His first decision was what wood to use. He tried roof shingles, but they were too thin; freshly cut wood was too green, the keys splitting as soon as they dried. The only spare planks we found were disintegrating in the long grass behind the cabin. When we picked them up they crumbled wetly, leaving behind a muddy negative and thin pink worms lying flaccid against the soil. In the end, my father prised a plank from one of the interior walls so that die Hütte’s insides were exposed—grey daub and smooth tree trunks. When I looked away, almost embarrassed, as if I were seeing something indecent, he promised me we would pack the gap later with moss and clay.
My father rose with the sun to carve the keys into shapes that would meet his exacting requirements. He was an obsessed perfectionist. He worked until dusk, when he could no longer see the chisel without danger of slicing something other than wood. We had brought with us one torch and four candles, which we kept on a shelf alongside the few stubs of wax we had found when we moved in. The torch must have been cheap or else the batteries had got wet, because it petered out after a week or so. Even though my father might have wanted to work all through the night, his rule was that candlelight was for emergencies only. When it got dark we went to bed.
He cut each white and black key to a template with the saw and worked at them with the chisel. He cursed our lack of sandpaper. On the table my father nailed two blocks of wood far enough apart to lock all the keys together in a row. From the plank, he cut a long strip of wood into a square piece of dowelling, which he tacked the length of the table between the blocks. Each key had a corresponding shallow groove cut in its underside at a quarter of its length so that when the key was placed in position, over the dowelling, it could be rocked backward and forward. He then had to weigh down the top end of each key so that when I pressed and released them they would return to rest with their front edges higher than their backs. The only things we could find in the cabin to use as potential weights were a handful of worthless coins we had arrived with, but there weren’t enough for eighty-eight keys. While he mulled over this final challenge, my father continued to work at the rectangles of wood, scraping and smoothing each key so they would sit packed in together but still be free enough to move without grating against their immediate neighbours. We found the solution for the weights at the bottom of the water buckets.
The one job I refused to help with was fetching water from the river. My father had tied a bucket to a tree which had tucked its roots around a slab of rock sticking out above the pool we had seen from the other side of the river. Every day he lowered the bucket down and drew the water up. I could never get close enough to the edge without the world spinning and my stomach churning like the white water, so that I had to turn away. He had tried to teach me to fish lower down the river, where we had emerged, but even the noise made my legs weak. After we had arrived, I never again asked him to teach me to swim. My task each day was to walk through the forest to check the animal traps and gather whatever edible plants I could find.
Once a day, my father staggered up the slope to die Hütte with a bucket in each hand—twice a day if we wanted to wash. He would set them down beside the stove and use a billycan to ladle small amounts into the saucepans. A thick sediment smelling of pondweed settled at the bottom of the buckets. And in the mud there were white and grey pebbles, which for centuries had rubbed against the river rocks until they were smooth. Within a week I had collected eighty-eight pebbles of a similar weight and size from the bottom of the buckets. Using the corner of the chisel, my father dug a hole in the top of every key and tapped a pebble into each one.
For the remaining days of the summer, my father worked on the piano on one side of the table and I learned to play on the other.
When the weather changed, the piano was finished. The long hot days and thundery showers had been replaced with mornings that smelled of autumn, and mist that hung about the river. Many of the ferns were curling and changing to the colour of straw. But we had no idea of the date.
The piano was clunky and crude, but I thought that maybe it was the most beautiful thing. Despite all the whittling, many of the keys stuck together and continual playing gave me blisters and splinters. Several times my father took it apart to shave off a sliver and pack it all together again. And yet I could press a key and hear the note it made; release it and the key would pivot back to a resting position and the sound would stop.
The creation of the piano had taken the summer and the best days of the autumn. We should have been gathering and storing food and wood for the winter and, too late, we discovered that music could not sustain us.
13
London, November 1985
“There’s a tennis court at the bottom,” said Oskar, pointing to the far end of the garden. “I wanted a swimming pool, but Mum said tennis would be better exercise.” He said “Mum” as if she were a woman I had just met. Perhaps he was right. I wondered what it had been like for him, having Ute to himself for eight years and not knowing his father or his sister—family he thought he might never meet or who might already be dead; strangers he would never bury. When Oskar heard I was alive, what had he wished for?
“Can you play tennis?” I asked.
Oskar, in contrast with Ute, was skinny and long-limbed. His shaggy hair hung over his Scout neckerchief—in the end he hadn’t changed out of his uniform when Ute had sent him upstairs.
“Only a knockabout,” he said, and smiled. Too young to be called handsome, he was sweet-looking, with a wide mouth that carried on in an upward curve even after the ends of his lips had finished. It wasn’t like mine—small and pursed, with a disapproving pout.
Oskar had at first ignored my tears over the broken bucket and had continued to pick up lumps of ice and smash them on the terrace so that splinters flew all around us. I had turned my face away from him, and when the choking heaves had subsided, Oskar had asked if I wanted his hanky. I took it from him, rather grey and certainly used, but I wiped my eyes and my streaming nose and put it in my pocket.
My brother didn’t seem cold, even though the day hadn’t yet seen any sun. In his coat and khaki shorts, he jumped about me, chattering, his breath misting. He twirled and threw his arms around while he pointed out a new birdbath and the pile of leaves where a hedgehog was hibernating. I wondered what he would say if I told him that Reuben had shown me that the best way to cook hedgehog was to bake it in a coat of clay.
I dug my hands deeper into my duffle-coat pockets and shrank my chin down into my scarf. The cold air came through my tights and under my dress. On the terrace, my brother suggested a tour of the garden—his garden. I resented that he didn’t acknowledge the fact that it had once been mine, that I had played in it, camped in it, before he was even born.
“There used to be a swing seat next to the house,” he said. “It was great fun. Me and my friend Marky made it go really high. But the cushions got left out in the rain and it stank and Mum had to throw it away.”
“The one with the hole in the awning?” I said, my words clipped.
Oskar sized me up from under his eyebrows, his chin tilted downward, creasing over his neckerchief.
“Was the material dirty white with large blue flowers?” I said. “Did it have a squeak that sounded like a duck laying an egg, and a frill around the bottom that made the backs of your legs itch?”
For a second he was confused, as though he was trying to work out how I knew so much about a seat that was his seat and had always been his seat, but a flush rose in his cheeks and I realized I had gone too far. We walked down onto the lawn, flanked by tidy borders, brown and crisp with winter plants.
“Can you still walk straight through to the cemetery at the bottom of the garden?” I asked, to make amends.
He didn’t answer, just carried on walking. All day the frost had stayed, riming every stalk, every leaf, every blade of grass. Oskar’s shoes left shallow prints across the lawn. I trod close behind him, matching his stride and placing my feet where his had be
en.
If I can fit inside every one of his footsteps, I said to myself, my brother and I will be friends.
I averted my eyes as we passed the tennis court, constructed on the patch of ground where once my father and I had pitched our tent and built our campfire. Instead I looked beyond it, where the brambles and thistles had been cleared and there was more lawn and a summer house. It seemed to take only a few moments to reach the bottom of the garden, whereas in my memory the walk down from the house to the cemetery took five minutes or more. A high chain-link fence now separated the lawn from the trees, but I recalled their outlines as soon as I set eyes on them, like the furniture and ornaments in the house—unremembered until seen once more, and then familiar. Ivy was creeping its way back into the garden, reclaiming old territory.
Oskar approached the wire as though it might open up and let him through, but instead he bent down, hooked his fingers in the holes, and pulled it upward. It lifted high enough to make a gap, just big enough for an eight-year-old boy, at least a skinny one, to crawl through.
“Mum doesn’t like me to go into the cemetery. She doesn’t let me go out alone,” Oskar said, when he was on the other side. He pushed up the fence and turned his head away from me when he spoke. “We drive a lot. She even takes me in the car to see Marky.”
We both looked back at the house, the white cube blending into a sky which threatened snow.
Oskar raised the fence higher, for me to crawl under, before the tension in the metal flicked the wire back into position. From the garden the trees had seemed like old friends, but as soon as I was amongst them they were full of menace and the air underneath was even colder. It took me a second or two to get my bearings, but Oskar must have come often without Ute knowing, because even in the dim light he found the narrow paths that wound around the graves without trouble. The undergrowth and ivy were denser than when I had been there last, the ground a green lake with treacherous rocks sticking out of it at obtuse angles. Even in the frost, the cemetery smelled of decaying vegetable matter. The ivy still clung to the trees and the graves, dripping like liquid plant from everything. Determined and persistent, it had wrapped its vines, many as thick as a wrist, around stone—breaking and lifting with its grip, so it seemed to be prising the lids from the tombs, to peek with its leafy eyes at the human remains inside.
I followed Oskar over undulating ground to one of the main paths. Slabs of fallen stone buried under years of leaf fall had created small mounds, while dips had formed where the underground world had shifted and settled. At the edges of the path, someone had been at work, hacking back the ivy, leaving a heap of greenery for composting or burning. They had revealed an angel, risen up out of the green waves which lapped at her plinth. Hairy tracks crawled over the folds of her drapery where the ivy had been ripped away, and her arms were raised in supplication, but they both ended in the stumps of her wrists.
We sat side by side on her bare feet. Below us the inscription read, Rosa Carlos, born 1842, died 1859. Lost to all but memory.
“Lucy Westenra was buried here,” I said, remembering one of my father’s stories.
“Who’s she?” asked Oskar.
“The girl from Dracula. She became a vampire and sucked the blood from children.”
“I’d drive a stake through her heart before she could do that to me.”
“Aren’t you frightened?”
“What of?”
“Being here on your own.”
“I’m not on my own,” he said.
And I looked up at the angel, her stone cheek merging into the sky, and wondered if he meant Rosa.
“You’re here,” he said, and I was suddenly, ridiculously, pleased. “Anyway, I like it in the cemetery, it’s peaceful. I brought Marky here once, but he threw a rock at an angel’s face and broke off her nose.”
“Have you ever climbed the Magnificent Tree?” I asked.
“Which magnificent tree?”
“It was over there, I think.” I waved my arm in the direction the path led. “Papa and I used to climb it.”
“I don’t think there is a kind of tree called a Magnificent Tree.”
“Yes there is,” I snapped.
We sat in silence for a while, looking out over the snaggle-toothed stones and crooked crosses.
“Did you come here then? With Dad?” It was the first time Oskar had acknowledged the man had existed.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Why did he have to go away?” The question burst out of him, surprising us both. His cheeks went red again and he picked at the lichen which grew across the stone toes like badly painted nail polish.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Marky says that Dad thought the world was going to end. He says Dad was crazy and ran away to join a cult in the woods. But the world didn’t end, did it?”
I almost smiled, but instead I said, “Marky doesn’t know anything.”
“Why didn’t he come back for me, or take me too?”
I could tell he had asked himself this question over and over.
“Why did you get to go and not me?”
“You weren’t even born. Maybe he didn’t know about you.” I shuffled my bottom on the cold stone to get more comfortable.
“Well, Mum could have gone with you too.”
“She was in Germany when we left. Anyway it was all a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“That’s not what Mum says.”
“What does she say?” I was interested, now that I might get information from Oskar that I wasn’t able to ask Ute about.
He continued to look down and scratch at the lichen with his dirty fingernails.
“Oskar?” I prompted him.
“She says Dad left a note, but she won’t show it to me until I’m old enough to understand. She says he wrote that he was sorry but he had been thinking for a while that he needed to go on a journey, and that he would always love me.”
“Note? What note?” I said, standing up.
“I don’t believe her. She’s always lying and forgetting what she’s told me. I know she’s only trying to make me feel better, and he probably didn’t write anything like that at all.”
“What note, Oskar?” I said again, speaking over him, my voice bouncing off the stones around us.
“I don’t know and I don’t care!” Oskar climbed onto the angel’s feet so he was taller than me.
“Where’s the note?” I demanded.
“I don’t know! None of it’s true anyway.” He jumped down from the plinth. “I wish it was Dad who had come back instead of you,” he said, and pushed past me, running back along the track into the trees.
“Oskar!” I called after him. At first I heard him tearing through the undergrowth, twigs cracking, but then he was gone and the cemetery was silent. Gradually, I became aware of the rustle of leaves, something falling from a tree, way off, and the frost cracking and re-forming. There was a scrabbling noise behind Rosa Carlos and a steady drip, drip, drip across the path from where I stood. My breath came in little puffs in front of my face. The cemetery bulged in toward me, the stones ballooning and flattening themselves again. The face of my father, which was still stuck under my breast, was scalding. Half crouching, I put my hand under my dress and took the circle of photographic paper out. I couldn’t look at him. With my left hand, I clawed at the earth beside Rosa Carlos. I could make only a minute pit in the frozen ground, but I placed his head in it, face up, and pressed the soil down on top of him.
14
It wasn’t until the piano was finished that my father looked up from his work and realized the autumn was almost over. One morning he set out with his rucksack to the forest of wintereyes to collect acorns. He was excited at the possibility of flour and described in great detail the flatbreads, porridge, and thick stews we would soon be eating. But when he returned he lay on the bed with his back to me and wouldn’t speak, even though I stopped playing and begged him to tell me what was wrong. Without
fully turning around he threw the rucksack across the room so that a handful of acorns flew out, pinging off the shelves and table and scattering over the floor.
“There are no acorns,” he said.
I gathered a few together. “There are. Look,” I said, holding out my hand, not understanding.
“Not enough to even make one dumpling,” he said.
“But where have they all gone?”
“The fucking squirrels got there first,” he said.
“We can eat the squirrels then,” I said, which made him laugh, but he wasn’t happy for long. As the weather changed his mood worsened. I still played the piano every day, but my father rarely joined in and instead of encouraging me he complained if I lingered on the stool in front of the table. He worried that the season had turned without us. He wrote detailed lists and calculations on the gun pellet boxes, flattening them out into fat crosses, and on both sides of the map—the only paper we had left in the cabin apart from the sheet music. He pressed down hard with the pen so his writing would be legible over the green valleys and pale mountains:
Increase the woodpile
Collect and dry mushrooms
Bulrush roots
Dried meat
Dried fish
More wood
Daub cabin
Check shingles
I woke in the night to the glow of a candle on the table and my father bent over the map, chewing the end of the pen, the creases in his forehead ploughed into furrows. I worried about what kind of emergency we must be facing.
“What is it, Papa?” I asked the halo of light.
“Winter’s coming,” he said tersely, even though it seemed to me that the sunny autumn was lasting forever. When I got back to sleep, I dreamed of two people frozen to death in their single bed, locked together in the shape of a double S. When the spring sunshine crept under the door, the bodies defrosted and melted. An unknown man came upon the cabin, hacking his way in with an axe through the stems of a thorny rose which bound the door shut. I saw his hand, rough and hairy, reach out to pull back the sleeping bags, revealing faceless pulp, like the slippery guts of fish. I woke sweating and terrified at the image and the feeling I was left with, but even worse was the realization a few seconds later that no man would ever fight his way into die Hütte to find our decomposing bodies; there was no one left in the world but the two of us.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 11