I felt pure in that moment. I felt possibility crest beneath me, pushing me forwards into the world, and I thrilled at the uncertainty that awaited. Anything might happen.
That night we slept on the ship. The carpenter had not yet fashioned a crib for Hermine so she lay between Mama and me, little arms jerking into my chest. I remained awake, my head on my arm, listening to the murmurs of families behind their partitions. The boards of the upper berths complained as people turned in them. There was coughing. Rapid footsteps of women directing children to the water closet or scraping buckets out from underneath berths, and then the drumming sound of piss. Elizabeth Radtke was still crying. I heard Magdalena sit up, ask her mother-in-law for a wet cloth.
Later, when most seemed asleep, my face grew warm when I heard Elize Geschke sigh behind her curtain and quietly ask Reinhardt to stretch her cramping feet. It seemed impossible that I would hear such a thing, and yet I had. I was suddenly as privy to their intimacy as a spider on the wall. A ghost in the doorway.
The ship seemed a living thing to me. It was unlike sleeping on the barges, where everything felt temporary and open and free. The Kristi carried not only the weight of our bodies, our belongings, but the weight of something heavier, something living and soulful. Timelessness and temporality together, somehow, knotted in the cord of the wood. It feels like a forest, I thought. And I wondered at the boards above me and the trees that had been felled and skinned and offered up to the saw. I wondered what would happen to the trees I had loved.
The safety lamp in the main hatchway was extinguished and the darkness seemed absolute. I raised my hand to my face and, unable to see my fingers, placed them on my cheek. I touched my nose, my lips, and as I did so, my body again remembered Thea’s mouth upon my own and I realised that it had not been a kiss of farewell.
I wondered what Thea was thinking in her berth. Was she forced to share with Amalie, who might be still crying over the child who was not her child, or was Henriette Volkmann lying there instead?
I thought of Henriette, her narrow face sleeping peacefully next to Thea’s in the bunk. The image of the two of them lying so closely together woke something in me, brought upon me a kind of longing belied with dread.
I thought then, for some reason, of the bolt of cloth I lay upon: the wedding dress yet uncut, but nonetheless waiting for me. Crouching under the mattress like a dark flag of a country not yet known. It dawned on me that my future husband was likely resting in a berth in this same close space I lay in. And if not on this boat, then on one of the others filled with Old Lutherans, also sailing for the colony. I imagined myself dressed in black, hair bound with myrtle, head bent under the weight of vows and my hands taken up by a man’s hands. I imagined myself lying not next to my mother, as I was then, but beside the unfamiliar terrain of a stranger’s body, and in my imagining I saw skin and sinew thread from his body to mine, so that we were as one flesh. That would be it, then, I thought. I would be tied to him by tissue and cuticle and hair. Forever buried in the bodily tapestry of marriage. The thought filled me with panic.
broken beds
Deep night now. The witching hours. The lonely hours.
There is an art to wakefulness at this time, when those around you sleep. All that is diminished with daylight – regret, sorrow and fear – can press on your chest until it is impossible to breathe. Uneasy thoughts can pin you to your bed if you are not careful. The weight of them can sink you into the soil until you feel that you are being buried alive.
When I feel the earth give way around my body under the weight of a troubled mind, I let go. I surrender. I think of all the bones charged to the earth’s tender care, and I imagine my own held in her gentle hands. I imagine the peace of that, of being claimed by such beauty and benevolence, and I let the wind take all my sorrow. I give my fear to the ground, I give my regret to the water.
Disintegration as reunion. Ashes to ashes.
The moon rose before I was there to see it. The moon will rise when I am gone again. I yield to that.
A few days later a steamer towed the Kristi from the city, and the ship made quick work of the Elbe, hampered only by the ill health of Elizabeth Radtke. All of us soon learned that the little girl was suffering from fever – I was woken by her cries at night, as well as Magdalena’s brittle requests for drinking water from the barrel by the long table. One night I woke to a flurry of raised voices and, listening, recognised Anna Maria’s. There was a brief silence and then I heard the Wend exhale sharply out of her nose. ‘You know where I am if you change your mind,’ she whispered.