WE HAD ARRIVED in the winter to end all winters. That morning Nina had been standing at the appointed place, behind the gate in the arrivals hall, left arm flung around her body in a half embrace, the other raised and waving, her long, deep red curls a torch above the dark blue coat.
‘N,’ she had said, as her cold lips brushed my cheeks.
‘N,’ I had answered.
In the car, leaning forward slightly to adjust the heat, she asked if I’d had a good trip, and didn’t I think it was cold, fifteen below … Had I heard there was more snow on the way? And she had turned the car onto the motorway, as the chromium grin of a delivery van loomed up in the corner of my eye. Without thinking, I jerked back in my seat. Nina straightened the wheel and sniffed as the van barely missed us and slithered, honking, into the left lane.
‘Trolls,’ she muttered.
The further inland we drove, the whiter the world became. There were cars parked along the roadside, a pair of snowploughs chugged along ahead of us. Halfway there, we stopped for coffee in a snowbound petrol station, full of lorry drivers smoking strong tobacco and phoning their bosses to ask what they should do. After that the snow began falling with such a vengeance, you could hardly tell the difference anymore between road and land. The snow banked up and blew in thick eddies across the whitened countryside. Nina and I leaned forward and peered into the whorls.
After more than three hours we neared our destination. The car danced a helpless cakewalk on the rising and falling country roads. Nina sat motionless, one hand clamped around the wheel, the other on the gearstick, eyes narrowed and fixed on the horizon. We were going less than twenty miles an hour. Her hair blazed so fiercely, I could almost hear it crackling. Her pale skin was whiter than ever.
‘Another fifteen minutes or so.’
Nina nodded. She turned the wheel to the right. The car drifted into a side road.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Not at all. That is, as long as it isn’t one of those filthy cigars.’
‘That was Uncle Herman, dear girl. And they weren’t filthy cigars. He only ever smoked Partagas and Romeo y Juliettas.’
‘It’s like setting fire to a pile of dry leaves.’
I grinned.
‘I can’t believe you still do that,’ she said, as I lit up my Belgian cigarette and blew the smoke at my window.
‘I’m too old to stop. It’s too late for me anyway.’
She shot me a sidelong glance.
‘Sixty,’ I said. ‘When this century retires, so will I.’
Nina frowned.
‘When we bid farewell to the twentieth century, I’ll be sixty-five.’
I gazed out at the picture book of white fields and paths, and smoked. Every so often we dipped down, into a shallow valley, and the akkers, the fertile slopes for which this region was famous, spread out before us, only white now, gentle curves beneath the endlessly falling snow.
‘Hey, was that a joke?’
I looked sideways. ‘About the century, you mean?’
She shook her head. ‘What you said over the phone, that Uncle Herman’s biography has turned into more of a family chronicle.’
I rested my head against the cold doorjamb and closed my eyes. Even then, I could see the whiteness slipping past us. I pulled at my cigarette and blew more smoke at the window. I knew that Nina was truly interested, not just in the family history, but also in the things I made. She was the only one of the Hollanders who had read everything I’d ever written. For several years now she had even been my European agent. As a result of her efforts my fairy tales were leading new lives. A number of them had appeared as cd-roms, a group of Scandinavian television stations had banded together to turn them into a thirty-two-part series, and in the Czech Republic a director had bought the rights to Kei. He had phoned me one night, in Uncle Herman’s Manhattan apartment, and I had listened in amazement. He wanted to film Kei as a realistic story. ‘Let us forget that fairy tales belong to the realm of fantasy,’ he said. ‘Let us accept them as an expansion of our own limited reality.’ In the nearly forty years that I had travelled the world as a fairy tale writer, he was the first to speak about my work as something that could be taken seriously.
I looked at Nina. ‘A family chronicle. Almost a family chronicle.’
‘But why put so much work into it? Fifty pages would have been more than enough.’
‘I think Herman’s little plan worked.’
She squinted again and peered through the windscreen. This far away from town they didn’t sand the roads, or at least, not any more. The road that, a few miles back, had wound through the whiteness like a black river, was now nothing more than an indentation in a landscape that had been stripped of all distinguishing features.
‘What little plan?’
I told her. That one of the terms of Herman’s will, a biography of him in exchange for the house, had been his final attempt to lure me away from the domain of the fairy tale. That he had always thought my work was a waste of talent and, all my life, had tried to change me. ‘And now, after fifty years, he’s actually done it. I can’t get away with some fake biography. But I can’t see myself writing a real one either. The Life and Works of Herman Hollander … No. Somehow or other I have to tell everything. From Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim up until this very moment. Like that story about the English explorer who finds himself in an Indian tribe in the Amazon. Never seen a white man. He and his travelling companions receive a royal welcome and that night around the fire the tribal sorcerer tells them the history of his people, from the moment the gods created the first Indian out of a crocodile, up until the moment that three white-skinned, red-headed Englishmen walked into the village.’
‘The Creation of the World, and everything that goes with it. By Nathan Hollander.’
‘Something like that.’
Nina sighed.
We had reached the end of a long, sluggish dip in the road and were now moving slowly upward, up the Mountain that wasn’t a mountain. Conifers, heavy with snow, jostled along the narrow path. Now and then the car skidded and Nina had to shift down to get it back on course. The woods grew denser, the road narrower, until all that remained was a path that bore like a tunnel through the thick hedge of tall white firs. It twisted left to right and the car glided right to left. I looked sideways and, in a flash, saw ghosts among the trees. They were hurrying along with us to the top. Uncle Chaim, Magnus, Herman, Manny, Zeno. They dashed through the thick white forest like a pack of wolves. The road curled once more, the car wriggled, groaning, into a curve. It was as if we were driving so slowly because we were laden down with history, as if my family was indeed running along the edge of the wood, while the weight of their stories hung from the rear bumper.
‘Shit.’
With a thud, the car veered into a snowdrift. The engine screeched and died. The snow scurried around us and the windscreen wipers stuck out through the layer of down that was forming on the glass. Nina opened the door and looked outside. Then she turned to me in amusement. ‘We’re stuck.’
I rolled down my window a little and tried to inspect our surroundings through the veils sweeping by. ‘It’s not even supposed to snow this hard around here.’
‘Yes, but when it does you get an instant seventeenth-century winter landscape.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘The only thing we can do,’ said Nina. ‘Walk.’
‘Don’t