I untied the rabbit from the rucksack and tried to arrange it on its tummy with the legs tucked underneath so that it might have been nibbling the grass. But the rabbit’s head kept lolling forward at an awkward angle—its neck clearly broken. I laid it on its side with the hind legs stretched out, so that it could have been springing over a grassy mound, and tilted its head upward; the ears were still alert and soft, even in death. Only the eyes had changed—blinded by a thick fog.
The trees whispered and watched me while I arranged the rabbit. I thought about the trout and how easily and swiftly my father had changed it; with one blow to the head he had brought flapping, slippery nature under his control. Glad that the rabbit couldn’t look at me, I kneeled beside it and lifted the end of the axe shaft in both hands. “Sorry, little Kaninchen,” I whispered. I hefted the axe into the air, where it wobbled, deciding whether to tip me over backward, but my shoulders tilted and the axe took over, swinging itself forward with terrifying violence—taking me with it. I shut my eyes; the axe was in charge. With a life of its own, it cleaved the air and I felt the crunch as steel met flesh and bone, and it buried its blade into the earth with the downward force. It pulled me in its wake, my forehead slamming into the handle.
“No!” my father shouted from the cabin, and I heard him racing down toward me.
I opened my eyes and up close saw a mangle of blood, fur, and bone where the rabbit’s neck had been. The beautiful ears were severed, halved, and pulped by the blade so that the animal had bloody copies of my balaclava’s furry tips. My father yanked the axe from my hands.
“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?” He gripped the handle with the head hanging down, hopping around me and the rabbit and the fire. “That could have been your fingers! Your hand! Why can’t I leave you alone for just a minute?”
I stayed on the ground, trying to make myself as small as possible. He came toward me, but I flinched and he must have realized he still had the bloody axe in his hand because he flung it away into the grass.
“I wanted to make us dinner.” My voice was thin. I touched my forehead and could feel an egg-shaped lump already forming under the skin where I had hit the handle.
“Can’t you do what normal girls do? Go and play. Go!” He pointed at the cabin and shoved my rucksack into my arms. “And take that bloody dress off.”
I untied the belt and shrugged off the dress, leaving it in a pile on the grass. I ran crying up the slope and, without any hesitation, into die Hütte, and squeezed into a corner between the metal box—now recognizably a stove—and the bird-pooped shelves, my arms around my knees. I pushed my hair out of my face, repeating the action again and again until my crying hiccups subsided. My back was pressed against the wall, and it felt good to have something solid behind me after weeks of living under canvas. I opened my rucksack, pulled out Phyllis, and cradled her into my neck.
“There, there,” I crooned. “Ssh, Liebchen, don’t cry,” I said, brushing the hair out of her face too. She hopped around me on the dirty floor and onto the shelves, then jumped along them, scraping up the white droppings with her pretend shoes. I tucked her in behind the stove, and my fingers touched something in the wood of the cabin wall, under the bottom shelf. When I crouched to look I saw that a word had been carved there, gouged into the wood with the point of a knife. I traced it with my finger: “Reuben.”
11
During our first few days at die Hütte, every sunny afternoon blended into each warm evening. I spent my time playing outside with Phyllis, washing all the small things we had found—metal plates, a few pieces of cutlery, wooden bowls—in buckets of water my father hauled up from the river. Although he made me a shoe from a hessian bag with a carved shingle for the sole, I mostly ran around barefoot, and naked apart from my pants. In the evenings we rolled plants into rope and told stories around the campfire. At odd times I would remember with a jolt that Ute was dead, and Phyllis and I would crawl inside the tent to cuddle, until she stopped crying.
On the third day of camping outside die Hütte, my father climbed onto the roof with the mended hammer and the nails, and worked on repairing the shingles. At first he made me stand inside and direct him to where I could see sunlight sneaking through, but after a while he didn’t seem to need my help and I wandered outside into the sunshine.
“Make yourself useful,” my father called, his words mangled by the nails he held between his lips. “Take the traps and catch us some dinner.”
I still hadn’t been into the forest on my own; the thought made me nervous and excited, and I hurried to put on my clothes and my odd shoes, and to collect the nooses. On the edge of the clearing I hesitated, then took a few steps forward into the trees. Gnarled and mossy roots spread like giants’ fingers amongst ferns that came up to my chest. There were as many trunks fallen and rotting as there were upright trees, fighting for the patches of green daylight that filtered down through the leaves. The forest smelled earthy; moist, like the cemetery. I pushed my way through the plants until I came to a massive trunk which must have come down years before, its decaying wood spongy and dark. I stepped up onto it, and the rotten bark gave way, tipping me off so that I stumbled, only just catching myself before I fell. A shiver ran through the trees as though they were laughing, and I had to fight the urge to turn and bolt. At my feet was a thick branch, newly fallen, and I picked it up to whack the trunk with it and beat a path through the ferns and damp plants until the way became clearer and the ground peaty. Looking back at where I had come from, I glimpsed the ferns closing around something quick and low and grey that ran through the undergrowth.
“Wolf!” a voice hissed inside my head. My heart thumped in my throat, but I stood my ground. The forest was testing me. I growled, deep in the back of my throat, and hunkered down with my branch held out, ready to spring forward and fight, but the ferns didn’t twitch again, so I sat on the forest floor and then lay back, spreadeagled. The cool, damp earth penetrated my clothes and chilled my skin. I let the trees encircle and lean over me while I looked up through the canopy as if I were staring through a fisheye lens. They checked me for one of their own and turned me upside down so that the faraway blue sky, hidden behind their leaves, became the land and I floated free.
When the feeling had faded, I rolled over onto my stomach, my eyes in line with the mossy forest floor. Spread out in front of me, for as far as I could see, was a forest of giant chanterelles. At ground level they were transformed into exotic trees with egg-yolk-yellow gills, towering over me. I stuffed them in my pockets, cupped them in a hammock made from the bottom of my T-shirt, and ran back to die Hütte.
My father and I walked all of the land on our side of the river. Our southern boundary was the water, and our northern, the slope of the mountain. East of the cabin was a forest of deciduous trees.
“Oak trees, or Wintereichen,” said my father. “The acorn is one of the most nutritionally complete foods, the only food in this forest that contains carbohydrates, protein, and fats. What is the acorn?”
“The acorn is the only food that contains carbohydrates, protein, and fats,” I said.
“And what’s the name of the tree?”
“Wintereye,” I said.
The wintereyes, the beech, and the occasional hoary yew spread downhill toward the river, until a horseshoe of tall pines, then scrubby bushes, filled the gap between the mostly deciduous trees and the bank. Through this forest was the gill—a deep channel of mossy rocks which had long ago tumbled down the mountain and settled on top of a gurgling stream that we could hear but couldn’t see. We didn’t cross it; not far beyond, the mountain rose in crumbling scree, which looked impossible to climb. To the west of the cabin was a smaller area of forest, also bounded by the river and the mountain. We named this the rock forest, because while the east side had the gill to funnel the boulders that the mountain threw down, on the other, huge rocks had slammed into the soft earth and lodged there, half buried, amongst the trees. Every day,
I walked the same route, checking our nooses for their grisly harvest. If they were empty, there would often be a rabbit in a snare, more mushrooms, leaves and roots, edible berries, fish my father caught, the provisions we had carried with us. We were never hungry that summer.
Each morning since we had arrived, my father had cut notches in die Hütte’s door frame, but when he got to sixteen he decided to stop.
“We’re not going to live by somebody else’s rules of hours and minutes any more,” he said. “When to get up, when to go to church, when to go to work.”
I couldn’t remember my father ever going to church, or even to work.
“Dates only make us aware of how numbered our days are, how much closer to death we are for each one we cross off. From now on, Punzel, we’re going to live by the sun and the seasons.” He picked me up and spun me around, laughing. “Our days will be endless.”
With my father’s final notch, time stopped for us on the twentieth of August, 1976.
My father showed me how to hone the knife against a stone to keep it sharp; how to put a nick in the fur behind a rabbit’s head and pull off his jacket so that he was left with just his socks on; how to pull his grey insides down and out, but save the heart, liver, and kidneys; and how to put him on a spit to roast. In the forest, we used every part of the animals we killed—saving the bones for needles, trying to form thread from the guts, and making poor attempts at curing the skins. We were busy, too busy for me to question why our fortnight’s holiday was slipping into three weeks and then a month.
After a week, my father said we could move out of the tent and into die Hütte. He had pulled out the bramble, patched the holes in the roof, screwed the door back on straight, and got the stove working. He stood outside the cabin and cheered as smoke appeared from the metal chimney that poked through the shingles. I jumped up and down and clapped too, without knowing why it was so exciting. The sun shone from a sky so shiny it hurt my eyes to look up into it, while the rising wind whipped the smoke away.
“There’s still lots to do, but tonight we sleep in die Hütte,” my father announced with his chest sticking out and hands on his hips. “We should celebrate,” he said, and slapped me on the back as if I had mended the stove. “What shall we do, Punzel?” He looked at me, laughing.
“Celebrate!” I said, and laughed too, although I wasn’t sure at what.
“Let’s make a kite. We can fly it from the top ledge.” He shaded his eyes and looked high above the cabin. “Fetch me the string; I’ll cut some sticks.”
I ran into die Hütte and my father went to the woods.
By the time I had found the ball of home-made cord, which was stuck on a peg behind the door, my father was down by the tent, kneeling with his back to me, working away with the knife. I ran to him, holding the ball in the air: “Papa, I found it!” But here my memory slows, like watching an old cine film, jerky, with all the colours too bright. My father spoke to the camera but no words came out. He was in front of the tent, slicing it with the knife. Stabbing and jabbing at it, slitting it open as if he were preparing a carcass. He looked over his shoulder at me, smiling and chattering, but all I could see was the gaping hole in the tent’s side. And then the sound cut back in, as though I had shaken my ears free of water, and I heard him say, “The wind will be strong up the mountain.” He made a sawing action with the blade, so that a flap of canvas came loose. Watching him made me double over, holding my stomach. “We can make the tail from these little bits of canvas,” he said, busy working. “God, this would be so much easier with scissors. There must be scissors somewhere in die Hütte.”
I sat on the ground, tears falling. It was too late to stop him.
“How will we get home, Papa, without a tent?” I said to his back. He turned around and looked at me, confused for a second, but then understanding.
“We are home, Punzel,” he said.
It took him an hour or so to make the kite. It was a blue diamond—patchy, where the sun had scrubbed away at the colour, and the length of my father’s outstretched arms. He tied pieces of string to three of the four corners, and where these met he attached the ball of cord. We didn’t talk while my father finished it, but I could tell he was trying to be happy.
“Come on. Let’s go.” We hadn’t been up the mountain before, but where the land rose behind the little house, when I squinted, I could see a slab of bald rock, high above the treeline. I dragged behind him while he followed an animal track through the ferns—a path no wider than my shingle-bag shoe—a groove in the layer of last year’s fallen leaves. From down in the river valley, I heard the wind coming up through the wintereyes. Like approaching rain, it raced toward us, shaking the canopy, an infectious palsy, passing the shake from one tree to the next, until it was over our heads, fracturing the light on the forest floor. Then it was gone, racing ahead up the mountain. Eventually the peaty ground became rock, the trees thinned, and we had to scramble on our hands and knees. My father had tied the kite to his back so he could use both hands to pull himself upward. As I followed behind him the diamond of blue canvas mocked me, the awful knowledge staring me in the face while I climbed that we wouldn’t ever be going home.
The rock platform was much bigger than it had appeared to be from below, where the foreshortening of the view up the mountain changed it to a narrow ledge. In reality, it stretched back to a near vertical cliff face a way behind us, while from the edge we could see down over the tops of the trees to our cabin and the patch of green surrounding it. From that high vantage point, the limits of our land were obvious: die Hütte sat toward the back of its small clearing, bordered below by the pines and the river, glinting in the sunshine. To our right the mountain curved around the rock forest until it met the water. And to our left was the forest we had climbed through, but beyond that, the mountain again, sloping down to the water in a tumble of giant boulders, as if long ago half the mountain had slipped off for a swim which had lasted centuries. Die Hütte was held in the mountain’s embrace: two arms wrapped around us, pulling us back from the river like an anxious mother, while we hid in a crease in her skirts—an insignificant wrinkle in a mountain range that spread as far as the horizon. Beyond the river the wooded land rose again to another ridge, and after that I could see only blue sky.
My father had been right: the wind was strong. It tugged at our bodies and whipped my hair into a frenzy, wrapping it around my head and flinging strands of it into my mouth. It sucked the breath from me and made my heart race, even though inside I was still angry. My father stood with his arms out at the edge of the slab and shouted, a long tailing “Weeeeaaaay” that the updraught caught and carried away.
He untied the kite from his back and immediately the wind wanted it. The tail uncurled, flicking. My father checked the tightness of the knot and, holding the ball of cord in his fist, he let the kite go. Instantly it was airborne. Demanding more and more string, it jerked at the line in frustration. Even I had to admit it was a beautiful thing. It soared over the wintereyes, becoming a blue bird in a blue sky. It took all the string my father fed it, until one loop remained, tied around his palm. We both stared up; our necks craned back until they ached and our eyes blurred.
“Do you want to have a go?” he said.
I nodded, and he put the loop over my fingers and closed them around it.
“Hold tight,” he said, and smiled. The kite tugged at me, nagging for attention. My father was looking up as I straightened my fingers and let the kite jerk the string from my hand. The blue diamond got even smaller, the string sailing off below it. For a moment my father was confused; he looked down at my empty hand and back up at the string.
“No!” he shouted into the wind. And while I watched the kite fly away over the river and the trees, toward home, I felt an instant of real and absolute happiness.
That night, our first in the cabin, the weather broke and my father’s roof-mending skills were put to the test. The rain pounded on our little house in the woods, d
ripping through the holes in the shingles he had missed. He had tacked a square of tent canvas over the empty window, so when the first lightning bolt flashed, the stove, the table, and the wooden walls all flared an electric blue. The wind pulled and pushed at the canvas and shrieked through the gaps around the door. We lay curled together in our sleeping bags on the single bed, a mattress made from ferns beneath us, and while the thunder rolled over the forest in angry waves, my father told me stories. He whispered them into my hair as he held me, but much later I wondered whether the stories and what happened in the morning were my punishment for letting go of the kite.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a beautiful girl called Punzel, who lived in the forest with her papa. They had a little house, with a little bed and stove to keep them warm; in fact they had everything they could have ever wished for. Punzel knitted her long hair into two plaits, which she curled into seashells, over her ears.”
I thought of Becky sitting in the front row in our classroom, not a hair out of place.
“And with her coiled plaits she could hear all sorts of things: the deer and the rabbits chattering in the forest, her father calling to her from a long way off, and all the people of the world shouting at once in their different languages. When her hair was curled around her ears, Punzel could understand every one of them.”
“What were they saying?” I whispered back as the room flashed. I clung to my father, afraid that the wind would lift off the roof above our heads and whip up all the things in the cabin so that my father and I would be whisked around and around with the bed and the stove and the tool chest, until we were sucked up and away.
“Well, mostly she heard the people of the world fighting with each other.” The thunder rumbled right on cue. “They couldn’t live together happily. They lied to each other, and when people do that, in the end, the world they have built will always come tumbling down. Punzel hated hearing the people of the world lie and argue. But one day she woke to find that the angry planet was silent; all she could hear was the sound of her father chopping wood for the stove and the animals asking her to come out to play. And Punzel was the happiest girl in the world.”
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 9