was ankle-deep.
Elsbeth screamed hysterically as the water finally forced its way into their quarters, and Karl heard Ida trying to reassure her. “Didn’t you hear when Father and Mr. Brandmann were talking to Mr. Beit? Mr. Beit said that it was completely normal for water to get in.”
No one had given that information to Karl. Few of the other passengers had any idea about it either. The reactions to the flooding were correspondingly panicked. There was constant shouting, and people were praying aloud. Hysterical passengers crowded against the hatches, and their fear grew when they found them latched shut from the outside. The nightmare seemed to be never ending.
But suddenly it did end. The wind eased. The ship lay calmer in the water again. Karl saw Ida come out of her quarters looking completely worn out.
“Do you think—do you think it’s over?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
Karl shrugged his shoulders. They hurt, like his back and the rest of his body. He had spent hours holding himself upright and balancing on the swaying floor so as not to spill the contents of the buckets.
“Looks like it,” he replied, mostly to comfort Ida. “I can try to find someone to ask. But it will surely take a while. The sailors are all busy. Shall I—may I come by later?”
Ida shook her head regretfully. “If it’s over, my father will soon be well again. And then I’ll get in trouble if he sees you here.”
Karl smiled bitterly. “Really, he should thank you. But he probably thinks I shouldn’t be here, doesn’t he? I don’t mean just here with you”—he indicated the corridor that ran between the family quarters—“but not even on this ship.”
Ida nodded and pushed a strand of damp hair out of her face. Everything was damp, and Karl noticed only now that his clothing was soaked through.
“Everyone thinks that,” Ida said softly, and almost guiltily. “They say you—you abandoned the position that God gave you. You violated the holy order . . .”
Karl looked into her eyes, which were reddened from strain, and he saw red patches on usually pale cheeks. Her sweat-dampened hair had escaped and had crept out from under her bonnet, and her stained dress hung heavily. But for him, she was infinitely beautiful. And he wanted to know what she really thought.
“But I had been praying for just such a possibility,” he said. “Perhaps God just heard my prayers.” He put a hand lightly on her arm, as though he wanted to stop her from running away when he asked his question. “Or should I have prayed for humility?”
Ida didn’t answer, but her face reflected a multiplicity of shifting emotions. Sorrow and fear, loyalty and opposition.
“Should I have stayed there and prayed for humility, Ida?” Karl asked again, his voice growing harder.
Ida seemed to want to free herself, but then she gave in and shook her head fiercely. “I’m glad that you’re here,” she whispered. “And maybe—maybe I prayed for you too.”
Chapter 10
During the next few days, the weather grew calmer; there wasn’t another strong storm. But floods remained a part of their daily existence. For that to happen, the deck didn’t have to be swamped by waves. Heavy rainfall was enough. And during that time of year, it rained almost every day.
“So why are you emigrating in the middle of winter?” one of the sailors asked when Lange complained yet again about the uncomfortable conditions. “The Atlantic is even stormy in summer, and now, it’s a miracle it’s not worse!”
Ida thought it was bad enough. Steerage hadn’t dried out again after the storm. Her dress and the children’s clothes wouldn’t dry either, and changing them was hopeless, because the spare clothes had gotten soaked too. Everything stank of airlessness and decay, and the overflowing latrines were a problem. It was impossible to air out the tween deck because the hatches had to stay closed in the constant rain. Of course, people complained, and Beit made things worse by holding the stewards responsible. He rebuked them with rude words and replaced them. When the conditions didn’t improve under the new stewards, he docked everyone’s rations, supposedly to punish the settlers for not making an effort to keep their quarters tidy and clean. Lange protested in the name of the villagers of Raben Steinfeld and, as punishment, was relieved of his duties in the galley.
To the dismay of the emigrants, Beit was behaving more and more like a tyrant. He ordered the stewards around, arbitrarily determined the amount and content of the rations, and ordered the young women to go to his family’s cabin and clean it along with his maid. When the girls returned, they reported breathlessly about the comfortable quarters of the first-class passengers, which added fuel to the settlers’ resentment. They were suffering from the scanty meals and the cold and dampness. When the children began to cough and a small boy died after a weeklong fever, they got angry.
Karl took comfort in the fact that the conditions on board were temporary. The sailors had assured him that they would soon reach the Bay of Biscay and the weather would improve. It would be warmer too.
“Too warm!” one of the sailors said with a laugh. “Just wait, in a few weeks you’ll be complaining about the heat.”
Karl couldn’t really imagine that, but he was ready to believe the men, who had sailed the same route many times. He continued to keep his distance from his fellow passengers and spent his time studying English. He already knew all of the phrases from his book by heart, and now he began to memorize the dictionary words he thought would be important. He was extremely eager to try out his language skills on someone, and during the daily free hour on deck, he looked for people to talk to. But that turned out to be difficult. Karl assumed that at least John Nicholas Beit’s family had a good command of English, but the first-class passengers didn’t fraternize with the others and remained in their cabins when the steerage passengers were let out. He only saw the missionaries. On the weekends they offered prayer groups. Karl finally got up his courage to ask Pastor Wohlers, but the
clergyman didn’t speak any English.
“We’ll learn when we arrive, young man!” he said hopefully.
Karl wondered how the clergyman imagined his mission working without English. The natives certainly wouldn’t speak any German. If it was possible to give sermons in a common language at all, it would be English. But perhaps the minister planned to learn the Maori language as well. That one seemed very strange to Karl, based on the few examples in his book. Anyway, he would have to practice English some other way—even if that meant breaking the rules.
On a fine, calm morning when a few sunbeams even found their way into steerage, he climbed the ladder to the deck and went in search of someone to practice with.
Jane Beit tilted her face up toward the sun and enjoyed the warmth without it having any great effect on her mood. She had made it a habit to spend some time on deck every morning. The best time was during breakfast. If she ate with the family, her mother would criticize her relentlessly for the size of the portions she took, so she had decided to replace breakfast with a walk around the deck every morning. But afterward, she was usually chilled through, which put her back in a bad mood, and Peter Hansen, the butler, always had a cup of hot chocolate waiting for her when she returned.
Now at least the weather seemed to be improving. Perhaps she could spend more time on deck soon so she wouldn’t have to listen to her siblings’ bickering or the spiritual debates that the missionaries engaged in to pass the time. Her father was constantly complaining about the useless, negligent settlers. They’d already lost a child, and if conditions didn’t improve, it could come to an epidemic, and more people would die. The ship’s doctor agreed, and called for the passengers to take greater measures for tidiness and cleanliness. The missionaries prayed to God for aid, and for the enlightenment of the occupants of steerage.
The first-class passengers took part in the prayers, but Jane knew very well that her father was only thinking about his profit. As far as she herself was concerned, her predictions had been confirmed. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, for her to do since the ship had cast off. She was doomed to endless boredom. She sometimes kept a lookout for the whales that the captain had said could be regularly seen. But in truth, she couldn’t care less about the animals—she even felt a kind of hatred for them, captive as she was in the painful whalebone corset her mother forced her to wear even on the ship.
Jane passed a sailor who was scrubbing the deck without greeting him, and then finally discovered someone she could take out her resentment on. A steerage passenger was sneaking around on deck! And he didn’t even try to hide as she walked toward him. Instead, he gave her a friendly smile, and even had the audacity to speak to her.
“Goot mornink, ladi!” he said in English with a heavy German accent.
Jane glared at him in disbelief.
“Issn’t it a nize dei?”
Jane’s forehead creased. The young man seemed to be confused.
“You have no business being here!” she barked. “Such impertinence, sneaking around and harassing people! Go to your quarters immediately, or I’ll tell my father!”
The young blond man, who actually didn’t seem as deranged as his speech had made him appear, looked taken aback and a little hurt. Jane had the impulse to express herself in a more placable manner, but then she changed her mind. What business was it of his to speak with her? She turned on her heel and strode toward the cabin—majestically, she hoped. She must never become so fat that she waddled the way her mother did.
Karl watched her unhappily and then walked over to a sailor who was shaking his head.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asked the man.
The sailor shrugged. “I dinna ken, I warn’t harkening,” he said in his broad Hamburg dialect. Then he made an effort to speak more neutrally. “But yeh probably didn’t say bad things. The damsel is always like that, yeh shouldn’t worry about it. She’s surly to anyone who crosses her path.”
Karl rubbed his forehead. “It’s just that—I tried to speak English with her. And maybe—maybe it’s possible that I said something that insulted her.”
The sailor, a small man with a pointy chin and bright, cunning eyes, looked up briefly at the tall emigrant before he returned to his scrubbing.
“What did yeh say to her, then?”
Karl repeated the words.
The sailor stopped scrubbing and grinned. “Well, yeh can’t ha’ insulted her wi’ that,” he said. “But it’s nay English.”
“It’s not?” Karl was now completely at a loss. “But it’s written here, in this book. I bought a dictionary. And now it turns out everything in it is wrong?” The cost of the book and all the hours of learning . . . Had it been for nothing?
The sailor laughed. “Nay, t’ull be right, what’s written there,” he said calmly. “It’s just that yeh say it different from how it’s written. Think so, anyway. I haven’t read much in English so far—”
“But you’ve spoken it?” Karl asked excitedly. “You speak English?”
The man whistled through the few teeth he still possessed. “Weel, nay like a fine gentleman,” he said. “Just what yeh learn on the docks, and so. Orderin’ a beer and a rum, findin’ a floozy, hagglin’, buyin’ summat to eat . . .”
Eating seemed to be far down the sailor’s list, whereas Karl had painstakingly learned the words for the most important foods first. Right after “work” and “money.”
“Say something!” Karl demanded.
He grinned again. “Weel, what yeh tried to say to the damsel, that’s ‘Good morning, lady.’ But the English would rather say ‘Miss.’ The captain calls the damsel ‘Miss Jane’ or ‘Miss Beit.’”
“‘Miss’ means Fräulein!” Karl said with excitement.
He’d already learned the word, and fortunately it was pronounced the way it was written. But the other words were much more difficult for him.
“Isn’t it a nice day?” the sailor repeated in English when Karl held out the dictionary and pointed out the phrase to him.
It sounded completely foreign to Karl, and his head was spinning. But at least now he had found someone who knew what he was talking about. “Can you teach me?” he asked the sailor. “I’d pay you.” With a heavy heart, he thought about his hard-earned cash. Hopefully the man wouldn’t want too much.
But the sailor shook his head. “The wee bit I can say is probably nay all correct. Yeh’re better off wi’out it. Yeh can keep yer coins.”
“But you can speak more than anyone else who will talk to me!” Karl begged. “Please! Is there anything I can do for you in exchange? Maybe I can help you here”—he pointed to the half-scrubbed deck—“and then you can teach me. What’s your name, anyway?”
The short sailor introduced himself as Hein, and Karl introduced himself as well. Then he looked around for another scrubbing brush and bucket.
“Yeh’re nay allowed on deck,” Hein reminded him. “How do yeh intend to get permission?”
Karl reflected for a moment. He briefly considered asking Beit for his consent, but that was surely hopeless. He gazed uncertainly at the bridge, and saw Captain Schacht speaking to the helmsman.
Karl gathered his courage. The captain had welcomed them to the ship so kindly and was always trying to arbitrate when the settlers got into arguments with Beit. Schacht had also seemed kindhearted during the weddings of two couples and during the funeral for little Rudolf. Karl didn’t have to deliberate for long. The captain couldn’t do anything worse than say no, and even if he was annoyed by the disturbance, he wasn’t going to throw Karl overboard.
The young man climbed the steps to the bridge confidently, and his hopes were bolstered when the captain smiled at him.
“How can I help you, son?”
A little later, Karl had a job as an assistant sailor and had already learned the English word for his new position. He was supposed to help Hein and the others, and the captain didn’t care what language they spoke as they worked.
But that began to change when Karl met the Beits’ butler. Peter Hansen, a small, friendly man, spoke almost fluent English because he’d already lived in Australia and New Zealand. What was more, his wife was Scottish. Hansen was glad to help Karl, as long as he didn’t constantly tease him about his “women’s work” like the sailors did. The truth was, Karl would have loved to earn money by brushing suits, ironing blouses, dusting, and serving hot chocolate!
However, Beit was no easy taskmaster. He hardly ever gave the butler any free time, and berated him harshly for the most trivial of misdemeanors, such as not anticipating his every wish. Karl often wondered how Hansen could stand it. But when he asked, the butler just shrugged indifferently.
“It’s part of the job, boy. He wants a doormat—and here I am. It would do you settlers a lot of good to take things a little more calmly. The constant complaints only make Beit angry, and here on the ship, you can’t get away from him.”
Lange and Brandmann and the other self-assured cottagers had continued protesting almost daily, even though their conditions had improved now that it wasn’t constantly raining. Their main complaints were the food and the prohibition against spending time on deck. The cramped quarters and bad air were catastrophic for their health. When two more small children died of fever, the settlers vehemently demanded better living conditions. In exchange, Beit accused them of various rule violations, fined them, and reduced their rations, with the excuse that provisions were allegedly running low. The settlers would have to do without until they reached their stopover in Bahia. But the cook told Karl there was enough; it was only the quality of the provisions that was lacking. Remaining were hardtack, dried beans, potatoes, and salt meat. However, the steerage passengers were never served anything else anyway. The food was poor and lay heavily in their stomachs. Many of the children suffered constant stomachaches.