“Papa?” I said, and kneeled beside him. Blood dripped from my face onto his. I pulled at his shoulder and he fell onto his back and I saw that the other half of his head was wrong, missing. I rolled him onto his side again and was pleased at how peaceful he looked. I put one of our straw pillows under his head to make him more comfortable and tucked my bedcovers over him up to his neck.
“He’s dead,” said Reuben, stepping forward from behind the door. The axe hung in his hand. He laid it down beside my father. There were smears of blood across the handle and Reuben’s face and shirt were splattered with it. “Let me look at you,” he said. He leaned forward over my father and tilted my chin.
I could feel fresh blood flowing when my head moved.
Reuben picked up a piece of clothing and pressed it to my temple. “I think he got some of your ear.”
“What now?” I asked for the third time that day.
I knew the words he would say before they came out of his mouth: “You have to come with me. You have to cross the river.”
24
London, November 1985
After lunch, on my way upstairs, I stood and read Ute’s framed newspaper review, still hanging in the hallway—Despite her young age, one can tell that Bischoff has lived with the music and its world for a long time; her passion flows from every note she plays—and I noticed for the first time that the review was of her performance of La Campanella, when she had met my father.
The review hung next to the central-heating thermostat. I turned it down, again. Ute had sent me up to my bedroom to get changed before Becky and Michael arrived. Instead, I spread my father’s lists across the bed, picking odd ones up which caught my eye, and rereading them. I got a notebook and a pen from my desk, and at the top of a blank page I wrote, Things I Have Missed. I followed the title with:
Butter and cheddar cheese
Salt
Apfelkuchen
Toothpaste
Socks
Getting to know my brother
Baths
Mirrors?
Becky
Nine Christmas dinners
Trifle
Boyfriends (and I crossed this out)
Omi
In my bedroom, the radiator gurgled as the central heating was turned up.
“Peggy?” Ute called from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you getting changed?” I sat amongst the pieces of paper and waited. I heard her climb the stairs, out of breath by the time she came into my room.
“Oh, Peggy, you haven’t even started,” she said, looking at what I was wearing. “Come on, they will be here soon, and you want to look nice. Don’t you?” She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and I started to gather up the lists scattered across the blanket.
“What are all these?” she said, picking up a list describing and calculating lengths and quantities of four-by-fours to build the bunk beds in the fallout shelter. A line formed between her eyes as she grasped what it was. “Oh my goodness, where did you find these? I thought that everything was gone out of the house.” She picked up another piece of paper with a list of underwear and other items of clothing.
I watched her reading them. I wanted her to know that it wasn’t going to be possible to just throw away all evidence that my father had existed, that it was never going to be that simple. Before I had time to stop her, Ute picked up the piece of paper on my lap: my own list. We were both silent while she read it.
“Oh, Peggy,” she said, “I am pleased, at least, that you don’t feel you missed out on boyfriends. There is plenty of time for that.”
She really didn’t have a clue, I thought, as I took my list from her and collected all of the others.
“Where are all the pictures of Papa?” I asked her. She looked taken aback and composed her answer before she spoke it.
“I threw them all away. Angela and I—Mrs. Cass and I—decided it would be for the best when I found out what had happened.”
I thought about the photograph she had missed, the one I had cut my father’s head from.
“Isn’t it odd for Oskar that he has no photographs of his father?”
She shrugged. “I think he understands.”
“What about the note? I know you didn’t get rid of that.” It came out sharper than I had intended.
“What note?”
“Oskar says that Papa left a note. Please don’t lie.”
“Peggy,” she said. “There’s something . . .”
“Where is it?” I cut in. “I want to read it.”
She sighed. Her hands were in her lap, clasped together. As she spoke she released them, and I could see red crescents where her nails had dug into her skin.
“You can read it,” she said with forced patience. “I will get it for you.”
She went to her bedroom and came back with a piece of paper which she handed to me. Ute was written in green pen on a folded square, which had been scored flat many times. My father had used graph paper torn from my maths exercise book. The staples had caught and ragged the sheet. I opened it and scanned it.
I think it’s better for everyone if I go now. I’m taking Peggy with me—you can keep the other one. That’s fair, don’t you think?
And my father’s signature, scrawled, as though he was in a hurry.
“This isn’t what you told Oskar. He thinks his father loved him. He’s been living with a fantasy that Papa would come back for him. Why did you lie?” I shook the paper in Ute’s face.
She gave the slightest movement of her head away from me. I read the note again, slower this time.
“The other one,” I said. “What did he mean, the other one?”
Ute opened her mouth to speak, but I carried on talking.
“Oskar! He meant Oskar, didn’t he? He knew you were pregnant and he didn’t want it. Is that why he left?” I could hear my voice rising as if I had stepped outside myself. “But why did I have to go with him?” The voice was a shriek. I stood up and ripped the note in half again and again. “You know he went mad in the forest? He tried to kill us both and there was nothing I could do. He said everyone was dead and I believed him.” My cheeks were burning and my head jutted forward. “He told me the world had gone, disappeared in a puff of smoke.” I threw the note into the air and pieces of graph paper flew about us.
Ute flapped her arms trying to catch me, to quiet me. “Peggy,” she kept saying, “Peggy.”
“Oskar’s right. It’s all lies. You should have stopped him. You should have been here!” I shouted at her like a devil.
She slapped me, hard, against one cheek. Instantly we were still; only the bits of paper fluttered. Bile rose in my throat.
“I’m going to be sick,” I said, clamping a hand over my mouth.
“The bathroom, quick.” Ute pulled me off the bed and out the door. We ran past Oskar, standing flat against the wall on the landing, listening. I saw his red cheeks and his hands held in fists as we rushed past him.
I no longer had long hair for Ute to stroke out of my eyes. A nurse had shaved it off when I was in the hospital. I hadn’t understood what he had said, although his tone had been reassuring, but as he forced the electric trimmers between my scalp and my hair, tears had formed in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. My hair had come off in a single matted ball. The nurse had carried it like a dead cat, his hands in see-through gloves, and he had put it in the yellow bin in the corner of my room. Since then my hair had begun to grow back, and it now lay short and flat across my scalp. Ute said I reminded her of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.
In the bathroom I hung my head over the toilet while she stroked my forehead.
“There, there,” she cooed until we heard the doorbell ring.
25
In die Hütte, Reuben wrapped the wound on my head with my dungarees, tying them on with cloth torn from Ute’s camel dress. He washed his face with the water from the one bucket which hadn’t been overturned and helped me search for my missing shoe. We looked everywhe
re: upending the broken beds, emptying the chest, shifting the stove, even hunting around outside, but we couldn’t find it. I sat in the doorway and cried—my shoe was lost again.
“You need shoes. You’ll have to take your father’s,” said Reuben. He leaned against the shingles outside, puffing on a cigarette made from another page of his book. I saw the words all my born days go up in smoke. He seemed a different man from the one I had done such private things with earlier.
“But he needs them,” I said, shading my eyes and squinting up at Reuben.
“He doesn’t. He’s dead.”
I went back inside. It was already warm in the cabin, stuffy. My father was still resting, although he looked paler. I stroked his cheek and pushed back his hair. His head had a halo of blood spread out over his pillow.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I said, lifting the cover from his feet. His boots were tattered, laced with homemade twine. I undid them and prised them off. His feet were bony and white, with black hairs sprouting from the toes; a dirty crust had collected between them and the nails were thick and yellow. His feet made me want to weep. I put on his boots.
“Get some stuff together,” Reuben called from outside. “Clothes, food, the knife, whatever you think you’ll need.”
I got down my rucksack from the back of the door, much repaired but still usable, and kicked through the debris that was scattered across the floor, trying to sort the useful objects from the broken ones. I was light-headed, watching a girl inside a cabin pick up one blood-splattered item after another and decide without any logic what to take and what to leave behind. I found one of the hairless toothbrushes and put it in my bag; the broken comb went in too. I remembered the headless body of Phyllis under the loose board, but the stove now lay across it and I couldn’t shove the metal box aside on my own; the effort made my head swim. My anorak was on the floor behind the door. I went to put it on but dropped it when I saw it was speckled with bloody lumps and unidentifiable scraps. The knife, the axe, and the spyglass lay on the floor, close to my father, as though they had been arranged to make packing easier. I touched the axe with the tip of my father’s boot but couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. I looked at the knife too, but I thought my father might need it, so I chose the spyglass, put it in my bag, and walked out into the sunshine.
Reuben and I sat on the rock above the river. I couldn’t look over the edge, even though I knew the water below us would be calm. My head throbbed; the day was too hot, the sun too bright. I didn’t need to tell him I couldn’t do it.
“Shall I go first or second?” he said, standing up, stretching and yawning. “First!” he shouted, and before I knew what he was doing, he had leaped off, one minute his legs pedalling in mid-air in front of me, and the next, all of him gone.
There was a splash, and I scrambled back from the drop as if his sudden fall might pull me with him. I lay on my stomach and peered down into the water. Reuben’s head, his hair flat and dark, was already bobbing downstream as he was swept toward the opposite bank. I got the spyglass out of the rucksack, and after a bit of searching and focusing on rocks, I watched his shoulders rise up out of the water. He waded through it, churning the muddy bottom, and when he reached the bank he shook his head like a dog, his hair spraying drops of water as it spun outward. He was framed in the spyglass’s circular window; I saw him smile at me, raise one hand, perhaps in a wave, perhaps beckoning, and then he stepped amongst the trees.
I looked over the top of the spyglass to see if I could follow his progress through the bushes, but there was no movement on the opposite bank. “Reuben!” I called; no reply came. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t waited. Panic rose in my chest; I needed him here to tell me that I must go after him. I sat up, hugging my knees and rocking, with my eyes squeezed shut. If I rocked for long enough, when I opened them I would be able to stand and walk back through the trees into the clearing and hear the regular beat of the axe as my father chopped the wood, and I would call out to him, “Squirrel for dinner!” And tomorrow afternoon, I would meet Reuben in the rock forest. He would be lounging against a boulder, smoking a cigarette, and he would tell me that the cuckoo lays its eggs in the afternoon.
When I stopped rocking and opened my eyes, nothing had changed. Still holding the balaclava and spyglass, I stood up and stepped off the rock, into the void. I hit the water sideways, with a vicious slap and a stinging pain that shocked me as much as the cold. The fall took me to the bottom of the river, and the momentum spun me so I wasn’t sure which way was up. I would have been happy to stay down there, kept below by my father’s heavy boots, washing back and forth with the pebbles and the fish, but the current snagged me, popped my head out like a cork, coughing and choking, and deposited me on the opposite bank where Reuben had climbed out. It wasn’t until I had wrung out the balaclava that I realized I had jumped without the rucksack. And the river had taken the spyglass from my hand. I imagined it spinning downstream and dropping into the Great Divide. The wound on my ear had opened again, and from under the dungarees a trickle of watery blood flowed down my neck, but the river had washed the red flowers from my nightshirt. I turned and pushed my way into the trees.
All the rest of that day I traipsed through the forest on the other side of the river. Once or twice, I thought I saw a tree or a path I recognized from when I had been there years before, until I saw the same tree again and understood I had gone in a circle. The land on Reuben’s side of the river was steeper, and more crowded with trees and tangled bushes than mine. I walked through it, calling out for him and searching for signs that he had gone before me, but there were no broken branches, no footprints, nothing. In the late afternoon, I was even brave enough to climb a tree to try to spy the smoke from his campfire, but the branches became too thin to bear my weight and I had to return to the ground. My head throbbed with every step, and my skin was scratched and sore from the thickets that tried to trap me. I lumbered uphill through a copse of wintereyes, all the time thinking that beyond the next tree Reuben would be sitting on a log, his kettle whistling and his boots steaming in front of the fire. He would kiss me, laugh, and say, “What took you so long?”
I walked until the light left the sky and it became too dark to see my feet. A hook of tree root sent me sprawling; I put my hands out just in time to prevent my head hitting the ground. As soon as I sat down, my body began to shiver and the thought of the bedcovers and anorak discarded on the floor of the cabin tormented me. I tried to pull the balaclava over my head, but the dungarees still tied there made it too difficult and stabs of pain shot down the side of my face, so instead I rubbed my legs with the damp wool. I eased off my father’s boots, my toenails tender to touch, and tucked my feet inside the balaclava and tried to curl up on the lumpy earth. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering, so I sat up again and rested my forehead on my knees. It was impossible to sleep. I hummed a few phrases from La Campanella, but they didn’t distract me. I was alert to every noise the trees and hidden animals made, jumping when an owl hooted, wondering what was roaming in the midnight forest, but ever hopeful it was Reuben coming to find me. After a few hours I must have dropped off, because I saw my father emerging from the river with the sodden bedcovers draped around his shoulders. He was talking to me but his language was unrecognizable, garbled, his mouth distorted as if it moved underwater. He turned and I saw that the corner of his head was still missing. I woke with a start, in the middle of the forest.
It was the longest night, but when dawn broke, it was with a slow lightening of the sky; there was no sun. When the plants around me grew more distinct, I put my father’s boots back on and climbed higher, calling again for Reuben. I climbed with the idea that, near the top, I would have a view over the trees to see the column of smoke from his fire. I didn’t think about what was on the other side; I was scared of the swirling blackness of the Great Divide. Near the top, just as on my side of the river, the trees thinned and the ground became stonier, but here there was no towering cliff
. I kept going, until I came to bare rock, carried on up it, and looked backward over the valley. An autumn mist hung along the river and its banks. There was a gap amongst the trees which must have been our clearing, but the roof of die Hütte was hidden from me and there was no smoke. I turned away, and on my hands and knees crawled forward with my eyes closed, terrified of being sucked over. The boots sent showers of stones skittering down the hillside as I scrabbled for purchase. My heart hammering, I opened my eyes, my head already spinning with anticipated vertigo. In front of me, I saw another valley falling away. Wintereyes and beech and more mist stretched down to a distant hill, and beyond that, another. What I saw was beautiful.
For a long time I didn’t understand. I pivoted around to check I hadn’t become disoriented and was looking back at the way I had come, but even after I had turned several times the land beyond the ridge was still there. I threw a stone into it, expecting ripples, as though it were a pool reflecting my world back to me, but the stone bounced down the rocks and into the undergrowth. My father had been mistaken. The Great Divide wasn’t an infinite blackness but a mirror image of our world. I put down one foot, the way I used to test the ice on the boggy shore near the river in winter. The ground held under my weight. One final time, I looked over my shoulder for smoke, a sign of Reuben, but there was nothing, so clutching the balaclava to my chest, I went forward into the new land.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 21