Snowleg (51 page)

“What direction are you heading?” Peter asked. He had no more time to waste.

“Why, where do you want to go?”

“Dorna,” said Peter.

“Darling, could you run him there?” said her mother, agitated. “I did promise.”

“I guess,” said Katya, and looked at her boyfriend.

Sören compressed his lips. “How long will it take?”

“Ten minutes,” said Frau Metzel. “Actually, the drive is longer, but if you go through the woods it's much quicker.”

“Perhaps I could walk,” said Peter.

“No, we'll give you a lift,” said Sören.

She watched Peter tug his coat from the door, begin to put it on – and suddenly she wanted to give him something. But what?

He stooped to pick up his suitcase and through the window behind him she saw a movement in and out of the hollyhocks. “The honeybees are back! I don't believe it. Bees in March!” She touched his arm and pointed out two boxes in the adjoining field, corrugated at the side as in structures that measure rainfall. “Isn't it extraordinary, they find their way back every year to the same place – heaven knows where from.” She continued talking in a babble. “I don't like bees myself. I mean, do you have bees in Berlin? Of course, you do. They're not everybody's cup of tea, but we do well by our neighbour. The children used to be fascinated by the honeycombs – remember, Katya? I tried to draw what they sounded like. You can tell what they're smelling from their sound. They see blue very well, ceanothus, lavender, blue mint, echium, crocus. Have you ever tried to draw?”

“Mutti!” said Katya briskly. “Stop it. We have to go!”

But she hadn't finished. “Why don't you leave your suitcase here? I'll run you to the station.” And before he could reply: “Here, take this.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

T
HE CAR WAS A
renovated Trabi, painted a garish yellow. Peter sat in the back, Frau Weschke's cane across his knees. When Sören started the engine, the music came on very loud,
Fuck and Run
blaring from the windows. He fiddled to lower the volume, but turned it up – and off they drove, waving to Frau Metzel.

Peter saw her staring after them. She stood at the water-pump and waved what seemed a borrowed hand and then the Trabi turned into the lane, losing her, and all he could see of the house was the stork's nest on the roof.

They sped through the trees and the car as it filled with exhaust fumes smelled like warm goat's cheese. In front, Sören squeezed Katya's knee, then moved his hand to her thigh. Peter caught his breath and leaned forward to say something. But Katya was putting on her seat belt as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be driving along a narrow country lane at 100 kilometres an hour with the driver's hand between her legs.

Peter felt his hostility rising. Katya couldn't see what Sören was doing, but he could. He knew what this boy wanted, what his kneading hand was up to. And yet what could he say or do? It was none of his business. He was the interloper. He was the outsider.

Sören caught Peter's eye in the rear-view mirror. He shook his head and smiled and it unmanned Peter to see that the boy's smile was self-conscious, innocent even. He kept staring at Peter in the mirror and then whispered into Katya's ear.

Brushing the hand away, she glanced over her shoulder and said something to Peter.

“I'm sorry, I can't hear.” He removed the cane from his lap and put it on the seat beside him. “What are you saying?” coming forward.

She turned down the music. “He asked if you were my uncle.” She swept the hair from her eye. “Are you?”

He thought she was teasing, but for the first time she was looking at him. “No, I don't think so,” he said.

Still she went on looking, as he had seen babies look at their parents, as Milo had looked at him – a strange, concerned, ancient look that was almost not human nor sentimental. As though she was staring at him across years, even centuries.

“Sorry,” he laughed.

Sören switched up the music and thumped his hand against the steering wheel. He accelerated down the avenue of poplars and Katya rested her arm on his shoulder.

Peter's laugh blew something away and he saw everything in dazzlingly clear outline. He had not had such clarity since he was a little boy bicycling along the road to Tisbury. Suddenly it was obvious. Sören was just a young man. He was behaving with Katya in the way that young people everywhere behave. The way he had once behaved himself.

Peter watched the couple, not hearing the music. The two of them unspoiled. Everything possible. As it was when Snowleg had taken him to her brother's party.

He was moved and it struck him that he was recovering the image of something that had been his before he defiled it. A kind of giddiness. A promise he had never tasted again.

In slightly more time than Frau Metzel had estimated, they reached Dorna.

“Where do you want to go?” said Katya.

“Over there. Could you drop me by the church?”

“Do you want us to wait?”

“No, I'll walk back.”

“Are you sure?” said Sören.

“Yes, I'm sure. Without the suitcase I'll be fine.”

“We can run you home,” said Katya.

“It's very kind. But I'd like to do some thinking,” and tried to climb out, but the door was locked from outside as though childproofed and she had to come round and open it.

“Remember your stick,” said Katya. She handed it to him, her arm exuding impatience and the satirical officiousness of the young when they are playing parent to the parent.

He felt impelled to kiss her on the forehead and she smiled as if it was her due. As if his kiss was part of the bounty of people's affection for her. She was in love. She had a boyfriend who loved her. Everyone wanted to kiss her. Why wouldn't he?

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

F
EELING AN OBJECT TUCKED
into one of the sleeves, she removed the Karlovy Vary mug and then lifted the muskrat coat from the box. The hem needed stitching, but Katya might like the coat. She smoothed out the arms and heard,
Once is never enough.

She carried the plastic container with both hands to the garden and poured the contents over the hollyhocks. Shadow came running, but after a desultory sniff turned away.

Her grandmother had known. “An extraordinary thing, but there's a doctor here who has looked after me so sweetly and so kindly that if I could, I would commend him to you. In fact, dearest Snjólaug, I may send him with my ashes.” She had discovered who Peter was and the old woman's last act on earth was to send him to her.

Out of habit and a sense that she needed to be among her tools she left Frau Weschke's letter on the table and walked along the brick path to her studio. Even as she put out a hand to open the door, she felt that something was not right. When she picked up a pencil it was heavy and lifeless and blunt. She began to draw, but she knew without having to try that nothing was going to come of it.

The sound of a bee blundering against the skylight made her get up from her desk. Listless, she returned to the kitchen and started to wipe the top of one of the jars on the sill. The jar had leaked and there were twigs and flies beached in the honey. As she rubbed the stickiness from the glass she could hear her daughter saying tartly, “Nice present, Mutti!”

No. On his own, or not at all.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

T
HE CHURCH WAS PARTLY
camouflaged by oaks, a building of unhealthy red brick the colour of a drinker's face. Of someone who had left their secrets in half-bottles under cushions and beds.

He searched among the older tombstones. They lay in short grass, slabs of black marble with gold lettering and snowdrops rubber-banded into jars. He didn't suppose it was a deliberate policy of the gardener, more like inattention, that the memorials of the Russian soldiers were overgrown. These were arranged in stiff ranks down the slope, cracked obelisks 2 feet high and each with a red star and a relief of once-gold bays. Some of the obelisks had names, others not. Most had died in 1945 and 1946.

He found his father's grave on the lower level: a perfunctory slab, about a foot square.

“Peter Brendel 1938–64”.

The concrete was spattered with bird-droppings and on the ground before it was a burnt-looking circle of grass as if a rainbow had come and gone and all that was left was a scorchmark in the soil.

Peter found it hard to line up an emotion with the event. To feel it fully, he thought, I'll have to come back. He dropped to his knees and ran his fingertips over the chapped surface, outlining the indented letters and figures. The barrenness distressed him. No RIP. No biblical text. He twisted around for something to put on the grave.

In quite a short time he had collected a larch cone, a sprig of conifer needles, some berries and feathers. I will write to my mother, he thought. I will give her a report on this place. But what I would really like, after I've created a bouquet of feathers and leaves, is a photograph to send her. Something she can have which will resolve her obscure grief. Something which says: The man who was the father of my child is here in some way united with his son.

And there came back to him the image, under a fridge magnet, of a lawn in winter. Frau Metzel – that perfectly nice, rather sad woman – she had a camera, a Polaroid.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

S
HE PARKED WHERE THE
Trabi had left him an hour before.

“Don't get out,” he said. “It will only take a second.” At the house he had handed back the cane with the gesture of a man checking in his lance and breastplate, a man who had travelled as far as he could go.

“No, I want to come with you.”

She walked in with him. The fragile bouquet was where he had left it. He knelt, thinking: This is it. I've failed in every other respect this weekend, but at least I am here. He arranged the bouquet on the slab and with his finger sketched an X on the concrete in the way that as a schoolboy he used to finish a Sunday letter home. “I'll just do this and then we can go.”

She saw him fumbling with the camera. “Would you like me to take it?”

“Would you – since you're here – do me a terrific kindness? Could you take a photograph of me actually standing by the stone?”

He faced her. He was writing the letter in his head. Dearest Mummy and Dad and Ros, I'm sorry I haven't been in touch. I had various reasons for coming to Leipzig, but the most important was to see where my father is buried. As you always suspected, Mummy, he didn't make it to old bones. He was shot trying to escape (I would have been about three at the time). I'm going to make the grave cleaner and tidier –

“Look up.”

He straightened his back. He took her honey out of his pocket and held it in front of him.

She was four, five paces away. She lifted the Polaroid to her eye. But the photographer, not the image, was taking shape before him. A hatch was lifting and he felt fresh air pouring in and down, drenching him, and all his past and present confusion, guilt, misery, loneliness, flooding out. Snowleg. But he cannot speak. He cannot move.

He sees her walk towards him.

She takes his arm. “Peter.”