Snowleg (23 page)

He retrieved the boxers from the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.

She was still looking at him in a concentrated way. “Your jersey's on the wrong way around. What do you think it means to wear a jersey back to front?”

“That I'm not vain?”

Up flared the sharp brown eyes, two claymores darting right between his ribs. “Wrong! It's designed to draw attention to yourself. In fact, it's a form of extreme vanity and selfishness.”

Bettina marched back into the bathroom and picked up her eau de toilette. He watched her face in the mirror. She was spraying her throat with the fastidiousness of someone who might have slept with him, but was going off to meet another lover.

She wiped her arm and his shaving bag went flying. “Oh, fuck.” Then silence. He sat up on the bed, heart thudding. She clipped out of the bathroom, back straight, and held up the needle triumphantly. She knew what it was. She had even injected herself on occasions. It was the easy way out.

“Not only a pig.” Her voice had a note of cold finality, as if he wasn't there. “But a fucking junkie.”

His head on his knees. Not looking at her. So she bowled him the needle along the floor. “I'm sorry, sweet, I don't think I can marry you.” She went on: “I'm sad to have to say this but I no longer love you,” and stared at the Alster, the lake like a spread of Rosalind's silver foil. “In fact, I feel betrayed. I came towards you and you let me down. I feel bitterly let down.”

He wanted to say “I love you”, but the words remained in his throat. He found it physically impossible to utter them.

Still her voice ploughed on. “I tried to fight against it and it's a lesson – you can't,” her face at the window tight and bunched like a bulb that refuses to flower. “I've never felt so lonely as I've felt since I met you. I hope I never feel that in death. You were never there for me. I've been trying to end it since the summer, but you wouldn't let me. I don't mean it that I don't love you. I do. But you're not the person to make me happy.”

Slowly, he dressed.

“You know what I blame as much as anything?” the cocaine she had taken in the bathroom making her voluble. “Your English education. There are so many layers of artifice ironed into you that you find it hard to be real. Oh, there's a sweetness to you, but you leave no taste.”

He put on the designer jacket that she had bought him, the trousers made out of sailing material.

“Why didn't I see the signs? Of course, you were going to tread on me. You trod on Pericles,” checking her fringe in the mirror. “I admit, at first I was taken in by your schmaltz. I don't suppose you remember what you said as we walked from the Syracuse? ‘People have lied to you, I can tell. But I won't be that man.' So plausible you sounded, and then you recited Tennyson. It took a while to realise you were addressing your poetry to my panties, not to me.”

He stood up.

“But do you know what
really
did it for me?” applying a rhubarb lipstick the same colour as her hatband. “It was the most trivial thing, but it struck at my soul.
It was the way you constantly took off my music and put on Bach.
Why, all of a sudden, were you so interested in Bach? You never paid any attention to classical music before.”

He waited at the door while she hunted for a leash and then filled Pericles's bowl with mineral water. “The trouble with you medical men is you consider yourselves Renaissance figures. You think you know about art, you think you know about music, you consider yourself a healer. But me, I was raised in a medical family, I have two secondary degrees. Sometimes I get up in the morning and I start to write and time passes and I don't know where I am, but I have gone so deep into myself that I find it difficult to come out. That's a form of automatic writing you wouldn't have access to. There's a Berlin Wall between your psyche and your intellect. But it's not a strength. It's because you don't know what to feel. Or how.”

By the door she pulled down his head and kissed him full on the mouth as if she needed this last taste of him. “Goodbye, sweet.”

The weight of her rhubarb lips, the ache in his chest like a dry socket.

Instead of bicycling to the faculty, Peter walked to a bar on the Alster and smoked his way through a packet of West Lights, drinking one glass of Weißen after another. Shortly after 2 p.m. – these details he learned later – he stripped off his Omen jacket and trousers and tossed them in the lake. He had no recollection of seeing a dog hurl itself into the water or of walking into the Thomas-I-Punkt store in Gänsemarkt where a diminutive roly-poly woman in a bob-cut was folding a jersey. She looked up and started to ask how might she help. It was then she noticed that Peter had nothing on. Not a stitch. Not even a pair of Birkenstocks.

“I thought he was German,” she told a local reporter, whose story was spiked at the last moment because of the momentous events taking place in East Germany. “But he kept speaking in this refined English voice. As if – how can I put it? – he was trying to sing.”

To everyone's astonishment but his own, Peter flunked his membership exams. Days short of completing his training as a senior houseman he was found collapsed on the toilet while a child with a blocked carotid artery waited in the operating theatre. A search uncovered two needles in his locker. Confronted by his registrar, he confessed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

O
N THE LAST MONDAY
of October, Leipzig's city centre – the length and breadth of its streets – filled with men, women and children holding candles and walking along Dittrichring in one of the processions that would earn for Leipzig its sobriquet “City of Heroes”. The same evening Peter entered the psychiatric clinic of Ochsenzoll in the north of Hamburg. His registrar had given him an extended leave of absence to pull himself together. Peter Hithersay, he wrote in his report, was the best student of his year. It would be a tragic waste not to grant him a second chance.

“Fentanyl!” sneered the heroin addict in the Narco-Anonymous class Peter was compelled to attend. He looked at Peter in the way a hippy might regard a yuppie. “That's the lowest rung. I thought coke was the lowest. But fentanyl!”

In the evenings the patients watched television or dozed. Late one November evening Peter saw a stream of gleeful faces pouring through the Bornholmer crossing point.

The heroin addict, who came from Berlin, was upset. “Look at this cesspool being tipped into our streets. I want the Wall. I need the Wall. I don't want these bastards loose in my city. Get it back up!”

“That's right, get it back up!” said a voice from behind him, a woman's.

In the corner a man with a deviated septum sang, “There's no getting over that rainbow.”

“What do you think, Herr Doktor Peter?” The heroin addict nudged him. “Should we let them in?”

“That's my home,” he said, his vision coloured by his crazed muddled head. “That's where I'm from.”

“Well, ducky, there's no-one there. Are you going to Berlin to squeeze through the Wall? Because the tide coming this way is so massive that before we know where we are we'll have dealers from Moscow all over our streets.”

Ten days later Peter was again in the television room. On screen a vast crowd stood shoulder to shoulder outside a building with a curved facade, gazing intently up at the windows.

“Where's this?”

“Stasi headquarters in Leipzig,” piped the bandaged nose.

The heroin addict glowered at Peter. “Do you know what they're doing over there? The cunts are burning everything. I mean, everything. In fact, it's time we sent some of you fentanyl fuckers back so they can burn you.”

The refrain was taken up. “That's right! Burn you!” Soon everyone was chanting, “Burn you, burn you, burn you.”

Peter made a vow. I am going to get better. I'm going to go to Leipzig however long it takes me. At some stage in my life I'm by God going to find that girl and atone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

D
AY AFTER DAY THEY
had stood in their thousands in Dittrichring. Not moving on. Staring up at the building. Chanting. But today, for the first time, the ginger-haired man was nervous. Another file was missing. Someone had been here before him.

“How will you ever forgive me?” he hummed and slammed shut the cabinet. He knew who it was. He knew fucking well.

Early December and behind a shuttered window on the second floor of the Runde Ecke, Kresse was destroying everything his gloved hands could seize. In continual use for three weeks, the shredder had given up on him. All afternoon he had been ripping up documents, but there seemed no limit to the files that crammed the shelves and cabinets.

From the street came the sound of singing. Kresse recognised the hymn from his childhood. They had been singing it every night. “Wake up, wake up, O German land. You have slumbered long enough.”

He strode through the sacks bulging with shredded paper, parted the slats of the orange blind and peered sullenly out. The night was ablaze with what looked like Halloween pumpkins. The faces of numberless ghouls who held candles beneath their chins and placards bearing the same message: “We're staying here,” and “We are one people”. The ghouls had been peaceful so far, but he sensed that this was the last evening on which they might be prepared to see smoke billowing from this building.

Unseen by them, Kresse surveyed their exaggerated features and remembered the night three weeks before when he had mingled with such a crowd. He remembered how the radio warned of people being crushed because the platforms couldn't cope with the numbers. It was like a zoo, all the animals leaving. Why go into their cage? he thought. But on that November day he couldn't very well remain in his country – there was no-one left.

He remembered the young mother with two small children in the queue, and recognising this was Marla – he stood so close he could smell her hair – and his relief when she looked around and smiled at him, not knowing who he was, saying to her daughter, “Come here, Katya. Stay together.” He remembered being propelled through the gate and into the West. People everywhere. One moment he was walking among them, enjoying the pressure of his feet on the pavement. The next, he was flowing half a metre above the ground. He had the strange impression that he was still and his surroundings were moving. That he was a rock in a river and the people were swimming by. “Boss, it was like a fucking drug trip,” he told Uwe.

The crowd carried him to a branch of the Dresdner Bank where the West Germans had promised them each 100 Marks. He remembered Turks passing by and spitting as he queued for his welcome money, and thinking: If the Turks in West Germany are spitting at us, then they must think of us as an inferior race.

Kresse had always imagined West Berlin as looking like Leipzig done up. But it seemed to him like any bombed-out city from the 1950s. Not showy at all. Around him families were running like lost people, children hanging onto their parents' arms, looking at shops with huge eyes. It was winter, but in the supermarkets there were cucumbers, strawberries, everything.

He bought a yucca plant for 15 Marks, and a kilo of oranges. In East Germany he was used to green Cuban oranges, fibrous and bitter on the tongue. He remembered how he said to the woman, “Are these oranges sweet or will they clench the pores of your skin?” She looked at him bluntly and then a large Turk came out from behind a curtain holding a knife. He thought, He's going to kill me. But the Turk took the orange, cut it in half and offered it. “Try.”

He sucked at the rest of the orange in the queue for the Pornokino. The audience consisted of old grannies and children, all choosing, like him, to spend their first evening in the Golden West watching
Texas Chainsaw Massacre II
. The orange tasted sweet.

But now he was back in the Runde Ecke where some fucker, whether to protect the individuals concerned or to create more trouble or simply as a matter of personal insurance, had removed certain files that he, Kresse, had been ordered to get rid of.

He let go the blinds and unlocked another cabinet. Yet again there was a yawning space. He checked the index for the name of the missing file. “How will you ever forgive me?” he hummed through the gap in his teeth. The cabinet contained records of political prisoners arrested in the central Leipzig district between 1958 and 1961. He twisted his head, but the telephone was ringing.

At the other end, Morneweg's voice. “Kresse. How are you getting on?” He sounded old, a man with a rusted inside.

“As well as I can, sir.” In fact, he itched to tell Morneweg that it was a fucking miracle what he had done. Since November 10 he had incinerated more or less the entire Information Research System as well as records for operational payments, not to mention files belonging to those whose freedom the West German authorities had purchased, together with details of the bank accounts.

“Where have you got to?”

“Nineteen sixty, sir. That's going back – what you wanted.”

“Look, I've some stuff in my office that I've kept. I really need you to sweep it away.”

“More files, are they, sir?”

“No, Kresse, glass jars.”

And Kresse, whom Morneweg had promoted from dog-handler two years before, immediately understood: Morneweg wanted help to smash up Uwe's smell pantry.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Have you sent anyone else to take files?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, sir, an awful lot of files are missing.”

“This is not a help at a time like this, Kresse. You've probably seen the news.”