Snowleg (48 page)

Her heart jumped. She couldn't help it – whenever she saw a letter with handwriting she didn't recognise, the superstition seized her that the author was a previous owner of the house who was writing to claim it back. Abandoning her quest for a teacup, she found a knife, butter still on the blade.

She breathed out. A letter of condolence. She wondered why there weren't more, before reminding herself that Oma had outlived everyone, even her century, her country too. “It's sad what I'm telling you, but true,” had been her words in the ambulance that took them to Berlin. “In my long life I have seen Germany – my Germany – defeated, divided, reunited, vanish.” There was no-one alive to mourn her. Save for Bruno, who would never mourn anybody – and the author of this letter.

“I only knew her for a short while . . .”

She read the past tense and let out a groan. It was different to be told something over the telephone than to see the cold dead fact of it in writing.

“. . . indeed, my son had come to think of her as his own grandmother.”

Her eyes flicked to the top of the page and when she saw the address she couldn't help thinking of the words of another doctor in another hospital where her grandmother had been admitted when she broke her leg. “There's little chance she'll get out of here,” warned the solemn little man with a pointed chin.

And yet two months later there was a knock. Anne-Katrin from the corner shop. “Telephone!” In his wheedling voice she recognised the pointed chin. “Please collect her. She's walking like an athlete.” And he conjured the spectacle of a fierce, petite old lady tapping her way along the crushed-marble corridor – “driving us crazy with her cane”.

She went on reading, the memory returning of the afternoon she travelled to Dösen to fetch her grandmother. The heated look. The gruff voice: “What on earth's happened to you?” The pressure of those old palms on her face. As if she was able to tell by the simple gesture of squeezing her granddaughter's cheek all that had taken place while she lay there, her leg in plaster.

She turned over the page and saw the signature. Her free hand went up to her eyes. She shook her head. It must be a different doctor.

Twenty minutes later, he telephoned. “Frau Metzel?”

“Yes.”

“Thank goodness.” He introduced himself and she recognised the voice. “Did your daughter pass on my message?” He was being polite. He sounded tired, disheartened.

“Yes.” She waited for him to go on, to say something more. The last time she had heard him speak – on Morneweg's tape recorder – he was talking about swans.

In his English-accented German he asked for directions to her house.

She must have given them because she heard herself saying: “It's five minutes by car – or half an hour if you walk . . .”

“When would be convenient?”

“Any time. I'm here all day.” What can I say to keep him on the line? – but in the background his train was announced, he had to go.

She put down the receiver and spread her hands on either side of the letter. She leaned forward in order to reread the signature and when she realised with a spasm of understanding that there was no mistake her breath snorted out as if she were laughing. A successful doctor, then. She wasn't surprised. He had known that there was nothing wrong with her throat.

Once more she read his name and her eyes moved down her stomach to her legs. She went over to the sink and picked up a glass. She peered at it for dirt and filled it from the cold tap and drank.

Why are you coming? I can understand why then, she thought, but why now?

In two hours' time a dead man was going to walk into this house and she didn't know what he wanted, what she was going to say to him.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

P
ETER WAS ANXIOUS TO
look his best for Frau Weschke's granddaughter, but apart from his twill overcoat and the shirt Frau Hase had washed, and which smelled of something like Dettol, he realised he had nothing to wear.

Glumly, he riffled through Renate's “hot new season” clothes, pulling out, one after another, a pair of black Rip-Off shorts, a pair of brown cowboy trousers stamped to resemble cow-hide, and a “J'adore Capri” shirt in the piercing green of Renate's dress. With a sense of deepening hostility he held them up against his body and it seemed he was being invited to try on pains of different colours. All at once he thought of the trousers that had been left in his room.

“But I haven't washed them,” wailed Frau Hase. “Besides, they might not fit. Herr Mehring was a little smaller . . . Wait, I will fetch them and you will see.”

Back in his room he tried them on. He had woken with a savage hangover and tiptoed across the floor in order to keep the pain at bay. At the same time he felt more stable and moderate in his thoughts than in weeks. Khaki corduroys, Herr Mehring's trousers smelled of cologne and pinched at the waist – but they would do.

When he had finished packing, Peter left Renate's clothes on the bed and wrote a note to Frau Hase to say that these were for her with his very best wishes and more lingerie was to come. Ten minutes later he carried his suitcase downstairs and settled the bill. “I will mail these back to you.”

Frau Hase glanced with grave disdain from his trousers to the walking stick that seemed to have become the centre of his gravity. “Oh, whenever,” in a strained voice. Then blurted out: “Herr Doktor, I am so sorry you didn't find your friend.” She spoke as if she personally was to blame. “Will you be coming back?”

“No,” and buttoned up his coat. He had been through the mill, the seven storeys of hell. He wanted to get out of Leipzig.

The horizon glowed pink through the deer-heads of blown trees. The warm wind had melted the snow from the branches and beside the railway tracks scales of watery skin glittered in puddles in the first sun. Alone in his compartment, Peter didn't shift his gaze from the window until an attendant with a trolley pulled open the door. He bought two bottles of mineral water and drank them one after the other as the train hurtled through the morning landscape. His head throbbed so violently that, to his relief, he no longer heard the lather and scratch of his memory. With every kilometre that the train put between him and Leipzig, Snowleg sank away from him until it seemed that he had left her safely behind. Snowleg, and the unbearable memory of his last sight of her.

The train crashed through a forest. Rank after rank of sea-green pine. The sun hurling black shafts through the mist into the dew-frosted grass. The trees not trees, but a king's company of pikes and halberds and lances, awaiting the order to advance. He settled back into his seat and nursed his queasy head. He wouldn't ever know the end of the story. He would discharge his undertaking to the old lady and go home, cultivate his garden, behave better.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

N
OT UNTIL SHE CAME
into the bedroom did she remember: Katya was jogging. Bed unmade. Lights on. Curtains drawn. The place was a mess. A litter of lipsticks, bottles and creams all over the chest of drawers and on the floor clothes everywhere in dark piles.

The confusion startled her. Normally, she shut the door on Katya's disarray, but this time she started to pick things up off the carpet. An application to university. A dry-cleaning bag. Nailpolish remover. She took stock of the dust, the unpaired socks, the empty teacups – so this was where they were – and felt a charge of protectiveness for her daughter.

She threw open the curtains and then the windows. She changed the sheets on the bed, put all the black clothes into a laundry basket for Katya to sort. And ended up sorting them herself.

Cleaning didn't require deliberation or discipline or the use of too many faculties. Cleaning took her back to herself. Back to her own days and months of drudgery after Katya was born. It gave her an oddly comforting feeling to think that anyone from that time who saw her dealing into separate heaps the black tube skirts, turtlenecks, Lycra shirts, would have to believe that her world had stood still.

Setting the room in order, she started to ward off the shock of recognition at Peter's voice. She pulled the bed away from the wall and worked her way around and under it with the vacuum cleaner. So her grandmother had ended her days in his care! She tried not to make sense of the information. But her efforts to keep it at bay were futile. She would spend the morning working alongside the coincidence, adjusting to it, until he arrived.

I thought it was dead and buried, she told herself. And now you're coming back.

She knelt beside the bed and hunted in the dust and the biscuit crumbs and the tiny balls of tissue paper. The room had a distinct smell – their daughter's smell.

“Afterwards – what happened to you afterwards?” Isn't that the first question Peter would ask? And she thought of her grandmother. “Men are so transparent,” Oma used to say. “Men are such cowards. Very few try to taste courage. For women it's the opposite.”

She switched off the cleaner. The room was neat at last, but she looked around it with apprehension. If only she could untangle her half-memories as easily as her daughter's clothes. What would Katya's room have been like if she had grown up with Peter, a doctor in the West? Would she have run in the fields?

The sun poured in through the six-paned window. Outside, a tractor ploughing the field and the distant figure of Katya picking her methodical and insistent way across the skyline. Did he even suspect he had a daughter?

She touched her short blonde-streaked hair, her face. With the same fingers, she tugged her jersey over the belt accentuating the fullness now of her body. This was the person she had become. But the younger woman, what about her?

She looked at her watch. His train would arrive in ten minutes.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

A
T
9.26
THE TRAIN
halted at a small country station of mauve brick. A geranium in a rusted paint tin. In the field, a little grey colt with a bald patch. Peter stared through the window and interrogated his reflection. He imagined that he saw his father. The nose slightly larger than he had pictured it. The eyes more slanted. The mouth like something started and abandoned.

His imagining disintegrated into a young man entering his compartment. He was dressed rather as Peter had once seen Johnny Rotten: Beuys-type waistcoat, legs shackled in ripped bondage jeans, stiff green hair, two rings in a nostril and wearing children's plastic sunglasses. “You're in my seat.”

Peter got up and caught sight of the station sign. He stood motionless while the guard ambled along the platform calling out “Dorna! Dorna!”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

S
HE LIT A FIRE
in the kitchen and sat at the table and waited. The clock struck ten. She went into the corridor and stood before a low shelf. She brushed a finger along the spines and tugged out a book. Then returned to the kitchen.

Nervous, she hunted for her reading glasses. But she couldn't concentrate on the book. The slightest sound and she glanced up at the window.

If he had taken a taxi he would be here by now, she thought. He must be coming on foot.

The clock struck the half-hour. Maybe he's not coming! and savoured the last-minute reprieve.

At 10.45 a.m. she took off her glasses and stood up. She would go into town – after all, she needed to buy toilet paper, bread, milk. She started to put on her coat. But I told him I'd be in all day. What a stupid, stupid promise.

She looked out of the window. The only person in the lane was her daughter, running home. She watched Katya getting closer.

It was the morning she discovered the valley.

She had saved a little money from her scholarship and had permission once she graduated to work as a free artist. She informed Professor Kleist that she didn't want a studio in Leipzig – she preferred to be in the countryside to paint. He beamed at her. “That's marvellous!” Every other student had requested a studio in town. There were more artists than rats, he told her, and he had no space. “For you, I will write a letter tonight.”

She spent the summer exploring empty lanes by bicycle. One day she met a shy but determined engineer who was putting up protection orders on old houses. He told her of a house near Milsen, a twelfth-century fortress that belonged to a von something or other. He loaded her bicycle onto his van and drove her to the top of the valley.

They stopped to ask the way at a farm. Under the cherry trees a child lay asleep on a mattress while an old woman with a clerical hat tied under her chin threw tarnished
boules
into the dust. She pointed to a dilapidated orange-tiled roof. The park was overgrown and the trees had lost their formality. Beyond, open fields led to Czechoslovakia.

The rooms were derelict. Villagers had stolen the tiles. The ransack was complete. No doors. Windows smashed. Even the gatepost missing. Only birds lived inside.

The fortress dated from a time when Otto I was delivering Christianity to the East. In the 1960s, forty Czech families had occupied it, but for seven years now no-one had slept here save for a few hunters. There was a print of Landeburg on the principal staircase and some feathers where a pheasant had been slaughtered and, balanced across two ruined mahogany chairs, a slab of amber-coloured bacon.

“A good place to make music at night,” Stefan had said, coming up from the cellar, when she took him there a week later.

There was no water, no electricity, no sewerage. In point of fact, the shy young engineer confided, the district government were hoping the house would collapse. They planned to cut it from history like a shame. Then along he had come to secure it with a protection order. And now there was a strange family who had official permission to live there. In the village, they didn't know what to make of it.