Devotion(5)

‘What’s the matter?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can’t sleep?’

‘No.’

He turned his back to me and I drew close to him, breathing in the smell of the outside world on his skin. Cut grass and horses and earth.

‘Are you sad about Gottlob?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Sometimes I dream about him,’ Matthias whispered. ‘I dream that he’s sitting just there, at the end of the bed, watching me sleep.’

‘Do you talk to him?’

‘No. He just sits there. Once he told me he was hungry.’ He paused. ‘You know what I thought of today?’

‘What?’

‘Remember when Otto stood on Gottlob’s foot and his toe went all black?’

I smiled. ‘Oh, that was disgusting.’

‘And then the nail fell off and he wouldn’t shut up about it. Remember how he went on and on, until Mama made him bury it and sing a funeral dirge?’ Matthias began to laugh. I pulled him close.

‘I thought I’d forget everything.’ His laughter subsided. ‘I thought I’d forget, but all I do is remember. I wish they’d talk about him more. They act as though we never had a brother.’

I rubbed my cheek against Matthias’s back. ‘Me too.’ His body felt strange to me. Stronger than I remembered. Muscled from harder, longer labour. ‘Matthias, do you ever think there must be something wrong with you?’

My brother rolled over. I felt his hand on my shoulder, the pressure of his thumb. ‘What did Mama say to you?’

‘Nothing.’

Matthias was quiet. ‘No. I don’t think there is anything wrong with me. Except this.’ He tapped the gap between his front teeth. ‘And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you either, Hanne. Except . . . you know.’

‘What?’

‘You are clumsy. And you steal the blanket.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘They love us,’ Matthias whispered eventually. ‘I think they’ve just forgotten how to show it.’

I settled my head on Matthias’s shoulder and the next thing I knew it was morning, Papa was bellowing Matthias’s name, and Mama’s head appeared in the hatch to the loft. Her expression when she saw me in my brother’s bed was odd.


‘What were you doing?’ Mama asked me later as we prepared the midday meal.

‘What?’

‘This morning.’

‘You mean, why was I in the loft?’ I cut slices of Mettwurst.

‘Hm.’

‘Oh. I couldn’t sleep.’

Mama hesitated. ‘It’s not appropriate that you go to him.’

‘We slept in the same bed when we were little. Matthias calms me. He’s my brother.’

‘You’re not little anymore, Hanne. You’re a woman.’

I groaned aloud.

Mama placed the steaming plate of potatoes down on the table then abruptly left the room, footsteps loud on the stairs. A few minutes later she returned with a full bucket and set it at my feet. Water glimmered pink over swathes of suspended rags, and I realised, with horror, that they were the soiled cloths I had left to soak in the cellar.

I looked up at her, appalled.

‘You know what these mean?’

‘Mama . . .’ I glanced at the front door, anxious Papa or Matthias would come in and see them there.

‘Hanne.’ Mama’s voice was calm. Insistent. ‘These mean you are a woman.’

‘Yes, I know.’ My mouth was dry with shame.

‘The time has come to farewell childish things. God is preparing your body so that it might be blessed with children, and so you, too, must prepare yourself for the other blessings of womanhood.’

I stared at the floor, face crimson, mortified.

‘A home of your own, Hanne. Marriage.’

I bent down to pick up the bucket, but my mother quickly reached out and took my wrist. Her hands were damp.

‘Now is the time to renew your faith in and submission to Christ,’ Mama said, her voice low and urgent. ‘God has created a place for you and a role for you, and now that you are grown, you must learn to fulfil it. It is one thing for a girl to come home smelling of . . . of weeds and river mud . . .’

I tried to wrest my hand from her, but her grip was firm.

‘Hanne, I haven’t finished. It is one thing for a little girl to share a bed with her little brother’ – she inclined her head, eyes seeking out my own – ‘another for a woman.’

I let my hand go limp in hers and stared down at the bucket of bloody water, willing myself not to cry. My pulse jumped in my fingertips. I wanted to run from the room. I wanted to run into the forest and never come back.

Mama suddenly pulled my head towards her, kissing it so hard I felt the press of her teeth beyond her lips. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

She nodded at the bucket. ‘You can put it back now.’



It is hard to remember these moments with my mother. I wish I knew then what I know now. That Mama’s withholding from me was not a sign that she disliked me or suspected me flawed, as I believed at the time, but a sign of a fear she could not articulate. She was afraid to declare her love for me: she did not want to tempt fate by it. Since I have had a child, in my own way, I understand the terror a mother feels at the prospect of loss, and how easily superstition creeps into the smallest of gestures.