Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (6 page)

Oskar was at Saturday morning Cub Scouts, helping to tidy the grounds of an old people’s home. I knew Ute had chosen this particular morning, with Oskar away, to ask me to sit at the table, because she thought that sitting down to eat with my eight-year-old brother might be one step too far. Oskar, Oskar, Oskar: I had to keep repeating his name to remind myself that he existed, that a boy was born and grew for eight years and eight months without me knowing. He was almost as tall as me, but so young. I was still shocked, every time I looked at him, to think I was exactly his age when my father and I left this house. While Ute was ladling porridge, made with water—the way I liked
it—I wondered whether the Scouts had taught Oskar how to light a fire without matches, or how to catch squirrels by their necks, or use an axe with one smooth, swift motion. Perhaps they were things he and I could discuss another day.

At the table, Ute tried to engage me in conversation.

“Do you remember that summer?” she asked, her mouth still full of
z
’s and
v
’s, even after all these years. Straight away she began with a question, even though she had promised.

I shrugged an answer.

“I have been thinking of your father, the summer you went away,” she said. “Went away” was the phrase she always used—innocuous, with no blame attached. “I think perhaps I was too old for him. Too steady. He wants to have fun with his friend Oliver.”

“Wanted,” I corrected under my breath, but she didn’t hear; she was staring through and beyond me.

“They were like boys. They were swinging the garden seat too high. I was afraid it would be damaged, and also the grass with their shoes. That seat belonged to your grandmother; Omi had it delivered all the way from Germany, you know. And then, when they were so hot, they took off their shirts and ran around the garden, playing at tomfoolery with the hose, even though the
Water Board said it was not allowed. I watched them from your bedroom window, then I went down to ask them to be careful with the seat.” She paused, recollecting. “Oliver, he teased me and said, ‘Ja wohl.’ Maybe that’s when it started. Yes, maybe then.”

I didn’t ask Ute for these confidences, but still they spilled from her, as if, in the telling, she was assuaging some kind of guilt. In my mind’s eye I saw my father, so unaware that one push with his heels against the earth, in time with Oliver Hannington, or a single yelp of delight when a splash of water hit his freckled back, would create a hairline crack in his family’s footings. Ute said my father didn’t give a damn, that it was all about quick pleasures for him. But the evidence of the fallout shelter still below the kitchen, and the lists I had found down there, told me a different story.

Ute’s eyes refocused on me and the way I was eating. She asked whether I was enjoying the porridge, and I became aware that I was shovelling it into my mouth and swallowing, although it burned my tongue. I slowed down and nodded, chastised. I scraped the bowl clean and she gave me a second helping. I had filled out since I returned—my breasts swelling into my new bras, the elastic on my pants leaving a red groove around my hips and stomach, the shadows under my cheekbones fading to pink.

“What did you like to eat when you were away?” Ute asked in her bright and cheery voice.

I wondered if she imagined a daily menu where I had been able to check on the freshness of the fish if I didn’t fancy the nut roast. I considered answering, “Reuben and I ate raw wolf, ripped apart with our bare hands, and after we had eaten it we used the blood to paint stripes across our noses,” just to see the look on her face. But it was too much effort.

“We ate a lot of squirrel,” I said, keeping my voice level. “And Kaninchen.”

“Oh, Peggy,” she said in a concerned tone, and reached out a hand to me, but I was quick and pulled mine back. She tucked her hands under the table and pursed her lips.

“When you were away . . .” she started to say.

“When I was taken,” I cut in.

“When you were taken,” she repeated. “When I understood you had really gone, I went down in the cellar. You remember the cellar, how it was like?”

I nodded.

“All those shelves with food, tins and tins of food. I went down in the cellar and it was just how your father had left it, natürlich. Packets with rice, dried peas, beans—all with dust everywhere.” Ute sounded as if she
was repeating a story she knew well, one she had told many times, to many people. “I tried to imagine what you were eating, whether it was healthy, and I worry you are hungry, wherever you are. I take a tin of baked beans, another of peaches, and one of sardines from the shelves and I put them on the table in the cellar. The table is still down there, you can see it, but I threw the food away years ago. An absolute waste. I took a tin-can opener and a fork from the drawer under the cooker, and a metal plate. And I line them up on the table, Peggy, just how you liked to line up all those things from your rucksack, remember? I line the tins neatly beside the fork and the plate, and I look at them. It made me cry, thinking about where you could be, and maybe my little daughter still arranging the things from her rucksack.” Ute’s voice broke, and I looked up from my empty bowl. Her face was stricken; tears had welled in her eyes and it occurred to me that they were genuine.

“I was crying,” Ute continued, “but still I sat there, because I thought you could be sitting somewhere too, with your doll and your nightie lined up. And I open the beans and the peaches and also the Sardinen with the little Schlüssel, the little key. I was pregnant, natürlich . . .” She paused, to calculate. “Expecting Oskar since two months, I think, and feeling very sick. With the fork, I eat the beans
and peaches and Sardinen. I eat them at once, and all the time crying, crying. I make myself swallow, because maybe you don’t have the food you like. I eat until I am sick.”

I couldn’t work out what response she wanted. Should we cry together and hug, or was she expecting me to volunteer a story of my own? So I just sat, looking down at my bowl again, with my licked-clean spoon placed to the side. It, too, reminded me of the tidy piles of my belongings, taken from my rucksack. The idea that I was still putting things in lines made me smile, but I hid it from Ute, behind my hand. Minutes passed, with both of us silent and not even the scrape of cutlery on porcelain to make the kitchen seem lived in. Eventually I said, “Oliver Hannington ate some of the food from the cellar.”

Ute jumped backward in her seat, the legs of her kitchen chair grating against the floor. It wasn’t a response I had anticipated, and for the first time since I got home we really looked at each other—my eyes seeing into hers, and hers looking back into mine; both of us trying to work the other out, as if we were new to each other, which we were. And then the moment was gone. A mask had come down over her face, the same mask that Dr. Bernadette uses—calm, beneficent, like one of the stone angels in the cemetery.

“Really?” Ute asked. “Is that true? Oliver Hannington?” Her overreaction made me curious, as though there was something I had missed, something that was right under my nose.

“He told us we should eat the food and replace it, so it didn’t go out of date,” I said.

“You are sure? He came to stay, with James? When?” she asked, jumpy.

There was an itch under my right breast as she said my father’s name, and I rolled my shoulder to get rid of it.

“Just before. Just before . . .” I trailed off. It hadn’t occurred to me that she didn’t know this. Every session, the first thing Dr. Bernadette said to me was, “Whatever you say in this room will stay in this room.” The same line, every time. After each session I would come out to the waiting room dry-eyed, and I could see Ute was disappointed. I would sit on an upholstered chair while she went in to see Dr. Bernadette. I would wait for twenty minutes, and each time Ute came out she would be dabbing at her eyes with one of the pink tissues that the doctor kept handy on her coffee table. I had assumed that everything I said to Dr. Bernadette was repeated to Ute.

“There was an argument,” I said. “Oliver argued with, with . . .” I couldn’t work out what name to use. “My father.”

“Oliver,” she repeated. “What did they argue about?”

“I couldn’t hear,” I said. “The glasshouse roof got smashed. And then we left.” Ute looked stunned. I wondered if by some miracle the glass had been repaired before she had got home, or whether my memory of it was wrong.

“I didn’t know how the glass got to be broken,” she said. “I wondered if maybe a boy, a neighbour, had thrown a stone. The policemen—the detectives—did not believe in me. I am sure they listened to the telephone, I could hear
click, click
when I picked up.” Ute’s words tumbled out, one over the other. “After a few months, when you are still not found, they came to the house and they are digging up the end of the garden, where they say there is fresh earth. Fresh earth! I do not have time to dig the garden in my situation. They find, how do you say it? Gebeine, animal bones and fur. I say, I don’t know how they get there, under the ground. They beated through the cemetery with sticks and with dogs. I yell at them in German. ‘Ich bin schwanger!’ I shout. They tell me that you say to your headmaster that I am dead. I do not understand why you would say that. I cry for a long time, and it is Mrs. Cass—you remember Mrs. Cass from school?”

I nodded.

“It is Mrs. Cass who comes to see me to make sure I am all right, who looks after me. I am worried about the baby inside and what will the neighbours say. It is absolute stupid. My little girl is gone with my husband, but it is months, years, before they believe it is not up to me.”

She was exhausted and angry. And I saw how it might have been for her, crying and worried and alone, suspected of murder, with Oskar growing inside her. But I sat with my hands in my lap and said nothing.

6

The holiday my father had promised wasn’t a holiday. There were no beaches or sandcastles, no ice creams, no donkey rides; my father said we would rest when we got to die Hütte. The bushes at the sides of the path we walked along were nearly grown together, as if to say, this path is not for humans. My father was having none of it. He beat them with a stick he had picked up when we left the road. Walking behind him, I heard the thwack of stout wood whipping the bushes into shape. They didn’t stand a chance. Puffs of summer dust rose with each beating. I kept my face turned down, trying to match the rhythm of his footsteps while a ray of sunshine burnished the bony nodule at the top of my back. Earlier, when I had been in front, I had lifted my face upward and seen layers of green
upon green, and peaked hills the shape of poured sugar. Beyond them, double their height, was a menacing spine of dirty brown rock with ragged gashes of white. But now, walking just behind my father, I saw only the dust that had settled on the hairs of his bare legs, like the flour that Ute sifted over her Apfelkuchen pastry. Above the legs was the bottom of the shorts, and above that was the rucksack, as wide and as tall as my father’s back. Our tent was tied to the bottom of it with twine. Billycans clinked in time with water bottles, which swung against the rabbit wires.
Thump, chinkle, jangle, ding; thump, chinkle, jangle, ding
. In my head I sang:

       
There are suitors at my door, oh alaya bakia,

       
Six or eight or maybe more, oh alaya bakia,

       
And my father wants me wed, oh alaya bakia,

       
Or at least that’s what he said, oh alaya bakia.

The shade the trees cast was ancient and scented. The smell rushed me back to Christmas in London, and I wondered if this forest was where our tree came from. Last Christmas Eve I had been allowed to clip on the candleholders, strike the matches, and light each candle. Ute had let me open one Christmas present from under the tree because she said that when she was a girl
that’s when she had opened all of hers. I chose one of the presents that came in the box from Germany, and unwrapped a tube that folded up into itself. A spyglass, Ute said, which had belonged to my dead German grandfather. She tutted and said that Omi must be clearing out her drawers and giving away all sorts of rubbish. I stood on the arm of the sofa and looked through it at Ute’s enormous head as she played the piano and sang “O Tannenbaum” until her voice went croaky. She said we had to stop because the branches on the Christmas tree were sagging and it might go up with a whoosh at any moment. As we blew out the candles I saw her eyes had filled with tears. They didn’t fall but collected between her lashes until her eyes sucked them back in.

The memory made me suddenly, desperately homesick—a physical sickness, as if I had eaten something bad. More than anything, I wanted to be in my bedroom, lying on my bed, picking at the piece of wallpaper that was coming loose behind the headboard. I wanted to hear the piano in the sitting room below me. I wanted to be at the kitchen table, swinging my legs, eating toast and strawberry jam. I wanted Ute to push my long hair out of my eyes and tut. And then I remembered that Ute wasn’t even at home but was playing someone else’s stupid piano in Germany.

I forgot Christmas and shivered at the idea that no human being had ever walked this way before. My father had said this was a path made by deer, and so I walked like a deer—lifting my knees and tiptoeing without snapping even a twig with my cloven feet. But a deer wouldn’t have had to carry a rucksack overstuffed with the anorak my father had bought for me, even though it was far too hot for coats. I slowed and my father, who carried on walking at the same pace, became a figure I could hold between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. Every now and again he turned to look at me and his mouth puffed into the shape of a sigh, so that even from a distance I could see that his eyes were screwed into a hurry-up frown. Then he would turn back and carry on walking. I wondered what would happen if I stepped off the path into the trees. Imagine how his face would change when he looked around and I was no longer behind him? He would drop his rucksack and run back in panic, shouting, “Peggy, Peggy!” I liked that thought, but when I glanced sideways into the forest the trees were denser than those in the cemetery at the end of our garden. From the path, the daylight was just two or three trees deep; after that there were no chinks of light, just trunk after trunk, fading into black. “We could get lost forever in there,” Phyllis whispered from my rucksack.