Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Over her shoulder he caught the despondent glance of Stefan and then of Bruno and suddenly he was looking at himself through their eyes and he felt as if he was gyrating in a dream in which he was naked. He tried to struggle against this feeling, but it won and he didn’t know what to do with his arms or his legs or where to put them or how to breathe.

  She saw his confusion and quickly came to him. She looped her arms around his neck and he felt his cheek against her skin and she gave him a look that went through his eyes and behind them and she whispered in an altered voice, “Don’t slip away. I want you to stay here with me. Just don’t go. Don’t go. Stay here.” Her breath hot and innocent as a baby’s.

  The music ended and they walked back to the table. She picked up a bottle of wine and filled her glass. Hand at her throat. Brown light licking over her face from the revolving lamp. Her beauty renewing an ache.

  He offered her a cigarette.

  “No, thanks.” She lit one of her own with a Zippo lighter and breathed out. She was aware of her effect and it excited him.

  Her brother rejoined them. “I didn’t know you liked rock and roll, baby.”

  “No? Well, I do, so fuck you.”

  “She’s a crazy girl,” turning to Peter. “But you know that, don’t you?” He sat down on the stool and capsized the rest of his glass into his mouth and licked his lip. He pointed at Peter’s glass. “Any more? Simon, wasn’t it?”

  “Peter. No, I’m all right.”

  “Hey, Bruno,” said Renate. “Asking me?”

  “Not especially,” said Bruno over his shoulder. He looked at Peter, curious. “So how did you two meet, if that’s not a personal question?”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “I’m with a mime group at the Rudolph Theatre.”

  “Is that so?”

  On stage the band struck up Over the Rainbow.

  Snowleg glared at the musicians. “Don’t they play anything else?”

  “My request,” said Bruno. In his strangulated voice he sang, “Way up high,” and he wrapped his fingers around his cue and lifted it in the air. “Hey, little sister, you look like someone who hasn’t sung in a while. When was the last time you sang?”

  “Can’t remember,” pouting.

  He lowered his cue. There was no billiard table in sight. “You can’t remember?”

  She tapped out a cigarette.

  “What about that one?” said Bruno.

  A cigarette was burning in a knee-high metal ashtray. She took it and lit the new one and stubbed the old one out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He looked at her with a mad grin. “Now, baby, this isn’t the place.”

  “But you told Oma. You told Papa.” Her words rang out accusing him. “Didn’t you?”

  “I did.” He scratched the side of his nose. The corner of his dry mouth. “But the reason –”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask. Just lots of serious bullshit. People’s lives. My life!” He reached out, but his glass was empty. He closed his eyes. Concentrating on the path his thought had taken. And Peter had the sense that the fall on either side was steep.

  “When did you tell them, Bruno?”

  He shook his head. His lips trembled. He seemed collapsed and old sitting there, leaning on his billiard stick that had no table to play on.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “That’s the worst of it. I can honestly say that’s the worst of it. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Snowleg mercilessly.

  His tongue appeared pink on his lip and disappeared. “Who told you I was leaving – Stefan again?” he said bitterly.

  “Officially? Falk Hirzel.”

  “Hirzel!”

  “I went to see him last night. You know, right up until he told me I never wanted to believe it . . .” Tears glittered in her green eyes. “When did you apply?”

  He drew a long breath. “Two years ago.” He said this with his eyes closed.

  “And you didn’t speak to me about it? It’s not very brave, Bruno. If you loved me . . . if I mattered at all – even a little – you could still have talked to me and you didn’t.”

  “I always supposed you were on their side.”

  She laughed and rubbed at her eyes. “Why should a decision you make for your life affect mine, Bruno? Why didn’t you say, ‘Look, I know this will ruin your life’?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that. Anyway, I’m doing nothing wrong. It’s in the ’49 constitution. Article Ten. Everyone has the right to leave.”

  “Shut up! Have you thought about those of us you’re leaving?” her fury stressed with sharp tugs on her necklace. “What happens to us?”

  “You don’t realise! One has no time for feelings. Listen, it’s good you’re here. I want you to have these.” He leaned back and produced from his trouser pocket a ring of keys. “Take them.”

  She looked at the keys. Flicked them in his face.

  Bruno held up a hand, deflecting them to the floor. She started to leave, but he barred her way with his cue.

  “Let me go, Bruno.” Her eyes overturned rocks. The corollas pulsing across her face.

  He leaped off his chair and caught her around the waist. She tried to squirm away, but he pinned her by the arms and rotated her until she was staring straight at Peter.

  They stood in a large empty circle on the edge of which people with anxious expressions hovered as if wondering whether it would damage them to be associated with this struggle.

  Uneasy at the tone the party was taking, Peter stooped to pick up the key ring. Through the wad of smoke he heard Stefan’s amplified voice, kind and calming, over a loudspeaker. “Are you being difficult again?”

  Renate stood up. “Seeyuh, Bruno. This time Monday, I’ll be thinking of you.” She started singing, “Little Johnny went into the great wide world all alone.”

  Bruno bowed lifelessly. “Love you, Renate. Don’t ever change.”

  A hand on her shoulder. “Seeyuh, little sister.”

  Snowleg’s head on one side and her gaze more intense.

  The jazz band left the stage and its place was taken by a group in black jeans and T-shirts. Stefan picked up the microphone again. There was an electric guitar around his neck and he sounded drunk. “I want to play a new song. It’s called Deer in the Woods. We all know who this goes out to. And it’s not to Bruno.”

  A strained cheer. Bruno raised a hand in acknowledgement, allowing Snowleg to wriggle from his grip.

  Stefan played a loud chord, drowning out the cheers. Behind him, a drummer started up a crude, methodical beat. Ten feet from Peter, the girl in the high boots convulsed as if electrocuted.

  “Oh, God,” said Snowleg, standing beside Peter.

  He looked at the faces beginning to quiver on the dance floor and had the impression that he was viewing them through the eyes around her neck.

  Hair trailing about his face, Stefan stomped to the edge of the stage and jerked up his guitar and screamed: “Snows are silent on my frozen plain / Why can’t I be a snowflake / And fall without aim / Instead I fall in love.”

  His voice reached a crescendo as the band riffed into the chorus: “We are like deer in the woods / The moon is out / The night is clear / And you can be cruel without trying / You go away / Without knowing the pain / You are hard, you are soft . . .”

  Out on the floor, Bruno danced alone. He had taken the tall ashtray, was hitting his head with it, and cigarette butts were flying everywhere as well as sparks from the cigarette in his mouth.

  “We’ve got to go,” Snowleg said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SNOW WAS FALLING. She wore thin shoes and had to hold onto his arm. “You’re going to ask me what that was about. Don’t bother.”

  Their footsteps squealed in the fresh snow. They walked on, not speaking, into the soft noisy night. At the second tram stop she paused. “We should wait.”

  He brushed the snow from the
collar of her parka. “What does Stefan do?”

  She peered down the street. “He works in the Christian bookshop.” Easier to talk about him than her brother. “He protested against the blasting of the old University Church and wasn’t allowed to study engineering.”

  “He’s in love with you,” a shade too emphatically.

  “He’s not in love. He’s in over-valuation.”

  “Not what I saw.”

  “Oh, Stefan’s always falling in love with someone and writing songs about them. If it goes well, no songs. So he falls for ones who give him trouble and trouble gives him songs.”

  “And your feelings for him?”

  “Stefan’s a very old friend. He and my brother go back. But some old friends think they’d like to be new friends,” and wriggled her shoulders as if something was crawling there.

  A Trabi hissed by. One of its windscreen wipers wasn’t working and the metal blade cawed on the glass until the car turned the corner and the street was empty again.

  She stamped her feet. Peered once more into the snow-streaked darkness. “We may have missed the tram.”

  “Let’s go somewhere,” he said suddenly.

  “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “What about this?” holding up the key ring. “Where’s this to?”

  She touched the keys. “Well done.” Her face completely grateful. “Yes. Let’s go there.”

  The larger key unlocked the main gate to a colony of Schreber gardens in the centre of the city. A brick chimney soared into the night, and high up, over manicured fruit trees, lights shone from a huge gymnasium. Otherwise, it was possible to imagine they had arrived before the gateway to a country park and were not in a city at all.

  Snowleg fiddled with the lock. Peter started to ask something, but she put a finger to her lips. “Shhsh.”

  He was desperate to piss. Beside the gate, a streetlamp threw its feeble glow over a glassed-in board. His eyes scanned the notices pinned inside. News of a forthcoming “Children’s Day”. The date for the water supply to be switched back on. A list of rules. No weeds, bathtubs, clothes lines. And a reminder that it was forbidden for members of the Garden Association to spend the night.

  “Come on,” seizing his wrist. She led him down a path between lattice fences and he was aware of the sureness of her step compared with his own more hesitant one. She took a right fork and then another, stopping before a chest-high wooden gate. “This is it.”

  “You go on,” he said, and turned away from her, bursting, towards a terracotta gnome. He unzipped his trousers and his piss steamed up from the snow.

  Inside the shed, darkness and the smell of broken winter. He heard her scrabbling around in a drawer. “We used to keep them here . . . Ah!”

  The sound of a bag being emptied and a flash. In the lighter’s flame her throat a blue glow and behind her a bar-fire crackling.

  She lit the wick, her eyes staying on the candle stub.

  He took off his scarf and draped it across her shoulder. Sparks of snow in her hair. Her breath smoke in the cold. His desire frightening him as the candle flame thinned and thickened.

  On the chair were the objects that she had tumbled there. A white ribbon. Two keys. The stolen book.

  He picked it up. A card poked from the pages. “You’ve been reading it?”

  “Yes,” and taking a half-burnt cone of incense that someone had left on a saucer, she dipped it in the flame. The incense mingled with the scent of squirrels and burning dust.

  “Why steal this?” he wanted to know.

  “They have everything. We have nothing. What’s a book?”

  At the way she said “they” he felt another blow of desire. It placed him, for the moment, on her side.

  “I mean why steal this book.”

  “Oh, I recognised his name from school. But I wasn’t aware he wrote novels.” She mumbled in a rush, addressing herself as much as Peter: “I mean it’s insane. It’s bad luck to grow up in a place where you have to be courageous just to read a book. There are books which if you don’t read them at twenty-three you won’t read them at forty, or it’s not the same.”

  Ashamed of his intensity, he tried to transfer it onto the novel. “What’s it about?”

  The story sounded more like a novel for young adults. A boy breeds swans for a splendid, orderly park that he is never permitted to leave. Restless to escape, he one day hatches a plan to gather thirty swans and lash himself to their feet. He hopes that if he fires a gun to scatter them into the air the swans will carry him over the tall fence to freedom.

  “And does he escape?” asked Peter, knowing that he had to yield to the chit-chat and yet grateful to the book for bringing them together like this.

  “I haven’t found out.”

  Peter thought of an adolescent boy attached to the legs of thirty white birds. It was impossible, ludicrous. Thirty swans couldn’t lift you up. Even if you did manage to scare the swans into the air, they would tangle. This was why he didn’t like novels. But he went on with his questions. “Do you think it’s possible for swans to carry our weight?”

  “I imagine it depends on the swans,” she replied, with a child’s need for sincerity. “Whether each of them takes off in a different direction. Or whether they decide to swarm in a single flock. And I suppose you don’t know what will happen until that moment and neither do they.”

  “Does Bruno?”

  His mention of her brother upset her. “Actually, could I ask a favour? Could you take it off my hands?”

  “You don’t want to know how the story ends?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What would you like me to do with it?”

  “Read it, give it away, send it back to the author. I don’t know. It will disappear in the West. Here, it’s like having nitroglycerine in my bag.”

  He pulled out the card that marked her place.

  “My medical card! Thank goodness you saw it,” and tidied it into her bag.

  “So,” he said, looking around. “Where are we?”

  In the street, she had been infuriated and silent. Now she appeared nervous at her own audacity. As if she had been misbehaving and this was where it was leading to. In a faltering voice she told him that the hut had belonged to her grandmother. “It was a place I used to adore. Whenever we had a weekend free, I wanted to spend it here, helping in the garden, planting bulbs.” She gave a quick smile, touching her lip. “My grandmother said my mouth was so big because as a child I’d put it around whole carnations. And I believed her!”

  “Why do you say ‘used to’?”

  It was Bruno’s fault. When he married Petra he had wheedled their grandmother into giving him the allotment as his wedding present. He had pleaded and insisted and worn her down until she relented. Not once since then had he invited Snowleg to visit.

  “It’s a joke – he’s never gardened in his life.”

  “Could he have been trying to protect you? He must have been planning to leave for a while.”

  She wasn’t convinced. Her anger suggested that her brother had betrayed not only her, but their grandmother as well.

  “You sound as if you’re close to your grandmother?”

  “Yes. I like listening to her. A lot of people don’t talk, don’t want to make judgments, don’t want to expose themselves. But she does.”

  “What does she tell you?”

  “If you do things, do them properly, one at a time, with your whole attention. When you eat, eat. When you love, love. When you listen to a person, listen to them, don’t let your eye stray across the room and don’t think about what you’re going to say next.”

  She rested her hands together between her knees and her eyes darkened and he felt a feathered swish inside him.

  He peeled off his hat. She stood to fetch something, but he stopped her. He took her hands and separated them and rubbed one after the other until they were warm and then he raised the heel of her right hand to his chin. The light winked o
ff her cheek and he collected droplets of melted snow from her hair with his tongue.

  He led her over to the bed, removed the scarf from her shoulders.

  She sat down and lifted her sweater. Underneath, a faded red silk shirt. He moved to unbutton it, but she held his hand and prevented him and as he lowered his hand she kept on grasping it.

  He climbed onto the bed. She lay back awkwardly and he steered his head over her stomach, his lips kissing her skin where the book had been, where she had hidden it, slipping his fingers at the same time under the rim of her jeans, pulling down her pants with the jeans.

  She pressed her legs together and rolled over. He kissed her bottom, kissing the crease between her closed legs, and slowly turned her on her back.

  “I’m a virgin,” looking down at him.

  “You’re what?”

  “For this.”

  She pulled his hair for him to come up. He kissed her and then he lowered his head and she pulled his scarf over her face and he sensed her relax, one hand cupping his neck, pressing his mouth further into her until she fell back on the pillow, long legs up around his neck, and he saw the arch of her throat and the summit of her chin and the blackberry undercurrent to her hair.

  In a while she drew herself up and looked down on him with a fleeting expression of regret and then she leaned forward and helped him off with his trousers and feeling his hardness between her breasts she widened her legs and guided him to where his tongue had been, her body warm and liquefying beneath him, his mouth seeking hers, until a long thin sound tore from her throat and for a precarious moment everything in their lives converged.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked later.

  “Nothing.”

  She got up from the bed and he thought she was going to wash herself, but she blew out the candle and came back to him. He held her from behind and he held her tight. Tracing the lines of her back under the thin red silk of her shirt until the muscles grew less tense.

  He murmured, “I’d love to fold you in my dressing-up box and take you away.”

  She said, “If you go on doing that, you can.”