‘No one calls me that.’
‘And I suppose you will add your husband’s?’ she said quietly. ‘When you know who he is?’
I stared at her. I had not told Thea about the black cloth lying under my mother’s mattress, even though much of the conversation amongst the women was about hope chests. In truth, since joining Thea’s berth I had not given much thought to the material brought in readiness for my own marriage. Neither of us contributed to the ongoing talk about weddings and the households they would lead to. Once, when the elder of the other Johannes asked her, Thea mentioned that she knew her mother had packed some things for her to have when she was married, but she had not shared what they were, and Johanne had not asked. We had never spoken of husbands to each other.
Thea was giving me a strange, pale look. ‘We will both marry, I suppose,’ she said.
I did not reply.
Thea dropped her eyes. I watched her try to thread her needle before taking the cotton and doing it for her.
‘Would you make me a pillow overcover?’ she asked. Her voice was small. ‘When you have finished yours?’
‘Won’t you want to make your own?’
‘I think it will take me the whole of this journey just to finish this handkerchief.’ She hesitated. ‘Besides, I would like to rest my head on a place your hands have been.’
The night after the whale appeared, I dreamed of our trees in Kay. I dreamed I had returned from the colony, had come back to see the walnut tree in our orchard. Years had passed; it was gnarled now, older.
When I placed my hands on the bark, I felt the tree rouse beneath them, as though awakening from a slumber.
You, it said.
‘I came back.’
Wind shook the leaves.
I heard you singing, the tree said.
‘What was I singing?’
The endless song.
At that I woke, but the feeling of the dream remained with me. I felt deeply reassured, as though my life had already been lived, and it had been good and worthy.
When I rolled over, I saw that Thea was also awake. We drew closer together.
‘You were talking in your sleep,’ Thea whispered.
‘Was I? What was I saying?’
‘I don’t know. You might have been singing, actually.’
‘I was dreaming about our orchard.’
I felt Thea smooth the hair out of my face. ‘Like your father’s dream? The one about Heaven?’
I lifted my cheek so that it filled her palm. Her hands were cool, grown soft from a lack of labour. ‘No.’
The endless song.
‘Maybe,’ I added. ‘Maybe a type of Heaven.’
‘Tell me about it.’
So I told Thea about the walnut tree. Not only how it had spoken to me in my dream, but that I had heard it in my waking hours. How I had always thought that anything growing carried its own hymn to creation. All the while Thea stroked my hair in silence.
‘I hope that glory is like your dream and not your father’s,’ she said eventually.
‘Why?’
She touched her forehead to mine, and in her closeness came an upswell of something I did not have words to name. ‘I think I would miss ordinary apples.’ She hesitated. ‘Things born of soil.’
I thought of Papa’s vision, the shining paradisiacal fruit. In that moment it seemed a frigid wonder.
I wish now that we had had the language to speak of what was unfolding between us in those moments. I wish that, with Thea’s hand in my hair, her nearness sounding through me like hallelujah, like fever’s refrain, I had allowed myself to consider the possibility of different devotions. That I had considered the weight of a plain ripe pear in hand, the promise of juice down my wrist.
That we had pushed ourselves off the precipice. That, once begun, we could no sooner stop than we could defy gravity.
I wish I had drawn closer to Thea then. Willed her to kiss me. Deeply, so that the whole world turned in revolution.
Our lives were split by light. In the day, we were as we always had been, occupied by chores, distracted by the weather, the heat, by the requests of Mutter Scheck, the unwell women, our mothers. Sometimes we assisted Anna Maria in the kitchen. Boiling rice. Pulling the leaves from dried sprigs of wormwood. We were friends, as we had been, and easy in our friendship.
But at night, when we found ourselves alone in wakefulness, we would turn and lie close together, our heads on the same pillow, in a way that made me breathless. Once, I felt Thea’s hands run over my body in a way that made me tremble, but someone shifted in their bunk and she did not do it again. In the morning I wondered if it had happened at all. We never spoke of it. We never spoke of the forest and what had happened. It was as though we were both asleep, meeting in a common dream.
With only the safety lamp perforating the darkness, our bodies close and the heat all around us, I found myself telling Thea things I had never told anyone. She listened quietly, never seeking to interrupt me or punctuate my thoughts with nods or murmurs. Her silence was attentive and open and it asked nothing from me. My whole life I had been surrounded by those who had, implicitly and openly, with discretion and demand, asked much of me. My parents’ love ever manifested as an urging towards improvement: to be more. More prayerful, more contrite, more dutiful. God, too, was related to me only within a context of request. I was never enough as I was. My best self, the self that might be most loved, most accepted, was forever in front of me – a shadow self ahead of me on the path that, no matter how fast I ran, never melded with my person.
The few times I had spoken to Mama about the contradictions and impulses of my heart, my uncertainties, she had responded with directives on how I might abolish them. But Thea never drifted away from my conversation, her mind already formulating a remedy. She just listened. And so, on the ship, I told her everything. How I was afraid my mother did not love me as well as she might. That there was something wrong with me for not crying at Gottlob’s funeral. That I had a canker in my heart.
Thea’s response to this last secret was something that, even now, even as I lie here with the stars burning holes in the night, warms me. It was a moment of grace that I have held on to in everything that has followed. Even now, even after the great cataclysm, it sustains me.
‘Owe no one anything, only love one another: for she who loveth hath fulfilled the covenant.’
Never was scripture so beautifully rendered to my heart.
One night Thea and I were woken by a sudden thump from the foot of our berth. We had been sleeping in each other’s arms. We jumped apart.
A voice emerged from the dark. Hoarse. Afraid.
‘It’s burning.’
Someone was kneeling on the floor, leaning against our bunk.
‘Ottilie?’ Thea’s voice was husked.
In the ghost-light I saw she was right. It was Ottilie, her arms folded tight against her abdomen. Her nose was bleeding. ‘Fire, everywhere,’ she muttered. ‘It’s all burning down.’
‘What?’