Snowleg Read online

  At 11 a.m. the following Wednesday he wrote Snowleg a note on a postcard he had bought in Hamburg zoo. “How will you ever forgive me?” In a PS he added that the giraffe on the back reminded him of her. He addressed it to “Snjólaug” at the faculty of psychiatry at Karl Marx University. On Friday, he telephoned the faculty to find out if she had been awarded her place. He telephoned the following day and the day after that. Nobody picked up.

  He was still writing letters six weeks later. In May he sent four of his favourite novels as well as an edition of Malory. He had no way of knowing if she had received the parcel, or whether she was choosing to ignore him.

  One night Anita said: “Why do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Shut your eyes.”

  “Do I?” opening them at once. “I didn’t realise.”

  “Maybe it’s English,” with a buckled-up look. The women shaved under their arms while the men made love with their eyes closed. “It’s just that you’ve never done it before.”

  A fortnight later he telephoned Karl Marx University and this time someone answered.

  He spelled out the letters.

  “Snjólaug?” repeated a bureaucratic voice.

  “It’s her nickname,” said Peter. “Somebody in the department might recognise it.”

  “We require a surname,” acidly.

  Her silence reproached him. He waited in vain for a letter from Leipzig, a call. He hardly dared to leave his building. Fearful that the payphone in the hall would start ringing, Snowleg at the other end.

  Sleep was his only refuge from her silence. He couldn’t bear to wake because that was to be him again. He longed for the morning when he opened his eyes and didn’t think, immediately, of Snowleg.

  Each time he thought of her, currents of fear shot through him. In his obscure distress, he kept asking himself: Did she get into trouble that night? Would she forgive him? Had the university accepted her?

  On good days he was able to persuade himself that his denial was unimportant. No-one had overheard her speak to him in the Rudolph Theatre. No-one knew of her intention to escape. She would be safe.

  To get the guilt out of his head, his shocking behaviour, he tried to console himself. He wasn’t the first person to have acted like this. He had done what any young man might have done in similar circumstances. Snowleg would have known the score. She might have been angry for a moment, but then she would have forgotten the incident. It was nugatory, the sin he had committed. Chances were she had folded him away and didn’t think of him, not at all. Sometimes it’s like that, he told himself. Those who are offended against forget everything while those who offend remember for the rest of their lives.

  On bad days, he thought of himself as the boy on the bicycle who had reported his father in Dorna. In his mind he had murdered her. And in a way he did murder her by offering up a flawed version of that night.

  In June, without telling Anita or warning his family, he returned to England for a school reunion. It was the first time he had been home since going to live in Germany. At the end of the meal – in a downstairs room of the Garrick – the old boys sat around and paraded their most embarrassing moments in the six years since they had met, before becoming bankers, lawyers, journalists.

  Leadley told an unlikely story of how he had appeared in his underpants on a balcony of the British Residence in Paris and had been mistaken by a crowd below for President Nixon.

  Tweed revealed that he had caught the clap off the sister of a friend at Cambridge who was an earl.

  “What about you, Hithers?” said someone. “Fucked any strippers on the Reeperbahn?”

  “Actually, I did meet a girl,” Peter replied, fuelled by calvados and laughter and an unanticipated desire to belong. “But not in Hamburg.”

  They turned their heads to hear.

  Sometimes you retell a story in order to reshape it morally and digest it. That night, as anyone does to quell something dreadful, Peter tried to refine and smooth his experience with Snowleg into a version he could live with. Even as he shaped it for himself, he wondered if he need include every detail. Much as his mother might have done, he started to offer up a drained account. One that thereafter became his account. In which Snowleg was converted into a girl whom he had met for the first time at the crush bar following the final performance. A person he barely knew. Who just wanted to come to his party.

  Peter finished speaking and to his ears the silence was like the silence in a room where a hornet has settled and no-one knows where.

  “Oh, that’s not so bad,” said someone.

  “No, I know, but it was pretty bad at the time.”

  “So was she or wasn’t she a prostitute?” asked Tweed.

  Peter smiled enigmatically.

  It was Leadley who rescued him, a bully’s sad look in his small brown eyes. “Aren’t they all?”

  He flew back to Hamburg and retreated behind his door.

  Anita left notes. She knocked and he heard her sighing on the other side. The more he ignored her, the more frequently she called at Feldstraße until one afternoon, returning from a lecture, he found her sitting in a heap on the landing.

  “Teo let me in.” She scanned his face like a dog who has seen its master’s suitcase. “Why don’t you answer my messages?”

  “I haven’t been here.”

  “What’s the problem? Tell me.” She wanted it spelled out. A reason. Was it something she had said or done? “I didn’t grow an extra head while you were in Leipzig. What happened? Did you meet someone? Be honest.”

  He struggled with the urge to blurt it out, but it was too late to tell. “OK, you want me to be honest. Right.” He plunged his hand through his hair. “I need space.”

  “I thought you loved me.” Not wanting to be excluded by them, she couldn’t bear to look into his eyes.

  “I do, but I’m not in love with you.”

  She looked at him and burst into tears. “That’s so awful! Listen, please don’t make any decisions about us. I can give you space if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t want . . . That’s not what I mean,” in the soughing voice of a man no longer in love.

  She bumped into him two days later. He was sitting in a bar with a student nurse from UKE. He pretended not to see Anita. Her vulnerable, pale face. Her swollen eyes. They exchanged glances, but when he looked for her again she was gone. He continued his small talk, deep down hating Anita for her obvious suffering, and in the morning wrote her a letter. “I can’t make any promises to you and it would be wrong of me to lead you on. But I don’t see a future.”

  When his door was taken off its hinges, he assumed it was Anita’s brothers.

  In August, he moved into digs in Haynstraße. He stopped playing in Teo’s football team and strenuously avoided the two other members of Pantomimosa. All his chivalrous intentions having failed, he swore fealty to medicine and threw himself into his clinical studies. Trying to work so hard that it didn’t hurt any more.

  One term passed like this. Then another. Until, in his final year as an undergraduate, his sister came to stay.

  Rosalind had finished catering college that summer. To celebrate, he invited her to Germany.

  “I’ll meet you in Berlin,” she said. She had a hankering to peer over the Wall.

  On a cold July morning he examined the passengers emerging into Tegel airport. He hadn’t seen her for six years, not since she had waved him off on his way to Hamburg.

  “Bedevere!”

  The voice he recognised, but not the face. Puffier, with her father’s deep-set eyes, and framed by thick crinkly hair that reunited in the cleavage of a yellowish Laura Ashley dress. He was surprised at how small she was. The whiteness of her skin. How very English she looked as she took stock of him.

  “Rosalind,” he said with formality.

  On their first morning together they went to a Turkish restaurant in Charlottenburg. She asked him to explain the menu, and after he had
done so said with a stern expression: “Everyone sends their love.”

  “How are they?”

  “Mum wants to know if you got her last care package?”

  “Of course I did.” A CD of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with another of her letters: “Ros gave it to me for Christmas, but I’ve already got it. I’m sure you’ll love it. Do write from time to time. I don’t mind your being gone five months, but you’ve been gone six years. Is there any prospect of my becoming a grandmother? Because as far as we can tell Rosalind is not going to help us out. Perhaps you have some friends she can come and meet . . .”

  “You might drop her a line,” said Ros. “She might not take it from me that you’re still alive.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Dad’s not so good, you know. Mum’s driving him mad with her music. Although he sends her bonkers in other ways.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s had this friend staying from Morocco.”

  “Not Silkleigh?”

  She laughed. Her father’s sad little laugh. “He comes and goes, promising to repair Daddy’s finances with his schemes, but so far not a sausage.”

  “I thought he was writing a book.”

  “Oh, that’s firmly on the back burner until, so he says, he gets the right title. He went clean off the last one! No, his great ambition at the moment is to open a restaurant in Abyla – that’s in Morocco. I have a suspicion he wants yours truly to advise him, but so far he’s only invited me snorkelling. I have to say, he’s a pretty good riot. You should see him trying to get Mum to do a duet. He took me aside after the last row they had and whispered: ‘Your mother wasn’t born, darling, she was quarried.’”

  But Peter didn’t want to hear about Silkleigh. “What about you, Ros?”

  “Oh, I’m doing fine.”

  “No boyfriend?”

  “No boyfriend,” and asked quickly: “How long are you planning to stay in Germany?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Surely you want to come home?” She didn’t conceal her irritation that as far as she was concerned her brother had gone chasing after Germany, or rather his misconceived idea of it, in the same embarrassing manner as once he had pursued her girlfriends. “Mummy hasn’t said anything, but now Grandpa’s died I’m sure she’s hoping, well, you know, that you’ll come to your senses.”

  “Which means?”

  “Be a doctor in England, for God’s sake.”

  “No, I can’t, not yet. I’m stuck. I can’t go on living this life indefinitely, but I am going to qualify first.”

  “Peter, do you know what you’re doing to our parents by not being there, not visiting? Grandpa was so proud of you and you didn’t even come for his funeral.”

  “I’m sorry, Ros. I didn’t have the money. But I have promised to visit when I finish my exams.”

  She wasn’t to be parried. “You don’t have to apologise to me. All I want to understand is, why are you here and why are you so unhappy? There has to be a reason. You’re my brother. What are you running away from? Was it something at school I don’t know about? I saw Tristram the other day and he said that after your birthday you were never the same again.” She gave him a merry look. “By the way, Tristram’s fallen head over heels for Camilla.”

  “Ros, I’m not running away from England.”

  “So if you’re not running away, what else is keeping you? It’s perfectly ghastly here. Humourless and ghastly. As for the food . . .”

  “I’m not here for the food.”

  “Listen. Something clearly isn’t working in your life. Is being here making any difference?” Then: “Don’t tell me you’re still looking for your father?”

  “If you like.” He hadn’t talked to anyone about it, and with that extra level of loneliness which her being there had emphasised, he revealed to his sister the story of his frustrated visit to Dorna two years before. “I managed to get to see the village where Mummy met him. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t find his name. Incidentally, you can say to your mother that if there’s anything she can do to find a name or date . . .” But even as he asked, he knew that his mother had told him everything she was going to tell him, and was even more stung into regret.

  He went on: “You can’t imagine how fantastically difficult it is. In England, you just go to the local council and ask. Not over there. Even if I did come across him or his relatives, there was no way I would have recognised them. I couldn’t go wandering around saying, ‘Excuse me, do I remind you of anyone?’ Anyway, the village was completely demolished in my memory by the journey back. I can still hear the deer being killed. It was terrible, Ros.”

  But she knew him too well. She wasn’t satisfied that his unhappiness could be laid all at the feet of his German father. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Beaming like a midwife, Rosalind said: “Is it a woman?”

  He went quiet.

  “Peter, I know that expression. I almost wish we were in Hamburg because I’d like to see who you’re sleeping with. What happened to Anita? Still seeing her?”

  “No, we had a slight falling out. In fact, I’m completely off girls, partly because I’m working so hard and partly because, since you ask, I did lose my heart.”

  “Where was this?”

  In Leipzig.”

  “Come on, we’re all grown up.”

  “We spent the night together. We only had one night, but I haven’t been able to get over it. I did this appalling thing. I panicked in a way . . . a way I can hardly bring myself to describe.”

  “Tell me.”

  He needed a fresh packet of West Lights to do so.

  Afterwards she said, “Have you heard from her?”

  “Not a word. I’ve written letter after letter. But she’s a young woman,” he said brokenly. “She probably does it with all sorts of people, all sorts of stage managers.”

  “Steady on. She must have been pretty taken with you to barge into the hotel like that.”

  “I dare say it was a mixture of love and fear, but the truth is it can’t possibly be explained by love.”

  “And why the fuck not, my liege?”

  “Because if you boil it down all we had was two cigarettes and a glass of vodka. She saw me as a ticket out of the country.”

  “Peter,” her cheeks bulging with bread, “you understand absolutely nothing about attraction. Can I know her name?”

  “Snowleg.”

  “Snowleg! Doesn’t even sound German.”

  “No, it’s not a name. It’s her grandmother’s pet name for her.”

  Rosalind could not believe that he had fallen for a young woman without a name. “That’s frankly a little bit dim. Even by my big brother’s standards.”

  Next morning he took her to the Wall. She stood at Checkpoint Charlie and stared in horror across the border. “My God, Peter, how can they do this to each other? The same people!”

  “I know,” and went on looking at the Wall. Picturing a blackened rope. Caught between worry and hope and his utter relief that the Wall was there.

  Over a beer, he found himself returning to the subject of Snowleg. “Why did I say I didn’t know her, Ros? Why?” Abject, he had no answer.

  His sister put her cigarette out in the empty bottle. “You’re acting as though there was a reason. And perhaps there isn’t an explanation. People do inexplicable things.” And tried to suppress the irritation that was entering her voice. “Look, we all mess up. It’s human. It’s hard work being anyone. You’ve got to let go of this fantasy that you’ve made a terrific impact on this person’s life. Maybe for you it was a moment of extreme significance and you’ve been stuck in it. But maybe for her it was just one millimoment in a myriad stream of moments. Maybe if she were sitting where I’m sitting she’d say to you: ‘Yes, I was betrayed and the course of my life shifted, but it was much more altered by things that happened later.’ Maybe she’d tell you that she’s forgive
n you long ago. That you didn’t do to her anything that her country hasn’t done to her all along and without apology. Think of the Wall, for God’s sake. I still can’t get it out of my head.”

  Not that the Wall could eliminate Snowleg. He had tried to stamp out the memory of her like a plant between the pages of a heavy book he had returned to the shelf, but she lay in him dormant and unexploded. Ever since he had got back from Leipzig, he felt stuck in a perpetual dusk at the hour of his denial, snow falling and a cold dread in his heart. He wanted nothing more than to love someone. It never happened. He couldn’t admit to his sister that he had completely lost the appetite for loving anyone.

  Once or twice in the months following Rosalind’s visit Snowleg stole into his mind when he wasn’t paying attention. On one occasion he saw her on the platform at Blankenese, her trim waist in a cherry dress and her breasts up-tilted. But the woman he startled was Italian. Another time she sat in bright clothes on a bench overlooking the Alster, face absorbed in a gardening magazine. She only looked back in a painting. The Easter before his final exams, he visited the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna and was taken aback to see Snowleg in a portrait of a young woman by Bellini. Looking back and feeling sorry for him.

  Sometimes he felt a moment of calm as if someone a long way off was thinking kindly of him. Sometimes he felt a moment of terror as if the opposite were true. But these moments came less and less until, by the time he entered the examination room at the end of six years of medical school, he had managed to persuade himself that he had, as his mother would have wanted, put the past behind him.

  One week after he completed his Staatsexamen, Peter flew back to England to honour the promise he had made to his parents. By the time he boarded the train at Waterloo, he had made a decision to draw a line under Snowleg. He was not going to spend the rest of his life whimpering “If only”. He was not going to die aged ninety-five like his grandfather without having engaged himself. His sexual antennae were telling him to take a break, get on with it. Expecting shortly to qualify as a doctor, he determined henceforth to avoid thinking about Snowleg, about East Germany. Whatever had happened there had had the effect of depoliticising him. His action had tainted that place and he wanted nothing more than to turn his back on it. Not wanting to be reminded of what he had done, he would try to forget it like a sin.