Devotion(107)

My brother nodded, smiling at Augusta as the two boys turned and ran through the small orchard beyond the vegetable garden and fowl house. Wilhelm followed after them, the puppy at his heels.

You’re a papa now, I thought. Matthias, you are a father.

‘Shall I take her?’ Augusta asked, setting the basket of eggs on the ground and extending her arms for the baby.

My brother shook his head. ‘She’s sleeping.’

‘You’re soft on her,’ Augusta said.

Matthias carefully lowered himself down onto the grassy verge of the vegetable garden, tucking the swaddling around his daughter, still nestled in his elbow.

Augusta picked up the egg basket. ‘Call me if she cries,’ she said, and went into the cottage.

I sat down next to my brother and rested my chin on his shoulder, looking down at his daughter. He smelled the same as he always had, and for a moment we were almost children again, sitting outside in Kay. It was as though nothing had happened. We were both alive, undivided. ‘She’s beautiful,’ I said softly.

The baby wrinkled her nose, purled lips pouting as she blinked awake.

Matthias smiled at his daughter. I watched him lift a rough finger and gently trace the fine brown hair on her skull.

‘Hello, Esther,’ Matthias said softly. ‘It’s your papa.’

‘Esther,’ I whispered. The baby looked at me and smiled.

Matthias laughed. ‘Augusta!’ he called. ‘Augusta, come and see!’

‘What is it, Papa?’ Wilhelm jogged back from the orchard, dog in his arms.

Matthias extended a hand and Wilhelm went to him, leaning into my brother’s chest. ‘Look, she’s smiling,’ he said.

Wilhelm grinned. ‘What’s she looking at?’

Matthias placed a hand on the boy’s head. ‘Who knows,’ he replied softly. ‘Who knows.’

The wind was rising. Out beyond the trees the wheat crop blew green waves across the slope. I did not know how to bear the passing of time.

‘I have to go,’ I told Matthias. I bent my mouth to his shoulder and kissed it. ‘Don’t forget me.’


I left my brother’s house. The sun was setting; the sky was washed with violet. I was ready to see Thea. I was ready. But as I continued out of the village, past a new-planted spring garden and a one-roomed house, I heard my father’s voice.

I stopped. Through the cottage’s uncovered window I could see my father praying at the head of the table with his Bible open, Mama with her hair covered and eyes closed beside him. Facing her was a fine-boned, dark-haired girl.

Hermine.

I hardly recognised my sister. The irritable, easily upset baby was now this watchful, quiet child praying with my parents, sucking her upper lip. My mother’s image.

How many nights had I been that daughter sitting at the table, bowing my head while my stomach twisted in hunger? The scene was so familiar to me that for a moment I imagined I, too, was about to join my parents at the table, about to be reprimanded for staying out, for not helping Mama prepare the Abendbrot. Part of me almost went inside to take up a seat, to pretend that nothing had happened.

You do not belong there anymore, I told myself. You’ve been claimed by different tides.

‘I am glad you’re happy,’ I murmured against the glass. ‘I am glad you have the daughter you needed.’

Love and hope turned me to liquid. I walked on beyond Heiligendorf, into the evening.


At midnight, I turned off the dwindling track from the village and followed a fence out towards the deep blue of the bush. I could see a solitary light blinking against a shadowed rise behind.

Thea’s home, I thought. I knew it in the way I knew my own name.

‘Hanne.’

Something was happening. I could feel the fibres and tendons of my body resonate with sound; I was a struck chord. There was a tremble at work within me and, heady with music, I grasped for the nearest fence post to steady myself and knocked something to the ground.

A stone.

I picked it up, weighed it in my hand. It was smooth and rounded with water, and I could hear the river like a skin upon it.

I looked back up to the light and stepped forwards, and when I placed my hand on the next post there was a stone there, too. Another on the next, and the next. Every post had been crowned.

I ran towards the light then. The earth held each falling foot, pushed me towards her, towards the cottage now visible in the darkness, to the glowing window, to her.

Thea.

And there she was. Lit in light from a lamp burning on the table in a one-roomed house, bending over the Book of Moses with a hand over her mouth and her eyes wet.

I was that eagle again, holding up the sky. Rapture rolled through me like blood.

She was older, more beautiful, more flawed. Her teeth still snagged on her lip but she was thinner, aged by sun and time. Hair escaped from her braids and wisped along her neck as it always had.

‘Thea.’

She stilled, then. As though she had heard me.

I said her name again.

She stood suddenly. ‘Hanne?’ Her voice was a whisper.

I went to Thea and placed my arms around her. I rested my head against hers and she leaned into me, face turning towards mine, as though I had weight, as though she felt me there.

She started crying then. I felt the shudder of her against my rib cage and it was too much; tears ran down my face.