Snowleg

Table of Contents

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Epub ISBN: 9781407073699

Version 1.0

  

Published by Vintage 2005

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Copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare 2004

Nicholas Shakespeare has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not byway of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

The Harvill Press

Vintage

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is available from the British Library

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Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of
The Vision of Elena Silves,
winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards;
The High Flyer
, for which he was nominated as one of
Granta
's Best of Young British Novelists, and
The Dancer Upstairs
, selected by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997 and adapted for the film of the same title directed by John Malkovich. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.

ALSO BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

To Niko and Brit

My memory of your face

Prevents my seeing you

R
UMI

On that night without sequel

You realised you were a coward

B
ORGES
,
Snorri Sturluson

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
HIS IS A WORK
of fiction and not one of the characters is a real person. Many of the events described did take place. I am grateful to Katja Lange-Müller, Johanna Bartl, Bernhard Robben, Katharina Narbutovic, Bettina Schröder, Elmar Gehlen, Reinhard Jirgl, Ulrike Poppe, Sabine Moegelin, Gesine Udewald, Hans-Jürgen Hilfrich, Stefan Richter, Edda Fensch, Frank Berberich, Corinna Ziegler, Rachael Rose, Ulli Janetzki, Michael Hofmann, Matthew Kidd, Simon Cole, Tim Blackburn, Richard Lowe, Daniel Johnson, Jo-Ann Johnson, Patrick Hanly, Patricia Linders, Sharon Mar, Gillon Aitken, Clare Alexander; and most of all to Christopher MacLehose and Gillian Johnson. I am glad to pay tribute to
The Other Germans
:
Report from an East German town
(Pantheon, New York, 1970), by Hans Axel Holm. My thanks too to the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin and to the Künstlerhaus Schloß Wiepersdorf, where parts of this novel were written.

PROLOGUE

Leipzig, March 1983

T
HE SCREECHING OF A
blackbird, flying through the icy branches above the hut, tore the peace.

Early Sunday morning and the snowflakes tumbling again over the deserted gardens. In the middle of this grey city, the snow brightened everything. The narrow allotments were flannelled with it, the pruned pear trees glittered with it, the garden ornaments looked holy with it. Only the gnome on its back seemed out of place, the flakes drifting into its wide-open mouth and the wire poking from its feet.

Two men, one leading an Alsatian, tramped in haste towards the hut. They were dressed the same, in kidney-coloured jackets and “Present 20” trousers. The cold had reddened their ears and noses. The dog-handler was about twenty-five, ginger-haired, with insolent, protruding eyes. His younger companion was a foot taller, more educated-looking, and held up a bespoke case made of black plastic.

They didn't speak, picked their way with care. A wildcat frost had hardened Saturday's snow and the puddles had refrozen with points on them that pricked into the men's bootsoles. Even the sure-footed Alsatian found walking treacherous, and slithered over the frosted furrows with its nose low and the day in its eyes sparkling cold and bright from the iced-over pools.

The man with the case noticed the footprints first. “Kresse, look,” pointing to the bottom of the wooden gate.

The dog-handler stared in fury at the two sets of tracks, while his hound, distracted, criss-crossed the path, wanting to go the other way.

Again the blackbird. In the silence that followed Uwe heard Kresse humming to himself. Kresse always hummed, he noticed, at moments when he himself would have sworn like a sailor. Anyone approaching might have supposed Kresse happy until they saw those eyes. They seemed to share the property of one of Uwe's chemicals at the Runde Ecke. An acid that burned on contact.

“Come on, boss!” With a gesture of impatience, Kresse drew his pistol from his holster and unlatched the gate, and together they followed the footprints coming towards them all the way to the hut.

It had a lime-green door. The gnome that had guarded it lay upturned on the path. Something about the ornament attracted the Alsatian, which started whining at full stretch of the lead, but Kresse, ignoring it, nodded curtly to the gnome as to a superior, and kicked open the door. He erupted inside with the frustrated energy of a man who had badly wanted to arrest two young people lying in bed.

A silverfish streaked across the matting and under an open fridge.

Kresse opened his mouth, revealing a gap at the side of his teeth. “Shit,” and dropped the pistol to his side. “They've gone, boss.”

Thank goodness, poor bastards, Uwe thought. Standing in the dark behind the angry wrecker, he breathed in. The hut was musky from passion and squirrels, but his nostrils picked out other scents. Damp firewood. Burnt dust from a heater. Incense from a cone.

His glance darted about the room, his eyes adjusting, and he saw under the low window an unmade bed. Whoever had spent the night here had departed in a hurry. A Formica table and three white garden chairs. Uwe clacked open his case on the table and drew from their tight velvet lair two glass jars of the sort used for storing honey. He unscrewed the lids.

Something moved across the floor and Kresse stamped on it. He advanced on the bed like a miner towards the rubble his explosion has detonated. His pace was too slow for his dog. The Alsatian lunged from his grasp and made a dash for the thin mattress. It leaped around, barking, then gave a confused yelp and pawed at the sheets, leaving muddy marks, and Uwe knew that it was smelling one scent and then another and that the scents were competing.

“Get that dog off!” Uwe said sharply, and once the Alsatian had been ordered to the floor, he knelt beside the bed. His gloved hands separated blanket from sheet and soon found what they were looking for. He walked to the table and rubbed his fingers until the hairs dropped into their respective jars. The girl's pubic hair was dark.

Another stamp shook the hut. Kresse dragging the Alsatian from the bed had caught his boot on something. On the worn matting, a woman's cerise silk shirt.

Uwe moved swiftly to retrieve it – old-fashioned and fragile, oriental dragons stitched into the fabric. He spread the shirt on the table and with a pair of tweezers laid a strip of yellow felt, about 4 inches square, on the armpit. He covered the felt with a sheet of foil and onto the foil he pressed one of the lead weights that he carried in his case.