I will fold myself so small you will hardly recognise me. I can’t spend one more night in this country.
A slow flush crept over his face and he felt himself unstitching and the threads coming out of him. Little could he have dreamed that 19 years after saying No he would be looking for her again. Or that his way of saying No would have sent her spinning out into the universe irretrievably, to where not even the Stasi could find her. He had propelled her into oblivion by his cowardice and his father was dead.
“What saw you there?
Sir, I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.
Ah, traitor unto me.”
“What did you say?” The girl looked over her shoulder. “Were you talking to me?”
“No, I was talking to King Arthur.”
“You were what?” She threw him a sympathetic expression and turned back.
He inhaled again, the smoke fuming into his lungs and unpacking something. A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man once. That was the difference between Sir Bedevere and Arthur. He felt a choking and his eyes smarted, peppery with pain. He couldn’t see the couple at the next table. Nor the light from the lamp, his father’s photograph, his letters to Snowleg. All he could hear was the jungle static of frogs and parakeets and crickets. He was standing on a chalk cliff. A pilot in the cockpit of a blazing bomber. Spiralling into a rainforest. Branches and thorns slashed at his face. He breathed in. The air was thick with smoke. His ache kicked out and he felt a pain scrabbling up the wall of his stomach and falling back into its pit and rising again.
“Are you all right, sir?” The waiter leaned over him.
“I’m fine, absolutely fine.”
The waiter lifted the bottle to pour more, but his life was empty.
What time was it? Looking in his pocket for his watch, he touched the key to the Schreber garden and its weight was heavier than a body. His father’s watch said 7.30 p.m. He hadn’t realised how much he had depended on finding him. On finding both of them.
He paid the exorbitant bill and fled with the folders. He had eaten nothing all day and he fed on his footsteps, walking faster and faster. Not since the reunion at the Garrick had he been so drunk.
Somehow he crossed Dittrichring in the direction of the Pension Neptune, and into the park. He followed a path through the trees to the river. Soon he was stumbling beside the bank. The river rising and a low linen moon catching ridges of foam and black serpents of water coiling.
A noise like applause rose from below, and he had the impression that people were clapping him. He looked down, his attention caught by a movement on a root exposed by the fast gargling water. And there floated to the surface, above the cheering and drumming of heels, Milo’s excited voice: Daddy, Daddy, have you seen Frau Weschke? She promised to catch me a river crab.
Could that be a river crab clinging to the tree root? No, it was absurd. Again it moved, like a duster flicked on the water. He had no idea what river crabs looked like – whether they had a season, whether they still existed even. Milo’s drawing was all he knew. But how hard could it be to catch one? The river must be teeming with them. To catch a river crab for his son seemed to Peter the absolute grail. He could picture Milo’s delight. Yes, things were going to change.
He took off his shoes and socks, laid the envelope beside them, and slithered down the soft bank. It went very quiet after his legs hit the water. The cold took away his breath and the river rapidly filled his trouser legs. As stealthily as he was able, he inched towards the root.
You can only catch them from the back.
He saw a fleck of moonlight on a pearly shell and a fluttery movement – the crab manicuring itself. He hadn’t frightened it away! With massive care, he stretched out his fingers: 6 inches. Remain unseen for only 6 more inches . . . He took a furtive breath and leaned forward, but even as he pushed out his hand he could see the texture was wrong.
The water hugged his knees. He threw the crisp packet back into the stream and clambered onto the bank.
He was careful not to make a sound as he stepped into the hall. But his shoe squelched on the first step of the staircase. A door cracked open and a shaft of light impaled him.
“Herr Doktor?” From behind the neon blade, Frau Hase’s anxious voice. “Herr Doktor Hithersay, is that you?” She stood with her mouth open a little. “You’re trembling.” Peter caught sight of the calamity in the hall mirror and mumbled something and staggered on up the stairs.
He stood under the hot shower until he was warm again. Afterwards, he sat naked for a long while on the edge of the bath, looking out at the street and the sky, his heart going slop slop slop in his hollow body like someone beating a path towards him.
PART VII
Milsen, 2002
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
SEVEN KILOMETRES FROM THE Czech border, a car drives into the courtyard of an old stone-built house. A woman gets out and collects her suitcase from the boot. The handwritten label on the handle reads: “Metzel, Milsen.”
In the middle of the courtyard was a water-pump. She paused beside it to exchange her grip, breathing in the still, early-morning air. She had never been gone so long. Her time in England had given her detachment. She looked up at the ancient house – the stork’s nest in the chimney, the sun reflecting on the skylight of the brick dovecote, the neighbour’s beehives – with the small shock of experiencing something both intimate and foreign, like the smell of her daughter’s breath. She picked up the suitcase. “Katya!” she called once inside. “Katya!”
Her daughter, alerted by the whippet’s barking, bounded down the wide, imposing staircase in a tracksuit and trainers
“How was London?” embracing her.
“Let me tell you over a cup of tea.”
Katya pulled a face. “I’m trying to get in a run before Sören arrives.” He was picking her up at noon, she explained excitedly, and taking her to a rock concert in Dresden.
They went into the kitchen, where Katya indulged her mother by sitting down rather primly to drink a glass of water.
“So, how did it go?”
“I sold all but two,” filling the kettle.
“Mutti, fantastic!”
“Better than I expected.” She switched on the kettle, chatting on about the opening night, the review in The Times, her days in England. She wanted to tell Katya that she had fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit Hampstead Heath and the ravens in the Tower of London, but her daughter was elsewhere. “Listen, go for your run.”
“Catch up later,” said Katya, leaping to her feet and giving her mother another hug. “I’m sad for you about Oma” – and to the whippet: “You talk to Mutti.”
She watched Katya walk from the kitchen – the pronounced way she had of springing on her heels – and felt rueful. I won’t get you back, she thought, till I’m a grandmother.
Katya stopped at the door. “By the way,” beginning – before she corrected herself – to speak in the tone in which she had addressed the dog, “a doctor rang from the city. He said he would ring again and talk to you about Oma’s ashes. As a matter of fact, he’s got the ashes himself. Does that make sense?”
“Did he leave a number?”
“No, but I said you’d be back this morning. If Sören arrives, I’ll be ready in an hour.”
She heard the door slam and thought, See you in ten years.
The number for the Lion’s Manor was pinned to the cork board. She telephoned Sister Corinna. Yes, Frau Weschke’s very special doctor had himself taken the ashes to Leipzig. His intention was to deliver these in person, together with a box containing her grandmother’s things and a letter.
“I didn’t mean you to go to this trouble.”
“It’s not a trouble,” Sister Corinna said quickly. “The doctor needed to be in Leipzig anyway.”
Grateful to be spared the journey to Berlin, she made a pot of tea. Glancing over the kitchen for a cup, she noticed Katya’s efforts to tidy up and was moved, but
it turned out to be a job unfinished. In the sink was a thick wool sweater that smelled of rain-soaked sheep. There was a pile of not very well washed plates and on the table in an untidy heap the mail of the past fortnight. Some circulars. Two bills. A note from Stefan to say that he would bring Kristjan back on Friday. An envelope with a Berlin postmark.
Her heart jumped. She couldn’t help it – whenever she saw a letter with handwriting she didn’t recognise, the superstition seized her that the author was a previous owner of the house who was writing to claim it back. Abandoning her quest for a teacup, she found a knife, butter still on the blade.
She breathed out. A letter of condolence. She wondered why there weren’t more, before reminding herself that Oma had outlived everyone, even her century, her country too. “It’s sad what I’m telling you, but true,” had been her words in the ambulance that took them to Berlin. “In my long life I have seen Germany – my Germany – defeated, divided, reunited, vanish.” There was no-one alive to mourn her. Save for Bruno, who would never mourn anybody – and the author of this letter.
“I only knew her for a short while . . .”
She read the past tense and let out a groan. It was different to be told something over the telephone than to see the cold dead fact of it in writing.
“. . . indeed, my son had come to think of her as his own grandmother.”
Her eyes flicked to the top of the page and when she saw the address she couldn’t help thinking of the words of another doctor in another hospital where her grandmother had been admitted when she broke her leg. “There’s little chance she’ll get out of here,” warned the solemn little man with a pointed chin.
And yet two months later there was a knock. Anne-Katrin from the corner shop. “Telephone!” In his wheedling voice she recognised the pointed chin. “Please collect her. She’s walking like an athlete.” And he conjured the spectacle of a fierce, petite old lady tapping her way along the crushed-marble corridor – “driving us crazy with her cane”.
She went on reading, the memory returning of the afternoon she travelled to Dösen to fetch her grandmother. The heated look. The gruff voice: “What on earth’s happened to you?” The pressure of those old palms on her face. As if she was able to tell by the simple gesture of squeezing her granddaughter’s cheek all that had taken place while she lay there, her leg in plaster.
She turned over the page and saw the signature. Her free hand went up to her eyes. She shook her head. It must be a different doctor.
Twenty minutes later, he telephoned. “Frau Metzel?”
“Yes.”
“Thank goodness.” He introduced himself and she recognised the voice. “Did your daughter pass on my message?” He was being polite. He sounded tired, disheartened.
“Yes.” She waited for him to go on, to say something more. The last time she had heard him speak – on Morneweg’s tape recorder – he was talking about swans.
In his English-accented German he asked for directions to her house.
She must have given them because she heard herself saying: “It’s five minutes by car – or half an hour if you walk . . .”
“When would be convenient?”
“Any time. I’m here all day.” What can I say to keep him on the line? – but in the background his train was announced, he had to go.
She put down the receiver and spread her hands on either side of the letter. She leaned forward in order to reread the signature and when she realised with a spasm of understanding that there was no mistake her breath snorted out as if she were laughing. A successful doctor, then. She wasn’t surprised. He had known that there was nothing wrong with her throat.
Once more she read his name and her eyes moved down her stomach to her legs. She went over to the sink and picked up a glass. She peered at it for dirt and filled it from the cold tap and drank.
Why are you coming? I can understand why then, she thought, but why now?
In two hours’ time a dead man was going to walk into this house and she didn’t know what he wanted, what she was going to say to him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
PETER WAS ANXIOUS TO look his best for Frau Weschke’s granddaughter, but apart from his twill overcoat and the shirt Frau Hase had washed, and which smelled of something like Dettol, he realised he had nothing to wear.
Glumly, he riffled through Renate’s “hot new season” clothes, pulling out, one after another, a pair of black Rip-Off shorts, a pair of brown cowboy trousers stamped to resemble cow-hide, and a “J’adore Capri” shirt in the piercing green of Renate’s dress. With a sense of deepening hostility he held them up against his body and it seemed he was being invited to try on pains of different colours. All at once he thought of the trousers that had been left in his room.
“But I haven’t washed them,” wailed Frau Hase. “Besides, they might not fit. Herr Mehring was a little smaller . . . Wait, I will fetch them and you will see.”
Back in his room he tried them on. He had woken with a savage hangover and tiptoed across the floor in order to keep the pain at bay. At the same time he felt more stable and moderate in his thoughts than in weeks. Khaki corduroys, Herr Mehring’s trousers smelled of cologne and pinched at the waist – but they would do.
When he had finished packing, Peter left Renate’s clothes on the bed and wrote a note to Frau Hase to say that these were for her with his very best wishes and more lingerie was to come. Ten minutes later he carried his suitcase downstairs and settled the bill. “I will mail these back to you.”
Frau Hase glanced with grave disdain from his trousers to the walking stick that seemed to have become the centre of his gravity. “Oh, whenever,” in a strained voice. Then blurted out: “Herr Doktor, I am so sorry you didn’t find your friend.” She spoke as if she personally was to blame. “Will you be coming back?”
“No,” and buttoned up his coat. He had been through the mill, the seven storeys of hell. He wanted to get out of Leipzig.
The horizon glowed pink through the deer-heads of blown trees. The warm wind had melted the snow from the branches and beside the railway tracks scales of watery skin glittered in puddles in the first sun. Alone in his compartment, Peter didn’t shift his gaze from the window until an attendant with a trolley pulled open the door. He bought two bottles of mineral water and drank them one after the other as the train hurtled through the morning landscape. His head throbbed so violently that, to his relief, he no longer heard the lather and scratch of his memory. With every kilometre that the train put between him and Leipzig, Snowleg sank away from him until it seemed that he had left her safely behind. Snowleg, and the unbearable memory of his last sight of her.
The train crashed through a forest. Rank after rank of sea-green pine. The sun hurling black shafts through the mist into the dew-frosted grass. The trees not trees, but a king’s company of pikes and halberds and lances, awaiting the order to advance. He settled back into his seat and nursed his queasy head. He wouldn’t ever know the end of the story. He would discharge his undertaking to the old lady and go home, cultivate his garden, behave better.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
NOT UNTIL SHE CAME into the bedroom did she remember: Katya was jogging. Bed unmade. Lights on. Curtains drawn. The place was a mess. A litter of lipsticks, bottles and creams all over the chest of drawers and on the floor clothes everywhere in dark piles.
The confusion startled her. Normally, she shut the door on Katya’s disarray, but this time she started to pick things up off the carpet. An application to university. A dry-cleaning bag. Nailpolish remover. She took stock of the dust, the unpaired socks, the empty teacups – so this was where they were – and felt a charge of protectiveness for her daughter.
She threw open the curtains and then the windows. She changed the sheets on the bed, put all the black clothes into a laundry basket for Katya to sort. And ended up sorting them herself.
Cleaning didn’t require deliberation or discipline or the use of too many faculties. Cleaning
took her back to herself. Back to her own days and months of drudgery after Katya was born. It gave her an oddly comforting feeling to think that anyone from that time who saw her dealing into separate heaps the black tube skirts, turtlenecks, Lycra shirts, would have to believe that her world had stood still.
Setting the room in order, she started to ward off the shock of recognition at Peter’s voice. She pulled the bed away from the wall and worked her way around and under it with the vacuum cleaner. So her grandmother had ended her days in his care! She tried not to make sense of the information. But her efforts to keep it at bay were futile. She would spend the morning working alongside the coincidence, adjusting to it, until he arrived.
I thought it was dead and buried, she told herself. And now you’re coming back.
She knelt beside the bed and hunted in the dust and the biscuit crumbs and the tiny balls of tissue paper. The room had a distinct smell – their daughter’s smell.
“Afterwards – what happened to you afterwards?” Isn’t that the first question Peter would ask? And she thought of her grandmother. “Men are so transparent,” Oma used to say. “Men are such cowards. Very few try to taste courage. For women it’s the opposite.”
She switched off the cleaner. The room was neat at last, but she looked around it with apprehension. If only she could untangle her half-memories as easily as her daughter’s clothes. What would Katya’s room have been like if she had grown up with Peter, a doctor in the West? Would she have run in the fields?
The sun poured in through the six-paned window. Outside, a tractor ploughing the field and the distant figure of Katya picking her methodical and insistent way across the skyline. Did he even suspect he had a daughter?
She touched her short blonde-streaked hair, her face. With the same fingers, she tugged her jersey over the belt accentuating the fullness now of her body. This was the person she had become. But the younger woman, what about her?
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