Snowleg (10 page)

The moment arrived when he realised he was lost. He waited at a junction and everything stretched away undifferentiated, a grey prairie of streets and pavements and sky. He heard a muttering and out from a concealed passage between two houses emerged an old man in a long quilted coat the colour of hare's fur, tattered and haggard and grisly. White curly hair to his shoulders. Talking to his dog. Thin and angled as a Danish buoy.

Peter approached to ask directions. At the man's groan, the dog darted from between his legs and Peter recognised the lame animal he had seen in the park. The man drew his coat around his shoulders and shuffled away, still speaking to himself in the way of someone whose memory was confused and dimensionless.

At the next corner, Peter spied the entrance to the zoo and hurried home.

He spent the morning at the Rudolph Theatre. The wickerwork trunk had arrived from the station and Peter unpacked it: costumes with ruff-necks, enormous false noses, paraphernalia for the cubicle. By 11 a.m. he had rigged this up. Assisted by a taciturn electrician, he cabled the lighting keyboard to a lamp on the edge of the stage. Then he asked Teo to run through each prop and explain it again.

At noon, the director appeared and took them to a one-room bar called the Tagesbar Bodega, run by an elderly couple, where he ordered a bottle of Romanian wine and toasted their success. They sat at a shared table and ate frankfurters while he discussed with Sepp the advanced state of East German theatre.

No matter how much Peter tried to concentrate, his inattention mastered him. He kept looking outside. The street drew him like a magnet. He knew that his quest was fruitless and silly. That he was never going to find his father among these strange, resilient faces. Even that he was enacting his own pantomime, the parody of the lost son. But he felt powerless to fight the impulse. At the end of the meal he excused himself.

The director glanced up. His trousers were too short for him and he was visibly agitated.

“Make sure you're back by seven,” called Marcus, looking more than ever like a Lutheran priest. “And remember – be careful.”

“Listen, off you go, off you go,” said Teo.

In a light rain of lignite ash he drifted with the crowd towards the centre. Soot had settled everywhere. There were slashes of it in the sky like something crumbled into water and even the pigeons clustered along the aerials seemed coated with it.

He came to the end of a street, and feeling the raw cold he paused to wrap his scarf tighter about his neck. An icy wind blew from behind and he started forward into the square, following the tail of his scarf towards a grimy basilica of carbon-smeared stone.

Not until he was halfway across the square did Peter notice the uniformed men. Six of them, standing close to the church wall and enthusiastically kicking a man on the ground, in the kidneys and in the back. One of them, pale-faced and stumpy with reddish hair, held a frenetic dog on a lead and spurred on the others as if he didn't remotely care that anyone might be looking. And no-one was looking, even though plenty of people were in the square. Everyone diverted their eyes except Peter, who watched the man, hardly able to walk, being dragged to a van with a fish painted on it. Peter could see six cages inside. An unvarnished floor, bulb screwed into the ceiling, no window. The man was locked in one of the cages. Then the men in uniform climbed in and the van drove off.

Sprayed across the outside of the church was the uncompleted graffito: “
SORRY, KARL MAR
”.

Peter continued towards the entrance, shocked by the awful violence he had glimpsed. Still fresh in his mind was a vision of East German guards on the Wall, willing to shoot a young woman who had crashed through no-man's-land and prepared to leave her dying in agony on the cold concrete.

He walked up four steps and pushed his way through a blanket the colour of moss. The interior smelled stale, suggesting the church was not often aired. Lamps cast a yellowish glow on the grey octagonal pillars and on the red flagstones, and above him a choir was singing. He could make out the choristers and the organist's head and in the side gallery a row of young men and women sitting engrossed.

Knees moved to let him through. He sat in a pew, smelled the polish. The church wasn't full. A few rapt pensioners turned their heads to the gallery stiffly, as if their necks were made out of paper they were afraid would tear. An old lady in the front row opposite leaned forward to scratch an ankle and next to her an old man in a white anorak slept like a marmot.

The choir's singing soothed him. His pulse became regular and gradually he stopped thinking of the incident outside. He was aware of the secret warmth of these faces. When he looked at them he recognised himself. Unlike his experience of the night before, he felt returned to his gene pool. Everyone his cousin.

Peter went on listening to the choir, and now and then it seemed that a face turned in his direction and stared for a moment and glanced away. Long and thin with watery olive eyes and cheeks like old sails tight-stretched on either side of a straight nose so that the smallest puff might capsize it. Each time the face turned away, he felt breathless.

The choir finished singing and a pastor climbed the pulpit and read from Habakkuk. “‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, more menacing than wolves.'” He was descending the black marble steps when the man in the anorak shifted his body to reveal, in the pew behind, a young woman who did not look like anyone else.

Her head moved into the light and fell back. Peter saw her fleetingly, enough for the air to boil around her. He couldn't properly see her face, and leaned forward, eager for another look. Willing her to move forward again.

In the gallery the orchestra began playing again, and now the music reached into him to a level that it hadn't before. He thought of his mother singing in the Bach competition in the year before he was born. Wishing she were seated next to him to whisper the name of the cantata. And it excited him to go on watching the young woman listening to the music, not seeing him.

She opened her eyes and caught him looking at her and their eyes locked. Her mouth fell open a little. She half-turned, gazing back at him through different depths in a slow surfacing. With a shake of her head, she rose to her feet.

His eyes swayed after her. She stepped into the lamplight, a green coat over her arm and at her throat some kind of necklace. Back in Hamburg he would remember Musil's notion that every person has an animal coordinate with which they're connected in some secret inner way. He thought of her then and afterwards as a giraffe. Something fine and pure-bred and delicate with a natural haughtiness that didn't know its own power. When she walked down the aisle, drawing all the light in the church to her face, she led with her nose as if reaching up to chew a leaf.

He watched her cross the nave. He strained to see her breasts and it maddened him that he couldn't.

The congregation filed outside at an excruciating pace. Girls waited on the steps or chatted to parents. He searched for a green coat among the sausage-coloured anoraks, and found it. She stood at the edge of the small crowd listening to a man, about thirty. Round and small with a wide brown beard and a sealskin jacket with pockets for everything.

She put her hands to her eyes. Moved away. And the man with a hangdog expression thrust both hands deep into his jacket.

Peter descended the steps and followed her into the Market Square. There was an intent to her stride, in the way she straightened her back. Slightly gangly, she enlisted the whole of her body when she moved.

She disappeared into a three-storey building on the corner. A banner outside the building read “Leipzig – open to the world” and there was a poster with details of the Book Fair. He paid 7 Marks and hurried to the first floor, a low-ceilinged hall with stalls to the right and left, and began to circle the room.

He tracked her down at the stand of a publisher from Munich. Her back to Peter. Flicking the pages of a book. Scrupulously, she replaced it on the display shelf and when she didn't look up he saw that her gaze was fixed to an attaché case open on a table. She lifted an arm overhead and scratched her back.

“Too bad they can't airbrush my prose!”

At right angles to the same table sat a stout man with a large nose and bulging eyes and hair patted in careful lines over the top of his head. His features only carelessly resembled the handsome physiognomy pictured on posters around the stall. He reminded Peter of the cadaver he had dissected in anatomy.

“Ah!” catching sight of Peter, and Peter recognised the author who had engaged Sepp in conversation on the train and whose name featured alongside Pantomimosa on the invitation to the Astoria.

Peter approached the table heaped with books. “Herr C –,” he began, and the author, mistaking his intention, opened the title page. “Who shall I . . .?” His fountain pen hovered.

“I'm with the mime group.”

The author hitched up his smile. Closed the cover of
Amazing Scientific Discoveries: Volume 9 – Madame Curie
, and with cold politeness enquired the time of Peter's performance.

“Seven-thirty.”

“I regret I have to give a reading tonight,” and beckoned Peter closer.

Behind him, a sudden movement. Peter looked up in time to see her snatch a book from the attaché case and tuck it into her black jeans.

She brushed past him.

“See you at the reception,” he told the author.

He caught up with her in the square and fell into stride.

“I saw you take it.”

She heard him, but didn't turn. “Just keep walking,” and grabbed his arm. Now he was happy.

They crossed the square, walking fast. Down a street and through a concealed passage into an alley. Not until they emerged into another square did she give a quick look round and slow her pace.

“You took his book,” he repeated.

She chewed the inside of her cheek, breathing hard. One of her teeth was chipped. Strung around her long neck and separated by a hollow bone she wore a pair of marble eyes, acetylene blue, that once might have peered out of a dead animal.

“You have to steal,” she said unexpectedly. “Unless you want to read crap. It's the only way to get a good book.”

He held her gaze. Her own eyes deep-set and green – the greyish green of chapel glass – and with a slight shadow under them. She's my age, he thought, and reached out his hand. He half expected her to draw back, but she faced him square on, not moving, watching him as he dug down his fingers between her jeans and waist. Feeling for the contour of the stolen book.

She helped him. A novel with a flock of swans on the cover. “You're from North Germany, aren't you?” glancing at his shoes.

“No, England.”

“Really? I wouldn't have taken you for English. Why are you here?”

“I'm with a mime group,” and described his involvement with Pantomimosa. He sensed her interest fading.

“Why are you following me? I should report you.”

“Except you've stolen property on you.”

She grabbed back the book and started to put on her coat, at the same time quickening her step.

“I saw you in church.”

“I know.”

“It's a rare person who doesn't notice someone looking at them,” and he hated the inanity he heard in his voice.

She said nothing.

“I love Bach,” he went on, making an effort to catch up. Then, as he drew level, he made a stupid remark that wasn't what he meant to say at all: “I forgot Bach spent so much time in Leipzig.”

She stopped in her tracks. She didn't believe what she had heard. “This is Bach's city! He spent 27 years of his life here. He
belongs
to Leipzig.”

“Yes, I know –”

“What do they teach you over there? Melchior Lotter printed the first music here. Grieg studied here. Clara and Robert Schumann started their life here.” She pointed, the East German greyness about her face disappearing as she tried to educate him. “Look. See the Konsum? Richard Wagner was born there.”

Even as she spoke his heart sank as it did on occasions with Anita. Something humourless and dutiful had stormed in. An agenda he couldn't locate. Maybe she was a tour guide. Maybe she was a bore.

He apologised: “I don't know much about Leipzig.”

“It's a lovely city and it always was.” Poised to go on, she changed her mind. “That's OK. Have you a cigarette?”

He offered her a West Light and she inclined her head to his lighter. Long eyelashes and a blackberry undercurrent to her hair and skin that he wanted to touch. He forgot his worries.

“Have you a moment?” squeezing his arm. “Come, I'll show you something.”

She walked in long strides ahead of him along a pavement crumpled and broken, as though something under the earth had shifted. She turned into a street and waited for him, smoking his cigarette. “This is the Brühl.”

“Named after Count Brühl?” He was pleased with himself.

“No, that's in Dresden. This is the Leipzig Brühl. Our Brühl is Slav for swamp. See those windows? Fifty years ago, this street was the centre of the world fur trade.”

She took a deep breath. Closed her eyes. Savoured the air that tasted of coal dust. “This is where I'd come if I wanted a mink coat. Or ocelot. Or moleskin. But I'd make sure to buy my coat in sunlight. Not on a day like today.”

He craned his neck at the blackened facades. The sky and topmost storeys dissolving into one another. “Hard to imagine.”

“No, it's not,” opening her eyes and giving him a heated look. “If all students in the West are like you, they must be a stupid lot. Look, there – below the ledge.”