‘Mama, what is wrong with Elizabeth?’
My mother did not open her eyes but reached out a hand and touched my shoulder. ‘She has a temperature. The journey here has tried her. Go to sleep. She will be better now that the doctor has been.’
But the following morning I woke to the sound of Christiana crying and the captain below decks, speaking with Samuel and Magdalena. They told us the news, ashen-faced. Later that day Elizabeth’s body was rowed out and buried on the shore of a place called Juelssand.
The next day another two-year-old died, and as the family waited for the captain to negotiate a place of burial at a town along the river, the mother took a knife and cut off the child’s curls. Many of us had just sat down to eat at the long table, and beyond the muted prayers of thanks, we could hear the husband admonish her. The mother seemed indifferent to his hissed reprimands. I looked up over my plate to see her climbing out of a berth, hiding her face in hands filled with the hair of her child.
The deaths of the two children had a sobering effect on the passengers. Captain Olsen, while sympathetic to the grief of the families, did not seem surprised at the early tragedies.
‘In the confines of a ship, illness and disease can spread quickly,’ he said to us after our usual morning prayers upon the deck. ‘I expect us to reach open sea today and it is my fervent wish that no more of you succumb to ill health. We are just over two hundred souls on board and I will do everything within my power to ensure that we remain so for the duration of our passage. But please, you must listen to Dr Meissner and do as he instructs. He will advise you on the best ways to keep your quarters clean and sickness at bay.’
The doctor himself had little to say. When Mama, anxious at our berth’s proximity to the Radtkes, asked him what she might do to inure Hermine against the sickness that had taken Elizabeth, she received a brusque response.
‘A doctor may not be able to prevent illness, although he may treat it,’ Meissner replied, glancing at the Radtkes’ bunks. ‘If you are anxious, pray. I am afraid that I cannot heal those who are not yet sick.’
Mama said nothing, but after the doctor had left, and when she thought no one was looking, I saw her press her nose to the soft tenderness behind my sister’s earlobe and, eyes shut, fiercely breathe her in.
A few hours after the captain’s warning, the Kristi sailed out of the Elbe and into open waters. We felt the shift in the tween decks. A steady tugging rose to lift and fall, and those who had not secured their belongings saw them roll under berths. There were uncertain smiles as neighbours returned a runaway cup, a wooden clog, a shaving bowl.
Weeks had passed since we had left Kay, and it seemed impossible that, after so many rivers, after such waiting, we were away. The freedom that had been spoken of for so many years seemed, finally, to be within reach. It had shape. People crowded the hatchway, eager to be on deck to witness the shoreline slip away. Matthias and I joined the throng, laughing as the ship moved beneath us.
‘The ocean,’ Matthias said. His eyes were sparkling.
‘The ocean,’ I replied. We gripped the steps and clambered out into the wind-slap and exclamations of our fellow passengers.
The deck was crowded; I saw the sea in the air first. The sky was hazy with ocean-breath that kissed my lips, and when I licked them I tasted salt. I squeezed past the people gathered, forcing my way to port side, where my view was clear.
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?’