I could not move. I sank back on my heels, aware of Flügel shepherding everyone out into the soft morning light. His robes brushed past me. I closed my eyes and waited until silence descended and the church was finally empty. Then I laid down in the aisle.
‘Dear Lord, into your hands I commit my soul.’
No summons upon my spirit.
I looked up at the celestial body painted on the strung bedsheet above me.
No heavenly host. Only a long-limbed spider scurrying along, worrying the stretch of stars with frantic silhouette.
I left.
I did not keep the same direction. The sun was at once above me, now dawning to my right, now setting in the same place. Days and nights passed and though I kept moving – compulsively, urged on by some sense that I must place as much distance as possible between myself and Thea – I dwelled almost wholly within myself. I woke some nights and saw that the moon had changed and realised that it had waxed bold since its husking light the previous evening, and then I understood that I had forgotten the rhythm of days and they had bled by unnoticed. There was no handbell rung by Elder Pasche or Pastor Flügel to mark the time of day. No devotional services to begin the week. I felt neither chill nor sun, hunger nor thirst. My mind ran to a different measure; it forgot the steady turning of the earth.
I saw things. I saw the two Tiersmen kissing in their cabin. The cave of ochre and the shore that took the Ramindjeri woman home. I saw things that sickened me and aged me and made me weary of ongoing, but I continued. I didn’t know what else to do.
I thought of Thea and bled into trees. I did not care if they fell. I became birds so that I might explode with song and fill hollow bones with longing, and woke in sunshine, their feather-light bodies in my fingers. I crawled into a dingo for the satisfaction of blood on my tongue, when blood was all there was to meet my grief: holy beat of marsupial heart crunching into silence beneath my teeth. I blacked out in iron-rich ecstasies of woe and hunger, woke back into this world with blood on my chin and ears furred. I stroked them at night till they faded and I became once again myself, unbeating heart, unbreathing lungs. Just shadow quickening with love and memory of pale head bending to me, lips pressing her seal in the molten wax of my being.
Distance and time affected nothing upon my heart.
Years passed. I believed I had seen her for the last time. I thought our story was done.
And then. And then.
THE
THIRD
DAY
THEN
incarnations
Thea, in all incarnations, wherever my soul has resided, I have loved you, am loving you, will love you. If the earth one day burns out its charge, you will find me in the ash. If the sea dries, find me in its sand. Fingers forever writing your name in ash, in sand, over and over in a love-patterned wasteland.
tributary
It is nearly dawn now. The hour of the first birds and their summoning of light and warmth. I feel the night leaving over the edge of the world, like a tablecloth slipping to the ground.
I am nearly finished. This will be the third morning I have seen the sun rise in the east. Here it comes. It rises so golden the world seems an altar to its glory. Here it comes.
My voice is held by the wind. Let me write my story on the air, and when it rains, let it pool upon the earth so that the valley may drink of it. Let this testament return to soil. Bones in the water. Voice on the land.
When I am gone, these things will remain.
My thoughts circled Thea, always.
But one evening as I lay on a slab of rock in stony high country, feeling the warmth of the day within it, my mind saw her face and my ears heard her voice in such a way that I sat up. I had spent so much time committing her to memory, and now memory unmade me. In my mind I saw again her lips, the curve of her chin, the sun on her eyelashes, fringing her gaze with light. The evening sky became the looming softness of pines.
‘Hanne.’
I heard her. My skin prickled.
‘Ersurgant mortui, et ad me veniunt.’ Her voice, again. I felt her leaning above me, eyes moving upon me, and when I reached into the dark to touch her face, I felt fire.
Thea, alight, my flame swimming in the dark. Calling me. Summoning me.
The warmth of the stone deepened and grew warmer, until it was so hot I had to stand.
‘Hanne!’ Her voice was there again, but this time it carried distance. Thea was calling me from some place far away. It was not in my mind, it was not imagined. I could hear my name thrown again and again into the air, miles away, but it reached me. I heard her.
I did not imagine it. It was not the work of a broken heart. She was calling me.
And so I left to find her.
I walked all night, following the sound of my name. I didn’t know where I was headed, only that I must keep going. Dawn rose red and violent; the sky was on fire. I was compelled. The day widened into a glory of sunlight. And then I heard children’s voices calling in German and, looking up, saw that I stood at the upper shelf of a valley at once strange and familiar to me.
It took me some moments to assure myself that I had returned to Heiligendorf. It had changed since I had left it, and the realisation was like a blow to the heart. I had not understood just how much time had passed; I had fallen out of pace with the steady footfall of the world.
The slopes surrounding the village had been cleared of remaining bushland in my time of absence, the wheat crops extended. As I walked down into the cluster of houses, I saw that most had been replaced or improved beyond recognition. Thatch was now straw, not kangaroo grass, and I could see none of that bronze grass anywhere, nor the yellow flowers of the yam daisies I remembered from that first summer. Every available space had been given over to farming and pasture for sheep and cattle. Houses had been built right to the road to allow more space for vegetable gardens; orchards were now in full blossom behind. All had outbuildings of silvered red gum slab with haylofts, horse tack and wagons, hand ploughs and harrows beneath. Piles of manure beside pig sties. There were squat chimneys on pitched roofs, barns made of sapling rail, outdoor bake ovens.
They have recreated Kay, I thought. All this way and they have disfigured the land back into Prussia.
The only marked difference came from the gum trees still dotting the settlement. Yet these were fewer than I remembered, and I found myself unsure of exactly where I was without their old, familiar bearings. Adding to my sense of disorientation were the animals everywhere, the noise of them loud and unrelenting. The milking cows were more than I could count, and as the children herded them past me, their voices sweet with laughter, I could hear a background chorus of triumphant crowing, goose gabble against the higher sweetness of singing magpies.
The afternoon was full of spring haze. Everything growing was young green but the song of the place was different. Muted, somehow. Only the red gums and the occasional untouched acacia chanted deeper, older notes. Then the sound of hammer on anvil rang out and spoiled it all.