Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (10 page)

“That’s a good girl. Nice and careful. We’ll be at the other side in no time,” he said, and I wanted to believe him.

Icy inch by icy inch we crept in; the water chilled my knees, a thousand bees stung my thighs, and a cold deep
pain rose between my legs, until I was waist-deep, and then chest-deep, standing on the tips of my toes. The river treated us like boulders, its flow buffeting us, splitting and regrouping beyond our bodies.

In the middle, the noise of rushing and churning was overwhelming. My father shouted, “Keep close to me! Keep close!” and something else, but the water snatched away every other word and spat them out far downstream. I could still touch rocks with my shoes, but the river, greater and stronger than me, picked my feet up and took them away. They didn’t float behind me like my father had said they would; instead they were pulled and jerked as if they were a rag doll’s. I gripped the branch so tightly I could see white knuckles. I was lifted off my feet and the stick came up to meet my face, or my face went down to the water. It filled my mouth and throat. I could taste it at the back of my nose, dirty and coarse. I tried to cry out, to let my father know, but more water choked me. My legs twisted. My father’s eyes were wide and his mouth was open, but I was already under the surface when he shouted for me to hold on.

The current lifted my legs forward. My wrists were still bound, tied to the branch. My hair became the weed, dark strands whipping across my face, dragging with the flow. I went under and my father let go of his end of the
branch. For an instant, his hands were on my waist, but I slipped away and it was just me and the angry river. It took me and played with me, turning me over and over, around the rocks and so fast that time slowed, and under the surface all was quiet. I could see whirlpools down there, where the disturbed liquid lifted and shifted the pebbles on the bottom and each time they moved a spurt of silt moved with them. I danced with them, was held by them, let go and became the water, flowing with it.

My father shouted, a small voice from far away. “Peggy! Punzel!”

I opened my eyes to the roaring water, slamming me between rocks. My hand was full of pain, trapped between the branch and stone. And my father was holding me around my waist again while he tried to untie me. The water was still struggling to take me, slapping my head forward. My father gave up with the tangle of rope and lifted me, still attached to the branch, over to the bank. He laid me on my back with my arms outstretched, and I moved my head to the side, coughing and spewing water.

“Fuck, fuck. Peggy!” His nails were bitten down to his fingertips and he found it difficult to pick at the knots in the rope, which had tightened around me when I had been tossed and turned in the water. He worked at
them until they loosened, then he shifted me onto my side and slapped my back. He picked me up, floppy, and held me in his arms.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Where does it hurt? Here?” He pushed my hair out of my face. “Does it hurt here?”

Realizing that I was on the bank and still alive, I cried, dry choking tears. My father, misunderstanding, began to check me all over, bending my knees and elbows and wiggling my fingers. One knee was grazed and oozed watery blood. The other was already swelling and changing colour. My wrists were sore where they had been rubbed between the rope and the branch. But when my father had examined me all over and was satisfied that my injuries were superficial, he opened my mouth to look at my teeth.

“About eight years old, if I were to hazard a guess,” he said in his army voice. It made me laugh, and he laughed with me and kissed my forehead and kissed my cheeks, his face wet, but not from the river.

“I lost one of my shoes,” I said in a whisper. We both looked at my feet—a wet shoe on one foot but only a sock on the other. My chin began to wobble again.

“I promise, Peggy . . .”

“Rapunzel,” I said.

“I promise, Punzel, that we will come back and look for it and I will teach you how to swim.” He was solemn, as if he were making a very serious vow. “But we’re nearly at die Hütte. We need to reach the cabin before it gets too late.” He carried me up to the rucksacks and dressed me and dressed himself. He wrapped my shoeless foot in an empty canvas food bag and secured it to my ankle with a piece of string. Inside my head I made a vow too—that I would never go in the water again.

The walking was slower after that. I hobbled along behind him, my grazes stinging and my foot feeling all the stones and roots in the ground through the bag. My father used a stick again to beat an uphill path through the undergrowth. He held back branches for us to pass beneath, but he hurried, excitedly urging me on. He didn’t get his map out again; we just walked away from the river, and after another ten minutes the bushes thinned and we came into a space where the trees were much less dense. Ahead of us in a small clearing was a single-storey wooden cabin.

9

London, November 1985

After breakfast, I lay on the sofa as I often did, my eyes shut, drifting off in the overheated sitting room. There were so many possibilities for activity, but all were optional and all seemed pointless when our lives didn’t depend on any of them. I could watch television, try to read a book, write down my thoughts and draw pictures of what I remembered, as Dr. Bernadette urged me to do, or I could listen once more to
The Railway Children
; I had checked and it was still in the sideboard. Ute had given up trying to encourage me out of my lethargy and was simply happy that I was downstairs, where she could keep an eye on me. She didn’t understand that because there was so much choice, I
chose to do nothing. I preferred to lie still, with my mind empty.

But today, I let a few of the memories in: singing
La Campanella
, my voice echoing off the high rocks; lying under the trees, watching summer midges dance; sheltering from the rain in the lee of the mountain, my back protected by its massive presence. Still half asleep, I heard the music and recalled it spilling from the cabin, mixing with birdsong and wind in the grass. I remembered being sure that the last summer would never end. On the sofa, in London, the music became louder, richer. It was no longer just one or two voices, but chords and harmonies, layers of sound we had never achieved in the forest. I woke fully and understood that actual wooden hammers were tapping real metal strings, which in turn were reverberating against a soundboard. Ute was playing the piano. It was a lullaby I had heard often when I was in my bed as a child, when she forgot to come upstairs and I had taken comfort from the music, as if it were tucking me in and kissing me goodnight.

Resting on the sofa, I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be sleeping. For a long time I lay still and let the music caress me while I thought about the last time I had heard Ute play—just before she had left for her concert tour. No one had thought to tell me she was
going; one day I had come home and she was gone. That
is
what happened; that is how I remember it. But the doctors say my brain plays tricks on me, that I have been deficient in vitamin B for too long and my memory doesn’t work the way it should. They have diagnosed Korsakoff’s syndrome and prescribed large orange pills, which Ute makes me take with my first sip of black tea in the morning. They think I’ve forgotten things that really happened and have invented others. Two days ago, after I had swallowed the pill and Ute was watching me gobble my porridge in the glasshouse, I asked her why she had left so suddenly that summer. She looked down at the plate of toast balanced on her lap and said she didn’t remember. I knew she was lying.

When Ute had finished the piece she was playing, through my half-closed eyes I saw her get up from the piano. She came and stood over me, stretched out on the sofa. She reached out a hand as though to brush hair from my forehead, but recoiled when we both heard a car pull up outside. A car door slammed, and the front door opened. Oskar rushed down the hall and into the kitchen.

“Mum!” he called. “Mum, I’m starving!”

I heard the suction noise of the fridge opening. Ute left the sitting room and I rose to follow her, watching
her pick up Oskar’s trail of discarded coat, gloves, and scarf. I passed the thermostat in the hall and turned the wheel until I heard the heating click off. Oskar stood in the kitchen, with a yogurt in his hand. He had taken the top off and was licking pink gloop out with his tongue. I wanted to do it too, but instead I stood watching with my back pressed into the kitchen counter, amazed and enchanted by this creature that was my brother. With his clothes over her arm, Ute tutted and held out a teaspoon she had taken from the cutlery drawer.

“How was your morning at Scouts?” she asked, but he was too excited to hear or to notice the spoon on offer. Instead Oskar wheeled his arms about, demonstrating his friend Henry Mann having an epileptic fit—“a real-life epi”—while clutching a half-empty beer bottle the boy had found in a flower bed during litter-picking duty. Henry, his limbs twitching, had sprayed the beer over himself and everyone who had been crowding around him. Oskar’s yogurt tilted inside its pot, close to slopping over the edge. Ute grabbed it from him as he flung himself onto the kitchen floor and did an impression of Henry—blond hair flopping, kicking his legs and jerking his body across the tiles. Ute told him to get up right away and stop being so silly, but I stood by the kettle, looking down at him, laughing.

His limbs went still and Oskar said to me, “Your teeth are really rotten.”

I hid my mouth behind my hand.

“Oskar!” Ute said.

“It’s true,” he said. “And she has half an ear.” I pulled at the hair on the side of my head. Every morning I spent an hour or so in front of the mirror, wetting and combing it down, hoping it had grown longer overnight.

“Get up,” Ute said. “Get up. Go at once to change those muddy clothes.”

When Oskar had gone upstairs, Ute put the kettle on and I sat at the table.

“The dentist, he will mend your teeth, Peggy,” she said from behind me. “And I promise your hair will grow. You are still my beautiful girl.” She laid her hand on the top of my head.

I tucked my chin into my chest, but I let her hand stay.

The kitchen was hot even though, outside the window, a rime of frost lay on the garden. Ute placed a cup of tea in front of me and instinctively I curled my hands around it.

“You haven’t forgotten that the police are telephoning today?” she asked. “And Michael and your friend Becky are coming this afternoon?”

I thought “friend” was an odd word to use about someone I hadn’t seen for nine years.

Ute sat down opposite me, cradling her own cup. “But maybe it is all too much for one day. Perhaps I should cancel,” she continued, almost to herself.

“The police?” I said, and gave a short laugh. She was about to say more when we both looked up at Oskar standing in the doorway. In his hands was a box, which he held out like a gift. His eyes were round and his brows raised. I wondered if he had been practising an apologetic face in his bedroom mirror.

“I thought we could all do a jigsaw together,” he said. He came forward to put the box on the table. “I found it in the cellar.” The picture was an illustration of a thatched cottage in a wooded glade. A rabbit sat in the foreground beside a meandering stream, and a haze of bluebells spread under trees dotted with brilliant green. Ute made noises that suggested she didn’t think it an appropriate image, but we had nothing better to do, so we tipped the pieces out and sorted through them.

“These trees are wintereyes,” I said, turning over each piece so that colour showed on every one.

“Wintereichen,” said Ute. She picked up a scrap of green, peered at it intently, and put it face down, in a different place.

“They’re oak trees,” said Oskar, grouping all the blues together.

The three of us raised our heads at the same time and smiled at one another. I kept my lips together.

“Can you speak German?” I asked Oskar, looking down.

“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” he said in a very poor accent. “No, Mum couldn’t be bothered to teach me.” He teased her in a way that I had never been able to.

“This is not the reason,” said Ute with a pout. “There are always so many other things to be getting on with.”

“What about the piano? Did she teach you to play the piano?” I asked.

“She says it’s her instrument.”

I smiled at that, behind my hand. “She said the same to me.”

“It is only because I do not think the Bösendorfer is suitable for children to be learning on,” she said. “You do not learn to drive in a Porsche. It is the same thing, exact.”

“It was nice to hear you play,” I said. I found a piece of the edge where the stream flowed out of the picture, and locked it into another fragment of silver. “We had a piece of piano music with us,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “The Liszt—I searched for it much later and found it was gone. It was a very old copy, from Germany.”

“I’m sorry. There was a fire. It got burned.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t worry about the music now.”

We both stopped doing the jigsaw and looked at each other, while Oskar continued to match the pieces.

“It was the music I played when your father and I met—the piece he turned the pages for.”

Oskar stopped concentrating on the jigsaw too and watched us, as if hoping for a revelation, but neither Ute nor I said more. The Liszt played itself in my head, fluttering and rippling, and something unravelled inside me; a stitch I had once believed was firm came loose—a tiny thread waiting to be pulled.