Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (14 page)

“I really want to try, Papa,” I said, attempting to sound eager but still examining the notes and the green writing. I spread the fingers of my left hand as wide as I could and placed them on the table beside the pages.

“Like this,” my father said, leaning over me and stretching my fingers even wider, to place them on imaginary keys. “Hang on,” he said, and fetched the pen, which hung by a piece of string from a nail. Shooing my hands away, he drew piano keys—fifty-two large and thirty-six small—along the edge of the table. The lines wiggled where the pen nib caught in the grain of the wood, and the keys tapered toward the low notes. Later, we tried colouring in the black keys with charcoal from the fire, but although it made the table look more like a piano, the soot coated my fingers and smudged across the white keys until they were all a uniform grey and we had to wash the table and start over again.

We moved the cups of tea out of the way and sat side by side on the stools.

“It’s going to take a lot of practise, Punzel. Are you sure about this?”

I knew it was a warning he thought he ought to give, rather than a challenge he wanted me to back down from. There was an enthusiasm bubbling inside him, like he hadn’t had since he started work on the fallout shelter. My father always needed to have a project.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Maybe we should start with scales first, or at least the names of the notes.” My father took my right hand
and touched my thumb on one of the large keys in the centre of the table. “This is middle C.” He sang the note, a long, strong “laa.” “What’s this?”

“Middle C,” I said, singing it with him.

“C, D, E,” he sang, his hand moving rightward. He tucked his thumb under and continued, “F, G, A, B, C,” then rolled his hand back down again.

By the end of the morning, I could play and sing the C-major scale, up and down the table, my fingers rolling in a jerky crab across the wood. He chose one of the long sticks propped in the corner by the stove, ready for snapping into kindling, and used it as a metronome, tapping out the rhythm on the wooden floor while he paced from bed to stove and back again. We practised until my fingertips were sore from the friction against the table, and until hunger made us stop and we realized it was the middle of the afternoon and none of our jobs had been done.

Every day I practised, starting with scales and arpeggios with both hands until my wrists seemed thicker and the tendons on the backs of my hands stood proud. Eventually, when the leaves outside die Hütte showed a tinge of yellow, my father said I was ready to start playing “
La Campanella
.”

“Begin with the most difficult part,” he said, hovering in the same way that had made Ute snap at me
whenever I had hung around her as she played in London. He leaned over the piano and put his hands on the keys, playing a bar or two and humming.

“Papa!
I’m
meant to be playing, not you.”

Reluctantly he went back to binding more sticks onto the twig broom while I flicked through the music and returned to the first page.

“Don’t start at the beginning,” he said, standing up again and coming over. He plucked the music out of my hands. “Every time you sit down at the keyboard, you’ll want to play the bit you know the best and that part will get the most practise, so you should always start a piece of music with the most difficult section.” He flicked through the booklet and stopped at page nine, where a run of notes formed the steady upward slope of a mountain, reached a peak, and fell away to a series of small hills. He propped the pages in front of two saucepans to keep them upright. The music slipped and he moved it up again, tutting. “I need to make a music stand.”

“Papa, it’s fine. Stop fussing.” I elbowed him away.

“Here’s the pen,” he said, handing it to me. “This is your music now, you must add to your mother’s annotations.”

I put my fingers on the keys, waiting, nervous. I thought about the beautiful music that had flowed from Ute’s hands and how, when she had played, everyone
stopped to listen. I remembered a line from a review that had been framed and hung in the hall of our London home: “Ute Bischoff turns the music in on itself with the gentlest of touches.” When I was younger I had thought it meant that Ute sat at her piano with a sheet of music, folding the dots and the sticks inward with dexterity and precision, scoring creases until the page was a delicate piece of origami sitting in the palm of her hand. Taking hold of two corners, she pulled them in opposite directions so the sheet blossomed into a paper flower.

“How will I know if I’m doing it right, if I can’t hear the music?” I said.

“Beethoven was already deaf by the time he was my age,” said my father. My face must have shown that I wasn’t sure I believed him. “Really,” he insisted. “But he still played and composed.”

“But I’m not Beethoven,” I whined.

“Just hear the notes inside your head and watch your fingers—you’ll know when they go wrong.”

“But I need to read the music at the same time.” I pressed a silent chord with my left hand.

“You’ll work it out.” I could hear his impatience building, but when I glanced around, he had turned away to take the broom between his knees and carry on with his work.

My right hand started in the foothills, white and black notes rolling over each other as it climbed. And while my hand climbed, I sang. Sharps and naturals flowing under my fingers and out of my mouth. The need to breathe was frustrating. I had to gulp air even when there was no pause in the music. When my fingers didn’t match my voice, or my voice was too fast for my fingers, I started the run over again. I came to understand Ute’s green notes—when to be steady and which fingers she had used for the most difficult sections. I liked to think they were messages written for me to find, in the middle of a forest on a piano that made no sound.

When I played, my father would sometimes sing the bass line while I was the bell, or the bird; or one of us sang the treble clef with the other joining in on the high notes to create the chords. By page six, the bird was joined by a cat, and the fluttering became more desperate. The bird circled higher and higher, trying to escape the open maw that followed its flurries at the window. When the bird tired and swooped too low, the cat jumped, feathers were lost, and I despaired for the creature. In the final refrain, as if sounding an alarm call, the bird began to fight back. The animal I had taken for a sparrow or a wren became a fiercer creature, showing its talons and curved beak so that fur flew as well as feathers. By the time we reached
the closing bars of the music the window was smashed, one of the animals had gone, and the other was dead, but whether it was the cat or the bird, I could never be sure.

La Campanella
was the first thing in my head when I woke in the mornings and it was the song I collected kindling to, the tune I found I was singing without realizing when I checked the traps, and what I hummed while I stuffed handfuls of wood strawberries into my mouth when they should have been going into my basket—a mouthful of pips and a sharp burst of bitter forest.

When my father realized I wasn’t going to stop, that every day I would play without him having to remind me, that already music was as much a part of me as breathing, he decided it was time to make keys that moved. As the summer turned, my father drew his design on the inside covers of the Liszt: measurements, materials, and equipment. We had no idea that the making of the piano was likely to kill us.

My father planned the piano without hammers or pedals, strings or a soundboard. It had only keys, and the sound it made was the sound we made ourselves. Even once he was happy with the design, making it wasn’t simple: the tools he had found in the chest were blunt and rusty, and most of them were too large for making
piano keys. Still he went at it in a frenzy of creation. He forgot to bring up water from the river or to chop wood for the stove. He barely stopped to eat, and I had to drag myself away from the pen-drawn keyboard to go into the forest to check the traps and pick plants and berries so that we had food.

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.