Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  His eyes swayed after her. She stepped into the lamplight, a green coat over her arm and at her throat some kind of necklace. Back in Hamburg he would remember Musil’s notion that every person has an animal coordinate with which they’re connected in some secret inner way. He thought of her then and afterwards as a giraffe. Something fine and pure-bred and delicate with a natural haughtiness that didn’t know its own power. When she walked down the aisle, drawing all the light in the church to her face, she led with her nose as if reaching up to chew a leaf.

  He watched her cross the nave. He strained to see her breasts and it maddened him that he couldn’t.

  The congregation filed outside at an excruciating pace. Girls waited on the steps or chatted to parents. He searched for a green coat among the sausage-coloured anoraks, and found it. She stood at the edge of the small crowd listening to a man, about thirty. Round and small with a wide brown beard and a sealskin jacket with pockets for everything.

  She put her hands to her eyes. Moved away. And the man with a hangdog expression thrust both hands deep into his jacket.

  Peter descended the steps and followed her into the Market Square. There was an intent to her stride, in the way she straightened her back. Slightly gangly, she enlisted the whole of her body when she moved.

  She disappeared into a three-storey building on the corner. A banner outside the building read “Leipzig – open to the world” and there was a poster with details of the Book Fair. He paid 7 Marks and hurried to the first floor, a low-ceilinged hall with stalls to the right and left, and began to circle the room.

  He tracked her down at the stand of a publisher from Munich. Her back to Peter. Flicking the pages of a book. Scrupulously, she replaced it on the display shelf and when she didn’t look up he saw that her gaze was fixed to an attaché case open on a table. She lifted an arm overhead and scratched her back.

  “Too bad they can’t airbrush my prose!”

  At right angles to the same table sat a stout man with a large nose and bulging eyes and hair patted in careful lines over the top of his head. His features only carelessly resembled the handsome physiognomy pictured on posters around the stall. He reminded Peter of the cadaver he had dissected in anatomy.

  “Ah!” catching sight of Peter, and Peter recognised the author who had engaged Sepp in conversation on the train and whose name featured alongside Pantomimosa on the invitation to the Astoria.

  Peter approached the table heaped with books. “Herr C –,” he began, and the author, mistaking his intention, opened the title page. “Who shall I . . .?” His fountain pen hovered.

  “I’m with the mime group.”

  The author hitched up his smile. Closed the cover of Amazing Scientific Discoveries: Volume 9 – Madame Curie, and with cold politeness enquired the time of Peter’s performance.

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “I regret I have to give a reading tonight,” and beckoned Peter closer.

  Behind him, a sudden movement. Peter looked up in time to see her snatch a book from the attaché case and tuck it into her black jeans.

  She brushed past him.

  “See you at the reception,” he told the author.

  He caught up with her in the square and fell into stride.

  “I saw you take it.”

  She heard him, but didn’t turn. “Just keep walking,” and grabbed his arm. Now he was happy.

  They crossed the square, walking fast. Down a street and through a concealed passage into an alley. Not until they emerged into another square did she give a quick look round and slow her pace.

  “You took his book,” he repeated.

  She chewed the inside of her cheek, breathing hard. One of her teeth was chipped. Strung around her long neck and separated by a hollow bone she wore a pair of marble eyes, acetylene blue, that once might have peered out of a dead animal.

  “You have to steal,” she said unexpectedly. “Unless you want to read crap. It’s the only way to get a good book.”

  He held her gaze. Her own eyes deep-set and green – the greyish green of chapel glass – and with a slight shadow under them. She’s my age, he thought, and reached out his hand. He half expected her to draw back, but she faced him square on, not moving, watching him as he dug down his fingers between her jeans and waist. Feeling for the contour of the stolen book.

  She helped him. A novel with a flock of swans on the cover. “You’re from North Germany, aren’t you?” glancing at his shoes.

  “No, England.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t have taken you for English. Why are you here?”

  “I’m with a mime group,” and described his involvement with Pantomimosa. He sensed her interest fading.

  “Why are you following me? I should report you.”

  “Except you’ve stolen property on you.”

  She grabbed back the book and started to put on her coat, at the same time quickening her step.

  “I saw you in church.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a rare person who doesn’t notice someone looking at them,” and he hated the inanity he heard in his voice.

  She said nothing.

  “I love Bach,” he went on, making an effort to catch up. Then, as he drew level, he made a stupid remark that wasn’t what he meant to say at all: “I forgot Bach spent so much time in Leipzig.”

  She stopped in her tracks. She didn’t believe what she had heard. “This is Bach’s city! He spent 27 years of his life here. He belongs to Leipzig.”

  “Yes, I know –”

  “What do they teach you over there? Melchior Lotter printed the first music here. Grieg studied here. Clara and Robert Schumann started their life here.” She pointed, the East German greyness about her face disappearing as she tried to educate him. “Look. See the Konsum? Richard Wagner was born there.”

  Even as she spoke his heart sank as it did on occasions with Anita. Something humourless and dutiful had stormed in. An agenda he couldn’t locate. Maybe she was a tour guide. Maybe she was a bore.

  He apologised: “I don’t know much about Leipzig.”

  “It’s a lovely city and it always was.” Poised to go on, she changed her mind. “That’s OK. Have you a cigarette?”

  He offered her a West Light and she inclined her head to his lighter. Long eyelashes and a blackberry undercurrent to her hair and skin that he wanted to touch. He forgot his worries.

  “Have you a moment?” squeezing his arm. “Come, I’ll show you something.”

  She walked in long strides ahead of him along a pavement crumpled and broken, as though something under the earth had shifted. She turned into a street and waited for him, smoking his cigarette. “This is the Brühl.”

  “Named after Count Brühl?” He was pleased with himself.

  “No, that’s in Dresden. This is the Leipzig Brühl. Our Brühl is Slav for swamp. See those windows? Fifty years ago, this street was the centre of the world fur trade.”

  She took a deep breath. Closed her eyes. Savoured the air that tasted of coal dust. “This is where I’d come if I wanted a mink coat. Or ocelot. Or moleskin. But I’d make sure to buy my coat in sunlight. Not on a day like today.”

  He craned his neck at the blackened facades. The sky and topmost storeys dissolving into one another. “Hard to imagine.”

  “No, it’s not,” opening her eyes and giving him a heated look. “If all students in the West are like you, they must be a stupid lot. Look, there – below the ledge.”

  He didn’t notice them at first: camouflaged with dirt, the mouldings of three faces. A Chinaman. An African. A Red Indian.

  “There’s a story of a Canadian trapper. He sent a letter to ‘Brühl’ – just the one word. It started in February in Montreal. From there it was sent to Bremen and it was here in Leipzig by March.”

  Without waiting for his reaction, she steered him by the hand to a three-storey building covered in green tiles of which many were cracked or missing.

  “All you have
to do is raise your eyes and you’ll see traces from all over the world, but no-one looks up. They look down and walk along – just like you,” and her face was no longer grave but had a mocking smile.

  “You should be on commission for the city.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, you seem to know a lot.”

  “Ah, this is what I want to show you,” ignoring him.

  It was the entrance to a once grand house, its facade now layered with the same coloured filth – the grey of Rodney’s anchovy paste – as the buildings on either side. Over the doorway was the ceramic of a man naked save for a fur cape. In different panels the figure had on a fur hat, fur boots, a fur stole, a pair of gloves and a muff.

  “You like fur, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. Muffs are my favourite.”

  She couldn’t have been aware of what connotations the word might have for him. Nor did she fear his judgment. A moment before she had seemed regretful, solemn, officious. Now she had the confidence of the old city. He felt drawn to her in a way he never had with Anita.

  “My grandfather was a furrier,” and gestured at the neglected, begrimed door. “He began here.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Look!” Under the dull grey paint, a red scratch-mark. She licked a finger and rubbed at the mark, her spittle deepening the colour. “It’s the original porphyry. They try to copy this by painting the windows red, but it doesn’t work.” Even this trivial gesture moved him.

  “By the way, my name is Peter Hithersay.”

  “I am boring you.” She began to button her coat.

  “And you?”

  “I have to go,” she decided.

  “You mean, I don’t get to know your name?”

  She smiled her mocking smile. “Why should you want to know, you who go away in a day or two?”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Then, what does your mother call you?”

  Her mouth hung open and her face had a look of uncertainty.

  “My mother’s dead. My grandmother calls me Snjólaug.”

  “Snowleg?”

  She corrected his pronunciation. “Snjólaug. It’s Icelandic.”

  He uttered the name slowly as if it was an object in his mouth. It still sounded like Snowleg.

  “Why does she call you that?” searching for a way to delay her.

  “You’re right. It’s not interesting.”

  He couldn’t believe he was asking, but he knew he must. In the same voice that he adopted when urging his grandfather to speak, he said: “No, please. I’d like to hear. Why are you called Snowleg?”

  The name, she told Peter, had belonged to a Canadian woman, a friend of her grandfather. She had never met her grandfather – he had died in the Second World War – but her grandmother, with whom she lived during the week, had spoken of him incessantly. As a child she believed she only had to rub the glass eyes of the stuffed muskrat that had been his prized possession and he would materialise before her, soft-voiced and bent and with a cigar roaming under his nut-brown hat.

  “I knew him only as a photograph.” From the cherry-wood table beside her grandmother’s bed, he looked back at her through the veil of tobacco smoke in the way she imagined he examined his pelts, with the gaze of someone not afraid to blow the fur apart and scrutinise the leather and mutter aloud: “Dyed skin!”

  As a young man he had worked at 71 Brühl for a Jew from Brody, but he served his most valuable apprenticeship during two years he spent in Canada. In 1925, with the low price of squirrel in Leipzig, a limited quantity of rats were shipped from Rainy Lake on a gas-schooner. “There was a berth vacant on the return journey and he took it.”

  “The hunter needs to see the wolf,” he told her grandmother on the evening he asked her to marry him. He had flung at least a hundred categories of pelt out of his employer’s windows to dry on the railings, including cross fox, silver fox, hare flank, opossum, fitch, vicuna, wallaby and Tibetan lamb. “But I haven’t seen one in the flesh.”

  He spent a summer with three trappers at Fort Chipewyan, working at night because of the deer flies. At dawnbreak on the fifth day he wrote to his fiancée: “I’ve skinned my first animal – a buffalo.” He smeared the fleshed skin with fish oil and drummed it in sawdust and that winter used it as a sleigh robe, heading east through the unanimous snowscapes of Manitoba.

  Over the following year, he learned that riding in a sleigh wears out a fur more quickly than walking. He wore out the furs of a moose, a lynx and a priceless black fox.

  His favourite fur – it became his favourite word – was the muskrat. In Gimli, he lived for a season with an Icelandic Indian and his wife Snjólaug who taught him how to slit the skin at both hind legs from heel to vent, skin out the toes and leave them with the claws on, and pull the skin from the body. From that day on he could never pass a muskrat coat without stroking it, still seeing the animal which had given up its fur, its white bones on the prairie and the coyotes gnawing at the frosted meat. Before he sailed for Germany, he had a muskrat stuffed by a taxidermist in Toronto.

  One winter night, three hours down-country from Kenora, his trap caught a wolf. Saliva frothed in the starlight and yellow eyes stared at him, insane and fretful and wild. He saw the bloody knee and heard the rasp of tattered gums on the metal and decided it was time to go home.

  He arrived back in Leipzig in time for the first World Fur Congress. He heard Ernst Poland’s rousing opening speech and attended a lecture on ear mange in silver foxes and another lecture on the extreme difficulties of bleaching skins. In Gimli, Snjólaug had taught him how to hand-bleach rabbit skin. Within six months he had started his own business in the Brühl, developing her process.

  “That’s why my grandmother calls me Snjólaug. Because of her, they were able to live.”

  Peter tore his eyes from the tiled figure above the doorway. Her enthusiasm had infected him. “You can’t know, but this might have been my city. Maybe it can be my city. Maybe I can come and study here.”

  “Why, what do you have to do with us?”

  He explained how once upon a time an English girl from Lancashire went to sing in a Bach competition in Leipzig and sheltered a man on the run. “Let me ask: how would you go about finding him?”

  “Listen,” she said, wetting her finger and rubbing at the wall. “You’re here for a weekend. You’re not going to be able to reach anyone. The only people who have any idea or who would be able to help are Party or police.”

  “I’ve been told I can’t go to the police.”

  “Of course you can. These people are on our side. They’re here to provide protection.”

  “Do you know someone?”

  “I know someone in the Party,” revealing more porphyry. “He might be able to help.”

  “Could you speak to him?”

  “Gladly. Give me your address. I could write to you.”

  He hunted without success for a piece of paper.

  “Write it here,” holding up the novel.

  On the inside back cover he wrote down his address and telephone number. “If I ever come and study in Leipzig, will you be here?”

  “Come on, we’ve only just met.”

  “I think you’re lovely.”

  She looked at him with a grave expression. “You don’t have a right to say that.”

  He wasn’t listening. He sensed a thickening in his throat, spreading into his chest. An overpowering desire to kiss her. At that moment the buildings around them exploded into light.

  Not until the streetlamps snapped on did Peter realise how dark it had become. She led him into a square and he recognised where they were. “We’re back here?” unable to stifle his disappointment.

  “The centre of Leipzig is not even one square kilometre,” she said lightly. “Anyway, what would you study here?”

  “Medicine.”

  Her smile vanished. “Really? You’ve chosen a corruptible profession, doctor.”

  “What do
you mean?”

  “Forget it. I have to go,” and her eyes had the focus of someone with a lot to do all of a sudden.

  “Wait. Have you time for a beer?”

  She frowned at a clock face on a tower. Five o’clock. “There’s someone I must speak to.”

  “Can’t you put them off?”

  “No.”

  “What about another cigarette?” to keep her.

  Again she glanced at the clock. Her face saying, We must stop this.

  He tapped out two West Lights and lit them.

  “Have you been to the Auerbach’s Cellar?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You can’t see Leipzig and not see the Auerbach’s Cellar! ‘Our Leipzig is renowned, A little Paris . . .’” But there was no cheer in her voice.

  She took him into a glazed mall where a dense crowd, many in business suits, shuffled beneath a statue and down a stone staircase. They began to follow, but a uniformed attendant prevented them. The Auerbach’s Cellar was closed – a special event connected with the Trade Fair.

  At the ragged end of the mall was a wine bar. An effeminate waiter led them to a round glass table in a corner. Seated by the window an old lady, her face roofed in with a tight black hat, stared into a flute of white wine. Otherwise, the place was empty.

  “You know what I’d like more than anything?” She put down her book on the table, causing the Tiffany-style lamp to flicker. “A vodka.”

  The lampshade was patterned with red stained glass in the shape of dragonflies. Even after Peter had ordered two vodkas she went on fidgeting with it. When their drinks arrived she retrieved the plastic swizzlestick from her glass and gulped down the vodka in the manner of someone fortifying herself.

  He said, “You mentioned I had chosen a corruptible profession. Why?”

  She glanced around. The waiter had disappeared into the kitchen and the old lady sat with her eyes closed. “Tell me,” she bent forward, speaking in a low voice. “Do you know much about throats?”

  He was not sure he had properly heard. “Throats? Why do you ask?”

  “I know this sounds strange, but would you look at my epiglottis and tell me what you see?”