Devotion(3)

Elize noticed my confusion and leaned closer. ‘Newcomers to Kay,’ she whispered. ‘We were talking about them earlier. A family, renting the forester’s cottage.’

I knew the building she spoke of. It was a ramshackle one-roomed cabin that stood in front of the dark wall of pines at the village border. No one had lived there for some time and the cottage had started to list towards the trees. Sometimes, from a certain distance, it looked as though the house and the forest had begun to reach towards one another. I often walked that way to collect kindling and would sometimes stop and think how wonderful it was that, emptied of people, a building would inevitably reach for the elements that made it. Clay, wood, earth, grass. Disintegration as reunion.

‘Will they worship with us?’ asked my mother.

‘My husband says yes,’ replied Emile Pfeiffer, who lived close to the forest. She pulled off her headscarf to scratch her head, grey hairs threaded through the brown. ‘Herr Eichenwald asked him about services. His wife seems friendly. Quite forthright. She told us she was a midwife.’

‘We lived in a Wendish village when I was a child,’ Elize said softly. ‘They were very kind to us. They told wonderful stories.’

‘Demons and the Wassermann,’ Magdalena interrupted.

‘The Wassermann?’ asked Christiana.

‘A little fish man who lives in a pond and drowns people,’ Elize murmured. ‘It’s a children’s story.’

Christiana pulled a face at Henriette, who laughed.

Mutter Scheck piped up in her corner. ‘And are there any children?’

‘A young woman,’ answered Emile. ‘Same age as these girls. But no others.’

‘Imagine, a midwife and only one child yourself. Pity.’ Magdalena clicked her tongue against her teeth.

‘Did you meet her – the daughter?’ asked Christiana. ‘What is her name?’

Emile retied her headscarf. ‘She didn’t tell us. Her mother did all the talking. But I expect they’ll introduce themselves at worship. You and Henriette and Elizabeth can meet her then, make friends with her.’

Elize nudged me with her elbow. ‘And you, Hanne.’

I felt my mother glance at me and wondered what she was thinking. Hopeful, perhaps, that I would finally make a friend. That I would become a part of things. She nodded in approval as my fingers stripped the feathers, and I returned her smile, but inwardly I felt my stomach drop, imagining another girl welcomed into Christiana’s fold while I remained steadfastly on the outer.



I was forever nature’s child.

It is probably best to say this now.

I sought out solitude. Happiness was playing in the whir of grass at the uncultivated edges of our village, listening to the ticking of insects, or plunging my feet into fresh snow until my stockings grew wet and my toes numb. Occasionally, in a spirit of contrition after some misdemeanour and knowing it would please my mother, I would run in the road with the children of the other Old Lutherans. There had been some fun in throwing stones and hanging upside down in trees with the boys, but my brothers’ friends did not enjoy being beaten in their races by a long-legged girl, and their sisters had always confounded me. Even as a young child I had felt that girls forsook on whim and offered only inconstant friendship. Allegiances seemed to shift from day to day like sandbanks in a riverbed and, inevitably, I found myself run aground. Better to befriend a blanket of moss, the slip-quick of fish dart. Never was the love I poured into the river refused.

But I was no longer a child, with a child’s freedoms. Common chores and the expectations of the congregation had thrust me back into the company of girls I had known my whole life, but whom I did not understand, for all I recognised their faces. Christiana, Henriette and Elizabeth all seemed to accept and perform their early womanhood with an ease that rendered me fiercely jealous. Their bodies were soft, like mine, but they seemed contained where I was long-boned and sprawling. They were small and neat, and their faces had shed childish plumpness and become youthful simulacra of their mothers’. I had Mama’s name only. I did not even have the good fortune of resembling Papa, although I alone received his height, which amused him. Christiana, Henriette and Elizabeth knew what to say at which occasion, how to make everyone laugh or smile, how to please their parents and themselves. They came together in a dance I did not know the steps to: I was separate even when in their midst. On the few occasions I had revealed something of my true self, seeking communion or recognition, I had been met with wide-eyed confusion or outright scorn. My interests were not theirs. Another girl my age in the village would be yet one more reminder that I was ill-made.

How do they know how to be? I remember wondering as I ripped feathers that night. How does anyone know how to be?



Mama and I stayed at the Radtkes’ well past midnight, helping to clean up the room. Christiana and I swept the floor of discarded quills and washed the glasses and plates, while Mama and Magdalena stuffed the collected down into calico bags.

‘Did you know she’s a witch?’ Christiana whispered under her breath.

‘What? Who?’ My face grew hot.

‘That Wendish woman they were talking about. Frau Eichenwald.’ Christiana glanced at me, her face solemn, dark hair escaping from under her headscarf. ‘They’re all heathens at heart, the Wends. Very superstitious. Mama told me they believe in unholy things.’