Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (8 page)

“I’m tired of walking,” I said.

“Just a little bit farther.” He tapped his watch and shaded his eyes at the sun. “We’ll camp down at the Fluss tonight.” With a noise that came from the very bottom of his chest, he hoisted his rucksack onto his back. While he wasn’t looking, I stuffed the bread with the piece of cheese still inside it between the roots of the pine tree.

The next morning when I woke, my father was already up. I liked to wake without moving my body to see if I could catch myself in that empty place between sleeping and waking, just as I became conscious of the world and the position of my body. My arms were flung above my head, and in the heat of the night I had pushed my sleeping bag to the end of the tent. Looking up, I could see the dots of flies that had gathered, bumping against the ridge pole, hoping to find a way out.

“They should crawl through the holes you made with the fire,” Phyllis said in my ear. She lay beside me, her rigid hands digging into my shoulder. My nightie was sticking to me and there was sweat around my forehead and the back of my neck. While we had been away from home I had taken to wearing the blue balaclava at night, despite the heat. It had been the first thing I had packed when I had heard my father’s whistle back in London. Omi had knitted it and a pair of matching mittens from
a blue jumper that I had when I was a baby. She had unravelled it, pulling at the live and wriggling wool, and with German words I couldn’t understand she showed me how to hold my hands out so the wool caught and wound around them. Omi was my grandmother, and for a long time I thought she was only that. I remember the moment when I realized she was, or had been, other things too—a daughter, a wife, and, most difficult to comprehend of all, Ute’s mother. I couldn’t imagine Ute having a mother, or any relations—she was too complete. Ute said that Omi was angry because I didn’t know any German and couldn’t speak to her.

“She blames me,” Ute said.

“Eine fremde Sprache ist leichter in der Küche als in der Schule gelernt,” said Omi, winding the wool.

“What did she say?” I asked Ute.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “She says I should have taught you German in the kitchen. She is a silly old woman whose brains have shrunk.”

I looked at Omi, wrinkled and brown like a walnut. I imagined her brain, also wizened, rattling around inside her skull.

“In the kitchen?” I persisted.

Ute huffed. “She means I should have taught you at home when you were young, but it is not her business
and it is a good thing you don’t know German. Omi tells lies and because you cannot understand her, you cannot understand them. I told her that she tells too many stories.” Ute put on a wide smile for Omi, but the old lady frowned and I thought perhaps she wasn’t as stupid as Ute believed.

I liked to watch Omi’s face while she worked and talked to me. Sometimes she grew wistful and the wool slackened. Then something in her story would agitate her. She would repeat a phrase over and over, staring me in the eyes as though that might make me understand. If Ute was passing, I begged her to translate, desperate to know what my grandmother thought was so important. But Ute would just roll her eyes again and say Omi was only telling me not to trust the stranger in the woods, or to be sure to always carry breadcrumbs in my apron pockets, or to stay away from the wolf’s teeth.

“Ja, stay away from the wolf,” Omi would copy in halting English, and the hairs on the back of my neck would rise at her warning.

My grandmother moved my hands apart, so the wool could be wound fast and tight against my skin, making red tracks on the backs of my hands. When the jumper was gone, eaten away by a ball of wool that grew fat on its blue food, Omi knitted it into a hat that I could
pull down over my face so just my nose, mouth, and eyes looked out. My grandmother sewed two small black ears on top and embroidered three lines of whiskers, radiating out from each side.

In the forest, I crawled to the end of the tent and stuck my head out. The world was muted beyond the blue wool. My father moved like a man in a silent film, on his hands and knees, blowing, without a sound, at the fire to coax a flame from the embers. I came out like a woodland animal and watched him pour water into a billycan; when a few flames started to lick upward, he nestled the can amongst them. A stick cracked under my knee, but still he didn’t turn around. I was a deer, a mouse, a mute bird creeping up to take my revenge on the hunter. I lunged at his back, launching myself forward, talons out and clinging on around his neck. My father didn’t even jump.

“What do you want for breakfast, pipsqueak?” he asked. “Stew, stew, or stew?”

“My name isn’t pipsqueak,” I said, sliding off him. My voice sounded like I was underwater.

“What is it today then?” My father sat back on a log he had put beside the fire the night before, and lifted a metal plate which covered another billycan. He fished something out from the stew with a fingertip, an insect or
a piece of leaf, and flicked it away into the grass. He stirred the meat and set the billycan beside the boiling water.

“Sleeping Beauty?” my father asked, and turned to look at me. “Little Blue Riding Hood?”

I sat beside him on the log and poked at the fire with a stick. He pulled the balaclava off my head by its ears and flung it behind him toward the tent.

“Rapunzel!” my father exclaimed. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” He was suddenly loud, as if someone had turned up the volume. There were birds and wind in the trees, and in the distance I could hear the river, a never-ending chatter, like a crowd of faraway people.

Even with the hat off, my long hair stayed bunched in a wild and static-filled tangle against my head. My father hooked his fingers in it and tried to draw them downward, but my hair remained nested, refusing to move.

“I can’t believe you forgot to pack your comb,” he said, like he had said every morning for the past few weeks and, as in all those times, I was instantly alert to the change in his tone of voice. “Damn,” he continued, “why didn’t we just buy one?”

“It doesn’t matter, Papa. Look, I can do it myself.” I dragged my fingers through my matted hair and patted it flat against my head. I could feel that it was only
slightly better. I opened my eyes wide and tried to look my most beguiling. “See, I don’t need a comb.”

“No, I suppose we can get away with it.” He didn’t sound convinced.

I relaxed and let out a breath. My father stirred the stew and dished it up onto plates. He made tea in two mugs, putting a pinch of leaves taken from a tin into the billycan and swilling the water around until it became brown. We had no milk, so we drank it without, each of us staring into the fire, lost in our own thoughts.

The river wasn’t blue like the map had shown; it was a silver ribbon threaded through a green blanket. My father stood on the pebbles at the very edge, the toes of his shoes damp. He shaded his eyes, scanning up and down, assessing the best fishing location. I stood beside him, half his size, also shading my eyes and watching the water. I tried to hide my disappointment. I didn’t dare ask where all the fish were, or why my father had to catch one with a rod and line rather than just leaning in to grab a trout. He looked over his shoulder at the trees behind him; I looked over my shoulder too. On one of our evenings by the campfire in London, my father had told me about a fishing trip he had taken with his father in Hampshire. He said that they had fished in streams so clear he had
seen the chalk at the bottom and trout hanging in the current with open mouths. I had imagined white sticks of blackboard chalk swimming in the clear water underneath the fish, but now that image seemed as impossible as the animals flying. My father said it was important to always look behind before you cast, because on that trip he had caught his father’s eyebrow with the hook as he flicked the line over his shoulder. The barb had gone in above the eye, emerging from a fold in the lid. My father said that Grandpa had held his hand over his face and sworn a great deal, but the hook refused to go forward or backward, and when he shouted for the metal to be cut, my father, responsible for packing the equipment, realized he had forgotten to bring the wire cutters. My grandpa had made my father cut through the skin of his eyelid with the fish-gutting knife to remove the hook.

By the river, my father unpacked his fishing rod and slotted it together. I watched him for a while, but it took so long—feeding the line along the guides, tying on the artificial fly, and attaching the reel—that I got bored. I wandered upstream and crouched at the water’s edge, turning over stones, absorbed by the tiny creatures running for their lives.

My father whistled a tune I recognized from home, something I often fell asleep to. I caught the melody and
hummed it while I squinted at him. With the sun behind him, he stood in front of the water as if he were conducting it, commanding it to flow. He pulled the line from the reel so that it lay in unravelled loops at his feet. In rhythm with his music, he flicked the rod up and over his head, craning backward to watch the fly streak out behind him. He twitched the rod forward and the coiled line whisked up and through the guides, catapulting out to a patch of sunlight. I looked up and followed it, etching an arc over the blue sky. As the hook touched water, my father jerked his arm up and back, the line and fly following gracefully, and forward again so that they dropped farther out. He repeated the movement once more, until the fly swam in the middle of the current and floated downstream.

He carried on casting backward and forward, a mesmerising fluid action, something his whole body performed until the rod was an extension of his arm and hand. I walked upstream so the swoosh-whip of the line, cutting through the air, could have been the cry of a bird. The bank was lower where I was, eaten away by the river when it was in full flow. I untied my shoes and took them off. My father had bought them for me at the start of the summer. They were boys’ shoes, dark blue with a white stripe and a leaping cat on the back of each heel. I removed my socks and tucked them inside the shoes.

The water flowed fast through the middle channel, but where I stood it had pulled back from the bank and left behind a strip of silt. I stepped down from the grass into brown mud which oozed between my toes, cooling my blood.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my father cast the line again. The day was hot and the water inviting; there would be no problem with wading up to my knees, even though my father still hadn’t taught me to swim. Hopping on one foot, then the other, and in the process smearing mud over my legs, I removed my trousers. Mud caked their insides, but I flung them behind me onto the bank and took a step into the water, gasping with shock at the cold and the pain of the stones on the soles of my feet. I stood in the water up to my knees, churned mud swirling around my legs while the current tried to suck me away. It was the deepest I had ever been in and still my father didn’t notice.

I gave up willing him to turn around to look at me; he was focusing all his attention on the artificial fly out on the water. I came out of the river and sat on the grass, prodding and picking at my numb legs, already changing to grey elephant skin. It wasn’t fair to be the warmest person in the world, sitting next to the coolest thing, and not know how to swim. I wanted to ask my father
whether he could teach me right away, but didn’t dare. He cast—up, back, forward, up, back, forward, up, back, forward—until the fly rested on the water. Then the line tightened and he let out a long, low “wowyaa” as he pulled the line through the guides with his hand. There was a flash of heat in my head when I saw how much he cared for the fish. I might have been in the middle of the river, drowning, and if he caught me on the end of his line he would have been disappointed. I watched him for a bit longer, battling with the fish, pulling it in without letting his rod bend too far, allowing it to swim out a little and pulling it in again. A tired and docile trout was dragged through the shallows, while I walked into the woods and sat down in the long grass.

“Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Einer kleiner flish!” My father shouted like a winner.

It was as if I were in a cinema, watching the action on a big screen. What would happen next? When would the hero realize the heroine had disappeared? My father prised the hook out of the trout’s mouth and laid the fish on the ground. He had already selected a heavy rock from the bank, and now he picked it up, lifting his arm high in the air, aiming at the fish’s head. I narrowed my eyes in preparation but didn’t look away. Before the rock came slamming down, my father glanced over his
shoulder—to search for me, I supposed. There was a sourness in my chest; I wanted the fish to be beaten and I wanted my father to be shocked that I was no longer on the riverbank. He stood up, letting the rock fall beside the trout. Between the stalks of grass, I could just see the flapping of its tail while it drowned in the summer air. My father went to my scattered clothes and picked up the trousers. He looked underneath them as though I might be hiding there. I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a giggle.

I saw his lips form a word that may have been “fuck.” Then, looking around, he called, “Peggy? Peggy!”

I didn’t answer, but sat still like a creature of the forest, a shadow.

My father gathered up my clothes and held them to his chest. The mud on the trousers marked his shirt with a brown streak; he put them back down and stared desperately out across the water.

“Peggy!” he shouted again, and he waded in, without even taking off his shoes. I winced for him because of the cold. He strode straight in, up to the top of his thighs, so he could look beyond the bushes which hung out over the water. I worried about how wet his shoes and shorts would be and how angry that would make him later. I was no longer quiet because I was hiding, but
because I needed to hide. He stood in the water where I had been ten minutes earlier and scanned the banks upstream, shading his eyes against the sun. He turned and stared downstream, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted with real worry in his voice, “Peggy? Peggy!” and, “Shit!”