Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (26 page)

“I could blow it down with one breath.” He blew through his mouth and a few white thistle tufts flew around us.

“OK, let’s go now,” I said, but neither of us moved. I continued to lie on my back, watching a woodlouse crawl across the roof. I was waiting for something, without knowing what.

“Woodlice have their lungs in their hind legs,” he said, and then, “You don’t have to come back here.”

I didn’t say anything, although I knew it was a question and he was waiting for an answer.

“You could stay, on my side of the river.” He didn’t say “stay with me.”

“Do you have a piano?”

“No, of course not.” With some effort he turned onto his stomach and crawled out of the nest, and I wondered
if my chance for something I didn’t fully understand had just been lost.

We walked in the rain, heads down, to the flat rock where every day my father lowered the bucket into the pool. It was an open and dangerous place. We stood together on the slippery green lip and looked over the edge. Drops of rain joined the river water many feet below.

“You just have to jump,” said Reuben. “The current will take you downstream to the other side.”

The opposite bank was stepped through several layers of rock until it became level with the river. Here, thick bushes and trees crowded the water, thinning out where my father and I had crossed when I was a child.

“Can’t we go in farther down, past the reeds?”

“And get swept downstream, hit our heads on a rock, and never come up again?” he said, and I shuddered.

I contemplated the still pool again and knew I wouldn’t be able to jump. My body would resist leaving solid rock for air and water. They were the wrong elements, not meant for me.

“For God’s sake, Punzel. It’s only a small jump.”

“I can’t do it.” I shook my head and moved backward.

He was angry—shouting that I was a pathetic child, that he had no idea why he was bothering with me at all and it would be much better for both of us if he jumped
now and never returned. I tucked my chin into my chest, letting the raindrops follow the curve of my head and run cold into the secret hollow in the nape of my neck. I wondered if he was right, whether everything would be better if I had never met this strange man and just let things play out with my father. Eventually Reuben was quiet and we left the river and went up through the trees, skirting the clearing. By the time we were sitting under my favourite wintereye, the rain had stopped, leaving beads of water clinging to the ferns. The sun came out and shone on the cabin, nestled in the crook of the mountain’s elbow.

“My father told me that he and I are the only two people left in the world,” I said.

“He’s lying,” Reuben said. “I’m here too.”

He pointed to an eagle far above us, its wing tips outstretched like fingers as it circled in an updraught. I caught the smell of blackberries again on Reuben’s words and leaned closer, breathing him in.

He looked down. “You aren’t watching,” he laughed, and I thought maybe he had forgiven me for not being able to cross the river. He took my chin in his hand, tilted my head upward, and kissed me.

23

For the remaining days of summer I stayed out of my father’s way, keeping a physical distance between us—pressing my back against the piano or the shelves when he squeezed past. Sometimes he still caught me though, made a grab for my dress and pinned me between his knees. I stood rigid and kept quiet, so that later I could be sure I had done nothing to encourage these episodes of weeping or anger, and subsequent apologizing.

He often called me Ute, and I gave up correcting him. He reminisced about the fuss made when they were newly married, laughing at how they had run away from a newspaper photographer who had hounded them. He became frustrated when I couldn’t join in with the names and locations of the hotels they had hidden away
in when they were on honeymoon. At other times, he talked about how the three of us should be together again. This idea grew so gradually it was impossible to remember one conversation, one defining moment, when the course of our lives changed and his decision was made. Most nights after I was in bed, he wrote more words on the cabin’s walls, elaborate schemes and lists. He said he had a death list and laughed at his joke. In bed I sometimes heard him crying, muttering and burying his head under his pillow. The nights of weeping made me feel insubstantial, as though I existed only inside my father’s head, but it was worse when, in the dark, he tried to engage me in his plans.

“If we had dynamite—yes, dynamite would do it. Kaboom!” He gave a bitter laugh. “We could blow up die Hütte. Bring the mountain down on our heads.” He let out a groan as if he were in pain. “She left me—Ute. It’s easy to die when you don’t have to do it yourself, but you and I, Punzel, we have to work it out. We’ll do it together, won’t we?”

When I didn’t reply, he called out my name again like a child calling for his mother in the dark. I pretended to be asleep but he got out of bed to shake me.

“Promise you’ll come with me? Promise me.”

“I promise,” I whispered.

“You have to mean it. If you commit to something you have to stick with it. Not like Ute. We’ll go together, won’t we?”

“Yes.”

“We just have to work out how.” He sat on my bed, biting his fingernails, planning.

“Ute broke her promise,” he said, choking on the words, and he curled up on the floor, shaking and sobbing, until I put my hand out to touch him and said again, “I promise.”

Reuben and I met after the vegetables had been watered, the traps checked, and the piano played. The summer was warm, the ferns the tallest I remembered, the moss on the wintereyes a tinned pea green, and the rain, when it fell, never fell for long. One morning there was a smell in the air, of the season turning, of leaves collecting in the crevices of the mountain, of the blackberries fermenting under a grey down of mould.

“How does the spider make his home?” I asked Reuben, gazing at the cobwebs above our heads. We were lying on our backs under the wintereyes, the afternoon light catching on silk threads.

Reuben was silent, his eyes closed. Flies hummed about us, and I wondered whether the skin on the rest
of his body was as pale as his face. I prodded him in the ribs.

“Hmm?” he said.

“The spider. How does he start? Does he spit the first thread, or jump, or what?”

“Or what,” he said dreamily, still not stirring. I ran a blade of grass down the bridge of his nose. He flapped his hands in front of his face as though a spider were crawling there. I moved the grass over his skin again, and this time he opened his eyes.

“OK,” he said, and sighed. I wasn’t sure if he was irritated or tired. “He lets the wind take it,” Reuben said, “and wherever it lands, that’s where he builds his home.”

“Like you. You live wherever the fancy takes you, don’t you?” I asked.

Reuben had already closed his eyes.

I shut mine too and let the warm afternoon carry me. In my dream I lay on my bed in die Hütte. Reuben was curled behind me, his arm over my waist, his fingers moving rhythmically between my legs. His beard and warm breath tickled the back of my neck, and more than anything I wanted the bite of his teeth against my skin. I lay quiet, listening to the curious creaking noise the circular motion of his hand made, as if something inside me needed oiling. Still dreaming, I rolled over onto my
back and saw the soles of my father’s boots just above my head, slowly swinging, and realized that his body was hanging from one of the rafters. I woke with a cry, the sun in my eyes. Reuben had gone from beside me, leaving behind the shape of a body in the flattened grass. I looked up and saw him sitting on a branch, his feet dangling high above me. Behind him, the shadow of the mountain crept forward.

“What can you see?” I said, standing up.

“Your father. He’s looking for something under the beech trees.” My stomach lurched. Reuben was holding his book, but he wasn’t writing.

“My father’s searching for destroying angels,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“
Amanita virosa
: the deadliest of the poisonous mushrooms. Eat any part of its pure white body and its toxins will bind to your insides, your liver, kidneys, and even your brain. No known cure.” With one vicious motion he ripped a page from his book. “Wrong trees. Tell him to look under the pines. It’s still too early for destroying angels anyway. Come up and see.”

It took me several attempts to scramble onto the lowest branch of the tree; once there, I edged toward the trunk and levered myself up until I was at Reuben’s level. He didn’t look at me or shift from his position. I
scraped my knee on the rough surface, and when I lifted up my skirt, beads of blood rose through the ripped skin and tears came to my eyes. I gripped the wood and, with sweating fingers, shuffled sideways toward him. On the ground, a branch lay in the long grass. Its bark had fallen away, leaving a bleached bone underneath us.

Reuben had rolled the paper from his notebook into a cigarette and stuffed it with dried grass. I could make out a few words:
all no good
, spiralling around in blue ink. With matches he lit the brown filaments which stuck out of the end; they flared and the paper caught. He held the cigarette out toward me, holding his breath. “Want some?”

I shook my head, overwhelmed with loss, watching the words he had never allowed me to read glow and change to ash as he blew the smoke out through his nostrils.

“Everything looks perfect from far away, doesn’t it?” Reuben said.

My father, bending down every now and again, could have been picking meadowsweet for the table.

“He’s kept me safe for a long time. He’s very good at chopping wood and skinning rabbits.”

“What does he want destroying angels for?”

“And squirrels. He can skin a squirrel in two seconds flat.”

“Wants to end it all, does he?” Reuben sucked on his cigarette and it burned fiercely.

His beard and moustache had become yellow on one side. He flicked the stub off his thumbnail and we both watched it land in the grass. A minute later, a thin column of smoke rose into the still air and I prayed my father would look up from his work and come running. But he was examining something; he held it close to his eyes and placed it into the reed basket strapped to his waist.

“He’s looked after me for a long time,” I said.

“I’d be careful about eating what he gives you for dinner,” Reuben said, and laughed. I swung my legs, but the feeling of not having anything solid under my feet made me feel sick and I stopped after a couple of kicks.

“He’s a good cook.”

“
Amanita virosa
stew, with corncockle salad. A deadly combination. Is he going to eat it too?”

“He says he’s seen them there before.”

Reuben raised an eyebrow and stroked his beard. It made the sound of dry leaves.

“Is that so?”

“He says we have to go together.”

“Go where? What does that mean?”

“He says I couldn’t survive here without him.”

“You seem to manage pretty well—for a girl.” Reuben winked at me.

“He says it’s not right for the last person in the world to be on their own.”

“Tell him there are three people left.”

“I can’t do that,” I said quietly.

“But you’re not going to go through with it, are you?” he said, surprised.

I shut my eyes, but I felt I was falling backward, so opened them again. A trickle of sweat or an insect crawled across the small of my back, but I couldn’t let go of the branch to scratch.

“I promised him.”

“What? You promised him you would die with him?”

“Yes.”

“Promises can be broken. Punzel?” Reuben’s face was even paler than normal, his eyebrows raised, as though he had only now realized I wasn’t joking. “Just because some old man wants to top himself, it doesn’t mean you have to join him in his crazy suicide pact.” Reuben sounded outraged.

“We’ve agreed—as soon as he finds the mushrooms.” I said it matter-of-factly, but while I watched my father walking up the hill toward die Hütte, my body trembled at the thought of what lay in his basket,
and a chill spread across my back as the shadow of the mountain reached us.

“He says we’ve survived a lot longer than most of the world, but now it’s time to go.”

“Tell the fucker he can go if he wants, but you’re staying.”

“I promised,” I said again.

“This is ridiculous.”

Reuben grabbed hold of my wrist; the grass and rocks below me shifted in response and I thought I might throw up.

“I have to go home now,” I said, although it wasn’t clear to me how I would get back down the tree. I made a movement along the branch and the forest spun around me.

“Punzel, promise me you won’t eat those mushrooms.” He paused, and we both stared at his fingers around my wrist. They reminded me of my father’s. “I don’t . . .” He paused again and didn’t finish; instead he let go of me and I continued my shuffle back toward the trunk. Reuben stayed where he was, looking out over the landscape.

I had wanted us to say goodbye properly. I had wanted him to kiss me again. It was even harder climbing back down than going up; I couldn’t look below me, so I pressed
my cheek into the bark and prodded for where to put my feet. I jumped the last part, landing on the side of my ankle.