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. ‘After we’ve eaten we’ll have to chop some more, but that barricade is so huge, it’ll go a long way.’
She looked at me glumly.
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.
