Oskar was at Saturday morning Cub Scouts, helping to tidy the grounds of an old people’s home. I knew Ute had chosen this particular morning, with Oskar away, to ask me to sit at the table, because she thought that sitting down to eat with my eight-year-old brother might be one step too far. Oskar, Oskar, Oskar: I had to keep repeating his name to remind myself that he existed, that a boy was born and grew for eight years and eight months without me knowing. He was almost as tall as me, but so young. I was still shocked, every time I looked at him, to think I was exactly his age when my father and I left this house. While Ute was ladling porridge, made with water—the way I liked it—I wondered whether the Scouts had taught Oskar how to light a fire without matches, or how to catch squirrels by their necks, or use an axe with one smooth, swift motion. Perhaps they were things he and I could discuss another day.
At the table, Ute tried to engage me in conversation.
“Do you remember that summer?” she asked, her mouth still full of z’s and v’s, even after all these years. Straight away she began with a question, even though she had promised.
I shrugged an answer.
“I have been thinking of your father, the summer you went away,” she said. “Went away” was the phrase she always used—innocuous, with no blame attached. “I think perhaps I was too old for him. Too steady. He wants to have fun with his friend Oliver.”
“Wanted,” I corrected under my breath, but she didn’t hear; she was staring through and beyond me.
“They were like boys. They were swinging the garden seat too high. I was afraid it would be damaged, and also the grass with their shoes. That seat belonged to your grandmother; Omi had it delivered all the way from Germany, you know. And then, when they were so hot, they took off their shirts and ran around the garden, playing at tomfoolery with the hose, even though the Water Board said it was not allowed. I watched them from your bedroom window, then I went down to ask them to be careful with the seat.” She paused, recollecting. “Oliver, he teased me and said, ‘Ja wohl.’ Maybe that’s when it started. Yes, maybe then.”
I didn’t ask Ute for these confidences, but still they spilled from her, as if, in the telling, she was assuaging some kind of guilt. In my mind’s eye I saw my father, so unaware that one push with his heels against the earth, in time with Oliver Hannington, or a single yelp of delight when a splash of water hit his freckled back, would create a hairline crack in his family’s footings. Ute said my father didn’t give a damn, that it was all about quick pleasures for him. But the evidence of the fallout shelter still below the kitchen, and the lists I had found down there, told me a different story.
Ute’s eyes refocused on me and the way I was eating. She asked whether I was enjoying the porridge, and I became aware that I was shovelling it into my mouth and swallowing, although it burned my tongue. I slowed down and nodded, chastised. I scraped the bowl clean and she gave me a second helping. I had filled out since I returned—my breasts swelling into my new bras, the elastic on my pants leaving a red groove around my hips and stomach, the shadows under my cheekbones fading to pink.
“What did you like to eat when you were away?” Ute asked in her bright and cheery voice.
I wondered if she imagined a daily menu where I had been able to check on the freshness of the fish if I didn’t fancy the nut roast. I considered answering, “Reuben and I ate raw wolf, ripped apart with our bare hands, and after we had eaten it we used the blood to paint stripes across our noses,” just to see the look on her face. But it was too much effort.
“We ate a lot of squirrel,” I said, keeping my voice level. “And Kaninchen.”
“Oh, Peggy,” she said in a concerned tone, and reached out a hand to me, but I was quick and pulled mine back. She tucked her hands under the table and pursed her lips.
“When you were away . . .” she started to say.
“When I was taken,” I cut in.
“When you were taken,” she repeated. “When I understood you had really gone, I went down in the cellar. You remember the cellar, how it was like?”
I nodded.
“All those shelves with food, tins and tins of food. I went down in the cellar and it was just how your father had left it, natürlich. Packets with rice, dried peas, beans—all with dust everywhere.” Ute sounded as if she was repeating a story she knew well, one she had told many times, to many people. “I tried to imagine what you were eating, whether it was healthy, and I worry you are hungry, wherever you are. I take a tin of baked beans, another of peaches, and one of sardines from the shelves and I put them on the table in the cellar. The table is still down there, you can see it, but I threw the food away years ago. An absolute waste. I took a tin-can opener and a fork from the drawer under the cooker, and a metal plate. And I line them up on the table, Peggy, just how you liked to line up all those things from your rucksack, remember? I line the tins neatly beside the fork and the plate, and I look at them. It made me cry, thinking about where you could be, and maybe my little daughter still arranging the things from her rucksack.” Ute’s voice broke, and I looked up from my empty bowl. Her face was stricken; tears had welled in her eyes and it occurred to me that they were genuine.
“I was crying,” Ute continued, “but still I sat there, because I thought you could be sitting somewhere too, with your doll and your nightie lined up. And I open the beans and the peaches and also the Sardinen with the little Schlüssel, the little key. I was pregnant, natürlich . . .” She paused, to calculate. “Expecting Oskar since two months, I think, and feeling very sick. With the fork, I eat the beans and peaches and Sardinen. I eat them at once, and all the time crying, crying. I make myself swallow, because maybe you don’t have the food you like. I eat until I am sick.”
I couldn’t work out what response she wanted. Should we cry together and hug, or was she expecting me to volunteer a story of my own? So I just sat, looking down at my bowl again, with my licked-clean spoon placed to the side. It, too, reminded me of the tidy piles of my belongings, taken from my rucksack. The idea that I was still putting things in lines made me smile, but I hid it from Ute, behind my hand. Minutes passed, with both of us silent and not even the scrape of cutlery on porcelain to make the kitchen seem lived in. Eventually I said, “Oliver Hannington ate some of the food from the cellar.”
Ute jumped backward in her seat, the legs of her kitchen chair grating against the floor. It wasn’t a response I had anticipated, and for the first time since I got home we really looked at each other—my eyes seeing into hers, and hers looking back into mine; both of us trying to work the other out, as if we were new to each other, which we were. And then the moment was gone. A mask had come down over her face, the same mask that Dr. Bernadette uses—calm, beneficent, like one of the stone angels in the cemetery.
“Really?” Ute asked. “Is that true? Oliver Hannington?” Her overreaction made me curious, as though there was something I had missed, something that was right under my nose.
“He told us we should eat the food and replace it, so it didn’t go out of date,” I said.
“You are sure? He came to stay, with James? When?” she asked, jumpy.
There was an itch under my right breast as she said my father’s name, and I rolled my shoulder to get rid of it.