I stood. I remember that. I stood at the sight of it, and although some small part of me waited for shock or disgust, none came. Instead, I was happy. I was happy for them, these two beautiful men, who, pulling apart from one another, shared such an intense look of affection and desire that I was jealous. Tom resumed washing the cooking pot, head turning over his shoulder as the taller one undressed, bringing his shirt over his head and dropping it over the back of his chair. I had never seen a naked man before. I had never seen a naked man undress another man before, and even as I remembered myself at last and moved past them, out into the dark filled with frog sound and the silent rustling fall of bark easing away from trunk and branch, I felt my body ripple with revelation.
I had been clear-eyed about my own feelings for years by then, but I had never known there might be others.
We exist, I thought. And all that night I wondered at the mysteries of such things and, remembering the desire of the men holding each other in the light of their fire, thought of Thea and imagined us in their place.
What might have happened? I wonder this even now. What might have happened had I known of such possibilities in my living years?
It is enough to bring me to my knees.
a long-memoried place
The day we arrived dawned in perfect cerulean, sea and sky the one colour so that to look out at the horizon was to feel unsure of space, of gravity. I had spent the night listening to the ocean’s muttering and a new kind of music that occasionally threaded through it. At sunrise I followed the sound up on deck and saw that the Kristi was floating through sky. The ocean had lifted hands up around the ship and all was blue, blue, blue. The breeze was fresh, and I stepped up to the bow so that I could feel the air carve around me. I lifted my arms up and closed my eyes and I heard it clearly: a humming that floated on the water like oil, chordal and so old it seemed to hold notes long lost to music. Rock, water, salt, sun, soil, fire. The sound of a long-memoried place remembering itself to time.
We are here, I thought.
The island appeared like a vision from all that water and air. It arrived like a dream, a bruised line so that the elements divided once more. A long slick of not-water, of not-air. Mass. Darkly green and grey. Rock formations still against a backdrop of thick forest. I knew at once that the humming was coming from the island.
My skin shivered. A curious feeling of dissipation swelled in my fingers, in my feet. My hair lifted. It felt, suddenly, that the song of this place was filling me, like sheet lightning fills a sky. There – I felt a stagger of separation from myself. I let go of the mast. Another – as though something much greater than myself had pulled me from my body. The song flooded my mouth, it cracked knuckles, and the feel of it was gratifying and soul-deep.
What is happening? I wondered. The ground fell away from me, my heels rose from the deck.
I am being undone, I thought, and just as I felt I might surrender to the song, might let it shake me apart, I felt myself whole again.
What was that?
The song quieted to a hum. A rising shoreline speaking in tongues.
News spread quickly. As soon as land was called, voices begin to talk excitedly behind me. I heard them rise in volume and multiply and felt the press of passengers at my back, until I could not hear the sound of the land over the cries of celebration.
‘We have made it! We are finally here!’
‘K?nguru Island. Look! We will remember this moment for the rest of our lives.’
‘We have not yet put into harbour.’
‘God provides! Praise His name.’
‘The wind is good! We may reach the strait this evening.’
I felt the relief and hope and gratitude of the congregation swell around me until I thought I might weep. Eleonore Volkmann held her clutch of daughters tight to her chest, all of them laughing and dabbing their eyes. Mutter Scheck emerged onto the deck gripping Amalie’s arm, and, seeing the island in front of her, made the younger woman polish her glasses on her apron so she might better see ‘the promised land’。 Samuel Radtke kept lifting the corner of his elbow to his face, wiping his cheeks on his sleeve when he thought no one was looking, and the Simmel brothers were whooping into the wind, hats gripped in their hands.
I heard my papa’s voice then, deep and sure and loud, and within moments all the voices around me collapsed into a hymn of praise. As soon as it had finished, another song began. I had never heard the congregation sing like this before; it gave me gooseflesh. Even as the ship passed the island and began to buck in the strait like a horse desperate to shed its rider, heading towards the mainland, the congregation remained on the open deck, pouring their voices into the sky until even the air seemed to glisten with music.