Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (18 page)

We ate well that Christmas Eve: four squirrels in the pot with a handful of mushrooms and dried herbs, and a couple of bulrush roots baked in the stove.

“Sod the calculations,” said my father.

For two or three full moons after Christmas, we eked out the smoked and dried food, supplementing it with occasional wild finds. As our stores decreased, each meal was smaller than the previous and I was always hungry. Our empty stomachs dragged us out of bed, muscles shivering. Borrowing my father’s boots, I would clear the snow from the traps and reset them with clumsy fingers. Once or twice I came back with a rabbit, which we made last for days. We ate every bit except the fur. We even washed out the intestines and stomachs, and boiled them. “Chitterlings,” my father said they were called. When they had all gone and the pan had been scraped clean, we sipped at plain water, boiled in the same saucepan, my father trying to convince me that there would still be some goodness left. Until, one day, the only stored food remaining was four bulrush roots in the bottom of the tool chest. We cut them in half and found brown veins lacing through them, each with a grub inside. My father stumbled to the sluggish river to use the fat bugs for bait, but no fish came. We dug through the
snow under the trees, looking for a frozen mushroom or two we might have missed, and scrabbled around where the bulrushes grew, searching for more roots. Under the snow, the earth was like rock, the trowel bouncing off it when we tried to dig. Every day we stayed out less and often came back with just a handful of pine needles, which we boiled into a tea and drank.

We stopped playing the piano or even singing and spent a lot of the day sleeping or lying in bed with all our clothes on, listening to the snow creak and stretch, waiting for it to fall from the roof. Sometimes I imagined a squirrel was playing up there, and I would go to the door, hoping to find another lying on the doorstep. I begged my father to let us eat the sprouting potatoes he had bought, or a pinch of the carrot or cabbage seed. Once, when he was out fishing, I searched die Hütte for them, going through all the pockets of the rucksacks and balancing on my tiptoes on a stool on top of the table, so I could see along the joists, but I didn’t find them.

“We’ll get through. Just wait,” he would say. “We’ll need those seeds when the spring comes.”

Hunger flowed over me in waves; bedtime was the worst, when I would feel that my stomach was devouring itself from the inside and I would sit up in bed, holding my cramping muscles, looking around the
cabin for something I could eat. My father boiled anything he could think of: a putrid pap he collected by re-scraping the animal skins we had discarded and even once, in desperation, his leather belt. I sipped the foul liquid and lay back down on the bed, holding Phyllis’s hard little body against mine.

Mornings were easier. When I woke I was always able to convince myself that this would be the day we would find food. I remembered when my father and I had sat at the top of the meadow and he had cut some cheese and given it to me with a hunk of brown bread; the cheese and the bread that might still be hidden in the roots of the tree we had stopped to rest under. I made a plan to go and find it and packed my rucksack with Phyllis and a toothbrush, but when I stood at the edge of the river I realized that not even starvation could make me cross it.

Two mornings later, I woke to the scream of the wind, shrieking through the gaps in die Hütte, shaking and rattling the roof shingles and sending invisible icy streams across my face. Outside, the noise from the forest was of crashing and whipping, as if the trees were being uprooted and flying through the air. My father stirred beside me, mumbling something but not waking. I squeezed closer into his side and buried my head under my sleeping bag, trying and failing to ignore the sound
of the storm. Finally, I wriggled my way out, scrambled over him, and pulled the door open. It was only a chink, but frenzied snow blasted me in the face through the gap. It took the weight of my body to push the door closed. I shook my father’s shoulder; he groaned, although his eyes remained shut.

“Papa, Papa, a blizzard! A blizzard has come.”

He moaned again, bringing his knees up to his chest inside his sleeping bag. “I need to go to the loo,” he said. His breath was sour and the corners of his mouth cracked open when he spoke.

“I’ll get you the bucket,” I said.

“Outside.” His voice was a whisper.

“You can’t go outside, Papa, there’s a blizzard.” I stroked his hair back from his sweaty forehead. Shivering, he pushed his sleeping bag down and swung one leg and then the other off the bed. A rank smell rose from him as he moved, and I stepped backward. He was wearing his cardigan and, over that, his dirty coat. He also had on his trousers with patches across the knees, and a pair of socks—nearly all his clothes except for the boots. I wondered how he had managed to get up in the night and put on everything without me hearing him.

The cabin was dark, but I could see the shape of him on the edge of the bed, doubled over, clutching his
stomach. When the spasm had passed he said, “Fetch me the rope, Punzel.”

The masses of the table and the stove loomed at me, but I found the bucket and took it to him, together with our loops of home-made rope, and put them on the floor in front of him. He had his head in his hands, and when he lifted them away I saw that in the night his eyes had shrunk back into purple sockets, or else the bones of his face had come forward, to press against his stretched skin.

“Tie the end of the rope onto the door handle and get me my boots,” he said.

I hoped he might already be feeling a little better if he had so many instructions for me. I did what I was told and he put the boots on. He leaned on me as he staggered up, and I was strong, full of a strange energy, my empty stomach forgotten.

“I have to go outside to use the loo,” he said.

“But the blizzard will come in if we open the door, Papa.”

“It’s just windy. I’ll be back in a moment. Quickly, help me.” We stumbled over to the door and he opened it. Outside, the snow was a snarling white beast, clawing and biting at our faces. It blasted straight through my dungarees and the jumper I had worn to bed.

“I don’t mind if you use the bucket indoors.” I was sure going outside wasn’t the right thing to do. “Please, Papa, don’t go.” I clung on to the back of his coat, but he shook me off.

He took hold of the rope and, turning back toward me, he said, “You can eat the seed potatoes now. They’re under a loose floorboard, near the stove,” and he stepped out into the storm.

The whipped-up snow stung my eyes, and after a couple of paces my father was a blurred grey shape and after three he was gone. The rope, attached to the door, spooled out slowly, stretched tight, then slackened. I couldn’t bear to shut the door after him, so I stood in the opening, shivering with my teeth chattering while snow blew inside, piling up and melting on the floor.

“Papa!” I called, but the wind flung the name of my father away. For a long time I stood at the door with the snow beating against me, grit in my eyes, the front of my jumper caked and stiff. Eventually, I shut it and went to the stove, stomping on the floor until I heard the rattle of a loose board. Tucked under it was a hessian bag full of wrinkled potatoes and the packets of seed that my father had brought with us. I looked at the pictures—carrots, cabbages, leeks, beans in garish colours—then I put them back in the bag, laid it under the floor, and
replaced the board. I shoved a log onto the embers of the previous evening’s fire and moved a pot of snow water to the other side of the stove. I went to the bed and tidied our sleeping bags. I went back to the stove and moved the pot again. I bent to check the fire, but when I straightened I couldn’t remember if it needed another log or not. I went to the door and peeped out into the storm, shielding my eyes. There was just wind and blasting snow. The rope was still slack.

“He’ll return in a minute,” Phyllis said, but muffled, because she was under the covers.

“By the time I get the rest of my clothes on, he’ll be back,” I said to her. I put on my anorak, balaclava, and mittens, which were kept warming on a nail above the stove. I got Phyllis out and together we sat on the edge of the bed, watching the door. I pulled on my shoe and the shingle bag. “Wait here,” I told her, and I went out into the snow after my father.

The noise of the storm was a tremendous roar, a shriek of fury. I crouched low, my face down and my arm across my eyes. Each breath was an effort. With my mittened hands I held the rope, the whipped snow freezing the wool, so my fingers became fixed into the shape of hooks. Doubled over, I shuffled along, hand over hand. The end of the rope tapered to the thickness of string
and, as I reached it, the wind almost whisked it away from me. My father was not there. I looped the rope twice around my hand and tugged to make sure the other end was still attached to the door of die Hütte.

“Papa!” I called again and again into the white noise, but my words were taken so quickly, I wasn’t even sure I had said them aloud. As if playing blind man’s bluff, I stretched out from the end of the rope as far as I could, groping for someone I couldn’t see. I prodded the drifts around me, terrified the rope would unwind from my fist and I, too, would be lost. Without the rope, I might crawl back in the direction I thought was right and miss die Hütte by inches.

Using the rope to guide me, I circumscribed the snow for a shape, a sign to show that my father had been there. And then I nearly tripped over him. Hunched like a rock, with his head and arms tucked underneath, my father was white, snow piling up against the sides of his body. I brushed it off his head.

“Papa! Please!” I cried into his ear, my voice shaking, desperate. “Take hold of the rope.”

“Ute?” He lifted his head from his white pillow.

“Papa!” I tugged again and again at the collar of his icy coat until he got to his knees. I saw that his trousers were undone and drooped around his hips. The flesh on
his bottom hung slack and empty. I looked away. “Take the rope,” I repeated.

Hand over hand, we crawled forward as if we were following a trail of breadcrumbs. Finally the shape of die Hütte came out of the white—solid, substantial. I pushed my father through the door. Outside the storm howled its frustration. I shook the worst of the snow from our clothes and with effort got my father back onto the bed and laid the sleeping bags over him. I stoked the fire and made a pan of pine needle tea. As I held the mug to his lips, I could taste the thick tomato soup that Ute used to spoon-feed me when I was ill in bed, and the sharp tang of it rasped the back of my throat. There was nothing else to give my father, so I lay behind him, trying to warm his body with mine.

I lost track of how many days or nights we lay there, but on the last of them, while the blizzard blew itself out, I dreamed of Ute’s Apfelkuchen, plump and warm. I woke to a phantom smell of cinnamon and apples, which teased me out of bed to check inside the stove and sniff in each of our pans to find the source. I could still smell it when I opened the door to determine whether it was carried on the wind, only to find that the snow was receding and a brown forest was reappearing around us.

I checked on my father, who was still sleeping, put on his boots, and went out into the new day. I walked between the trees and they parted to allow me access. At each trap, I bent or stretched on legs that I thought might not bear my weight for much longer. I trudged up to the wintereyes, making fresh tracks on my usual paths. I rested there, trying to ignore the hollowed-out feeling inside me. When I removed my mittens and held my hands up in front of my face, my fingers shook. I curled up on the hard ground and imagined I was a small animal, a rabbit in its burrow, a hedgehog in a pile of leaves, a downy blackbird in its nest, and I shut my eyes, thinking that if I could sleep, when I woke, everything would either be better or just be gone. Instead of her cake, I dreamed of Ute. She was swimming in the Great Divide. She floated in the blackness, her pale body lit by the moon, and gave a little flick of her legs, which had become a fish’s tail. There was a steady drip as the Great Divide filled up, and I knew that, soon, Ute would swim away. The water rose higher and there was a flash of iridescent scales and then only Ute’s face until a wave took her. The noise of the water woke me, and I saw that the snow was melting and dripping from the trees.

Instead of returning, I followed the footprints of an animal, a wolf or a fox, that had trotted along one of the
mountain trails. It took me in a loop around the back of die Hütte, but not as high as where we had flown the kite in the summer. When I could look down on the rock forest far below me, I came across mounds of heather tucked amongst the south-facing boulders; perhaps the stony overhangs above had protected them from the snow, because they were flowering—purple bells studded the twiggy stalks. An insect had found the plant before I had and within the blooms had laid its grubs in gobs of spittle. I picked one up and, without inspecting it, put it in my mouth and swallowed it whole. The next one I bit down on. There was an instant, like eating an overripe berry, when the flesh gave way with a burst of thick liquid. It tasted of almonds. I ate the larvae until I was full. The rest I plucked from the heather, put in my pockets, and ran back to die Hütte, slipping and sliding down the icy mountain.

16

As the food came back to us, so did the music, as though the fish and the squirrels and the green buds of spring nourished not only our bodies but our minds too. I read
La Campanella
like a book I couldn’t put down; one that, in the end, I was able to recite by heart.