Liss was standing in the pantry, measuring out rye for her bread. She always baked for two weeks ahead, and somehow it was a good sign that the last batch had only lasted nine days. She tied the brown paper sack up again and pushed it under the butcher’s bench. When she straightened up, she felt as though she could smell the stale whiff of blood in the wood, and she shook her head unwillingly. Then she leant down again, until her nose was almost touching the wood. No. It smelt of wood. Nothing else. The smell was only in her head. She looked up at the boning knives hanging over the bench. One was missing. But it had been missing a long time. The steel was hanging from a cord beside the knives. She took it down, reached for one of the knives and sharpened it, the way she’d learnt back then.
Eleven years old? Twelve. She was twelve. She was probably twelve. Yes. The first snow had fallen and thawed right away, and the yard hadn’t yet been paved, so it was full of cold puddles. Early December.
Are you coming? he’d shouted across the yard. He had on the white rubber apron that he only wore for butchering. Once, when she’d been little, it hadn’t used to bother her. But now it was different. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to eat meat. She loved the ham. She liked the large bratwursts that they sold by the metre or the half-metre at the autumn wine festivals down in the town. She knew that pigs had to die for that, or cows, but that wasn’t it. It was the way he did it. She got dressed slowly, but she was still ready too soon. She walked down the back corridor, took the zinc bucket and the wooden spoon, and stepped out into the open. The sky was grey and low, and a few solitary wet flakes were falling into the puddles, onto the midden wall and onto his grey-brown cap. They melted immediately.
Her mother pulled the tub over to the high frame he’d welded together out of water pipes. A hose ran out of the half-open kitchen window, across the windowsill into the yard; her mother picked it up and began to fill the tub with hot water. The water steamed like it did in the bathroom when she was supposed to have a bath. The thought repulsed her.
He had a cord in his hand and was shouting something at her; she couldn’t hear what, but she knew what she had to do either way, so she shut the gate so that the pig couldn’t run away if it slipped out. He vanished into the sty, and the pigs squealed because they thought they’d be fed. But then he came out again, dragging the sow behind him as she kicked against the taut cord with both her forelegs. Yes, she thought, you’ve never seen the yard before. I’d be afraid too. You’ve never been outside. Never. Other farmers at least kept their pigs outside half the year. He just laughed at that: churn up your orchards and make more work for you. But on the other hand, his sows sometimes ate their own young, which the other farmers’ animals never did. If she’d been born a pig, maybe her mother would’ve … Maybe it wasn’t even wrong for pigs. If the litter didn’t work out for the parents, maybe it was better for it to be eaten. She felt queasy. The wooden spoon smelt of blood. Already. You could wash it as much as you liked, it would always hold the iron tang of blood.
The sow squealed. She wanted to go back into the sty. All she’d ever known. And she was strong. The sow dragged the cord from his hand, and he cursed as she ran off around him, but there was Mother with the rake in her hand, standing by the stable door to fend her off. She turned and galloped through the yard, slipped as she went to sidestep the tub and slid a few metres through the mud on the yard. Elisabeth! he bawled, Elisabeth.
No, she thought. He was running after the sow, which had got up again, and threw himself onto her. Literally threw himself onto her. Two pigs in the muck, she thought, and found herself laughing. The sow squealed.
But by then he’d pulled the bolt gun from his pocket, positioned it and fired. The sow fell. Her forelegs twitched. He stood up, pulled the knife from his belt and looked around for her.
The bucket. Get that bucket here.
She brought it, and he looked up, then he looked at her. You gotta learn this, he said roughly, it’s high time. He pressed the smooth handle of the knife into her fingers, closed his fist around her hand and drove it into the sow’s neck, accurate and without hesitation. She felt in her hand, in her fingers, the way the knife went through skin and fat and flesh – so easily. The dark blood spluttered into the bucket and she pulled out the knife, dropped it and began to stir so that the blood didn’t curdle. The reek of iron was so strong that she longed to spew. On him and on the sow and into the filthy puddles. But she swallowed and stirred. The sow was dead. Five minutes. That was the lucky part. Death came so quickly. She looked up at him and wondered what it would be like if he were lying there. In the dirt. Instead of the sow. Stir, she thought, moving the wooden spoon through the thick blood, stir.
Bake bread. This was now. Bake bread.
She switched the mill on and it was only as she let the rye run into the hopper and the noise started up that she realised it was still very early and she’d wake the girl. But it was too late now. The grain ran grey into the pan, and the scent of the rye percolated, wiping away her memory of the stench of blood. She thought rye smelt nicer than wheat. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the smell of wheat, but when you milled rye, you could still smell the grass it had once been. A good scent.
The girl’s voice behind her made her jump. She hadn’t heard the door over the racket of the mill.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Sally, who must have come straight from bed. She was still in her T-shirt and hadn’t even put her shorts on. It took Sally a second to register that that was good; that Sally wasn’t thinking about the other day anymore. She had to shout to be heard over the grinder.
‘I thought you were drilling. Is that a mill?’
Liss nodded but waited for the rye to run through before answering.
‘A grist mill. Over a hundred years old. My grandfather used it before me. It’s really intended for animal feed, but I use it for bread. You can’t bake cakes with this flour.’
Sally stood beside her and reached into the pan, took a handful of grain and let it run through her fingers.
‘Can I try?’ she asked.
‘Go ahead,’ said Liss.
‘You always do your own baking, don’t you?’
Sally chewed the rye slowly.
‘It tastes of … kind of green,’ she said. ‘Or a bit like the smell of hay.’
‘That’s rye,’ Liss explained. She fetched the bowl of sourdough starter, which she’d covered with a tea towel.
‘How do you do it? Baking bread, I mean.’
Sally sat down on the butcher’s bench. Utterly uninhibited, as if the other day had never happened. She braced herself on her hands. She crossed her legs at the ankles. Liss caught a brief glimpse of the white stripes of the scars, but also noticed that her knees no longer stuck out the way they’d done three weeks ago. She saw the thing that had hit her so hard the other day: the raw, powerful, brittle beauty in the girl’s thin body.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Liss. She handed her the starter. ‘Take the cloth off and have a sniff,’ she demanded. Sally took it, pulled off the cloth and lifted the bowl to her nose.
‘Vinegar,’ she said, ‘or … gone-off apple juice?’
‘Then it’s OK.’
Liss sniffed too. Wasn’t it strange that everything she liked doing involved the transformation of sweetness into something else? Baking bread. Pressing wine. Distilling schnapps.
‘It’s acetic acids and a little alcohol. You have to make rye go sour or you can’t bake with it.’
She scooped out a couple of teaspoons of the leaven and put them in an earthenware bowl, which she covered over. Then she handed the spoon to Sally.
‘Try?’
Sally took it and popped it in her mouth.
‘It doesn’t taste of bread,’ she said. ‘It’s good, but not like bread.’
‘That comes next,’ said Liss. It was strange to be explaining something.
‘What about the flour?’ Sally asked, pointing at the rye they’d just ground. ‘Doesn’t that have to be fermented?’
‘You add half of it as it is. Along with the salt and spices. Here. Do you want to?’
Sally came closer. She let Liss show her the spices, chewed on anise and fennel seeds, put too much coriander into the dough before Liss could stop her, and then she began to knead the dough in the bowl. It looked powerful. And again, it was like she wasn’t doing it for the first time. Or, thought Liss, she grasped what it was about so quickly. You didn’t often have to show her things.
She fetched the casserole dishes. Sally, up to her elbows in dough, looked up in surprise.
‘Do you boil the bread?’
Liss looked at the pans in her hand. How strange your habits could seem if someone else questioned them.
‘No,’ she answered briefly, ‘you can bake in casseroles too. I like the shape.’
Sally freed her hands from the dough, watched Liss grease the pans with butter, and tried it again.
‘It still doesn’t taste of bread.’
‘You’re impatient,’ smiled Liss.
‘Not as impatient as you,’ Sally answered.
Yes, thought Liss after a moment of surprise, I am. Always have been. But it was strange that the girl could see that so clearly. She threw a handful of sunflower seeds into one pan and a handful of sesame seeds into the other.
‘Give them a swirl.’
Sally immediately understood what she meant and circled the dishes so that the seeds were evenly distributed as they stuck to the buttered sides. Then, without asking, she put them down and popped in the dough.
‘You can eat the rye as it is,’ she mused aloud. ‘And the dough. The flour. But people want bread. The rye has to be ground and fermented and shaped and burnt. Then we like it.’
She looked at Liss.
‘Sometimes I’d like to be like an animal. Take everything as it comes. Eat what’s there, just the way it is. Raw. Move like an animal and live like an animal. Without thinking and…’ she hesitated ‘…without being afraid. Without always being tied to something.’
In silence, Liss cut two crosses in the dough to stop the bread tearing as it rose.
‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘sometimes that would be nice. But we’re not made for that. We can throw.’
‘What?’ Sally asked uncomprehendingly, opening the door for her. Liss had a pan in each hand. Sally followed her into the kitchen. Liss pointed to the oven, which she’d already preheated a little, and Sally opened it. Liss put the casseroles in.
‘The dough needs to prove for an hour now.’ She turned to her. ‘Throwing. That’s what distinguishes us from all other animals. We can aim a throw. And we can shape things. Ferment flour and grape juice. Make wine. Bake bread. That’s no bad thing.’
‘But it’s unnatural.’
Sally fetched herself a glass of water, sat on the bench and drew up her legs. Liss leant on the terrace doorframe.
‘What do you think you are?’ she asked, amused. ‘You’re just as much part of nature as a potato. You’re exactly as much part of nature as elephants and beavers and humans. We all change stuff. Elephants turned large areas of Africa into savanna by destroying the forests. Beavers dam rivers and destroy the habitats of mice by flooding meadows. We humans are animals. Clever animals, incredibly skilled at manipulating things. Thinking seems to be an evolutionary advantage, for a certain period. Although in the long term … Either way though, we’re animals the same as elephants and beavers. We’re not outside of nature just because we can build nuclear power stations.’
‘Wow,’ said Sally. ‘I think that’s the most I’ve ever heard you say. So you mean, you can’t just leave things as they are? You change everything around you, just by existing. So then it makes no difference whether you destroy more stuff or less.’
She looked challengingly at her. Liss considered before she spoke. This isn’t just a conversation about nature, she thought.
‘Everything you do has some kind of effect on others. You need to know that, I think. As for destruction … Am I destroying anything if I help the bees survive?’
‘Yes. You’re destroying the mites.’ Sally grinned. ‘You can’t win,’ she said. ‘Admit it.’
Liss smiled. ‘Nobody wins this kind of conversation. People just have them to assure themselves of their convictions.’
The grey of dawn was gradually breaking up. The sky over the barn was growing lighter, and the shredded clouds were gradually turning pink.
‘Why do you live alone?’ asked Sally.
Liss felt everything close up inside her.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t ask you questions.’
Sally nibbled on her pear. Unfazed. Calm. Liss wondered how it could be that this girl sometimes exploded with rage at the least provocation, while at other times she could be as tranquil as a stone in the sun.
‘That’s different. You know all about me anyway.’
Liss was astonished. ‘Me? About you?’
Sally raised her shoulders, then let them drop again.
‘Not so hard,’ she said. ‘You read the paper. You talked to the policeman. You can see me. And you say I remind you of yourself when you were young. Not so difficult, is it?’
Liss thought for a moment. Maybe there was something in that.
‘I like living alone. And not many people can put up with me. Does it matter?’
Sally put the rest of the pear on a saucer. Liss liked the way Sally ate. There was always something very conscious about it; she never did so casually.
‘It wouldn’t if you were happy,’ she said, standing up. ‘But you’re not. Can we start baking the bread now?’
Liss felt a heat rising inside her, but she held herself back.
‘You’re not happy either,’ she retorted, composedly. ‘Why else would you be here?’
Sally looked at her wide-eyed.
‘What?’ she asked, utterly taken aback. ‘Do you think that? When I arrived, I wasn’t happy. Truly not. But right now … or in the vineyard, in the forest … otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.’
Liss opened the patio door. She didn’t know what she was feeling. As she walked through it, she said: ‘The bread needs another half-hour yet.’
As she walked across the yard, the girl’s remark echoed in her ears.
Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.