Papa looked up from his meal, wiping his beard with the back of his hand. He was silent for a long moment. ‘What about Hermine?’ He gently rapped his spoon on her nose.
‘It will be moth-eaten before she is ready for it.’
‘Not for yourself?’
Mama smoothed the wrinkles in the fabric. ‘No. Not this.’
I followed Mama to the Eichenwalds’ cabin and it was as if Thea was expecting her. The sacking cloth was drawn aside and Thea regarded her for a heavy moment. ‘Frau Nussbaum.’
‘Take this, Thea.’ My mother’s voice was clipped. ‘For your wedding.’
Thea was sombre. ‘I don’t know. Are you . . .?’
‘I’m sure,’ said Mama, handing her the material. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’
My mother and Thea stood there for a long moment.
‘Well then,’ said Mama, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I’d best be –’
‘I miss her terribly.’ Thea pulled the cloth close to her chest and folded her arms about it. ‘I hope you know that.’
Mama’s lips twitched.
‘I wish she were here. I think about her every day and I keep her in my prayers.’
‘Well. That is why I thought you might like the cloth.’
‘Yes. She told me you had brought it.’
Mama looked down at her empty hands.
‘Thank you,’ said Thea softly.
Mama stepped forwards and quickly, briskly, kissed Thea hard on the forehead, leaving a red mark. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, already turning away, the word thrown over her shoulder.
Thea unfolded the black cloth on her parents’ bed, smoothing the fabric out over the mattress. I watched her lay down upon it. Against the black of the fabric, she was golden.
‘Hanne.’
I drew nearer. She was so beautiful. Already I could imagine her in the black dress, myrtle leaves against the pale smoke of her hair.
‘I am to be married,’ she whispered.
It was the first time she had spoken to me since she had accepted Hans’s proposal.
I climbed onto the bed with her and placed my head next to hers. She turned towards me, our foreheads touching, our bodies mirrored. For one hallowed moment it was as it used to be, the two of us only, the entirety of the universe ending at the periphery of our curled limbs.
The banns were read at the following two services, and each time I declared that it was impossible. I loved Thea. We had already given ourselves to one another, had sealed that covenant, had made witnesses of trees. We have married ourselves, I told the congregation. Ask the forest. Ask the ship lumber. You’ll find our signatures in the bruised gills of mushrooms. In the salt air above the sea.
No one said anything. The ocean claimed me each time.
I woke here, where I sit now, in the bush, amongst the scrape of fallen stick and undergrowth. I placed my hands on trees so vast they seemed at once to encompass time itself and, standing under their certain weight, I wept for myself.
They were cragged and beautiful and defiant. You know nothing, they said, and they meant it kindly. They were not indifferent.
A few weeks before the wedding, Hans told the Eichenwalds that his father had agreed to slaughter a pig to ensure a decent feast for the congregation. ‘The farm is doing well. The days are cool enough now,’ Hans said to Friedrich and Anna Maria. ‘We’ve fasted one. We’re hoping for tomorrow afternoon, if it does not rain.’ He smiled at Thea. ‘Please come. All of you. You too, Anna Maria. Rosina complains at a lack of stepdaughters.’
I looked at once to Thea, whose face had taken on a pall.
‘Of course,’ Anna Maria replied. She smiled at Thea. ‘Bacon and Wurst and fresh bread and Sauergurken. Oh, it will almost be as it was back home.’
Hans grinned. ‘No more parrots.’
‘No more parrots! Oh, Friedrich, remember the bird with white feathers?’
‘Der Kakadu?’
‘It was like eating string.’
Friedrich gestured at Thea’s pale face. ‘You know, Hans, Thea doesn’t much like a Schlachtentag. Hasn’t got the stomach for it.’
Hans’s face fell.
‘It’s the squeal,’ Thea offered. ‘It’s –’
‘She’ll come.’ Anna Maria frowned at Thea. ‘Tell Rosina we’ll help, of course. Thank Elder Christian for his generosity – Thea doesn’t mean to be rude.’ She nudged her daughter. ‘Won’t be long before you two will have pigs of your own.’
I lay beside Thea that night, watching her as she stared up into the thatch, following the curve of her eyebrows, tender lines branching out from her eyes. I was trying to imagine her as an old woman, the wrinkled face and white hair.
We will see each other every day of our lives. We will sit next to each other in church.
Thea sighed. ‘Hanne?’
I’ll name my daughter for you.
I closed my eyes, heartsore.
‘Everything feels so wrong.’
‘A pig knows you have betrayed it,’ I murmured.
Her voice was a hot whisper in the dark. ‘It’s as though I don’t know who I am. There is no one here to remind me who I am.’
‘I love you, Thea,’ I whispered. ‘I know who you are.’
The next day, Elder Pasche greeted the Eichenwalds as they entered the yard, turning from where he was sharpening his knife. ‘That’s the one,’ he said, pointing the blade to a long-bristled fattening pig separated from its fellows. ‘Hans!’
Hans emerged from the house followed by Rosina. ‘Well then, are we ready?’ she asked.
Christian tested the blade on the hairs of his arm. ‘Ready,’ he muttered.
Rosina passed Anna Maria a whisk and motioned for Thea to come and take the pail by her feet.
Thea did not move. She had drawn away from the sty and looked waxen with dread.
‘Thea,’ Anna Maria said patiently.
‘I feel a little . . .’ Thea shook her head at her mother.
‘Pick it up,’ Anna Maria said.
Thea did so, all the while staring at the pig. A memory of her on the Kristi came back to me.
Hanne, talk to me. Sing to me. Tell me something.
I began to hum, then. I let my voice join the song coming to me from the ground – that old, chordal note of earth – and turned from Thea to the creature, whose own piggish sound was lifting off its back like steam. A body hymn to the warmth of hot-bellied brothers, earflap snuffle of mother nipple against wet snout. I hummed it all, and as I did, I felt a scattering. I felt a fluttering within myself. Everything around me blurred except the pig, which was now before me in exceptional clarity. I could see each bristle as it caught the sun, see the tiny pupils widen. The gleam on the snout. It was before me, iridescent, this pig now running, now fleeing. And as I felt myself fade into the air, the pig grew spectacular. I not only saw it, I heard it in a way I had never heard a pig. The hammer-heart of it, yes, but the blood-rushing too, and the gurgle of the empty stomach. I could hear the knocking of gristle and the clap of mud between toes and the air-suck of lungs taking breath. Frightened breaths. For I felt it then, the fear coursing through the pig. It was my own fear, too. It was ours. And suddenly, those small pupils were my own, too, and we saw mud and reaching hands, and felt our heat pushing out against the chill of autumn air.
I was the pig.
We were the pig.