Devotion(34)

Perhaps they overslept, I thought to myself. Or perhaps they made an early start and are ahead of us, as Matthias said. Still, a sickening feeling grew in my stomach. My eyes felt sandy, my limbs cumbersome and ill-jointed.

I thought again of the kiss. Touched my fingertips to my mouth again and again.

Matthias nudged me, nodding towards Mama, who sat amidst the trunks in our wagon, bonneted, dress open. Hermine was snuffling at her breast and batting her in the face. ‘She hasn’t said a word since we left,’ he murmured. ‘Hanne, look. She’s going to cry.’

I looked. Mama was staring at the village diminishing behind us, eyes wet, gaze fixed on the church steeple winking in the sunlight beyond the bobbing crowd of hats and bonnets and scarves.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry,’ Matthias said quietly.

‘She was up in the night. Saying goodbye to the stars.’

‘That doesn’t sound like her.’

I looked back along the stream of people behind us. Nowhere. I couldn’t see her anywhere.

‘Hanne? In what direction was she looking?’

‘Just out towards the rye fields.’

‘The old church?’

‘I suppose so.’

Matthias pushed back the brim of his hat and raised his eyebrows. I stared at the hair darkening his top lip. It seemed unfair to me that we were to be cleaved from one another so thoroughly by adulthood, that I would not be able to grow the same beard as him, that I would take up my woman’s face and he his man’s.

‘She was farewelling our brother,’ he said, and I knew immediately that he was right. ‘We are leaving Gottlob behind.’

I glanced again at Mama. Her eyes pierced the horizon. ‘Gottlob is with Christ,’ I said.

Matthias nodded. ‘But we are leaving his bones in the ground.’ He placed his hand in his pocket and took out a small, stoppered bottle.

‘What’s this, then?’

‘Soil,’ Matthias replied. ‘I took it from his grave.’ He put the bottle back in his pocket. ‘So that our brother can come with us.’

My heart rushed with love and I suddenly had a yearning to tell him about sneaking out of the window and meeting Thea in the forest. I wondered, briefly, if he had ever been kissed. But I said nothing. Both of us had always known, intuitively, that there were parts of us best left hidden. The moment in the forest was mine alone. I wrapped myself around the kiss, like a shell around a nut, keeping it sweet, keeping it safe.


The road was stirred into dust under the wagons. Some of the poorer men, like Daniel Pfeiffer, had tied a trunk to his back. His hat was dark with sweat. Emile carried their younger daughter on her hip, and their eldest, Elsa, pushed a handcart with a second trunk in it. Little Anna Pfeiffer kept copying her father’s grunts as the road keeled uphill, and I could see their shoulders shake in laughter, despite their exhaustion. The families of Elder Pasche and Fr?hlich the shoemaker swarmed together behind our wagon, Hans nodding miserably as Rosina chastised him for forgetting something or other. Traugott Geschke, Reinhardt and Elize, now round with child, sat in their own wagon, singing before us.

More families joined as we passed through the busy outskirts of Züllichau, and as the breeze lifted, leaves nodding in hedgerows, I saw that we were attracting the attention of the district. Onlookers gathered by the roadside to stare. An old woman and her daughter, both holding squalling children, shouted out blessings and well wishes to my mother, who nodded, unsmiling. Two men rested against a rail, pointing and laughing to themselves. Girls my age unbended from seedlings in vegetable gardens, eyes squinting.

Papa and Uncle Ludwig stopped to load Mutter Scheck’s and Amalie’s trunks into our wagon when their handcart broke, and Elizabeth Radtke, whimpering and writhing against Magdalena, was handed up to Mama, whereupon she stopped crying to stare at Hermine, open-mouthed, until Hermine poked her in the ear. Mutter Scheck arranged herself between our luggage and cast an appraising eye over those who had joined us. There was now a thick and steady flow of people headed towards Tschicherzig.

‘Brethren from Rentschen and Nickern,’ she nodded, fussing at her nostrils with a handkerchief and briefly examining its contents. Matthias and I exchanged appalled looks.

‘Krummendorf, too, perhaps,’ murmured Amalie. She was walking next to me, puffy-eyed but no longer weeping.

I didn’t care. It could have been Sch?nborn or Rissen or Schwiebus or any other place in Kreis Züllichau; they were all the same in the black of their clothes, in their farmers’ shoulders, in the whispered arguments that could be heard in the dying notes of ‘Lasset die Kindlein zu mir kommen’ – the child’s shoe already lost, the forgotten water bag. They had been fined and harassed and driven from worship just as we had been. Hundreds of people with a growing thirst in their mouths, all destined to be packed into ships for some place we could not even picture in our minds. They were all fellow pilgrims and I did not care for any of them. Nowhere could I see Thea or her parents. I needed to see her. I needed to make certain that our prayer had bound us together. I needed to make sure that our faith had been rewarded.


The Oder River was glass, smooth and wide and bright under the unclouded sun, but the air was filled with crying.

Pastor Flügel had told elders from his various congregations to hire barges to take everyone to Hamburg, but there was some confusion as to how the families would be divided up, and it took hours before the names were announced and the trunks and luggage unpacked from the wagons and placed on board. Matthias and I sat against one of the wagon wheels as we waited, pulling splinters of painted wood from the spokes and jabbing each other in the arm.