Next, I walked a trail from the buried head, downhill to the river, to form a triangle of offerings. For most of the way I followed a deer track, until I came to the clearing. This I ran across, crouching low and scurrying more than running, in case my father was in die Hütte. The summer river disturbed me; even though it was shallower and gentler than its winter cousin, I couldn’t look at the constant movement or shake off the feeling that the water was pretending to be serene with nowhere in particular to go and nothing much to do. Just under the surface it lived and breathed—malevolent and cunning.
In my pocket I had a leaf taken from the wintereye and another I had plucked from the gribble. Holding one in each hand, I stumbled across the muddy pebbles to the river’s edge where my father fished. Tensed and holding my breath I stretched out over the water and placed both leaves on the surface and let them go. The current took them, like it had once taken me.
“Take my love to Ute,” I called out after them, even though I knew she was dead and they would never reach her. The water danced with the leaves and spun them until they must have been dizzy and disoriented. I ran alongside calling out again, “Take my love to Ute.” With a sudden eddy they were sucked down and out of sight, as though a hand had pulled them into a watery grave. I backed away onto the bank, frightened that the same fingers would reach out for my ankles.
As I scrambled back through the grass, I saw something lodged in the bank under the bushes—the toe of a shoe or a boot, sticking out of the mud. With a cry, I thought that all the wishing and thinking and offerings had been wasted. The river had already taken Reuben, swallowed him whole and left his bones in the earth, before I had a chance even to meet him. I tugged at the dark toe with both hands and dug around it with the flint that was still in my pocket. I imagined Reuben’s sock tucked inside the boot, his leg and the rest of his body brown and leathery, preserved by the mud, like the Tollund Man, remembered from school. I pulled again at the slippery toe, and with a sucking belch the mud let it go and I fell backward. It was empty and it was my shoe—the one I had lost when I first crossed the river. I sat cradling it with relief and sure that magical, incredible things would happen now. I wiped the mud from the heel and saw again the leaping cat.
I held my re-found shoe close to my chest and followed the flow of the river, planning to walk as far as I could until the mountain stopped me. I was dawdling, daydreaming about new green laces, when I saw the man.
20
London, November 1985
When I reached the hall I heard the key lid open as someone clunked it against the piano frame, and I knew it couldn’t be Ute. Oskar sat at the piano, his hands poised, ready to play.
“Either come in and close the door or go away,” he said, putting on a cross face.
I went in. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “She’ll kill you.”
He gave up the artificial frown and moved along the stool so I could slide in beside him.
“I learned this at school. If she can’t be bothered to teach me, I’ll have to teach myself. Do you want me to show you?” Without waiting for my answer, he continued, “Curl up all your fingers except these two.” He pointed his index fingers side by side, like Peter and Paul in the nursery rhyme. I copied him, hiding a smile to keep my secret.
“Your job is to play these two notes.” He put my fingers on F and G. His hands felt cool and were already as big as mine. “You have to press the notes six times. OK?”
I pressed the keys just hard enough to hear the noise of the hammer on the string. It might have been the first time I had made a piano produce a real sound.
“No, not yet,” he said. “Not until I’ve counted to six. And do it quietly.”
Oskar spread out his fingers and started to play. Looking at him, nodding his head, biting his bottom lip, pleased me. He gave an extra-deep nod, but I was too busy watching his face.
“Where were you?” Oskar said. “You have to be ready. After six.”
I nodded.
We were clumsy and halting, but we were making music; under my fingers’ instructions, just two at a time, the piano answered. When we had played six notes he stopped.
“Why are you making that noise?” he said.
“What noise?”
“You were doing a weird kind of singing.”
“Sorry.”
“I think it might sound better if you didn’t.” He took hold of my fingers again. “Now you have to move your left finger down one, and keep your right in the same place, and play these notes six times.”
We were out of sync with each other, but it didn’t seem to bother Oskar. He showed me four more notes.
“Do you think you can remember? Four lots of six.”
We started again from the beginning, with much more head nodding. Oskar stared at both his hands with intense concentration, but still his left was always a little behind his right.
“I think you might have got it,” he said.
We played the duet a few times, each round faster, until we didn’t stop in between but performed the sequence again and again, until one of us went wrong and we stopped, out of breath and laughing.
“Once more!” I yelled, and we began thumping the piano as hard and as fast as we could, without thinking about the noise. After a couple of minutes Ute flung the sitting-room door open, her hands tucked inside oven gloves.
“‘Chopsticks’!” she shouted. “On the Bösendorfer!”
“Oh, Mum,” Oskar yelled back, standing up and pushing the stool with his legs, making it scrape the floor again. “Nobody has fun in this house.” He stormed past her and out of the room, leaving me sitting alone.
Ute came to the piano. “If you would like to learn I will arrange lessons for you.” She took the oven gloves off and started to lower the lid so I had no choice but to withdraw my fingers. “Lunch in five minutes,” she said over her shoulder, and went back to the kitchen.
I laid my forehead on the polished wood, closed my eyes, and remembered the piano my father had made, how much effort had gone into its creation, the wood turning greasy from my fingers, the pebble weights coming loose and falling between the floorboards, the song of La Campanella etched into my every cell. I sat up and opened the key lid again and traced the gold lettering of the word Bösendorfer with the fingers of my right hand. My left hand settled into a familiar arrangement on the keys, and when the tip of my finger reached the curlicue of the final r, my right hand joined my left.
It didn’t feel as if I was doing the pressing, but more like I was sitting at a pianola, the ivory moving by itself, following the pattern of holes punched in a paper roll located somewhere deep inside the mechanism, and I was following along. My left hand played the first three notes, and my right, the high echo; then one low, two high, repeated; then the slightest of pauses.
“Lunch!” Ute called from the kitchen.
The spell was broken and the music stopped. I heard Oskar clatter down the stairs two at a time like I used to, his empty stomach overriding his brief argument with Ute.
“Peggy, lunch!” Ute called again.
I closed the piano and went into the kitchen.
21
The man was hunkered down under the trees, his head in profile. At first I mistook him for a boulder, not one which had rolled off the mountain in the recent rainstorm, but a rock which had lain in place for years, while the undergrowth had grown up around it and its surface had become mottled with orange and green lichen. I froze midstep, my heart hammering. I watched him with wide eyes, waiting to see his next move before I made mine.