Devotion(21)

I did as she suggested, and Thea smiled at my astonishment. ‘She’s so strong,’ I said, gazing down at the tiny, working mouth. In the quiet I heard Anna Maria’s voice sound from the room, low and rhythmic and loud.

‘Ich ging über eine Brücke, Worunter drei Str?me liefen.’

‘What is she doing?’ I whispered. ‘Why is she talking about a bridge?’

Thea said nothing, only stroked the damp wisp of hair on the baby’s head.

‘Der erste hies Gut, Der zweite hies Blut, Der dritte hies Eipipperjahn, Blut du sollst stille Stahl. In Namen Gottes, Javeh.’

‘“Blood you shall be silent”?’ I asked, panic striking through me. ‘Is Mama bleeding? Thea, what is Anna Maria saying?’

Thea opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She gave me a heavy look. ‘My mother, she . . .’

The baby broke away from my finger and, mouth wide, chin shaking, began to cry again.

‘What is she saying, Thea?’ I was on the cusp of tears myself.

‘It’s like a prayer,’ Thea said. She reached for my sister and placed her own finger in the baby’s mouth. ‘It’s like a prayer,’ she said again. ‘It is a prayer. A prayer of healing. In the name of God.’

At that moment Papa and Matthias returned indoors and, seeing Thea holding the child, approached us wide-eyed. Thea offered the baby up to Papa and, as he held her in his arms, I saw that his good eye was filled with tears. He cupped her tiny skull in his hands and looked at me.

‘How is Mutter?’

There was the sound of a door opening and a moment later Anna Maria entered the room, wiping blood from her forearms with a balled-up apron that seemed just as red. As my stomach dropped, Anna Maria offered a wide smile, teeth shining in the low light. ‘All is well.’

‘Johanne?’ My father’s voice was oddly thin, as though it might snap in half.

Anna Maria nodded. ‘She lost some blood, but’ – she glanced at Thea – ‘I was able to stop it. With the help of the Lord.’

‘Praise His name,’ said my father, and tears slipped from his cheeks to the crying baby in his arms. ‘Praise His name.’





stones into water


I have been thinking about the dead up here. Already the light is growing rich and the sun is sinking below the horizon. Already a day is nearly gone. I think about all the bodies buried with the heads facing east, the better to greet Christ. All the sunsets they are missing.

In the congregation it was customary to give the dead an opportunity for resurrection. Three days for the body to rise, as Jesus’s did, and then, when it did not, they made space in the earth and laid the unrisen to rest until the time trumpets sound and all four corners of the world are shaken like a sheet to upend the buried, so that their sins might be tallied and the chosen called home. Home to silver orchards. Holy honey and magdalen milk.

The three days lent a sort of cruelty to Gottlob’s passing. Seven weeks of dying in bed and even then he had to wait to be buried. I hardly remember those three days, only that the flowers placed in his coffin by visitors wilted within the hour.

I do remember the seven weeks.


Gottlob never opened his eyes again after he fell. He was insensible to the world. Still, it took him some time to die. Hans took Otto to his new farm in Skampe and my father was released from prison at Züllichau in time for harvest. Without a horse and without Gottlob, harvesting took twice as long, and so Mama and Matthias joined Papa to bring in the crop. I was suddenly responsible for cooking my family’s meals, for washing their clothes and keeping house. When I was not doing these things, Mama made me sit sentry over my elder brother’s body.

The curtains were always drawn; I sat in endless half-darkness. I no longer wandered when my chores were completed but remained indoors, changing Gottlob’s bedclothes, dribbling gruel into the corners of his mouth, turning his man’s body and attending to the sores that erupted on his skin. For weeks I sat next to my dying brother and, as I sat, my own body was altered. In the time it took for Gottlob to die, my own vigour made itself certain. It was as though my physical being, forced to dwell in such close proximity to approaching death, sought to assert its own vitality. As I sat and watched my elder brother’s ribs emerge, I felt my own chest swell painful against the stitching of my clothes. My wrists stretched beyond my cuffs. My toes strained against my stockings. Already tall, I grew taller, but where once I was sleek, epicene, utterly at one with my frame, I now felt a fracture between myself and my body. I did not recognise the new weight, the new shapes I felt under my hands or glimpsed in the glass of my mother’s framed wedding myrtle. I was suddenly softer than I knew myself to be. My skin smelled different. One night, lying in bed after a long day listening to my brother’s lungs lift and fall in awful gurgling slowness, I realised that I now possessed the body of a stranger.


Gottlob died in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, seven weeks after he fell from Otto’s great height. I was seated at his side, dozing, bare feet resting on the edge of the bed. The room was lit only by moonlight escaping through the curtains; I had long blown out the candle. In my half-sleep, I realised that I could no longer hear Gottlob’s rattling breath and the awful certainty that he was gone pierced through me. I was immediately awake. I leaned over him. My brother’s chest was still.