My father was singing. I blinked into the hymn and saw that I was upon the open deck of the Kristi, surrounded by a standing solemnity of passengers. Voices rose. Around me, familiar faces, singing.
I opened my mouth, but before words could meet air, I glanced down and saw that my hands were resting on a body, sailcloth sewn to the chin so that people might say a last farewell.
It was my own face.
You are dreaming, I told myself. This is not possible.
Someone had combed my hair with water. I touched it and felt that it was damp.
This is a dream. You will wake up.
But I did not wake up.
The lips upon the pale face were ajar. I placed a fingertip upon them and was frightened to feel them so cold and ungiving when the hand I extended was alive. I ran my fingers across my own mouth and felt that my skin was warm and soft. I did not understand how I could be standing over my own body when I still inhabited it, familiar and living.
Shock kept me still. I was afraid to do more. I noticed the thread hanging from the last stitch in the sailcloth, the needle at its end, glinting in the sun. Waiting for the end of the hymn.
I did not understand why, knowing it all for a dream, I did not wake up.
I am here, I thought. I am still here.
The hymn faded. A sob interrupted the pause and I turned and saw Magdalena Radtke crying, eyes sunken with tears and her arm entwined with my mother’s.
Relief swept through me.
‘Mama!’ I walked to her, threw my arms around her neck and waited for her to return my embrace.
Nothing.
I stepped back.
Her eyes did not shift to my own.
I pressed my forehead against hers, and I could feel the hair escaping from her bonnet against my skin, but she was looking beyond me at the sailor folding my face into the cloth.
‘No, Mama,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. I’m here. Look at me!’ My fingers stroked her cheeks. I tried to meet her eyes. ‘Look at me!’
She was still, as though a great weight were balanced upon her shoulders and, if she moved, it would topple and crush her.
It was only when the sailor threaded his last stitch through the nose that she turned away. A stitch to make sure of insensibility. Embroidery for the dead who die at sea.
I was afraid and heartsore. I did not understand what was happening.
A nightmare, I thought. It is only a nightmare.
The sailor nodded at my father. Papa placed his heavy hands upon the shroud. Then Matthias – my brother! – came forwards from the men standing shoulder to shoulder and was held steady as he bent to the body. Tears were slipping down his face, and he was letting them fall. I knew my brother. I knew he was ashamed of crying. I recognised those tears as the same he shed for Gottlob, silent and angry. They dripped from his nose and chin as Papa gripped my brother’s shoulders and lifted him upright. Matthias broke down. My father gripped the back of his neck, steadied him with a small shake. He stopped crying.
And then, my mother. Arms by her sides. Stone-faced and pale as milk.
Mama stood over the shroud and did not cry.
My father lowered his mouth to her ear; his holy eye slunk sideways to the waiting ocean. He murmured.
Mama shook her head.
Papa nodded at the sailors and they tipped my likeness into the sea. Everyone flinched, waiting for a splash that did not come, that was not heard. I stood on the deck, staring at the place where the shroud had been. My mouth slowly filled with sea water. I spat it out upon the dry boards of the deck and saw that it did not mark them. I fell to my knees. The ocean was pouring through my hair without a drop hitting the wood beneath me. On all fours, I felt myself sink through a cold so complete and encompassing it awed me. I felt the hard corners of bricks at my ankles, felt them drag me down as my arms lifted in weightlessness. Sediment gathered under my tongue.
I vomited silt onto the deck of the Kristi as people dispersed about me. I was crying and my tears were the Atlantic, and no one saw me, no one saw that I was drowning on deck. I looked up, eyes blurred with salt water, and saw Eleonore Volkmann returning to the hatchway, holding Hermine. I grabbed at her ankle but she moved past me. She moved through me. I heard my sister cry, and I said her name, and it came out as a small silver fish. I watched it wriggle upon the deck, unregarded by all.
I blacked out. I disappeared from myself. And when I woke, I was tucked between two barrels of herrings. I could smell spoiled fish and I saw that the barrels had been opened and that the salted herrings within had deteriorated, the flesh coming away from the bones.
Several families were standing in the thick air arguing with each other, hands over their mouths against the stench. The doctor stood between them. I waited by the opened barrels for long enough to understand that some were demanding their rations of herrings, while others were determined to keep them for cooler temperatures. Dr Meissner had allowed another barrel to be opened. The herrings were spoiled, and those who had wanted the herrings earlier were red-faced with anger.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I want to wake up.’
No one heard me. I recognised Gottfried Fr?hlich and stepped closer to him as he reached into the barrel, picked out a fragment of fish and flung it at the feet of a sunken-cheeked man from Tschicherzig.
‘Herr Fr?hlich?’
Spittle flecked his chin as he shouted at the doctor. ‘You are a curse upon us!’
‘Herr Fr?hlich!’
I reached out and touched him. He was in his shirtsleeves, had rolled them back to his elbows, and I could feel the wiry hair damp upon his forearm. I recoiled, expecting him to turn in disapproval, but Herr Fr?hlich continued shouting, and when the doctor reached for his shoulder to calm him, he threw him off and strode to the hatchway.
‘Herr Fr?hlich, please. Please listen to me.’
But I was nothing to him and he did not hear me.
I followed him down the hatchway, my eyes adjusting to the ghost-light of steerage. It was more or less as I remembered it, but there was a greater sense of people having made the best of things. Washing was strung up between the beams. Children played on the floor as men stepped over them, carrying water and kindling for the kitchens.
Herr Fr?hlich stormed off to his bunk and I stood, unsure of everything, by the foot of the hatch. What had happened? Was I still ill?
Go back to bed, I told myself. Either you are wandering in a fever and hallucinating, or you are in a nightmare, dreaming that you have died. Go back to bed. Go back to Thea. She is unwell and she needs you. You said you would not leave her.
I walked to the bow, reaching out a hand to push the curtain aside. I saw my hand grasp it. I saw my hand move it, but I also saw in the same moment that the cloth did not move.
It is delirium, I told myself.