Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (19 page)

In the lighter evenings my father worked with the rabbit and squirrel skins to make me a pair of moccasins. They were warm and dry, but it took him many goes to get the curing process right. We no longer noticed the smell of our bodies, the unwashed stink of our clothes, or the reek of our hair, but the rotting-animal odour of the first few pairs of skin shoes my father made was truly disgusting. At night I often left them outside die Hütte and fell asleep thinking of the leaping cat on the back
of my missing shoe, jumping off on its own dangerous journey toward the Great Divide.

My father and I settled into a routine: rising at daybreak; an hour or two of work—chopping wood, collecting kindling; breakfast; an hour of piano; my father’s trek to the river and back up for fresh water; gathering food and eating it if we were successful; an hour or two of free time; more work and food and piano; and when the sun set we’d get ready for bed. The rhythm of our days cocooned me, reassured and comforted me. I slipped into it without thought, so that the life we lived—in an isolated cabin on a crust of land, with the rest of the world simply wiped away, like a damp cloth passed across a chalked blackboard—became my unquestioned normality.

My father created a vegetable garden in front of the cabin, carrying bucketfuls of the rich forest soil and digging it into the earth. As soon as the ground was warm enough, we planted the seeds and the seed potatoes, in neat rows. Every morning my father asked for rain so that he wouldn’t need to make so many trips down to the river, and every evening I asked if the vegetables were big enough to eat yet. We fought a constant battle with the birds and the rabbits and deer, which were drawn to the young green shoots of our first plants. In the following years, my father built a fence around the garden and
we made complicated devices, involving trip wire and stones which fell into tin cups, to scare the animals away from our precious crops.

In my free time I continued to map the forest and the mountains. I explored every spot; there wasn’t a tree that I hadn’t stroked or stood beneath, gazing up into its canopy and making myself dizzy with the sky passing by. Like a big cat in a zoo, I paced out my territory in the half-hour’s walk from the riverbank to the sides of the mountain that protected die Hütte in the curve of its hand. I sat on boulders, looking down on our cabin or across the river to the edge of the world, my stomach churning at the thought of the black void that lay over the hill.

On the far side of the forest, toward the gill, I built a secret place. I bent thin saplings into an arch, weaving and tying them together. I interlaced these with reeds and sticks, and laid fresh ferns over the top so that my father could have walked past and not noticed my green bower. Inside, it curved over the top of my head when I sat upright, but most of the time I lay on more ferns covered with moss that I had prised from the rocks. I stretched out on my back, with my head sticking out of the opening, watching an upside-down world of branches and leaves and blue sky. I was a weaver bird and it was my nest.

One morning, as spring changed to summer, I woke with
La Campanella
singing in my head. The room was still dark—just a dim light shone around the edge of the window, which we had unblocked and covered again with tent canvas. I had dreamed of the music and a bird, tapping with its beak on a window pane. It had cocked its head and peered at me sideways, its eye ringed in blackbird yellow.

I had been struggling with the last musical notes on page five, where a fermata hung over a pause. My father had explained that the symbol meant that my fingers could rest for as long as I pleased. I had played it over and over but was never satisfied. I was cross with Ute and with Liszt for not giving clear instructions on how to play it, for leaving the decision up to me. In the grey-blue light of early morning, I needed to read the music and I needed to do it immediately. I climbed over the sleeping bulk of my father. It was still too dark to see the notes on the page; even putting a new log on the fire didn’t cast enough light for me to be able to sit at the table and play.

Above the stove, melted onto a shelf, was the stub of our last candle. My father specified when we were allowed to light a candle; it turned out that it wasn’t just emergencies after all. On Christmas evening, when we said something approaching a prayer for all those who
had died, we had lit one. And we had stuck one in the middle of our joint birthday cake, made from mashed bulrush roots. Although my birthday was in wintertime, we had picked a warm spring day to celebrate it and I was allowed to blow the candle out and make a wish. It was a wasted wish; I had asked to have a chocolate cake with buttercream icing for my next birthday. And one night, my father had lit another candle when we had heard scrabbling noises coming from the tool chest full of food and had suspected rats. The light from the candle had flickered when he chased a shrew around the cabin and out the door. Another time, I was sick in the night and missed the bucket, and there had been numerous other incidents and accidents when he had decided that a candle was necessary. Now we had one stump remaining.

For me, that morning, the need to read the music was as urgent as any of the other occasions that had required light. I pulled at the candle, snapping it from the shelf, and lit it from a feathery twig that I poked into the fire. I melted a drop of wax onto the piano table and stuck the candle in it. I propped open
La Campanella
and sat at the piano, humming the trills under my breath in the guttering light. The next moment I heard a roar, as if a bear were standing on its hind legs behind me, its claws raised, ready to fight.

“Punzel!” the bear shouted.

I cowered on the stool, cringing and waiting for the bloody slash of a claw across my back.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The candle stuttered and went out.

“Candles are for emergencies,” he yelled. “What is it that you don’t understand about living here? Once this candle”—he yanked it off the table and shoved it in my face—“has gone, there are no more. No more. Do you understand?”

The smoke from the dead wick made my eyes water.

“Do you understand?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry, Papa,” I said. “I was just trying to work out a trill. I didn’t think about it.” The tears were welling; they would overflow with my next blink.

“That’s your trouble—you never bloody think.” He stormed about the room, making it even smaller. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you with me. You’re too much of a liability. I should have let you die like the rest of them.”

I took the corner of the front cover and closed the music, a pain in my chest at the reminder that we had been spared.

“You don’t deserve to be here, wasting things without thinking. If there was only going to be two of us, it should have been me and Ute.” He whipped around, but
I couldn’t bear to look at his purple face. I pulled on a moccasin as quietly as I could. He saw and he shouted, “Yes, just go! Get out of my sight. Don’t come back until you’ve thought about wasting things for your own pleasure and gratification.”

I pulled on my other shoe, grabbed my anorak, and ran out into the morning. I ran across the clearing, leaving tracks in the dewy grass and skidding under the cover of the trees. I ran along the deer tracks into the forest until the ferns and the cow parsley grew up around me and I was running blind. Without thinking, I found myself at my nest and I crawled inside. My legs were bare and cold. I lay curled on the damp moss until the sun came over the mountain and found its way in through the gaps in the twigs and leaves, creating shadows that waved over me. I stretched out onto my stomach, my head propped in my hands, and let the tears dry on my cheeks while I stared out of the entrance into the forest.

That’s when I saw the boots, ankles, thick socks. They strode past my hidden doorway with a purpose. They knew where they were going. Blood pounded in my throat, but my body was frozen in place. In two or maybe three paces they were gone from my view and I wasn’t sure that I had seen them at all. I let my breath out, very quietly, very slowly. I lay in the same position
for a long time until my bony hips ached against the hard ground and the damp seeped into my joints. I sat up. The boots I had seen go past were not my father’s.

His I knew well, his I still often wore when the weather was bad. These were black and had come up higher around the ankle and had more laces and rounded toes. They were splattered with mud and looked wet, as though the person wearing them had waded across the river. Folded over the top had been cream-coloured socks and, striding in them, a pair of muscled legs. A man’s boots, I said to myself—definitely a man’s boots. Reuben’s boots. The thought thrilled and terrified me. I had been told over and over that all that was left was a scrap of land floating in the dark of the Great Divide, so this man couldn’t just be passing through. Instead of two, there were three.

After maybe an hour of hiding in the nest, looking out, waiting in case the boots came back, I needed a wee, I needed to eat, I needed to go back to die Hütte and warn my father that we were not alone. I shuffled to the opening and stuck my head out, looking right and left along the forest tracks; they were empty. The ground wasn’t wet enough for the boots to have left any prints. I came out and scuttled into the ferns which huddled over me, where I squatted to pee, splashing over feet and
ankles. I was a sparrow in a bush with one eye on a worm, the other on the bird of prey circling overhead. Through the undergrowth I went, avoiding the paths until I could see die Hütte in the clearing. I raced across it, like I had the previous winter, head down, feeling exposed and vulnerable. The cabin was empty. I sat on the edge of the bed and picked at my fingernails and ate the food my father had left straight from the pan. Eventually, I heard him whistling outside and the door opened. He came in with two buckets of water sloshing over his boots.

“Papa!” I jumped up from the bed, breathless, wanting to get everything out at once. “I saw a man—”

My father interrupted me. “I don’t want to hear anything from you today.” He held his hand up in a stop sign, palm toward my face.

“But, I saw—”

“No.” He cut over me again, his hand still out but now with only his index finger pointing skyward. “Nothing,” he said forcibly, as if he had been thinking about my punishment all morning. “There will be no playing the piano today. No singing. Today you will work and you will say nothing.”

I sat down on the bed, my news spoiled. After a moment’s thought, I clamped my lips together and went to the corner by the stove and picked up the axe. I carried it
outside with the sharpening stone. I was powerful with the tool in my hands and angry enough with my father to use it. I stroked the blade with the stone until the sun caught its edge. I placed a small log on the block, as my father and I had done last autumn, and holding the axe shaft halfway down, I lifted it over my head and let its weight slam into the wood. The little log split clean in two.

The boots never passed by my nest again, or at least I never saw them. Our second summer in die Hütte was even hotter than the first. My father worried about everything that year: forest fires, not enough rain for the vegetables, missing the acorn harvest again. But we doubled our autumn stores, cramming the shelves with dried and smoked food, and even though the snow was heavy and the winter cold, it was never as desperate as our first.

As I grew and the years blended one into the next, there was a rhythm to our lives; we let the seasons and the weather dictate when clothing needed to be made and mended, when seeds should be planted, when the acorns should be gathered, and when to celebrate birthdays and Christmas. I still sometimes thought of Omi and, if she were alive to knit her winter gifts, how grateful I would be for them in the forest. The thoughts of her
and Ute no longer caused a sting of pain inside me, but instead a bittersweet memory.

When each long winter had passed, my father sometimes decided on an activity that would consume him, like constructing the piano had once done. One spring, he worked on diverting the gill so we would have a stream running past the cabin. For weeks he levered boulders with branches and dug in the rocky ground, but when the next storm came the mountain ignored all his efforts and carried on channelling water where it had always done—down the gill. When these plans and schemes failed, my father would sink into despondency for days, until another idea came to him and he was excited all over again. Keeping up with his moods made me irritable, but sometimes when I was alone in the forest I would think about Becky—what she had smelled like, how she had sounded, what she might have said to make things better: “You ought to be happy. You won’t know how happy you are, till your pretty life in die Hütte is over and done with.”

17

London, November 1985

On my bed, Ute had laid out a purple top and a skirt for me to change into—three tiers of fabric with white dots sprinkled across them, and each finished off with a circle of lace. They might have been selected by a fourteen-year-old shop assistant.

When I had arrived back in London, Ute had bought me new sets of everything. She went shopping without me, leaving Mrs. Cass downstairs, flicking through a magazine in the sitting room while I sat by the open window in my bedroom. I had tried to imagine the two of them becoming friends, sharing confidences and mopping up tears, but the images wouldn’t stick.

Mrs. Cass had, of course, been too curious to stay downstairs. Later, I overheard her saying to Ute that she had thought she heard me crying, but I knew that wasn’t true. She had poked her head around my bedroom door, in her hands two cups of tea.