Snowleg Read online

  “What did you have to do?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Then: “It’s Stefan’s birthday.”

  “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with him?”

  “I’d rather be here.” She looked at him in a strange way. “Maybe if you really want something you can make it happen.”

  “Your grandmother?” But he knew that what he said, the awkwardness of his expression, wasn’t reflected in his heart.

  She resumed, colouring. “I was thinking of Bruno.” Then in a move so unexpected that it punched away his breath she put her arms around him. She spoke urgently into his ear: “Look, I’m coming back with you. I want to go in your dressing-up box. I will fold myself so small you won’t notice me. I can’t spend one more night in this country.” Her embrace relaxing. “Ah, Renate . . .”

  “Wait here,” said Peter, taking her empty glass. He pushed his way to the bar, trying to master his confusion, the dispute in his head. That morning she had left him feeling frightened and short of confidence, but dwelling on her as if she had planted in him some question vital to his well-being. All day, he had tried to put himself in a state of not wanting. Now he heard his heart hammering in his ear, She wants to come home with me, she wants to come home with me.

  He paid for the beer and threaded his way back to Snowleg. Renate had vanished and she stood facing him and he thought, She’s so attractive. Her greenish voluptuous eyes filled the room and she was staring at him as she had at Bruno’s party, aware of his desire.

  He didn’t understand his emotions. A minute before he had felt panicky. Now he felt bold, noble, until it wasn’t Peter who stood before her, but Sir Bedevere. He handed Snowleg her glass and his look kindled something in her eyes. Why not take her home? She’s in distress. Of course, I must help her.

  He led her to the little back room and opened the wickerwork trunk. He chucked the contents onto the floor. Marcus’s gong. Sepp’s clothes. The faulty footlight. He was hatching the plan as he went along. “Listen, they’re about to take this to the station. Our train leaves at one in the morning.” He kept back the green curtain and wrapped it around her shoulder, hugging her passionately. They hadn’t searched the trunk when he crossed the border. Why would they search it on the way out? “Get in.”

  Snowleg was about to step inside when a voice stopped her.

  “Aha!” Teo’s eyes lingered on her. “Here you are. There’s a very delightful reason for your delay, Peter. But we’re late. We must go.” He said to Snowleg, “Sorry to take this man away, but he has to be somewhere else.”

  “Where are the others?” asked Peter.

  “Already left. Come on.”

  Just then Renate appeared. A beer bottle in each hand. “Hey, trying on clothes?”

  “I was packing up,” said Peter, taking the curtain from Snowleg and throwing it into the basket.

  “Where you going?” Renate said.

  “Only to some party,” Teo said.

  “We could come with you.”

  “You don’t really want to come,” Teo said. “It’s just an official reception. It’s actually going to be fucking dull.”

  Snowleg touched Peter’s arm. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Yes, why don’t we all go?” Renate said.

  There was an awkward pause. Peter looked at Teo. “What do you think? Would they be allowed?”

  Teo said in a much sobered voice, “Can I take you to one side?” And when they had moved into the corridor: “This is not on, Peter. We can’t do this. Do we or do we not wish to spend our lives in an institution in this godforsaken country?”

  “You’re not going without us?” Snowleg said, coming into the corridor.

  “Listen, you two girls,” Teo said. “Peter and I are going to this party because, like it or lump it, we’re official guests.”

  Peter looked at Snowleg. “I’d love you to come.”

  It was snowing hard. The four of them piled into a taxi and rubbed hands and shivered.

  “Watch out!” called Renate as they nearly ran into a van with a fish painted on it.

  On the radio a woman’s voice sang, “Komm, gibt mir dein Herz.” Renate giggled and Teo listened in a morose way as she talked some more and Snowleg, sitting next to him, gazed at Peter with the expression of someone who had woken up in an enormous hurry to the reality of life. If she looked expectant, wasn’t it because he had given her reason to be? “I’ll put you in after the reception,” he had whispered as they left the theatre. “It’ll be there on the platform. You’ll have to move like lightning.”

  “What’s that smell?” Teo lifted Renate’s arm and sniffed her wrist. “No.” He gave Snowleg a hysterical look. “Nice perfume.”

  “It’s French,” she blushed.

  Peter hadn’t noticed her scent before. Suddenly it clung to everything in the car.

  Teo leaned forward. He whispered: “Were you going to smuggle that girl in the basket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t do it, Peter. This isn’t part of the game.”

  “Fuck off,” said Peter.

  But Teo ignored him. “This is unbelievably stupid. You really don’t want to spend the next 14 years mixing cement and chopping it up and mixing it again.”

  Teo sat back and Snowleg smiled at them, wanting to explain something. “My grandmother made me buy it. The only scent I had was Polish. ‘You can’t wear that!’ she told me. ‘It really is awful.’ So she gave me 100 Marks to buy a French perfume.”

  But the smell made Peter queasy. Everything that had been proof of Snowleg’s naturalness and lack of affectation suddenly seemed indicative of a sophistication that didn’t sit well with her. That reminded Peter suffocatingly of his mother.

  You can make a life in a night. He took his tie from his pocket and started tying it, struggling to lose the voice of his mother in his head.

  How in God’s name had he got himself into this position? In a heated moment he had made an impossibly romantic promise and Snowleg had called him on it. He lifted his chin and noosed St Cross’s mauve and green diagonals around his neck. He noticed her chipped tooth and heard the slushiness on her words, the rough Saxon accent, and experienced a flicker of revulsion. She’s no different from Renate. He tried to stop himself, but couldn’t. He pulled out one black thought and there was another one clinging to it. Why has she dressed like that? Why did I invite her to this reception? Why did I tell her to meet us afterwards at the station? And he spattered her with his black thoughts until she was no longer visible.

  Hungry for Teo’s attention, Renate took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. Snowleg turned to Peter and said in a lowered voice, “I didn’t know which one to buy so I went to this café in Neumarkt. It’s a place where artists go for lunch. A teacher from the graphics college was there. I asked him to come with me to Exquisit and pick a perfume. He chose this.”

  She kept her eyes on Peter’s face for some sign that he liked it. That he did mean to fold her away in his dressing-up box. But she saw in his face that she had read it wrong. And then she must have caught sight of herself as she leaned over. She tapped his knee and instead of saying something she burst into song and he suspected she had just observed a flash of Stefan in the mirror and had seen that she looked exactly like Stefan at her brother’s party and that it was the look of a sad and hungry animal. “You can be cruel without trying . . .”

  He didn’t hear the rest of the words. Only the roar of his own panic. She’s upset, she’s needy, and I’ve agreed to take her out of the country.

  The Astoria was cordoned off, but a policeman waved through the taxi. It set them down beneath a long brown metal canopy that extended from the hotel entrance into the freezing night.

  A doorman stood in front of a sliding glass door and with keen eyes followed their progress towards him. He was slimly built, in a highwayman’s jacket filthy with gold braid.

  Peter stepped ahead, already separating himself from Snowleg. “We’re with the Hans
en party.”

  The doorman pressed a white glove against the peak of his cap. “Sorry, sir, they can’t come in.”

  Snowleg caught up. Took his arm.

  “You can’t go in.” The doorman addressed her, speaking in a strong way. Like a security guard.

  “But she’s my guest,” said Peter.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s invitation only.”

  “Leave this to me,” said Renate, in a voice that made the doorman turn his head.

  Peter felt Teo’s hand on his shoulder and they were through.

  Once inside the lobby, Teo exploded. “You’re mad! You’re off your trolley. You really thought you could smuggle her out? Can’t you see what would have happened? We’d have been torn to shreds at the frontier. She’d have been hauled out onto a freezing platform at two in the morning and we’d all have been locked up. We’ve only got about three hours left in this country. For God’s sake, don’t spoil it, Peter.”

  “There you are!”

  Sepp gesticulated from the end of a corridor hung with jellyfish lights. He was standing beside a nervous-looking man who was dressed in a well-cut suit. He still had make-up on.

  “Where have you been, for Christ’s sake? Poor Herr Wettiner here is starting to lose his rag.” Sepp steered Peter away before he could explain. “Someone’s about to give not the first but the third toast. Get into that blasted room in a hurry.”

  Peter gave a last look round. Outside, Renate was talking to the doorman and the doorman was listening. He couldn’t see Snowleg.

  The banqueting room lay at the rear of the building. Czech chandeliers and gilt-framed oil paintings and at intervals, positioned along the middle of it, square white pillars edged in gold. Against the far wall and separated from the rest of the room by a worn curtain patterned with tropical flowers stretched a long oval table.

  Sepp had failed to impress on Peter that the reception was not in fact a cocktail party but a formal dinner. About thirty people sat around the table. Peter was introduced too quickly to remember who they were. He recognised the author from the Book Fair and a children’s publisher who had paid for their train tickets. The remainder were diplomats and businessmen visiting the Trade Fair. They shook his hand and half rose from their seats before resuming their conversations.

  Peter was seated next to the Permanent Representative’s wife, a bulbous white-haired woman in a sturdy jade dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves. She opened her mouth as soon as she learned who he was and filled it quickly with polite conversation, from time to time rearranging crumbs on the white cloth.

  “What a marvellous performance,” she began. “You’re so clever.”

  He had been concerned about Snowleg when he sat down, but the praise of this smartly dressed woman much older than himself overtook him. She asked about his plans after university and whether he intended to go on working with actors, and when he told her that he was hoping to specialise in paediatrics she confessed that she too despised the theatre and how wonderful that he was going to be a paediatrician because people who helped children, in her experience, led the most rewarding lives. He let her words flow over him, allowing himself to be impressed by her house in the wine-growing region of Bavaria, a library he was welcome to visit any time, a river – did he like fishing? – and even their official residence in Hannoversche Straße where she and her husband – “that’s right, the lugubrious gentleman at the end” – entertained visitors to East Berlin.

  The waiters had started to clear away the soup plates and the white-haired lady was talking about her husband’s last post, in Africa, when he became aware of a scuffle behind him.

  He turned in his chair. In the corner, by the door, the doorman struggled with a young woman. Snowleg. He felt a contraction in his gut.

  Everyone stared. In the bright chandelier light, her leather skirt looked cheap, her make-up garish, her top like a fake Japanese blouse. Peter saw the shadow of her necklace through the silver satin and he shrank back in his seat, clenching against the lipstick, the clothes, the new effect. In that moment, everything changed.

  “Oh dear me, how very awkward,” murmured the Permanent Representative’s wife. It was apparent to her and to everyone in the room: this was a girl of the Leipzig streets.

  Gripped from behind by the doorman, Snowleg looked up. Her frightened eyes located Peter and she pointed. “That’s him.”

  The doorman, still holding her arm, thrust her forward and thirty faces – intrigued, shocked, amused – exchanged rapid glances. Together the couple walked towards the table as the guests sawed at their pork with their Potsdam cutlery and cast their eyes at the tablecloth, the wineglasses, the peculiar flowers on the curtain, the carpet.

  The doorman moved her step by step down the length of the table until she stood opposite Peter. “Sir, this young lady says you invited her to dinner. Is she with you?”

  His tone outside had been trenchant, but now he asked his question in a more reticent voice. Almost, in fact, as though he hoped that Peter would say “Yes”.

  Peter heard the rustling quiet of the room. The people faded away and Snowleg looked directly at him, her large eyes imploring. Now she would be vindicated. Now he would rise to his feet. Now he would take one of the inlaid chairs from the wall behind and say: “Yes, I invited her. How wonderful to see you. Please, sit down.”

  She waited for the answering gleam, but he stared back at her with a terrified glaze in his eye.

  “No.”

  A single syllable and yet as soon as he uttered it he had a terrible clairvoyance that he had become someone else.

  Snowleg received the news with a look he would never forget. And then all expression fled from her face and disappeared, leaving her eyes dead, as if they had fallen into a hole.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the doorman in a quiet, disappointed voice.

  She stood for a moment, cradling her silence, and he was reminded of Sepp on stage at the end of the mime. It was the silence of someone betrayed and as the doorman began to pull her away it resonated in the room.

  He regretted his answer immediately. With horrible detachment, he was released into seeing her beauty again. Something in the line of her back seemed straighter than before and the word “dignity” came to his mind and stayed there. What tortured him was that he could see himself getting up and running after her and it was a surprise to discover that he was still sitting there as though immersed in water. He couldn’t feel himself, nor the air on his skin. He was seeing Snowleg as he saw her at the beginning, in church, at varying levels of depth.

  “I think there must be some mistake, some mistake . . .” He broke through the surface and she was gone and the woman’s hand on his was not hers, but that of the Permanent Representative’s wife.

  “Don’t worry yourself. In Africa, we always had these people.”

  Around him everyone started talking at once, but nothing was the same. His lips felt seared. The air was misshapen, unbreathable. He had flunked. And you can’t do that if you’re a perfect, gentle English/German knight. You simply can’t. Someone at the table winked at him, another gave him a ruthless look. Teo leaned over and patted his shoulder and said something, but all he could hear was the shouting in his blood, the receding gallop of hoofs, of the visored figure he had once dreamed of being, in clinking armour, who tilted through a forest clearing to pluck maidens from the scaly clutch of dragons. He scraped back his chair and made to rise, but remained anchored to the spot.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “HOW WAS LEIPZIG?” IN Hamburg the following night, Anita sat beside him on his sofa. “Did you find out about your father?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to the hat and scarf I gave you?”

  “I lost them.”

  “Both?” staring down at her lap. Stricken, she began to separate the Polaroids. Grinning in a crowded church. Holding a dense bouquet of tiny white flowers. Trying on the veil.

  Peter moved to embrace her. To ass
ure her that his affections had in no way altered. But he had left behind more than a woollen hat and scarf. He had come back from Leipzig smitten in all directions. So in love, so muddled, so guilty that when Anita arched her back for him to unzip her dress, he felt like a creature asleep in formaldehyde. His features frozen in the reflex of his cowardice.

  “Peter, I’m waiting.”

  But he was still dreaming, dreaming of Snowleg. The thought of what he had done to her ripped into him. It had been there when he ran onto the platform at Leipzig’s Main Station, and it didn’t abandon him when the guard, noting the trickle from his eyes, said: “Yes, it’s very hard to leave this beautiful country.”

  At the end of the platform had stood three policemen in jodhpurs and jackboots and a furious-looking man with an Alsatian. Peter recognised him from outside the Thomaskirche. His dog was sniffing in an excited way at the corner of the wickerwork trunk. The man unholstered his pistol, his antagonism fuming up with his dog’s breath. He pressed the barrel to the lid.

  “Do you want me to open it?” said Peter.

  The man looked at him with a smile that was almost pleased. “No need. I’ll just put three shots through the middle. Just to be sure.”

  Peter was surprised that the trunk should be quite so heavy, but all was explained in Hamburg.

  “What the fuck is that?” cried Marcus. Into the space where should have been Snowleg was coiled a thick black painted rope.

  It horrified Peter to think that the rope had been put there by people to whom Snowleg had talked about him. More unbearable was the idea that because of his cowardice she could have fallen into their hands. How differently his mother had behaved. She had stuck by his flesh-and-blood father and shown an unhesitating courage. Against her gallantry and prodigality, her reckless openness to adventure, what had been Peter’s reaction when fate took him by the arm and asked to know the sort of person he was?

  His denial of Snowleg in the Hotel Astoria was the moment that defined Peter to himself. He knew now who he was. A Duckmäuser. Someone who kept their head down. Someone who said: “I know thee not.”