Snowleg (49 page)

She handed Professor Kleist's letter to the mayor. He read it aloud, bemused: “Please give your support to this young artist. It's essential for our nation's cultural life that artists of her quality can live and work in the country. There are no more studios in Leipzig.”

The village elders agreed to connect electricity to the old house, to enrol her children at the village school, to help with materials. They were too cowed to say No.

That summer the family slept in the village inn and she and Stefan laboured themselves to repair the roof. The next four months were the best they had together. They built an outside toilet with a black-market cistern and bricks. They glassed in the dining-room windows. They laid floorboards. And they discovered, with the help of the old lady at the farm, a water supply. She had remembered seeing a pump working in the courtyard before the war. They dug for many days and 4 feet down, far from where the old lady had thought it, they found a hand-pump and a well. Before the year's end, they had restored two rooms. Enough to abandon the inn.

In the late autumn evenings Stefan lit a bonfire and toasted garlic and bread. She could buy four loaves for an Ostmark and the bread was good. She looked at the fire then as her two children now watched television. Saying nothing, not even thinking.

The spacious dining room became her studio. She slept here with the children, surrounded by books and trays of nibs and rolls of thin brown paper – until she learned to make her own from hollyhocks – that a contact of the baker purloined from a mill in Dessau. No stranger came there – and Stefan only when he was drunk. She went out by day with a sheet torn from this paper and sat in the woodland and waited for a sound – a bird singing or a voice in the distance – and tried to repeat the noise with her nib until the nib was part of her, a finger.

These hieroglyphs were her notes. She also took Polaroid photographs. At the academy Professor Kleist had tried to coax her from painting to photography, and in particular to study the work of Sander and Cartier-Bresson. But though she used the camera incessantly, she ran into so few of Cartier-Bresson's “decisive moments” where she was now living that she had no appetite to seek them out. Her instinct was for self-effacement. Her short-term ambition to let a shy, mistrustful nature trust her. Make her its lightning rod.

When the children slept, she lit a lamp and settled at her table. She worked through the night, drawing after drawing, while her husband's electric guitar beat out from the cellar and over the abandoned park. Once she opened the shutters and the lamplight reflected in a squirrel's eye.

Nobody from the village came. They listened to the jagged discord of Stefan's music and were friendly enough, but they never came.

“They're afraid we're Stasi,” Stefan said.

A door slammed. She heard Katya panting along the corridor. “Sören not here?” called her daughter between heavy breaths.

“No, darling,” and took off her coat. She had nothing of him. No photograph. No letter. Once there had been a blue hat and woollen scarf, but Stefan had taken to wearing these for his concerts until one night he didn't bring them home. All she had was condensed in a forgotten novel by an author whose name she had never heard uttered again.

Katya climbed the staircase and tramped along the corridor, creaking the beams.

She sat down and put her reading glasses back on.

The story had gone right out of her head but, her English revived by a fortnight in London, she was drawn in, and having understood one page she read another until she looked up at the window less and less.

In the early dawn, he walked to the canal that fed the lake. The birds knew him by his movements and advanced towards him in a silent cavalry. He tied one leg with string and then another. Soon they were ready.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

H
E GOT OUT AT
Milsen. Since the place appeared destitute, Peter, after waiting five minutes outside the station without any sign of a taxi, decided to proceed on foot according to Frau Metzel's directions. A walk might clear his head. Wheeling his suitcase behind him, he headed out of the village.

At first glance it was like any of the villages seen from the train. Buildings the colour of a horse-rug. Empty chairs on a veranda. A war memorial, its plaque cracked in half. A woman sat on her steps bare-legged in the sun and watched him go gingerly by. In a garage workshop, an aria from
La Traviata
– possibly Pavarotti, more likely a mechanic.

He passed a row of houses each with a small front yard and a wire gate, his progress punctuated by the snarl of locked-up dogs. Signs warned of their disposition to bite. An Alsatian stood still and shivered at him. At the next gate another dog lunged to the end of its chain, darkening as it growled.

The border was only kilometres away. Had these been guard dogs? Milo's mother in her article had written how trains stopped at the border for 15 minutes to let trained animals crawl under the carriages and sniff out anyone clinging to the underside. Reunification had made these dogs redundant, their former handlers compelled to sell them – or else to bring them home as pets, sometimes, Frieda said, with dreadful consequences for the community. The dogs attacked ducks, goats and cattle as well as villagers. “Were he to return from the dead,” wrote Frieda with her usual woolly reprise, “not even Colonel Most would be guaranteed a safe reception.”

An Alsatian in the last house choked at the end of its tether. Licked the spittle from its snout and crouched. Black eyes sparkling. Nostrils quivering in a low snarl.

“@ Schillerstraße, left, keep going > a crossroads.”

The fields were covered with a blanket of snow and mud. Hedges standing like yard-brushes. By the time he reached the crossroads the barking had died away.

He picked his slow way along the narrow road, his suitcase rattling behind him and the tap of his cane on the asphalt. He knew he must sound like a blind person. Stopping to rub his eyes, he focused on the sun bobbing out of the clouds like a fisherman's float. Impossible to know what the sun would do with the rest of the day. The sky that had been clear earlier on had the grey-white texture of freshly filleted cod, and was dotted here and there with scales of Prussian blue.

He followed the road through a line of poplars. Their trunks grey and the uppermost bark pinkish with the stripped patina of burnt skin. Along the roadside, white-painted crosses marked the scene of accidents.

The trees gave way again to open country. The road climbed steeply up a vast field. At each step he felt a recurrent pain in his back and neck. He slackened his pace, stopping once or twice to rub the sweat from his eyes. The field was furrowed in neat and specific rows and cropped as he used to imagine his father's head. The snow had shrunk back into the earth, but when he breathed in there was still a smell of cold in the air, like fur.

Over the brow, where a lane branched to the left, a shallow valley unfurled below him. “You'll see it to the left.”

Frau Metzel's house was not at all what he was expecting. An old fortified manor-house that lifted its stone gaze above a courtyard and across fields that might have been landscaped. In contrast to the hostile uproar in Milsen the scene that met his eyes was tranquil and soothing. A tractor, its ancient plough-shares gouging open the soil, trundled out of sight behind a timber barn. Pigs lolled in a field, and in the distance a runner closed on the house. Long dark hair, black tracksuit, young.

He looked at his watch. What did she mean, half an hour? It had taken 50 minutes. Leaning on the cane, he stepped towards the house. When he had delivered Frau Weschke's ashes, he would ask her granddaughter if she could save his weary legs and drop him at the next village.

CHAPTER FIFTY

H
OLLYHOCKS BRUSHED HIS KNEES
as he approached the door. He pressed the bell. The buzzer whirred. Feeble, like a beetle on its back.

He took off his hat and mopped his brow and waited. Not a sound. He pressed the bell a second time and after long seconds stood back and looked through the window. A woman sat at a table. He had a fleeting image of simple black clothes, fair hair. She didn't turn. Didn't move.

Peter rapped at the glass with the silver horse-head. The corner of the window was stitched with cobwebs and there were honey jars and bottles along the sill.

“Yes?” The tone of a woman interrupted, but there was no-one else in the kitchen. She was reading.

The woman who opened the door was dressed in the sombre style of the newly bereaved. The dark clothes fitted loosely and he couldn't tell her age. She had a long, intense, slightly pale face and her skin was delicately netted as if someone had squeezed it hard between their palms and left the prints.

“Frau Metzel?” He smiled at her his professional smile and she smiled back, excited and then disappointed, and he wondered if she had expected him to be someone else. “Peter Hithersay,” introducing himself. “I spoke to you from the station. I've brought your grandmother's things.”

She went on looking at him and crossed and uncrossed her arms in a gesture of consternation. He hasn't recognised me, she thought. But why should he? We met for three days 19 years ago and I've changed. She was 10 kilos heavier now, with her long dark hair cut off and streaked; and she had steel-rimmed glasses through which she studied him with grey eyes that had no doubt lost their fire.

He peered back at her with an odd expression. She was about to take off her glasses, but stopped herself.

“I recognised you straight away,” he said – and she thought with a pang, Here we go. “You look like your grandmother.”

Frau Metzel didn't say a word. Finally, she stepped back. “Won't you come in?” her face in shadow.

He wanted to say, I must go, there's somewhere I've got to be, but the voice smouldering in his suitcase said, Don't you dare. “Well, perhaps for a minute.”

Her long stride carried her away from him into a tall-ceilinged hall, passing a perfectly preserved stone staircase, a battered suitcase on the bottom step. The hall smelled of turpentine, maybe dogs as well, and half a dozen canvases were stacked against the left wall.

He ought, he knew, to ask about her art – Bettina would have shot Pericles for a show at the Whitechapel.

She went ahead into the kitchen. Long pine table with a book open. Large 1960s fridge stickered with photographs. Board pinned with telephone numbers and pictures cut from art books, and a door with coats and hats hanging on it leading to the garden.

“I see you're limping badly. What is it?”

“A knee.”

“You had a rough weekend?”

“You don't know the half of it, Frau Metzel.”

She looked at him enquiringly, but just then a black whippet emerged from under the table and sniffed his crotch. She made a quick gesture with her hands. “Shadow – please. For goodness' sake.”

He patted the whippet away and the dog, as if they understood one another instantly, turned and went back to its basket.

“You're right to ignore him,” and she stared at Peter, musing. The mud-spattered, not especially well-fitting trousers, the face a little exhausted. A man with a stick who smelled of snow and something antiseptic.

He lifted the stick and she thought, Any second now . . .

Peter wasn't prepared for the rush of emotion when he set the cane on the table. He felt – despite the violence of his hangover and the pain shooting down his spine – the liberation of someone dismounting having accomplished their knightly task. And yet he was reluctant to part with it. He caressed the tarnished handle and the extravagant thought flashed through him that his fingers weren't touching an inanimate mould but the haft of an infinitely precious weapon.

She waited tensely. “Do you want to take off your coat?”

He started to unbutton it, when he caught sight of something on the table. He had noticed the book! But it was his letter from the Hilfrich Klinik. She half turned her head and took frowning note of his face as he reread his words. This she hadn't foreseen. All morning she had composed herself for his coming. Her flare of disbelief that he hadn't recognised her gave way to a bolt of anger, swiftly leading to silence.

He straightened. Without his coat he appeared very thin, like something maltreated. She stared wonderingly at the trousers and his shirt with its faint reek of Sagrotan. He looked raw, defenceless, and more authentic somehow than the young man of her memory.

“Here – give that to me,” and she added his coat to the garden door.

He went to open his suitcase. His walk unchanged and rocky, like a skater taking different glide steps. Unchanged, too, the way he swept his hair back from his eye.

Under the table, Shadow slept.

She went on watching him with her secret gaze, and as he delved around in his suitcase she had a disrupting sensation, as though time had stopped and she was resuming a conversation that could be heard across a vast expanse of ice. As though not an hour of the time they had spent apart had been endured.

He pulled out a white cardboard box and she was now afraid that he was going to recognise her after all.

“Sorry about the packaging. It's really meant for cakes,” he said unnecessarily.

She looked at the words
BÄCKEREI MEYER
stamped on the side, the cellophane peeling from the lid. “I must say, I didn't expect this. Is it usual for doctors at the Lion's Manor to ferry their patients' ashes?”

“Your grandmother made us promise to bring them to you.” He smiled that odd smile again. “Anyway, I've been looking for a reason to revisit Leipzig.”

She tore open the lid. In the muskrat sleeves was the burgundy container with Frau Weschke's ashes. She took it out and put it on the table.