Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (23 page)

With a flint I had taken from the shelf, I dug a neat pit under the gribble, about the size of my clenched fist. From my pocket, I took Phyllis’s head. I stroked her hair, pushing it away from her face, and gave her a kiss on her forehead. I placed her head in the hole and dusted it with soil, wishing she had the kind of eyes that fell closed when her face was tipped up. Even though I no longer played with her, her head was the hardest object to sacrifice and prising it from her neck had made my eyes sting with tears. I hadn’t been able to look at her headless body and so had tucked it away under the floorboards where we kept the seeds we gathered at the end of each summer. Once Phyllis was sprinkled with earth,
I filled in the hole and laid two twigs on top, one over the other, in the shape of a cross.

Next, I walked a trail from the buried head, downhill to the river, to form a triangle of offerings. For most of the way I followed a deer track, until I came to the clearing. This I ran across, crouching low and scurrying more than running, in case my father was in die Hütte. The summer river disturbed me; even though it was shallower and gentler than its winter cousin, I couldn’t look at the constant movement or shake off the feeling that the water was pretending to be serene with nowhere in particular to go and nothing much to do. Just under the surface it lived and breathed—malevolent and cunning.

In my pocket I had a leaf taken from the wintereye and another I had plucked from the gribble. Holding one in each hand, I stumbled across the muddy pebbles to the river’s edge where my father fished. Tensed and holding my breath I stretched out over the water and placed both leaves on the surface and let them go. The current took them, like it had once taken me.

“Take my love to Ute,” I called out after them, even though I knew she was dead and they would never reach her. The water danced with the leaves and spun them until they must have been dizzy and disoriented. I ran alongside calling out again, “Take my love to Ute.” With
a sudden eddy they were sucked down and out of sight, as though a hand had pulled them into a watery grave. I backed away onto the bank, frightened that the same fingers would reach out for my ankles.

As I scrambled back through the grass, I saw something lodged in the bank under the bushes—the toe of a shoe or a boot, sticking out of the mud. With a cry, I thought that all the wishing and thinking and offerings had been wasted. The river had already taken Reuben, swallowed him whole and left his bones in the earth, before I had a chance even to meet him. I tugged at the dark toe with both hands and dug around it with the flint that was still in my pocket. I imagined Reuben’s sock tucked inside the boot, his leg and the rest of his body brown and leathery, preserved by the mud, like the Tollund Man, remembered from school. I pulled again at the slippery toe, and with a sucking belch the mud let it go and I fell backward. It was empty and it was my shoe—the one I had lost when I first crossed the river. I sat cradling it with relief and sure that magical, incredible things would happen now. I wiped the mud from the heel and saw again the leaping cat.

I held my re-found shoe close to my chest and followed the flow of the river, planning to walk as far as I could until the mountain stopped me. I was dawdling, daydreaming about new green laces, when I saw the man.

20

London, November 1985

When I reached the hall I heard the key lid open as someone clunked it against the piano frame, and I knew it couldn’t be Ute. Oskar sat at the piano, his hands poised, ready to play.

“Either come in and close the door or go away,” he said, putting on a cross face.

I went in. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “She’ll kill you.”

He gave up the artificial frown and moved along the stool so I could slide in beside him.

“I learned this at school. If she can’t be bothered to teach me, I’ll have to teach myself. Do you want me to show you?” Without waiting for my answer, he
continued, “Curl up all your fingers except these two.” He pointed his index fingers side by side, like Peter and Paul in the nursery rhyme. I copied him, hiding a smile to keep my secret.

“Your job is to play these two notes.” He put my fingers on F and G. His hands felt cool and were already as big as mine. “You have to press the notes six times. OK?”

I pressed the keys just hard enough to hear the noise of the hammer on the string. It might have been the first time I had made a piano produce a real sound.

“No, not yet,” he said. “Not until I’ve counted to six. And do it quietly.”

Oskar spread out his fingers and started to play. Looking at him, nodding his head, biting his bottom lip, pleased me. He gave an extra-deep nod, but I was too busy watching his face.

“Where were you?” Oskar said. “You have to be ready. After six.”

I nodded.

We were clumsy and halting, but we were making music; under my fingers’ instructions, just two at a time, the piano answered. When we had played six notes he stopped.

“Why are you making that noise?” he said.

“What noise?”

“You were doing a weird kind of singing.”

“Sorry.”

“I think it might sound better if you didn’t.” He took hold of my fingers again. “Now you have to move your left finger down one, and keep your right in the same place, and play these notes six times.”

We were out of sync with each other, but it didn’t seem to bother Oskar. He showed me four more notes.

“Do you think you can remember? Four lots of six.”

We started again from the beginning, with much more head nodding. Oskar stared at both his hands with intense concentration, but still his left was always a little behind his right.

“I think you might have got it,” he said.

We played the duet a few times, each round faster, until we didn’t stop in between but performed the sequence again and again, until one of us went wrong and we stopped, out of breath and laughing.

“Once more!” I yelled, and we began thumping the piano as hard and as fast as we could, without thinking about the noise. After a couple of minutes Ute flung the sitting-room door open, her hands tucked inside oven gloves.

“‘Chopsticks’!” she shouted. “On the Bösendorfer!”

“Oh, Mum,” Oskar yelled back, standing up and pushing the stool with his legs, making it scrape the
floor again. “Nobody has fun in this house.” He stormed past her and out of the room, leaving me sitting alone.

Ute came to the piano. “If you would like to learn I will arrange lessons for you.” She took the oven gloves off and started to lower the lid so I had no choice but to withdraw my fingers. “Lunch in five minutes,” she said over her shoulder, and went back to the kitchen.

I laid my forehead on the polished wood, closed my eyes, and remembered the piano my father had made, how much effort had gone into its creation, the wood turning greasy from my fingers, the pebble weights coming loose and falling between the floorboards, the song of
La Campanella
etched into my every cell. I sat up and opened the key lid again and traced the gold lettering of the word
Bösendorfer
with the fingers of my right hand. My left hand settled into a familiar arrangement on the keys, and when the tip of my finger reached the curlicue of the final
r
, my right hand joined my left.

It didn’t feel as if I was doing the pressing, but more like I was sitting at a pianola, the ivory moving by itself, following the pattern of holes punched in a paper roll located somewhere deep inside the mechanism, and I was following along. My left hand played the first three notes, and my right, the high echo; then one low, two high, repeated; then the slightest of pauses.

“Lunch!” Ute called from the kitchen.

The spell was broken and the music stopped. I heard Oskar clatter down the stairs two at a time like I used to, his empty stomach overriding his brief argument with Ute.

“Peggy, lunch!” Ute called again.

I closed the piano and went into the kitchen.

21

The man was hunkered down under the trees, his head in profile. At first I mistook him for a boulder, not one which had rolled off the mountain in the recent rainstorm, but a rock which had lain in place for years, while the undergrowth had grown up around it and its surface had become mottled with orange and green lichen. I froze midstep, my heart hammering. I watched him with wide eyes, waiting to see his next move before I made mine.

He had separated the wet grass and ferns like a pair of curtains and was peering intently forward through the gap. I had longed for this, offered up gifts for it, but now I wanted nothing more than to run back to die Hütte, even though my father’s responses were likely to include
grabbing the axe and hunting the man down, or setting the forest alight to smoke him out. I moved one leg up and backward. But before my foot had even touched the ground, the man took his hands out from the grass and slowly, deliberately, turned his head toward me, as if he had always known I would be there. Shaggy hair hung down to his shoulders and his beard flowed over the front of his green and orange plaid shirt like a swarm of honeybees. His look was plaintive, as though he might be about to cry at what he had seen through the grass, but later I came to know this as his natural expression—melancholic, as if a terrible tragedy had happened that he couldn’t bear to speak of. Everything about his face flowed downward: his eyes, his mouth, even his thick, untrimmed moustache.

He lifted a finger to his lips and at the same time cocked his head, beckoning me with it. I stayed where I was, almost tempted to glance behind me to check that he wasn’t nodding to someone else. He repeated the twitch of his head, and without waiting to see if I would come, he parted the grass again with his hands and stared through it. Gingerly, I went forward. If he had turned his head toward me once more, I’m sure I would have bolted, but the intensity of his stare beyond the grass drew me on. I walked toward him and crouched down beside him. He smelled different from me and my father. His
scent was of the woods—bonfires, autumn berries, and leather, and underneath, something sweet: soap, perhaps. Tucked under his bent legs were the boots, damp again and creased across the toes. He still didn’t acknowledge that I was there; he just spread the grass wider, so I could see what he was looking at. Amongst trampled ferns, a doe licked her newborn fawn, still slippery with blood and membranes. The mother’s thick tongue lapped over the baby, cleaning and checking. She raised her head and fixed her large brown eyes on us, but in the same way that the man I squatted beside had looked at me, the doe took us both in and carried on with her work. She nudged the fawn with her nose, encouraging it to stand. It staggered to its feet and the man withdrew his arms from the gap and let the grass fall back into place.

“I think that, just now, we are not wanted there,” he said, standing up and stretching as though he might have been crouching for hours. It shocked me to hear another human voice in the forest, one that wasn’t mine or my father’s. I wanted him to carry on talking so I would know we weren’t alone. He reached his arms high over his head and cracked his elbows. He seemed to go on forever, and I thought that when he had come into die Hütte to carve his name beside the stove, he would have had to dip his head under the door lintel to get in. I
stood too and stared up at him as he yawned. His beard opened up a pink hole in the middle of his face, and I looked away, embarrassed.

“You’re Punzel, aren’t you?” Then he held out his hand and said, “Reuben.”

Awkwardly, I shook it, as I had shaken the survivalists’ hands when I had greeted them at our London door. He was younger than I had first thought, his face less weathered and creased than my father’s, whose skin had become leathery from his time spent in the sun and the wind. Reuben smiled, and the exposed cheeks above his beard shaped themselves into pouches.

“You have the dirtiest face I’ve ever seen,” he said.

He reached his hand out toward my temple, and I realized I still hadn’t washed off the blood from yesterday or the mud from the river. He looked down to where I clasped my shoe to my chest.

“That’s an odd thing for a girl to be carrying around a forest. Do you want to clean it? And your face?”

I hesitated, and as if he understood my reluctance, he said, “Not in the river. We can go to the gill.”

He didn’t wait for an answer but walked off, away from the deer and her fawn, seeming to assume I would follow. I stood looking at his retreating back, then went after him. He seemed to know the forest as well as I
did, striding along the same trails I used every day, and I wondered again how he could have been here without me seeing him. In the middle of the wintereyes he headed right and uphill, passing within a few feet of the nest.

“It looks as if there was a landslide last night after all that rain,” he said, patting the new boulder which had nearly killed me. We carried on until we stood at the lip of the steep channel. The tumble of mossy rocks had been dislodged by the rainstorm and had rolled down the gill, taking chunks of earth with them. The trunk of a tree had wedged itself crossways between the banks, and forest debris had collected behind it, water seeping through the gaps formed by a tangle of branches and logs.

Reuben picked his way down the slope with obvious practise, each foot placed with confidence, and didn’t even glance at the temporary dam above us. It wasn’t until he was standing on the boulders at the bottom that he looked back at me, still hesitating at the top of the bank.