Snowleg (8 page)

Rodney dredged up the name of an editor in Donhead St Mary who many years before had commissioned a book jacket. His offer to write on Silkleigh's behalf brought a beam to the face of his guest.

“That's the marvellous thing about school chums, Mrs Hithersay. Never. Let. You. Down. Your husband and I, we share the same moral compass. Always have. Which is why I've come here tonight with a little old
proposizione
,” and raised his glass. “Anchors away!”

His mother plainly thought Silkleigh insufferable, but Rodney was tempted to believe every word. Peter see-sawed between the two.

Only when discussion turned to Peter's departure for Germany did Silkleigh's face take on a sober aspect. “Rodders did mention your German connection,” and then to the undiminished horror of Peter's mother, Silkleigh went on confidingly: “I know these East Germans. Infuriating lot. Eavesdrop on each other from dawn to dusk. It wouldn't get off the ground here. Have you any idea where they put their cameras? They put them in the ruddy gnomes! Can you imagine anything stupider?”

“You've been to East Germany?” asked Peter, very interested.

“Oh, yes, I've been. Ruthless place. Quite the vilest regime in the Communist bloc.” He helped himself to more singed sprouts, his appetite for them contributing to a demented look. “Everyone turns a blind eye to what's going on, but you don't have to be a Fellow of All Souls to see that it's a police state. Most of their lady shot-putters have penises. And the dogs they get over there! We had one retired to North Africa once. Astonishing creature. He could smell out almost anything. Kept him in the laundry, so when anyone lost their knickers I could say: ‘Oh, Mrs Herbert, is this yours?' And you know, it always was.”

“Darling, could that be your pudding?” asked Rodney.

Once Peter's mother had disappeared into the kitchen, Silkleigh plucked at Peter's arm and said in a hushed voice: “Going back to your father, young Peter, a note of Silkleigh caution. It's perfectly natural that you should think him a romantic hero and all that, but have you ever thought he could be working for the other side? For all you know he could be the chief of the dark forces.”

Peter was still at that stage where it was hard for him to believe bad things of his father's country, or of his father. “You're just making that up.”

“I'm afraid I've rather overcooked the next course,” said his mother, coming back into the room and fixing Silkleigh with an expression of marked antipathy.

“Course I am. Course I am.”

After dinner Rodney took Silkleigh off to his studio. They reappeared an hour later.

“Don't worry, old soul, I'll make my own way out,” said Silkleigh, wrenching open what he thought was the front door and sailing with tremendous brio into the saucepan cupboard – “Why have all the stars gone out?” – after which Rosalind had to be escorted to bed.

“He's barking,” giggling so violently she was weepy.

“I suppose he is,” said Rodney, who kept it secret for several weeks that he had tentatively agreed to go into partnership with him.

“He's not coming back?” asked Peter's mother.

Next morning Peter flew to Hamburg.

He was leaving with the express idea of trying to see whether, partly in response to his grandfather, he couldn't sacrifice himself to the memory of what Germany had meant to England. He refused to become like Milo Potter or Tristram Leadley. He didn't think like that. He had never thought like that. He was going to be like one of those two old boys at St Cross who had given their lives to their country. In his visored vision he was anxious to accept both England and Germany. At St Cross he had become aware of the great Protestant Alliance and of the chivalric links that had existed between both nations. He wanted to exemplify the bridge, the alliance, the best of each tradition. He had spent his first 18 years as the son of an English mother. It was time to swing into the saddle and discover his father's culture.

He spent his gap year in Hamburg. Speaking German more fluently. Becoming less and less English.

His grandfather died in the summer and was buried in his wool cap. Peter couldn't afford to be there for the funeral, Rodney having only been able to pay for a single ticket. He wrote, he telephoned, but for years he never went back to Wiltshire. Instead, he read Musil, Canetti, Fontane and looked up words like “Eisenwaren” in the dictionary. And learning about Emperor Barbarossa who sat alone for a thousand years on Kyffhäuser, and Christian Rosenkreuz, founder of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, who lived to 106 and whose body was discovered 120 years after his death, untouched, it was said, by decay. Reading a twelfth-century poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, he came across another hibernation – “half-death, half-asleep” – ascribed to the King of the Grail. He learned a lot, but not about himself.

One Sunday afternoon, feeling a sudden loneliness and a fear that Germany might not assimilate him, he telephoned Kirsten. Her father answered. “Ah, the boy with cramp! Sorry, Kirsten's in Insel. Training. Yes, I'll pass on your regards.”

The campus was situated in a dead corner of Eppendorf. A week before the beginning of term, he read on the department pinboard that a group of students in Eimsbüttel were seeking a room-mate. Two days later, he moved from the Youth Hostel to Feldstraße: a brown-painted building converted from a piano-maker's factory, with low ceilings and no front garden and a second building in the small back yard where his room was, and which he decorated with a few objects from England. A cricket bat, the Blu-Tacked print of Bedevere, the antique oak table from Tansley.

Thenceforth Peter was alone. His childhood was a well from which he feared to draw, and he had very little to cling to. Only the thought of his German father sustained him. He had a mechanical hope that sooner or later he would meet his father. Whether as head of a teaching hospital or part of the vilest, most repressive regime in the Communist bloc.

PART II

Germany, 1983

CHAPTER EIGHT

O
NE NIGHT IN HIS
third year at university, Peter was working late when there was a knock and through the door came a thin-framed young man with long, prematurely grey hair.

Teo, who boarded in the room above, was a Konservatorium student who had given up the violin in favour of composition. (He once demonstrated to Peter, by twisting a knife in a cabbage, how to imitate the sound of someone's head being battered with a club.) They didn't know each other well, although once a week they played in the same soccer team.

“Look here, Peter. I know it's not the right moment, but an amazing opportunity has turned up.”

Peter cleared the pile of books from the sofa and Teo sat down. “I see Anita hasn't been in here,” grinning.

“Banned – till after my Physikum.”

“How would you like to go to Leipzig?”

“Leipzig?” He went over to close the curtain. It was hard to work in this cold. The snow wanting to fall. But his chest was beating.

Quickly, Teo explained. He was part of a group of student actors who had been invited to perform in East Germany during the week of the Leipzig Trade Fair. This afternoon their stage-manager had pulled out. “You can open and close a curtain? It's that simple. Otherwise, it's a matter of taking a few props on stage and fiddling with some lights. Teach you in an hour.”

“I don't know anything about theatre,” Peter said guardedly. One of his least favourite experiences at St Cross had been to hold a lantern as a nightwatchman in
Othello
.

“It's not strictly speaking theatre,” said Teo, skating over his reply. “It's mime.”

“Mime!” Even worse. Conjuring images of audience participation and Marcel Marceau.

“You wouldn't be expected to act, you oaf.” Teo's face had the expression it wore when he was about to pass the ball. “Why don't you come with us? We just need an extra body, Peter. It's hard to visit East Germany unless you have connections. You could dig out your father, extend the search.”

“Let me think about this,” said Peter.

Teo tilted back his head and regarded the poster of Johnny Rotten, his eyes skirting over the upside-down Wehrmacht insignia safety-pinned to Rotten's waistcoat and coming to rest on the coloured print of Bedevere above Peter's desk. “Listen, if you can't pull it off I know someone I can ask.”

“Wait, when is this?”

“Leave Thursday, back Monday morning. We can sort out the visa tomorrow.”

Peter glanced at the five textbooks – one chemical, one zoological and three botanical – that he planned to have read by Monday. “Oh, shit. I couldn't – even if I wanted to. This is the weekend of Anita's wedding.”

Anita, Peter's German girlfriend of two years, was playing bridesmaid for her colleague, a teacher at the same kindergarten. All month she had attended fittings and returned with Polaroids of herself holding up yards of salmon-coloured satin. Peter pretended to be interested, but the whole business bored him to death.

“Oh, right,” nodded Teo, “the wedding where Anita will catch the bouquet, hell or high water?”

“She's already caught the bouquet,” sighed Peter. “It's in a vase beside her bed.”

Teo chuckled and stood up. “You don't stand a fucking chance. Listen, I refuse to get in the way of your audition. I'm going to find a free man instead.”

“No, don't!” The invitation to bolt, to leave behind Anita and the wedding feast in Blankenese was exhilaratingly tempting. “I'll go. I can do it.”

They looked at each other. “Are you sure?” said Teo. “I don't want to be held responsible for what Thomas and Michael might do . . .” Anita's hulking elder brothers, crew-cut engineers, played in the same soccer team.

“They're OK. I'll just have to figure out what I'm going to tell Anita.”

Teo opened the door and stopped. “Remind me – who's that?”

“Sir Bedevere.”

“King Arthur stuff?”

“The guy with the sword.”

“Oh, that guy.”

Long after Teo had left the room, Peter continued to look at the face of the medieval knight. As he brushed his teeth, he murmured to the mirror in English:

Minutes later he switched off the light. If he could do this, obviously he didn't love Anita. If he loved her, he wouldn't consider abandoning her on a day when, as she had made very clear, she needed him. But German girls were stoics. She wouldn't make a fuss. She would understand about his father. It was a while before he slept.

Following his anatomy class next morning, he went with Teo to a studio on the corner of Bellevue, on the top floor of an old house overlooking the Alster. A large light room of blues and yellows fitted with a stainless-steel counter and with an upstairs gallery reached by a spiral staircase.

The room had been cleared to make a stage. Two actors, sitting on stools, rehearsed before a cubicle assembled from sheets of corrugated plastic and hung with a green curtain. Peter leaned against the wall to watch, but what they were doing seemed incomprehensible to him.

A dog's basket lay at his feet, and tidied onto a davenport-style desk with barley-sugar legs were the traces of a woman's presence. A bright orange bra. A straw boater like one he used to wear at St Cross. A silver-framed hand-mirror. He was wondering, Which one is she sleeping with? when Teo nodded at the shower-shaped cubicle. “That's where you'll be.”

The scene over, Teo introduced him to Sepp who was the director and principal actor. It was an extreme face that Peter looked into. Harelip. Beak of a nose. And above the sparse beard cheeks clear and pink as if hand-coloured.

Sepp leaned from his stool, extending his hand far out over the floor. “Thanks for helping out at short notice.”

Peter began to apologise, “Anything to do with theatre, I'm an idiot,” but Sepp held up his hand. There was one rule only Peter had to remember. It applied to tragedy and to comedy as it did to mime and to life. “True drama is when there are no more chances. This is it and how it will be.”

The statement flummoxed Peter and his apprehensions of the night before came tumbling back. Was the man serious?

Before Peter could find his footing, Sepp turned to his companion, a severe-faced man in tortoiseshell glasses, and raised an invisible glass. “Marcus. To our fourth member.”

Marcus responded with a series of hard, brief noises hammered out on a wooden gong.

Sepp next lifted his imaginary glass to Teo, who had taken up a position behind the counter and was crouched over an apparatus with rubber and metal tubes coming out of it and resembling an oxygen mask.

The director pretended to drink Peter's health. Instantly, the studio filled with a loud swallowing as of liquid gurgling into a vast stomach. Peter recognised the sound. All term, he had heard it coming through Teo's floor.

The pipes and valves were Teo's invention, the product of a temperament that delighted to catch people by surprise. Blowing into his machine, Teo conjured sounds to announce themselves in the most unlikely places, like a coin behind the ear, so that no-one who had their eyes fixed on Sepp was likely to associate his raised glass with a stooped figure 20 feet away.

Teo abandoned the counter and piloted Peter into the cubicle, drawing the curtain. The curtain gave them invisibility, and that made it palatable. So long as he could see out and not be seen he was fine.

At 11.00, Teo had to go to the Konservatorium. Aided by an occasional prompt from Sepp, Peter operated various lights and pulleys until he reached the end of the script.