“Please, do you have any water?” I said to the man with curly hair, similar to the child’s but darker and thinner. The dungarees tied around my face, crusty with blood, pulled against my skin as I spoke. The man said something I couldn’t understand, touched the side of his face with his hand, and moved toward me, the child still clinging to his leg.
26
I awoke in a room where everything was white—bed, floor, walls. Uniformed people came in and pressed needles into my arms, shone lights into my eyes, and peered into my mouth. I lay still and let them examine me. They spoke in gentle questioning voices, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I didn’t know what to tell them anyway.
Sometimes I whispered, “Is this the Great Divide?” but they didn’t answer. I was amazed at the different faces human beings can have, at the noises they made—from the squeak of their shoes on the white floor, to the clink of a wedding ring against a metal dish. I remembered the toy doctor’s set that Becky owned, with its medical instruments strapped into a carry-case. She would make me lie on her bed so she could listen to the beat of my heart through the plastic stethoscope. We never worked out what we were supposed to do with the hammer which was also included, so I used it to beat out a rhythm on her headboard and in a deep voice she would say, “A1, that’s an A1 heart you have there, Miss.”
In the white room I drifted in and out of sleep. Reuben came to check up on me, sitting on the end of the bed with a leaf stuck in his hair. I asked him whether it was autumn yet, but he wouldn’t say.
One day I woke properly. I was aware of the shape my body made in the bed, knees curled to my chest, hands clasped under my chin. I stretched out my feet toward the cool end, lifted up the white sheets and the white gown which covered me, and stared at my naked body; it had never been so clean. I got out of bed and put my feet on the cold, hard floor and stood at the window. Curving away to my left was a white building, three storeys high. The sky beyond its flat roof was still dark and all the windows were illuminated. Shapes and shadows of people walked past them, all busy going somewhere, doing something. The building formed a semicircle around a dull patch of green, not a quarter the size of the clearing. In the middle was a bench under a solitary tree—a spindly thing with leaves that were already turning brown. More than anything I wanted to breathe the same fresh and cool air the tree was breathing. I couldn’t find a catch to open the window; I tried to slide it, pushing one way, then the other, but it wouldn’t move. I pressed my cheek up against the glass, leaving behind a smudge, and then walked around the bed to a white sink and turned a tap. Water gushed out. I turned it again and the water stopped. On, off, on, off, on. It amazed me. I thought I would tell Reuben about it, and the idea that I might never find him in this huge white building made me sick with worry. Still standing at the sink, I looked up and was shocked to see a girl right in front of me, nose to nose. Her eyes were deep-set and her cheeks hollow; her head was shaved and bandaged, her face a more adult version of mine.
There was a sharp knock, and behind her a door opened and a group of people came in: men and women in white coats and an older lady in a blue uniform. I spun around, clutching at the gaping gown behind my back, and the group all started talking at once. I recognized the sound of their words; how odd that they speak German in the Great Divide, I thought. The blue lady came forward and gently but firmly ushered me back into bed, while someone else turned off the tap.
“I can do it,” I said, as she pulled back the sheets.
The oldest man in the group came toward me and all the others fell into place behind him.
“You are English,” he said, with some hesitation over the words. He started to say more, but gave up and spoke to the white-coated people, until a man at the back raised his hand and stepped forward.
“Dr. Biermann would like to know your name,” said the young man. His thin hair was combed flat to one side, but a cowlick leaped out from his parting.
“Punzel,” I said, more into the bedsheets than as a reply.
“Rapunzel?” he asked, and his hand flew to his hair to flatten it.
“Just Punzel,” I said.
The man spoke to the others and said the name “Rapunzel” in the middle of his German.
“Do you know where you are?”
Everyone was silent, waiting, looking at me. I stroked my own head, feeling the soft bristles growing straight out from my scalp, while the overhead lights reflected in Dr. Biermann’s glasses winked out a warning. The glare from his glasses grew, spreading like drips of bleach on sugar paper, until his eyes were white, his face was white, and finally everything was white and I had the same sensation of falling that I had felt on the road in the little town.
The man with the cowlick was sitting on my bed when I woke up. He bounced a couple of times as if he were testing its springiness and smiled at me. On the chair in the corner of the room, an older, fatter man took a pen and notebook from his jacket pocket. I tried to read his writing upside down and thought I could make out the words keep off the line, but then realized he would be writing in German.
“So, you are English?” the man next to me said. I nodded.
“I’m Wilhelm, medical student, final year,” he said, and laughed even though he hadn’t said anything funny. “And this is Herr Lang. He is a policeman . . .” He indicated the man in the corner. “. . . a detective. Dr. Biermann asked me to come to speak to you. Rapunzel, do you know where you are?”
“In the Great Divide, or I may be dead, or both,” I said.
Wilhelm laughed again, a girlish giggle, and I thought it must be true. He talked to the detective in German, and the man gave a snort.
“You’re certainly not dead,” said Wilhelm, turning back to me and smiling. “You’re in a hospital.” And his hand flew upward toward his hair. “You hurt your ear and you lost a lot of blood and you were very . . .” He paused, searching for a word. “. . . thirsty, when you were found. I think you are perhaps a little confused. We would like to find out more about you. Would that be all right?”
I nodded.
“For instance,” he said, “where do you live?”
“In die Hütte,” I said.
The man behind us shuffled around in his seat, and Wilhelm made a surprised sound in the back of his throat. He asked me a question in German.
“I only speak English,” I said.
After a pause, he tried again. “Where is die Hütte?”
His tone was gentle, but the action of his flying hand made me suspicious, and I wondered whether he was trying to catch me out. Perhaps he knew where die Hütte was, had already been there and discovered my father on the floor.
“Out there.” I waved toward the window, and Wilhelm looked behind him, as though he might see die Hütte on the other side of the patch of grass.
“Who do you live there with?” he asked.
“My father,” I said.
“Is he still in die Hütte?”
“And Reuben,” thinking while I said it that it was almost true.
“Reuben,” said Wilhelm. “Is he your brother?”
“No.” But I didn’t know what to say he was.
“Your grandfather?”