“But it’s not just food. Fuel for the stove is getting scarce, too. The other night I ran out completely and it was so cold I couldn’t stand it. My knee has started to ache as well, so I knocked on a neighbor’s door to ask if she could put me up, just for the night, but she turned me away without so much as an excuse.” This was the woman two houses down from mine.
“You can’t expect anything from them. They act as though they’ve never seen you when you pass in the street, and they’re rude when you go to collect for the neighborhood association. You can never tell what they’re thinking.”
They were talking about the house next to mine where they kept a dog. I didn’t know much more myself, except that the owners were a young couple in their thirties who both worked and apparently had no children.
Since the topic had shifted to complaining about these neighbors, I wanted to go back inside but, lacking an excuse to leave, I occupied myself by knocking the snow from the top of the wall with the fire poker and nodding. The dog barked, as though he’d realized that they were speaking ill of his masters.
“Still,” began the ex-hatmaker. “I wonder if spring will ever come.”
The rest of them nodded in agreement.
“Perhaps it never will again,” murmured the woman with bad knees.
The former hatmaker zipped up his jacket as far as it would go. I continued my work with the poker.
“In any normal year, the winds would have shifted by now and trees would be budding out. The color of the sea would be lightening. It seems strange to have so much snow on the ground this late.”
“Though perhaps not all that strange—we get these odd years now and then.”
“But it’s not that simple. Think about it. With the calendars gone, no matter how long we wait, we’ll never get to a new month… so spring will never come.”
The old woman rubbed her knees through her woolen leggings.
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“If spring never comes, does that mean summer won’t either? How will the crops grow when the fields are covered with snow?”
“I’m not sure I could stand cold like this going on forever. We’re already low on fuel.”
And so the complaints circled back to the beginning. One after the other, we let our anxieties bubble up. An even colder wind blew down the street as a muddy car rumbled past.
“Don’t worry. It’s no good overthinking this. Calendars are just scraps of paper. Be patient. It will all work itself out.” The former hatmaker seemed to be reassuring himself as much as the rest of us. But we nodded in agreement.
In the end, however, it was the old woman’s prediction that turned out to be accurate. No matter how long we waited, spring never came, and we lay buried under the snow along with the ashes of the calendars.
Chapter 16
We decided to celebrate the old man’s birthday in the secret room.
“Now that the calendars are gone, there’s no way to know when it really is, so please don’t make a fuss,” he told us. But birthday parties have been a tradition in this house since long before I was born, and even if we couldn’t recall the exact date, I knew that his came around every year just as the cherry blossoms were budding out. I was quite certain that time was fast approaching. I also thought that a party would be good for R, who had spent so many dull days hidden away.
I went to the market every day for a week in order to assemble the ingredients for the festivities. As the neighbors had said, the shelves in the stores were poorly stocked, there were lines here and there, and it was particularly difficult to get anything of good quality or a bit out of the ordinary. Still, I patiently made the rounds to every corner of the market.
A sign was posted in front of the greengrocers: “Tomorrow morning, 9:00 a.m., we expect a shipment of fifty pounds of tomatoes and thirty pounds of asparagus.” It had been months since we’d seen any sign of either, but if I could buy some, I could make a fresh salad for the party. The next morning I showed up at the store two hours early, but there was already a long line. As I waited, I anxiously counted and recounted the number of people ahead of me, and when it was finally my turn, there was almost nothing left on the shelf. What’s more, the tomatoes were green and small, and the asparagus tips were broken off. Still, I was luckier than those behind me who had waited almost as long but came away empty-handed.
A circuit of all the other grocers in the market yielded a small bunch of parsley to decorate the dishes, a few spindly mushrooms of indeterminate variety, a handful of worm-eaten beans, three red and three green peppers each, and a withered head of celery.
And I ended up giving the celery to an old beggar woman.
“Excuse me, young lady. Would that possibly be celery I see peeking from your sack? If it’s not too much to ask, I wonder if you’d mind sharing a bit of it with me.” Her tone was extremely polite as she approached. “I took a fall in the street from all the snow and I must have dropped my wallet. I don’t know what to do. This weather is awful for an old woman like me. You can see that my basket is empty.”
She held a plastic shopping basket in front of me, which was, as she’d said, quite empty. I could have passed by without stopping, but for some reason the void in the basket struck me as so sad that I filled it with the celery.
The next day and the day after that I saw the same old woman holding her empty basket in front of someone in the market. I looked for more celery, but there was none to be had anywhere.
The market itself was crowded with people at all hours of the day. Snow had been pushed up in the alleys between the stalls, covering piles of vegetable scraps and fish scales, bottle caps and plastic bags. Shoppers wandered between the stalls, clutching the things they had managed to buy, looking around eagerly for something more interesting. The sounds of laughter or a minor dispute could be heard here and there among the shops.
There were still all sorts of things I wanted to buy. Butter for a cake, wine, spices, fruit for a punch, flowers, a lace tablecloth, new napkins. But I knew I would not be able to get even half of these, since I had to keep some money in reserve for the most important thing: the present.
Buying meat and fish was relatively easy. The shop owners were both friends of the old man.
“I put aside the most tender chicken I had,” said the butcher, bringing out a package that had been tied up like a present with a proper bow.
The fishmonger let me choose from a bucket full of live fish. After hesitating for several minutes, I finally selected one that was more than a foot long with spots on its back.
“You have a good eye,” said the fishmonger. “This one will be delicious, with nice firm flesh. You’re lucky—we don’t catch many of these.” As he spoke, he snatched up the fish and slapped it down on his cutting board. After striking it once with a heavy stick shaped like a pestle, he scaled and gutted it in the wink of an eye. Clutching the package carefully to my chest, I set off home.
The old man showed up precisely on time that day, dressed in his only suit and wearing a striped tie. His hair had been neatly slicked back.
“Come in!” I told him. “I’m so glad you came.”
He bowed as he passed through the door, holding his hand to his throat as if self-conscious about his tie.
He let out a cry as he reached the bottom of the ladder in the secret room.
“How magnificent!”
“It may be a bit crowded, but the decorations dress it up nicely, don’t you think? R helped me with everything,” I said, feeling rather proud.
We had put things not related to the party away, and then we’d set up a long, narrow folding table for us to sit around—which took up nearly every inch of available space.