Snowleg (15 page)

“My grandmother took the lead. She demanded a meeting.”

They met at the medical school. Her father and grandmother, the head of her faculty and a man from the university, Sontowski. When they sat down she noticed a sheet of yellow paper in front of Sontowski, with a short written evaluation and then her marks and something else that she couldn't figure out.

Immediately, Sontowski started to pick her to pieces. “If you have marks as bad as these no wonder you can't continue at university.”

She was paralysed. “I told myself: He has the wrong piece of paper. He thinks I'm someone else.”

But he carried on, becoming more personal. “Someone as stupid as you, they shouldn't want to be a psychiatrist.”

“I thought, This isn't me. They must have made a mistake. I haven't done anything against them.”

The head of faculty seemed in accordance with Sontowski, staring at her and nodding at what he was saying. Then he spoke, and what he said astonished her. He had always gone out of his way to congratulate Snowleg on her work, but he talked in front of her as if he was being openly critical in a constructive way.

“She is a pleasant girl. That may be her damnation. She has this enormous gift of relating musically to every situation, but she never relates to anything else. Now I've nothing against harmony, but this ability to harmonise very rarely goes with supreme gifts. Certainly not in the line of work she wishes to pursue.”

Her father looked ready to explode, but her grandmother erupted first. “Stop this, just stop it!”

“Stop what?” said Sontowski, bewildered.

“You know as well as we do that she's perfectly qualified. Don't do this to her.”

At this, her father burst out: “Could you tell me – is it true my daughter is being rejected because of her brother?”

Sontowski didn't answer, talking in empty phrases. “Well, this is not a matter to be discussed here. We're not an inquisition. You should be grateful to the German Democratic Republic because we are able to offer you employment. We've just received the result of the clearing talks. A position has come free.” He studied his yellow piece of paper. “The university switchboard requires a telephone operator.” He gave her a hideous smile. “You'll still be at the university.”

For the second time her grandmother spoke. “No. Never. Never in my life. She's not going to be a telephone operator. She wants to be a psychiatrist.”

“Then you're rejecting the only chance she's probably ever going to get to be employed.”

Her father was still puzzling it out. “Her brother is leaving for West Germany and you make her responsible?”

Sontowski stared at her. “You'll have to have a voice test. Why not take the chance I'm offering you?” He told them to go outside, think it over.

“You haven't done anything and they treat you like this,” said her father bitterly. He resented Bruno for having ruined her career, her future. For causing these strains in their family.

She was too numb to think properly. She was scared. She couldn't sort out what she had just heard. She was starting to believe she really was as stupid as they were saying. And now this information about Bruno!

Sontowski opened the door. What had she decided? Her father and grandmother looked at her. She could see it in their faces. They didn't know what to say.

“Perhaps you're right,” she said. “Perhaps I should be a telephone operator.”

Her grandmother was unusually quiet on the way home. She shut herself in her room and in the evening put on her coat and gathered her walking stick, muttering that she was going to the “Paulaner”. When she didn't come back, Snowleg imagined that she must have stayed out for dinner. The “Paulaner” was her favourite café. She often ate there, tipping the band to play Viennese music.

Next morning Anne-Katrin at the corner shop knocked on the door. The hospital had telephoned: her grandmother had slipped on the ice as she stepped off a tram.

Snowleg went immediately to the hospital in Dösen. A solemn young doctor had examined the shattered knee. It was unlikely that her grandmother would walk again.

For three hours she stayed at her grandmother's bedside before tearing herself away. “I had this voice test to do.”

At 2 p.m. she was ushered into a large room at the university medical school. A man, fiftyish with sallow features, pushed a book over his desk. “Read this.” The passage was from Goethe's
Faust
and chosen, as Doctor Behrend explained, because it contained a lot of
ss
sounds.

She read aloud while he flicked through a file with her name on it. When she had finished, he looked into her throat.

He withdrew the spatula. Shook his head.

“What's wrong?”

“Your epiglottis.”

“Why, what's the matter with it?”

“I've never seen such a decayed glottal passage in a girl of your age.”

“But I used to sing in the choir!”

Even as he was peeling off his headband, she knew he was lying. He started to write down something and he had the same expression as Sontowski.

He wanted her to sign. A paper to say why she couldn't work as a telephone operator.

“I can't sign.”

“But you have to sign here.”

“I'm sorry, I can't. My hand, suddenly it's not able to hold a pen.”

She ran outside, down the steps. The bells of the Thomaskirche were ringing.

On those Saturdays when she wasn't in the country with her father, she invariably went to hear the St Thomas boys' choir sing Bach. It was her space for thought. Her freedom within church walls. For half an hour every week she could close her eyes and be herself.

She normally sat with the choir in the seats reserved for their girlfriends and family, but after her experience with Doctor Behrend she couldn't bear to meet anyone she knew. And so rather than climb to her usual seat in the gallery, she joined the congregation in the nave.

“When the singing was over, I opened my eyes and saw you.”

On any other day she wouldn't have stopped and talked to a Westerner. But her mood this afternoon was defiant. Such a goody-two-shoes she had been and where had it got her? She couldn't even pass a voice test to become a telephonist. As she sat in the Thomaskirche, she sensed something inside her hardening. “That's why I stole that book. That's why I talked to you. That's why I asked you to look down my throat. And when you told me you could see nothing wrong, I made a decision.”

Upon leaving the Book Fair, Snowleg had intended to track down her brother and face it out with him. But she changed her mind after speaking with Peter. Instead of going to see Bruno, she headed directly to the Party HQ in Karl-Liebknecht-Straße.

Because of the Trade Fair, people were still at work. She decided to make an appeal and beg somebody to explain. If she was to live in this system, she had to find out why she couldn't become what she had trained so hard to be. “I still couldn't accept it had anything to do with Bruno.”

The door was open to Falk Hirzel's office. Hirzel was the Number Three in the Party. Once at a prize-giving he had asked her to dinner and another time had invited her back to his house where they talked in passionate terms about Fontane.

She walked in and he recognised her. His face beamed until she told him about the ridiculous voice test.

Hirzel closed the door and after a few minutes a secretary came in carrying a folder. Everything was inside the folder. Her application for going to graduate school. The results of her exams – he admitted she had passed them all – and a copy of the letter rejecting her for a place.

He writhed in his chair. His glasses sat uneasily on his nose. He read another document and shook his head. “You have no chance, forget it.”

“Why?”

“The reason is your brother.”

“Then it's true?”

“Apparently, he has been granted a United Nations visa and will be leaving on Monday.”

“Even if that's the case, why should it affect me?”

He was shaken by the question. “You must know that's how it is: anyone in your family wants to leave, you fall into a big hole.”

She stared at him. “How could you side with them?”

“Yes, yes, don't tell me.”

“Why? Why blame me for something that's not my fault?”

“Unfortunately, that's how it is.”

“During the Nazis' time this was called
Sippenhaft
.”

He gave her a long look. The statement was simple and yet it cornered him. “You're right,” his voice dropping. “Our system shouldn't work like this.” He closed the file. “What is it you want?”

“I want to be a psychiatrist.”

“A psychiatrist?”

“A psychiatrist.”

He wrote it down. “What's today? Give me till Wednesday. On Wednesday I have a meeting with the director of the university. I'm going to see what I can do.”

“Next week,” she said to Peter, “where will you be?”

“It depends what time of day. But somewhere in Hamburg.”

“Please. At eleven on Wednesday morning think of me.”

“All right. I will.”

“Hirzel is a decent man. He knows a mistake has been made.”

“I hope you're right.”

She turned over on her stomach. Her lips drew back in a smile, revealing her chipped tooth. “By the way, I asked him about your father.”

She had no reason not to ask. “I said to Hirzel, there's this person from Hamburg University. He's here to see if he can find any trace of his father. How can we help him? Who should he talk to, which department?”

“What did he say?” and Peter imagined Hirzel writing down the details meticulously. The thought racing through the man's head: Someone in East Germany has a hitherto undiscovered son who is English. The innocuous question: “You say that he doesn't know that he has a son?”

“He promised to put someone onto it. But he needs dates. Can you let me have dates? He says if you give him dates, he might be able to get the information by tomorrow.”

Only the day before it had excited Peter to think that Snowleg might be able to help him in his quest, but now he was appalled that this innocent creature had raised the subject. He knew how perilous it was because he had been told so over and over again. At the same time, it touched him that her grasp was nothing near so full as his. And having been touched it was a short step for Peter to think, What if she's right? What if Hirzel is a decent man? What if this is the only chance I'm going to get? He promised: “I'll ring my mother.”

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.