Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (7 page)

Up ahead, beyond my father, was bright sunlight, and forgetting the forest and the deer and Christmas, I ran to catch up. He was standing at the very edge of the trees. Rolled out before us was a meadow of bright grass, falling away to a deep valley. So deep, we couldn’t see the bottom. After that, the land rose up again to more dark pines and meadows. The monster hills that had been there before had disappeared. I took a step forward into the light, soaking up the sunshine. I stretched out my arms and imagined rolling over and over down the hill and back up the other side. I would roll forever. I was a cold-blooded lizard and the sun gave me energy. I went to run, but my father caught me by the shoulder.

“No!”

He pulled me back into the shadows.

“Look.” My father, still squeezing my shoulder, pointed to the left, along the edge of the forest. It was as if we actually had become deer and were standing at the very limit of our territory, deciding whether a taste of fresh grass in the open was worth the risk. At the side of the meadow were six haystacks, tall and pointed, like shaggy wigwams. They were green with age, as though they had been there for years, left behind from a harvest long ago.

“If there are haystacks, there are people,” hissed my father. I didn’t understand why this was a problem. We
had met lots of people on our trek through Europe: the French lady who gave me boiled sweets on the ferry across the Channel, the man behind the desk in the car-hire office who tweaked my cheek, overalled men in petrol stations, grubby boys who collected our money at campsites, and foreign girls who sold us loaves of bread. My father had avoided conversations with people who spoke English, hurrying me away from the girl with long hair who said she was from Cornwall and let me have a bite of her ice lolly when I was waiting outside a supermarket for my father, in an unnamed French town.

“My name’s Bella,” she said. “That means beautiful. What’s yours?”

I was struggling to swallow the cold lump of ice so that I could tell her I was called Peggy, when my father came back and dragged me away. I would have liked to talk to her, to say the way she smiled reminded me of Becky.

I looked up and down the meadow. “What people? Where?” I asked my father. The view stretched for miles, down into the valley and back up the other side, but all was green—there weren’t any buildings, not even a barn.

“Farmers, peasants . . .” My father paused. “People. We’ll have to go around the edge of the forest. Farther to walk, but safer.”

“Safer from what, Papa?”

“People.”

My father readjusted his rucksack and set off along the treeline, keeping the meadow just out of reach to our left. And I followed on behind.

I wanted to ask how long it would be until we got to die Hütte, if Ute would be joining us, and whether there would be chickens there as well as fish and berries. We had left our hired car on the outskirts of a town days ago and caught a train that carried us across fields and forests and through long black tunnels. My overwhelming impression had been of green and blue—grass, sky, trees, rivers. I had laid my forehead against the window and let my eyes go out of focus. It was hot on the train and stuffy. Every time I moved, the smell of dust rose from my seat, like the air blown from the vacuum cleaner when Ute was in the mood for housework. The journey was uneventful, apart from a brief stop in a town of tall chimneys blowing smoke and factories advertising cigarettes on their walls. An official-looking man shouted into our carriage in a language that sounded like German, and everyone rummaged in bags and pockets. My father handed over our passports and tickets. The man flicked through them and glared at my father and me, and for no reason I could understand made me feel guilty. My father looked the official in the eye and glanced away. He tousled my hair, winked at me,
and smiled at the man, who stared back with a blank face before returning our documents. In the evening, we got off at a town whose houses trickled down a steep hillside—pooling together at the bottom, with the lowest teetering on the edge of a river that buckled and kicked. We camped beside it, fell asleep to its fussing, and the next morning my father made a list of the things we needed to buy:

       
Bread

       
Rice

       
Dried beans

       
Salt

       
Cheese

       
Coffee

       
Pellets

       
Tea

       
Matches

       
Sugar

       
Wine

       
String

       
Rope

       
Shampoo

       
Soap

       
Needles and thread

       
Toothpaste

       
Candles

       
Knife

When we had bought and crossed off everything, we passed a hardware shop and, seemingly on the spur of the moment, my father said we should take a look around because there might be things we had forgotten. We stood at the counter and he produced a list I hadn’t seen before. A man in an apron served us by fetching the items my father pointed at until, laid out before us, were a trowel, many packets of seeds, and a brown paper bag of potatoes which were so old they were already sprouting. My father didn’t look at me while he paid.

What?” he said when we were outside again, even though I hadn’t said anything. “They’re presents for Mutti,” he continued.

“She hates gardening,” I said.

“I’m sure we can make her change her mind,” and again, just like on the train, he tousled my hair. I shook him off, angry about the lie but unable to work out the truth.

In the afternoon, we caught a bus with half a dozen schoolboys in short trousers and a woman carrying a basket covered with a tea towel. The bus was even hotter than the train, and piteous cries came from the basket
as the bus swung around corners. When the boys got off, my father let me approach the woman. She frowned and spoke to me; a long stream of words was born in the back of her throat and rolled off the front of her tongue.

“Can Phyllis and I see the baby?” I said, enunciating every word. “Please.”

I tucked my doll under my arm as I steadied myself against the seat, and the woman lifted the tea towel. A tabby cat, scrawny and balding, shivered in the bottom of the basket. My hand went in to stroke the top of its head, but the cat pulled back its gums and hissed, and I jerked my fingers away. The woman spoke again, abrupt jagged words this time. I looked at her blankly so she shrugged her shoulders, covered the cat with the cloth, and, still swaying with the rhythm of the bus, turned away from me to look out of the window. The cat began to wail again.

“Bavarian,” said my father, when I went back to our seat.

“Bavarian,” I said, without knowing what he meant.

He had unfolded a map I hadn’t seen before, and draped it over the rail of the seat in front. In the map’s creases the paper had worn thin, and in the centre there was a hole where the land had been rubbed away entirely. Phyllis and I sat next to him, looking over his arm. The
blue snake of a river twisted through flat green, interrupted by spidery lines as if a shaky hand had tried to draw circles across the paper. The water flowed off the side of the map, and as my father flapped it, for an instant I saw in the top right-hand corner a small red cross, inside a circle. He packed the map away, looked out of the window, then at his watch, and said it was time to get off the bus and walk.

At first we had stuck to the narrow roads, dusty with a strip of grass growing down the middle. We had seen distant farms, but we met only one other person—an old woman in a headscarf who gave me a cup of milk. She held her cow, brown and docile, on a length of rope. The teacup, missing its saucer, was delicate, the china almost translucent, but most of the handle had been broken off, leaving two sharp horns which stuck out from the side. A stripe of green around the rim had been worn away in places by the hundreds of lips and teeth which must have pressed up against it. The milk in the cup was still warm and smelled of farmyards. The old lady, the cow, and my father watched while I turned the cup so I could drink from a spot opposite the horns. The milk swilled around the inside. As I hesitated, I could see a tightness come in my father’s face, the muscle at the side of his jaw bulging as he clamped his teeth together. Inside my head I said, “If I drink this milk, Papa will say it’s time to go home.”

I tipped the cup and the clabbered milk filled my mouth, washing over my teeth and settling inside my cheeks. The cow mooed as if encouraging me to swallow. I swallowed, but the milk didn’t want to be inside me. It rushed back up, bringing with it all I had previously eaten. I had the good sense to turn away from the old woman’s sandaled feet, but when I retched, my long hair caught in the fountain spewing from my mouth. Later that night in the tent, I ran my fingers through the matted strands and my stomach heaved once more from the smell.

My father apologized again and again to the old woman in English, but she didn’t understand. She stood with her lips pressed together and her hand held out, beside her cow. My father dropped a pile of foreign coins in her leathery palm and we hurried away. I had no idea this wind-worn woman, creased and bag-eyed, standing outside her barn with her cow on a rope, would be the last person I would meet from the real world for another nine years. Perhaps if I had known, I would have clung to the folds of her skirt, hooked my fingers over the waistband of her apron, and tucked my knees around one of her stout legs. Stuck fast, like a limpet or a Siamese twin, I would have been carried with her when she rose in the morning to milk the cow, or into her kitchen to stir the porridge. If I had known, I might never have let her go.

7

At the beginning of our journey, I had been pleased it was just the two of us again. I forgot all about Oliver Hannington, the argument and the smashed glasshouse. But I was tired of walking and bored of how all the meadows and forests merged into one long deer track. Already I couldn’t remember if we had camped for two nights or three after we got off the bus. Now, we were walking downhill, using the edge of the trees to take us into the valley. My stomach was hollow, and under my rucksack my shirt stuck to my back. My legs were so heavy they might have been lumps of stone.

From inside my bag, Phyllis said, “I wonder if die Hütte is actually real. Do you think there is a Fluss so full of fish they can jump straight out of the water into our outstretched arms?”

“Of course there is,” I said.

I let the song come back to me, singing it loudly to drown out her voice. And even though he was ahead, my father joined in, clear and bold:

       
And I told him that I will, oh alaya bakia,

       
When the river runs uphill, oh alaya bakia,

       
And when fish begin to fly, oh alaya bakia,

       
Or the day before I die, oh alaya bakia.

At an unexplained distance from the haystacks, my father decided it was safe enough for us to rest. We sat side by side with our backs against the bark of a pine tree, our feet warming in the sun. I prised Phyllis out of my rucksack and bent her plastic legs so she could sit beside me. Now we were farther down the hillside, I could see into the valley. At the bottom was a river, snaking like it had done on the map, and catching the light where it jumped and tumbled over rocks. The meadow grew into tall grasses and bushes along the banks, and I thought that this must be the river that flowed past die Hütte. My father tore at the last loaf of dark bread we had brought with us from the town, and pared strips of yellow cheese with his knife. The cheese was warm and sweaty and, although I was hungry, it reminded me of the milk I had
regurgitated, but I didn’t want to say anything to change my father’s mood. When he sang he was happy. My father ate with his eyes shut while I made a hollow in the soft dough, pushing the cheese inside, so that together the two became an albino vole in a mudbank. Then the piece of bread and cheese became a brown mouse with a yellow nose, which ran up and down my leg and sat on top of my knee, twitching its whiskers. I offered it to Phyllis’s pouting mouth, but she didn’t want any.

“Just eat it, Peggy,” my father said.

“Just eat it, Phyllis,” I whispered, but she wouldn’t. I looked at my father; his eyes were still shut. I picked at the crust, nibbling a few dry flakes.

Then, with an effort, my father said, “I bet you didn’t know that there
are
fish that can fly.”

“Don’t be silly, Papa.”

“Tomorrow at the Fluss I’ll catch a flish for our flupper,” he said, and laughed at his own joke.

“Will you teach me to swim there too? Please?”

“We’ll see, Liebchen.” He leaned down and awkwardly kissed the top of my head, but both the “darling” and the kiss were not right. Those were Ute’s things.

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Come on, Pegs. Time to get moving again.”