Snowleg (27 page)

After she had introduced Nadine and Nadine with a troubled look and a blush gathering on her cheek had walked away, he warmed his hands on Corinna's chest. “So. Who do I start with today?”

The new patient's name was Frau Weschke. She had arrived in an ambulance the previous Wednesday with her granddaughter from the Anderson-Nexö in Leipzig.

He brushed the snow from his collar and from behind his neck. “Why on earth send her here?”

“The home's been closed for refurbishment. The superintendent persuaded Frau Metzel – her granddaughter – that in this particular case West was best.”

They climbed the staircase.

“Any children?”

“One daughter, who died some years ago. Frau Metzel is appointed next of kin. I think she was frankly just relieved to have found somewhere for her grandmother.”

They reached the landing and Peter took the file from her and flicked through it. “How old is she?”

“She's 103.”

The only confirmation of Frau Weschke's advanced age seemed to be a letter of congratulation from President Ulbricht on her seventieth birthday. In his letter, Ulbricht noted she had been a member of the Socialist Party since 1910 and paid tribute to her work as Secretary of the Socialist Women's Union in Leipzig, and after the war – her husband had died in Theresienstadt – for her contributions to the Association of the Victims of the Nazi-terror. The letter was dated August 17, 1969, and had been forwarded from the Anderson-Nexö, a retirement home for “distinguished socialists” which she had entered in 1983.

“Frau Metzel apologises for the lack of paperwork. That's all there is. The government's been pressing her grandmother to exchange her GDR passport, but she refuses. She complains that she's carried the passports of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and East Germany. She's too old for another change of identity.”

“Don't you sympathise?” groaned Peter.

“The last two years have been bad for her.” Sister Corinna pressed on ahead of him. “Her eyesight's failing. She refuses her food. She lives on bread and wine.”

Sister Corinna tapped the door and went in. “Hello, Frau Weschke,” in a jocular tone.

On the bed lay a petite old lady with pink thin cheeks and, behind a pair of rimless glasses, eyes of a very light grey-blue. She had on a blue short-sleeve shirt and was sipping noisily from a porcelain spa-mug.

“Here is Herr Doktor Hithersay to see you.”

The old woman twisted her head and ignoring Peter gave Sister Corinna a vinegary stare. “Schwester Corinna, this fish is off.”

“What about the cake? Didn't you like the cake?” Sister Corinna had bought it with her own money from the bakery beside the railway station.

Frau Weschke dismissed the cake with a wave of her tiny thin arm. “No.”

She opened one hand and counted off what she liked. Leek soup with marjoram. River crabs with carrots. Sweet and sour lentils, and a slice of Leipziger Lerche pie.

“But I thought you liked cake.”

Frau Weschke looked down at the slice on her plate as if she wished it would start eating itself. “I hate cake. I would rather be crushed into pulp a hundred million times than eat this cheesecake.”

“It's not a cheesecake. It's a Vollkorn.”

At that Frau Weschke suddenly asked, “Have you been to Leipzig?”

“No.”

She glared at the nurse. “Isn't it exquisite that I who have eaten river crabs should be served cheesecake by a woman who has never been to Leipzig!”

Peter squeezed Sister Corinna's elbow. “Leave us together.”

Frau Weschke scrutinised him after the door closed. She angled a hand over her brow and after a little grunt said, “I bet all the women in your life, Herr Doktor, have enabled you to do exactly what you wanted.”

He thought about what she said.

She laughed. “To be on good terms with that one you have to tell her to go right straight to hell. I shout to her: ‘Hedgehog! Cherry-picker! Berliner!'”

Her stern expression cracked. She glanced at something on her arm, slapped it. “Do you know the loveliest German word? It's not Prussian. It's Saxon.” Her voice had become round and soft. “Moodschegiebchen. Ladybird.”

Peter sat in the metal-framed chair beside her bed and experienced the sensation, as whenever he visited the tower-room, of being abnormally high up. It was a tall-walled, brightly lit and warm-smelling place, on the faded ceiling of which a fresco of two hunters in a forest looked down from another century. Dominating the room was a large window with a view through a corridor of lime trees to the Wannsee. Visible on one side was the kindergarten playground, with its rusted basketball hoop; on the other, an abandoned house with an overgrown garden and two ancient Citroëns without their tyres. All sheeted with snow.

He picked up Frau Weschke's file. Typical multiple illness. Bad knee. Cancer. Heart. Oedema.

He took the stethoscope from his bag and placed it against her chest and listened to the blood-chatter.

She coughed.

“Lean forward.”

She moved her hips and lay on her side while he ran the stethoscope up and down her back.

“Any chest pains?”

“No,” she said.

“What happened to your knee?”

“I fell on the ice once.”

“You're not short of breath?”

“No.”

He removed the tubes from each ear.

She turned and said: “Do you know what I would love? A sip of apple juice. You get so dry.” She held up the mug – the name Karlovy Vary glazed in azure florals on the side – and pointed to a plastic bottle on the sideboard.

He rose from the chair and unscrewed the top of the bottle and felt a pang when he smelled the contents.

“Give me the mug,” she called.

“Where did you get this wine?”

“None of your business. Give me the mug.”

She looked at him in a pinched, terrifying way that made Milo's mother a Madonna by comparison.

He filled her mug to the brim. “You're going to the bathroom on your own?”

She gestured at the end of the bed. Her furniture had shrunk to a lacquered black cane with a silver horse-head handle. “I have that,” taking the mug from him and fastening her lips to the porcelain straw.

“Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“For your low spirits, there's a new drug. In theory –”

“I don't believe in theory. I've had to be a Monarchist, a National Socialist, a Marxist, a Capitalist. And now I'm a very old lady.” Her left hand went up to the film of white hair and she touched the scalp beneath, brown with age-spots. “No, young man, you can't fool me with anything revolutionary. The greatest privilege I know is to be stupid, especially very stupid,” and her eyes flicked over the room as though every object that didn't emanate from Leipzig affected her with disgust.

He followed her gaze. There was an old fur coat with a torn lining on the back of the door and on the dresser beside the door half a dozen books.

“Do you read?”

“I don't want to, for some reason. I just want to be quiet.”

“What about photographs?”

“Photographs?”

“Of you younger. I bet you were good-looking.”

There was a loud colicky gurgle and silence. She watched him over the rim of the mug.

“I bet you were. Or what about a photograph of your daughter? Or granddaughter?” So that those who worked in the Lion's Manor didn't see Frau Weschke as a body in a bed. “You have to find the character of that person and make sure it never gets squashed.” That's what he taught his students. What he had told Sister Corinna at their first meeting.

“No,” she said dourly. “No photographs.”

“What's this?” He hadn't noticed it at first. A board about 6 inches square. Lodged between the books. Flecked with strange beak or claw – or even paw – marks.

“My granddaughter. She made it.”

He looked at the painting for a while as though he could hear a sound coming out of it. “It's good. I like it.”

“I don't understand it,” she shrugged. “I prefer things I can understand.”

He propped it back and glanced at the newspaper discarded on her bed. “Would you rather be in Leipzig?”

She stared out of the window. Her face had become gaunt and he knew she was not looking at the skaters on the Wannsee. Her vision of the frozen lake was dissociated from what images raced before her glassed-over eyes.

“I would.” And he heard her thinking. In Leipzig the girls were prettier, the men taller. And you could taste the food. “Leipzig is a great city, doctor.”

“I know,” he said gravely.

She turned her eyes on him and he saw himself in them like a cell divided. “You have been there?”

“Once, when I was a student.”

“Once!” she said. “Once is for dilettantes. What do you do
once
that's worth anything? You can't see Leipzig once. Once is never!”

He closed his bag and prepared to stand up.

“Wait.” She looked at him with renewed curiosity. She elevated her chin, her gaze nimble all of a sudden. “You're not German?”

“I was brought up in England. My mother's English.”

Again she scrutinised him, her mouth open, her teeth shiny. The gaze of someone who had woken up. “And your father?”

“He came from East Germany. Before it was East Germany.” He felt himself serve up the information.

“Ah.” She nodded.

“My mother knew him for a day. I never met him.”

They regarded each other and he forgot the depression that had overtaken him just now in the snow.

After he told her the story Frau Weschke stared at him in a way that suggested that what he had said affected her too. “Dorna! I know Dorna. A lovely village. It has a medieval forest and a lake like this one. You should go.”

“I did, but I have to say the whole visit was coloured for me by an accident. We ran into a deer.”

“You ran into a deer!” She put down her mug and gave him an incendiary glance that declared never in her life had she heard an excuse so pitiful.

“It must have escaped from the forest –”

Frau Weschke did not want to hear about the deer. “Did you ever find out about your father? How do you know he's not alive?”

She lay very still, her eyes focusing on his ears, and her question revived in his mind a campaign almost forgotten.

“I don't,” he said.

In Berlin, the application to read his mother's file had got lost in the system for four years. Then last April a letter. Summoning Peter at a certain hour to the building in Otto-Braun-Straße.

He registers himself at the desk. Shows his passport. Receives a pass.

Presently, a skinny square-faced woman appears wearing a pleated fawn-coloured dress. She signs him in. “Please – this way.”

He fixes his eyes on her dress, tined like a saxophone reed, and follows it along a balconied atrium – down below he glimpses his silver Golf and a grey muzzle poking from the window – to a silent reading room and a cubicle that cannot be overseen. It puts him in mind of a dream that often plagues him in which he has suddenly returned to St Cross to sit an exam that is crucial in some way and yet for which he is utterly unprepared and which furthermore he knows in advance he cannot pass. A dream in which his medical qualifications count for nothing.

“You may take notes with a pencil,” she whispers and disappears to fetch the file. Then a man comes out, there is some muttered commentary and Peter is ushered into an office. Open on a desk is his application. Nervously, the man checks the documents. Item: a letter, signed by Peter, to the effect that his father is too invalid to allow his mother Mrs Henrietta Hithersay to travel from England. Item: a letter, signed by his mother and witnessed by a notary, giving her son power of attorney. Item: a letter permitting Doktor Peter Hithersay to read her file and take notes on her behalf.

“I'm sorry. There was a file on your mother, but in this region a very large number appear to have been destroyed. I can't say why.”

“What about mine?”

For some reason it depressed Peter almost as much to learn that no file on him existed. It hadn't been removed or destroyed; it hadn't been compiled in the first place.

From downstairs, a stamping of feet and the babble of young voices.

Frau Weschke cried out, “What on earth is that?”

It was Peter's project on Tuesday afternoons to invite children from the next-door kindergarten to play for an hour with the elderly. “Society celebrates the beginning of life,” he had told a dubious Sister Corinna when he proposed his “adopt a grandparent” scheme. “We're not so much interested in the end. But we have to find a way to meet our end. Not shrink from it.”

One of the first things to strike Peter about Germany was how the generations didn't speak to each other. Unlike in England, the grandfathers and fathers and sons of Hamburg all drank in different pubs. At the Lion's Manor he hoped, bit by bit, piece by piece, to dismantle this barrier. Shortly after he started to visit the nursing home, he contacted the kindergarten next door and encouraged the children to select a grandparent and bring them home-made cakes.

He started to enthuse to Frau Weschke about his project for integrating the old with the very young and his hope of what both generations could offer each other, when the door to her room burst open, slamming against the wall.

A grinning boy stood on the threshold. About 5 years old, with long dark lashes and a cartoon face emphasised by red spots on his forehead and cheek, the last vestiges of chicken pox. He looked from Peter to Frau Weschke and when he saw the old woman's expression he raised a tasselled tube to his lips and blew.