Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  They opened the door to a magical world, the gardens covered in fresh snow and the sun above the tarred roof belling out like blown glass.

  “Come on – it’s warmer out.” She sat on the steps wearing only his shirt, her parka loose around her shoulders.

  He put on his jersey and perched beside her. “The first house I lived in,” playing with her lighter, “had a communal garden like this.”

  “Where was that?”

  “In London. Near Portobello Road.”

  She smiled. “London for me is Karl Marx.”

  “How so?” He had never felt so happy. Snowleg was a tremendous liberation after Anita. This is love, he said to himself. This is absolute love.

  “Oh, it’s a children’s book about Karl Marx taking children from the textile mills to Hampstead Heath. The Moor and the Ravens of London. It was my first children’s book and I loved it. He has a great black beard and he shows them space, fresh air, food, trees and sun.”

  “Don’t you want to see it for yourself?”

  “Of course! I’d ask my father: ‘Why aren’t we allowed to travel?’ I thought it was stupid. I was never going to see London, but I was learning all about the Tower of London. On the other hand, I knew I was not going to change anything. I told myself: ‘If you’re good at your studies perhaps you’ll have a chance to travel.’”

  “Maybe you should leave with your brother,” he said.

  “Do you think it’s that simple? What would I do in West Germany? My life is here.”

  “You call this a life?”

  “The Western system doesn’t interest me. To get new books, yes – but not to live there.”

  “What about leaving with me?” and he was conscious of his brows knitting together.

  She nudged him with her knee. “What – in your dressing-up box? I don’t think so, Peter.”

  He tried to change the subject. “Then I’d like to take something back from here.”

  “Like what?”

  “The eyes around your neck?”

  “You may not take the eyes around my neck!”

  “Look, I have to take a memento of the happiest day of my life. Can I take the key to your hut?”

  “You may not take the key to the hut.”

  He looked around, willing himself to feel the extravagance of someone about to leave. Able to leave. On the edge of the lawn facing them was the terracotta gnome against which he had pissed.

  “What about him?”

  “What about him?”

  He laughed. “I love kitsch,” and he leaped to his feet, planning then and there to extract the gnome from her grandmother’s lawn. “I could put him in my study. Although I’ll have to clean him off.”

  He packed up a handful of snow and started wiping the terra-cotta face. Then he picked up the gnome. “What the hell . . .?” A wire led from the feet into the frozen earth. “What is this?”

  “Oh, no!” The tendons rose taut in her neck.

  “Look, there’s something in his mouth.” A small device the size of a walnut. “Snowleg . . . they’re photographing us.”

  “They’re not photographing us, they’re photographing Bruno.” She glared at the gnome, the same scalding look she had given her brother. “I’ll give you something to photograph,” and in blind rage and fear tore it from the ground.

  She ran into the hut and started to dress in a hurry. “You’ve got to leave.”

  He tried to soothe her, but his words hurtled to the ground in the unpredictable way that he fell in dreams when he thought he could fly. “I don’t want to leave.”

  She pulled up the corner of his shirt and wiped her eye. “You have to leave. Now.”

  “When am I going to see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you come to the theatre?”

  “I’ll come if I can, but it may be impossible.”

  He walked away, turning his head every few steps, until she melted into the lawns and trees, a white bird so similar in absence of shade to all around her that she seemed created from the same snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “AND WHERE HAVE YOU been?” Teo sat alone in the dining room, surrounded by empty breakfast plates.

  “I spent the night in a Schreber garden,” he said evasively.

  “You what?”

  “OK, you were right. It was a foolish thing to do.”

  “May I ask what happened?”

  “Look, I feel like getting out of Leipzig for a while.”

  “Do you have anywhere in mind?”

  “Yes.”

  The discovery of the recording device had genuinely alarmed Peter. He knew from studying the map how close Dorna was to Leipzig. On this snowy morning in this grey watchful city it beckoned as the most obvious place in the world for him to visit. He had no expectation of finding anything. He just wanted to smell the village where he had been conceived, to feel he had been there. And to remove himself from Leipzig until he could make sense of the past 24 hours.

  “What do you want to see the country for?” asked the landlady. “There’s nothing there. Only darkness and animals.”

  After learning from her that Dorna was no more than an hour away by train, he persuaded Teo to accompany him. They bought tickets and departed shortly before 11 a.m.

  The train headed south through the city. Concrete facades rose up, dead-coloured in the snow as though fur had been ripped from them. Soon Leipzig was behind them and the air no longer tasted of coal ash. They passed through a forest. Peter gazed into the white-sheeted trees and battled in vain to picture an East German village, a music professor’s house; but instead of a kitchen with a blue-tiled stove where his mother had fed a famished man he saw a young woman stirring awake in a garden hut. He thought of the innocent smile that went through his ribs, the swish in his stomach, her white shiny scar, her breasts pushing against his shirt. And moments later, her expression of horror.

  “We’re here,” said Teo, who had agreed to come, as he said, only to keep an eye on Peter. “By the way, I don’t care what you say but we’re not stopping to ask questions.”

  They walked from Dorna station and down an avenue of flowering cherry trees that led up to it. His mother had described a half-timbered house on the corner of Breitscheidstraße. It stood there still, a modest white-painted building with a sagging roof and blue-rimmed windows that looked over a front garden. On one sill a child’s decoration, a butterfly cut from cellophane, and beyond the house a riding school with caravans. He had no inclination to knock.

  Peter spent an hour in Dorna without learning any additional clues. He walked with Teo up the high street to a cobbled square where a bar was closed. They walked into a churchyard full of the graves of Russian soldiers. They walked to the edge of a frozen and polluted lake. A woman bicycling by glanced in their direction and looked away. Even if Teo had allowed him to stop and speak with her, Peter had nothing to say. He felt no connection. He had not told Snowleg he loved her.

  “Seen enough?” said Teo.

  “I think so,” not feeling even within hailing distance of his father.

  “Let’s go.”

  The next train to Leipzig did not leave for two more hours. They got a lift with a truck. The driver was a burly silent man. Stone Age face. Broad nose. Dark leather jacket. He sat gripping the steering wheel, staring ahead, not opening his mouth.

  The road ran straight through flat country. There was nothing to distinguish one field from another. There were the fields, there were the hedges, there was the cold white snow.

  They reached the forest as darkness was falling. The driver switched on the headlights. The road was in a terrible condition, icy with large holes and rocks, and the headlights bumped up and down. The potholes jolted his spine, rolled him against the door. He was hungry and cold and his bladder was full.

  Teo rubbed his hands. He made a noise and Peter saw his lips moving in silhouette, mouthing his made-up music. He had not once asked about the Sch
reber garden and Peter was grateful for that.

  Then something lurched out of the forest and there was a crash.

  The driver switched off the engine and joined Peter and Teo by the roadside, crouching to get a better view.

  The deer lay panting on the ground in the headlights, the brains viscous and flapping from the caved-in skull and the steam aspiring into the snowflakes. Not knowing what to do the three men continued to kneel. In front of them the animal bled from its mouth, breathing very heavily, eyes open, alive.

  “There’s blood in its lung,” said Peter. He had a desperate impulse to save it. “We could put it in the back of the truck.”

  “It’s illegal,” muttered the driver, his eyes fear-coloured against the trees.

  A hoof kicked out, scraped a hieroglyph in the snow.

  “You could eat it,” suggested Teo.

  “No! It’s illegal,” said the driver. “I should report it to the police.”

  “Why don’t we leave it here?” said Teo.

  “We can’t leave it,” said Peter. As though the deer could understand him, an eye swivelled up and caught him in its glare and then a tongue came out and there was blood and gravel on it.

  In his youth, saddled on a borrowed horse, Peter had loved the ride through Leadley’s woods. The hoofs on the hill above Wardour. The blaze and crackle of fallen autumn. Then he had brushed the twigs from his eye and galloped towards the hounds’ cry. But ever since studying medicine he had lost his appetite for the kill.

  The tongue roamed over the nostrils as if it had been drinking. One antler smashed and blood forming in droplets on the velvet and quills of ice pulsating. Peter walked a few steps and turned back. All around was dark and everything was focused on the heavy breathing of the animal and the intense black look of its eye, a shimmering half-dome that gazed up at Peter while the blood continued to bubble from the corner of its mouth.

  “Do you think it saw us?” asked the driver.

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “Why?”

  He grunted. “If the deer sees you, the meat’s not so good.” He returned to his cabin and from under his seat grabbed a large jackhammer that curved back on itself like a snake. “Step aside.”

  Standing with one foot on either side of the animal’s head, he lifted the hammer and took aim. The deer lay there. Head at an angle. Not concerned with the driver, but looking at Peter, who plunged his head in his hands to blot out the sound. A little later, he grew conscious of the driver saying: “Hold the back foot.”

  They seized the animal by the feet and dragged it over the snow and tossed it into the back of the truck.

  “I’ll take it to the police,” said the executioner. He wrestled his hammer into position under the seat and then climbed up and slammed the door and drove away. Peter followed the sweep of the lights and felt the flakes falling thickly on his cheeks and on his nose, not melting but covering him, subtracting him from the world.

  He walked back along the road behind Teo. In quite a short time a car pulled up.

  “Where are you going?” asked a young man.

  “Back into the city,” said Teo.

  “Fine, I’ll take you.”

  Teo tried to make light of what they had witnessed. “Do you believe that venison is ruined if the deer sees you? A chicken tastes much better if you chase it round the yard!”

  Peter sat in silence, his eyes fixed to the back of the driver who had turned on the radio where a voice sang a sad song of nostalgia and regret and love gone missing.

  “Tell me,” said Teo after a while, his voice more sombre. “Have you ever in your life heard anything like that noise?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  The driver turned up the radio until it drowned out Teo and the sound of an animal’s deep wheezing and the thud of a hammer against living bone. He hadn’t told her that he loved her.

  “I love this song!” exclaimed Teo and started singing along.

  The driver nodded his head to the music. Trying to participate in their mood of relief.

  Teo turned round. “First girl I kissed was to this tune.”

  Peter had been trying not to react, but the music pitched him into a devouring temper. He thought, I have met the love of my life and I might never see her again. He was aware of his spine pressing into the seat and his thumbs kneading the black vinyl. The song had red eyes and ran furtively back and forth across his mind that was poised between tears and violence and taut with the effort of containing itself. It was a rat dressed up as a promise and he wanted to take it by the teeth and shake it until it stopped. It was a song that made him feel that his heart had been removed and replaced by a cold glass jar inside which he was aware of something frantic and floundering.

  He leaned forward. “Can you turn that fucking thing off?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THEY WENT BACK TO their room to wash off the blood and arrived at the theatre with minutes to spare.

  Sepp and Marcus had spent the day as guests of the director on a cultural tour of the city.

  “What did you get up to?” asked Marcus, suspicious.

  “Later,” said Peter, grateful to disappear into his cubicle and pull the curtain and concentrate on nothing more than a panel of switches.

  In the final act the 5-kilowatt lamp flashed in a confused way and started to pump like a heartbeat. Expecting the bulb to explode, he turned up the light with extreme care.

  On stage, Sepp mimicked a luckless fisherman whose predicament the throbbing light emphasised. He sat in an invisible boat holding his rod and gazed for a long time at his line. When no bite came, he plucked a make-believe paper bag from his pocket, took out an imaginary sandwich and tossed the bag into the water. At that very instant, Marcus scrunched up a sheet of paper and attached it to a wire that Peter began to roll in, the paper ball undulating across the stage as if floating.

  All at once Sepp saw a duck and moved to chase it away. Teo, blowing into his tubes, made quacking noises and Marcus imitated with his gong the clap-clap-clap of wings beating on water. Sepp swayed in the boat and the sound of waves slapped against the hull until he was still again. Peter faded the light and a second before the blackout Sepp jerked to his feet in great excitement: A FISH!

  Peter kept the stage in darkness a moment longer before raising the faulty footlight. The theatre was full as on both previous nights, but tonight, whether because of the presence of a West German diplomat or because this was the last performance or because everyone in the theatre had shared Peter’s relief that the light bulb hadn’t popped, the audience leaned forward in a mood of intense concentration. They had watched Sepp doing hardly anything – not giving himself away, not speaking a word – and they understood how appropriate it was to their situation. The mime over, they yearned to communicate their appreciation.

  The audience started to clap, but Sepp put a finger to his crinkled lips and flattened his hand. Once the theatre had fallen to a concert hush he opened the cubicle curtain and drew Peter out by the hand and crept offstage, followed by Marcus and Teo. A moment later Sepp led them back and the applause again erupted. Sepp held up his finger and repeated his gesture until the audience calmed down. He stood in the centre of the stage, holding the silence in his hands like a polished cup and then he tiptoed into the wings with his finger on his lips and this time the audience sat in absolute quietness expecting him to return, but he did not.

  The reception at the Hotel Astoria was not due to start until 9 p.m., and so on their behalf, before departing the theatre and after packing the dressing-up box, Sepp accepted the director’s invitation for a farewell drink in the theatre’s crush bar.

  The room was crowded with young people, hanging around, waiting to offer congratulations, but also to share ideas. “The Book Fair is the only chance for some of these men and women to meet different people,” the director had told Peter in the Tagesbar Bodega. “Maybe the only chance in their whole lives.” Sepp’s refusal
to let them applaud had had the effect of frustrating many in the audience, who now wanted to seek him out and thank him personally.

  Peter looked over his shoulder and found Snowleg standing behind him. She was dressed in a silver satin shirt, buttoned at the back and with a high collar, and a black leather miniskirt so short that it wrapped her almost like a belt. She wore dark red lipstick and mascara and seemed five years older. On her head was the Masaryk hat which he had left – with the scarf – in the hut.

  “Hello, Peter.”

  “Snowleg! What are you doing here?”

  “Well, you invited me.”

  “I thought you hated theatre.”

  “I’m here to see you.”

  He tried to smile. “There was nothing to see. I was hidden behind a curtain.”

  She tugged on her miniskirt. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am.” He lifted his eyes to the hat she was wearing, Anita’s hat. “I am.” But he didn’t know what had come over him.

  “When do you leave?”

  “Tonight. Listen, I didn’t have time to telephone my mother.”

  “Your mother?” She had forgotten.

  He went to get her a drink and when he came back she was talking to the young woman with marmalade hair.

  “I saw you last night,” the woman said to Peter. “I have a photographic memory for faces. I’m Renate, by the way.”

  At that moment Teo came up. Soon Teo and Renate were absorbed in conversation.

  Snowleg sipped at her beer. Nervous sips, like at the wine bar. Steeling herself to do something. “I thought you’d think I wasn’t interested if I couldn’t cancel my plans.” She spoke in broken pleasantries as if someone might be listening. “What I had to do tonight – I got out of it easily enough.”