The mother sat observing. She was flustered and distracted and fanned herself in the heat. She was throwing a dinner party and was impatient to take the prescription and leave. She still had to buy ice and flowers and was running late for a hair appointment.
He couldn’t see much. “I think it’s just a viral pharyngitis. But we’ll take a throat swab.”
He had examined hundreds of sore throats and yet this little girl touched him. Was it something she said? The way she opened her mouth? The vaguely worried look on her face?
“I’ll give you a prescription for antibiotics anyway,” he told the mother. “Don’t fill it in till we get a call from the lab. If she gets worse, please bring her back.”
He wrote out the prescription and looked again at Hannelore. There was an undercurrent to her hair. Something about it familiar.
The nurse interrupted. “The ward sister’s trying to reach you. She’s doing a dressing and wants you to look at it.”
“I’ll be there directly.”
As Peter walked out of the room he heard Hannelore make a croupy cough like a barking dog and the thought flickered through his head, God, could it be haemophilus influenza? But already the ward sister was dragging him away and his mind was filling with the next task.
Hannelore’s image pursued him through the afternoon. He remembered the chokey cough when he left at night. He was aware that he shouldn’t have sent her home. Her colour wasn’t good, he thought, she was a bit too silent. I didn’t follow up in the way I meant to. Uneasy, he stopped the car and from a telephone kiosk contacted the hospital for her address and telephone number.
He rang Hannelore’s home. No answer. He knew the address – he sometimes bought fish in the same street – and drove there. “Doctors don’t usually do that. And a medical student never,” the registrar would say. “Really, you have nothing to blame yourself for. As I always say, we’re more lucky than good.”
In the leopard light of a summer dusk he turned into a smart drive in Eimsbüttel. Cars on the gravel. The evening humid. The curtains still drawn. He loosened his tie and crunched towards the house. The mother, in a green organdy dress and holding a plate, flitted between tall open windows. The guests stood around. A bald man in a dark blue suit accepted one of her cocktail dainties.
He thought, pressing the brass buzzer: This is why she had to hurry Hannelore away.
After a while the door opened. She didn’t recognise him at first.
“How’s Hannelore doing?” he asked.
“She’s in her room. Why?”
He rushed upstairs.
She was sitting forward on her bed, drooling, scared, trying to breathe. She couldn’t swallow her saliva. Couldn’t call for help. Hungry for air, she fixed him with round widened eyes. Her hair tangled. The colour wiped from her face. From her mouth a fluttering moan.
Right away he could picture it. A swollen red ball like a large cherry blocking her trachea. But he couldn’t take out his spatula and look down her throat – it might kill her instantly. There was a Biro on the bedside table and it raced through his head to slit her throat and stick the Biro through to allow in air. But he was too junior. Too scared. This wasn’t the moment to perform his first trach.
He carried her, lamblike, downstairs and into the drawing room.
He heard the intake of breath. Was aware of the mother running towards him. His sharp voice warning: “Don’t touch her!” He ordered the mother to open the front door and then the door of his car. “I want you to put this child carefully on your lap and hold her.”
He drove to the hospital, the girl sucking the air beside him in deep stridorous gasps.
They paged Anaesthesia as soon as they saw her. They called Ear, Nose and Throat and senior people took over. He followed her into the resuscitation room. He was allowed to watch because he had to learn.
The nurse calmed her and speedily and gingerly attached a heart monitor. The doctor tried to intubate her, but the swelling of her larynx obstructed the airway and he couldn’t get the tube past. He yanked back her pigtails and palpated her neck and made an incision. Jelly-like clots of blood welled up as he stuck in the tube. The nurse noted that the girl’s lips had gone purple. “I can’t find a pulse.”
Afterwards, the doctor cursed the heat. A colder night would have constricted the blood vessels, he said. Her epiglottis would have shrunk just enough so she could breathe. Peter, half-listening, looked at Hannelore and thought, Why didn’t I do the trach in the bedroom?
The doctor had another call. He started to tell the nurse to go and inform the mother.
“That’s your job, I’m afraid,” said the nurse.
“I’ll go,” said Peter.
He tightened his tie and washed his face and walked down the grey speckled floor to face the woman in her green party dress. Seeing Hannelore on the table, the blackberry undercurrent to her hair, the innocent face, he realised of whom she reminded him.
Remorse. The bird that never settles.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HANNELORE’S DEATH AFFECTED HIM like no other patient’s.
He told Bettina: “I keep thinking of what the doctor said. ‘Had it been cold outside, she’d be alive.’”
“Want some of this? It will help.” Bettina nodded at her handheld mirror. A gunpowder trail of white.
“No, no, no.”
In the following weeks he existed as a sleepwalker. He couldn’t have accounted for his chronology. All he knew was that he attended her funeral in Nienstedtener Friedhof and several times visited her grave. On the bell-shaped headstone her mother had had inscribed a verse from the Book of Kings. “Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well with the child.”
In his sleep he convulsed with the spasms of the dying girl, waking from dreams in which she stood by his bed. Dark braids to her waist. Accusing eyes on his naked physique as if he were a drawing Rodney had rejected.
“Why didn’t you do a trach at home?” she asked, raising a braid to expose her neck. “Or were you again too embarrassed to spoil a dinner party?” She had Snowleg’s face.
“I could have made the error myself,” said his registrar, going out of his way to reassure Peter. “Concentrate on your exams. That’s the best way. I expect you to pass with the highest distinction.”
For the next three weeks, as he had learned to do at St Cross, Peter submerged himself in routine. He spent his evenings, Monday to Friday, in the library. On Saturday mornings after their walk he would lock Gus in his room and bicycle to Bettina’s studio.
She was working hard to complete the catalogue for her forthcoming exhibition. While she wrote, he studied. But his music that had filled her studio since January was forbidden. She was anxious to hear the news from East Germany, not his Bach CDs.
“It’s incredible,” letting him in one day.
“What is?”
“What’s happening in Leipzig.”
On her radio, reports spoke of protesters filling the streets of East Germany’s second city and bursting into song, any song that came into their heads – before troops and trucks arrived to arrest them.
“Apparently, the Trade Fair was the incentive,” she said. “They wanted the television cameras to see them.”
In the second week of September Hungary opened its borders and Bettina summoned Peter to dinner.
It was a Thursday and he was reluctant to drag himself from his books. In a fortnight, if all went well, he would have achieved his father’s ambition. But there was another reason he didn’t want to accept her invitation. Bettina’s demands had become so persistent of late that she sucked the air out of him. He could no longer provide her with what she most needed, which was why, he had no doubt, she turned to whatever it was she swallowed or inhaled.
“I don’t think I can risk it. I have exams in four days.”
“Sweet, I insist,” said Bettina. “I really do insist.”
They got drunk and when he woke up he couldn’t recall wheth
er they had made love or not.
At 8 a.m., he put on his jersey and went to close the window. Outside, a discoloured sky, the air colder and the traffic louder. She was running late for something and he heard her rummaging through the bathroom for a contact lens. “Christ, Peter, your stuff is everywhere.”
She came out of the bathroom and flung his boxer shorts at him. “You’re wearing the same underpants you were wearing last week. Surely your patients can smell this? Surely the children comment on your smell?” She said with contempt: “Don’t you look at yourself in the mirror ever? Don’t you have any pride at all?”
He retrieved the boxers from the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.
She was still looking at him in a concentrated way. “Your jersey’s on the wrong way around. What do you think it means to wear a jersey back to front?”
“That I’m not vain?”
Up flared the sharp brown eyes, two claymores darting right between his ribs. “Wrong! It’s designed to draw attention to yourself. In fact, it’s a form of extreme vanity and selfishness.”
Bettina marched back into the bathroom and picked up her eau de toilette. He watched her face in the mirror. She was spraying her throat with the fastidiousness of someone who might have slept with him, but was going off to meet another lover.
She wiped her arm and his shaving bag went flying. “Oh, fuck.” Then silence. He sat up on the bed, heart thudding. She clipped out of the bathroom, back straight, and held up the needle triumphantly. She knew what it was. She had even injected herself on occasions. It was the easy way out.
“Not only a pig.” Her voice had a note of cold finality, as if he wasn’t there. “But a fucking junkie.”
His head on his knees. Not looking at her. So she bowled him the needle along the floor. “I’m sorry, sweet, I don’t think I can marry you.” She went on: “I’m sad to have to say this but I no longer love you,” and stared at the Alster, the lake like a spread of Rosalind’s silver foil. “In fact, I feel betrayed. I came towards you and you let me down. I feel bitterly let down.”
He wanted to say “I love you”, but the words remained in his throat. He found it physically impossible to utter them.
Still her voice ploughed on. “I tried to fight against it and it’s a lesson – you can’t,” her face at the window tight and bunched like a bulb that refuses to flower. “I’ve never felt so lonely as I’ve felt since I met you. I hope I never feel that in death. You were never there for me. I’ve been trying to end it since the summer, but you wouldn’t let me. I don’t mean it that I don’t love you. I do. But you’re not the person to make me happy.”
Slowly, he dressed.
“You know what I blame as much as anything?” the cocaine she had taken in the bathroom making her voluble. “Your English education. There are so many layers of artifice ironed into you that you find it hard to be real. Oh, there’s a sweetness to you, but you leave no taste.”
He put on the designer jacket that she had bought him, the trousers made out of sailing material.
“Why didn’t I see the signs? Of course, you were going to tread on me. You trod on Pericles,” checking her fringe in the mirror. “I admit, at first I was taken in by your schmaltz. I don’t suppose you remember what you said as we walked from the Syracuse? ‘People have lied to you, I can tell. But I won’t be that man.’ So plausible you sounded, and then you recited Tennyson. It took a while to realise you were addressing your poetry to my panties, not to me.”
He stood up.
“But do you know what really did it for me?” applying a rhubarb lipstick the same colour as her hatband. “It was the most trivial thing, but it struck at my soul. It was the way you constantly took off my music and put on Bach. Why, all of a sudden, were you so interested in Bach? You never paid any attention to classical music before.”
He waited at the door while she hunted for a leash and then filled Pericles’s bowl with mineral water. “The trouble with you medical men is you consider yourselves Renaissance figures. You think you know about art, you think you know about music, you consider yourself a healer. But me, I was raised in a medical family, I have two secondary degrees. Sometimes I get up in the morning and I start to write and time passes and I don’t know where I am, but I have gone so deep into myself that I find it difficult to come out. That’s a form of automatic writing you wouldn’t have access to. There’s a Berlin Wall between your psyche and your intellect. But it’s not a strength. It’s because you don’t know what to feel. Or how.”
By the door she pulled down his head and kissed him full on the mouth as if she needed this last taste of him. “Goodbye, sweet.”
The weight of her rhubarb lips, the ache in his chest like a dry socket.
Instead of bicycling to the faculty, Peter walked to a bar on the Alster and smoked his way through a packet of West Lights, drinking one glass of Weißen after another. Shortly after 2 p.m. – these details he learned later – he stripped off his Omen jacket and trousers and tossed them in the lake. He had no recollection of seeing a dog hurl itself into the water or of walking into the Thomas-I-Punkt store in Gänsemarkt where a diminutive roly-poly woman in a bob-cut was folding a jersey. She looked up and started to ask how might she help. It was then she noticed that Peter had nothing on. Not a stitch. Not even a pair of Birkenstocks.
“I thought he was German,” she told a local reporter, whose story was spiked at the last moment because of the momentous events taking place in East Germany. “But he kept speaking in this refined English voice. As if – how can I put it? – he was trying to sing.”
To everyone’s astonishment but his own, Peter flunked his membership exams. Days short of completing his training as a senior houseman he was found collapsed on the toilet while a child with a blocked carotid artery waited in the operating theatre. A search uncovered two needles in his locker. Confronted by his registrar, he confessed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ON THE LAST MONDAY of October, Leipzig’s city centre – the length and breadth of its streets – filled with men, women and children holding candles and walking along Dittrichring in one of the processions that would earn for Leipzig its sobriquet “City of Heroes”. The same evening Peter entered the psychiatric clinic of Ochsenzoll in the north of Hamburg. His registrar had given him an extended leave of absence to pull himself together. Peter Hithersay, he wrote in his report, was the best student of his year. It would be a tragic waste not to grant him a second chance.
“Fentanyl!” sneered the heroin addict in the Narco-Anonymous class Peter was compelled to attend. He looked at Peter in the way a hippy might regard a yuppie. “That’s the lowest rung. I thought coke was the lowest. But fentanyl!”
In the evenings the patients watched television or dozed. Late one November evening Peter saw a stream of gleeful faces pouring through the Bornholmer crossing point.
The heroin addict, who came from Berlin, was upset. “Look at this cesspool being tipped into our streets. I want the Wall. I need the Wall. I don’t want these bastards loose in my city. Get it back up!”
“That’s right, get it back up!” said a voice from behind him, a woman’s.
In the corner a man with a deviated septum sang, “There’s no getting over that rainbow.”
“What do you think, Herr Doktor Peter?” The heroin addict nudged him. “Should we let them in?”
“That’s my home,” he said, his vision coloured by his crazed muddled head. “That’s where I’m from.”
“Well, ducky, there’s no-one there. Are you going to Berlin to squeeze through the Wall? Because the tide coming this way is so massive that before we know where we are we’ll have dealers from Moscow all over our streets.”
Ten days later Peter was again in the television room. On screen a vast crowd stood shoulder to shoulder outside a building with a curved facade, gazing intently up at the windows.
“Where’s this?”
“Stasi headquarters in Leipzig,” piped the ban
daged nose.
The heroin addict glowered at Peter. “Do you know what they’re doing over there? The cunts are burning everything. I mean, everything. In fact, it’s time we sent some of you fentanyl fuckers back so they can burn you.”
The refrain was taken up. “That’s right! Burn you!” Soon everyone was chanting, “Burn you, burn you, burn you.”
Peter made a vow. I am going to get better. I’m going to go to Leipzig however long it takes me. At some stage in my life I’m by God going to find that girl and atone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DAY AFTER DAY THEY had stood in their thousands in Dittrichring. Not moving on. Staring up at the building. Chanting. But today, for the first time, the ginger-haired man was nervous. Another file was missing. Someone had been here before him.
“How will you ever forgive me?” he hummed and slammed shut the cabinet. He knew who it was. He knew fucking well.
Early December and behind a shuttered window on the second floor of the Runde Ecke, Kresse was destroying everything his gloved hands could seize. In continual use for three weeks, the shredder had given up on him. All afternoon he had been ripping up documents, but there seemed no limit to the files that crammed the shelves and cabinets.
From the street came the sound of singing. Kresse recognised the hymn from his childhood. They had been singing it every night. “Wake up, wake up, O German land. You have slumbered long enough.”
He strode through the sacks bulging with shredded paper, parted the slats of the orange blind and peered sullenly out. The night was ablaze with what looked like Halloween pumpkins. The faces of numberless ghouls who held candles beneath their chins and placards bearing the same message: “We’re staying here,” and “We are one people”. The ghouls had been peaceful so far, but he sensed that this was the last evening on which they might be prepared to see smoke billowing from this building.
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