“I’m sorry. There was a fire. It got burned.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t worry about the music now.”
We both stopped doing the jigsaw and looked at each other, while Oskar continued to match the pieces.
“It was the music I played when your father and I met—the piece he turned the pages for.”
Oskar stopped concentrating on the jigsaw too and watched us, as if hoping for a revelation, but neither Ute nor I said more. The Liszt played itself in my head, fluttering and rippling, and something unravelled inside me; a stitch I had once believed was firm came loose—a tiny thread waiting to be pulled.
We gave up on the puzzle after that, and Ute started making lunch and an Apfelkuchen for the afternoon visitors. Oskar wanted to go into the garden to stamp on frozen puddles, so he put his coat back on.
“It is too cold, Oskar, to be outside. It is the coldest November in London since time began,” Ute said, already busy with the flour.
“Records,” I said.
Ute scowled at me. “What?” she asked.
“Since records began,” I said, but she still frowned. I caught Oskar’s eye and we both laughed. “I think I’ll go outside too,” I said, getting my coat and scarf from the hall.
The cold fresh air was a relief after the stuffy house. Our breath came out in clouds and the bricks on the terrace glistened, waiting to slip up an unwary foot. White dust lay along the top of the box hedging. Oskar jabbed the heel of his boot into the ice that had formed in the bottom of a flowerpot saucer, then tried to pack the dust into a snowball, but it fell in crumbs from his hands. I longed for a chilly blanket of real snow tucked around the naked and shivering wintereyes.
Oskar rapped his knuckles on the thick ice which had risen like a soufflé out of a bucket hanging on a nail beside the back door. I recognized it; it was the bucket my father and I had used, with a tap attached to the bottom so we could brush our teeth with running water. In the frozen garden the tap dripped an icicle.
“Would madam like something to drink?” Oskar laughed and turned the handle, twisting it hard; his mouth twisting too, with the effort. The tap snapped off. And for the first time since I had come home I cried—for the music, for Reuben, but most of all for the waste of a bucket.
10
“Die Hütte,” said my father as though he were starting a prayer.
I could say nothing. At that moment, with just one shoe, my hair still lank from the water, I knew, even more than when my father had smashed the fish head, or told me Ute was dead, that something had gone wrong with our holiday. I stared at the cabin with my mouth hanging open. In my imagination it had been a gingerbread house with roses around the door, a veranda with a rocking chair, and smoke puffing from the chimney. Exactly who was there to tend the roses and light the stove hadn’t been clear, but even seeing Oliver Hannington would have been better than the tumbledown witch’s house that stood before us.
Its walls were hung with wooden shingles, and where they were missing, dark gaps grimaced like a mouth with knocked-out teeth. The front door hung open at an angle, and the single window had warped and popped its glass. The only thing to remind me of home was the bramble that scrambled across the roof and dropped in loops through the gaps in the shingles that were nailed there too. Searching for light, the bramble had reached the window and now stuck its blind tendrils out, beckoning us to join it inside.
Saplings sprouted unchecked against the walls, so it appeared as if die Hütte, ashamed of its dishevelled appearance, was trying, and failing, to hide behind them. I half expected a trail of breadcrumbs to lead off into the trees that pressed in from both sides.
“Die Hütte,” my father said again. He took off his rucksack, dropped it, and walked toward the cabin. I followed him up the slope, wading through the grass.
Up close, the cabin seemed even more dilapidated. The wooden door frame was spongy where I leaned against it; the hinges had rusted and the bottom one fallen away. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the interior darkness, illuminated by shafts of light from the holes in the roof. The stink, an animal smell, musty and rank, like a dog’s damp bed, hit me before I could make out any proper shapes. My father had already pushed his way inside and was sifting through the mess, kicking at the broken things that might have once been furniture, all made from the same rough timber as the inside walls. With each item he found—a stool with two legs, a rusty spade, a broom with a few twigs clinging to the end—he cursed under his breath. In the middle of the room a table leaned drunkenly with one leg bent beneath it. My father pulled it straight, so the surface became horizontal, gave it a shake to check its stability, and started loading it with things from the floor: the prongs of a garden fork, a kettle without a lid, pans, heaps of dirty cloth which fell apart as soon as he lifted them, and other unidentifiable pieces of metal and wood which were strewn around. I glanced behind me, down the slope to the trees, worrying that maybe a bear had made this mess, but the line of dark trunks stared back without giving anything away. Inside the cabin, the wall to my right had been splattered with what looked like icing, stuck with feathers. It had dripped over the shelves, coating a metal box which was raised off the ground on four small feet. My father picked up a wooden bowl from the floor and plonked it on the table.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and, “fuck, fucking liar. It must be ten years since anyone’s been here,” he said to himself more than me. “Humans, anyway.”
I didn’t want to go in; the smell scratched at the back of my throat. I stayed in the doorway, watching my father frowning at every broken implement he found. He picked up pieces of pipe that appeared to have dropped out of a hole in the roof. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his long hair. A bit of the white icing stuck above his ear.
“How the hell did they manage to get this all the way up here and over the Fluss?” my father said, giving the box a kick with his foot.
“Where will we sleep?” I said.
My father looked around as if he had forgotten I was there. His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t.
“If I can get this going, we’ll be as warm as toast,” he said. He picked up another piece of metal pipe and tried to slot the two together. I knew he was pretending to be happy.
“I don’t like it. It smells.”
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
The Railway Children and their house with the three chimneys came back to me, and how the children had been frightened when they had first arrived. Perhaps I should try being brave. “It’s only the rats,” I said to my father in a northern accent. He looked at me as though I were peculiar.
“Out of the way, Punzel.” He squeezed past me and pulled the table into the middle of the room. He tested it again and gingerly put one knee and then the other onto it. Nudging all his found objects out of the way, he stood up. His head was just higher than the three beams which ran crossways below the roof. He stretched on the tips of his toes and craned his neck. “Damn,” he said, running his hand over the beam closest to him so that a shower of white flakes came down, making me cough. He jumped off the table and pulled it to the other end of the cabin, climbed up again, and examined the other two beams. Dust swirled in shafts of light.