I sat down on the bed, my news spoiled. After a moment’s thought, I clamped my lips together and went to the corner by the stove and picked up the axe. I carried it outside with the sharpening stone. I was powerful with the tool in my hands and angry enough with my father to use it. I stroked the blade with the stone until the sun caught its edge. I placed a small log on the block, as my father and I had done last autumn, and holding the axe shaft halfway down, I lifted it over my head and let its weight slam into the wood. The little log split clean in two.
The boots never passed by my nest again, or at least I never saw them. Our second summer in die Hütte was even hotter than the first. My father worried about everything that year: forest fires, not enough rain for the vegetables, missing the acorn harvest again. But we doubled our autumn stores, cramming the shelves with dried and smoked food, and even though the snow was heavy and the winter cold, it was never as desperate as our first.
As I grew and the years blended one into the next, there was a rhythm to our lives; we let the seasons and the weather dictate when clothing needed to be made and mended, when seeds should be planted, when the acorns should be gathered, and when to celebrate birthdays and Christmas. I still sometimes thought of Omi and, if she were alive to knit her winter gifts, how grateful I would be for them in the forest. The thoughts of her and Ute no longer caused a sting of pain inside me, but instead a bittersweet memory.
When each long winter had passed, my father sometimes decided on an activity that would consume him, like constructing the piano had once done. One spring, he worked on diverting the gill so we would have a stream running past the cabin. For weeks he levered boulders with branches and dug in the rocky ground, but when the next storm came the mountain ignored all his efforts and carried on channelling water where it had always done—down the gill. When these plans and schemes failed, my father would sink into despondency for days, until another idea came to him and he was excited all over again. Keeping up with his moods made me irritable, but sometimes when I was alone in the forest I would think about Becky—what she had smelled like, how she had sounded, what she might have said to make things better: “You ought to be happy. You won’t know how happy you are, till your pretty life in die Hütte is over and done with.”
17
London, November 1985
On my bed, Ute had laid out a purple top and a skirt for me to change into—three tiers of fabric with white dots sprinkled across them, and each finished off with a circle of lace. They might have been selected by a fourteen-year-old shop assistant.
When I had arrived back in London, Ute had bought me new sets of everything. She went shopping without me, leaving Mrs. Cass downstairs, flicking through a magazine in the sitting room while I sat by the open window in my bedroom. I had tried to imagine the two of them becoming friends, sharing confidences and mopping up tears, but the images wouldn’t stick.
Mrs. Cass had, of course, been too curious to stay downstairs. Later, I overheard her saying to Ute that she had thought she heard me crying, but I knew that wasn’t true. She had poked her head around my bedroom door, in her hands two cups of tea.
“Do you mind if I come in?” she said in a stage whisper, but she was already through the door. Mrs. Cass hadn’t altered since I had last seen her that day at school; she might have been born plump and grey-haired. Her lipstick was too red and her eyeshadow had settled into the folds of skin across her eyelids. She tried to hide her shock at what she saw—the wound dressing still covering my ear, my stubble hair—but I caught the look on her face before she changed it to one of sympathy. “I thought you might need some company,” she said.
I had shifted my furniture around, pushing the bed and the chest of drawers toward the door and moving the desk so I could open the window. I needed to lean out over the glasshouse and garden, toward the cemetery, to breathe in the smell of trees and green and the cool air of autumn. It took an effort to bring myself back into the room and face someone new.
“You look so like your mother, it’s uncanny, even with your short hair,” Mrs. Cass said. For some reason she seemed unsure what to do with the tea, and rather than pass me a cup, she sat on the edge of the bed and balanced them both on her knees. “It must be nice to be back in your own bed,” she said.
“I had my own bed in die Hütte, in the cabin,” I said.
“Of course, but it’s not the same as being home, is it? With all your old things about you.”
The two of us looked around the room—the books kept by Ute but too childish for me now; the empty wardrobe, waiting for Ute’s return; the chest of drawers with its row of teddy bears and dolls on top, from which Phyllis was forever absent; and across every surface and taped to the walls, the notes and cards welcoming me home. An uncle I had never met wrote me a long letter about the importance of family, a neighbour had put a postcard of a cat through the letterbox and said I could drop in any time, and children from the school I never went back to had drawn me pictures. And then there were the letters not on display, those that Ute tried to tear up before I could read them: complete strangers offering me their spare rooms in return for unspecified favours; people who wanted to write my life story; and others, assuming I had already sold it, asking for money. All of the things around us belonged to a different person, someone whose bedroom I had temporarily taken over until I could return to the forest.
Mrs. Cass lifted the cups off her knees and we both saw that the bottoms had left circular marks on her skirt. “And you’ll have a whole new wardrobe when your mother gets home.” She looked at the clothes I was wearing: the checked skirt I’d been given, which I’d grown fond of, but which was still held around my waist by safety pins; and a blouse and cardigan that Ute had selected from her own wardrobe, both far too big. “Teenage girls always find new clothes exciting. I know my granddaughter does—she’s about your age—Kirsty, always down the shops buying something new. I’m sure she’d be happy to take you, when you’re feeling a bit more up to it.”
I couldn’t imagine ever feeling up to it. She rambled on, and I let my mind drift away, remembering the anorak I had left behind and my father’s boots that I would never see again. Someone must have thrown them away without realizing how precious they had been to me, how much more cherished than all the things I had returned to. Only the balaclava remained, hand-washed and line-dried, hidden under my pillow. It was the one thing I had brought home, and Ute had allowed me to keep it.
“There must have been plenty of things you had to do without, though. I just can’t imagine it, all those years alone in the wilderness.” Mrs. Cass shook her head.
“It wasn’t the wilderness and I wasn’t alone,” I said.
She made a dismissive noise. “That man. I never thought I’d say this about someone, Peggy, but maybe he deserved what happened. He took you away from your family, from the people who love you. It was wrong, Peggy. He was a bad man.” She stood up, the cups still in her hands.
“I didn’t mean my father.” I turned back toward the window and leaned out over the sill, suddenly desperate for air.
I don’t know what Mrs. Cass thought I was about to do, but alarmed, she cried out, “Peggy!” and came toward me.