Those were very quiet days. They were both still moving cautiously. As if they’d walked a long way on a frozen lake, over ice that was now starting to crack and to creak if you trod too forcefully. Like after a day of heavy snowfall, when you can’t be sure if you’re still on the lake or if you’re already on solid ground, because everything is equally white.
Quiet days on which they spoke about nothing important. On the first morning, she’d buried the chickens right at the back of the garden, because she didn’t want Liss to see them in the yard. Liss didn’t ask about them. And she’d hidden the pistol. She knew that it didn’t actually matter, because if Liss wanted to try again, she’d find another way to kill herself. But she still couldn’t help it.
‘We’ll make schnapps today.’
It was the first time Liss had actually wanted to do any work. It was probably, Sally thought, like when you got up after a long illness and didn’t yet know how weak you were, whether your legs would carry you through the day or whether you’d get out of breath right away.
Liss didn’t talk much. Well yeah. She never had talked much. But right now she was saying even less. Not that it mattered. Liss spoke through her movements. And Sally liked the fact that she understood Liss; that she understood without words what they had to do. She watched Liss carefully layer wood in the steam boiler so as to allow air through. It took a while to get her head around the maze of copper vats and pipes, but she was no idiot. And following the tubes, the arrangement of various containers, thinking about where that meant the evaporated alcohol would condense, how it would cool and eventually drip through, was satisfying. She liked the sharp, alcoholic aroma of the pear mash in the pressing room. It seemed like a very long time since they’d been in the pear orchard. She liked the subtle sheen of the copper still in the firelight when she opened the damper to stoke it up again. It looked so old-fashioned, yet considered and effective. Some things didn’t need changing.
‘What’s that for?’ she asked Liss, pointing at the copper ball that sat above the still.
‘It’s called the onion head,’ answered Liss as she turned a small red wheel. The pointer on the pressure gauge above it was moving round to the right.
Sally wanted to put her hand on it, but not without checking how hot it was. It was bearable, and she ran her fingers over the copper. It was smooth, yet uniquely uneven; an almost supple structure of thousands of tiny dimples and waves. Liss watched her.
‘The copper is triple-hammered,’ she said. ‘You have to thicken it like that to stop the fruit acids reacting with the metal, because that makes it rough on the inside and changes the taste.’
‘Feels awesome. What about this?’
She rapped her knuckles on something that looked like a steam-engine chimney, except that it was closed at the top.
Liss gave an almost imperceptible smile, and Sally realised that it was the very first for days.
‘You’ll like the name. Dephlegmator.’
‘What does it do? Make the schnapps a little less phlegmatic?’
She was genuinely amused by the idea of secretly changing the character of the spirits.
Liss pulled over the mash tun and began to scoop the mixture into the lower retort pot. Sally took the other plastic measure and joined in. She couldn’t resist tasting the brown mash, and instantly winced. It tasted sour, alcoholic, fermented, and somehow only faintly of pear. It smelt a lot better than it tasted. Liss looked over at her.
‘All the flavour has been in the scent for a long time,’ she said. ‘That’s what we want to capture now.’
They filled the pot. When Liss closed the door, she pointed at the drum at the other end of the pipe from the onion head.
‘The dephlegmator is a great invention,’ she said slowly. ‘When you boil the mash, the vapours rise up together – water and alcohol. But you only want the alcohol. The dephlegmator is set up so that it lets the vapour with the higher boiling point condense. That separates the steam from the alcohol. The water runs back into the mash. The alcohol stays as vapour and rises into the swan neck.’
She traced the path of the alcohol through the still with her long, powerful fingers.
‘I like the names,’ said Sally. ‘Dephlegmator. Swan neck. Onion head. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.’
Liss nodded in silence.
‘How did it happen?’
It had just slipped out. She’d been sucking on the question for days. It was like old chewing gum in her mouth, so hard and tasteless that she’d involuntarily spat it out. Liss knew at once what she meant, Sally could see that. Her movements were jerkier, and quicker.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Sally said hastily. ‘Leave it. I don’t have to know.’
‘Yes you do.’
Liss’s voice sounded rough and hard.
‘I don’t know how to explain a thing like that. It always comes across wrong. I couldn’t tell them back then either.’
Damn. She shouldn’t have asked. It was far too soon. She saw that Liss’s hands were shaking as she turned the red dial again, and the temperature indicator dropped a tiny bit. It was quivering too.
‘I … we had a row. He … It sounds so ridiculous. He used to hit our son. Sometimes not once in ages. Other times it was two or three times a week. And sometimes he hit me. And I know that … that doesn’t mean … that you can’t just … that that’s no reason…’
She stopped talking and looked at the still. It was starting to drip from the slender tap under the long cylinder into the glass beaker beneath. A sharp, biting smell of spirits was suddenly in the air.
‘To kill someone? I don’t know. Tell me.’
OK. She’d crossed the bridge now, asked directly. Now there was no going back, and now was the point when something would be decided between them. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but that was how it felt. Liss bent over the glass jar.
‘That’s the foreshot,’ she said drily. ‘It’s poisonous and you tip it away. That’s why you must only heat up the retort slowly. So the poisonous alcohols vaporise first and don’t spoil the spirits. That’s how I am too,’ she continued seamlessly. ‘I’ve always burnt hot right away. With me you get everything in one fell swoop, and then there’s the poison in everything I do and say. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t the fact that he hit me. That happened, and I hit back. Sometimes it was almost like he wanted that. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst thing was that he imprisoned me.’
‘What?’
Sally didn’t understand right away, she was so shocked. Liss must have heard in her tone how horrified she was, and she made a dismissive hand movement. The glass jar clinked in its bracket.
‘Not like that. He didn’t lock me in the house. That would’ve been … you can get free. You can run away. You can do something. But it wasn’t like that. He locked me up inwardly. Through the boy. Through the fact that I’d never got any proper qualifications because I got pregnant so young. Through my parents. They were always on his side.’
She took a long pause before she spat out the last sentence, bitter and hate-filled.
‘Through the fact that I still believed I loved him. So stupid. So incredibly stupid!’
Sally listened. She just listened. There was nothing she ought to say. Nothing at all. Liss’s voice grew calm, almost businesslike.
‘And then there was a day when the boy spilt the milk. Nothing more. He hit him on the fingers. Not even hard, but with absolutely no emotion. I stood up and said: come here. Then, in the pantry, I said that he wasn’t to touch us again, or I’d leave and take the boy.’
Liss stared at the still. Sally was very close to her now. She touched Liss on the shoulder. Only with her fingertips, very lightly.
‘He just kind of laughed slightly and said that I wouldn’t get very far with no money and no job and … that either way, he wouldn’t let me go. That the boy and I…’
She faltered again, and Sally felt the way she tried to make her voice firmer as she said:
‘…that we belonged to him. And that it would never be any different. And that he could hit the boy whenever he considered it right. So I asked him what on earth had happened to our…’
She faltered for another moment, as if it were hard to find the words. But then her face hardened and she continued:
‘… what had happened to our love? I asked him. Said there’d been something very special there once. And he just said, just like that, like someone ordering a loaf from the baker, that he’d never loved me anyway. Maybe he only said it because he knew that would hit me the hardest of all. And then he said, very coolly, that he’d only ever been interested in the farm. Today, I don’t believe that that was even true, I think he just knew how to beat me without touching me. I took the knife off the wall and stabbed him in the chest. And yes,’ said Liss, raising her head and looking at Sally. ‘Yes. I wanted to kill him. I tried to hit his heart. I just botched it.’
There was a quiet hissing and gurgling coming from the copper pipes. The boiler was giving off warmth. A stronger, clearer stream now emerged from the tap. Fluently, Liss swapped the glass jar for a drum. Then she held a test tube under the tap. When it was three-quarters full, she stuck some kind of thermometer into it. Sally watched her in fascination. She always moved so fluidly. She would have snatched up the knife in exactly that way.
‘What’s that?’
She pointed at the thermometer thing that plunged into the pear spirit and then rose up again slightly.
‘It measures the alcohol content. We’re at seventy-four per cent right now.’
Sally leant over and sniffed. It was a very subtle scent, not nearly as strong as she’d expected. A scent like a wind-blown memory of the summery, blustery day in the pear garden.
‘And then you spent eight years in prison.’
Sally still couldn’t imagine what that meant. What that had meant for Liss, who had wanted to kill a man who’d imprisoned her.
Liss was astonished.
‘You know all that? You know that and you ask me?’
Sally felt a spark of the anger that Liss sometimes had. It was a good sign. Something was still smouldering within her. She held her gaze.
‘I read it. Just that. Not the other part. You didn’t tell the court.’
‘There was nothing to tell,’ answered Liss after quite a while. ‘Other people put up with much more without wanting to kill somebody. I tried to kill my husband. The father of my son. Everything else is insignificant.’
The glass cylinder was almost full. Liss quickly turned off the tap and emptied the cylinder into a bucket that was standing beside her on the wooden table. She checked the temperatures. She opened the door on the boiler. The warm glow of the embers shone on her beautiful, angular face. Sally swayed for a moment under a feeling that surged around her like a sudden wave on the sea.
‘It’s your son’s bike, isn’t it?’
Liss supported herself with both hands on the table and spoke facing away from her.
‘He didn’t let him visit me. At first, I didn’t want him to either … I was so ashamed. I … How could I have looked at him? Told him … Hi, son, I tried to kill your father. Sorry. Like that?’
She fell silent for a moment. Sally bent to pick up a piece of wood that had dropped on the floor in front of the steam boiler. The scent of pears was much stronger now.
‘When I got out, I bought the bike. It was meant to be for him. When we saw each other again. I didn’t want … I didn’t want to stand there empty-handed. But … we never did see each other again. He wouldn’t allow it, and they moved away. As soon as he got out of hospital, they moved away. I’ve never been there. And he’s never ridden the bike.’
Sally thought it over.
‘You never say the names. What’s he called? What’s your son’s name?’
Liss turned to her in surprise.
‘But I thought you’d known that for ages. You’ve read the letters. Peter. His name is Peter.’
The aroma changed suddenly, grew heavy, much sweeter and oily. Liss reached out hastily for the tap and closed it.
‘The tail is coming,’ she said drily. ‘Rotgut. It smells good, but it can spoil the whole batch.’
Again she decanted the spirit, then she retrieved the glass jar and put it back, before opening the tap again.
‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ she said quietly, ‘never.’
Sally fetched the crate of empty schnapps bottles and put it on the wooden table.
‘Good job I’m here then,’ she said softly after a while.
Liss smiled for the first time in days.