Snowleg (37 page)

“You choose,” exasperated.

Her eyes catalogued him. “Forest mist. Where are you staying?

I actually have these articles at home. I can bring them round tomorrow and you can pay me then.”

He gave the address of the Pension Neptune and she put it in her notebook.

“You want to talk to me about something? So, let's talk.”

“I'm looking for Snowleg.”

“Snjólaug,” in a flirtatious way as if the name had come up for the first time. “Now that is one oddball.”

The church hall. That was where they had met. “That's right, the party.” She laughed. “You might have thought, Bruno being married to my cousin, we'd have bumped into each other before. But all the time I was fucking him, he never talked about his sister.”

“Her brother was married to your cousin?”

“That's right. Petra.”

“Then you must know his surname.”

She looked at him with a lip-swallowing smile.

“Well?”

“Berking. Bruno Berking.”

“Berking.” He repeated the name. Trying to see Snowleg in it.

“What was her first name?”

“That I didn't know, and I still don't. I knew her as Snjólaug because I heard you call her that in the theatre. As I said, Bruno never talked of her.”

“Go on.” He was sitting on the edge of his chair.

“Well, the night after the party there she was at the Rudolph Theatre – with you again. And your friend, the musician. Anyway, I'm thinking since you and Snjólaug are together, I'll go with your friend – I can't remember his name.”

“Teo.”

“OK. You see, they liked us to go with Westerners. Even artistic ones! They gave us special rooms, sometimes paid us. So we get in the taxi and as I recall Snjólaug confused me. This wasn't some tart who'd waxed her pubes into a Mercedes-Benz sign. I mean to say, it was possible to look at her and think completely the opposite. It was possible to think: This is a pussy who isn't going to catch one SINGLE mouse. But it did cross my mind she might be a student whore. You know, extra money at Fair time. And why not? And I suppose that's what I thought when I saw her with you in the crush bar and I didn't change my mind until I saw her fling herself around your neck. Something about her expression, the way she was dressed, I don't know, but it made me want to come closer. And when I heard her asking you to take her out of the country, I thought, This one, I'll get. I'll have her. But there was no time to warn anybody. I saw Teo leaving the bar and I followed – and there she was, about to curl up into that basket. Well, if I hadn't believed it before, I believed it now. She wanted to leave with you! And if that was the case, I was going to make sure I earned some credit with one or two people.”

She studied her shoe. “I knew the doorman at the hotel, Anton. When he didn't let us through, I said to him, ‘Can I have a word?' and told him it was important, I had to speak to Uwe – Anton knew who I meant. ‘When Uwe hears what I have to say you'll be certain to let us through!' But Anton has his orders and he won't listen to me. ‘You're not coming in and that's that.' Meanwhile, Snjólaug behaves as if she doesn't know anything. She behaves like an Olympic gold medal cuckoo, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don't. How do you mean?”

She drank her wine and licked her lips in a way that made them appear redder. “Well, all the time I'm speaking to Anton she's looking through the door to see if you are going to come out. Then I see her walking over. She's upset, I can tell. Hookers are full of pride. I don't know the experience you have with hookers. You can say something and they won't touch you again for a million dollars. But not this girl. I take her into the car park and I start to lay into you. I mean,” shooting him a look, “it was pretty fucking tacky to ditch us without a word of goodbye, especially after you had agreed to take her to the Golden West! I even felt sorry for her, and when I feel sorry for someone there's not much hope. I told her: ‘Forget it.' And gave her a whole heap of cheek about what cunts you and Teo were. But the stupid little bitch keeps looking at the entrance as if you're going to run out and save her from me.

“Next moment, she starts walking back to the hotel and this time it works. She gives Anton something. He takes her inside and I realise what's going on.”

He watched her with intensity. He felt he was walking towards a woman with a gun. “What
was
going on?”

She flexed back her toes, testing the leather. “She was Stasi.”

Into that gaping dreadful stillness cut the peal of complacent male laughter. A face at the bar took a quick look round and went back to a jollier conversation.

“She wanted you to smuggle her out so she could blow the whistle at the border.”

“No.” He didn't believe it. That wasn't his Snowleg. Because if it was . . .

She touched his arm. “Let me finish. Otherwise, she couldn't have got into the Astoria. No German girl would start to talk to the doorman as she did with Anton. In Warsaw, Kiev, Minsk, maybe. But in East Germany, we're all well educated. We know the rules. Really, it's impossible that she wasn't working for the State. It's really impossible.”

“You don't mean –” But the rest of the sentence was already stiff in his mouth.

“I don't know how much you know about the Stasi, but even if you worked for it you'd never be aware of who the others are. Two or three at most. And I thought, This has all been arranged. Anton doesn't know who she is and she's telling him. It's a long time ago, but I remember thinking something else.” Eyes conspiratorial, she said: “Supposing she were to overhear me, she wouldn't like what I'm about to say, but even though she was about to play a trick I think the stupid little bitch had a real feeling for you. She was so aware of you in the taxi, presenting the nape of her neck to your gaze, that she almost broke
my
fucking heart. You probably don't know this, but she spent all her money on a perfume she hoped you'd like. And then you treat her like a window-smasher. Like a 10 D-Mark whore.”

“Did you see her again?” still astounded, still fighting to digest this. Still not able to believe it.

She looked away, opening the catalogue as if to find the words. “Sure, I saw her again. I saw her come out of the Astoria and get into a Wartburg, didn't I? The two men with her are Stasi, I can tell by their clothes. And I'm nodding to myself: That's right, she's with her own.”

The waiter had left a tin tray on the table. Peter stared down into his elongated reflection. “Stasi . . .” The thought had never occurred to him. Was it possible? Was he, not Snowleg, the victim? Did Renate's revelation make some sort of awful sense? Was that why Snowleg never gave him her name? All those improbable sob-stories. Her dashed hopes for a university appointment, her epiglottis, her brother. Concoctions to elicit the sympathy of a naive student from the West.

“Look, so what if she was Stasi?” Renate said this quite charitably and lightly stroked his arm to lessen the blow. “She had to have liked you.”

He snatched away his arm. Repudiating her version. Clinging with a frantic strength to the precarious image conjured by Frau Lube. He had loved the girl he invoked to Frau Lube. Loved her.

“God, I need to see her,” he said after a while.

Renate sat back and shook her head. Eyes merciless all of a sudden. “Honey, grow fucking up.”

He stared at the tray.

“Aren't you a little late?” Her plucked brows quivered and in her eyes there flashed a complicated hostility. She sipped her wine. Her laugh resentful. “Sure you're looking for her? Sure you're not looking for someone else?”

“Who?” he bristled.

“You tell me. Someone in a smart white shirt and dark blue tie, for instance?” She toyed with her glass. “You know, when I heard what you did to her, I was jubilant in my horrible female heart that someone could be so mean to another woman.”

“Where would I find her?” barely controlling his impulse to skim the tray into her chest.

“Let me ask you something,” and she might have been examining a dubious garment that she wished to return to the rail. “What would you do if you did find her?”

“I'd tell her how sorry I have been all these years.”

“Oh, really? Still in love?”

“Maybe.”

“Honestly?”

He wanted to say:
Fuck you
. “Sure.”

“Hah!” she said, stiffening and hostile. “Hasn't it crossed your mind that maybe you wouldn't even
recognise
her if she came down those stairs?”

“Don't be ridiculous. Of course I'd recognise her.”

Her head moved back as if his breath were bad. “People like you, you're so educated, but you don't even know where the heart is.”

“Renate . . .”

“Christiane.”

“Christiane, do you know where I'd find her?”

She shrugged. “I'd try and find someone who was in the Stasi. Either someone who worked with her. Or someone who interrogated her.” She measured him with a syrupy expression. “Depending on who you still think she is.”

He tried to turn on his charm. Not a drop came out. “These people in the Stasi, how do I speak to them?”

“Money, of course!”

“So you're saying it's impossible!”

In the bluntness of her words he heard Renate telling a client that the garment they had chosen really didn't flatter them at all. “It's impossible to find the people who were directly involved. You find them only by chance. You walk into a lift and you remember a pair of eyes, a face. You sit in the Auerbach's Cellar at the end of the working day and order a drink and talk to someone and it resurfaces. Or maybe the person at the next table is the person you're looking for. Otherwise, forget it.”

He swallowed hard. “What would you do in my position?” He had never heard this voice he had. This note of irritated, chastened desperation.

“What would I do?” For the first time, she seemed to feel some of his emotion. And catching his expression she altered her tone. “I would put an ad in the paper. The Stasi are scared of us. As we used to be of them. They won't tell you anything. But for money, yes. People will do anything for money.”

He reached for his wallet, but she stopped him. She wrote down something in her notebook and ripped off the page and tucked it under his glass. “Take this. It's a formula. A code they'll understand. Put it in the personal columns. Another way, you'll search until death.” She finished her wine. “As for me, I've talked quite enough for one night.”

She was preparing to sweep the catalogue into her bag, when she paused and her hard eyes liquefied at the sight of the model. “Forest mist. It suits us both – in different ways. Know why?”

“Why?” in a recovered voice.

“You couldn't care less, but I'll tell you.” With lipsticked sententiousness, she said: “Ossis are watchful, like animals in a forest. But Wessis are lost. You don't know where you are. The forest is inside.” She pushed the catalogue towards him. “Keep it. You may want to order something tomorrow. Seeyuh, honey.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I
T WAS PAST
8 p.m. when Peter left the Mädler-Passage and crossed the square to the tram stop. He walked through the slush, a salty grey soup that seeped over his ankles and made his socks wet. He had set out from the Pension Neptune that morning in a spirit of optimism, buoyant at the thought of Snowleg and of the possibilities the day held. A tram rattled to a halt and he climbed aboard with his head forward and his arms away from his side as if carrying two heavy suitcases.

People looked up. Friday evening faces going home. A fat girl eating a sandwich and in the back three pimply boys throwing something bright between them, back and forth. They seemed to be teasing each other. He took them for American students.

He punched in his ticket and sat with his back to the driver. His thoughts were extreme and he couldn't co-ordinate them. They kept swooping back to Renate, modifying the idea he had of Snowleg. One moment she appeared at Renate's shoulder as a spy and seductress, like a girl from the catalogue in his pocket. The next on Frau Lube's arm as a victim of his cowardice. And he recalled his conflicting impressions during their first walk together through the Brühl. The book-stealer in the black jeans with the cigarette had been sexy, but the righteous tour guide from the Leipzig information centre had not.

The tram stopped. Behind him doors hissed open, bringing into the carriage a gust of chill air.

“Fucking tourists.”

An old couple hurried past his seat, faces tense.

Figure after figure emerged from the collage of speculation and memory. He couldn't help thinking of the overvarnished portrait in the Auerbach's Cellar, the versions superimposed and proliferating so that they blurred. Faust on a barrel blurring into the image of himself on a barrel and then into Snowleg.

“Hey, you! Fat pig!”

In the back of the tram the cries had grown louder. A whistle blew and one of the boys jeered at the girl. She ate without registering their taunts. There was something sad about her hugeness. Short-haired with glasses, her cheeks expanding as she chewed. Perhaps she was retarded.

“Fucking elephant!”

The tram picked up speed and the girl straightened her back. He felt his mouth on Snowleg's scar. The texture of pearl. Why had he said “No”? Shocking and strange, but compelling his tongue to taste it. How did the same lips arrange themselves to permit that word? The skin softer than kid glove leather. Pale. A young honey. His teeth on the scar. Biting it. Smooth as the velvet wax of an artichoke heart. The surprising hardness under tongue and tooth that he can't draw into his mouth. The white of a child's eye refusing. The white of her eye at the table, refused.