“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.”