Devotion, p.5
Devotion, page 5
Anna Maria raised her eyebrows. ‘I meant to introduce myself, but she left very quickly.’
For a moment I wondered if Anna Maria knew of the rumours discussed at the Federschleissen. I pictured Christiana’s face as we cleaned, the whispered ‘Hexe’.
‘What’s her daughter’s name? The one our age?’ Thea was asking.
‘Christiana,’ I muttered.
‘What is she like?’
The room suddenly felt very warm. I could feel sweat prickle across my brow and undid the shawl I had tucked into my skirt.
‘You don’t like her,’ Thea said quietly, narrowing her eyes at me.
I laughed, embarrassed. ‘I didn’t say that.’
Thea smiled. ‘You didn’t need to.’
Just then the door opened and the winter weather swept in with Thea’s father, who apologised for the draught as he heaved the door shut against the wind. He collapsed into the chair next to Anna Maria and took his hat off his head, nodding at me in greeting. ‘Smells good,’ he said.
‘This is Hanne,’ Thea told him.
‘Yes, I know. Thank you for joining us,’ he said. He accepted a cup of water from Thea and drained it.
‘I’m starving,’ Thea said.
Anna Maria pushed her chair back. ‘I hope you’re hungry.’
As we ate Pellkartoffeln with herbs, pickled cabbage and thick turnip soup with dumplings, the Eichenwalds asked me more questions about Kay and its inhabitants. They did not seem to mind that, embarrassed to find myself the centre of attention, I dropped cabbage on my lap, nor did they remark on the fact that my cheeks kept flaming red, even though I felt them burn. Anna Maria told me that she had some experience in healing, as well as midwifery, and wanted to know who might be receptive to herbal treatments. I told her about Magdalena Radtke’s suspicion of homeopathy and Eleonore Volkmann’s digestive complaints, that Mutter Scheck considered herself a competent herbalist but that, as she had outlived three husbands, no one knew whether to trust her skill. (‘It all depends,’ Matthias said to me once, ‘on whether she treated herself or her husbands.’)
‘I don’t know about the others,’ I said, blowing on my soup. ‘If anyone suffers a complaint here, they generally keep it to themselves.’
‘Would your father like his eye treated?’ Anna Maria asked.
I hesitated. ‘He doesn’t see it as a complaint.’
Anna Maria sat back in her chair. ‘The angel.’
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘His holy eye.’
Friedrich reached for another slice of bread, smiling at Thea as she passed him the butter. ‘Daniel Pfeiffer told me that Kay is a stronghold of dissenters. That your own father was fined for refusing to allow Matthias instruction in state doctrine.’
‘Yes, fifty thaler.’
Friedrich paused, spoon held in mid-air. ‘That much?’
‘He sold Mama’s wedding dress to pay it,’ I said.
There was silence around the table. I noticed Anna Maria exchange a look with her husband and remembered, suddenly, the sodden handkerchiefs I’d found balled up in the laundry the night of Papa’s announcement. I had never seen my mother cry, but I wondered then, sitting at the Eichenwalds’ table, if she must sometimes. She had never said a word about the loss of the dress.
To break the silence, I told Friedrich that most of the men in Kay had been fined or arrested. The congregation, already stitched together in an embroidery of need and solidarity, had puckered closer under persecution. ‘Now, if someone is fined, we all make a contribution to pay it.’ I realised I was running my finger around my bowl, savouring the last of the soup, and looked up at him, horrified.
Friedrich dismissed my look with a casual wave of his hand. ‘She’d be offended if you didn’t,’ he said, and Anna Maria beamed.
Thea dropped her spoon and did the same with her bowl, smiling at me with her finger between her teeth. ‘There is no shame in appetite,’ she said, and both of her parents nodded.
When Thea walked me home that afternoon, her arm in mine, she asked if I would show her the village.
‘There isn’t much to see,’ I said.
‘You can show me who lives where,’ she replied.
We had reached the lane. Being a day of rest, there were no men working in the fields, and Kay was even quieter than usual. Only smoke drifting silently from chimneys indicated that people were home.
‘Well, this house belongs to the Pfeiffers,’ I said, nodding to a small, one-windowed cottage, the path to the front door pitted with puddles.
‘Oh yes, I met them with Mama. They have two daughters.’
‘Yes. And that house there . . .’ I pointed, and Thea strained her neck to follow my line of sight. ‘See the larger house there, with the goat staked in front? That’s Elder Gottfried Fröhlich’s house. He’s also a shoemaker.’ It had started to snow. I unwound my arm from Thea’s and pulled my headscarf down on my forehead. ‘I should go home,’ I said.
‘Why? There’s at least another hour of daylight.’
When I didn’t respond, Thea took my arm again and pulled me onwards. ‘Who lives there?’
‘Reinhardt Geschke and his new wife, Elize. And his father, Traugott. Wheelwrights by trade.’
We walked on into the heart of the village, where the cottages crowded the lane, narrow fingers of land spilling out behind.
‘That’s your house over there, isn’t it?’ asked Thea. ‘Is that your pig?’
I nodded.
She leaned closer to me and whispered, ‘And who’s that?’
‘Where?’
Thea nodded to the Pasches’ cottage and I saw Hans standing in the yard, carrying a milk pail. He raised his free hand in greeting as we passed.
‘That’s Hans Pasche,’ I told Thea. ‘Elder Pasche’s son.’
‘I thought Elder Pasche was not yet married?’
‘Rosina will be his second wife. Hans’s mother died.’
‘Thirsty?’ Hans called out to us, lifting the pail. I could see steam lift from it in the cold air.
Thea laughed and shook her head.
I was about to stop and farewell her there, in the lane, when I saw Magdalena and Christiana come around the far corner of my house. Without thinking, I veered sideways into the Pasches’ yard, dragging Thea with me.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Shh.’
Hans stared at us in surprise as I pulled Thea into the Pasches’ barn.
‘Hanne?’ Thea stumbled in the gloom.
I put a finger to my lips and peered out just in time to see Magdalena and Christiana stop on the swept flagstone and stamp the snow from their shoes. I ducked back around as Christiana glanced up, eyes sweeping the yard, and heard her call out a greeting to Hans.
‘It’s the Radtkes,’ I whispered, turning around.
Thea rested a hand on the flank of the Pasches’ cow and raised her eyebrows.
Hans stepped into the barn then and set the pail on the floor. ‘She’s gone inside your house now, if that’s who you’re hiding from, Hanne.’
‘Hello,’ Thea said, lifting her chapped fingers into the air. ‘I’m Thea.’
Hans nodded, glancing between us. ‘Hans.’
‘I don’t want her to see me,’ I mumbled.
‘Christiana?’
‘I didn’t realise they were visiting.’
The three of us stood together for an awkward moment. Thea ran her hand over the cow and smiled at Hans. ‘She’s lovely,’ she said.
Hans beamed. ‘She’s a bit sad, poor thing.’
‘Oh?’
‘My father just sold her calf.’ He scratched the cow behind the ears and pressed his own forehead to hers.
‘Sorry, Hans,’ I said. ‘Forget we were here.’
Hans shrugged, head still against the cow. ‘Don’t worry about it. I hide in here all the time.’
‘I knew at once you didn’t like her,’ Thea said, as we walked along the fence line that separated the Pasches’ land from my father’s. It was snowing heavily, white slowly covering the dun of the bare fields.
‘I never said that,’ I said. ‘She just . . .’ I hesitated, wondering how to explain that I yearned for Christiana’s approval and yet hated to be in her company. ‘She makes me feel . . . I don’t know. As though I am nothing.’ I took a deep breath. Cold air flooded my lungs.
Thea blew on her fingers and shrugged. ‘She sounds awful.’ We were standing in the Pasches’ rye field, snow catching on the stubble of the ground. ‘Where should we go?’
‘I can show you the other houses. Or I can take you to the river. It’s a bit cold.’
Thea shook her head. ‘Take me there.’
I turned and saw she was pointing to the church spire, empty sky showing where the bell used to hang.
‘It’s locked,’ I said.
‘Take me anyway.’
It is strange to think of that old church in Kay now that I am surrounded by sunlight and birdsong and the rustle of gum leaves. It seems a dead thing, in my memory. Even before it was locked, I remember it as dark and cold, as having nothing to do with God. I never mourned the church when it was forbidden to us – the forest was the more magnificent cathedral – and I never understood my father when, in a rare mood of despondency, he would reminisce about Sunday mornings of worship held there, the sound of voices echoing off the ceiling, still blue and gilt from an earlier life of Catholicism.
No doubt the church in Kay is in use again. I pity the faithful who attend it. Why do men bother with churches at all when instead they might make cathedrals out of sky and water?
Better a chorus of birds than a choir. Better an altar of leaves. Baptise me in rainfall and crown me with sunrise. If I am still, somehow, God’s child, let me find grace in the mysteries of bat-shriek and honeycomb.
Thea and I stepped through the graves, wooden crosses tilting in the frozen ground in various attitudes of age, and reached the heavy doors of the church. The varnish was peeling, snow sticking to the wrought iron spidering out from the boards. A heavy chain was looped through the handles.
Thea lay her hands flat on the doors and turned to me. ‘Shall we go inside?’
I pointed to the chain.
‘Here.’ Thea cast about to make sure no one was coming past, then pushed her shoulder against the door. After some resistance, the doors groaned apart, the chain jolting tight. Cold air reached us from within, smelling of stone and dust.
Thea glanced down. ‘Do you think you could squeeze in the gap?’
‘No.’
‘Try.’
I bent down and poked my head into the space. ‘Don’t let go now,’ I called out to Thea. ‘That door will crush my neck.’
‘Hurry up then,’ I heard Thea say.
I wriggled in further, turning sideways to squeeze my shoulders painfully past the wooden edge, and managed to haul myself forwards, my clogs falling off my feet. For a moment I lay prostrate in the aisle, eyes raised to the altar, before the door creaked closed behind me and the light was extinguished.
‘Thea?’ I stood and felt my way to the door, pressed my ear against the boards. The awful thought that she had left me in there, had trapped me as some kind of trick, dropped through my stomach. ‘Thea?!’
Silence, and then I heard her voice, muffled, on the other side. ‘Pull the handle!’ A fist, thumping.
I found the iron grip and yanked with all my strength. The door eased open again, daylight striped across the wooden pews, and I saw Thea’s red headscarf appear in the gap. I stood to one side as she wriggled in on her stomach.
‘You can close it now,’ she said, rising to her feet, grinning.
‘No, it’s pitch-dark when it’s shut.’
Thea looked up and noticed the boards covering the windows, then took off a wooden clog and jammed it in the doorway. I let go. Dust rose in the narrow belt of daylight.
‘I can’t believe we’re in here,’ I whispered.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s . . . sacred.’
Thea walked down the aisle towards the altar, outstretched fingers brushing over the backs of the pews. ‘Sacredness is in the gathering of believers who come around God’s word,’ she said, voice echoing. ‘Wherever that may be. Not in a building.’ She turned around. ‘What happened to this place?’ she asked.
‘The commissioner came a few years ago,’ I whispered. ‘We all stood in front of the door and sang hymns until he left. But then he sent soldiers to come and arrest Pastor Flügel. My father and the other elders barred the way and read scripture to them while the pastor fled.’ I shivered, remembering my father’s mouth, wide with the word of God, the horses’ nostrils flaring inches away.
‘Did that work?’
‘No. They broke through. When they realised the pastor had gone, they let their horses shit in here. I remember cleaning it up afterwards, all the women singing hymns.’ I sat down in a pew on the women’s side. ‘Now, whenever I hear “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”, I smell manure.’
Thea sat down next to me.
‘They came back,’ I added. ‘They came searching for Pastor Flügel and ransacked homes. Then they arrested people and chained the doors of the church.’
We were silent a moment.
‘Do you hear anything in here?’ she asked. ‘Singing?’
I shook my head. ‘Only outside.’
The snow on Thea’s headscarf was melting. She took it off and shook the water from it, then balled it in her lap. In the low light her hair seemed to glow. ‘You know what you said about Christiana earlier?’ she murmured.
‘Mm.’
Thea leaned against me in the pew. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re nothing.’
Blood rushed to my face. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.
We stayed in that church abandoned to dust and mice droppings, talking in hushed voices, finding empty swallow nests and tracing our fingers over the engravings in the dry baptismal font, until the light began to dim. When I suggested to Thea that she ought to go to ensure she could return home before nightfall, she went to the door and bent down to retrieve her clog.
She looked up at me, alarmed. ‘I can hear voices.’
I froze.
‘Quick,’ she said, pulling her shoe free. ‘Close it.’
I pushed the door shut and the church collapsed into darkness. Sinking to the floor, I felt Thea find my hand and hold it, hardly daring to breathe. From the other side of the door came the faint suggestion of women’s conversation.
‘Did you see who it was?’ I asked, bending my mouth to Thea’s ear.
‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘The Radtkes. Probably coming back from your house.’
We waited in silence. In the thick darkness I was aware only of the fading murmur of voices outside, Thea’s fingers entwined with mine and then, when we could no longer hear anything, when we creaked the door ajar and glanced out, faces pressed cheek to cheek, our bodies seizing with laughter and relief.
giblets and bacon
Thea and I fell into friendship like rain to the ground, like stones into water.
At their insistence, I began to eat at the Eichenwalds’ every Sunday, occasionally calling in on Saturdays too. Anna Maria had a gift for cooking that made my own mother’s offerings seem dismal; for all that the Wend would shout at her badly drawing chimney, slipping from German into Slav in her frustration, she worked magic with her three-legged oven bowl. On Saturdays, her baking days, she would lower round after round of smooth dough into its iron belly, carefully covering the heavy lid with embers each time. The dark loaves of bread she turned out smelled glorious, crusts crackling as they cooled. When I asked what her secret was, Anna Maria told me that she let the dough rise in her bed the night before, that a sleeping body offered the best temperature for yeast to ferment. The following Sunday, when I told her I’d suggested to Mama that she might improve her rye loaves by sleeping with them, Anna Maria shrieked with laughter.
‘What did she say?’
‘She told me to mind my mouth.’
Anna Maria wiped tears from her eyes. ‘Oh, I do hope she tries it. I love the thought of Johanne Nussbaum sharing a pillow with a dough bin.’
Thea’s home was a happy place to be, for all the winter winds breached the cottage walls and the roof leaked. Friedrich Eichenwald was a quiet man, content with his work and his family, and Anna Maria swept me up in the expansive love she showed her daughter. Theirs was a place of ready laughter, and while at first I found the family’s affection for one another odd and uncomfortable to behold, I soon could not help but compare my own parents unfavourably to the Eichenwalds. Anna Maria embraced me more than my own mother did, and when I heard Friedrich talk with his daughter, I wished that my own father would show the same interest in me, would speak to me of his own accord and not through the borrowed word of God. At home, the family table had become less a place of fellowship than a pulpit for my father’s denunciation of the Union Church and despair at the ever-shrinking possibility of religious freedom. His earthly sight seemed levelled only at his fields, our animals. Mama never placed her hand on Papa’s neck as she served him his dinner. Papa never commented on Mama’s beauty, though it was there, remarkable and singular, every hour of the day. They worked within their own spheres, remote and distinct from one another. Papa spoke of Mama as his helpmeet and he only ever called her Mutter. Friedrich referred to his wife by her name. He uttered it like an affirmation.
Matthias, ever my comfort, offered moments of light amidst the endless labour and criticism. During the week I lived for the rare hours when we might be in each other’s company: I relished his kicks under the table, the green bean tucked in his upper lip when he thought Mama wasn’t looking. But his days were spent in my father’s dominion and I was trapped in my mother’s.
‘Sometimes I wonder if I was born into the wrong family,’ I told Thea one afternoon as we sat in front of Anna Maria’s hearth, bare feet extended towards the embers.
‘Why?’ She was drowsy. I could hear it in her voice.
I hesitated. I knew that Thea thought all marriages were like her parents’: hands finding one another across tables or in passing, a constant homing of fingers. She never hesitated to wrap her arms about me in affection, and it was difficult for me to articulate the joy I felt each time she hugged me. I was no longer a child picked up by my father or permitted to crawl into my twin’s bed. My mother’s unpredictable kisses did not satisfy the longing I had to be touched, to be recognised as worthy of touch. I wanted to tell Thea that I was often so hungry for another body to acknowledge my own that I sometimes felt the weight of her arm slung around my shoulder long after I went home. Her cool fingers between my own left my skin burning. I wanted to tell her that sometimes I woke in the night convinced her hand was still in mine.
