Snowleg (44 page)

“Yes, I know,” said Uwe. “We heard everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let's stop playing word games,” raising his red-rimmed eyes and looking Peter full in the face. “We've all been fucked around long enough. If we're going to talk, let's talk.”

Peter was really frightened now. Clearly, something much worse had happened. He lowered his leg from the rail and pulled himself to his full height, feeling a hideous stab in his spine. “I really need to know who you are and why you're here and what you've got – and then we can talk. I've had a pretty long day.”

“Have you? I've had a pretty long day myself.”

The keeper started feeding: from the rail they could see him throwing branches from a barrow. Peter watched the giraffes eating with a sliding chew.

“I take it,” came the voice, measured again, “that you did not go on to great things on the boards?”

“No, I'm a doctor. Actually, I'm a German doctor,” and was conscious of Uwe looking at him with a little more interest. “I always hated the theatre.”

“Me too.” With strained jollity, Uwe said: “I didn't see your show, Herr Doktor, but I sent a couple of people along – including my colleague Kresse, who had been trying to stop it. Kresse maintained you were four prats from Hamburg who were going to put on a ludicrous theatrical performance. But Morneweg – that was our boss – overruled him. ‘They may be something later in life.'

“Well, Kresse reported back that in the whole history of stage management he had never seen anything so incompetent. He referred to you in the department as the Pantyhose Four. The music was disgraceful, too. And I tell you, Herr Doktor, he didn't like you any more when you ripped out our camera in the Schreber garden. You see, because of her brother the hut was already bugged. You remember – just outside on the lawn – der Gnom?”

His mind switched away. It was blasted clear of some things – loyalty, pride, patriotism – but others poured back to fill the mother-sized hole. He thought of Morneweg whom he had served with filial obedience, almost until the end. He thought of Kresse, hurtling his ginger head against the walls of his basement cage. “I don't want your money,” he said. “But I thought if there's something I can do to stop Kresse finding her, if not for your sake then for hers . . .”

He tapped the padded envelope. “I'm sorry I was late – I was having a quick look at these files. Before you see them, it's important you understand the context.”

There was no reason Peter should have remembered this, but he had arrived in Leipzig in 1983 not long after the West Germans had done something to make the East Germans look foolish. “You never saw such a mess. They had a dead body and they pulled it through the minefield, and what could we do? You're bound to shoot – and when we got to it, it had no stomach. The episode was humiliating. We wanted our own back.”

This was why Uwe had reacted with alacrity when Renate telephoned from the Astoria. “She asked: Did I know of someone – a young woman – planning to escape that night with a group of actors from Hamburg? I had an idea who she was talking about. I said, ‘Let her in. I'll get authority for this. Meanwhile, we can set it up. While they're at dinner, we can organise things.' We didn't have long, but I thought we had a chance here of seriously embarrassing someone, in this case the West Germans and the English.

“I was about to speak to Morneweg when Kresse came in. He had been on her trail since that morning – in fact since I went with him to the Schreber garden. I said to him, ‘This is your chance, Kresse. Take your dog down to the station. Get the cameras. Let that wicker basket go to opposite the last carriage. You're in charge of the detail that will arrest her.' We might have had a marvellous – not a propaganda victory, but a humiliation victory. But even as we were putting it in motion you threw your spanner in our wheel.

“My first thought – when I heard how you'd behaved in the hotel – was: Could it be a blind? I said to myself: Maybe she's going to go off miserable and then turn up on the platform. She's going to walk to the end of the train, kiss you goodbye and vanish.
Brief Encounter
all over again. And if she had tried to escape, we were primed. I don't know to this day how serious she was about getting into that basket. Probably she was. Anyway, I had to assume she was, which is why I brought her in. But if she had got into that basket – that would have been the end of her, and her brother too. We'd have rounded the whole lot up, father, grandmother – you as well.

“Instead of which all we get is this girl, who didn't seem like someone who wanted to turn the state upside down.”

Between the metal cranes and mansard roof floated thinning packs of cumulus clouds. Uwe sniffed. The sun had brought out a whiff of giraffe droppings and urine-soaked hay. It reminded Uwe of the smell of Morneweg's Wartburg and his first sight of the woman outside the Astoria, the doorman bundling her into the car and Morneweg catching up behind. He remembered how she kept looking round at the entrance. How she was still staring through the back window when the car lurched off, its tyres honing away in the sludge.

“I said to her – this was in the car: ‘If you will implicate this English student in his escape plan we will lift him at the station.' She didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. I repeated what Renate had overheard. ‘I want to go in your dressing-up box. I will fold myself so small you will hardly recognise me. I can't spend one more night in this country.' At this, she laughed. She said we had got it wrong. It was a lover's joke. But Morneweg was sitting next to her and he was adamant. Because of what happened with his wife, it was his philosophy that everyone was running away. She might be ‘a mother of the underground'. She might be working for Workers of Peace. Or in league with her brother. And if she wasn't a hostile negative force, a term we used, maybe she was an indigent. Whoever she was, we couldn't let her get away. Since I was already involved in her case, he wanted me to be there at the interrogation.”

Peter put out a hand to the rail. His knuckles were like stems that had been lopped off. “Who was she? You did find out, didn't you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you mind me putting it to you like this? Would you tell me as thoroughly as you can what happened?” He was willing to get down on his knees for any last gritty hurtful detail with which to sandpaper his conscience. “I'm not afraid.”

Uwe touched – for reassurance – the large envelope, tapping his fingers on the printed words “Guggenheim & Berberich – bread-machines” as if to slow down and make more deliberate his thoughts. And decided that he did want to help this man who insisted on hearing everything. It was comforting to talk to someone who would register his words: it would stop him thinking of a hollow hand clawing for a morsel of air. A quick look through the file and the case had come back to him. He hadn't thought of it in 19 years, but his memory was infectious. Since he had started remembering, he remembered more.

In no time they reach the Runde Ecke. Wordlessly, Uwe guides her across a frozen quadrangle. The snow falling in dark grains. A police car with its bonnet up, a rack of bicycles, dirty icicles hanging from the gutters in jagged free-fall.

He punches his number into a security box, shoves her up some steps and along a corridor to have her fingerprints taken. The policewoman – blue trouser and jacket uniform, short hair dyed red, bat ears – squirts ink into a mirrored glass. She seizes the girl's right hand and rocks her little finger in the ink. Then takes her into a bright-lit room with a basin and a pail in the corner. There is hardly any ventilation.

“I watched her on and off through the night – and other nights too. I see your point, Herr Doktor. I remember her sponging herself in the early hours. Lovely to look at – except for that burnmark. But you must see many naked people in your profession . . . For me – as I said – this was no degenerate. This was a classic situation, a girl in despair. We can use this, I thought. We'll pick her up, we'll put her back together, we'll tell her, ‘Darling, they're not worth anything. They're not worth horse-piss. Who would join one of these bastards? Join us. Get your own back.' I've seen it happen a lot. They scream their heads off, and after a while they're turned very simply. Some take two minutes, some two hours. But most give up in the end, there's only one way to go. Well, with this one it wasn't quite as easy as we'd hoped. By the next morning I know that she's not like the others.”

She stands before him in Morneweg's office. She has slept in the clothes she wore to the theatre, plus she has on a police-issue woollen pullover, olive green and on the back “MFS”. Lipstick and mascara smears on the collar of her shirt.

Uwe sweeps her slowly with his eyes and remembers a dark hair on a sheet and immediately files the thought away. “Please,” he says politely, indicating a chair in front of the larger desk.

She walks hesitantly across the grey carpet tiles and sits. Shadow of a lace curtain on the wall. A flag: “Germany – One Fatherland”. On the desk an embossed-leather-framed photograph of a teenage boy standing on a yacht's deck. Morneweg's son. There is a folder, two glass jars, a book, a key, two telephones, a tape recorder.

“My colleague will be here very shortly.”

Through a second door, half open, the drift of a male voice conferring with someone. Morneweg comes in, closes the door and goes behind his desk. Loose tan suit. Pink shirt. Thick black-framed glasses. An old man with round child-eyes taking her in.

He starts the tape recorder. “Your name?”

She gives it and he stops the machine, spooling back the tape. A hissing fills the room and over it her voice, composed and clear: “Marla Hedwig Berking.”

He smiles and starts the tape again. “What is your date of birth?”

“February 17, 1960.”

“You are twenty-three.”

The machine is a grey-ribbed Uran with a green light like a spirit-level that snakes back and forth as they speak.

Assuming an expression of great solicitude, Morneweg adjusts the microphone and leans forward.

“To begin with,” Uwe tells Peter, “it's small talk. When did she finish her studies, what music did she like to listen to, what did she think of the theatre?”

“This incident last night. Tell me in your own words what you think happened.”

“I was invited.”

“You were advised it was a formal dinner.”

“Not by him.” The machine snuffles up her answer.

“By the doorman,” Morneweg reminds her.

“I'd had a drink. But I was invited.”

After a silence, he says: “Would you accept that terrorism has to be countered?”

Puzzled, she concentrates on the Party button in his lapel. The metal oval stamped with the yellow, blue, red of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

“Yes. But what has that to do with last night?”

Timid, as if afraid to infect her, Morneweg suppresses another cough. “I have to speak with you about a serious problem.” It has come to his knowledge that a Western secret service has been collecting information about her. He needs to find out for what reason. “It's important for your own security and for that of your family.” He takes off his glasses and breathes on them. “You must tell us all about yourself and your friends and relations.”

“I can see she's wary, but curious too,” Uwe tells Peter. “Is Morneweg talking about you, she has to be asking herself. Have the British sent a student to spy on her?”

She says: “No-one would have any reason to spy on me. What sort of information?”

Morneweg polishes his glasses on his shirt and begins to speak about her life, her character, her family. He tells her how her grandfather started his bleaching business. How her parents met. Her childhood. He knows everything. The milk bar where she bought ice cream as a 14-year-old. The first Beatles record she'd exchanged. The origin of the scar on her back.

“We are here to help you,” he says with a friendly smile, and holds up his glasses to the light like someone checking a tumbler for lipstick. “Maybe we could do something for you.”

“Her face is puzzled, at the same time impressed. I can see her thinking: Who told you this?”

“Yes,” she says after a while, “there is something you can help me with,” and explains her problems with Sontowski.

“You want to become a psychiatrist? Maybe we can help, but first we have to get more information.”

Morneweg puts his glasses back on and studies her with shrewd, unreflecting eyes. The Englishman – how long has she known him? How did she come to meet him? What did they talk about? What did he tell her about his work . . . ah, yes . . . What was he going to do after university? What did he tell her about his family? Why did he come to Leipzig, to the Fair?

The fusillade of questions unsettles her. Her eyes swing around and come to rest on the glass jars. She cocks her head, trying to read the labels.

“I'm confused. I want to know who she is, this young woman who has got under the skin of my boss. I ask myself: Is this a dissenter? Could this person possibly be a threat? She doesn't impress me as an oppositionist or as a deviant. Morneweg has shown me the file – all her reports for school and university say she's the star pupil. OK, she's belligerent. OK, she barges her way into an official dinner at the Astoria. OK, she reads forbidden novels. But isn't this what she is? Just a spirited girl who's fallen for a Westerner and wants to see him again. As far as I have been able to make out, she isn't involved in any organisation. She doesn't belong to the League of Evangelical Churches. She doesn't fit any familiar dissident pattern. The point is, there's no broad resistance to the regime. Morneweg starts from the position that they're everywhere, like stars in the sky. But there aren't many. Just what we called single ghosts. And this girl is a single ghost, if she's anything. As I say, the whole thing is confusing. And most confusing of all is the key.”