From the corner of my eye I could see Reuben pulling at the axe handle. My father moved closer, holding both his hands out as if asking me to choose between the two objects he gripped. I still clutched the balaclava, but I lurched forward without any clear intention. At the same time, my father’s right hand sliced upward. The knife slashed across the side of my head, and although I didn’t feel any pain, when I looked down, the petals of a dark bud were growing and flowering with immense speed across the shoulder of my nightshirt. I put my hand up to the side of my face and it came back slippery with blood. I swayed, closed my eyes, heard a dull thump and thought I must have fallen, but when I opened them again, I was standing over my father, who lay on the floor, his body turned sideways and his head resting on the rug.
“Papa?” I said, and kneeled beside him. Blood dripped from my face onto his. I pulled at his shoulder and he fell onto his back and I saw that the other half of his head was wrong, missing. I rolled him onto his side again and was pleased at how peaceful he looked. I put one of our straw pillows under his head to make him more comfortable and tucked my bedcovers over him up to his neck.
“He’s dead,” said Reuben, stepping forward from behind the door. The axe hung in his hand. He laid it down beside my father. There were smears of blood across the handle and Reuben’s face and shirt were splattered with it. “Let me look at you,” he said. He leaned forward over my father and tilted my chin.
I could feel fresh blood flowing when my head moved.
Reuben picked up a piece of clothing and pressed it to my temple. “I think he got some of your ear.”
“What now?” I asked for the third time that day.
I knew the words he would say before they came out of his mouth: “You have to come with me. You have to cross the river.”
24
London, November 1985
After lunch, on my way upstairs, I stood and read Ute’s framed newspaper review, still hanging in the hallway—Despite her young age, one can tell that Bischoff has lived with the music and its world for a long time; her passion flows from every note she plays—and I noticed for the first time that the review was of her performance of La Campanella, when she had met my father.
The review hung next to the central-heating thermostat. I turned it down, again. Ute had sent me up to my bedroom to get changed before Becky and Michael arrived. Instead, I spread my father’s lists across the bed, picking odd ones up which caught my eye, and rereading them. I got a notebook and a pen from my desk, and at the top of a blank page I wrote, Things I Have Missed. I followed the title with:
Butter and cheddar cheese
Salt
Apfelkuchen
Toothpaste
Socks
Getting to know my brother
Baths
Mirrors?
Becky
Nine Christmas dinners
Trifle
Boyfriends (and I crossed this out)
Omi
In my bedroom, the radiator gurgled as the central heating was turned up.
“Peggy?” Ute called from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you getting changed?” I sat amongst the pieces of paper and waited. I heard her climb the stairs, out of breath by the time she came into my room.
“Oh, Peggy, you haven’t even started,” she said, looking at what I was wearing. “Come on, they will be here soon, and you want to look nice. Don’t you?” She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and I started to gather up the lists scattered across the blanket.
“What are all these?” she said, picking up a list describing and calculating lengths and quantities of four-by-fours to build the bunk beds in the fallout shelter. A line formed between her eyes as she grasped what it was. “Oh my goodness, where did you find these? I thought that everything was gone out of the house.” She picked up another piece of paper with a list of underwear and other items of clothing.
I watched her reading them. I wanted her to know that it wasn’t going to be possible to just throw away all evidence that my father had existed, that it was never going to be that simple. Before I had time to stop her, Ute picked up the piece of paper on my lap: my own list. We were both silent while she read it.
“Oh, Peggy,” she said, “I am pleased, at least, that you don’t feel you missed out on boyfriends. There is plenty of time for that.”
She really didn’t have a clue, I thought, as I took my list from her and collected all of the others.
“Where are all the pictures of Papa?” I asked her. She looked taken aback and composed her answer before she spoke it.
“I threw them all away. Angela and I—Mrs. Cass and I—decided it would be for the best when I found out what had happened.”
I thought about the photograph she had missed, the one I had cut my father’s head from.
“Isn’t it odd for Oskar that he has no photographs of his father?”
She shrugged. “I think he understands.”
“What about the note? I know you didn’t get rid of that.” It came out sharper than I had intended.
“What note?”
“Oskar says that Papa left a note. Please don’t lie.”
“Peggy,” she said. “There’s something . . .”
“Where is it?” I cut in. “I want to read it.”
She sighed. Her hands were in her lap, clasped together. As she spoke she released them, and I could see red crescents where her nails had dug into her skin.
“You can read it,” she said with forced patience. “I will get it for you.”
She went to her bedroom and came back with a piece of paper which she handed to me. Ute was written in green pen on a folded square, which had been scored flat many times. My father had used graph paper torn from my maths exercise book. The staples had caught and ragged the sheet. I opened it and scanned it.
I think it’s better for everyone if I go now. I’m taking Peggy with me—you can keep the other one. That’s fair, don’t you think?
And my father’s signature, scrawled, as though he was in a hurry.
“This isn’t what you told Oskar. He thinks his father loved him. He’s been living with a fantasy that Papa would come back for him. Why did you lie?” I shook the paper in Ute’s face.
She gave the slightest movement of her head away from me. I read the note again, slower this time.
“The other one,” I said. “What did he mean, the other one?”
Ute opened her mouth to speak, but I carried on talking.
“Oskar! He meant Oskar, didn’t he? He knew you were pregnant and he didn’t want it. Is that why he left?” I could hear my voice rising as if I had stepped outside myself. “But why did I have to go with him?” The voice was a shriek. I stood up and ripped the note in half again and again. “You know he went mad in the forest? He tried to kill us both and there was nothing I could do. He said everyone was dead and I believed him.” My cheeks were burning and my head jutted forward. “He told me the world had gone, disappeared in a puff of smoke.” I threw the note into the air and pieces of graph paper flew about us.
Ute flapped her arms trying to catch me, to quiet me. “Peggy,” she kept saying, “Peggy.”
“Oskar’s right. It’s all lies. You should have stopped him. You should have been here!” I shouted at her like a devil.