“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.
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.