Devotion(16)

I pointed to the chain.

‘Here.’ Thea cast about to make sure no one was coming past, then pushed her shoulder against the door. After some resistance, the doors groaned apart, the chain jolting tight. Cold air reached us from within, smelling of stone and dust.

Thea glanced down. ‘Do you think you could squeeze in the gap?’

‘No.’

‘Try.’

I bent down and poked my head into the space. ‘Don’t let go now,’ I called out to Thea. ‘That door will crush my neck.’

‘Hurry up then,’ I heard Thea say.

I wriggled in further, turning sideways to squeeze my shoulders painfully past the wooden edge, and managed to haul myself forwards, my clogs falling off my feet. For a moment I lay prostrate in the aisle, eyes raised to the altar, before the door creaked closed behind me and the light was extinguished.

‘Thea?’ I stood and felt my way to the door, pressed my ear against the boards. The awful thought that she had left me in there, had trapped me as some kind of trick, dropped through my stomach. ‘Thea?!’

Silence, and then I heard her voice, muffled, on the other side. ‘Pull the handle!’ A fist, thumping.

I found the iron grip and yanked with all my strength. The door eased open again, daylight striped across the wooden pews, and I saw Thea’s red headscarf appear in the gap. I stood to one side as she wriggled in on her stomach.

‘You can close it now,’ she said, rising to her feet, grinning.

‘No, it’s pitch-dark when it’s shut.’

Thea looked up and noticed the boards covering the windows, then took off a wooden clog and jammed it in the doorway. I let go. Dust rose in the narrow belt of daylight.

‘I can’t believe we’re in here,’ I whispered.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s . . . sacred.’

Thea walked down the aisle towards the altar, outstretched fingers brushing over the backs of the pews. ‘Sacredness is in the gathering of believers who come around God’s word,’ she said, voice echoing. ‘Wherever that may be. Not in a building.’ She turned around. ‘What happened to this place?’ she asked.

‘The commissioner came a few years ago,’ I whispered. ‘We all stood in front of the door and sang hymns until he left. But then he sent soldiers to come and arrest Pastor Flügel. My father and the other elders barred the way and read scripture to them while the pastor fled.’ I shivered, remembering my father’s mouth, wide with the word of God, the horses’ nostrils flaring inches away.

‘Did that work?’

‘No. They broke through. When they realised the pastor had gone, they let their horses shit in here. I remember cleaning it up afterwards, all the women singing hymns.’ I sat down in a pew on the women’s side. ‘Now, whenever I hear “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”, I smell manure.’

Thea sat down next to me.

‘They came back,’ I added. ‘They came searching for Pastor Flügel and ransacked homes. Then they arrested people and chained the doors of the church.’

We were silent a moment.

‘Do you hear anything in here?’ she asked. ‘Singing?’

I shook my head. ‘Only outside.’

The snow on Thea’s headscarf was melting. She took it off and shook the water from it, then balled it in her lap. In the low light her hair seemed to glow. ‘You know what you said about Christiana earlier?’ she murmured.

‘Mm.’

Thea leaned against me in the pew. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re nothing.’

Blood rushed to my face. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.


We stayed in that church abandoned to dust and mice droppings, talking in hushed voices, finding empty swallow nests and tracing our fingers over the engravings in the dry baptismal font, until the light began to dim. When I suggested to Thea that she ought to go to ensure she could return home before nightfall, she went to the door and bent down to retrieve her clog.

She looked up at me, alarmed. ‘I can hear voices.’

I froze.

‘Quick,’ she said, pulling her shoe free. ‘Close it.’

I pushed the door shut and the church collapsed into darkness. Sinking to the floor, I felt Thea find my hand and hold it, hardly daring to breathe. From the other side of the door came the faint suggestion of women’s conversation.

‘Did you see who it was?’ I asked, bending my mouth to Thea’s ear.

‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘The Radtkes. Probably coming back from your house.’

We waited in silence. In the thick darkness I was aware only of the fading murmur of voices outside, Thea’s fingers entwined with mine and then, when we could no longer hear anything, when we creaked the door ajar and glanced out, faces pressed cheek to cheek, our bodies seizing with laughter and relief.





giblets and bacon


Thea and I fell into friendship like rain to the ground, like stones into water.

At their insistence, I began to eat at the Eichenwalds’ every Sunday, occasionally calling in on Saturdays too. Anna Maria had a gift for cooking that made my own mother’s offerings seem dismal; for all that the Wend would shout at her badly drawing chimney, slipping from German into Slav in her frustration, she worked magic with her three-legged oven bowl. On Saturdays, her baking days, she would lower round after round of smooth dough into its iron belly, carefully covering the heavy lid with embers each time. The dark loaves of bread she turned out smelled glorious, crusts crackling as they cooled. When I asked what her secret was, Anna Maria told me that she let the dough rise in her bed the night before, that a sleeping body offered the best temperature for yeast to ferment. The following Sunday, when I told her I’d suggested to Mama that she might improve her rye loaves by sleeping with them, Anna Maria shrieked with laughter.