Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  She thrust her hand into the plastic bag and pulled at a ball of pink thread. “I’ve heard the stories. I don’t know how true they are.”

  “That night,” he pressed on, “after the Stasi took her from the Astoria – what happened to her?”

  “Herr Doktor Peter, let me tell you what I saw and you make up your mind.”

  She was knitting a quilt for a church raffle as she talked. “The night you’re speaking of. Whatever this girl did, we in Leipzig were not accustomed to it. Leipzig is a small place, everyone will have told you. I heard many rumours. All I can tell you is what she told me.”

  No pause for breath, like Gus bolting his food, he said: “Did she talk about me?”

  “Of course she talked about you, Herr Doktor Peter! You were the cause of all this trouble. But I am not prepared to say one more word until you answer me this. Did Renate mention Morneweg?”

  “Morneweg?”

  “It was the name he used. He only came at Fair times.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Oh, he’s not interesting in himself, but he’s important for your story. He listened to what was going on in the rooms and we were meant to report to him.”

  “Go on.”

  She touched her leg. “Morneweg. Morneweg. How to explain Morneweg? To look at, an anonymous old man. Pot belly, hair on his fingers, like one of those men you see in business pages. But in fairness, pleasant to me. Sometimes too pleasant, Herr Docktor Peter. He hears I’m a widow and this becomes embarrassing. He was always coming up and putting his clammy hand on my waist and asking how was I? He even sent a photograph of himself and me taken in the Galerie! It got to a point when I had to say to him – over coffee just like this – ‘Herr Morneweg, this is not how it should be.’”

  “Morneweg was the doorman’s boss?”

  “He was the Leipzig ringmaster! Very senior. No-one knew how much so until the end. He had a small cubby-hole downstairs and for three or four days at Fair time you’d see him writing notes with his headphones on. Eyes shut like this. Just listening to his tape machine.

  “Now why does he do it? In his position? The fact is, he doesn’t trust anyone to hear what he hears. He makes it his business to know all the voices. Businessmen. Ambassadors. Even the sound of me praying, Herr Doktor!

  “One day I’m in the pantry and who is standing behind the plates, watching me intently? He’d heard this strange noise on his machine and he’s come to investigate.” She chuckled. “I see the disturbance in his eye and I can smell him. The girls used to complain that he smelled like something he’d shot on one of those hunts he liked so much. Like something dead.

  “I warn him that I don’t like his look: ‘Don’t underestimate the power of prayer, Herr Morneweg.’

  “Later, I go by his cubby-hole and he stops me.” She made a throat-cutting gesture with her needle. “I’m expecting a reprimand. But he wants to know if I have children. I tell him about Wilhelm. Turns out he has a son the same age. This surprises me because Morneweg – well, even in those days he must have been over seventy. He shows me a photo of his son and I suggest that the boys get together. He says that’s impossible. Suddenly I’m angry. Does he think his son too good for my Wilhelm? Then out it comes. His wife has taken their child to the West. Morneweg is so busy listening to Leipzig that he hadn’t heard the warnings in his own house.

  “Anyway, everyone knows Morneweg is the informer-in-chief. Everyone has to sit around playing cards with him, smelling his rank smell. And what can you do? Nobody in the hotel is pleased to see him, but it’s like a ship at sea. You can’t move out.” She put down her cup and tugged out another ball of wool. “You’re sure Renate didn’t tell you any of this?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that surprises me. Because it was Renate, as I understand, who was responsible for getting Morneweg so worked up about your Snjólaug. Now, I don’t know what Renate tells him, but Morneweg has fixed ideas about what kind of a girl it is who bursts into a room with a West German diplomat present. He sends her to be interrogated.”

  “But she was released, wasn’t she?”

  Frau Lube went on knitting. She might have been sitting at an execution. “To speak the truth, I forget all about her. And then one Saturday, about three or four months later, I see your girl again. She’s crossing Kochstraße with someone – a man.

  “I was pleased to see her. So I stop and say, ‘Remember me?’ She’s not startled at all. ‘Of course I do.’ And this is the strange thing, Herr Doktor Peter. I’m certain her name isn’t Snjólaug. I am certain she’s called something else, but I can’t remember what.

  “She introduced me to her fiancé and it’s no good, I can’t remember his name either, but I see her effect on him. She wasn’t beautiful, and yet she could be.” Frau Lube crossed and uncrossed her ankles, luxuriating in the sunlight.

  “And that was the last time you saw her?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Frau Lube!” cried Peter, just like his mother, a horse stamping its foot.

  “As it happens,” she said quietly, “I did see her one more time. Ten or eleven years ago, not long after the Change. I’m walking along Nordstraße when all of a sudden someone stops and touches my arm: ‘Remember me?’

  “‘Of course I do.’ We have a good laugh over that. We’re right outside the Bei Mutti and like a wicked girl she asks me in for a beer. She’s left home after an argument with her husband and she’s all upset, but happy too – and suddenly so am I! Anyway, we have a beer and I’m sure she tells me other things, I can’t recall, but I show her photos of Wilhelm. You see, he’s had his accident a few weeks before. He was a good-looking boy, but after the crash his eyes became dead. He hadn’t had his ear done, although he could cover it with his hair. Well, I tell you, she was sweet. She insisted the day would come when he’d forget he ever had a scar. At first I didn’t believe her, but she kept promising. She sounded so sure of herself, I wanted to know why – and then she tugged down her shirt. I knew what it was straight away. This one was light, not purplish at all.

  “Forgive me for going on about this, but it was a link she understood. The fact is, she had taken an interest in my son. She was curious about him, what was he like as a child, did I have more photos? I showed her others, from when we lived in Rosentalgasse, and she went on staring at Wilhelm’s face and her own face had such a tender expression, I can picture it now. As if my son was someone she loved as much as I did! I’m not saying that I didn’t get along with my daughter-in-law, but it did cross my mind that if Wilhelm had met your Snjólaug at the right time maybe he wouldn’t have had to go to Australia.

  “Anyway, we drank another beer and she told me a little about what happened when the Stasi took her. It wasn’t pretty. It never is. And reliving those difficult times made us sad. Two single women, ordering another drink.”

  “What about her husband? I thought you said she was married.”

  “Oh, she was – to a childhood sweetheart. But it was as good as over. He wasn’t the right man. The point is, she had been in a bad way and he was there for her. Maybe not someone she loved, but someone she could trust. You see, from what she was saying, she’d reached a stage when she couldn’t trust anyone. While she was in prison someone – I think she said he was from the Kulturbund organisation – went around to her apartment building, asking questions. Was she with someone, who were her friends, had she a job, a car? – all the questions someone might ask if they wanted to marry you!

  “And that’s not the whole of it. The neighbours started telling stories. Dreadful stories that had been planted, Herr Doktor Peter. She tried her best to ignore them, but then something happened that she couldn’t ignore. No, don’t ask what, she didn’t say, but I can tell you whatever the Stasi did, it revolted her. She wouldn’t talk about it, not even after two beers in the Bei Mutti. On top of everything, she had just discovered that she was pregnant.

  “We have another drink. This time she orders a
vodka. It reminds her of life before marriage. Once she gets married, everything happens so fast. She has two children and no money and in the exhaustion of getting by she hasn’t had a moment to think about what she’s done. I tell you, regrets for that sort of thing only happen when your children leave home. Or when you meet someone who reminds you of how life might have been.

  “She picks up Wilhelm’s photo again and her eyes shine and it’s obvious to me that she hasn’t been living, she’s been surviving. Maybe it’s because of the vodka, she starts to talk more freely. It seems to me she doesn’t feel understood. I have the impression that she feels inadequate to her husband’s love – because how can you blame the lover? Her husband is blameless. He’s good with the children, adores her. And though she doesn’t love him she does feel sorry for him. As a woman it’s easy to have pity for the things that depend on you. The things sucking the life out of you. Even if you want to, you can’t pluck them off your arm because you can’t bear the sight of that broken face as you chuck them away. That’s how it was with her. She told me he’d implored so much that there behind the fence, in the hut with her hands on the sill, her clothes still on, looking at the pear tree . . . She told me these details! And that’s why, when she found out she was going to have a baby, she agreed to marry him – because she thought he would make a certain aspect of her life so much easier. Until the Wall came down, she lost herself in that.

  “But now she doesn’t know which way to turn. He’s drinking his life away. If she challenges him, he tells her that he drinks because he feels she doesn’t love him. What do you say to that? What do you do when your husband wets your bed? Or halfway through dinner there’s a clunk and his head’s in the plate? If someone’s going to pass out in their soup night after night some damage has been done. When he promises to kill himself if you leave him, you start to resent. And that’s what’s happened. He’s sent her a long and suicidal song on a cassette saying that unless she goes back he will kill himself. I ask what she’s going to do and she says with a sense of doom: ‘Go back.’ She’s decided that she wants to blow on the embers and save her marriage.

  “Poor girl, all I can do is put my arm around her. She finishes her drink and looks at her watch and mutters that she has to catch a train. We say goodbye in the street and that’s the last time I saw her. As I say, I can’t tell you where she’s living, whether she’s still married or even what her name is. But I’ll always remember the look in her eyes when I showed her my photos of Wilhelm.”

  The oven bell shrilled from inside. “My only alarm,” and Frau Lube hastily tucked away the pink woolly rectangle and stood up. Time to get ready for the midday service. Time to do her face. She checked her legs. “No change yet,” wrinkling her nose.

  “It’ll be a few days before you notice the difference.”

  She hobbled before him into the hallway. “Whoever she now is . . .” She was talking over her shoulder with a crescendo of purpose, coming to the end of a hymn. “Trust me. Everything will turn out the way God intends it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  PETER LIMPED TO THE S-Bahn, shaken by the force of his longing. The need to find, even to set eyes on Snowleg, even if she was today happily married, tore away at him. How Snowleg came to be married to a man she didn’t love was not something he could bear to dwell on.

  He walked through Grünau uncertain of his destination: red and green painted buildings, a children’s playground with a capsized slide, a boy extracting a chip of gravel from the wheel of his skateboard. He couldn’t recall, not since he became a consultant, when an afternoon stretched empty ahead of him like this. No Milo to entertain. No dog. No mobile or bleeper to reel him in. And as he made his way between tower-blocks coloured like Frau Lube’s balls of wool, he tried to relish the idea of being out of touch. He didn’t want to be at Corinna’s beck and call, though he loved her. Or stalked by Angelika, Nadine, Frieda. But Frau Lube’s words had stranded him. Take away his medical context, his lab coat, Milo, Gus – and what remained? A 40-year-old man picking his bruised path through a never-ending housing estate on a too-short cane.

  As he reached the S-Bahn, he thought of a dream told him by the violinist in Hamburg. Of Brahms walking through a landscape and all his used notes trailing behind him like acolytes. Pursued by his own Eumenides, Peter was relieved to have left Berlin and his scorching other life. In Leipzig, maybe he could untie the little black notes of his nightmare and pick up his parallel dream.

  He noticed that his injuries had adapted him more neatly to Frau Weschke’s cane, which tapped the steps down into the station with a spirit of its own. Under the impulse of his longing, he decided to search for the boarding house where Pantomimosa had stayed. It was an absurd idea, one he would have smiled at in a patient, but by the simple procedure of stepping again into that house – its flavour of Toast Hawaii, its lignite bricks, its message in a bottled aubergine from God – he hoped to rediscover his sense of proportion, of what was sacred.

  Erich-Ferl-Straße, when he managed to locate it, was now Dresdener Straße. The street named after a person had had character. This one did not. He spent 20 minutes wandering stiffly up the pavement and back on himself. Past the sides and backsides of old buildings. Boarded-up windows. Stained brown bricks. He couldn’t find the house.

  His turmoil dragged him to the park where he had walked on his first night in Leipzig. An elderly couple sat on a bench – the man in a flat cap, the woman in a baggy dark sweater – feeding in silence from a packet of crisps. On the edge of the park, in mist that the sun had failed to burn off, a few black trees stood out as if splashed there by the same artist who had sprayed “Venom” across the Astoria’s facade.

  The river, swollen by snowmelt, stampeded past him and hurried into a reed-filled gully. He watched a trout flick between chutes of white foam and then tail back into the fast current and lie there, a shadow again.

  On the bank was a willow tree and its branches reaching into the stream reminded him of hair over a girl’s shoulder. He pictured the young Frau Weschke creeping up on her river crabs and heard a murmur from the water: “Leipzig is a great city, Herr Doktor.”

  Acceptance comes in stages. That’s what he told his patients. You can only face up to what you can absorb. At 6 p.m. he returned to his lodgings holding a bottle of whisky.

  Frau Hase met him in the corridor. She came towards him desperate, holding her nose up like a river rat above the water. “You have a guest. I put her in the front room. I think it’s her!”

  A woman sat on the sofa reading an old magazine. Long after her face had become a blank, he would remember the green cocktail dress. Spaghetti-straps. Knee length. A virulent insect colour.

  Her gaze wandered down the cane. “What happened to you?”

  “A run-in with the jeunesse dorée of Leipzig.”

  “I wonder if it’s the same gang who murdered the Turk?”

  “I don’t think these ones had murder on their mind. Just robbery and humiliation.”

  “Sounds sexy,” in a lipsticked voice.

  “Not really. They offered me a vision of the city I won’t forget in a hurry.”

  “A vision of what?”

  At that moment the landlady poked her head into the room and looked eagerly at Peter. “I forgot to ask. Will you be dining in?”

  “No, thank you, Frau Hase.”

  Her eyes shifted to the sofa. Draped over the leather arm were the garments he had ordered. That Renate had in mind for Snowleg. “Oh, and I’ve put your shirt through the wash, Herr Doktor.”

  “That’s most kind of you,” and he suggested to Renate that they go to his room.

  Peter hung the clothes in the lavender-scented wardrobe while Renate sat at the table and flicked through the catalogue he had left on it. “If I sell a thousand Marks worth, I qualify to win a cruise abroad.” The condition was unspoken. She would talk once he had spent this amount.

  He put down the whisky on the table and drew up the othe
r chair. Gamefully, he ordered a Parisienne Nights dress in stretch lace (“perfect for any after 5 event”). Two pairs of black Rip-Off shorts. Moo trousers in “trendy rawhide cowprint” . . . His eyes flew more and more rapidly across the pages and he stopped reading the descriptions. He had always been indifferent to clothes.

  She calculated what he owed. “Eleven hundred and twenty Marks!”

  “I don’t have that, at least not in cash.”

  “Herr Doktor – did I hear her call you Herr Doktor? – I will take a cheque.”

  He limped over to his suitcase and took out his chequebook. Thank goodness he hadn’t unpacked it.

  Her dress gave a cellophane rustle as he wrote out the amount. He wondered who he could possibly give these clothes to. Nadine? Angelika? Frieda? Corinna? If she could fit into them, it might improve Rosalind’s chances beyond recognition.

  She folded his cheque into her bag. “My job keeps this active,” tapping her head, “that’s the main thing. When I first started, you Wessis tried to stop me. ‘Go ahead, offer them new jeans. You’ll find they have no ass to put in them.’ But what do Wessis know about ass?” She leaned forward. Her face had a glossy brightness. “Can I tell you something, Herr Doktor? Leipzig was a passionate town.”

  He nodded.

  She smiled and pinched off her earring and touched her ear lobe as if it was sore. “There was great understanding between people. And, yes, sometimes this understanding created passions which were extremely dangerous.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.” Had she been drinking?

  The cane creaked as she rotated in her chair, the light falling on her full and freckled cleavage. “Of course, today we’re not supposed to remember how it was. There are those – I hope you’re not one of them! – who would prefer us to remember nothing.”

  He endured her stare. She was enjoying her teasing. The effect and sound of her words. She knew what he wanted and she was going to make him wait.

  “I may have been one of those,” with a doctor’s sage nod. “But no longer.”