“How was your morning at Scouts?” she asked, but he was too excited to hear or to notice the spoon on offer. Instead Oskar wheeled his arms about, demonstrating his friend Henry Mann having an epileptic fit—“a real-life epi”—while clutching a half-empty beer bottle the boy had found in a flower bed during litter-picking duty. Henry, his limbs twitching, had sprayed the beer over himself and everyone who had been crowding around him. Oskar’s yogurt tilted inside its pot, close to slopping over the edge. Ute grabbed it from him as he flung himself onto the kitchen floor and did an impression of Henry—blond hair flopping, kicking his legs and jerking his body across the tiles. Ute told him to get up right away and stop being so silly, but I stood by the kettle, looking down at him, laughing.
His limbs went still and Oskar said to me, “Your teeth are really rotten.”
I hid my mouth behind my hand.
“Oskar!” Ute said.
“It’s true,” he said. “And she has half an ear.” I pulled at the hair on the side of my head. Every morning I spent an hour or so in front of the mirror, wetting and combing it down, hoping it had grown longer overnight.
“Get up,” Ute said. “Get up. Go at once to change those muddy clothes.”
When Oskar had gone upstairs, Ute put the kettle on and I sat at the table.
“The dentist, he will mend your teeth, Peggy,” she said from behind me. “And I promise your hair will grow. You are still my beautiful girl.” She laid her hand on the top of my head.
I tucked my chin into my chest, but I let her hand stay.
The kitchen was hot even though, outside the window, a rime of frost lay on the garden. Ute placed a cup of tea in front of me and instinctively I curled my hands around it.
“You haven’t forgotten that the police are telephoning today?” she asked. “And Michael and your friend Becky are coming this afternoon?”
I thought “friend” was an odd word to use about someone I hadn’t seen for nine years.
Ute sat down opposite me, cradling her own cup. “But maybe it is all too much for one day. Perhaps I should cancel,” she continued, almost to herself.
“The police?” I said, and gave a short laugh. She was about to say more when we both looked up at Oskar standing in the doorway. In his hands was a box, which he held out like a gift. His eyes were round and his brows raised. I wondered if he had been practising an apologetic face in his bedroom mirror.
“I thought we could all do a jigsaw together,” he said. He came forward to put the box on the table. “I found it in the cellar.” The picture was an illustration of a thatched cottage in a wooded glade. A rabbit sat in the foreground beside a meandering stream, and a haze of bluebells spread under trees dotted with brilliant green. Ute made noises that suggested she didn’t think it an appropriate image, but we had nothing better to do, so we tipped the pieces out and sorted through them.
“These trees are wintereyes,” I said, turning over each piece so that colour showed on every one.
“Wintereichen,” said Ute. She picked up a scrap of green, peered at it intently, and put it face down, in a different place.
“They’re oak trees,” said Oskar, grouping all the blues together.
The three of us raised our heads at the same time and smiled at one another. I kept my lips together.
“Can you speak German?” I asked Oskar, looking down.
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” he said in a very poor accent. “No, Mum couldn’t be bothered to teach me.” He teased her in a way that I had never been able to.
“This is not the reason,” said Ute with a pout. “There are always so many other things to be getting on with.”
“What about the piano? Did she teach you to play the piano?” I asked.
“She says it’s her instrument.”
I smiled at that, behind my hand. “She said the same to me.”
“It is only because I do not think the Bösendorfer is suitable for children to be learning on,” she said. “You do not learn to drive in a Porsche. It is the same thing, exact.”
“It was nice to hear you play,” I said. I found a piece of the edge where the stream flowed out of the picture, and locked it into another fragment of silver. “We had a piece of piano music with us,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “The Liszt—I searched for it much later and found it was gone. It was a very old copy, from Germany.”
“I’m sorry. There was a fire. It got burned.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t worry about the music now.”
We both stopped doing the jigsaw and looked at each other, while Oskar continued to match the pieces.
“It was the music I played when your father and I met—the piece he turned the pages for.”
Oskar stopped concentrating on the jigsaw too and watched us, as if hoping for a revelation, but neither Ute nor I said more. The Liszt played itself in my head, fluttering and rippling, and something unravelled inside me; a stitch I had once believed was firm came loose—a tiny thread waiting to be pulled.
We gave up on the puzzle after that, and Ute started making lunch and an Apfelkuchen for the afternoon visitors. Oskar wanted to go into the garden to stamp on frozen puddles, so he put his coat back on.
“It is too cold, Oskar, to be outside. It is the coldest November in London since time began,” Ute said, already busy with the flour.
“Records,” I said.
Ute scowled at me. “What?” she asked.
“Since records began,” I said, but she still frowned. I caught Oskar’s eye and we both laughed. “I think I’ll go outside too,” I said, getting my coat and scarf from the hall.
The cold fresh air was a relief after the stuffy house. Our breath came out in clouds and the bricks on the terrace glistened, waiting to slip up an unwary foot. White dust lay along the top of the box hedging. Oskar jabbed the heel of his boot into the ice that had formed in the bottom of a flowerpot saucer, then tried to pack the dust into a snowball, but it fell in crumbs from his hands. I longed for a chilly blanket of real snow tucked around the naked and shivering wintereyes.
Oskar rapped his knuckles on the thick ice which had risen like a soufflé out of a bucket hanging on a nail beside the back door. I recognized it; it was the bucket my father and I had used, with a tap attached to the bottom so we could brush our teeth with running water. In the frozen garden the tap dripped an icicle.
“Would madam like something to drink?” Oskar laughed and turned the handle, twisting it hard; his mouth twisting too, with the effort. The tap snapped off. And for the first time since I had come home I cried—for the music, for Reuben, but most of all for the waste of a bucket.
10
“Die Hütte,” said my father as though he were starting a prayer.
I could say nothing. At that moment, with just one shoe, my hair still lank from the water, I knew, even more than when my father had smashed the fish head, or told me Ute was dead, that something had gone wrong with our holiday. I stared at the cabin with my mouth hanging open. In my imagination it had been a gingerbread house with roses around the door, a veranda with a rocking chair, and smoke puffing from the chimney. Exactly who was there to tend the roses and light the stove hadn’t been clear, but even seeing Oliver Hannington would have been better than the tumbledown witch’s house that stood before us.
Its walls were hung with wooden shingles, and where they were missing, dark gaps grimaced like a mouth with knocked-out teeth. The front door hung open at an angle, and the single window had warped and popped its glass. The only thing to remind me of home was the bramble that scrambled across the roof and dropped in loops through the gaps in the shingles that were nailed there too. Searching for light, the bramble had reached the window and now stuck its blind tendrils out, beckoning us to join it inside.
Saplings sprouted unchecked against the walls, so it appeared as if die Hütte, ashamed of its dishevelled appearance, was trying, and failing, to hide behind them. I half expected a trail
of breadcrumbs to lead off into the trees that pressed in from both sides.
“Die Hütte,” my father said again. He took off his rucksack, dropped it, and walked toward the cabin. I followed him up the slope, wading through the grass.
Up close, the cabin seemed even more dilapidated. The wooden door frame was spongy where I leaned against it; the hinges had rusted and the bottom one fallen away. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the interior darkness, illuminated by shafts of light from the holes in the roof. The stink, an animal smell, musty and rank, like a dog’s damp bed, hit me before I could make out any proper shapes. My father had already pushed his way inside and was sifting through the mess, kicking at the broken things that might have once been furniture, all made from the same rough timber as the inside walls. With each item he found—a stool with two legs, a rusty spade, a broom with a few twigs clinging to the end—he cursed under his breath. In the middle of the room a table leaned drunkenly with one leg bent beneath it. My father pulled it straight, so the surface became horizontal, gave it a shake to check its stability, and started loading it with things from the floor: the prongs of a garden fork, a kettle without a lid, pans, heaps of dirty cloth which fell apart as soon as he lifted them, and other unidentifiable pieces of metal and wood which were strewn around. I glanced behind me, down the slope to the trees, worrying that maybe a bear had made this mess, but the line of dark trunks stared back without giving anything away. Inside the cabin, the wall to my right had been splattered with what looked like icing, stuck with feathers. It had dripped over the shelves, coating a metal box which was raised off the ground on four small feet. My father picked up a wooden bowl from the floor and plonked it on the table.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and, “fuck, fucking liar. It must be ten years since anyone’s been here,” he said to himself more than me. “Humans, anyway.”
I didn’t want to go in; the smell scratched at the back of my throat. I stayed in the doorway, watching my father frowning at every broken implement he found. He picked up pieces of pipe that appeared to have dropped out of a hole in the roof. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his long hair. A bit of the white icing stuck above his ear.
“How the hell did they manage to get this all the way up here and over the Fluss?” my father said, giving the box a kick with his foot.
“Where will we sleep?” I said.
My father looked around as if he had forgotten I was there. His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t.
“If I can get this going, we’ll be as warm as toast,” he said. He picked up another piece of metal pipe and tried to slot the two together. I knew he was pretending to be happy.
“I don’t like it. It smells.”
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
The Railway Children and their house with the three chimneys came back to me, and how the children had been frightened when they had first arrived. Perhaps I should try being brave. “It’s only the rats,” I said to my father in a northern accent. He looked at me as though I were peculiar.
“Out of the way, Punzel.” He squeezed past me and pulled the table into the middle of the room. He tested it again and gingerly put one knee and then the other onto it. Nudging all his found objects out of the way, he stood up. His head was just higher than the three beams which ran crossways below the roof. He stretched on the tips of his toes and craned his neck. “Damn,” he said, running his hand over the beam closest to him so that a shower of white flakes came down, making me cough. He jumped off the table and pulled it to the other end of the cabin, climbed up again, and examined the other two beams. Dust swirled in shafts of light.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He got down and did his pretend smile again. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he said, sitting down on something that might have been a bed, which leaned against the opposite wall to the shelves. He bounced once or twice, and something cracked and gave way beneath him. He got to his feet without comment and stamped on the floorboards.
“There should be a root cellar under here somewhere,” he said. “And the roof is going to need work.” Using a rag that was crusted into a stiff block, he grasped one of the loops of bramble hanging from the ceiling and gave it a tug. It resisted. My father carried on moving things around, pushing junk with his feet, picking up objects, examining them, and putting them on the table. “Where are the damn jerrycans? He said there were jerrycans.”
I backed out, into the long grass, as my father dragged the table toward the door before realizing it was too big to fit through.
“Must have made it inside,” I heard him mutter.
“It’s only the rats,” I said again, but this time he didn’t even look at me. I walked back down the slope. The thick air weighed heavy on the top of my head as I sat on my father’s rucksack and stared at die Hütte. It looked back with a piteous face but was perhaps pleased that it now had company. The land rose steeply behind it; wooded on the lower slopes, then a few trees clinging to rocks until, craning my head backward, I saw sheer cliff and, beyond that, sky, the colour of a bruise. Far behind me, if I concentrated, I could hear the river’s never-ending rumble. Either side of where I sat in a small clearing were tangled bushes, which gave way to dense trees. I was aware of them watching me, shoving against one another to get a better look, but when I whipped my head around, as if I were trying to catch them out in a game of What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf, they were still.
I sat for a long time, my chin in my hands, gazing at my father working and sorting. When he came outside, he sang snatches of opera, changing the words, singing about living in the open air and what fun we were going to have. I scowled at him, refusing to smile. Just outside the door, he made a pile of usable objects: three buckets, an axe, a fire poker. Another mound, of broken items, grew faster. When he went back inside, the singing stopped and instead he grunted and swore as he worked. I wondered whether, if he couldn’t see me, he thought I wasn’t there. I stumped back up to the open doorway and stood on the threshold.
“My knees hurt and I’m hungry,” I said into the gloom. The hut was clearer now; I could see the floor, and the narrow bed had been emptied so that its wire mesh, which had lain flat under the debris, had sprung back on itself. I didn’t see how we would be able to sleep, curled up like dry leaves.
My father didn’t stop. He had found a large chest and was taking out tools from inside it, one at a time: the head of a hammer, dislocated from its handle, a saw with missing teeth, a rusty file, a paper bag of nails. As though he had discovered a box full of treasure, he examined each item, looking at it closely and placing it with care on the floor beside him.
“Papa, I’m hungry,” I said again.
“What?” he said, still not looking up.
“I’m hungry.” This time quieter.
He carried on working.
I turned and went down to where we had dropped our bags. The rabbit was still tied to my father’s rucksack. It needed to be skinned and cooked. At the edge of the clearing where the bushes and weeds started, I pulled up tufts of hairy thatch and collected twigs and larger sticks, every so often lifting my head and daring myself to glare at the forest. Back at the rucksacks, I searched through my father’s, pulling out packets of dried beans, his coat, and two of Ute’s winter dresses. I dropped them quickly, as if at any moment she might discover me at her open wardrobe, fingering her clothes with my sticky hands, but then I held one of them up to my face, inhaled comfort and security, and put the dress over my head. Ute had called this one her camel dress, and it was scratchy around the neck like I imagined camel hair might be. The bottom of the dress pooled on the ground, even when I tied the belt as tight as it would go, but I liked the feel of it against my legs. I dug through my father’s rucksack until I found his char-cloth tin, and the flint and steel, and then tugged at the long grass to make a clear patch for the fire, but it clung to the earth and ripped through my fingers; so, holding up the dress, I trampled the s
talks, flattening a small area. My father would have made a stone circle for the fire to burn in, but there were no stones.
Red welts had risen on my wrists from the rope, and the backward and forward motion of the steel and flint made me wince, but I was able to produce sparks with just a few strikes, and I thought how proud my father would be that I could light a fire without using any of our emergency matches. The dry kindling caught quicker than I had expected, the flames gobbling up everything I fed them. The smoke hung heavy above the fire and drifted off toward the river, away from die Hütte.
Once the fire was going well, I dug into my father’s rucksack again and found his skinning knife in a side pocket, still in its leather sheath. I wasn’t supposed to take it out—it was too sharp and dangerous for little girls—but, clumsy from the dress, I carried the knife up to the cabin in both hands, my wary eye on it, and stood in the doorway again.
“Papa, can I use the knife?”
“Not now, Punzel,” he said, without turning around. He was chipping the white stuff off the metal box with a spade. I stepped back outside. On top of the pile of salvageable items was an axe. I considered it while putting the skinning knife in the pocket of my dungarees. The axe was long-handled and heavy-headed and, grasping it in two hands, I pulled it from the heap. Its shaft was polished from years of sweat and oily hands. I ran my thumb along the pitted edge of the blade without any idea of what the action meant. Attempting to skin the rabbit with a forbidden knife would get me into trouble, but my father had never warned me about using an axe. Holding it near the head for balance, I carried it through the clearing and laid it beside the fire. The grass smouldered in places; I stamped the patches out with my one shoe.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 8