Devotion(36)

The hymn ended. Someone briefly placed a hand on my shoulder as an elderly man led into ‘Where’er I Go, Whate’er my Task’. We stared at the crowd on the bank, their voices fading as we sailed downriver.

‘Hanne!’

My name, faint and faraway, as though I had imagined it.

Again. A cry under the swelling harmony that surrounded us. A beautiful punctuation.

I could not see her, but she was there, on one of the boats. She had heard me sing.

One more time, as the cloud darkened over us and it looked like it might rain after all.

‘Hanne!’

My name in her mouth.


It took us three weeks to reach Hamburg, along canals of water so shallow that all able-bodied men were regularly forced to disembark and pull the barges with ropes from shore, and through mountains where lockmen asked questions of our journey, and those who were sympathetic gave us beer and bread and those who were not jeered and called us fanatics. At Crossen we passed under a bridge filled with so many sightseers, the police arrived to keep the peace.

Each day I searched for Thea’s face upon the decks of the other boats, and while I did not see her, I saw Friedrich once, hauling a barge over a sandbank, and it was enough.

Every day on our boat, Papa or Elder Pasche or Elder Radtke led prayers and lay services, and every evening we sang as the sun set and the horizon flushed pink, mirrored upon the river. We sang like birds at daybreak and nightfall in exaltation of ever-changing light, and all about us was river and sky and the sympathetic croaking of frogs, the euphoric diving of ducks. The further we travelled from Kay, the more my ears pricked to unfamiliar sounds. The whine of reeds, the slap of sun on water that cowered from the heat and shrank from banks that smelled of mud and rotting feathers. I sang as loudly as I dared, knowing that Thea might hear me. I sang to the music I heard; God felt close to me. I forgot the trepidation I had felt on boarding the barges.

It was rare for us all to spend so much time in each other’s company and I sensed that my parents, always wearied by work, were grateful to sit and watch the changing landscape. Even Mama grew lighter in spirit. She brushed out my hair and sang to Hermine, and once I saw her twitch with suppressed laughter when my brother, boyhood swinging a last blow, squeaked his way through ‘Our God is a Mighty Fortress’.

Weeks passed. We entered the Spree and then the Elbe, leaving Prussia. The waters changed. And then one morning we woke and emerged on deck to see masts and rigging rising bare and brutish against the sky like a forest in winter, the bargemen already hauling our trunks onto the docks.

The ships at anchor in Hamburg were enormous. Black and looming against the grey morning, sailors and wharfmen crawling like ants all over them, bale hooks in hand. My stomach lurched at the sight of their bulk, at the smell of the harbour, which was salt and smoke and fish and waste. Not many of us had ever been to a city so large and we huddled together and waited for someone to take us somewhere.

The morning turned warm and hazy. We became thirsty. Every now and then someone would begin singing, and heads would turn to watch as all of us joined in, dry-tongued choir as we were.

By noon, those who still had money left to buy fresh food and drink went in search of it, while others decided to stretch their legs and take in the sights of the great city: the buildings three storeys and higher, the bridges and the swarms of people about their business. But Mama was firm. We were all to stay with our trunks, to wait for direction. And so we sat on the docks and I picked at my sunburn and watched the gulls and the oarsmen in their small boats. The water seemed an ugly, greasy thing.

‘Is this salt water? When does it become the sea?’ I asked Papa.

He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, eye skirting the wharf, flicking to the Kay elders who were in intense discussion together. There was a man approaching them, clasping a sheaf of papers.

‘Papa?’

He suddenly marched towards the churchmen. They admitted him into their circle, dark coats and hats clustered together like a thundercloud, nodding at the stranger, fingers pointing.

‘Mama,’ Matthias said quietly, ‘what if they do not have the passports? What if they don’t have a ship to take us?’

‘Stop it, Matthias.’ Mama buried her face in Hermine’s fat neck.

‘Excuse me, Frau?’ A red-faced man stood nearby with concern on his face. ‘Do you require assistance?’

Mama looked up at him, frowning. ‘Are you the agent?’

‘Which agent?’

‘The shipping agent.’

‘Off somewhere?’

Hans, noticing the man speaking to my mother, approached us with his shoulders back, chin raised. ‘We are to sail to the colony of South Australia. We are waiting for an agent.’ He hesitated. ‘And a ship.’

The man took out a handkerchief and rubbed his forehead. ‘You are all together then, are you?’ he asked, flapping the cloth at us and the other families stranded upon the docks. Some of them had begun to sing again, much to the amusement of the sailors. One of them was waving his arms about from the rigging of a large ship, pretending to conduct.

Understanding dawned on the man’s face. ‘Ah, you’re the mystics.’

Mama stiffened. ‘We are no mystics.’

‘I saw the first group come up on barges. They left a few days ago. All of them singing like you. Dressed like you. Abandoning your country, then?’