Devotion(43)

There. The North Sea was before us, churning blue and green, capped with white, and something in me lifted. I was soul-struck by the immensity of ocean. My spirit rose in recognition of its divinity.

‘Praise God,’ I gasped. ‘Praise God.’

In the press of people, someone took my hand. Squeezed it.

Thea.

I looked at her bright face and I knew she was feeling as I felt. To think, if we had remained, we might never have been in such a presence. To see something so ancient. Awed, we looked back at the sea in eye-wide inhalation. We breathed it in together, and with the firm grip of her fingers between my own, I felt time dissolve in the arms of the ocean’s brilliant, salted constancy.



In between the ordinariness of my days there have been moments when life offered itself to me as a blade, and if I didn’t hold back, if I leaned into it, I felt everything.

The good Lord knows, if I could live any moment of my life over again, it would be that one. Ribs divided, heart devouring the knife-edge of beauty. To see the ocean for the first time, every time. Her hand in mine.

Holy blade that guts us with awe.



We stood on the open deck for an hour. Many prayed – the ocean’s magnitude was a sure manifestation of God’s sublimity – but it did not take long for euphoria to descend into misery. Not long after the Kristi broached open water, seasickness came upon us.

At first the rolling of the deck in harmony with the sea seemed a joy. It was impossible not to laugh at the sight of Elder Pasche listing from side to side like a drunk, and the novel feeling of movement delighted Thea, Matthias and me. But the novelty passed quickly, and it was not long before we noticed several men and women staggering to the gunwales and emptying their stomachs over the side.

The sight of others so violently ill did little to reassure the rest of us who had also started to feel queasy. Matthias left, and a little while later Thea and I agreed to return to our berths to lie down and wait for the feeling to pass. By the time we began our descent down the hatchway, the deck, once so crowded, was deserted, save for sailors glancing at one another with knowing smiles.

I found Mama lying in our bed, her eyes closed, her lips pressed tightly together.

‘Where is Hermine?’ I asked.

‘Matthias has her. I sent him for water.’

The ship suddenly dipped down, and there came a collective groaning from those who had already cloistered themselves in their bunks. I watched as Reinhardt scrambled from his bed, hand over his mouth, and ran barefoot to the water closet, which was occupied. My stomach lurched as he grabbed a bucket from the floor and was sick into it.

With one hand on the table for balance, I staggered along the tipping decks to the water barrels, where several people had lined up for their turn with the dippers. Matthias was hunched in a corner, Hermine in his lap, crying.

‘Matthias? Are you unwell?’

He looked up at me, pale and sweating. ‘Can you take her?’ he asked.

I picked my sister up and sat her on my hip as he hauled himself up the hatchway, then I staggered back to our berth. Mama was miserably blotting at the mattress: she had been sick.

‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘How will we survive six months of this?’


As night descended the seasickness grew worse. No one was spared. It was a nightmare, everyone in steerage lurching to the water closet, to any spare slop bucket. And the smell. I kept thinking I had recovered only to hear another retch and splatter, and my gut heaved again. We were all wretched, and only a few of us managed to make it occasionally to the open deck, in the hope that fresh air would work equilibrium into our legs and stomachs. Again and again, I lurched to the side of the ship to empty my stomach, only to have the sailors shout at me.

‘Leeward! Leeward!’ they cried, and then, perhaps in pity at my lack of understanding, they explained that all waste must be hurled downwind to avoid soiling the deck and those about me.

Once my stomach had been emptied, leaving me exhausted and shaking, I rested my head on the gunwale and tried to surrender to the heave of the waves. I knew I ought to go back below deck and relieve Mama of Hermine, so that she might be unwell without the added difficulty of a sick and crying baby, but it was cooler on deck, and the idea of stepping down into the dark, smelling as it did, the hot fug of misery, made my throat close upon itself and my stomach roll again. And so I remained on deck, buffeted by sickness and wind and the remonstrations of sailors, until my father called my name and I turned to see his head bobbing up from the hatchway, finger beckoning, holy eye firmly closed.


By ten o’clock that night, all lamps being assiduously extinguished, most of the passengers had fallen into uneasy sleep, weakened by the day’s sickness. I lay in my berth next to Mama and Hermine, too feeble to brace myself against the dip and roll of the ship, my body listing back and forth against the hard plank separating my bunk from the Geschkes’ and my mother’s shoulder. Every now and then an overwhelming desire to vomit overcame me, and I placed my arm over my eyes and concentrated instead on breathing; I did not have the energy to rise.

I must have drifted off, for the next thing I knew, I woke to the crack of wood and a great pain in my foot. Terrified, I sat up in the darkness, knocking my head against something hard. It took me several moments to remember that I was not in my bed at home, but on board the Kristi, and yet I could not understand what had happened. It was pitch-black, and although I felt the mattress beneath me, something vast and wooden was pressing upon me, not an inch from my forehead. The ship is sinking, I thought. It is breaking apart. It is as Thea dreamed it would be.