Snowleg (29 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Milo was standing between them. Refusing to go with either parent unless they were quiet.
“Can't you see how gutting it is for me to leave him with you?” she spluttered, adjusting the shawl over her shoulders. “It's not as if we're splitting it and having an equal share in looking after him. What was it you said when I first met you? âThe shoemaker's son always goes barefoot and doctors' wives die young.'”
“I said I would marry you. I give you all the child support you ask for. If you don't â”
“Oh, shut up,” though if she hadn't interrupted he didn't know what he was going to say.
“How is he?” he asked.
She glanced over at her son. His hands flat against his ears. “Better,” edgily.
Along with Milo's overnight bag, she threw Peter a bottle of calamine for the spots. “Remember. I like him to be in bed by eight. Otherwise he comes home cranky. And to wear glasses when he watches television. And not to eat sweets, right? The last thing I need is an oversugared, overtired child who calls me âDaddy' for the first day he's home.”
She drove off and he took Milo to the Anti-War Museum in Brüsseler StraÃe (on Sister Corinna's urging) where Milo admired a pale butter dish in the shape of an Iron Cross, and then to a funfair in Mitte where for an obstinate hour they shot at wooden ducks and missed.
Next day they walked through a park near his apartment building where the snow lay grey and rough. They scraped together snowballs and lobbed them and afterwards he bought his son a lollipop and a video.
Back in the car, Milo studied Peter as though his father were something he had seen in a picture book. “I like snow,” he said with emphasis.
Peter held his sticky hand and drove home to Charlottenburg where he had promised they would spend the evening watching
Star Wars
. “Once you've had your bath.”
Star Wars
. “Once you've had your bath.”
It was in the tub that Peter noticed the Biro marks on Milo's chest. Fascinated, he traced them with his finger and thought of his first incision and the dotted line his registrar in UKE had made with a marker pen. In the days when he was able to cut through a patient's mattressy skin.
“What's this?”
Milo looked down. “A man.”
“Who is he?”
“Dunno.” The day before, Milo's best friend at the kindergarten had drawn the lines between his chicken-pox spots.
Peter scrubbed the flannel over Milo's face, but was reluctant to wash off the figure on his chest. All at once he had the sensation that his son was more joined up than he. He saw what Milo would look like as an old man. And while he couldn't discern Frieda's features in the arch of the brows, the wisps of uncombed hair, the glistening lips, he did perceive his own and this comforted him and at the same time gave him a wild brief stab of longing for the father he never had.
Pitter-patter and Milo came into the room with the video. Peter started the tape and they sat beside each other on the sofa-bed, Milo every now and then flashing him a sideward glance to make sure that he was enjoying it too.
“Good, isn't it?”
“Yes.” A word he had spent a lot of time teaching Milo to say.
Milo returned his face to the screen, but Peter went on looking at him. Remembering the moment when he uttered his first word. As if Gus had suddenly started to speak.
He couldn't keep his eyes from his son's rapt profile. The boy sat there like an exclamation mark and Peter was overcome by gratitude that through Milo he had learned to see things again in primary colours. He thought, You wouldn't be here if your mother hadn't asked to interview me, and the arbitrariness of that fact, and of his own conception, seized him with a kind of solemn horror.
“Daddy, look at the film.”
He tried to watch it, but couldn't concentrate. Who could Frieda be interviewing in Leipzig? And his mind drifted back to the letter she had written six years before and her article on Daniel Schreber.
Doktor Daniel Schreber was a Leipzig paediatrician with perverse and possibly dangerous ideas of education. His first son shot himself; his second went mad in a way that intrigued Freud into developing his theory of paranoia. He never lived to see the project for which his name became most widely known. Months before his death in 1861, Schreber came up with a plan that would overnight transform our nation's attitudes to gardens much as Father Kneipp had altered its conception of water: he proposed that the Leipzig authorities set aside the city's waste ground as an area for children to play in.
An anarchistic bureaucrat and an admirer of Dickens, the progressive more than the novelist, Schreber had observed at first hand the debilitating effects of industrial life on Leipzig's young population. He believed the only sane person was the farmer and envisaged a network of “pauper's gardens” in which the infant proletariat might exercise in the open air under adult supervision and learn to plant flowers, fruit-trees and vegetables.
After he died, Schreber Garden Associations sprang up all over Germany and even attracted the endorsement of Nietzsche. The gardens followed the model established in Leipzig. Land was cleared, mainly in the city centre but also on the outskirts bordering the railway tracks, and divided into allotments. Each allotment was the same size and each contained a small hut.
Intended as a domain for children, the garden colonies were swiftly hijacked by adults â within two years in the case of Leipzig. Strict rules came to govern the number and variety of trees, the hygiene of plants, the height of the grass and hedges. In March, usually during the Leipzig Trade Fair, the water was turned on and in autumn it was turned off. A rule in force throughout the year banned anyone from spending the night in their hut under penalty of expulsion.
In times of fascism, many people hid in the Schreber gardens. Jews. Communists. Social Democrats. Lovers. Times change and yet in these allotments it is still possible to come across the hardy patterns of old East Germany.
On screen Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia prepared to swing across the abyss. As the music swelled, they kissed.
Milo squirmed: “Eeew, girl germs!” Then looked at Peter and in a matter-of-fact voice that confounded him: “You and mummy don't love each other.”
“Well, we both love you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
O
N TUESDAY MORNING, AS
though Milo had invoked it, the snow fell again.
N TUESDAY MORNING, AS
though Milo had invoked it, the snow fell again.
Sister Corinna had wanted to take him shopping. “I'm going to insist. I've never insisted before, but I'm going to now. You look like nothing on earth. You're frightening the staff. You might get a haircut at the same time.”
“Corinna, I'm not â on your one morning off â going to let you shop for me.”
He was relieved to be inside. An icy wind thrashed through the hospital grounds and lifted the pigeons from the trees, slamming them into a stone-coloured sky. The turn in the weather had confused the swallows. Black and white birdshit spread over the balcony outside his window, flecked with small feathers as if the wind had smeared one of the newborn birds on the ice.
“What a ghastly, ghastly day,” commented Angelika, his secretary. She might have been pronouncing a death sentence on the sky. Everyone in the office looked pale and miserable.
At 2 p.m. Peter drove with Gus to Wannsee. He was about to go into the chemist to buy Milo a toothbrush, when his attention was caught by a young woman in a lemon-yellow jacket opening up the charity shop next door. She scraped the snow-sealed entrance to reveal a window piled with bric-a-brac. Without thinking, he followed her inside and noticed through his breath, balanced on a radiator beside a bunch of artificial leather flowers, a small pen-and-ink sketch of a giraffe.
He tilted the sketch to the light. A scene from a zoo. The giraffe accented in a quick blue wash and the figure of a man leaning against the railing. No signature, but the artist had written: “Leipzig â 1899.”
“It's just a sketch but I like it,” said the woman, who was older than her little suede jacket suggested. “It has energy.”
“Look what I got for Frau Weschke,” showing the giraffe to Sister Corinna. “Can we wrap it?”
“I thought you didn't have time to go shopping.”
“What about that?” He nodded at a white bag.
Sister Corinna removed the boots she had bought and replaced them with the picture.
“See,” he said. “It fits!”
“It doesn't look very festive, Peter.”
“What if we put a ribbon on it?” He put his hand on the back of her neck and rolled away the bow bunching her hair.
“She's been quizzing me about you,” watching him tie her bow to the strings of the bag.
“What did you say?”
“What else but the truth?”
“Which is?” to tease her. But he heard her thoughts. I've stopped fighting you for being a self-centred prick. I know what you give to your patients. It's admirable. I don't know when I met a doctor who has given so much, and if you weren't a doctor I'd probably loathe and despise you for how little you've given to anyone else.
She reached out and touched his ear as if she had scent on her fingers and wanted to perfume it. “To keep out of your way at all times.”
He grinned sadly back.
“How do you know I didn't tell her that?” removing two dog hairs from his turtleneck. “I could have done. How do you know that I didn't?”
“Corinna, enough. How is she?”
“Not a good night,” shaking her head and tidying up his knot. “I had to give her morphine this morning.”
He kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for this.” And bounded up the stairs.
“Frau Weschke? Hello? Hello?”
She lay quite still. Her face at an angle towards the Wannsee. Her pillows propped up so she could enjoy a view of the frozen lake. Discarded on her bed was a copy of the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
.
Leipziger Volkszeitung
.
“I've got something for you,” he said before he had accustomed himself to the quiet of the room. Ordinarily when he approached the tower-room he would hear her squalling against one of the nurses.
She turned her head. At their first meeting two weeks ago, she had had the baby face of an old woman. Now her skin was taut with a carved-out look.
He put the bag on the dresser. “How are you?”
“I'm all right,” she said roughly. “I'm full of beans.”
“You look thinner.”
“That would be some help if I was 80 years younger.”
He read her chart. “The nurse says she's noticed some black stool. Maybe it's related to the aspirin.”
“Could be,” and reached up to her throat in the way of someone wishing to touch a necklace they have taken off.
“We don't want you to catch a cold.”
Frau Weschke grunted as he took her pulse. It was no higher than normal. Her wrist gave off a scent of soap and it moved him. He heard the beat through his stethoscope and suddenly had the sensation of feeling closer to Frau Weschke than to anyone. Even though he knew little about her.
“Where's Milo?” she asked.
“He'll be here soon.”
After a moment she said, “I think the time is coming for me to stitch that coat.”
Her feet were cold, her nails the blue-grey of her eyes.
“Has your granddaughter been to see you?”
She shook her head.
“Try to drink.”
He held her mug and she brought it to her mouth and then pushed it aside, sending her newspaper to the floor. Peter picked it up. The pages were open at a photograph of a snow-covered garden. “That's a very pretty picture.”
“She sent it to me,” in a voice that didn't seem to come from her but from another place.
The caption read: “Schreber gardens in winter.”
“I was there once.”
She twisted her head and looked at him with a different intensity. “Tell me about it.”
He could see she was dying. “I spent the night in one of these gardens with a woman I loved.”
She studied him. The muscles tightening around the eyes. “Everyone thinks you're such a fine man, Herr Doktor.” A pillow had slipped and he tucked it back under her shoulder. “I'm just an old lady. Why do I feel sorry for you?”
“Because I work so hard.”
She darkened. “Always these games.”
He fetched the bag and put it on her bed. “Look what I brought you.”
He untied the bow and pulled out the sketch and held it up. “Just imagine. You might have seen that very giraffe.”
She gazed at the animal and then at Peter. There was an opacity in her look and yet she seemed to be taking him in.
“Didn't you go to the zoo?” he said.
“I went once.”
“Once?” But she wasn't in a mood to be teased. He continued in a gentler tone, “Weren't you born in 1899?”
“In 1899, I was 2 years old.” She coughed and closed her eyes.
He did his rounds and a little after 3 p.m. slipped into the kitchen. A dark room of chequered oilcloths and long oak tables and institutional fridges that hummed. A bold shadow detached itself from a wall in the corner.
“Hello,” said Nadine.
He unbuttoned her shirt and he felt her heart beat fast and her skin hot on his lips. He ran his hands under her skirt and between her legs and she raised herself on the table.
One eye sagged lazily. “Tell me this is a one-off.”
“This is a one-off.”
“Liar.”
“Is that what you think?” with a lopsided smile.
“Is this where you break in all the student nurses?”
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