Snowleg (34 page)

Peter served the elderly and it sickened him to think of how a gang of insane geriatrics had presided over this breakdown in trust. The permanent exhibition – it went under the name of “Power and Banality” – didn't evoke a country so much as his boarding school. A pressurised place where people behaved worse than in the natural world.

Half a dozen smallish rooms led off the corridor. The first had been a Stasi office. A map of Leipzig. Pipes on the ceiling. The rust-edged leaves of a dying pot plant. He noted the files clustered like fruit-bats in a cabinet and on the desk a manual typewriter in a corn-coloured plastic cover. The office was nondescript. What jolted him was the odour coming off the scratched lino.

Peter had remained sanguine while looking at the photographs, but the turpentine-smell of “Wofasept” pricked him. Oddly awakened, he passed into another room and found himself face to face with a selection of instruments used by the East German regime to watch over its people.

Once when a student in Hamburg, he had been moved by Canetti's description to make an expedition to Grünewald's altarpiece in Colmar. Neither Canetti nor any reproduction prepared him for the painting of the crucified Christ. So with these horrific works of art, salvaged from the Runde Ecke in December 1989 following a three-week frenzy during which staff had fed into the flames and shredder the evidence of a regime that had lasted 40 years. His age.

He stood engrossed. Recalling the disbelief, the impotence, the pornographic thrill that had shot through him at the sight of his first dead body.

A shelf of Leica cameras and radio bugs concealed inside watering cans, bird-houses, tree-trunks. An assortment of fake rubber stamps from Brussels, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, to make it look as if letters had in fact reached their destination and the Leipzig Post Office was simply returning them to sender, “Name unknown”. An enormous gherkin-green shredding machine to convert personal files into pyramids of adobe.

The exhibits reached back to his science lessons at St Cross. Only, instead of creating earthquakes and volcanoes from papier mâché, this gerontocracy reduced the world to ant-heaps where everything that did not lie in its place was hostile.

He came to a wardrobe of disguises. “Supracolour” make-up powder. A rubber patch to transform a full head of hair into a bald pate. A false belly with a camera-hole for navel. He looked into the cheating navel and all at once the stomach yielded to the image of the gnome in the Schreber garden.

His words returned to haunt him:
I love kitsch
. And he remembered a line of Canetti: “With kitsch he thinks he can protect himself against his future.”

It both unnerved and aroused Peter, this material proof of how one fifth of the population had spied on itself. So much so that when he came to an ordinary-looking display case he was on the verge of walking past. The exhibit struck Peter as unremarkable compared to what he had seen. And yet for a long time after he left the Runde Ecke the contents of this particular cabinet took on a cardinal significance.

The two glass jars contained strips of yellow material about 4 inches square which might have been scissored from Frau Hase's duster. Something about the cloth strips – they resembled nothing so much as foetuses – took Peter back to his first medical experiment. Beside the jars a xeroxed page with typed instructions had turned grey. He paused to read and the heat rose in his bones.

– These smells can be damaged by other people, animals, car exhaust fumes. That's why you must be quick and careful when getting the trace material. Before you start, think of where you will be most likely to find the individual scent of the protagonist. Think of how he/she might have acted so that you find the right place.

– Beware of getting your own scent on the aluminium foil. Please make sure you know exactly which person's scent you have taken. The best trace materials are: a chair, a bed, a pencil – or whatever they are writing with. If possible, place the cloth under the protagonist's belt between the T-shirt and underwear.

– Don't forget to close the jars and write on the label the date, the time, the place.

A friendly seeming woman he hadn't noticed sat at the reception desk and fanned her mouth as if she had eaten something hot. Mid-fifties, with short hennaed hair and the youthful complexion of the overweight, she glanced up at his approach and with a fine instinct for his mood enquired if he would like to know more about anything he had seen.

“Tell me about the jars,” hoarsely.

She put down her hamburger and jumped up. Somewhere – if she could lay her hands on it – there was a photograph. She unlocked a cabinet and tugged out a black folder.

Addressing him in the garrulous manner of someone who had waited a long time to be asked this information, she told him that the Stasi had conceived the idea relatively late, at the beginning of the 1980s. In their mania to control everything, and in every way, they assembled a voice collection, a fingerprint collection, a saliva collection and finally they decided on a collection of smells. One of their intentions was to establish a direct link between forbidden written material – underground literature, subversive leaflets, even graffiti on walls – and the person responsible for writing or distributing it. In 1982, a specially trained dog was bought from the police and kennelled in a villa in Leutzsch in the north-west of Leipzig. She had one word to describe the system: “Perverse”.

“How many smells were collected?”

“Thousands. Now we know why there was a shortage of jam jars!”

“Where were the jars stored?”

A plump index finger pointed at the ceiling.

“What happened to them?”

For the second time that morning he heard the phrase. “Please tell me if you find out.”

One winter night police had arrived at the Runde Ecke in a hired Volkswagen lorry and driven away the entire collection. On December 4, 1989, a large number of jars were discovered in police headquarters, including a complete collection of the Leipzig opposition. These jars had since disappeared, either smashed or confiscated. “No-one knows who took them, where they went.”

She produced a page-sized black and white photograph. “Here's your dog.”

The Alsatian sat on a bare planked floor as though at the centre of a clock face. Arranged in a circle were a number of glass jars identical to those in the museum's cabinet. Each contained a folded cloth impregnated with a suspect's smell. To judge from the pose – eyes glittering at the photographer, front paws thrust forward – the dog had identified one of them.

Peter was surprised to feel a kinship with the animal, even a quiet envy. The dog was innocent. Moreover, it had found what it was looking for.

He returned the photograph. “Tell me, how would I track down someone from that time?”

“Someone whose scent the Stasi –”

“Maybe,” he said.

She stared at the dog. “I don't know – unless you can speak to someone who was Stasi.” But as Peter doubtless was aware, the government had granted an amnesty to anyone working for the security service. “They keep themselves entirely to themselves.”

“If I wanted to talk to such a person, how would I find them?”

She shrugged and her voice was despairingly downbeat with none of his landlady's polished cheeriness. “Luck? Coincidence? Serendipity?”

He headed along Dittrichring, head spinning. Exhilarated that a moment so transient might be preserved until now. At the same time fearful that he had pitched Snowleg into this evil, manic world.

His alertness spread into the street and set off the car alarm he heard. He liked the idea of a jar filled with Snowleg's smell, then argued the thought away. Not everyone was investigated. Wasn't he proof of that? It was naive and foolish – part of his romantic Western mythology – to suppose that because Snowleg had made an exhibition of herself in the Astoria her life would be endangered. The Croatian taxi-driver was right. Maybe she was dead or lived in the United States, Peru, Winnipeg. Maybe she had married a millionaire, like a depressed poet he had known. Maybe she lived in Charlottenburg!

He felt tender with hopelessness. He had found out nothing. He had no idea what to do next and coming to a little park he stopped to look at his tourist map to see if it might jog his memory. But the streets of Leipzig, like its university, operated under a new identity. Probably Snowleg had also changed her name, whatever it was. Anyway, she was bound to have a new name if she was married. And there was no point in looking for Bruno because Peter didn't know his surname either.

He kept on walking, feeling his frustration and impotence, not knowing where he was going. The street ranged ahead of him and he pictured 132 kilometres made up of files. But how could Snowleg have disappeared? Someone must remember her. She was too lively to be forgotten. And in the same way that as a 17-year-old in Hamburg he sought his father, he caught himself peeping into the eyes of people squeezing by. He yearned to communicate what he felt to those going about their business. He wanted to rush up, seize their lapels and ask: “Have you seen Snowleg?” For the first time since his arrival in the city, it was imperative he find her and make amends. And if he couldn't find her then at the very least to use this journey, which was going to be his last journey to Leipzig, to lay her ghost, cost what it may, suffer as he might. But where to begin, at least begin?

The railway station came back into sight and he recognised the word that jutted into the skyline, each purple letter the size of a man. The Astoria, at least, had remained faithful to itself. The day before, he had felt combative towards the hotel. But this feeling fizzled out and he looked with emotion at its entrance. Beyond that rusting brown canopy lay the room in which he had last spoken to Snowleg. Someone who had been in the Astoria that night, wouldn't they be able to tell him what had happened to her?

He returned to the tourist agency. Bursting into the office as if someone was grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back to a long oval table.

The young man recognised him. He had on a different suit. “Is Frau Hase treating you well?”

“Tell me, how could I get to speak with someone who worked at the Astoria in 1983?”

“With difficulty. Unless you find an old telephone directory in a jumble sale!”

Peter opened his wallet. “I can offer 100 Marks.”

“What about Leni?” said a girl at the next desk.

“Leni. I forgot about Leni.”

“Leni worked in the Intershop,” the girl said. With the other's approval, she looked up a directory and dialled a number.

The voice that answered sounded reluctant. Leni was too busy. She had to go to the dentist.

“But surely you know
someone
?” said the girl. “What about Wilhelm's mother?”

Peter understood from their conversation that if Leni could help without being traced, she might be more open. “Tell her . . .”

The girl covered the mouthpiece. “What?”

“Tell her I'm trying to get in touch with old relatives.”

Soon the girl was writing down the number of a woman who had been in charge of the hotel's kitchen. The young man took his money and passed him the piece of paper.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“I
SUPPOSE YOU WANT
to sell me a second-hand Golf?” the voice said with something almost like fury.

“No, no. It's personal.”

“I already have a nice satellite dish, thank you.”

“I'm looking for a relative, a young woman you might have known.”

“Who gave you my number?”

“The tourist office.”

“What's your relative's name?”

“Her name is Snowleg.”

“You mean Snjólaug? No, I don't know any Snjólaug. Where could I have known her? How could I have known her?”

“No?” unable to hide his disappointment. “Then I'm sorry to have disturbed you.”

Frau Lube would tell Peter in due course that he had telephoned in the middle of prayers for World Peace. She was watching the afternoon service on television and had just completed a prayer for her late husband when she heard Peter's foreign-accented voice ask if it could come and speak with her. And immediately she felt the old and irrational dread that she had done something wrong. She thought of the overdue telephone bills. She identified with the child-snatcher whose photofit was in the newspaper. All the crimes committed in Saxony over the past year lurched through her head.

“Goodbye, then.” On screen, the liturgy summoned her.