Christian Pasche delivered a farewell address to those who remained on the bank once we had all boarded the barges.
I could not speak. On tiptoes, neck craning, I tried to find Thea in the crowd. I examined the faces lining the boats surrounding our own. She was nowhere to be seen. As Elder Pasche’s sermon continued, his voice oddly loud in the still air, I was struck with the awful feeling that Thea remained in Kay. That was why she had kissed me. She had known she was staying but had not been able to tell me; she had known it would break my heart. I remembered her body shaking next to mine.
Thea was not there. I would never see her again.
Everything in my body revolted against the thought. I could not leave her.
Pressed tightly against my parents, I held my hands against my ears to mute the sound of sobbing and began forcing my way forwards to the gangway.
Mama swung Hermine onto her hip and grabbed my wrist. ‘What are you doing? Stop that. People are looking.’
‘I can’t go,’ I whispered.
‘Stop it.’
‘No. Thea isn’t here.’
‘Hanne!’
She pulled me back and I began to cry. Mama stared at me, despairing. But then I saw tears in her own eyes and, a moment later, felt her fingers release my wrist. Matthias took my other hand, secretly, his shoulder pressed hard against my own so that no one might see.
‘I thought the Eichenwalds were coming?’ he whispered to Mama, eyes fixed on Elder Pasche.
Mama said nothing.
He squeezed my hand.
We were finally released from prayer with a resounding amen. Clouds came in from the west as the anchors were weighed and the boats began to move away from the bank. Someone screamed – a stifled shriek that pierced the low dissonance of farewell. I could see the diminishing figure of Uncle Ludwig upon our wagon, waving his hat in great arcs, and stole a glance at my father to see if he were upset. His one working eye was closed: he was still praying. The other, ajar, glimmered darkly with God.
A single female voice lifted into the air from a nearby barge, singing a hymn of praise. I could not see who sang, but her voice was frayed and earnest and pained.
‘Commit whatever grieves thee, into the gracious hands of Him who never leaves thee . . .’
Other voices joined hers, smoothing the faltering notes.
‘Who Heaven and earth commands, who points the clouds their courses, whom winds and waves obey . . .’
Everyone joined in and song soared about me. Tears flowed down my cheeks. I pulled my hand from my brother’s and opened my throat and sang as loud as I could, as though I were pouring myself out into the air, as though I were making an offering of myself at an altar of sky.
‘He will direct thy footsteps and find for thee a way.’
I felt the purity of my voice before I heard it, was aware of faces turning and looking approvingly at me. I sang as though my voice were a ribbon, as though it were something I might later find my way home by.
The hymn ended. Someone briefly placed a hand on my shoulder as an elderly man led into ‘Where’er I Go, Whate’er my Task’。 We stared at the crowd on the bank, their voices fading as we sailed downriver.
‘Hanne!’
My name, faint and faraway, as though I had imagined it.
Again. A cry under the swelling harmony that surrounded us. A beautiful punctuation.
I could not see her, but she was there, on one of the boats. She had heard me sing.
One more time, as the cloud darkened over us and it looked like it might rain after all.
‘Hanne!’
My name in her mouth.
It took us three weeks to reach Hamburg, along canals of water so shallow that all able-bodied men were regularly forced to disembark and pull the barges with ropes from shore, and through mountains where lockmen asked questions of our journey, and those who were sympathetic gave us beer and bread and those who were not jeered and called us fanatics. At Crossen we passed under a bridge filled with so many sightseers, the police arrived to keep the peace.
Each day I searched for Thea’s face upon the decks of the other boats, and while I did not see her, I saw Friedrich once, hauling a barge over a sandbank, and it was enough.
Every day on our boat, Papa or Elder Pasche or Elder Radtke led prayers and lay services, and every evening we sang as the sun set and the horizon flushed pink, mirrored upon the river. We sang like birds at daybreak and nightfall in exaltation of ever-changing light, and all about us was river and sky and the sympathetic croaking of frogs, the euphoric diving of ducks. The further we travelled from Kay, the more my ears pricked to unfamiliar sounds. The whine of reeds, the slap of sun on water that cowered from the heat and shrank from banks that smelled of mud and rotting feathers. I sang as loudly as I dared, knowing that Thea might hear me. I sang to the music I heard; God felt close to me. I forgot the trepidation I had felt on boarding the barges.