Snowleg Read online

  “Why did you turn out the light?”

  She didn’t reply and he realised he was inhaling the scent of her sleeping breath and that she had a different smell when she slept.

  He woke. A lozenge of sunlight slanted across her face. She was propped on an elbow. Green eyes big and open. Staring down at him with the dawn. The tip of her finger pressed his chin and drew a line up to his ear.

  “I had a good feeling about you, but you can have a good feeling about someone and it comes to nothing.”

  He touched the necklace that still circled her throat. “Big Brother watching me.”

  She laughed, drawing back. “Who, Bruno?”

  “Your secret police,” covering the marbles with his palm. “I was warned you can’t speak to anyone.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I also read it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “The hell it isn’t. I know who to speak to. I know exactly who I can speak to.” She came close again. Her fingers crept under his hand and played with the shaft of hollow bone and the glass eyes, separating them.

  “Actually,” he looked up at her and the tension between them was enjoyable, “what is that?”

  It was a bone from her grandfather’s muskrat. “Granny had it made into a necklace after he died.”

  He stroked her breast under the red shirt that she still hadn’t taken off.

  “This is hers, too,” looking down. Covering herself with the shirt.

  “It must be very old.”

  “She said you should only buy the best,” and her voice imitated an old lady: “‘I am not so rich as to buy cheap things!’”

  “Any other words of wisdom?”

  She smiled. “I’ve already told you.”

  “Tell me some more.”

  “‘It’s not necessary to feel guilty, but it’s necessary to feel shame.’”

  “You’re close to your granny?”

  “You asked that before. Don’t you listen?”

  He didn’t answer, but started to unbutton her shirt and this time she appeared to make a decision. She waited for his fingers to reach her shoulders, bracing herself for the question, and as his hands mounted her back she didn’t breathe out. She felt his fingers discover the first pleated ridges of skin. Watched him inhale. Catch himself. Press his thumbs hard as if testing the skin – “I can feel that” – and continue their journey.

  He tickled her and she shook her head out of the spell. “I love that.”

  And because he never asked the question she told him.

  She was playing with Bruno in the kitchen. Her head hit the handle of a pot of coffee on the stove. It spilled over them both. She was 9 years old.

  She hoisted the shirt and sat still for Peter to see where the boiling liquid had melted the skin.

  He had known what it was straight away and was moved by her loveliness within it. Even so, it surprised him to see the burn-mark. The scar quite waxy and pearly, like hoar frost, and covering her shoulders.

  He was aware that she was worried by his response. She was saying, “I used to wear my hair long to cover it,” when he brushed her lips to be quiet and turned her over onto her stomach.

  Afterwards, she rubbed the tears from her smiling face. “Once is never enough.”

  He looked at her quizzically. She rolled over and lay on her back and raised one arm straight in the air. “That’s also something my grandmother likes to say. That’s her best advice.”

  It was cold in the room and she snuggled against him.

  “What happened to Bruno? Wasn’t he burned?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone said that was the miracle.”

  “Did you blame him?”

  “Oh, no. I idolised him.”

  He said he wanted to know everything and so she told him. In the cold her words made twice their impression.

  As children they had done everything together. Bruno took her to the Natural History Museum in East Berlin to stand before the dinosaurs. He smuggled her into the cinema in Grimmaische Straße, her shoes on his shoes, walking in step under his long coat, to watch a forbidden film. Once in the spring after their mother died they hiked for three days along the Baltic coast.

  “And then he fell in love.”

  Petra came from Dresden, but she had family in the West. She was possessive of Bruno from the first. After their marriage, Snowleg hardly saw him. They last spoke at a party thrown by their grandmother to celebrate the results of her Vorphysikum.

  “This was when?”

  “Three years ago.”

  Bruno arrived alone. He had filled his white Trabi with flamingo flowers as high as fenceposts and before leaving in a rage he gave her 200 Ostmarks. They had the briefest conversation. She told him she wanted to be a psychiatrist, do something serious with her life, and he encouraged her.

  “You should, little sister. You should do what you want.”

  Then the celebration turned into a quarrel with her father and grandmother and no-one explained to her what the argument was about. Bruno had stormed off and she hadn’t seen him since, not until the party last night.

  “I hear nothing from him until a few days ago Stefan tells me, did I know, Bruno’s going to the West? I’m astonished, but I’m even more astonished when I discover I’m being punished for it.”

  “In what way punished?”

  The patch of sunlight had shifted from the bed to the floor and was creeping over the red shirt discarded there by the time she finished explaining how stunned she was by the events of the past 24 hours. How her every basis for trust had been shaken to the root.

  Until very recently she never had any reason to cross the system. She was considered very bright at school. Had been active in the Freie Deutsche Jugend. Organised concerts and readings. She believed what she was told, that the German Democratic Republic was truly democratic and that her liberty was guaranteed by the constitution. She believed that her country was the “good Germany” and that the Federal Republic, on the other hand, was home to fascists who every day scratched their heads to think of new ways to undermine the GDR. Long before she went to university she knew that she wasn’t supposed to watch Western television and that the public telephone in the street was bugged and that there existed people in the regime who might do strange things to those who threatened its achievements. But she thought if she was a good girl things would work out. Things would be different. They wouldn’t pick on her. “I never took the regime seriously.”

  A fortnight before, she expected to hear that she had qualified for a postgraduate place at Karl Marx University to specialise in psychiatry. “Everyone told me I’d get it. Even if I still doubted myself, I was fairly confident that I had done well in my exams.” The head of faculty had assured her of a place. So had the dean. She had no reason to doubt the future towards which conscientiously she had been working. “You see, it’s a crime not to have a job and I had committed no crime. This was what I always wanted to do.”

  When the rejection came she didn’t link it with Bruno. Her voice shrank as she recalled how, twelve days earlier, she had returned to her grandmother’s apartment and found her father waiting in the kitchen.

  “They’ve failed you.” The letter in his hand trembled against the stove. “My daughter.”

  “Have they given a reason?”

  “No reason.” He was a miner, a Party member, a fervent admirer of Honecker. “There may be a possibility for other employment. But you have to wait a week.”

  The same evening she overheard him shouting at her grandmother. “This is Bruno’s fault!”

  Her story brought back to Peter the unendurable loneliness he had felt in his last two years at St Cross. Not knowing who to trust, who he was. He drew her closer and feeling the texture of her back against his chest he caressed the pleated ridges of skin with his lips and fingers, surveying it.

  “My grandmother took the lead. She demanded a meeting.”
/>   They met at the medical school. Her father and grandmother, the head of her faculty and a man from the university, Sontowski. When they sat down she noticed a sheet of yellow paper in front of Sontowski, with a short written evaluation and then her marks and something else that she couldn’t figure out.

  Immediately, Sontowski started to pick her to pieces. “If you have marks as bad as these no wonder you can’t continue at university.”

  She was paralysed. “I told myself: He has the wrong piece of paper. He thinks I’m someone else.”

  But he carried on, becoming more personal. “Someone as stupid as you, they shouldn’t want to be a psychiatrist.”

  “I thought, This isn’t me. They must have made a mistake. I haven’t done anything against them.”

  The head of faculty seemed in accordance with Sontowski, staring at her and nodding at what he was saying. Then he spoke, and what he said astonished her. He had always gone out of his way to congratulate Snowleg on her work, but he talked in front of her as if he was being openly critical in a constructive way.

  “She is a pleasant girl. That may be her damnation. She has this enormous gift of relating musically to every situation, but she never relates to anything else. Now I’ve nothing against harmony, but this ability to harmonise very rarely goes with supreme gifts. Certainly not in the line of work she wishes to pursue.”

  Her father looked ready to explode, but her grandmother erupted first. “Stop this, just stop it!”

  “Stop what?” said Sontowski, bewildered.

  “You know as well as we do that she’s perfectly qualified. Don’t do this to her.”

  At this, her father burst out: “Could you tell me – is it true my daughter is being rejected because of her brother?”

  Sontowski didn’t answer, talking in empty phrases. “Well, this is not a matter to be discussed here. We’re not an inquisition. You should be grateful to the German Democratic Republic because we are able to offer you employment. We’ve just received the result of the clearing talks. A position has come free.” He studied his yellow piece of paper. “The university switchboard requires a telephone operator.” He gave her a hideous smile. “You’ll still be at the university.”

  For the second time her grandmother spoke. “No. Never. Never in my life. She’s not going to be a telephone operator. She wants to be a psychiatrist.”

  “Then you’re rejecting the only chance she’s probably ever going to get to be employed.”

  Her father was still puzzling it out. “Her brother is leaving for West Germany and you make her responsible?”

  Sontowski stared at her. “You’ll have to have a voice test. Why not take the chance I’m offering you?” He told them to go outside, think it over.

  “You haven’t done anything and they treat you like this,” said her father bitterly. He resented Bruno for having ruined her career, her future. For causing these strains in their family.

  She was too numb to think properly. She was scared. She couldn’t sort out what she had just heard. She was starting to believe she really was as stupid as they were saying. And now this information about Bruno!

  Sontowski opened the door. What had she decided? Her father and grandmother looked at her. She could see it in their faces. They didn’t know what to say.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “Perhaps I should be a telephone operator.”

  Her grandmother was unusually quiet on the way home. She shut herself in her room and in the evening put on her coat and gathered her walking stick, muttering that she was going to the “Paulaner”. When she didn’t come back, Snowleg imagined that she must have stayed out for dinner. The “Paulaner” was her favourite café. She often ate there, tipping the band to play Viennese music.

  Next morning Anne-Katrin at the corner shop knocked on the door. The hospital had telephoned: her grandmother had slipped on the ice as she stepped off a tram.

  Snowleg went immediately to the hospital in Dösen. A solemn young doctor had examined the shattered knee. It was unlikely that her grandmother would walk again.

  For three hours she stayed at her grandmother’s bedside before tearing herself away. “I had this voice test to do.”

  At 2 p.m. she was ushered into a large room at the university medical school. A man, fiftyish with sallow features, pushed a book over his desk. “Read this.” The passage was from Goethe’s Faust and chosen, as Doctor Behrend explained, because it contained a lot of ss sounds.

  She read aloud while he flicked through a file with her name on it. When she had finished, he looked into her throat.

  He withdrew the spatula. Shook his head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your epiglottis.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with it?”

  “I’ve never seen such a decayed glottal passage in a girl of your age.”

  “But I used to sing in the choir!”

  Even as he was peeling off his headband, she knew he was lying. He started to write down something and he had the same expression as Sontowski.

  He wanted her to sign. A paper to say why she couldn’t work as a telephone operator.

  “I can’t sign.”

  “But you have to sign here.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. My hand, suddenly it’s not able to hold a pen.”

  She ran outside, down the steps. The bells of the Thomaskirche were ringing.

  On those Saturdays when she wasn’t in the country with her father, she invariably went to hear the St Thomas boys’ choir sing Bach. It was her space for thought. Her freedom within church walls. For half an hour every week she could close her eyes and be herself.

  She normally sat with the choir in the seats reserved for their girlfriends and family, but after her experience with Doctor Behrend she couldn’t bear to meet anyone she knew. And so rather than climb to her usual seat in the gallery, she joined the congregation in the nave.

  “When the singing was over, I opened my eyes and saw you.”

  On any other day she wouldn’t have stopped and talked to a Westerner. But her mood this afternoon was defiant. Such a goody-two-shoes she had been and where had it got her? She couldn’t even pass a voice test to become a telephonist. As she sat in the Thomaskirche, she sensed something inside her hardening. “That’s why I stole that book. That’s why I talked to you. That’s why I asked you to look down my throat. And when you told me you could see nothing wrong, I made a decision.”

  Upon leaving the Book Fair, Snowleg had intended to track down her brother and face it out with him. But she changed her mind after speaking with Peter. Instead of going to see Bruno, she headed directly to the Party HQ in Karl-Liebknecht-Straße.

  Because of the Trade Fair, people were still at work. She decided to make an appeal and beg somebody to explain. If she was to live in this system, she had to find out why she couldn’t become what she had trained so hard to be. “I still couldn’t accept it had anything to do with Bruno.”

  The door was open to Falk Hirzel’s office. Hirzel was the Number Three in the Party. Once at a prize-giving he had asked her to dinner and another time had invited her back to his house where they talked in passionate terms about Fontane.

  She walked in and he recognised her. His face beamed until she told him about the ridiculous voice test.

  Hirzel closed the door and after a few minutes a secretary came in carrying a folder. Everything was inside the folder. Her application for going to graduate school. The results of her exams – he admitted she had passed them all – and a copy of the letter rejecting her for a place.

  He writhed in his chair. His glasses sat uneasily on his nose. He read another document and shook his head. “You have no chance, forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “The reason is your brother.”

  “Then it’s true?”

  “Apparently, he has been granted a United Nations visa and will be leaving on Monday.”

  “Even if that’s the case, why should it affec
t me?”

  He was shaken by the question. “You must know that’s how it is: anyone in your family wants to leave, you fall into a big hole.”

  She stared at him. “How could you side with them?”

  “Yes, yes, don’t tell me.”

  “Why? Why blame me for something that’s not my fault?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s how it is.”

  “During the Nazis’ time this was called Sippenhaft.”

  He gave her a long look. The statement was simple and yet it cornered him. “You’re right,” his voice dropping. “Our system shouldn’t work like this.” He closed the file. “What is it you want?”

  “I want to be a psychiatrist.”

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  He wrote it down. “What’s today? Give me till Wednesday. On Wednesday I have a meeting with the director of the university. I’m going to see what I can do.”

  “Next week,” she said to Peter, “where will you be?”

  “It depends what time of day. But somewhere in Hamburg.”

  “Please. At eleven on Wednesday morning think of me.”

  “All right. I will.”

  “Hirzel is a decent man. He knows a mistake has been made.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  She turned over on her stomach. Her lips drew back in a smile, revealing her chipped tooth. “By the way, I asked him about your father.”

  She had no reason not to ask. “I said to Hirzel, there’s this person from Hamburg University. He’s here to see if he can find any trace of his father. How can we help him? Who should he talk to, which department?”

  “What did he say?” and Peter imagined Hirzel writing down the details meticulously. The thought racing through the man’s head: Someone in East Germany has a hitherto undiscovered son who is English. The innocuous question: “You say that he doesn’t know that he has a son?”

  “He promised to put someone onto it. But he needs dates. Can you let me have dates? He says if you give him dates, he might be able to get the information by tomorrow.”

  Only the day before it had excited Peter to think that Snowleg might be able to help him in his quest, but now he was appalled that this innocent creature had raised the subject. He knew how perilous it was because he had been told so over and over again. At the same time, it touched him that her grasp was nothing near so full as his. And having been touched it was a short step for Peter to think, What if she’s right? What if Hirzel is a decent man? What if this is the only chance I’m going to get? He promised: “I’ll ring my mother.”