Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Peter burst out: “What’s going on? It’s something about you, isn’t it? You’re having an affair. You’re getting divorced. You’re ill. Does Rosalind know?”

  “I’m not ill. No affair. Just go for a walk. Go with your mother.”

  Often at night when he couldn’t sleep Peter sifted his English childhood, beginning with the dragons under his bed and proceeding to the walk along the ox-drive and his mother’s revelation. A life-altering secret smelling of blackberry bushes after rain and causing a beating in his blood as if a large bird was taking off in the burrow of his chest.

  In his memory, they climbed towards a summit fuzzy with rain. Towards the wreckage of the aeroplane and a body never discovered, just an iridescent slick for the Nadder mayflies to hatch on. But the sun, as it happened, was shining.

  When they got to the top, she applied lipstick and adjusted her scarf, buttoning every single button of her coat.

  “It’s turning into a lovely afternoon, but so chilly. Are you covered up? Look at that open neck of yours. Why didn’t you bring your scarf? I hope you don’t run around St Cross like that.”

  A flint road led like vertebrae over the cornfields. She had been stumbling along it for five minutes when she stopped, already breathless.

  “As you so often point out, I do have a knack for filing away things I prefer not to think about.” She fixed her watery green eyes on the sky. Her words flat and giving the impression she had rehearsed them. “You could describe it as a blockage of some kind. Or an inability to grapple with ‘personal issues’, as Rodney calls them. But I’m starting to talk about myself, and you need to know about Peter.”

  She’s speaking of me as if I’m not here, he thought. Is she going nutty like her father? He yielded to an irritable blankness: “What do I need to know?”

  “Not you, my love, not you,” she murmured. She rotated the watch on her wrist in a purposeless way and said: “Rodney’s not your father.”

  Peter was aware of a bird’s shadow on the damp grass and something tearing inside.

  “Your father’s someone else.”

  “You mean I’m adopted?” he heard himself say.

  “No, no, I’m your mother. In every other sense Rodney is your father. We met when you were six months old. Here, let’s sit down. I can say it better sitting down.”

  They found a patch of grass where she began to explain that Peter’s father was not the affable and diffident Englishman to whom she had been married for 15 years, but an East German political prisoner whom she had known for hardly a day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NO-ONE REMEMBERED WHAT the young man had said, not even he himself any more. But he was overheard and sent to Bautzen, a prison known as Yellow Misery.

  He lived in a 3-metre cell until 1960. A smallpox epidemic resulted in a move to Waldheim and then to a temporary prison south of Leipzig outside a town called Dorna.

  On the day he was due to return to Bautzen he was marched with a line of inmates through the prison gate, along a narrow cobbled street until he came to a main road. People were going to work. The man ahead of him stumbled and through the sudden space he saw a pale young woman with frizzy hair hurry out of a garden.

  When the line turned the corner into Breitscheidstraße he noticed the guard looking at a bread van in the opposite direction. He saw his chance. He kept going, across the street, and took the woman by the arm.

  “Hilf mir,” he said and continued walking. Strolling on. Not exchanging a word. Walking her into a park. Expecting a shout.

  In silence, she let him guide her through the park and out the other side. Workmen were putting up electricity lines along a road to the lake. The buildings beyond were open and unfinished, stopped in mid-conversation. She could see an ancient forest in a dark green wedge on the far bank.

  “You’d better go.”

  But still his fingers held her arm and his voice sounded cavernous, as though he hadn’t spoken in a while.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t understand. I’m from England.”

  She came from a valley 5 miles west of Clitheroe. A roll of wild country that funnelled into the Trough of Bowland. She had no particular interest in Germany, but singing was her overriding passion. She wanted to stand up and sing and it didn’t matter whether her audience was a field full of Lancashire cows or a hall in Leipzig packed with Communists.

  What little she knew about Germany she had learned from her music teacher in Manchester. Joachim was an East German refugee who worked tirelessly to create a partnership between the Leipzig he had fled and his adopted city, both much destroyed in the war. In Cheetham Hill he started the local branch of the Free German League of Culture and founded a choir that sang in an old Methodist Mission hall. He encouraged local singers to join who had no links with Germany.

  In 1960, the Gewandhaus honoured Joachim’s dedication with an invitation to send one of his pupils to compete in the Bach festival. His first choice falling ill, he called on Peter’s mother.

  She didn’t win. In fact, her performance was a disappointment. But something in her performance appealed to the assistant director. He asked what she would most like to see in Leipzig. “The countryside,” she replied without hesitation, after three days cooped up in a city that depressed her intensely. It wasn’t a common request, but the assistant director enjoyed good contacts with the Party. He arranged for her to spend a week in a cottage near Leipzig and provided her with a hamper of food and fruit, part of a consignment sent by the new government in Cuba.

  On the second day of her stay, her hostess announced out of the blue that she had to go for the rest of the week to Jena. Her English guest would be collected, as agreed, on Monday morning. Meanwhile, she was to treat the house as her own. A number of recommendations were made as to how she might pass the time and she was introduced to a girl of her age who, if she liked, would take her on an excursion to a medieval hunting forest.

  It was the time of autumn when the cherry trees looked their barest. The half-timbered house was a five-minute walk from the Friendship Theatre. It was noon, she was bored and she was on her way to the cinema to see The Mystery Airship – “I was wondering how much of it I would understand” – when the young man walked across the road and took her by the arm.

  They stood a while at the edge of the park, a girl who didn’t speak much German and a strange man in another country.

  “This is an interesting area, round here.” He spoke in English. The precise accent of a schoolboy.

  She raised her eyes. Glanced at his striped shirt, his grey fingers gripping her blouse, and was on the verge of speaking.

  “Look at that flowering lavender,” he went on. He might have been speaking from a phrase book. “Soon it will be time to put out the beehives.”

  “Bees?” she snorted. “In October?”

  “Can you help me? I need somewhere to stay.”

  She assessed him. He had an open face. “Are you running away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Do not let us talk about it here.”

  She started to walk away. A boy with stuck-out ears paused on his bicycle. The young man reached for her hand. Fumbled for it. Missed. And then she stopped and held it out and they walked to the house together.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay here.” She went into the larder and ransacked the hamper. When she came back the radio was playing. He sat at the end of the table facing her. Large forehead. Thin neck. Late twenties. Slanted olive eyes sooted with fatigue.

  She cooked him a meal on the blue tile stove and watched as he ate. When he chewed he became repulsive. His face went the colour of fodder-beets and his cheeks became a series of lumps. Everything she served him he ate: rolled beef, red cabbage, fried Baltic herring, mashed potato and an orange.

  He stretched for the second orange, but she moved it out of his reach. That one was hers. “What did yo
u eat in prison?”

  “Watersoup.” He used to see the bottom of his bowl through it. “Who owns this house?”

  She told him.

  “What about her husband?”

  She pointed to a cast-iron weathervane in the shape of a gun dog on the floor. “That’s what fell on him,” and grimaced. “Just think of surviving two world wars and being killed by a weathervane.”

  On the radio a record came to an end. The room was cold. A log popped in the stove. He moved his eyes from the floor and she looked down. On one of his ankles a wristwatch.

  She made up a bed on the sofa and he spent the morning asleep. She washed his clothes and hung them close to the stove to dry and in the afternoon she sat on a chair beside him while his chest rose and fell and she read a history of polar exploration that she had begun in Clitheroe. After an hour she heard a noise and her attention stumbled from the cold south seas, the icy drizzle, the gulls beating against her cheeks, and she felt him leaning over her shoulder, alert olive eyes, reading the same page.

  He hadn’t read a book in 18 months. The only words he had seen were in the newspapers used to wrap the sausages his parents sent at Christmas, stained in blood. Mostly what he read were advertisements. “Linaugran: this highly valued health aid will give your bowels an education in regularity.” His shoulders cast a shadow on the page and she could tell that he was biting his lip.

  In Bautzen, he taught himself to banish language. He picked his words with care, neutralising them, blanching them of colour, shape, meaning, until the day came when all he would say was Yes or No – often by a shake of the head – and nothing that he was overheard saying was worth repeating, not even his name.

  She closed the book. Stood up. Held out her hand. “I’m Henrietta.”

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. When he squeezed, his knuckles cracked. “Peter.”

  They talked until evening. They lay beside each other on the sofa, his thin legs across her knees. He had learned his English from a tutor in Thuringia. He wasn’t allowed to study in the GDR because he was “landlord class” and so his father arranged for private lessons. The same tutor taught him French, Latin and Greek. He looked nearly thirty, but he was twenty-two.

  She listened to him describe his childhood in schoolboy English: the Protestant parents, the large estate, the house occupied by the same family since the seventeenth century. Following Germany’s defeat, his father, a paediatrician, was one of a handful of aristocrats who elected to stay on even after their lands were confiscated. The new Communist government permitted him to remain as a tenant in the house, but the estate had dwindled to a moat of grass on the outskirts of the village where he practised as the general physician.

  She asked, fingers playing piano on his ankles: “Why didn’t he leave?”

  Peter described the incident with an expressionless face. He was five at the time. It was almost his first memory. A hot day in 1943. The smell of pear blossom. The family having lunch outside. They had arranged their chairs around a blanket under the pear tree when a man, probably a Jew, was brought from across the field and hanged in front of them. He wore a dark green suit and two SS soldiers pushed him from behind.

  It happened quickly. The older soldier grabbed the chair Peter’s mother was sitting in and stood on it to tie a belt over a stumpy branch. The man in the green suit fixed the family with a nervous apologetic expression. The younger soldier punched him so that his face crumpled and the two soldiers lifted him, still wheezing, onto the chair and slipped the belt over his head. Their prisoner was tall and the branch selected not quite high enough so that when the chair was kicked back at the second attempt his feet brushed the ground. He strained on tiptoe to keep balance and the two soldiers had to kick his ankles several times until he suffocated. Then the younger soldier undid the trousers and groped inside. He grinned at Peter’s mother who was colicky from gulping her glass of Kalterer wine. Too late she hastened to cover her son’s eyes.

  He blushed when he told Henrietta what he saw.

  “Look,” the man snickered, unbuttoning the dead man’s flies and fondling the stiff penis. “It’s true.” He spoke with a Bavarian accent.

  Peter’s father was a German from the worn soles of his Salamander shoes to the crown of his bony head. He had served in an ambulance unit in the First World War. Had been a member of the National German Party, even though he thought the Kaiser was a clown. On an equally hot day in July 1940 he had stood at the radio to hear of France’s capitulation and acknowledged a charge of pride. But in this moment three centuries dissolved. He turned his back on his country and eight months later shambled into the drive, arms raised, to greet an American jeep.

  “My father couldn’t tolerate the thought of his only child growing up in this culture.”

  His childhood wasn’t all dour. There were days on which his life sparkled. His happiest moments were those when his father sat at the kitchen table and called for a spool of thread.

  “He asked me if I wanted anything mended,” she said 17 years later, on the damp grass among the bee orchids. “I thought it was odd, especially from a man. Then he revealed he wanted more than anything to be a surgeon. He was anxious to show me something his father had taught him.”

  They were sitting on the sofa when he lifted his legs from her knees. “Get that other orange. And a needle and thread. And a knife,” he shouted after her.

  He cut the orange in half. It was green and fibrous and good for juice, but not much else. “A grapefruit would be better,” starting to suture together the two pieces.

  She watched his deft fingers zigzag the needle in and out of the pith.

  “In surgery,” he told her, “the knot is everything.”

  Afterwards, he held it up, reciting: “Its feet were tied / With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving.”

  Because of his father he was forbidden to go to Humboldt University to study medicine. “You come from the class of yesterday,” was the attitude of the authorities. The universities of Halle and Kiev also rejected him as a class enemy.

  After the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956 he hoped that greater democracy would come to East Germany. He joined a small demonstration at Humboldt University calling for the Social Democratic Party to be legalised. The leaders were imprisoned for ten years, but he escaped arrest. “Probably because I wasn’t registered as a student.” Thereafter he avoided showing his face in Berlin.

  Without some professional training he could gain no full-time employment. He worked as a messenger for an X-ray lab in Ludwigslust and for a forester whose brother was a border guard in Boizenburg and finally on a pig farm. Within two months his shoes fell to pieces and the farmer lent him another pair, but the hard leather didn’t bend around the toes and he began to walk in the lilting gait of a pack animal. One day a lean snobbish girl visited. She wore a stylish grey dress and busied her fingers in a purse full of cosmetics. After lunch, she walked to where he was feeding the pigs and stood around smoking good cigarettes and the smell of the grey smoke tortured him.

  He decided that his only chance of studying medicine was to escape. Once in the West he hoped to enrol at Hamburg University where his father had a good contact. He told his parents and his father wept and his mother just nodded. They had become lonely in these last years. His father had no more friends while his mother’s circle had shrunk to four women who visited once a week for coffee. He implored his parents to accompany him, but his father declined. He was a doctor. He was old. And he was needed. “I can’t change.”

  Wary of leaving through Berlin, on a cool cloudy day in April he took the train to a village on the border. The guide, a former patient of his father, waited on the platform. Peter held a large cast-iron key from the house as a signal. The man saw it and approached: “Follow me.”

  They walked several kilometres. Wooded hills on either side and in the gaps between the trees the copper-coloured rooftops of a small town. They reached a fork and the man said
: “Go this way. It will take two hours.”

  He walked at his special lilting pace for two hours along a narrow path overgrown with ferns. After another hour he worried he had taken a wrong turning or was walking too slowly. The sun set and he panicked. In the night there were Russian soldiers on patrol with orders to shoot. He walked on in the dark and 40 minutes later arrived at the edge of a town. He saw a billboard advertising Juno cigarettes and knew that if the wording on the cigarette packet read “Juno – long and round”, then he had left the GDR, and if the words read “Juno – thick and round”, then he had not. He walked impatiently towards the billboard.

  “I was so full of hope and happiness. I thought, now it’s Go. I was free, I told myself.”

  He read the words “Juno – thick and round” and exclaimed something out loud. He never knew what, but a woman was passing who heard him. Within a short time he was stopped and taken to a small room next to the police station and charged with slander against the state. It was the time of Ulbricht’s paranoia. The mildest objection was a pretext for imprisonment.

  “The accused delivered the remark in such a manner as to mock the noble aims of the revolution,” declared the prosecuting judge. When his name was discovered on a list of members belonging to the banned Social Democratic Party his sentence was increased to five years.

  That was 18 months ago. He had been a prisoner ever since.

  “It seems anyone who lives here has to fool themselves in everything they do.” She picked up the orange he had stitched back together with blue cotton. Pressed it to her nose. Smelled it.

  He scratched his cheek with the back of his thumb. He hadn’t shaved and his thumb made a rasping sound. “Come here.”

  She put down the orange and walked towards him, stopping a foot from his chair. He looked into her eyes and without taking his eyes from her face he lightly sawed his hand between her legs. He removed his hand. Looked at it. Began to lift it to his nose. “I’d better leave.”