In slightly more time than Frau Metzel had estimated, they reached Dorna.
“Where do you want to go?” said Katya.
“Over there. Could you drop me by the church?”
“Do you want us to wait?”
“No, I’ll walk back.”
“Are you sure?” said Sören.
“Yes, I’m sure. Without the suitcase I’ll be fine.”
“We can run you home,” said Katya.
“It’s very kind. But I’d like to do some thinking,” and tried to climb out, but the door was locked from outside as though childproofed and she had to come round and open it.
“Remember your stick,” said Katya. She handed it to him, her arm exuding impatience and the satirical officiousness of the young when they are playing parent to the parent.
He felt impelled to kiss her on the forehead and she smiled as if it was her due. As if his kiss was part of the bounty of people’s affection for her. She was in love. She had a boyfriend who loved her. Everyone wanted to kiss her. Why wouldn’t he?
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
FEELING AN OBJECT TUCKED into one of the sleeves, she removed the Karlovy Vary mug and then lifted the muskrat coat from the box. The hem needed stitching, but Katya might like the coat. She smoothed out the arms and heard, Once is never enough.
She carried the plastic container with both hands to the garden and poured the contents over the hollyhocks. Shadow came running, but after a desultory sniff turned away.
Her grandmother had known. “An extraordinary thing, but there’s a doctor here who has looked after me so sweetly and so kindly that if I could, I would commend him to you. In fact, dearest Snjólaug, I may send him with my ashes.” She had discovered who Peter was and the old woman’s last act on earth was to send him to her.
Out of habit and a sense that she needed to be among her tools she left Frau Weschke’s letter on the table and walked along the brick path to her studio. Even as she put out a hand to open the door, she felt that something was not right. When she picked up a pencil it was heavy and lifeless and blunt. She began to draw, but she knew without having to try that nothing was going to come of it.
The sound of a bee blundering against the skylight made her get up from her desk. Listless, she returned to the kitchen and started to wipe the top of one of the jars on the sill. The jar had leaked and there were twigs and flies beached in the honey. As she rubbed the stickiness from the glass she could hear her daughter saying tartly, “Nice present, Mutti!”
No. On his own, or not at all.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THE CHURCH WAS PARTLY camouflaged by oaks, a building of unhealthy red brick the colour of a drinker’s face. Of someone who had left their secrets in half-bottles under cushions and beds.
He searched among the older tombstones. They lay in short grass, slabs of black marble with gold lettering and snowdrops rubber-banded into jars. He didn’t suppose it was a deliberate policy of the gardener, more like inattention, that the memorials of the Russian soldiers were overgrown. These were arranged in stiff ranks down the slope, cracked obelisks 2 feet high and each with a red star and a relief of once-gold bays. Some of the obelisks had names, others not. Most had died in 1945 and 1946.
He found his father’s grave on the lower level: a perfunctory slab, about a foot square.
“Peter Brendel 1938–64”.
The concrete was spattered with bird-droppings and on the ground before it was a burnt-looking circle of grass as if a rainbow had come and gone and all that was left was a scorchmark in the soil.
Peter found it hard to line up an emotion with the event. To feel it fully, he thought, I’ll have to come back. He dropped to his knees and ran his fingertips over the chapped surface, outlining the indented letters and figures. The barrenness distressed him. No RIP. No biblical text. He twisted around for something to put on the grave.
In quite a short time he had collected a larch cone, a sprig of conifer needles, some berries and feathers. I will write to my mother, he thought. I will give her a report on this place. But what I would really like, after I’ve created a bouquet of feathers and leaves, is a photograph to send her. Something she can have which will resolve her obscure grief. Something which says: The man who was the father of my child is here in some way united with his son.
And there came back to him the image, under a fridge magnet, of a lawn in winter. Frau Metzel – that perfectly nice, rather sad woman – she had a camera, a Polaroid.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
SHE PARKED WHERE THE Trabi had left him an hour before.
“Don’t get out,” he said. “It will only take a second.” At the house he had handed back the cane with the gesture of a man checking in his lance and breastplate, a man who had travelled as far as he could go.
“No, I want to come with you.”
She walked in with him. The fragile bouquet was where he had left it. He knelt, thinking: This is it. I’ve failed in every other respect this weekend, but at least I am here. He arranged the bouquet on the slab and with his finger sketched an X on the concrete in the way that as a schoolboy he used to finish a Sunday letter home. “I’ll just do this and then we can go.”
She saw him fumbling with the camera. “Would you like me to take it?”
“Would you – since you’re here – do me a terrific kindness? Could you take a photograph of me actually standing by the stone?”
He faced her. He was writing the letter in his head. Dearest Mummy and Dad and Ros, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I had various reasons for coming to Leipzig, but the most important was to see where my father is buried. As you always suspected, Mummy, he didn’t make it to old bones. He was shot trying to escape (I would have been about three at the time). I’m going to make the grave cleaner and tidier –
“Look up.”
He straightened his back. He took her honey out of his pocket and held it in front of him.
She was four, five paces away. She lifted the Polaroid to her eye. But the photographer, not the image, was taking shape before him. A hatch was lifting and he felt fresh air pouring in and down, drenching him, and all his past and present confusion, guilt, misery, loneliness, flooding out. Snowleg. But he cannot speak. He cannot move.
He sees her walk towards him.
She takes his arm. “Peter.”
Snowleg Page 39
