“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He got down and did his pretend smile again. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he said, sitting down on something that might have been a bed, which leaned against the opposite wall to the shelves. He bounced once or twice, and something cracked and gave way beneath him. He got to his feet without comment and stamped on the floorboards.
“There should be a root cellar under here somewhere,” he said. “And the roof is going to need work.” Using a rag that was crusted into a stiff block, he grasped one of the loops of bramble hanging from the ceiling and gave it a tug. It resisted. My father carried on moving things around, pushing junk with his feet, picking up objects, examining them, and putting them on the table. “Where are the damn jerrycans? He said there were jerrycans.”
I backed out, into the long grass, as my father dragged the table toward the door before realizing it was too big to fit through.
“Must have made it inside,” I heard him mutter.
“It’s only the rats,” I said again, but this time he didn’t even look at me. I walked back down the slope. The thick air weighed heavy on the top of my head as I sat on my father’s rucksack and stared at die Hütte. It looked back with a piteous face but was perhaps pleased that it now had company. The land rose steeply behind it; wooded on the lower slopes, then a few trees clinging to rocks until, craning my head backward, I saw sheer cliff and, beyond that, sky, the colour of a bruise. Far behind me, if I concentrated, I could hear the river’s never-ending rumble. Either side of where I sat in a small clearing were tangled bushes, which gave way to dense trees. I was aware of them watching me, shoving against one another to get a better look, but when I whipped my head around, as if I were trying to catch them out in a game of What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf, they were still.
I sat for a long time, my chin in my hands, gazing at my father working and sorting. When he came outside, he sang snatches of opera, changing the words, singing about living in the open air and what fun we were going to have. I scowled at him, refusing to smile. Just outside the door, he made a pile of usable objects: three buckets, an axe, a fire poker. Another mound, of broken items, grew faster. When he went back inside, the singing stopped and instead he grunted and swore as he worked. I wondered whether, if he couldn’t see me, he thought I wasn’t there. I stumped back up to the open doorway and stood on the threshold.
“My knees hurt and I’m hungry,” I said into the gloom. The hut was clearer now; I could see the floor, and the narrow bed had been emptied so that its wire mesh, which had lain flat under the debris, had sprung back on itself. I didn’t see how we would be able to sleep, curled up like dry leaves.
My father didn’t stop. He had found a large chest and was taking out tools from inside it, one at a time: the head of a hammer, dislocated from its handle, a saw with missing teeth, a rusty file, a paper bag of nails. As though he had discovered a box full of treasure, he examined each item, looking at it closely and placing it with care on the floor beside him.
“Papa, I’m hungry,” I said again.
“What?” he said, still not looking up.
“I’m hungry.” This time quieter.
He carried on working.
I turned and went down to where we had dropped our bags. The rabbit was still tied to my father’s rucksack. It needed to be skinned and cooked. At the edge of the clearing where the bushes and weeds started, I pulled up tufts of hairy thatch and collected twigs and larger sticks, every so often lifting my head and daring myself to glare at the forest. Back at the rucksacks, I searched through my father’s, pulling out packets of dried beans, his coat, and two of Ute’s winter dresses. I dropped them quickly, as if at any moment she might discover me at her open wardrobe, fingering her clothes with my sticky hands, but then I held one of them up to my face, inhaled comfort and security, and put the dress over my head. Ute had called this one her camel dress, and it was scratchy around the neck like I imagined camel hair might be. The bottom of the dress pooled on the ground, even when I tied the belt as tight as it would go, but I liked the feel of it against my legs. I dug through my father’s rucksack until I found his char-cloth tin, and the flint and steel, and then tugged at the long grass to make a clear patch for the fire, but it clung to the earth and ripped through my fingers; so, holding up the dress, I trampled the stalks, flattening a small area. My father would have made a stone circle for the fire to burn in, but there were no stones.
Red welts had risen on my wrists from the rope, and the backward and forward motion of the steel and flint made me wince, but I was able to produce sparks with just a few strikes, and I thought how proud my father would be that I could light a fire without using any of our emergency matches. The dry kindling caught quicker than I had expected, the flames gobbling up everything I fed them. The smoke hung heavy above the fire and drifted off toward the river, away from die Hütte.
Once the fire was going well, I dug into my father’s rucksack again and found his skinning knife in a side pocket, still in its leather sheath. I wasn’t supposed to take it out—it was too sharp and dangerous for little girls—but, clumsy from the dress, I carried the knife up to the cabin in both hands, my wary eye on it, and stood in the doorway again.
“Papa, can I use the knife?”
“Not now, Punzel,” he said, without turning around. He was chipping the white stuff off the metal box with a spade. I stepped back outside. On top of the pile of salvageable items was an axe. I considered it while putting the skinning knife in the pocket of my dungarees. The axe was long-handled and heavy-headed and, grasping it in two hands, I pulled it from the heap. Its shaft was polished from years of sweat and oily hands. I ran my thumb along the pitted edge of the blade without any idea of what the action meant. Attempting to skin the rabbit with a forbidden knife would get me into trouble, but my father had never warned me about using an axe. Holding it near the head for balance, I carried it through the clearing and laid it beside the fire. The grass smouldered in places; I stamped the patches out with my one shoe.
I untied the rabbit from the rucksack and tried to arrange it on its tummy with the legs tucked underneath so that it might have been nibbling the grass. But the rabbit’s head kept lolling forward at an awkward angle—its neck clearly broken. I laid it on its side with the hind legs stretched out, so that it could have been springing over a grassy mound, and tilted its head upward; the ears were still alert and soft, even in death. Only the eyes had changed—blinded by a thick fog.
The trees whispered and watched me while I arranged the rabbit. I thought about the trout and how easily and swiftly my father had changed it; with one blow to the head he had brought flapping, slippery nature under his control. Glad that the rabbit couldn’t look at me, I kneeled beside it and lifted the end of the axe shaft in both hands. “Sorry, little Kaninchen,” I whispered. I hefted the axe into the air, where it wobbled, deciding whether to tip me over backward, but my shoulders tilted and the axe took over, swinging itself forward with terrifying violence—taking me with it. I shut my eyes; the axe was in charge. With a life of its own, it cleaved the air and I felt the crunch as steel met flesh and bone, and it buried its blade into the earth with the downward force. It pulled me in its wake, my forehead slamming into the handle.