Snowleg (32 page)

It surprised Peter to see that nothing had changed since 1983. This was the landscape that had once been dearer to him than anything in West Germany. Plain though it was, the countryside seemed to have more depth and texture.

At 2.35 p.m., the train stopped in Wolfen. Visible through a web of overhead wires were the stacks of a factory. The sky had the muddy wash of one of Rodney's watercolours. Grey chemical dust on the rooftops and a foul steam in the air.

A country itself has an odour too. The first time Peter had smelled East Germany was on a train. In his third year at UKE, he spent Christmas with Anita's family in Nuremberg – as he couldn't help calling it, still in the habit of thinking of German towns by their English names. They changed at Crailsheim where every second train came from Prague on its way to Berlin and Paris. And while East German passengers had to get off at the border, the trains went on. The brown plastic seat left all his clothes impregnated with an odour much like the industrial-strength turpentine with which his stepfather oiled his press. Anita had to explain that it emanated not from the fabric, but from the detergent used to clean the seats.

“Wofasept”, he had heard or read somewhere, was still made in Wolfen.

Beyond the platform was a row of pylons with paint flaking from them. Graffiti on a boarded-up house read: “Foreigners out.” Twelve years had passed since a disgraced Chancellor's promise that all this would soon be a flowering landscape.

Beyond Wolfen, the fields flew into dark forest. The trunks straight as nails into the sky, as if hammered up through the earth. Peter peered through his reflection into the trees rushing by his window and a trick of the eye made them roll back towards him.

He leaned his head against the window as when a child in his stepfather's Rover and the vibrations of the glass revived a journey through an unchanging landscape of chalk downs and blackberry bushes.

At Buchholz Zauch, the train rocked into a siding. He looked back along the line at a station straight out of his childhood. Salisbury, Tisbury, Gillingham, Yeovil. Apple trees. An unpainted bench. Geese in a yard. A dog ran between the disused tracks where tiny Christmas trees sprouted and men with guns advanced in a line across a vast field.

“What do you think they're hunting?” he asked a woman opposite, likewise watching.

“I hope it is the Minister of Transport,” she muttered and went back to her crossword.

The field was ringed by a wood of silver birch. A deer ran out of the trees and froze on the horizon. The train began to move, the dog running and barking alongside. The smooth chortle of the wheels on the track had the tempo of a video rewinding. Far off the cough of a gunshot and through the sound of wheels and the dog's bark and a tunnel of 19 years, Teo's voice: “I think we've hit a deer.”

As they came into Leipzig, the woman tutted: “Four thirty-eight.”

Peter stepped down from the train and, tucking Frau Weschke's cane under his arm, he wheeled his suitcase behind him up the platform.

From beneath the station clock, he dialled Frau Metzel's number on his mobile. A boy answered. “Could I speak to Frau Metzel?” Peter said, wondering how close Milsen was to Leipzig.

“She's not here.”

He gazed around the enormous station. The fluorescent lights. The escalators leading down to food halls. “When do you expect her back?”

He heard the boy ask someone in the room: “Katya, when's Mutti back?”

“Monday,” said a man and a young woman together.

“Monday.”

“May I speak to your father?”

A man came on the line. “Hello, how can I help?” His voice sounded awry. He might have been drinking.

“I'm Frau Weschke's doctor. Well, I used to be. Look, I have something for your wife.”

The voice grew less guarded. “She's in London. And she's my ex-wife,” and explained that he had come to collect his son for the weekend.

Regretting a little his impetuosity in setting off before Frau Metzel had returned home, Peter revealed that he had with him her grandmother's ashes and a few possessions.

“What kind of possessions?”

Peter struggled to recall the belongings wrapped in scraps of
Leipziger Volkszeitung
. “Some books, her coat, a spa-mug –”

An announcement came over the intercom.

“Where are you speaking from?”

“I'm at Leipzig Main Station.”

“Then drop the box off at the left-luggage office, why don't you? I'll collect it some time next week?”

The man's tone made Peter uneasy. Offended by the casual reaction, he felt a spasm of anger that made it all the more important that he give the cake-box in person to Frau Weschke's granddaughter. Plus the letter. “I would prefer to deliver it in person.”

“Then you must wait till Monday,” the man said.

He unsheathed the walking stick from its ramshackle scabbard. His hand fitted comfortably enough over the handle, but the cane was far too short and it forced him to stoop in a way that reminded him of its old owner.

It was clear when he stepped into the street that winter was breaking up. He stood on the kerb and breathed in the cold scent of mud, redolent of the snow's underside and full of life. A cyclist rode by, plotting a path through patches of gravel, and on the news-stand, sharing the front page with the story of a murdered Turkish student, the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
forecast an end to the freak variations of weather.

The newspaper brought back to him the photograph on Frau Weschke's bed and a vision of snow-draped gardens. He had formulated no plan, but now he reached a decision. On Monday when her granddaughter came home he would take her Frau Weschke's ashes and then go back to Berlin. Meanwhile, he would explore Leipzig. He told himself: There's a sporting chance the gardens will be open. I'm going to walk around the city in the snow.

As he headed in purposeful steps towards a line of gleaming cream-coloured Mercedes, he was distracted by a word in the sky. On the parapet of the dilapidated building opposite, and spelled out in gigantic letters the colour of a ripe fig, he read -
STORIA
.

Peter threw the walking stick into the air and, catching it halfway up like a marching girl, he crossed the tramlines. He had no doubt about his destination. He would spend the night at the scene of his crime.

Graffiti splotched the curving limestone facade. “Ole has something against the Nazis”. “Reality trashes brains”. “Venom”. Something flapped in the wind and he raised his head. Strung across two windows, like a holiday flag, a large banner advertised a renovation firm. Cautiously, he advanced beneath the canopy and pressed his face against the heavy glass door.

Stranded behind the glass, his shadow fell across a broken radio and objects heaped in the dust. A doorman's cap. A scroll of citrus brocade wallpaper. Calico overalls splattered with yellow paint. He wouldn't be staying at the Astoria.

It amazed Peter how the building had deteriorated. The gust of freedom seemed to have blown everything away. Of the gilt-framed oils, the counter where he had removed his coat, the Czech chandeliers, there was no sign. Mounds of rubble obstructed the corridor down which Sepp and Teo had shoved him. The floor was raw where carpets had been torn up and everywhere, as if something had exploded, were fragments of wood and metal and glass.

He reeled back and a shape moved in the dust. He looked straight into his face and was disgusted. He had the powerful impression that he had taken an ageing potion. That he was the memory of someone who had been caught in that explosion and died a long while ago.

The dapper young man in the tourist agency, establishing that Peter would prefer private accommodation, telephoned an address in Kantstraße.

“Anna, darling,” smoothing his satiny double-breasted jacket, “I've a friend who needs a room, best discount.” He glanced up at Peter. “What's your name?”

“Hithersay.”

“Hithersay,” he said for the benefit of the person he was speaking to and afterwards wrote down the address of the Pension Neptune, indicating the location on a tourist map and the numbers of two trams that would take him there. “You pay me 10 Marks and 37 to the landlady. Anything else?”

“Yes. The Astoria, when did it close?”

The young man knew a little about the Astoria. It was state-owned, then rented to Maritim – “who got out”. Talks to sell the hotel to an American group had collapsed and the decision was taken not to refurbish it. The building had lain empty for a decade, one of, oh, so many monuments to the mishandling of state property post-reunification. “There's been talk of a new bidder. Although myself, I'd buy the Kempinski-Fürstenhof.”

The Pension Neptune, which Peter reached in less than 20 minutes, was a modest brown-brick house with its own garage. He unhitched the freezing latch and walked down a narrow path at the same time as a fastidiously dressed woman came out to put up a “No Vacancy” sign.

Frau Hase, the landlady, was a snobbish but helpful spinster in her mid-forties. Bavarian, jug ears, cravat fastened at her throat with a plaited leather ring – and a yellow duster in her hand that she dabbed in a lunging, discontented fashion at all surfaces within reach. She had just finished redecorating his room which was why, she explained, it smelled of paint. She had difficulty opening the window and he helped her.

“I think the paint's made it stick,” he remarked.

The room was simply furnished. Pink-washed walls, pine beams and six hooks along the door, from one of which dangled a white towelling dressing gown.

By the stubborn window was a round pedestal table and a pair of cane-bottomed chairs to which she had added identical covers, tapestried each with the outline of a sleeping cat.

The trousers of the previous occupant were still on the back of a chair and she gathered them up. They belonged, it seemed, to one of her regular guests. “Herr Mehring,” she said, meaning to impress, “is a gentleman of experience in the manufacture of security doors.”

“Is that so?” said Peter.

“He comes from Munich. Like me.” She opened a cupboard, releasing a pent-up gust of lavender, then strode to the bed and switched the bedside lamp on and off. “The rooms have no telephones, but there's a payphone downstairs.”

At the door she hesitated. Looked at the walking stick. “Are you ill?”

“No.”

“I thought you might be ill.”

He told her he was a doctor who had decided to spend a holiday weekend in Leipzig.

“Have you family here?”

“I'm looking for an old friend from the theatre, but I haven't seen her for some time and I don't know where she lives.”

She smiled a broad smile. “Leipzig is a mere village with only half a million people. That is what they told me when I first came here – and it's true. Meet someone and it will take you half an hour to find someone you both know.”

“Can I hold you to that?” opening his suitcase.

“You can.” She seemed eager to prolong their conversation. Perhaps he would become a regular guest himself, like Herr Mehring. “And when you have found your friend perhaps you will have time to relax? Kurt Masur is conducting the Seventh at the Gewandhaus. I have the details below.”

“Thank you.”

She watched him lift out the cake-box and put it on the table. Would he be dining in? Tonight was seared haunch of venison with jus de juniper berries and cabernet sauvignon from Chile.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

P
ETER WOKE TO A
clear day and the chatter of birds. A sparrow vibrated its cry against his window and the sun glinted on the pine knots above his head. He sprang out of bed with more optimism that he had felt in years and after a breakfast of cheese, pickled onions and black bread he set out for the city centre dressed in a clean white shirt, a sports jacket, the trousers of his suit and the midnight-blue tie he had worn for Frau Weschke's service.

The sky was clear. It was the end of March, the beginning of spring. Maybe he would go to that concert, browse in bookshops certainly, and on Sunday make an excursion to Dorna. But first he was going to visit the Schreber garden where he had spent the night with Snowleg. There was probably a coffee shop there by now. He would drink coffee and dream a little.

At the end of Kantstraße, he hailed a taxi. “Yes, I know the gardens,” said the driver, who had long hair and a squint and came from Croatia, where he was a famous poet. He was happier to be in Leipzig, though. “This car,” he told Peter, “is two months old.”

The traffic was thick and slow. Streets that Peter recalled as empty were bumper to bumper with new Mercedes-Benzes. They crawled past buildings concealed beneath scaffolding and house-sized advertisements for Pilsner.

Recognising nothing, Peter settled back into the corner of the taxi, the better to avoid its tart smell that reminded him of the innards of the fridge he had bought in a Christmas sale.

Two proper meals and a good night's sleep had calmed him. He felt able to concentrate on his quest, even if he hadn't defined to himself the nature of this quest beyond an impulse to retrace his footsteps.

As they still had some way to go before arriving at the centre, Peter repeated to the taxi-driver what the landlady had said. “How long do you think it will take to find her, driver? Half an hour?”

“What's the name of your friend?”

Snowleg.” Inside the car the name sounded cabbalistic. It thrilled him that it had stayed fresh, unmelted. His invention.

“Shit, what kind of name is that?”

“It's Icelandic,” said Peter fondly.