Snowleg Read online

  Her fussiness suffocated him. What were they doing together, the two of them, on this platform? He foresaw a lifetime of such departures. Anita, this talkative, motherly, totally inappropriate woman packing him off on trains. Bestowing on him gifts he didn’t want, woven from Scottish lambswool.

  And then she was offering up a little brown paper bag and he felt his heart sink further. Another claim. “The train food’s terrible,” she said, “and who knows when you’ll next get to eat – and you’ll like the sandwich, I promise.”

  He took the bag. Kissed her. Squeezed her arm. “Monday, then. And thanks.”

  She tried to laugh. “I’ve got a wonderful night of torture planned – the Polaroids of the wedding.”

  He was happy to get into the sealed train.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ONLY AT THE LAST minute – thanks to the intervention of Sepp’s father, a paint manufacturer who did business in East Germany – had Peter been issued with a five-day visa. Marcus was confident that he could explain the consul’s jittery behaviour when he opened his newspaper on the train. He made Peter read the article, about three East German border guards who had shot at a woman crawling across no-man’s-land. When the men reached the body they found a partially dissected corpse stolen from a morgue in West Berlin. The young woman they were firing at had been twitched across the concrete by a long black rope, attached to her wrist, that disappeared over the wall.

  While the train waited at the border, it fell to Marcus to take Peter aside and deliver a pep-talk. “We’ve been to Leipzig before. This makes it all the more important we behave. So don’t consort. Don’t get pissed and don’t potter off the beaten track. Otherwise, do what you like. But if you’re not there on the dot of 1 a.m. Sunday morning we’ll have to leave you behind. And don’t think your Foreign Office will bail you out!”

  “I’ll behave,” Peter promised.

  It had been decided that Peter should take charge of the dressing-up box, a wickerwork trunk resembling a large laundry basket that contained Marcus’s wooden gongs as well as Sepp’s costumes. Three hours later they reached Berlin and Peter hauled the trunk from the rack. He stood behind Teo in an S-shaped queue in the underground at Friedrichstraße, waiting a second time to show his papers. A policeman stamped his passport and made him change his money into a useless and derisory currency that was tossed into a large box when he recrossed the border three days later.

  “Admission fee,” joked Teo, as if they were entering a zoo.

  They caught the next train. Then more border police came on and the train stopped and nothing moved for half an hour. A tension passed along the carriage bound up with their progress through it. One policeman removed Teo’s newspaper. Another asked Peter where he was born. They couldn’t have shown less interest in his trunk.

  Shortly before 3 p.m. they reached Bahnhof-Lichtenberg from where their train left for Leipzig. Not until it pulled out of the station did Peter begin to feel the excitement of having crossed the border.

  Ever since coming to live in Hamburg he had expected at some point to visit East Germany. In the languorous fashion of his generation he had been gathering himself to go. Not putting it off exactly. More like setting aside a book he wanted to read in order to savour the expectation of it. Until now his studies had kept him busy. Four days in Leipzig, breathing its air, might bring him a step closer to answering a question that had lain under the fingernail since his sixteenth birthday.

  He spent the next two and a half hours staring out at the countryside. Piled along the track were earth-removal machines for brown-coal extract. They passed an opencast mine and Teo pulled a trollish face and murmured something to Sepp. It was obvious they found the landscape ugly and polluted. Peter didn’t join in their remarks. His throat wrapped in Anita’s blue scarf, he pressed his face closer to the window.

  The fields and woods wore the pallor of Sepp’s leather jacket. The leaves had blown from the trees so that Peter could see bird-nests in the branches. Here agricultural practices hadn’t destroyed the wildlife or the sense of a Germany from the nineteenth century. The train ran through villages where the architecture implied that the inner-German border was older than the Warsaw Pact and matched a more ancient division between civilisations. There were storks in the chimneys and cobbles on the roads. It was the land of someone’s childhood. Not his, but his father’s maybe. He looked out, drowsily searching the fields and villages, until his breath misted the glass.

  “And,” said a short, coarse-featured man, speaking in a Dutch accent, “if they don’t publish this novel, I am prepared to sacrifice all my other books,” and tapped in a significant way on his brown attaché case. “Every. Single. One.” With that, he tossed his head, bade Sepp farewell and receded in busy steps towards the buffet car.

  Peter sat up. Looked around. Marcus was reading. Teo asleep. “Who was that?” rubbing one gummy eye, then the other.

  Sepp gave a laconic smile. “Our joint guest of honour.”

  Although Peter hadn’t heard of the author, Sepp assured him that he was a figure immensely popular with East German teachers on account of his potted scientific histories. “He’s probably the most famous writer in the West as far as they’re concerned. But it’s not what he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He has a desire to be regarded as a novelist.”

  The author had taken Sepp into his confidence, infuriated that his publishers in Leipzig showed polite indifference to his fiction. In order to urge them to change their minds he had clandestinely brought along in his attaché case several copies, in English translation, of his first novel.

  “He’s got it into his head that because it’s been translated this will impress them.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Sepp’s voice was a touch mocking. At the same time he was respectful, as a fellow artist, of the author’s ambitions. “I understand it contains a lot of swans.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THEY ARRIVED IN LEIPZIG at night. A cavernous station of dark ribs and dirty glass. Sepp was first onto the platform. He lifted his long nose and sniffed. “The air tastes wrong.”

  Marcus passed Sepp their bags while Peter helped Teo with the large metal case containing his tubes and valves. He went back to fetch the wickerwork trunk and shoved it on top of Teo’s case. “Jesus, you could put a body in that.”

  At the end of the platform a clock told 7.25. Under its red-rimmed dial a young couple kissed, the girl’s right hand clutching a letter to post. Just then a young man – smallish, lots of black curly hair and brown coat flapping – ran puffing through the malarial light. He introduced himself. A student, sent by the director of the Rudolph Theatre, who sent his apologies.

  “Do you mind a short walk?” catching his breath. This being Fair time, all hotels and university hostels were full. “You’re booked into a room at a private address.”

  He organised a porter to wheel Teo’s case and the dressing-up box to the left-luggage office. “They will be collected in the morning.”

  The four of them followed him into a time warp. Cobbled streets with no advertisements. An overhead grid of sagging tramlines. One or two cars belching smoke. Peter’s first impression of Leipzig: potholes, fumes, rigid faces.

  Their lodgings were in Erich-Ferl-Straße in a house painted up to the first floor but no higher. Their guide pressed the bell and spoke his name into a combed grid, adding: “The group from Hamburg.” A large tidy woman opened the door and before they could enter a man in a vest shambled past.

  The landlady led them to an attic room with porcelain taps and two bunk-beds. She wore a carp-green cambric frock and every time she smiled her lips parted on long white teeth. When they came downstairs she asked them to sign a visitors’ book.

  “You from Hamburg, too?” turning to Peter.

  “No,” he said instinctively. “England.”

  “Ah, England.” And showed him a postcard she had once received from Winnipeg. />
  They ate downstairs. There was a tiled oven in the corner of the room and as they began their meal the man in the vest carried up from the cellar a bucket of black octangular bricks and one by one fed them into it. On a corner shelf was a stone struck by lightning, and beside it an aubergine cut to reveal a message from God that the landlady had preserved in a brown solution.

  “What’s the message?” asked Marcus, tremendously interested.

  “I don’t know. A Fair guest gave it to me. It’s in Arabic.”

  She settled by a lamp in the corner and watched everyone eat. They shared the room with a gay couple from Lake Como who had brought their own supply of spaghetti, tomatoes and olive oil, and who sat at a separate table and conversed in low whispers. At the end of each course, she creaked to her feet and collected their plates. She served them a salad of tinned asparagus and a dish she called Toast Hawaii consisting of ham, pineapple and cheese, and finally a metal cup of vanilla ice cream smothered with egg-liqueur. When Peter thanked her for a delicious meal she misheard and told him that her teeth were made in Hungary.

  Dinner over, the couple from Lake Como said goodnight and soon afterwards Sepp and the others filed upstairs. She called out as they climbed the staircase: “Do you want to be woken if you’re not awake?”

  “Why not?” said Sepp, his extreme face visible between the banisters.

  “What about you?” to Peter.

  “I don’t feel like going to bed.” The pineapple had furred his tongue and he had a hankering to see this city that he had waited so long to visit. “I’d like a walk.”

  She produced a key to the front door and told him to leave it in the visitors’ book.

  Peter wrapped Anita’s scarf around his neck and headed down Erich Ferl Straße and into a small park. There was yellow foam in the river, and along one bank, surrounded by the filth of unraked leaves, the trees stood out against the streetlamps. He picked up a twig and peeled it and threw it away and picked up another. A dog loped past. Its front paw was hurt and every time it put down that foot its right eye closed. Peter called out and extended a hand, but the dog ignored him.

  His throat soon hardened to the acrid taste in the air. He crossed the park and walked down an alley one side of which was boarded up. Smell of fermented hay and animal shit and from over a tall fence the growl of something wild. Down the alley and out the other side to a ring road. Squeal of trams and one or two grey Wartburgs.

  A car went by, the driver low in his seat. The headlights caught Peter’s walking shape and lofted it against a wall and the light raked slowly over a door and over windows so rimed with dirt it was impossible to conceive what might be visible through them. His shadow grew thinner and longer until it stretched over the buildings ranged before him monotonous and grey, carious facades of dark sandstone against a darker sky, and he imagined that he saw pass in the windows the images of all that had brought him to this place.

  He walked more quickly, sucked down the street. Feeling as never before the vacuum of his absent father. Drone of a factory. Out of a clanked-open gate a stream of bowed men and women, many clutching plastic bags. The late shift, he guessed. They tilted towards him. Faces harried and dead-looking. Clothes garish and ill-cut and made of some synthetic material that had never reached the West.

  Peter searched their features as they walked by. He thought, Could one of these be my father? A cousin?

  He passed a shop. Painted on the wall above was “Eisenwaren”, the old word for ironmonger. A woman stared down from a single window. Her arms leaning on a cushion. A soot stain under the window as though a flame had been stamped out. She called out something, but he couldn’t make out what. He turned and walked back.

  The moment arrived when he realised he was lost. He waited at a junction and everything stretched away undifferentiated, a grey prairie of streets and pavements and sky. He heard a muttering and out from a concealed passage between two houses emerged an old man in a long quilted coat the colour of hare’s fur, tattered and haggard and grisly. White curly hair to his shoulders. Talking to his dog. Thin and angled as a Danish buoy.

  Peter approached to ask directions. At the man’s groan, the dog darted from between his legs and Peter recognised the lame animal he had seen in the park. The man drew his coat around his shoulders and shuffled away, still speaking to himself in the way of someone whose memory was confused and dimensionless.

  At the next corner, Peter spied the entrance to the zoo and hurried home.

  He spent the morning at the Rudolph Theatre. The wickerwork trunk had arrived from the station and Peter unpacked it: costumes with ruff-necks, enormous false noses, paraphernalia for the cubicle. By 11 a.m. he had rigged this up. Assisted by a taciturn electrician, he cabled the lighting keyboard to a lamp on the edge of the stage. Then he asked Teo to run through each prop and explain it again.

  At noon, the director appeared and took them to a one-room bar called the Tagesbar Bodega, run by an elderly couple, where he ordered a bottle of Romanian wine and toasted their success. They sat at a shared table and ate frankfurters while he discussed with Sepp the advanced state of East German theatre.

  No matter how much Peter tried to concentrate, his inattention mastered him. He kept looking outside. The street drew him like a magnet. He knew that his quest was fruitless and silly. That he was never going to find his father among these strange, resilient faces. Even that he was enacting his own pantomime, the parody of the lost son. But he felt powerless to fight the impulse. At the end of the meal he excused himself.

  The director glanced up. His trousers were too short for him and he was visibly agitated.

  “Make sure you’re back by seven,” called Marcus, looking more than ever like a Lutheran priest. “And remember – be careful.”

  “Listen, off you go, off you go,” said Teo.

  In a light rain of lignite ash he drifted with the crowd towards the centre. Soot had settled everywhere. There were slashes of it in the sky like something crumbled into water and even the pigeons clustered along the aerials seemed coated with it.

  He came to the end of a street, and feeling the raw cold he paused to wrap his scarf tighter about his neck. An icy wind blew from behind and he started forward into the square, following the tail of his scarf towards a grimy basilica of carbon-smeared stone.

  Not until he was halfway across the square did Peter notice the uniformed men. Six of them, standing close to the church wall and enthusiastically kicking a man on the ground, in the kidneys and in the back. One of them, pale-faced and stumpy with reddish hair, held a frenetic dog on a lead and spurred on the others as if he didn’t remotely care that anyone might be looking. And no-one was looking, even though plenty of people were in the square. Everyone diverted their eyes except Peter, who watched the man, hardly able to walk, being dragged to a van with a fish painted on it. Peter could see six cages inside. An unvarnished floor, bulb screwed into the ceiling, no window. The man was locked in one of the cages. Then the men in uniform climbed in and the van drove off.

  Sprayed across the outside of the church was the uncompleted graffito: “SORRY, KARL MAR”.

  Peter continued towards the entrance, shocked by the awful violence he had glimpsed. Still fresh in his mind was a vision of East German guards on the Wall, willing to shoot a young woman who had crashed through no-man’s-land and prepared to leave her dying in agony on the cold concrete.

  He walked up four steps and pushed his way through a blanket the colour of moss. The interior smelled stale, suggesting the church was not often aired. Lamps cast a yellowish glow on the grey octagonal pillars and on the red flagstones, and above him a choir was singing. He could make out the choristers and the organist’s head and in the side gallery a row of young men and women sitting engrossed.

  Knees moved to let him through. He sat in a pew, smelled the polish. The church wasn’t full. A few rapt pensioners turned their heads to the gallery stiffly, as if their necks were made out of paper they were
afraid would tear. An old lady in the front row opposite leaned forward to scratch an ankle and next to her an old man in a white anorak slept like a marmot.

  The choir’s singing soothed him. His pulse became regular and gradually he stopped thinking of the incident outside. He was aware of the secret warmth of these faces. When he looked at them he recognised himself. Unlike his experience of the night before, he felt returned to his gene pool. Everyone his cousin.

  Peter went on listening to the choir, and now and then it seemed that a face turned in his direction and stared for a moment and glanced away. Long and thin with watery olive eyes and cheeks like old sails tight-stretched on either side of a straight nose so that the smallest puff might capsize it. Each time the face turned away, he felt breathless.

  The choir finished singing and a pastor climbed the pulpit and read from Habakkuk. “‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, more menacing than wolves.’” He was descending the black marble steps when the man in the anorak shifted his body to reveal, in the pew behind, a young woman who did not look like anyone else.

  Her head moved into the light and fell back. Peter saw her fleetingly, enough for the air to boil around her. He couldn’t properly see her face, and leaned forward, eager for another look. Willing her to move forward again.

  In the gallery the orchestra began playing again, and now the music reached into him to a level that it hadn’t before. He thought of his mother singing in the Bach competition in the year before he was born. Wishing she were seated next to him to whisper the name of the cantata. And it excited him to go on watching the young woman listening to the music, not seeing him.

  She opened her eyes and caught him looking at her and their eyes locked. Her mouth fell open a little. She half-turned, gazing back at him through different depths in a slow surfacing. With a shake of her head, she rose to her feet.