Snowleg (33 page)

The driver chuckled. “Less than half an hour. Man, there can't be many Vikings with that name in Leipzig.”

“The problem is she's not Icelandic – and it's not her surname.” “What's her surname?”

“I don't know.” He hadn't known his father's surname either – and was shocked at the coincidence, which hadn't crossed his mind until now. His single lead was his nickname for her. Based on a mispronunciation.

“You're looking for a woman with no surname? What are you, man, a crazee guy?” and his good eye checked Peter in the mirror. “What she do? A singer, is she?”

“When I knew her she was a student.”

“What school she go?”

“I don't know.”

A woman turned to look at him through a rear window and he saw a round face.

“When you last see her?”

“Nineteen years ago.”

“How you know she still lives in Leipzig?”

“I don't.”

“You haven't made it easy for yourself, man.”

“No,” and regretted that he hadn't returned to Leipzig sooner.

“You realise she could be anywhere?” said the taxi-driver, parking outside an iron gate. “America, Peru, Poland, Australia, Canada, Croatia – no, probably not Croatia . . .” His atlas petering out, he gave Peter his card and urged him, if he needed a reliable driver any time, to ring the number, any time. “Man, you realise she could be dead?”

Peter walked impatiently through the gate, looking to the right and left of him for a hut with a lime-green door. Gardeners stood greeting one another over their fences and privet hedges. From a boiler-suited man sanding a gatepost, he learned that the water had only recently been switched on after a six-month break. On this early day of spring, everyone wanted to savour the sunshine and their faces turned to collect its promise of heat.

He walked back on himself. Set off along another cinder track. Each time he stopped to look up a path he pictured, lounging on the steps at the end, his then self. Self-deceiving. Unkind. Cowardly. Not noble like Bedevere, but one of Leadley's barbarous Huns.

Was that the hut? He peered with an ache in his heart at the newly tarred roof and the pole from which a white and green Saxon flag stirred in the morning breeze. Beside a plastic pond a messy grey coil of hose had the appearance of guts.

Or that? In the next garden they were trying to light a bonfire. A smell of kerosene-soaked branches mingled with thick smoke. Children chased each other through a collapsible marquee and to one of the guy-ropes someone had tied the Ferrari flag.

Or that?

But none of it was familiar. He had come here at night when the gardens were covered in snow. Now the snow shrank into the earth, the big soft snowbanks turning into hard cones in the sun, and he didn't recognise the place. It was a lot smarter, a lot trimmer, a lot more
spießig
than the colony of his memory. And look where he would, no lime-green door.

Around another corner was a noticeboard. He marched up to it and began reading as though he would find Snowleg's name there.
Morilia frutigena
. A warning to “garden friends” about apple blight. A circular from a company intending to take earth samples. A reminder that dogs were to be kept on the leash.

Something smelled rotten. Under a hedge, revealed by the retreating snow, a scrap of grey fur with ants running around each other. Ants in March? He heard Frau Weschke's disparaging voice.
The way we live is destroying our planet
.

At the centre of the maze stood a white two-storey building. The upper floor was a museum devoted to the achievements of Doctor Schreber, and downstairs there was a bar. Peter ordered a coffee and sat at a table, listening to the chat of three men playing cards in the corner.

The lukewarm coffee stimulated in him the thought that the last moment he was conscious of being happy was in one of the allotments he could see through the window. He said to himself: At the very least, I can find out where she is. I could buy her a lovely scarf and a nice postcard. Maybe I could walk past her house before I post it? He composed the postcard in his head. “I have come back to Leipzig. You've been on my conscience all this time. I want you to know I haven't forgotten you and I'm bitterly sorry for the way I let you down. But I hope you've had a good life.” That was what he wanted to say. It sounded to him like something Frieda might have written. And too much left out.

He put down his cup and went to the table in the corner. The smack of cards ceased as he approached. “Excuse me,” he said, “but there used to be a hut here . . . with a green door.”

One of the Skat players lifted his head. Fiftyish. Strong. Fat. “A green door?” looking at him with suspicion. “Sacha, do you know a hut with a green door?”

His companion had a pigeon-breeder's badge and a bald cranium. “Young man, I have known literally dozens of huts with green doors.”

“It belonged to an old woman who passed it on to her grandson.”

“The woman's name?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“No.”

“And her grandson?”

“He was called Bruno but I don't know his surname.”

They looked at him with pity, not bothering to shrug.

“Does the name Snowleg mean anything to you?” he said clumsily.

“How do you spell that?” asked the pigeon-breeder.

He spelled it.

The third player rose to his feet and called out of a window. “Willi!”

A moment later, a man shuffled in with guarded grey eyes and dark bushy eyebrows like kindling wood.

“Willi has been a member of the Garden Association since 1957,” explained the bald man.

“Willi, do you know anyone called Snjólaug?” said the fat man.

“No.”

Peter thanked them and plunged back into the pruned labyrinth, seeking an exit to the street. He consoled himself that the garden most likely belonged to a West German who knew nothing of the previous owner. He turned right at a fork and walked until he came to a dead end.

He retraced his steps. The hedges passed under his hand and from a branch a blackbird looked at him. By day the garden colony was a lot bigger than he could have imagined. Everything the same as if the disciplined hedges had been cultivated deliberately to confuse him. A conspiracy of trees and hedges.

Nineteen years before, he had had Snowleg to guide him. Without her, exactly as on his first night in Leipzig, he was lost.

Pouched in wrinkles of nut-brown skin, two eyes glittered at him with the sad fervour of his grandfather on the last occasion they met. Then the old man turned away and continued digging and Peter remembered other faces. Frau Weschke. Rodney. Alfred, his patient from Linz. All at once appreciating the impulse that had driven an expert gardener to dig up his apple trees and replant them upside down.

I know what you got up to in Leipzig
.

“Please,” he called over the fence. “Can you tell me how I get out of here?”

He burst into Aachener Straße. With each step that took him further from the Schreber gardens he felt his optimism fading as well as the prospect of attending a Beethoven concert at the Gewandhaus. The message he had framed in his head kept drumming at him, impelling him irresistibly into the search.

Peter's questions drew blank looks among staff at the Rudolph Theatre. No-one recalled a tall, dark-haired young woman with a name like Snowleg. Still less a 23-year-old student in a leather miniskirt, blue lambswool hat – “like this” – and wearing a strange bone necklace. The person who might best have remembered the theatre in 1983 was the director, currently in the United States on a scholarship to explain the former East Germany to the citizens of Bloomington, Indiana.

At 10.30 a.m., he visited the school of the St Thomas's choir. The door was opened by a man with a large moustache.

“Could I look up someone?”

“Who do you want?”

“She's called Snowleg.”

“I don't know any Snowleg.”

“Who do you know who could have studied here about 20 years ago?”

“I don't know any Snowleg.”

He tried the Dmitrij Language School with the same result.

At Leipzig University, a helpful archivist, lately from Baden-Baden, she was anxious to point out, searched through records of students matriculating in psychiatry for that period, when it had been Karl Marx University. She could trace no student who fitted Snowleg's description nor even a list of graduates. After 1989, she lamented, many papers had disappeared. “The bastards
I'd
like to track down don't even have nicknames!”

“But why would somebody sack a university records office?”

“The people at the Runde Ecke, that is to say the Stasi headquarters, went through the records of every university, every hospital, like locusts, scooping up all they needed.”

“For what?”

“Ask them at the Runde Ecke – and when you've found out, please tell me.”

Tugging at the back of Peter's farewell was a small surge of relief. Right up until the moment when he entered the Runde Ecke, he did not think he was going to mind if he drew a blank. This had been a dream. Rosalind was right. He couldn't just expect to walk in on Snowleg's life and say he was sorry. She was bound to have married, bound to have children. On innumerable occasions at St Cross he had willingly gone to chapel and not expected to discover God. This experience was little different. And while something was driving him to look for her, he didn't admit to himself that anything was at stake. Here on his first morning in Leipzig, he was conducting his pursuit in a carefree spirit that suited him. Lightly. In a manner almost cat-like. Terrified to be too earnest, or too hopeful, he was going through the motions of looking for Snowleg without inhabiting them. Conscious that at any moment he could turn on his heels and catch the next train home.

Four different architectural styles had merged in the former Stasi headquarters in Kleine Fleischergasse, the building capped by a black watchtower that sprouted from the pantiled roof in the shape of Darth Vader's helmet.

Peter reached the entrance down a lane that slunk behind a drab six-storey building erected in the 1950s. Panels above and beneath the windows were composed of an in-between colour like dirty carrot. To demonstrate a spirit of openness, not a single blind was drawn. And yet it made no difference. Another security service might be in place, but daylight continued to shun the windows and even the trees looked dead around the building. Their branches quite still in the afternoon air. Too frightened to move.

He arrived before a grandiose nineteenth-century doorway carved with putti that he could picture Rodney itching to sketch, and climbed the steps.

Inside the Runde Ecke, a former fire insurance office, Peter ran up against the impossibility of his quest. A man behind a Plexiglas screen confirmed what he had suspected all along and what his experience of investigating his mother's past had taught him. He might apply to read his own file, no-one else's. Applications were taking six years to process.

He received the three-page application form in the spirit of someone accepting a flyer outside a theatre and looked in a daze at the familiar list of queries, the blank spaces to fill in. Already, Snowleg's absence from the university register alarmed him. Had he read her name on a list, he might have stopped this search there and then. She would have achieved her ambition. But the omission was ominous. Why had her university file disappeared? Had she been harassed by the Stasi? Had he in some way contributed?

Peter had started out that morning hoping to cleanse his spirit, but now on all sides questions assailed him. Was she alive? Where was she? What had happened to her after she was taken away? How was he to find her? Questions he had once asked of his father.

He sat down to tie his laces. It wasn't until he stood that he made the connection. His mother's file would have been compiled in this building. Beneath the black watchtower the state police would have supplied details of Henrietta Potter's height, the colour of her eyes, the shape of her nose – even the book she had with her when she met his father.

About to leave the Runde Ecke, he noticed a flight of steps leading to a doorway opposite. The Stasi museum was open.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

P
ETER WENT INTO THE
museum with the apprehension of someone walking into an examination hall. Since 1983, he had deliberately turned his back on the GDR. Over the next hour he absorbed himself in the regime that had separated his mother from his father and had nurtured Snowleg.

The boy in the turquoise tracksuit was eighteen. He lay on the asphalt in obvious agony. In another photograph crouched the Stasi officer who had shot him. Cigarette in mouth. Hands clasped around a pistol. The teenager was jailed for 20 months. His crime: Republikflucht. One of 63,949 arrested for attempting to leave.

An extract from the confiscated diary of Angela, a punk: “We have no freedom, we live in a mousetrap, I want to see other countries.”

A cartoon of the British Bulldog as Death.

Images tacked to the walls of a cramped corridor assisted Peter through a history of the East German security police. He had overheard the statistics too often to be shocked. They had drifted over him like a Lesson in chapel: 174,000 unofficial collaborators, 132 kilometres of files, 360,000 photographs, 99,600 audio cassettes, 250,000 political prisoners, 25,000 dead, 33,755 bought free. His eyes skimmed over the case histories and he read without concentrating how twelve of the 19 committee members of the Writers Association were Stasi. He read how the novelist Christa Wolf suppressed all knowledge of her contact with the Stasi until a file prompted her memories. “I never told them anything that could not be heard anyway at any public gathering.” He read how Knud Wollenberg had reported on his wife Vera under the name Donald. “I was reporting on myself as much as anyone . . .”