“Papa!” I called again and again into the white noise, but my words were taken so quickly, I wasn’t even sure I had said them aloud. As if playing blind man’s bluff, I stretched out from the end of the rope as far as I could, groping for someone I couldn’t see. I prodded the drifts around me, terrified the rope would unwind from my fist and I, too, would be lost. Without the rope, I might crawl back in the direction I thought was right and miss die Hütte by inches.
Using the rope to guide me, I circumscribed the snow for a shape, a sign to show that my father had been there. And then I nearly tripped over him. Hunched like a rock, with his head and arms tucked underneath, my father was white, snow piling up against the sides of his body. I brushed it off his head.
“Papa! Please!” I cried into his ear, my voice shaking, desperate. “Take hold of the rope.”
“Ute?” He lifted his head from his white pillow.
“Papa!” I tugged again and again at the collar of his icy coat until he got to his knees. I saw that his trousers were undone and drooped around his hips. The flesh on his bottom hung slack and empty. I looked away. “Take the rope,” I repeated.
Hand over hand, we crawled forward as if we were following a trail of breadcrumbs. Finally the shape of die Hütte came out of the white—solid, substantial. I pushed my father through the door. Outside the storm howled its frustration. I shook the worst of the snow from our clothes and with effort got my father back onto the bed and laid the sleeping bags over him. I stoked the fire and made a pan of pine needle tea. As I held the mug to his lips, I could taste the thick tomato soup that Ute used to spoon-feed me when I was ill in bed, and the sharp tang of it rasped the back of my throat. There was nothing else to give my father, so I lay behind him, trying to warm his body with mine.
I lost track of how many days or nights we lay there, but on the last of them, while the blizzard blew itself out, I dreamed of Ute’s Apfelkuchen, plump and warm. I woke to a phantom smell of cinnamon and apples, which teased me out of bed to check inside the stove and sniff in each of our pans to find the source. I could still smell it when I opened the door to determine whether it was carried on the wind, only to find that the snow was receding and a brown forest was reappearing around us.
I checked on my father, who was still sleeping, put on his boots, and went out into the new day. I walked between the trees and they parted to allow me access. At each trap, I bent or stretched on legs that I thought might not bear my weight for much longer. I trudged up to the wintereyes, making fresh tracks on my usual paths. I rested there, trying to ignore the hollowed-out feeling inside me. When I removed my mittens and held my hands up in front of my face, my fingers shook. I curled up on the hard ground and imagined I was a small animal, a rabbit in its burrow, a hedgehog in a pile of leaves, a downy blackbird in its nest, and I shut my eyes, thinking that if I could sleep, when I woke, everything would either be better or just be gone. Instead of her cake, I dreamed of Ute. She was swimming in the Great Divide. She floated in the blackness, her pale body lit by the moon, and gave a little flick of her legs, which had become a fish’s tail. There was a steady drip as the Great Divide filled up, and I knew that, soon, Ute would swim away. The water rose higher and there was a flash of iridescent scales and then only Ute’s face until a wave took her. The noise of the water woke me, and I saw that the snow was melting and dripping from the trees.
Instead of returning, I followed the footprints of an animal, a wolf or a fox, that had trotted along one of the mountain trails. It took me in a loop around the back of die Hütte, but not as high as where we had flown the kite in the summer. When I could look down on the rock forest far below me, I came across mounds of heather tucked amongst the south-facing boulders; perhaps the stony overhangs above had protected them from the snow, because they were flowering—purple bells studded the twiggy stalks. An insect had found the plant before I had and within the blooms had laid its grubs in gobs of spittle. I picked one up and, without inspecting it, put it in my mouth and swallowed it whole. The next one I bit down on. There was an instant, like eating an overripe berry, when the flesh gave way with a burst of thick liquid. It tasted of almonds. I ate the larvae until I was full. The rest I plucked from the heather, put in my pockets, and ran back to die Hütte, slipping and sliding down the icy mountain.
16
As the food came back to us, so did the music, as though the fish and the squirrels and the green buds of spring nourished not only our bodies but our minds too. I read La Campanella like a book I couldn’t put down; one that, in the end, I was able to recite by heart.
In the lighter evenings my father worked with the rabbit and squirrel skins to make me a pair of moccasins. They were warm and dry, but it took him many goes to get the curing process right. We no longer noticed the smell of our bodies, the unwashed stink of our clothes, or the reek of our hair, but the rotting-animal odour of the first few pairs of skin shoes my father made was truly disgusting. At night I often left them outside die Hütte and fell asleep thinking of the leaping cat on the back of my missing shoe, jumping off on its own dangerous journey toward the Great Divide.
My father and I settled into a routine: rising at daybreak; an hour or two of work—chopping wood, collecting kindling; breakfast; an hour of piano; my father’s trek to the river and back up for fresh water; gathering food and eating it if we were successful; an hour or two of free time; more work and food and piano; and when the sun set we’d get ready for bed. The rhythm of our days cocooned me, reassured and comforted me. I slipped into it without thought, so that the life we lived—in an isolated cabin on a crust of land, with the rest of the world simply wiped away, like a damp cloth passed across a chalked blackboard—became my unquestioned normality.
My father created a vegetable garden in front of the cabin, carrying bucketfuls of the rich forest soil and digging it into the earth. As soon as the ground was warm enough, we planted the seeds and the seed potatoes, in neat rows. Every morning my father asked for rain so that he wouldn’t need to make so many trips down to the river, and every evening I asked if the vegetables were big enough to eat yet. We fought a constant battle with the birds and the rabbits and deer, which were drawn to the young green shoots of our first plants. In the following years, my father built a fence around the garden and we made complicated devices, involving trip wire and stones which fell into tin cups, to scare the animals away from our precious crops.
In my free time I continued to map the forest and the mountains. I explored every spot; there wasn’t a tree that I hadn’t stroked or stood beneath, gazing up into its canopy and making myself dizzy with the sky passing by. Like a big cat in a zoo, I paced out my territory in the half-hour’s walk from the riverbank to the sides of the mountain that protected die Hütte in the curve of its hand. I sat on boulders, looking down on our cabin or across the river to the edge of the world, my stomach churning at the thought of the black void that lay over the hill.
On the far side of the forest, toward the gill, I built a secret place. I bent thin saplings into an arch, weaving and tying them together. I interlaced these with reeds and sticks, and laid fresh ferns over the top so that my father could have walked past and not noticed my green bower. Inside, it curved over the top of my head when I sat upright, but most of the time I lay on more ferns covered with moss that I had prised from the rocks. I stretched out on my back, with my head sticking out of the opening, watching an upside-down world of branches and leaves and blue sky. I was a weaver bird and it was my nest.