Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (13 page)

He untied the kite from his back and immediately the wind wanted it. The tail uncurled, flicking. My father checked the tightness of the knot and, holding the ball of cord in his fist, he let the kite go. Instantly it was airborne. Demanding more and more string, it jerked at the line in frustration. Even I had to admit it was a beautiful thing. It soared over the wintereyes, becoming a blue bird in a blue sky. It took all the string my father fed it, until one loop remained, tied around his palm. We
both stared up; our necks craned back until they ached and our eyes blurred.

“Do you want to have a go?” he said.

I nodded, and he put the loop over my fingers and closed them around it.

“Hold tight,” he said, and smiled. The kite tugged at me, nagging for attention. My father was looking up as I straightened my fingers and let the kite jerk the string from my hand. The blue diamond got even smaller, the string sailing off below it. For a moment my father was confused; he looked down at my empty hand and back up at the string.

“No!” he shouted into the wind. And while I watched the kite fly away over the river and the trees, toward home, I felt an instant of real and absolute happiness.

That night, our first in the cabin, the weather broke and my father’s roof-mending skills were put to the test. The rain pounded on our little house in the woods, dripping through the holes in the shingles he had missed. He had tacked a square of tent canvas over the empty window, so when the first lightning bolt flashed, the stove, the table, and the wooden walls all flared an electric blue. The wind pulled and pushed at the canvas and shrieked through the gaps around the door. We lay curled together
in our sleeping bags on the single bed, a mattress made from ferns beneath us, and while the thunder rolled over the forest in angry waves, my father told me stories. He whispered them into my hair as he held me, but much later I wondered whether the stories and what happened in the morning were my punishment for letting go of the kite.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a beautiful girl called Punzel, who lived in the forest with her papa. They had a little house, with a little bed and stove to keep them warm; in fact they had everything they could have ever wished for. Punzel knitted her long hair into two plaits, which she curled into seashells, over her ears.”

I thought of Becky sitting in the front row in our classroom, not a hair out of place.

“And with her coiled plaits she could hear all sorts of things: the deer and the rabbits chattering in the forest, her father calling to her from a long way off, and all the people of the world shouting at once in their different languages. When her hair was curled around her ears, Punzel could understand every one of them.”

“What were they saying?” I whispered back as the room flashed. I clung to my father, afraid that the wind would lift off the roof above our heads and whip up all the things in the cabin so that my father and I would be
whisked around and around with the bed and the stove and the tool chest, until we were sucked up and away.

“Well, mostly she heard the people of the world fighting with each other.” The thunder rumbled right on cue. “They couldn’t live together happily. They lied to each other, and when people do that, in the end, the world they have built will always come tumbling down. Punzel hated hearing the people of the world lie and argue. But one day she woke to find that the angry planet was silent; all she could hear was the sound of her father chopping wood for the stove and the animals asking her to come out to play. And Punzel was the happiest girl in the world.”

It took me a long time to fall asleep that first night, even after the storm had passed and with my father’s arms holding me tight. In the morning I woke alone. I listened for the animals and the sound of my father chopping wood, but I could hear only a few birds and the wind rising up from the river. The cabin was cold in the early morning, but I got out of bed and opened the door in my nightie. My father was trudging up through the clearing, walking through the leaves and twigs that were strewn about. His pyjamas were wet and his hair stuck flat to his head. He was crying and shivering, and he scared me even more than the thunderstorm had.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said, curling into a ball on the doorstep, hugging his knees and making horrible noises. “I couldn’t do it.”

I knew he wanted me to ask what he couldn’t do, but instead I backed away from him and crouched in the corner beside the stove. I reached out and let my fingers touch the letters gouged into the wood under the bottom shelf.
Reuben
. After a while, my father gathered himself together and came inside. His pyjama bottoms were muddy and the knees ripped. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and opened the stove to put a log on the embers, then he removed his pyjamas and hung them on the length of rope that we had strung up to dry our clothes.

“I went over to the other side of the Fluss,” he said. Steady drips of water punctuated his words with a hiss each time they dropped onto the hotplate. “To see the damage from the storm. It’s worse than I imagined.” He sniffed. “The rest of the world has gone.”

That’s how he said it—just like that, matter of fact. And I continued to sit in the corner with my hand under the shelf and my insides hollowed out. He changed into dry clothes and neither of us said any more about it.

In the afternoon, my father gave me a present of a comb. He had carved it from a sliver of wood, filed and sanded it and given it half a dozen teeth. He made me sit
on one of the mended stools and he combed my long dark hair. Where he found the knots too difficult to draw the comb through, he cut them out with his knife. When my hair was as smooth and sleek as it had ever been at home, he divided it with a centre parting and made me plait it. He tied the ends with string and we coiled them around my ears, sticking the loops in place with twigs. When it was done, he looked me in the eyes, holding my shoulders.

“We’ll be all right. It’s just you and me now, Punzel,” he said, and gave me a crooked smile.

I wanted to ask him if the Russkies had done it, but was too afraid to make him cry again. He picked up the buckets and said that he wouldn’t be long and that I should keep the stove going, but I stood at the door and watched him go, holding on to the door frame, terrified he would disappear into the trees and not come back. I stood there for a long time, just waiting. And almost too late, I remembered the stove. I opened its little door to a billow of smoke and prodded its red insides with the poker. The pointed end turned over a small charred book which lay amongst the embers and, as I watched, a flame caught it and curled it open as if an unseen hand flicked through the pages. I stared at my passport photograph while it blistered in the heat and my face melted away into the fire.

12

“Where’s the piano?” It was the first thing I said when I opened my eyes on our third morning in the cabin. I think my father had been waiting for the question, maybe since we had arrived.

He didn’t flinch; he was over by the stove, boiling a pan of water and fiddling with the flue. He twisted a section of tube to stop the smoke from seeping out, but it escaped from a different gap. He twisted it again, creating a new hole. A grey cloud loitered in the roof space.

“Papa! The piano,” I said, sitting up. “You told me die Hütte had a piano.”

I tried to imagine having the one from home inside the cabin. We would have to remove the roof and lower it in. An upright piano did not occur to me. In front of
the single bed we shared, a dirty rag rug lay on the floor, one quarter torn off or eaten away. The table stood under the window, laid with forks and metal plates; the three-legged stools were stored underneath. Up against the opposite wall was the tool chest, with the remains of the tent rolled on top, and facing me was the stove, tucked into its wall of shelves. It had taken us a whole day to clean the bird poop and feathers off them—droppings stuck so hard to the planks we had to chip them off with a chisel my father had found in the chest. He carried bucket after bucket of water up from the river, but we had nothing to scrub with, so we improvised with grit, rubbing it under blocks of wood until the planks were sanded clean. Odd nails and hooks had been hammered into the sides of the shelves, and it had been another of my jobs to hang up the billycans and assorted saucepans and utensils we had unearthed as we cleaned. There was no room for a piano.

“I’ll make one,” said my father, putting two cups of weak tea on the table. We were already rationing the leaves.

Behind me on the bed, Phyllis made a noise which suggested she was tired of stories and promises.

“Oh, Papa,” I said. I sounded like Ute, and perhaps he noticed that too, because he looked at me with a sorry face.

“Maybe not a whole piano. I could just make the keys, find some wood, work out the mechanism. It shouldn’t be too difficult.” My father was fired up at the idea, running his hands through his hair, already planning.

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling sceptical.

“I’ll make you one, Punzel, wait and see, and you can learn to play. Your mother might not have taught you, but I will. And I brought some sheet music with us.” He was like a child in his excitement. He stood on a stool to reach up into the rafters, tugging down his rucksack, which was stored there. “I wasn’t sure about showing it to you because I knew it would make you remember, about the piano.” He handed me a faded green booklet, the paper cover rubbed to felt from years of handling. “It was out on the piano when we left, so I took it. Your mother would have wanted you to have it.”

The cover had the word LISZT in black, and underneath,
La Campanella
. Above a line of writing that was probably German, a beautiful winged lady sat reading music and holding a small harp-like instrument, as though she had all the time in the world to choose what she wanted to play. Her face was serene, and she seemed to be untroubled by the fact that a baby was struggling under the weight of the book which he held open for her. All around them was an abundance of produce: grapes,
pears, apples, flowers, leaves. I would have stepped into that world if I could, and swung on a drape of ribbon, while the lady played and the baby dropped grapes into my open mouth.

Impatient for me to look inside, my father took the music and laid it open on the table, the white paper shaded blue in the morning light that struggled through the canvas window pane. In the white spaces between the lines were handwritten words and numbers in green pen. Ute’s handwriting:
beschleunigt!
—underlined three times;
achten
; and, many times,
springen
. I imagined her leaning forward at the piano to write something, biting her bottom lip, and I remembered with a lurch that Ute, the piano, the room she sat in, had all gone.

The dots, sticks, and lines blurring in front of me meant nothing. Ute had never taught me even one note. Sometimes I had been allowed to stand beside her while she practised, as long as I didn’t fidget, but I never understood the translation of the cryptic symbols into the jumps and ripples she made with her fingers, and the sound that came out of the piano. As she had done with German, Ute had kept the music for herself.

My father put his index finger under the first three sticks along the bottom line and sang three identical notes, the third one a fraction shorter than the others.
His finger moved along, and there were three answering chimes from the high notes. He didn’t hesitate; he didn’t have to search around for the right pitch, but sang them as though he were the instrument, and the sound that came out of his mouth was pure and sweet. He repeated the low notes, and the highs followed along behind them.

“This chord”—my father held his finger under two black circles, clinging to a single stalk—“is encouraging the high ones to take over. Listen.” He sang the refrain from the beginning, low then high, low then high. “But just when you think they’ve got the hang of it, there is the tiniest of pauses, as if these—on the treble clef—are nervous.” My father held his right arm in the air, his thumb and forefinger pressed together and his lips pursed. Wait, just wait, he seemed to be saying. “And suddenly they find their courage.” He forgot the sheet music and sang a few bars of the melody from memory, fast and rippling, his arms conducting.

“Can you hear the little bell? A handbell made of china. It rings over the top, like this.” He was silent for a moment, and I strained to hear the bell amid the noise of the wind and the creaking of the roof and walls. My father sang a high trilling tune and went back to the sinuous melody.

I recognized the music from home, from lying in bed and hearing Ute play it. I thought it sounded more like a trapped bird fluttering against a window than a bell.

He dropped his arms and stopped singing. “Perhaps it’s too difficult. Your mother . . .” he paused, as if this was the first time since we had been away that he had thought about her at the piano; his voice sounded strained. “Your mother used to say it was one of the most difficult pieces. There are two separate tunes that tease each other, so many trills, and it’s so fast. It was a stupid piece of music to bring.”

I was worried that already his mood was changing.

I sat on the stool, my feet tucked under my nightie to keep them warm, and looked at the music. I ran my finger along the fine horizontal lines, remembering the sound of it flowing through the floors of our London house—soaking into the wood, coursing up the white walls, swelling against the windows, creating a backwash which flooded up the staircase to my bedroom and lifted me out of my bed, so that as I drifted off to sleep I was held aloft by a salty sea of music.