I climbed down and sat in the sun, revelling in my curling hair, its tangles down my back. I felt wayward and mutinous. Around me sailors were busy. I paid them no attention. My whole body thrummed. My eyes stung from the rain and sea water that had harassed them, my skin prickled, and my hands ached from where I had clung to the rope. I did not feel invisible. I felt as though I had fought something and won. As though I had wrestled out a blessing.
I did not braid my hair again that day, but let it remain loose and salt-filled. It was the first stirring of my resistance. I remained in my shift, too, even as I returned below deck. What need of modesty had I, who was seen by no one? I felt ungoverned for the first time in my life.
In the bow, I found Anna Maria and Friedrich telling Thea about my funeral: what hymns were sung, the prayers offered, the sunshine of the morning. Anna Maria told her that services were not the same without my voice. That my family was being strong and making the best of things. Friedrich offered a prayer of such deeply felt gratitude that I shuddered to hear it. I watched him press his fingers together to stop them from shaking as He praised God for keeping their only child with them, as he extolled the Lord with gulping breaths for the great blessing of her recovery.
I sat by Thea’s side as she watched him pray. She was dry-eyed, mouth twisting as though she wanted to interrupt him. When he finished, his amen falling from his mouth like a shrugged-off weight, he reached for Thea’s hands and held them to his forehead.
‘But Hanne did not recover,’ Thea said. Her voice was a snapped twig. ‘Hanne has not been kept.’
Friedrich looked up, eyes red-rimmed. ‘No,’ he replied softly. ‘The Lord has taken her to be with Him.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Thea said.
‘She died in faith.’
‘How can you be sure she has gone at all?’
I rested my head against Thea’s.
‘What do you mean?’ her father asked.
Thea opened her mouth, then closed it again. I noticed Anna Maria frown.
‘I saw them tip her body into the sea, Thea,’ Friedrich said. ‘Let’s pray for her.’
I did not want to hear any prayers for the keeping of my soul, not even from Thea’s lips. I climbed out past Friedrich and went into the main quarters. Many of the passengers were trying to sop up the water that had fallen below during the storm, wringing out rags in buckets and hanging sodden clothes to dry on lines strung between the useless upper bunks. I ducked under dripping breeches and blouses and found Mama lying in her berth, Hermine propped up between her legs.
‘Hello, Mama,’ I said. I sat by her side. Touched her beautiful dark hair.
She closed her eyes.
Her stillness frightened me.
‘Buh.’ Hermine stared at me.
I shifted to the side. Her pupils followed. ‘Hermine?’
My sister smiled and shoved her fingers in her mouth, drooling.
I touched her cheek. She swatted me away, then toppled sideways, head colliding with the post. Mama sprang up as Hermine opened her mouth to cry.
‘Shall I take her?’ Elize Geschke pulled aside the cloth between the berths as Hermine began to bawl in earnest. ‘We’ll go for a little walk.’ She hoisted Hermine up over the dividing plank and sat my sister on her lap. ‘Look, Hermine! What is this? A biscuit! Reinhardt, show her the little poppet you made.’
The cloth dropped back down and Mama sank onto the mattress.
‘Go to sleep, Mama,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch over you.’
I stroked my mother’s hair until she fell asleep that afternoon. I hoped she might feel something tender, even if she could not know its source. Mama had held me at my moment of birth and at my hour of suffering, and I understood that there was a part of my mother that still lay in the soil of Kay, and that now a part of her would remain in the ocean.
‘She is with God,’ Papa said to Mama later, deep in the night. I saw Mama’s dark eyes staring at the ruined upper berth, lips pressing together over and over.
‘Johanne?’
‘Mm?’
‘She is dwelling now in that place where there is no more pain or sorrow, and she shall be the Lord’s handmaiden and under His protection.’
‘Tell me that is true, Heinrich.’
‘It is true.’
‘Tell me she is with God.’
‘She dwells in glory. She is at rest.’
My mother murmured assent.
The knowledge that my father spoke a lie and was so believing of his own falsehood tore at something deep within my heart. I was not with God. I was with them. Part of me hoped that Papa’s canted eye would light upon me and see my form as a contour in the air. A shifting of space. I followed him as he hauled nightsoil to the upper deck, and when he stood at the ship’s rail, empty bucket at his feet, looking up at the churning masses of clouds, I threw my arms around his middle. He gave no sign he sensed me there.
‘Papa?’
I reached up to angle his eye to my face. I could feel his beard under my palms, could feel his jaw working. There was his blind eye, the glisten between eyelid and lash. Part of me wondered if I might see my own image reflected in this pupil, angel-blessed, seer of Heaven and all unearthly things.
‘Look at me. Notice me.’ I waited for recognition, and when none came I wondered if his ruined eye truly did see Heaven, and what he had thought when I failed to appear in that holy orchard after my death. Had he lied to my mother about my inhabiting it? Or had he always lied to me?
His holy eye is simply afflicted, I realised, as he stepped through me and moved off towards the hatchway with the empty bucket. He sees nothing but the desires of his own mind.
I never saw Mama cry for me. She had not cried over Gottlob either, and I had thought then that her lack of tears spoke to a ruthless stoicism. I had resented that strength and thought her heart hard. But as I watched her quietly drag herself through the hours, I saw that my mother was possessed by loss. Her blood wailed with it. Her milk dried up and the young, red-cheeked woman from Klemzig became Hermine’s wet nurse.
Mama understood me to be gone from her and, in her suffering, I saw evidence of such love. I was awed by its enormity. She had loved me my whole life and she loved me still, but she had no place to put that love and she suffered under its weight.
If only I had known this in my living years.
such a thing happened
The storm shifted something within me. It was an untethering. If my first christening had, with still and sanctified water, welcomed me into the light of the Lord, the ocean that night admitted me into His shadow. I was the baptised dead. If my brief and wondrous life was gone from me, and if all I had now was the freedom to go where I pleased, to watch whom I wanted, then I would do so.
Days passed and I grew wilder with each one. Unbound from the religion of my father, I lived by my own nature. I explored the ship as I would never have been able to in life. I watched Christian and Rosina complain in whispers and remove food from each other’s teeth. I noticed Emile Pfeiffer give her daughter the better bread and Beate Fr?hlich weep in private at the lice. I examined the long, white sideburns of Samuel Radtke’s father, placed my fingertip inside one of Eleonore Volkmann’s mammoth nostrils and overheard sailors’ vulgarities, which I repeated to myself in delight. Most days I climbed the rigging. Wind in my hair, I gave names to the water. I introduced myself to the sky.