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.