In Babylon. Marcel Moring
asking a young girl such a thing, an old man like you …’
We laughed.
I looked at Nina. Shadows leapt about in her face. In the firelight, her pale skin had a warm, rosy glow. Her curly red hair even looked like fire, a churning mountain stream of arabesques and garlands. Nina? No, she would never have trouble getting what she wanted. I gazed at my niece with the satisfaction of a father who sees that his daughter has blossomed into an attractive young woman: intelligent, sharp, well-dressed and well-bred. Even now, in the old clothes we had found in Herman’s wardrobe, corduroy trousers that were much too large for her and cinched at the waist with a leather belt, a jumper with the sleeves rolled up four times, thick woollen socks, even now she looked like the sort of tubercular, red-haired beauty the Pre-Raphaelites were so mad about. Her lightly rounded lips were freshly painted. There was a shimmer of rouge across her cheekbones. The green of her eyes was pure enamel.
‘We have got to eat,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and cook us something.’
‘Cook?’
‘That’s what I said. There’s plenty of food. Enough supplies to last us through the next world war.’
She looked at me blankly.
‘I’ll show you,’ I said. ‘But only if you promise not to be frightened.’
I picked up a candelabra and we walked out of the library. In the stone-cold hall the warmth was driven instantly out of our clothes. Nina shivered. I felt her hand in my back, and even though I was still shaky from all that sitting, I hurried to the door of the cellar. At the top of the stairs, shadows bolted into the darkness of the second floor hallway. Sofas, chairs, tables, a wardrobe, a pustule of furniture swelled and shrank as the light glided across it. Nina rushed up beside me, grasping my arm so firmly that I nearly bit my tongue. Then I opened the cellar door and went ahead of her down the small flight of steps. When my feet touched the concrete floor I stopped and waited for her to follow. I raised the candelabra and let the light do the rest. Nina was halfway down the stairs, but the last step seemed to take forever. It was as if she were suddenly moving in slow motion. She clapped one hand to her mouth and, holding closed the collar of Uncle Herman’s jacket with the other hand, looked about in stunned silence.
‘Sauerkraut,’ I said. ‘Do you have any objection to sauerkraut?’ She shook her head. I handed her the candelabra and walked past the shelves of provisions, where I chose a tin of beef sausages, a bag of dried apples, condensed milk, a jar of stock, potatoes, a packet of sauerkraut, spices, mustard, a rectangular piece of dried meat, and a bottle of Pinot Gris.
‘What …’ She was still looking around. ‘What’s all this?’ The candlelight glided over the towering walls of cans and jars. ‘My God. There’s enough here for … for …’
‘For the next world war,’ I said.
‘Was he some kind of fanatical hoarder?’
I shook my head. ‘No. There was always an adequate supply of food in the cellar, but nothing out of the ordinary. I have no idea where all this has come from or when these shelves were stocked.’
Nina went over to one of the racks and picked up a tin. She turned it around in the light of her candle, squinting. Then she picked up another tin, a glass jar, a box, a crackling bag of pasta. ‘I’d say a year, maybe a year and a half. Not much more. Tins and jars usually have a shelf life of two to three years.’ She handed me a tin of peas and showed me the date on the bottom. Their edibility was guaranteed for at least two more years. ‘You can tell best by looking at the coffee. Here. This packet’ll be good for three more months. That means it couldn’t have been bought more than a year ago.’
‘Smart girl,’ I said.
She put back the tin and looked at me impassively.
‘Come on, I think we should go back upstairs,’ I said. ‘It’s much too cold down here. There’s a fire going in the kitchen.’ I opened the door and let her go first. With the swaying globe of candlelight before her she walked to the kitchen. There, in the pleasing glow of the Aga, which I had lit earlier that afternoon, I set out the ingredients. I handed Nina a knife and let her peel the potatoes, while I arranged the apples in a baking dish and poured myself a glass of wine. I slid the dish into a lukewarm spot in the oven.
‘What’s going on, Nathan?’ she asked after a while.
I filled a large pot with an inch or two of water and placed it on the stove.
‘What do you mean? This house? The barricade? The supplies? I don’t know. I have no idea. And what’s more: I can’t imagine how any of it got here.’ I cut the dried meat in thin strips with one of the large knives from the block. The meat was as hard as a wooden beam and tasted like Bressaola, as the Italians called their dried fillet of ox.
‘Mrs Sanders?’
Mrs Sanders managed the house during Uncle Herman’s absence and played housekeeper whenever he was there.
‘Why would she bother? Uncle Herman left the house five years ago. I haven’t been back here in all that time. Besides, when we did use to come here, Uncle Herman had everything delivered fresh.’
Nina handed me the potatoes and leaned against the counter. ‘But how …’
I cut the potatoes in four, tossed them into the pan and topped them with the sauerkraut.
We stared silently at the dark sky behind the kitchen window. Now and then a cloud of snow was hurled against the glass, as if someone were playing Mother Holle and shaking out a feather pillow.
The water boiled, I added thyme, salt and rosemary and moved the pan to a part of the stove where the sauerkraut could simmer gently.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t like it one bit.’
I poured a generous dash of Pinot Gris and the contents of the jar of stock over the sauerkraut and covered the whole thing with the dried apples.
‘So I’d noticed.’
Slowly the odours began to fill the kitchen. Wine-tinged fumes curled up along the lid and droplets of steam began forming on the windowpanes. I pricked the potatoes with a fork: time to add the shredded meat. I slid it off the marble chopping board I had found in a cabinet and stirred it into the sauerkraut. At the bottom of the big cupboard, where it had always stood, was the little saucepan. I emptied in the tin of sausages and put it on the back burner. I opened the can of condensed milk, added a few heaped spoonfuls of mustard (whoever had stocked these shelves certainly knew their condiments: it was Colman’s), and mixed it all together. A dash of the wine, a spoonful of cooking liquid from the pan. I stirred and tasted.
The windows were steamed up. Those farthest from the stove were already beginning to freeze over. I took two plates out of the cupboard, put them in the sink, and poured hot water over them from the kettle standing on the back of the stove.
‘This is the story of my life,’ said Nina. ‘I’m snowed-up in a haunted house with a fairy tale writer who’s writing the biography of his mad uncle, and he’s making sauerkraut and potatoes. My mother was right. I wasn’t destined for happiness.’
‘It could have been worse,’ I said. ‘I might have been an accountant. Then what would you have done for the next few days? Read my ledger?’
‘What do you mean: then what would I have done?’
I tipped the water out of the plates, got a dishtowel out of the cupboard, and began drying them. The towel smelled like it badly needed airing.
‘Now that we’re stuck here you’ll have plenty of time to read Uncle Herman’s biography.’
She heaved a sigh.
I took some wood out of the basket next to the stove and threw it in the Aga.
‘Do we have enough firewood to last us a while?’
I nodded.