One morning, as spring changed to summer, I woke with La Campanella singing in my head. The room was still dark—just a dim light shone around the edge of the window, which we had unblocked and covered again with tent canvas. I had dreamed of the music and a bird, tapping with its beak on a window pane. It had cocked its head and peered at me sideways, its eye ringed in blackbird yellow.
I had been struggling with the last musical notes on page five, where a fermata hung over a pause. My father had explained that the symbol meant that my fingers could rest for as long as I pleased. I had played it over and over but was never satisfied. I was cross with Ute and with Liszt for not giving clear instructions on how to play it, for leaving the decision up to me. In the grey-blue light of early morning, I needed to read the music and I needed to do it immediately. I climbed over the sleeping bulk of my father. It was still too dark to see the notes on the page; even putting a new log on the fire didn’t cast enough light for me to be able to sit at the table and play.
Above the stove, melted onto a shelf, was the stub of our last candle. My father specified when we were allowed to light a candle; it turned out that it wasn’t just emergencies after all. On Christmas evening, when we said something approaching a prayer for all those who had died, we had lit one. And we had stuck one in the middle of our joint birthday cake, made from mashed bulrush roots. Although my birthday was in wintertime, we had picked a warm spring day to celebrate it and I was allowed to blow the candle out and make a wish. It was a wasted wish; I had asked to have a chocolate cake with buttercream icing for my next birthday. And one night, my father had lit another candle when we had heard scrabbling noises coming from the tool chest full of food and had suspected rats. The light from the candle had flickered when he chased a shrew around the cabin and out the door. Another time, I was sick in the night and missed the bucket, and there had been numerous other incidents and accidents when he had decided that a candle was necessary. Now we had one stump remaining.
For me, that morning, the need to read the music was as urgent as any of the other occasions that had required light. I pulled at the candle, snapping it from the shelf, and lit it from a feathery twig that I poked into the fire. I melted a drop of wax onto the piano table and stuck the candle in it. I propped open La Campanella and sat at the piano, humming the trills under my breath in the guttering light. The next moment I heard a roar, as if a bear were standing on its hind legs behind me, its claws raised, ready to fight.
“Punzel!” the bear shouted.
I cowered on the stool, cringing and waiting for the bloody slash of a claw across my back.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The candle stuttered and went out.
“Candles are for emergencies,” he yelled. “What is it that you don’t understand about living here? Once this candle”—he yanked it off the table and shoved it in my face—“has gone, there are no more. No more. Do you understand?”
The smoke from the dead wick made my eyes water.
“Do you understand?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry, Papa,” I said. “I was just trying to work out a trill. I didn’t think about it.” The tears were welling; they would overflow with my next blink.
“That’s your trouble—you never bloody think.” He stormed about the room, making it even smaller. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you with me. You’re too much of a liability. I should have let you die like the rest of them.”
I took the corner of the front cover and closed the music, a pain in my chest at the reminder that we had been spared.
“You don’t deserve to be here, wasting things without thinking. If there was only going to be two of us, it should have been me and Ute.” He whipped around, but I couldn’t bear to look at his purple face. I pulled on a moccasin as quietly as I could. He saw and he shouted, “Yes, just go! Get out of my sight. Don’t come back until you’ve thought about wasting things for your own pleasure and gratification.”
I pulled on my other shoe, grabbed my anorak, and ran out into the morning. I ran across the clearing, leaving tracks in the dewy grass and skidding under the cover of the trees. I ran along the deer tracks into the forest until the ferns and the cow parsley grew up around me and I was running blind. Without thinking, I found myself at my nest and I crawled inside. My legs were bare and cold. I lay curled on the damp moss until the sun came over the mountain and found its way in through the gaps in the twigs and leaves, creating shadows that waved over me. I stretched out onto my stomach, my head propped in my hands, and let the tears dry on my cheeks while I stared out of the entrance into the forest.
That’s when I saw the boots, ankles, thick socks. They strode past my hidden doorway with a purpose. They knew where they were going. Blood pounded in my throat, but my body was frozen in place. In two or maybe three paces they were gone from my view and I wasn’t sure that I had seen them at all. I let my breath out, very quietly, very slowly. I lay in the same position for a long time until my bony hips ached against the hard ground and the damp seeped into my joints. I sat up. The boots I had seen go past were not my father’s.
His I knew well, his I still often wore when the weather was bad. These were black and had come up higher around the ankle and had more laces and rounded toes. They were splattered with mud and looked wet, as though the person wearing them had waded across the river. Folded over the top had been cream-coloured socks and, striding in them, a pair of muscled legs. A man’s boots, I said to myself—definitely a man’s boots. Reuben’s boots. The thought thrilled and terrified me. I had been told over and over that all that was left was a scrap of land floating in the dark of the Great Divide, so this man couldn’t just be passing through. Instead of two, there were three.
After maybe an hour of hiding in the nest, looking out, waiting in case the boots came back, I needed a wee, I needed to eat, I needed to go back to die Hütte and warn my father that we were not alone. I shuffled to the opening and stuck my head out, looking right and left along the forest tracks; they were empty. The ground wasn’t wet enough for the boots to have left any prints. I came out and scuttled into the ferns which huddled over me, where I squatted to pee, splashing over feet and ankles. I was a sparrow in a bush with one eye on a worm, the other on the bird of prey circling overhead. Through the undergrowth I went, avoiding the paths until I could see die Hütte in the clearing. I raced across it, like I had the previous winter, head down, feeling exposed and vulnerable. The cabin was empty. I sat on the edge of the bed and picked at my fingernails and ate the food my father had left straight from the pan. Eventually, I heard him whistling outside and the door opened. He came in with two buckets of water sloshing over his boots.
“Papa!” I jumped up from the bed, breathless, wanting to get everything out at once. “I saw a man—”
My father interrupted me. “I don’t want to hear anything from you today.” He held his hand up in a stop sign, palm toward my face.
“But, I saw—”
“No.” He cut over me again, his hand still out but now with only his index finger pointing skyward. “Nothing,” he said forcibly, as if he had been thinking about my punishment all morning. “There will be no playing the piano today. No singing. Today you will work and you will say nothing.”