Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He once heard his mother enthuse to the vicar: “Peter’s wonderful with my father. He never complains when he repeats himself.” Nor when his grandfather farted as he sat down in his wing-back chair. Or mislaid his teeth. Or soiled himself after a morning at the Black Dog pub.

  Peter’s shyness helped. It was a kind of shyness, after all, not to want to hear your own voice. But it was more than shyness that made him draw out a crusty old man about his experiences with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Adriatic or, after 1945, as a general practitioner in Clitheroe. It took Peter off from himself. Relieved the unease that sometimes he felt when he looked in the mirror.

  His mother remarked that his eyes gave him warmth. Hers were pale green, the colour of her favourite herbal tea. Peter’s on the other hand were dark and slightly slanted, the irises as black as his ropy hair, and photographed well. His skin was dark, too, a shade of oloroso that marked him out from others at school as well as from his parents and sister – and which his grandfather attributed with a knowing chuckle to a French sailor in the family. Peter took it for one of his stories.

  Like anyone who has fought in a war, his grandfather was full of stories. Alone with his grandson, he told Peter about the places he had seen. The train station in Trieste. The enemy flag he had captured from a castle. His adventures.

  Milo Potter. Terse, tricky, a good hater of Germans and a lover of pale ale and the dark chocolate he kept in his freezer. Who shared his daughter’s stubbornness, but not her hope that Peter would grow up to be a medical man like him. “I don’t know why your mother wants you to become a doctor.” Or rather he did know, but wasn’t telling. “Just because doctors cure people, it doesn’t mean they’re good. Don’t be fooled into thinking that.”

  At his grandfather’s flat the curtains were drawn in the living room, which stank of stale breath and urine. Peter walked into the small kitchen and called in a loud cheerful voice, “I’ll get you a beer.”

  His grandfather had returned to his chair. He sat in his favourite woollen sleeping cap, knitted for him 62 years before by the Baptist women of the Shepherd’s Bush Tabernacle. Peter handed him the glass and kissed him on the cheek, slipping something onto his lap and whispering, “I’ve brought you some Bournville.”

  “Dear boy, how are you?” sitting up, with a squeezed expression, revived by the sight of the beer. A week before, driving to Port Regis, Rodney had been alarmed to see him shuffling in his slippers towards the Black Dog. “You know, you’re very sweet to come and spend this time with me, particularly since I’ve been such a pain to your parents.” He unwrapped the Bournville. Pinched blue eyes, skin the colour of horseradish and a dent in his forehead that might have been left there by an exploding cork. “Tell me about school. What are you doing?”

  “I’m studying German.”

  “You’re not studying German! You’re English, for God’s sake.”

  “I have a German father, Grandpa.”

  “I want you to forget about your so-called father,” he said angrily. “Here you are, English mother, English stepfather, English upbringing, and you’re at an English public school. It’s just one of those things that happened.”

  “Put yourself in my position. What would you do?”

  “What do you mean, ‘do’?”

  “If you discovered you were German.”

  Silence.

  “Go on, Grandpa,” and Peter egged him on, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell, all his concentration on the figure who rocked in his chair and struggled to snap off a square of chocolate.

  Milo Potter folded his lips and chewed. And stared at the sisal floor. Forced by his grandson to see the English officer lying between his slippers. Watching himself leap from the jeep to attend the groaning man. “Maybe when you’re older,” licking at the dark rim on his lips. And telling him anyway. “If I discovered I was German, I’d top myself. It’s simply the bottom end of the scale. Let me tell you a couple of things about Germans . . .” and gulping his beer, he started to talk with a fluency that he couldn’t bring to the recent past.

  Later, Peter stood on the pavement where he and Rosalind used to play hopscotch. My God, he thought, am I capable of slitting throats?

  CHAPTER SIX

  INSTEAD OF THE DOORS he listened to punk. Anarchy in the UK. Bodies. Pretty Vacant.

  “Filthy Boche!” chanted Leadley, chewing his ear. His voice lazy and larval and powered by inherited money. “Achtung, Spitfeuer, aargh!”

  In March went the last of his moorings. Amid acrimony and controversy, St Cross had sold the Malory manuscript to the British Library and his favourite history master resigned. Encouraged by this master and also by Rodney, Peter had set his heart on reading history at Oxford.

  His German father became the sword he drew against those who approached. To stop the dissonance in his life he thought of him obsessively. He wanted to know about the man. To see and to touch someone who was his blood, who looked like him, who might understand him.

  “We know our fathers’ names, where we come from,” whispered Leadley, heatedly stroking Tweed under the blanket. “What we want to know is: What’s your father’s name?”

  “Oh, go screw yourself,” but reading in Leadley’s eyes the horror of his deformity.

  While Mr Brodribb, the replacement history master, stuttered through the dissolution of the monasteries, Peter sat in the back row and imagined his father in a toyes-sized cell. Scrubbing himself beneath a cold shower. Sweeping the hair from his eyes (was that his habit too?). Sometimes he reflected on the sentence uttered by his father that had caused him to be imprisoned. Could there be a comparable formula to bring him back, to undo the spell?

  Then, in the summer term of his lower-sixth year, a Hamburg academic contacted St Cross to enquire if there might be a boy willing to improve the English of his daughter, a member of the German Winter Olympics team.

  Peter volunteered and was accepted, but waited until half-term before approaching his parents to pay for the journey. His instinct being to treat them separately, he asked his mother first, seeking her out in the living room where she sat at the walnut piano. She had played it all weekend: Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and more and more Bach. Eschewing Chopin, Scarlatti and Borodin in favour of German, German, German music.

  Now it’s out in the open, he thought, there was bound to be a reaction.

  He explained that he wanted to spend the summer holiday in Hamburg. “Mum, this is what I really want to do. I just want to look like somebody. I want to see someone walking up the street who looks like me.”

  “Darling, I understand,” and her expression said: Look at my life, the way it has been made. There’s no way I can go to Germany to find your father. But I am moved to see you studying German, and it’s perfectly natural that you should one day go looking for him in the city where he wanted to be. “It’s just that I don’t know if Daddy can afford it. Things are rather tight right now.”

  In his studio, Rodney was replying to a letter.

  “Dad?” and Peter watched his stepfather turn stiffly to greet him. Feeling the first spike of worry. The first glimpse of Rodney’s frailty.

  Rodney listened carefully. “Of course, you must go. No question about it.” He would just have to take a lot more photographs, that was all. He gave a ghost of a smile. “And maybe this will bring in some money,” holding up a strange letter he had received. An old school-friend – someone he hadn’t seen for many years – had written from North Africa with a business proposition.

  Only Rosalind didn’t understand. “Teaching a speedskater? Why would a speedskater need to speak English?”

  For three weeks Peter stayed in a turn-of-the-century white stucco house in Ottensen with wide windowsills and full of pot plants. He had never left England before. At every step he came to know the meaning of the word “foreign”. He scrutinised the giraffes and marmots in Hamburg zoo, the watch shops in Gänsemarkt, the windows stacked with cakes and furs and smoked meat
s. He thought, Is this where my roots are?

  His postcard home read: “I am enjoying myself very much.” But he was miserable. He regretted more than he could say the waste of Rodney’s money. The pot plants. His pupil.

  Kirsten was a tall blonde German speedskater who had an uncomfortably open relationship with her parents. At his introductory meal with the Viebach family she told Peter about her first kiss and Peter was asked to supply the words in English. Her father nodded and smiled while her mother grew red-faced and said: “Sssh, Kirsten.” Even though she didn’t speak much English, Frau Viebach was aware that her daughter had gone too far.

  Away from her adoring parents, Kirsten was less full of herself. One night Peter collected her from the rink in her father’s Mercedes-Benz. He watched the athletes, most of them older than he was, loitering animal-like before they disbanded, having completed their two-hour fartlek, a Swedish word, Kirsten explained, that meant “speedplay – a combination of running and intensive callisthenics”. Lazily, the girls zipped up their vivid warm-ups and dispersed on bicycles, eyeing Peter. And he couldn’t help seeing himself through their eyes in his borrowed car, his English flannels, his stiff, non-athletic body. A different species.

  “Goodbye, Kirsten,” shouted one of them, refastening her pony-tail. “Be a good girl!” she added in English, and her words injected into the car the atmosphere of a nervous first date.

  Kirsten’s parents were out for the night. She suggested they stop for a hot cocoa. They ended up drinking beer and then on the way home she directed him along Hafenstraße and into a parking lot beside the Elbe where workers for the shipyards caught the ferry. After a nervous conversation, she let him undress her. She smiled distantly as he peeled off her layers, beginning with the warm-up pants and ending with a sheath of navy Lycra. He saw the stars through the rigging and became senseless with panic. His anxiety and desire so great he could hardly breathe. At St Cross he used to pray that he wouldn’t die before this moment. When the moment came, he yelled in pain and grabbed at his calf.

  Kirsten knew better what the problem was and that he was an innocent in the country of sex. “You’re having a cramp. Magnesium deficiency. You should eat more bananas.”

  At the end of their next lesson – to which she arrived very late – he asked in a significant way if they could go back to the parking lot on Hafenstraße.

  “Oh, no. I can’t. I’m meeting a friend. Bye.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  Kirsten shook her head. “No, Peter,” in a faraway voice, as if it wasn’t his tongue that had circled her breasts a few hours earlier, or her calves that had stiffened against his neck in the seconds before his unfortunate and disturbing seizure. “You are here to teach me English.”

  So instead of undressing Kirsten again, in the afternoons when she was training at the oval, he walked through Hamburg. Up the Reeperbahn, down through the port, along the Alster. Only the stucco buildings in Eppendorf had resonance for him, their tall windows and tidy front gardens reminding Peter of photographs in his mother’s blue calf album of a house in Notting Hill. And Sierichstraße: a street down which the traffic flowed one way until noon – and for the rest of the day in the opposite direction.

  In this mood – fluctuating, rejected, homesick – he had his first glimpse of East Germany.

  One Saturday morning, early, he boarded a bus to a small harbour on the border. A fisherman stood by the water’s edge, surrounded by cormorants, while on the marina a father and son unstudded the tarpaulin from the deck of a speedboat with an English name, Follow Me. The father, a pipe-smoker with a sunburnt face, in narrow black jeans, ducked inside and emerged with a duvet decorated with an enormous strawberry. He was laying it out on the rails to dry when Peter called down to him.

  They had a conversation after which the man tapped his pipe against his palm and gave Peter directions.

  He didn’t attempt to cross into East Germany. On this morning it was enough to stand near a wire fence and gaze at the forbidden country. He had no inkling of the whereabouts of his father’s village, but he composed in his mind a white-turreted house and a tall-ceilinged corridor hung with the portraits of previous Junkers. (A week later, his German master dismissed his reverie as absurd. After 1950, and Ulbricht’s collectivisation of the farms, whatever life the family led would have vanished. “Besides, Hithersay, there were no Junkers in Saxony.”) He stayed an hour, then walked back towards the toothpick masts. His head boiling with the same questions. Was his father still in prison? If not, what had happened to him? His mother had believed in him utterly, but what if his grandfather was right and he was not to be believed? Let me tell you a couple of things about Germans . . . Could he have been “re-educated”, become a functionary in the Communist regime? Or had he achieved his ambition and made it to the West? Become like the man who pointed him towards the border, a successful surgeon with a speedboat he had restored, turning lobster-red in the sun and smoking Dutch tobacco?

  Peter searched for the sleek black hull of Follow Me and thought of the pipe-smoker’s reaction. “Watch out! The only liberty East Germans have is to sail without any clothes on!” The speedboat had slipped her berth.

  He stared into the empty space and found himself looking for the first time through Eastern eyes. The smooth water of the harbour amplified each sound. The distant yell of the fisherman. The cormorant that plunged, croaking, towards whatever scraps were being tossed away. The bark of a dog on the opposite bank. Someone shook their raincoat, but it was a swan taking off.

  At the end of August he said goodbye to the Viebachs. He had sat out his remaining meals trying to avoid seeing in their expressions a sign that he had become dinner-party fodder.

  “You are welcome here any time,” said Kirsten’s mother solemnly.

  Next day found him in Holland. In a bakery, overhearing his accent, a man mistook Peter for a German and spat in his face. A small part of him was relieved: his German must be getting better.

  He had not found the language easy to learn. His schoolroom German wasn’t the German he heard spoken in Hamburg. But his desire to communicate with Kirsten had had a liberating effect and in the following term he rose to near top of his class. Nervous of Peter’s sudden fluency, his teacher – a frilly, Gothic script of a man who had until now insisted on calling him Höthersay, thinking he was doing Peter a favour – stopped singling him out.

  His German master wasn’t alone in observing a change. He had returned to St Cross more dissatisfied and confused. More defiant. One evening after “namers” Mr Tamlyn took Peter aside. “Is everything all right at home?”

  “Everything’s absolutely fine.”

  “It’s good to talk about these things.”

  “Really, sir. Everything is fine. Couldn’t be better.”

  He retreated deeper into his toyes, spending his last pocket money on a subscription to the German soccer magazine Kicker. He covered the walls with team photographs of Hamburger SV and at their centre pinned a poorly taken snap of Kirsten after a race, her suit of silver Lycra barely distinguishable against the snowbank.

  Until he was sixteen, he had assumed he would marry an English girl. Had built a picture of her in his mind, a sort of composite model of a young woman on a beach who happened to be one of Rosalind’s friends. But now? With each passing week, he sensed himself divided from his fellows, even Brodie. His German summer had taught him that there was a European culture and he was not part of it. In England, he felt small and restless. At the same time, his experience in Hamburg had led him to fear, even to dislike, a part of himself he couldn’t know.

  To vanquish this dragon he determined to ride out to meet it. As Bedevere might have done.

  He settled into his studies, making himself into a German and also qualifying himself to escape. If his decision to go to Hamburg marked the first jutting of the jaw, the second was demonstrated by his choice of university. He would become what his mother wanted, but that was incidental as it w
as also what his father had wanted – and now what he wanted, too.

  Eighteen months since his 16th birthday and he was ready to make the break. To go against every grain. To find himself by taking not Leadley’s obvious path through an Oxford quad and dark panelled rooms to an institution in the City, but the route which led in the opposite direction, among a people whose language he falteringly understood, past the rough streets of the Reeperbahn where he had heard shots in the night, past the grim housing projects, to the teaching hospital.

  His mother couldn’t contain her joy. “Medicine? But how wonderful, darling. Where will you go? Oxford or Cambridge?”

  “Hamburg.”

  “Hamburg?” she said and looked down at her book – she was reading Maurice Guest. “That’s a good university, I’m sure. If you can do it, you can do it.” What else could she say?

  The Universitätsklinik Eppendorf, or UKE, was not Peter’s first choice. He had looked into studying medicine in Leipzig, but the process was full of red tape and after contacting the new East German embassy in Belgrave Square he couldn’t see a way, at least not until he graduated. And so he decided on the city his father was aiming for when he was captured and where he himself had first tasted Germany.

  Thanks to Mr Tamlyn’s efforts, an interview was arranged at UKE in the Easter of Peter’s last year at St Cross. Over a leisurely meeting he was tested for his knowledge of the German language, biology, chemistry and Latin. The admissions tutor was an Anglophile with a reedy voice who kept insisting that medical education was so much better in England. Nonetheless, he was prepared to accept Peter’s four A levels in lieu of a baccalaureate, the offer conditional on his results and on his agreement to spend the gap year improving his German. “University study is free. Accommodation you will have to pay for.”

  “Tremendous news,” said Rodney. “Of course, I’ll foot the bills.”