I followed Oskar over undulating ground to one of the main paths. Slabs of fallen stone buried under years of leaf fall had created small mounds, while dips had formed where the underground world had shifted and settled. At the edges of the path, someone had been at work, hacking back the ivy, leaving a heap of greenery for composting or burning. They had revealed an angel, risen up out of the green waves which lapped at her plinth. Hairy tracks crawled over the folds of her drapery where the ivy had been ripped away, and her arms were raised in supplication, but they both ended in the stumps of her wrists.
We sat side by side on her bare feet. Below us the inscription read, Rosa Carlos, born 1842, died 1859. Lost to all but memory.
“Lucy Westenra was buried here,” I said, remembering one of my father’s stories.
“Who’s she?” asked Oskar.
“The girl from Dracula. She became a vampire and sucked the blood from children.”
“I’d drive a stake through her heart before she could do that to me.”
“Aren’t you frightened?”
“What of?”
“Being here on your own.”
“I’m not on my own,” he said.
And I looked up at the angel, her stone cheek merging into the sky, and wondered if he meant Rosa.
“You’re here,” he said, and I was suddenly, ridiculously, pleased. “Anyway, I like it in the cemetery, it’s peaceful. I brought Marky here once, but he threw a rock at an angel’s face and broke off her nose.”
“Have you ever climbed the Magnificent Tree?” I asked.
“Which magnificent tree?”
“It was over there, I think.” I waved my arm in the direction the path led. “Papa and I used to climb it.”
“I don’t think there is a kind of tree called a Magnificent Tree.”
“Yes there is,” I snapped.
We sat in silence for a while, looking out over the snaggle-toothed stones and crooked crosses.
“Did you come here then? With Dad?” It was the first time Oskar had acknowledged the man had existed.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Why did he have to go away?” The question burst out of him, surprising us both. His cheeks went red again and he picked at the lichen which grew across the stone toes like badly painted nail polish.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Marky says that Dad thought the world was going to end. He says Dad was crazy and ran away to join a cult in the woods. But the world didn’t end, did it?”
I almost smiled, but instead I said, “Marky doesn’t know anything.”
“Why didn’t he come back for me, or take me too?”
I could tell he had asked himself this question over and over.
“Why did you get to go and not me?”
“You weren’t even born. Maybe he didn’t know about you.” I shuffled my bottom on the cold stone to get more comfortable.
“Well, Mum could have gone with you too.”
“She was in Germany when we left. Anyway it was all a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“That’s not what Mum says.”
“What does she say?” I was interested, now that I might get information from Oskar that I wasn’t able to ask Ute about.
He continued to look down and scratch at the lichen with his dirty fingernails.
“Oskar?” I prompted him.
“She says Dad left a note, but she won’t show it to me until I’m old enough to understand. She says he wrote that he was sorry but he had been thinking for a while that he needed to go on a journey, and that he would always love me.”
“Note? What note?” I said, standing up.
“I don’t believe her. She’s always lying and forgetting what she’s told me. I know she’s only trying to make me feel better, and he probably didn’t write anything like that at all.”
“What note, Oskar?” I said again, speaking over him, my voice bouncing off the stones around us.
“I don’t know and I don’t care!” Oskar climbed onto the angel’s feet so he was taller than me.
“Where’s the note?” I demanded.
“I don’t know! None of it’s true anyway.” He jumped down from the plinth. “I wish it was Dad who had come back instead of you,” he said, and pushed past me, running back along the track into the trees.
“Oskar!” I called after him. At first I heard him tearing through the undergrowth, twigs cracking, but then he was gone and the cemetery was silent. Gradually, I became aware of the rustle of leaves, something falling from a tree, way off, and the frost cracking and re-forming. There was a scrabbling noise behind Rosa Carlos and a steady drip, drip, drip across the path from where I stood. My breath came in little puffs in front of my face. The cemetery bulged in toward me, the stones ballooning and flattening themselves again. The face of my father, which was still stuck under my breast, was scalding. Half crouching, I put my hand under my dress and took the circle of photographic paper out. I couldn’t look at him. With my left hand, I clawed at the earth beside Rosa Carlos. I could make only a minute pit in the frozen ground, but I placed his head in it, face up, and pressed the soil down on top of him.
14
It wasn’t until the piano was finished that my father looked up from his work and realized the autumn was almost over. One morning he set out with his rucksack to the forest of wintereyes to collect acorns. He was excited at the possibility of flour and described in great detail the flatbreads, porridge, and thick stews we would soon be eating. But when he returned he lay on the bed with his back to me and wouldn’t speak, even though I stopped playing and begged him to tell me what was wrong. Without fully turning around he threw the rucksack across the room so that a handful of acorns flew out, pinging off the shelves and table and scattering over the floor.
“There are no acorns,” he said.
I gathered a few together. “There are. Look,” I said, holding out my hand, not understanding.
“Not enough to even make one dumpling,” he said.
“But where have they all gone?”
“The fucking squirrels got there first,” he said.
“We can eat the squirrels then,” I said, which made him laugh, but he wasn’t happy for long. As the weather changed his mood worsened. I still played the piano every day, but my father rarely joined in and instead of encouraging me he complained if I lingered on the stool in front of the table. He worried that the season had turned without us. He wrote detailed lists and calculations on the gun pellet boxes, flattening them out into fat crosses, and on both sides of the map—the only paper we had left in the cabin apart from the sheet music. He pressed down hard with the pen so his writing would be legible over the green valleys and pale mountains:
Increase the woodpile
Collect and dry mushrooms
Bulrush roots
Dried meat
Dried fish
More wood
Daub cabin
Check shingles
I woke in the night to the glow of a candle on the table and my father bent over the map, chewing the end of the pen, the creases in his forehead ploughed into furrows. I worried about what kind of emergency we must be facing.
“What is it, Papa?” I asked the halo of light.