‘Well, Heinrich. It’s time. Are you sure you want to take these little urchins with you?’ I felt a hand tug at my earlobe and turned to see Uncle Ludwig, my father’s younger brother, grinning at me, teeth clamped around his pipe. He had come from Harthe to help us travel. Papa had promised him our wagon for his efforts.
I rubbed my ear and did not return his smile. There was no sign of Thea or her parents, and I could not summon even false good humour.
‘Matthias,’ I murmured, grabbing my brother’s coat sleeve. ‘Thea is not here.’
Matthias looked about us. ‘Hold on,’ he said. Climbing the wooden spokes of the wagon wheel, he stood on the driver’s bench and scanned the crowd. He frowned, shaking his head. ‘Maybe they have already left?’
‘Matthias.’ Papa beckoned my brother down. His shirt was damp with sweat from hoisting our trunks into the wagon. ‘Let us sing a song of praise,’ he said. Taking a deep breath he began to sing ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ in a voice so loud I had to draw away. Heads turned. And then I heard Matthias reluctantly join his voice to my father’s, and beyond his thin and unsteady harmonies I heard other voices enter the silence. The hymn rose up into the air about us. It had been a long time since anyone had dared to worship so openly.
We walked to Tschicherzig as the morning softened into sun, leaving nothing behind but footprints and the trailing notes of hymn after hymn. Papa sat on the wagon next to Uncle Ludwig, singing in his deep, rich voice, smoke from Uncle’s pipe lifting behind. Matthias and I walked side by side, saving our breath for the journey. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder every few minutes. Thea and her parents were nowhere to be seen, even as the crowd thinned out along the road.
Perhaps they overslept, I thought to myself. Or perhaps they made an early start and are ahead of us, as Matthias said. Still, a sickening feeling grew in my stomach. My eyes felt sandy, my limbs cumbersome and ill-jointed.
I thought again of the kiss. Touched my fingertips to my mouth again and again.
Matthias nudged me, nodding towards Mama, who sat amidst the trunks in our wagon, bonneted, dress open. Hermine was snuffling at her breast and batting her in the face. ‘She hasn’t said a word since we left,’ he murmured. ‘Hanne, look. She’s going to cry.’
I looked. Mama was staring at the village diminishing behind us, eyes wet, gaze fixed on the church steeple winking in the sunlight beyond the bobbing crowd of hats and bonnets and scarves.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry,’ Matthias said quietly.
‘She was up in the night. Saying goodbye to the stars.’
‘That doesn’t sound like her.’
I looked back along the stream of people behind us. Nowhere. I couldn’t see her anywhere.
‘Hanne? In what direction was she looking?’
‘Just out towards the rye fields.’
‘The old church?’
‘I suppose so.’
Matthias pushed back the brim of his hat and raised his eyebrows. I stared at the hair darkening his top lip. It seemed unfair to me that we were to be cleaved from one another so thoroughly by adulthood, that I would not be able to grow the same beard as him, that I would take up my woman’s face and he his man’s.
‘She was farewelling our brother,’ he said, and I knew immediately that he was right. ‘We are leaving Gottlob behind.’
I glanced again at Mama. Her eyes pierced the horizon. ‘Gottlob is with Christ,’ I said.
Matthias nodded. ‘But we are leaving his bones in the ground.’ He placed his hand in his pocket and took out a small, stoppered bottle.
‘What’s this, then?’
‘Soil,’ Matthias replied. ‘I took it from his grave.’ He put the bottle back in his pocket. ‘So that our brother can come with us.’
My heart rushed with love and I suddenly had a yearning to tell him about sneaking out of the window and meeting Thea in the forest. I wondered, briefly, if he had ever been kissed. But I said nothing. Both of us had always known, intuitively, that there were parts of us best left hidden. The moment in the forest was mine alone. I wrapped myself around the kiss, like a shell around a nut, keeping it sweet, keeping it safe.
The road was stirred into dust under the wagons. Some of the poorer men, like Daniel Pfeiffer, had tied a trunk to his back. His hat was dark with sweat. Emile carried their younger daughter on her hip, and their eldest, Elsa, pushed a handcart with a second trunk in it. Little Anna Pfeiffer kept copying her father’s grunts as the road keeled uphill, and I could see their shoulders shake in laughter, despite their exhaustion. The families of Elder Pasche and Fr?hlich the shoemaker swarmed together behind our wagon, Hans nodding miserably as Rosina chastised him for forgetting something or other. Traugott Geschke, Reinhardt and Elize, now round with child, sat in their own wagon, singing before us.