Snowleg (47 page)

Peter stifled a lurch of appalling anguish, but Uwe was taking another folder from the envelope, more faded than the first. “I also found this. I had a lot of files at home – fewer now. Until Kresse jolted my memory I'd forgotten that I had stuff from as early as that. Anyway, there it was,” and with the sense that he was clearing out an element of his life – tomorrow he would take his mother's clothes to the charity shop – Uwe handed it over.

The folder was exactly the colour of Rodney's anchovy paste. “What's this?” Peter felt Uwe's tired gaze on him.

“It's your mother's file.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

A
S SOON AS HE
came into the street he regretted leaving his coat behind. The wind had got up again and it licked his face like a dog's tongue. He hoisted his collar and headed along Jahnallee.

He was still searching for a quiet bar or café in which to read the file when he made out – above the scaffolded roofs – the Gothic spire of the Thomaskirche. Barely able to keep an eye open against the wind, he hugged Uwe's envelope closer to his chest – and, not looking for the place, he found it.

It wasn't until he was through the door that he recognised the wine bar. Stupefied, he gazed around. He had – for the briefest moment – the impression of having reached the mountain-top where the Emperor Barbarossa sat alone. Had time stopped? Had nothing happened at all? The little table looked as on the day when he seized a book from its glass surface and went in pursuit of Snowleg. Same coffee cups. Same ashtray. Same art deco lamp.

He pointed and the waiter nodded. “Yes, that table's free.”

At the next table, a man with thinning hair gathered in a rubber band lectured a girl in a black waistcoat. “The best way for Europe is to be Belgian.” Over the loudspeakers some sort of nature tape was playing that sounded like a recording of whales calling to each other. She lit a cigarette and swayed to the sound.

The waiter brought a wine list. Peter was nervous of opening Uwe's envelope without another drink to steady him. And why the hell not, he thought. A man has just made me a present of 5,000 Marks. In a fit of extravagance he ordered a whole bottle of claret from the year he was born.

He took out the grey file – he was surprised how thin it was – and smelled it: dust and the vegetable smell of old carbon paper. The true scent of the totalitarian regime. The waiter arrived and made a performance of uncorking the wine and pouring it. Peter put down the file and raised the glass to his lips, tasting the years in the bottle.

He intended to take a sip, but he drank a whole glass before picking up the file and opening it. There were only a few sheets of paper. He wiped the table to make sure there was no ash or wine and began to go over the pages terribly slowly. The signatures and countersignatures. The official accusations. Reading how Henrietta Potter, a British citizen on a temporary artist's visa (No: XP78U1957), had been accused of “exploiting her function” as a singer in the Bach competition on October 1, 1960. He could see the headstrong woman of twenty through the brisk shorthand notes of the interrogating officer.

Stapled to one page was a photograph, black and white, a young man. Typewritten below were the words: “Peter Brendel – following recapture at 18 Zieglerstraße, Dorna, 5.10.1960.” The photograph was stapled to a GDR death certificate. Four years after he was taken back into custody, the prisoner Peter Brendel was shot trying to escape. Interred municipal cemetery, Dorna.

“Brendel,” Peter muttered to himself. He said it again, louder. “Brendel. Peter Brendel.” And experienced an almost ungovernable desire to jump up from his seat. He was forty and at last he knew his name.

He picked up the photograph. No-one had asked him to smile, and yet the expression recalled one of Rodney's early attempts at his own portrait. The light on the face flickering as though it was rising to the surface. As though it was still in the stage of being developed.

The face was so similar to Peter's own at that age – twenty-two or twenty-three – that he could have been looking at his younger self. The dark slanted eyes. The furrowed expression. For a few seconds he had the sensation that the two of them had exchanged places.

“Peter Brendel.” At least he didn't know he had a son.

A table away, the girl in the black waistcoat looked round. Peter smelled her tobacco, instantly recognising the brand. “Doesn't matter how long you go without,” the hypnotist at Ochsenzoll had told him, coughing. “One puff and you'll be back to sixty a day within four days.” Warm air and cigarette smoke filled his lungs and the same dizziness came over him as when he left Bettina's studio for the last time. He leaned over and asked the girl for a cigarette. His first in 13 years.

The sensation of the hot smoke hitting the back of his throat was furious, pleasant. Since breakfast he had only drunk wine, and inhaling again he felt a jolt of nausea. He pounded down his hunger and his nausea with another long draught, and the smoke went through him and around him until he was cloaked in it.

Another glass. He pulled out the brick-coloured folder.

Some time later the music stopped and the waiter went behind the bar and changed the whalesong into jungle frogs and parakeets.

Uwe had told Peter everything. It was impossible to resurrect Snowleg from these clinical reports on Marla Hedwig Berking. Only in Peter's letters – a dozen or so written over two years – did she seem to have existed.

He poured another glass.

A slow flush crept over his face and he felt himself unstitching and the threads coming out of him. Little could he have dreamed that 19 years after saying No he would be looking for her again. Or that his way of saying No would have sent her spinning out into the universe irretrievably, to where not even the Stasi could find her. He had propelled her into oblivion by his cowardice and his father was dead.

“What did you say?” The girl looked over her shoulder. “Were you talking to me?”

“No, I was talking to King Arthur.”

“You were what?” She threw him a sympathetic expression and turned back.

He inhaled again, the smoke fuming into his lungs and unpacking something. A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man once. That was the difference between Sir Bedevere and Arthur. He felt a choking and his eyes smarted, peppery with pain. He couldn't see the couple at the next table. Nor the light from the lamp, his father's photograph, his letters to Snowleg. All he could hear was the jungle static of frogs and parakeets and crickets. He was standing on a chalk cliff. A pilot in the cockpit of a blazing bomber. Spiralling into a rainforest. Branches and thorns slashed at his face. He breathed in. The air was thick with smoke. His ache kicked out and he felt a pain scrabbling up the wall of his stomach and falling back into its pit and rising again.

“Are you all right, sir?” The waiter leaned over him.

“I'm fine, absolutely fine.”

The waiter lifted the bottle to pour more, but his life was empty.

What time was it? Looking in his pocket for his watch, he touched the key to the Schreber garden and its weight was heavier than a body. His father's watch said 7.30 p.m. He hadn't realised how much he had depended on finding him. On finding both of them.

He paid the exorbitant bill and fled with the folders. He had eaten nothing all day and he fed on his footsteps, walking faster and faster. Not since the reunion at the Garrick had he been so drunk.

Somehow he crossed Dittrichring in the direction of the Pension Neptune, and into the park. He followed a path through the trees to the river. Soon he was stumbling beside the bank. The river rising and a low linen moon catching ridges of foam and black serpents of water coiling.

A noise like applause rose from below, and he had the impression that people were clapping him. He looked down, his attention caught by a movement on a root exposed by the fast gargling water. And there floated to the surface, above the cheering and drumming of heels, Milo's excited voice:
Daddy, Daddy, have you seen Frau Weschke? She promised to catch me a river crab.

Could that be a river crab clinging to the tree root? No, it was absurd. Again it moved, like a duster flicked on the water. He had no idea what river crabs looked like – whether they had a season, whether they still existed even. Milo's drawing was all he knew. But how hard could it be to catch one? The river must be teeming with them. To catch a river crab for his son seemed to Peter the absolute grail. He could picture Milo's delight. Yes, things were going to change.

He took off his shoes and socks, laid the envelope beside them, and slithered down the soft bank. It went very quiet after his legs hit the water. The cold took away his breath and the river rapidly filled his trouser legs. As stealthily as he was able, he inched towards the root.

He saw a fleck of moonlight on a pearly shell and a fluttery movement – the crab manicuring itself. He hadn't frightened it away! With massive care, he stretched out his fingers: 6 inches. Remain unseen for only 6 more inches . . . He took a furtive breath and leaned forward, but even as he pushed out his hand he could see the texture was wrong.

The water hugged his knees. He threw the crisp packet back into the stream and clambered onto the bank.

He was careful not to make a sound as he stepped into the hall. But his shoe squelched on the first step of the staircase. A door cracked open and a shaft of light impaled him.

“Herr Doktor?” From behind the neon blade, Frau Hase's anxious voice. “Herr Doktor Hithersay, is that you?” She stood with her mouth open a little. “You're trembling.” Peter caught sight of the calamity in the hall mirror and mumbled something and staggered on up the stairs.

He stood under the hot shower until he was warm again. Afterwards, he sat naked for a long while on the edge of the bath, looking out at the street and the sky, his heart going slop slop slop in his hollow body like someone beating a path towards him.

PART VII

Milsen, 2002

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

S
EVEN KILOMETRES FROM THE
Czech border, a car drives into the courtyard of an old stone-built house. A woman gets out and collects her suitcase from the boot. The handwritten label on the handle reads: “Metzel, Milsen.”

In the middle of the courtyard was a water-pump. She paused beside it to exchange her grip, breathing in the still, early-morning air. She had never been gone so long. Her time in England had given her detachment. She looked up at the ancient house – the stork's nest in the chimney, the sun reflecting on the skylight of the brick dovecote, the neighbour's beehives – with the small shock of experiencing something both intimate and foreign, like the smell of her daughter's breath. She picked up the suitcase. “Katya!” she called once inside. “Katya!”

Her daughter, alerted by the whippet's barking, bounded down the wide, imposing staircase in a tracksuit and trainers

“How was London?” embracing her.

“Let me tell you over a cup of tea.”

Katya pulled a face. “I'm trying to get in a run before Sören arrives.” He was picking her up at noon, she explained excitedly, and taking her to a rock concert in Dresden.

They went into the kitchen, where Katya indulged her mother by sitting down rather primly to drink a glass of water.

“So, how did it go?”

“I sold all but two,” filling the kettle.

“Mutti, fantastic!”

“Better than I expected.” She switched on the kettle, chatting on about the opening night, the review in
The Times
, her days in England. She wanted to tell Katya that she had fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit Hampstead Heath and the ravens in the Tower of London, but her daughter was elsewhere. “Listen, go for your run.”

“Catch up later,” said Katya, leaping to her feet and giving her mother another hug. “I'm sad for you about Oma” – and to the whippet: “You talk to Mutti.”

She watched Katya walk from the kitchen – the pronounced way she had of springing on her heels – and felt rueful. I won't get you back, she thought, till I'm a grandmother.

Katya stopped at the door. “By the way,” beginning – before she corrected herself – to speak in the tone in which she had addressed the dog, “a doctor rang from the city. He said he would ring again and talk to you about Oma's ashes. As a matter of fact, he's got the ashes himself. Does that make sense?”

“Did he leave a number?”

“No, but I said you'd be back this morning. If Sören arrives, I'll be ready in an hour.”

She heard the door slam and thought, See you in ten years.

The number for the Lion's Manor was pinned to the cork board. She telephoned Sister Corinna. Yes, Frau Weschke's very special doctor had himself taken the ashes to Leipzig. His intention was to deliver these in person, together with a box containing her grandmother's things and a letter.

“I didn't mean you to go to this trouble.”

“It's not a trouble,” Sister Corinna said quickly. “The doctor needed to be in Leipzig anyway.”

Grateful to be spared the journey to Berlin, she made a pot of tea. Glancing over the kitchen for a cup, she noticed Katya's efforts to tidy up and was moved, but it turned out to be a job unfinished. In the sink was a thick wool sweater that smelled of rain-soaked sheep. There was a pile of not very well washed plates and on the table in an untidy heap the mail of the past fortnight. Some circulars. Two bills. A note from Stefan to say that he would bring Kristjan back on Friday. An envelope with a Berlin postmark.