Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (9 page)

I looked where he looked, but there was nothing to see except the rippling shadows of branches and clouds, and the occasional bubble. He came back to the bank and ran in a short burst against the current, then ran back, all the while looking at the water. He reminded me of a Labrador whose stick has been thrown into the middle of a pond and who hesitates for a second before leaping in. Hopping and tripping, my father pulled off his boots and his shorts, now a darker shade of blue. He yanked his shirt over his head, leaving his clothes in a pile on top of mine. His torso was startlingly white against his brown forearms and calves, as if he were wearing a flesh-coloured tank top. He hesitated on the bank, then strode in again, as though he had dismissed the thought of diving into the shallows. I was really scared, scared he would plunge into the river and not resurface. And then I would be the one running up and down the bank, shouting. I wouldn’t know what to do, where to go for help, how to get home. I wouldn’t know how to swim or catch fish, or what to eat. My mind
ran on as I watched him. I might be wandering around the forest on my own for years. I would have to sleep in the tent by myself, supposing that I could even put it up, and there would be rustling and howling and small animals scurrying around in the night. Something might be in the woods. That thought made me turn around from my position, hiding in the grass, and look behind me. A mass of trees and darkness loomed.

“Peggy!” my father shouted once more.

“My name isn’t Peggy,” I called out.

He froze, up to his waist in the water. He appeared unsure of what he had heard. He turned his head one way, then the other, trying to work out where my voice had come from. He waded back to the bank.

Louder, I said, “It’s Rapunzel.”

My father looked toward where I was sitting and ran forward, almost tripping over himself in his anxiety. He bent over me and put his face, which changed from white to red, very close to mine. He took me by both shoulders and dug his fingers into the hollows between my bones. And he shook me.

“Don’t ever, ever do that again,” he yelled into my face. “You must always stay where I can see you. Do you understand?” My body was jerking backward and forward in the opposite direction to my head. Tears of pain
and terror came, and I wondered if it was possible for my neck to snap from so much shaking.

His underpants were wet, leaking rivulets of water down his legs. He let go of my shoulders and, instead, held me by my wrist and pulled me upright. My father was a tall man. He lifted my wrist as high as he could, raising my arm over my head, so I had to stand on tiptoe in order for my body to follow after it. I started to cry—whimpering at first, then much louder. In bare feet, hopping over the twigs and stones, my father pulled me back to our pile of clothes and scooped them up. He carried on dragging me, howling, down the bank to the fish, which was still giving an occasional weak flap of its tail. He picked up the rock and held it up above my head. Against the bright sun, it was a meteorite spinning toward me. He brought it down fast. I tried to pull away, but his grip on my wrist increased. I kicked against the ground, knocking the slippery fish with my bare toes—turning it over onto my trousers. The hand with the rock whipped past my face by a couple of inches and landed on the trout’s head, destroying it. My father let go of me and hurled the rock into the water.

“Fuck!” he shouted as he threw it. I curled into a tight little ball beside the trout, my fingers locked together over the top of my head, still expecting the blow
from the rock to land on me. We were both silent; all the world was silent for a moment.

“I want . . . to . . . go . . . home.” I struggled to get the words out between choking sobs. I tried to not look at the fish with its mashed head.

“Get dressed.” My father gave my shoes a kick toward me. He picked up his own clothes and put them on with fierce movements as if they too had misbehaved. He took his fishing rod apart in angry bursts.

Almost under my breath, I repeated, “I want to go home, Papa.”

“Get dressed!” My father pulled my trousers out from under the fish as though he were performing a magic trick with a tablecloth. He flung them at me. Pieces of crushed fish flesh and skin stuck to them. Still crying, I put them on, then my socks and shoes.

“We’ll go home when the fucking fish begin to fly,” my father shouted. I tried hard to swallow my sobs and talk in a way that would reach him.

“I miss, I miss,” I stuttered. I wanted to tell him that I missed Becky and school and Ute, but the words wouldn’t come.

His anger was like a popped balloon—all the rage gone in an instant. He sat on the bank with his head in his hands.

“We can’t go home, Rapunzel.”

“Why not?” My voice was reedy.

“Mutti, she just isn’t there any more.” My father rushed the words without looking at me.

“She’ll be back from Germany soon though.” Even as I spoke, I knew that couldn’t be right; already more than two weeks and three days had passed since my father and I had sat beside the fire in London and he had told me that was how long it would be before Ute came home.

“No, that’s not what I mean. She’s gone, Punzel. She’s dead.” He still looked at the ground.

I remembered what I had told my headmaster and Mrs. Cass, and was frightened that, in saying it, I had made it happen.

“No, Papa. She’s just in Germany,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

“She’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“Gone where? Where?” My voice was a rising wail.

“I’m sorry.” He leaned in toward me, and I flinched as he held the upper part of my arms to my sides. My trousers were pinned against my thigh and I felt sick thinking about the fish brains soaking through the cloth. My father looked into my eyes and away. He pulled me to him, trapping me between his knees and burying his
face in my hair. My head was squashed between his arm and his chest. His heart was loud, but his voice muffled. I thought I heard him say, “The wolf took her, Punzel.”

“No. No, Papa. No.” I struggled against him, but he held me too tight.

He made a noise similar to the one I had heard in the glasshouse, the night before we had left, but worse—like one of our rabbits caught in a wire trap, wretched and unnatural. He said something else into my hair which might have been, “The whole fucking world,” but I wasn’t sure. I stopped struggling and went floppy in his embrace, and the awful choking noises subsided. Without a word and without looking at me, he stood up and walked off into the trees, leaving me in an odd crouch between the decapitated trout and the river. I wanted to call after him to ask him why we had bought the seeds if she was dead, but I never did.

Although eventually the stench of the fish on my trousers blended with every other smell, to become one big stink that we stopped noticing, the red stain in the shape of a duckling never faded from my trousers. It was high up on the right thigh, so even when I had to slice them into shorts much later it stayed with me.

8

We followed the river as it wound through the landscape. Sometimes we had to make a detour into the woods, and once we waded through the shallows when our path was blocked by fallen trees. We crossed marshy land, jumping from one grassy hillock to another, but my father wobbled and only just stopped himself from toppling into the boggy water. He said it was too dangerous and we’d have to turn back and go around it. We rested at the top of a hill, with the water unravelling below us. The clouds were heavy over our heads, and the air thick like the fug in a steamy kitchen. The sky threatened a downpour which didn’t come.

My father unfolded the map and tilted it one way, then the other, matching the wooded landscape
surrounding us with the features in front of him. I lay on my stomach, with my arm out and my palm upward, as steady as I could make it, waiting for the grasshopper sounding its scratchy rattle in the grass nearby. I told myself that if I caught the insect, Ute would not be dead and soon we would turn around and start going home. I was tired of walking and camping and catching squirrels. I wanted a bed and a bath and proper food. A quick green flash from nowhere and the grasshopper landed on my hand. It sat there like Joan of Arc in its armour and helmet, large amber eyes downcast and saintly.

“Can we eat grasshoppers, Papa?” I whispered, so that the insect wouldn’t be alarmed and jump away. My father still stood looking at the map and tapping his compass as though he would have preferred north to be in a different place.

“Papa,” I hissed, “can we eat grasshoppers?”

“Yes,” he said, concentrating on the map and not looking down, “but they’re better boiled because of the tapeworms.”

“Do they taste nicer when they’re boiled?”

“What?” he glanced at me, and the grasshopper launched itself back onto the battlefield, just as my fist was closing around it. When I opened my hand, the creature was gone. My heart sank. I rolled onto my side
and stared up at my father—a giant, holding back the heavy sky with the width and power of his shoulders.

“The tapeworms,” I said.

“Tapeworms? What?” He was still distracted, putting the map back in his rucksack pocket.

“How about grass? Is that nice to eat?” I picked a blade and put it in my mouth. It tasted the same as its colour.

“Come on, Punzel. Time to find die Hütte.” He lifted his rucksack onto his shoulders. Tied to the bottom was a dead rabbit, dangling from its hind legs.

“I wouldn’t like to eat snails.” I stood up. “That wouldn’t be right, taking them out of their houses.”

My father picked up my rucksack, helped me into it, and moved off in the direction of the glittering water.

“Papa? When can we go home?” I said in a voice so quiet he didn’t answer. I followed on behind him.

The sky pressed down on the land, leaving us walking in a narrow strip of air, charged with electricity. With one more check of the map my father said we had gone far enough. We sat down, high above the river on a shelf of rock, looking over a gorge which water, although colourless and insubstantial when cupped by hands, had worn through stone. On our left, the water forced itself through a narrow gap so that it burst out, roaring and
rushing over rocks and boulders, falling to a pool far below our feet. There, the water was still for a time until it moved onward, widening, spitting and foaming through more boulders. I sat beside my father, my chin in my hands, watching him from the corner of my eye, trying to sidle inside his head without him knowing. On the other side of the river, stringy trees and bushes jostled for position between slabs of rock similar to the one we sat on.

“Maybe there’s a bridge a bit farther down, Papa,” I shouted over the noise of the roiling water. He gave me a sideways look that meant I had said something ridiculous.

“No, we have to cross down there,” he shouted back, standing up on the slippery rock. I crawled away from the edge on my hands and knees, and the two of us picked our way downstream until the bank was level with the water. In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air. My father selected a strong branch from under the trees, broke a stick from it, tossed the stick as far as he could
into the river and, for a second or two, we watched it speed downstream, dance around the rocks, and vanish.

“You should have taught me how to swim,” I said.

My father took off all his clothes, except his underpants, then put his boots back on and told me to do the same. He crouched down beside me and looked me straight in the eyes and made me promise I would sit where I was and not move so he could see me at all times. That was the only reference he ever made to the fish incident. He had behaved so normally afterward that, later, I wasn’t sure it had ever happened.

My father stuffed our clothes into his rucksack and held it tight to his chest. He walked into the water without noticing the cold; there was just a slight shudder when it came above his thighs. Every now and again he glanced back to check that I still sat where he had left me. I rested my head on my knees and watched him. The water came up to the top of his chest and he moved the rucksack higher, holding it above his head, feeling his way across the rocks. My father staggered, and when the water came up to his chin he had to tilt his head toward the sky. He forced his way forward until more of his torso emerged, until he reached the far bank and dropped the rucksack onto the stony edge. He came back toward me and did the same thing with my rucksack. Finally, back on my side
of the river, my father took the branch he had found, held it horizontally, and tied me to it, looping a length of rope once around my waist and around my wrists. He stood beside me and we both gripped the branch, as if we were holding on to the front bar on a fairground waltzer.

If we make it across, we can go home, I said to myself.

Side by side we stepped into the water.

“When it gets too deep for you to stand, keep holding on with your hands and let your legs float out behind. I’ll be beside you, remember. It will be fine,” said my father. It sounded as though he was reassuring himself as much as me. I didn’t like the way the weed women wrapped themselves around my ankles. We were stepping into the unknown; anything could have been under there with them. The water was colder than it had been the day before, perhaps because of the oppressive heat in the air, or maybe because of the swirling speed of it. And it was noisier. Once we were past the vegetation, stones prodded under my shoes, and the shifting, restless riverbed tried to trick me and tip me over.