Devotion Read online

  For Heidi

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

  This novel was written on the unceded, sovereign lands of the Peramangk and Kaurna nations, and I would like to pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I acknowledge First Nations peoples and recognise and honour their spiritual connection to Country, community and culture, not least the sharing of story across time and generations.

  Sei getreu bis an den Tod, so will ich dir die Krone des Lebens geben.

  OFFENBARUNG 2:10

  Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

  REVELATION 2:10

  ~

  Ich habe dich einen kleinen Augenblick verlassen; aber mit großer Barmherzigkeit will ich dich sammeln.

  JESAJA 54:7

  For a small moment I have forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.

  ISAIAH 54:7

  ~

  Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.

  LOUIS ARAGON,

  quoted by Patrick White in A Fringe of Leaves

  ~

  CONTENTS

  THE FIRST DAY my heart is a hand reaching

  testimony of love

  BEFORE federschleissen

  girl in the fog

  holy

  giblets and bacon

  stones into water

  restlessness

  the kiss

  song on the river

  a bolt of black cloth

  broken beds

  born of soil

  whale

  THE SECOND DAY AFTER press of time

  albatross

  tell all my bones

  such a thing happened

  a long-memoried place

  the tree

  beten und arbeiten

  hunger

  pig

  oblivion

  THE THIRD DAY THEN incarnations

  tributary

  walnuts

  ordinary divinity

  NOW heart-shimmer, heart-shiver

  the song is endless

  author’s note

  acknowledgements

  THE

  FIRST

  DAY

  my heart is a hand reaching

  Thea, there is no line in your palm I have not traced, no knuckle cracked unheard, and the blue of your eyes is the coffin-lining of the world. I would they sing psalms to you and the down upon your thighs, and the eyelashes that have fallen to the fields you have worked. I would they lay boughs upon knees bent to the soil-hum of any place you have rested upon. Thea, if love were a thing, it would be the sinew of a hand stretched in anticipation of grasping. See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.

  testimony of love

  It is time, I think, to tell my story.

  In this moment, as the sun stretches its burnished hands upon the world, I feel myself finally pulling apart with time. Something is coming and I feel surrender approaching. A gentle giving-in.

  I am not afraid. Not now. I’ve seen enough to know that fear scrapes feeling from hearts and I have no desire to scour mine down to bare and trembling muscle. Still, after what has happened, in this moment of honey-light, the air a censer of eucalyptus, I wonder how many days remain to me and whether, if I pass out of existence without testament, something necessary will be lost.

  I could not remain with her. I think – and the thought lathes a yawning hole of grief within me – that it is over. I think I have already seen her face for the last time. That is what is hard. That is what has brought me up here amongst the trees. And now, one of these days, I will be gone.

  Perhaps that is why I want to bear witness. I feel it as an urgency within my body. If I rest my fingers against my mouth, I feel my lips move in readiness to speak.

  The light is rising. The wind rises. I lift my face to the sun as it fills the world.

  If I testify, no one will hear me. Is a story unheard a story diminished? I cannot believe that. The wind may hear me, perhaps. The wind may yet carry my voice down to the valley, might press it against the ear of a child who will one day wonder at deeper mysteries, the inheritance of miracles. I can be satisfied with that.

  The testimony of love is the backbone of the universe. It is the taproot from which all stories spring.

  Listen, wind. Here is my small filament.

  BEFORE

  federschleissen

  One night, years ago, in the autumn of 1836, I was lying under the walnut tree in my family’s orchard, listening to the tapping of raindrops sliding from leaves to soil. I heard them as a muted concord of bells. The trunk drummed black, the sky was chanting low cloud and I was bathed in hymns of water. Somewhere, beneath it all, I could hear my father calling my name. I stayed where I was. The wind scattered droplets upon my face. The damp soaked through my clothes.

  ‘Hanne!’

  I closed my eyes. For the past two evenings, and this night too, my mother had been at the Radtkes’ house for a Federschleissen, and I was determined to make the most of my freedom. I had escaped outside as soon as she had left. I was fourteen, nearly fifteen, and not yet used to the burdens of womanhood and its inert domestic companions of needle and thread, bucket and cloth. Our cottage with its low ceiling and cramped rooms suffocated me. I missed the livingness of things.

  ‘Hanne!’

  The walnut tree was singing to me. Stay.

  ‘Hanne.’

  A different voice this time, louder. I opened my eyes and saw my brother, Matthias, looking down at me with a bemused expression, lantern in hand. The tree’s song subsided.

  ‘What does he want?’ I asked, shielding my eyes from the glare of the light.

  ‘If you go inside now, he won’t see you. He’s looking for you in the lane.’ Matthias set the lantern on the ground and helped me to my feet, and together we walked through the orchard, heady with the smell of rain on loam and fallen leaves, to the mud of the yard. I could make out the pale bulk of our pig in the dark of her sty. She lifted her head to look at us as I turned the doorknob.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ I asked Matthias.

  ‘No. I’m to bed,’ he said, nodding towards the side of the house where the ladder led to the loft. He hesitated. ‘Were you listening again?’

  ‘It’s better at night.’

  ‘What could you hear this time?’ he asked. He was eye-bright in the glow of the lantern.

  ‘Singing,’ I said. ‘Like the tree was singing to the water and the rain was singing to the earth.’

  Matthias nodded. ‘You’d best get in. Goodnight, then,’ he said, and he moved off into the dark.

  As I pulled the door shut behind me, Papa appeared in the corridor, holding a candle. He paused, frowning with his good eye.

  ‘Hello, Papa.’

  ‘Where have you been, Hanne?’

  ‘Getting ready for bed,’ I said, easing my feet out of my clogs.

  ‘But you weren’t in your room.’

  ‘No, I had to . . .’ I flicked a thumb in the vague direction of our outhouse.

  My father lifted a hand to guard the flicker of the candle flame. ‘Put your shoes back on. I need you to fetch Mutter home.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘She’s been late the past two nights.’

  ‘Ja, exactly. Too late.’ He turned and headed towards the kitchen, the candlelight throwing his silhouette against the walls of the corridor. ‘Go get her,’ he muttered over his shoulder. ‘Bring her home.’

  The night had cleared and deepened into delicious cold. At that hour in the village, everything smelled of pickled pork and kitchen fire. I walked a little down the lane and then, when I was sure my father would not see me, turned into our neighbours’ allotment
so that I might walk beside the fields. I passed close by the Pasches’ cottage, bending over to avoid being seen through the window by Elder Christian Pasche, who I could hear at prayer within. I pictured his bald head shining in the firelight as he intoned over his Bible, his sons, Hans, Hermann and Georg, slumped and drowsy at the table. The Federschleissen was being held for Elder Pasche’s second bride, a narrow-eyed woman called Rosina with terrible breath and a mole on her forearm that she scratched at during services. Rosina was closer in age to Hans than his father, but as she and Christian were both dour and humourless, the match was generally agreed to be a good one. ‘They will be able to spend many wonderful evenings not laughing together,’ my mother had commented on hearing the news.

  I pulled off my headscarf to feel the air against my neck. In the clear light of the rising moon, the shorn rye fields seemed soft and melancholy, the forest upon the eastern rise the only interruption in the otherwise flat, silvered horizon of pasture, field and marsh. Only the spire of the church – locked now – steepled into the sky. Everything else was dull and low-lying, a patchwork of farm ground, whitewash and wood shingle. I had lived in Kay my whole life. I could have paced out each house, orchard and field in pitch-darkness.

  I could hear the sound of women’s laughter as I left the fields and turned north towards the Radtkes’ yard. The back door was ajar, offering a glimpse of lamplight and shifting shadows. As I paused by the henhouse to gather my braids back under my headscarf, there was a quiet cough from the side of the building, and I saw Elder Samuel Radtke sitting on his chopping block by the woodpile, smoking his pipe in the dark. He nodded at me.

  ‘Came by the fields, did you? Good night for it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I stammered.

  ‘She’s put me out for the night. Dog’s inside, though.’ He chuckled. ‘Go on in. They’ve been at it for hours.’ Samuel puffed on his pipe and gestured for me to enter, just as the women burst out in a new wave of mirth.

  Inside the women were squeezed shoulder to shoulder around the large kitchen table, cackling hard while their fingers stripped feathers and stuffed the down into clay jars for the new Frau Pasche’s wedding quilt. It took me several moments before I picked out my mother from their midst. She was laughing and, unused to seeing her smile, I was struck anew by her beauty – the painful, astonishing certainty of it. As a child I had not minded when people remarked upon our difference, or had wondered aloud why Matthias, my twin, and not I had inherited her full top lip, her dark eyes and hair. But now, as several heads turned in my direction, I felt again the silent, inevitable comparison and wanted to hide. Here she is, the cuckoo born to a songbird. The odd, unbeautiful daughter.

  Mutter Scheck, her round little glasses smudged with fingerprints, nudged Mama. ‘Look, Johanne – your little Johanne is here to herd you home.’

  Mama glanced up at me. ‘No, you’ve come too early! I’m not ready.’ Her voice was high and girlish. The women laughed again and I smiled, my throat suddenly, inexplicably, tight with tears.

  ‘Papa sent me.’

  ‘What does he want? A bedtime story? Your papa can wait.’

  Mutter Scheck snorted.

  I noticed then that Henriette and Elizabeth Volkmann were sitting with Christiana Radtke and something in me buckled. I had not been invited. Christiana coloured and the girls smiled at me with tight lips. I wanted to disappear.

  Elize Geschke patted the space beside her at the edge of the kitchen table, sweeping the bench free of stray stripped quills. ‘Here, Hanne. Come and sit with me.’

  I lifted my too-long legs up and over the bench, avoiding the guarded looks from Christiana and Henriette from across the room, as Elize squeezed my shoulder and offered me her glass. They were drinking sweet wine. Mama nodded and I took a sip. Elize was only three years older than me but, newly married to Reinhardt Geschke, she belonged to a different circle of women. She rubbed my back as I spluttered on the wine and I wondered how she could bear to have me sit next to her, plain and awkward as I was.

  Elize pities you, I thought. She saw Christiana look over and knows you have been left out. She’s being kind.

  I set the glass carefully back on the table.

  ‘Why don’t you help while you wait for your mama?’ Elize reached into the goose down, piled like snow, and placed a handful of plucked feathers in front of me. Copying the others, I tore the fluff from the stem, stuffing it into the jar in front of Elize. Magdalena Radtke’s sharp eyes were on me, making sure, no doubt, that I was stripping the feathers properly.

  There was a brief, companionable silence as twenty pairs of hands busied themselves in union. Elize leaned against me in gentle reassurance.

  ‘So,’ announced Rosina from her position at the head of the table. ‘The new family up in the cottage. What do we think of them?’

  Magdalena cleared her throat. ‘I have heard that his wife is a Wend.’

  Eleonore Volkmann raised her thick eyebrows. ‘If she has married a German, she is German.’

  ‘Well,’ continued Magdalena, ‘you would hope so. And yet, when I caught a glimpse of them, the wife had the headdress on. You know’ – she waved a plump hand above her head – ‘that strange-looking, horned thing.’

  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 s
now 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.