Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Unseen by them, Kresse surveyed their exaggerated features and remembered the night three weeks before when he had mingled with such a crowd. He remembered how the radio warned of people being crushed because the platforms couldn’t cope with the numbers. It was like a zoo, all the animals leaving. Why go into their cage? he thought. But on that November day he couldn’t very well remain in his country – there was no-one left.

  He remembered the young mother with two small children in the queue, and recognising this was Marla – he stood so close he could smell her hair – and his relief when she looked around and smiled at him, not knowing who he was, saying to her daughter, “Come here, Katya. Stay together.” He remembered being propelled through the gate and into the West. People everywhere. One moment he was walking among them, enjoying the pressure of his feet on the pavement. The next, he was flowing half a metre above the ground. He had the strange impression that he was still and his surroundings were moving. That he was a rock in a river and the people were swimming by. “Boss, it was like a fucking drug trip,” he told Uwe.

  The crowd carried him to a branch of the Dresdner Bank where the West Germans had promised them each 100 Marks. He remembered Turks passing by and spitting as he queued for his welcome money, and thinking: If the Turks in West Germany are spitting at us, then they must think of us as an inferior race.

  Kresse had always imagined West Berlin as looking like Leipzig done up. But it seemed to him like any bombed-out city from the 1950s. Not showy at all. Around him families were running like lost people, children hanging onto their parents’ arms, looking at shops with huge eyes. It was winter, but in the supermarkets there were cucumbers, strawberries, everything.

  He bought a yucca plant for 15 Marks, and a kilo of oranges. In East Germany he was used to green Cuban oranges, fibrous and bitter on the tongue. He remembered how he said to the woman, “Are these oranges sweet or will they clench the pores of your skin?” She looked at him bluntly and then a large Turk came out from behind a curtain holding a knife. He thought, He’s going to kill me. But the Turk took the orange, cut it in half and offered it. “Try.”

  He sucked at the rest of the orange in the queue for the Pornokino. The audience consisted of old grannies and children, all choosing, like him, to spend their first evening in the Golden West watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. The orange tasted sweet.

  But now he was back in the Runde Ecke where some fucker, whether to protect the individuals concerned or to create more trouble or simply as a matter of personal insurance, had removed certain files that he, Kresse, had been ordered to get rid of.

  He let go the blinds and unlocked another cabinet. Yet again there was a yawning space. He checked the index for the name of the missing file. “How will you ever forgive me?” he hummed through the gap in his teeth. The cabinet contained records of political prisoners arrested in the central Leipzig district between 1958 and 1961. He twisted his head, but the telephone was ringing.

  At the other end, Morneweg’s voice. “Kresse. How are you getting on?” He sounded old, a man with a rusted inside.

  “As well as I can, sir.” In fact, he itched to tell Morneweg that it was a fucking miracle what he had done. Since November 10 he had incinerated more or less the entire Information Research System as well as records for operational payments, not to mention files belonging to those whose freedom the West German authorities had purchased, together with details of the bank accounts.

  “Where have you got to?”

  “Nineteen sixty, sir. That’s going back – what you wanted.”

  “Look, I’ve some stuff in my office that I’ve kept. I really need you to sweep it away.”

  “More files, are they, sir?”

  “No, Kresse, glass jars.”

  And Kresse, whom Morneweg had promoted from dog-handler two years before, immediately understood: Morneweg wanted help to smash up Uwe’s smell pantry.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you sent anyone else to take files?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, sir, an awful lot of files are missing.”

  “This is not a help at a time like this, Kresse. You’ve probably seen the news.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kresse had watched the reports with fury and alarm: the authorities crumbling, the weak-kneed liberals jostling to replace them, the talk of tribunals.

  “What are we talking about, Kresse?”

  “I’ve counted so far – it’s a biggish number, about six hundred.”

  “Whose files are they?”

  “Since you ask, sir, since you ask, the case officer responsible for the majority of these files is Lieutenant Uwe Wechsel.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, sir, nearly all of them, apart from yours, sir, the ones that are signed out to you, sir.”

  “OK, get onto Lieutenant Wechsel.”

  “He’s dealing with the university records, sir. His office is locked. Do you want me to take the door down?”

  “No, be careful. I want you to be careful, Kresse. Lieutenant Wechsel knows where the bodies are buried. Your bodies and mine. I want you up here as soon as possible.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  He put down the phone. Something had altered in the room and he didn’t know what. Then it came to him. The crowd had stopped singing. A sound rose from downstairs, the drumming of fists on steel. He picked up his night-stick.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SIX YEARS AFTER HANNELORE’S death a journalist from the Berlin Tagesspiegel would watch Peter bandage a child’s wrist in a kindergarten overlooking Lake Wannsee and observe a touching affinity that was wholly different from the bedside manner he adopted with the elderly. With children, she would tell him, it was as if he became a child.

  “God, you were so good with that kid. I’m surprised you didn’t go into paediatrics.”

  “I almost did.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked at the serious, straw-haired woman with the mauve shawl that she kept adjusting on her shoulder, and a tiny tape recorder that she pointed at his face like a policeman trying to catch him speeding. And said: “A girl died when I was about to qualify. I got it wrong. I missed something.”

  “Missed what?”

  She appeared to be in her early forties and had a wide mouth. He couldn’t help noticing how determined it became when she urged the tape recorder closer and asked her questions. How defensive his answers.

  “It was a long time ago and I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  The journalist’s name was Frieda. She had contacted Peter after reading a case report submitted by him to the Lancet, on a case of insomnia associated with delayed sleep phase syndrome. She recognised her own father’s symptoms and was moved to write an article on his work for her newspaper’s Saturday supplement. “Ideally, I would like to spend a day with you, accompany you on your rounds . . .”

  About to throw away the letter, he noticed that she had stapled to it samples of her journalism, including a piece on the post-Wall fate of East German guard dogs and another on Daniel Schreber, the founder of Schreber gardens. He read it twice. Every word. Then telephoned Frieda. “Yes, why not spend a day with me?” and joked – but in an English way: “As long as I’m not the subject. As long as I make that perfectly clear.”

  Afterwards, she liked to complain, “I came to interview you, and rather than reveal a single detail about your life you seduced me. In an old people’s home!”

  On this particular Tuesday afternoon, Peter had driven Frieda from the Hilfrich Klinik, where she had spent the morning observing him at work, to a nursing home called the Lion’s Manor in the south-west of Berlin. He was on the point of guiding her around the home when Sister Corinna ran out to say that a boy had fallen badly in the playground of the kindergarten next door.

  “Do you mind?” he turned to Frieda.

  “Go ahead.”

  The boy, it turned ou
t, had fainted after being made to laugh by the other children. They had learned that if they made him laugh really hard he would fall down, and so they had surrounded him in a group and told jokes until his legs gave way.

  “It’s only a graze,” Peter reassured the boy. And to the teacher: “He seems very sleepy.”

  “Yes, he used to be so attentive, but now he falls asleep all the time.”

  “This isn’t any of my business, but tell his mother I would be happy to talk to her.”

  All this while Frieda stood under the new basketball hoop, taking notes. He apologised for keeping her waiting.

  “What do you think is wrong with him?”

  “Well, it’s not a vasovagal attack. Nor a cardiac arrhythmia. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s suffering from narcolepsy.”

  Musing, she let him shepherd her from the playground. “I can’t stop thinking of that line you wrote: ‘The eye never closes. It’s the lid that closes over it.’”

  He smiled. “We’re a lot like trout.”

  But she wanted to be serious. “Gerontology’s an up-and-coming speciality. But it’s not – and I hope you won’t take this in the wrong spirit – very sexy.”

  Peter laughed. “It’s one of the lowest paid sub-specialities!”

  “Then, why choose it?”

  His registrar at UKE had asked the same question. “But, Peter, it will be humiliating to go back.” The faces so much younger. The nights not his own. A different city to negotiate. The loss of income. “A lot more people die on you in geriatrics! Are there not simpler ways to atone?”

  But at that moment in April 1990, after Hannelore’s death, after the implosion of his relationship with Bettina, after his descent into the fentanyl pit, Peter sought regression. Instead of returning to UKE, he decided to rebuild his career in a place that wasn’t Hamburg. When he considered all the things he might do to purify himself, he could think of nothing to cleanse his mind so thoroughly as to repeat medical school. At seventeen, in disobedience to his daemon, he had abandoned history and embarked on nine years of preparing to be a doctor. Second time around, the volume of work offered a blessed escape. In Berlin, he yielded to his studies and eventually, after four further years in which he immersed himself in circadian rhythms and cataplexy and the effect of exercise on bone density, he pulled himself up again.

  “Why gerontology? Possibly because of my grandfather,” he told Frieda as they strolled back through the gate of the adjacent building. “I feel guilty about how he spent the end of his life. You see, I owe him a lot.”

  That much was true. Peter had learned his gift to be gentle and caring with the elderly from his dealings with his grandfather. In Berlin, he rediscovered his talent and the transformative effect of being listened to. Old age, which brought with it so many indignities, he found he was able to suspend. Past achievements were not distant achievements, but right there in the room with the patient. He refused to allow anyone to identify too closely with their bodily functions. Old age, said his eyes, was an unfortunate inevitability, but it wasn’t personal, and with his sigh he participated in the dismay of those who wet themselves or needed help to put in their teeth, while acknowledging that it wouldn’t be long before he would be crapping in his bed too.

  “But why Berlin?” she persisted. Looking sideways at him, her eyes watchful, poking about in his darkness.

  Another good question, but harder to answer. It was an unfailing source of regret to Peter that if his German father hadn’t been so keen to avoid Berlin, he might have escaped to the West. The borders were still open. He could have taken the S-Bahn, rather than attempting to cross the border through Russian patrols. But Peter didn’t reveal this to the journalist. Nor did he speak of all that he himself hoped to escape by moving to Berlin.

  “Because it has the largest concentration of elderly people in the country,” he waffled.

  Or was it one step closer to Snowleg?

  Despite the vow he made at Ochsenzoll, he had not visited East Germany. He shrank from it as from a black hole. When he went to define it, it had gone; when he went to meet it, it had gone. The idea that a whole country could disappear overnight, and so thoroughly, encouraged in him the hope that he might – in the same way – wipe out his guilt, his regrets, the memory of what he had done there. Once he qualified as a gerontologist – in 1994, at the age of thirty-three, with the third highest marks of his year – he turned down a number of invitations to lecture in the former GDR as well as several prestigious job offers. After the Wall came down, he avoided articles, television and radio programmes. Anything that discussed “die Wende” or served to remind him that Leipzig was a historical fact of life that predated the GDR. The thought of it had preoccupied him since he was sixteen, but now if he chanced to see a map of united Germany he made certain to avert his eyes from a chunk of it in the way that as a child he had hopped over the pavement on Tisbury High Street, warning Rosalind: “If you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back.”

  “I still think it’s weird,” persisted the journalist. “I mean, to go from children to old people. That’s one heck of a leap.”

  “I know what people say,” as they walked into the grandish hallway, past the hat-stand and up the chunky mahogany staircase smelling of beeswax. “‘They’re going to die anyway, they’ve had a life.’ But I can help them. I can listen to their snores in the ward and believe it the most comforting sound in the world. As I keep telling my students, they’re not bed-blockers, they’re your mother and father.”

  “Tell me more about yourself,” and she re-angled the tape recorder.

  Well, he worked Monday to Friday, and weekends when on call, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a break at lunch to exercise his dog in the park outside the Hilfrich Klinik, his teaching hospital in the west of the city. Then Tuesday afternoons he came here, to the Lion’s Manor.

  But the journalist wasn’t interested in the Lion’s Manor. She had visited enough old people’s homes. “Where do you live?”

  “I have an apartment in Charlottenburg.”

  “Tell me, are you single?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you married?”

  “Is this relevant?” He stopped on the staircase. “No.”

  “Why not? You’re an attractive man. Everyone seems to worship you. Or,” blushing, “are you not interested in women?”

  Her words hung in the air. He held his breath. Then turned and smiled at her, this determined woman with the wide mouth that didn’t stop asking questions. A wide mouth and wanting to know all about him.

  “Oh, I’m interested.” But how to explain that no sooner did he reach out than something froze in him? That ever since coming to Berlin, like a knight waiting for a sign, he had trotted from one unsatisfactory selfish sexual liaison to another? How to explain that he might be alive and vibrant in the eyes of others, but for himself emotion had abandoned him? He had floated away from himself, not in a violent way, but gently, and now when he looked back he was no longer there.

  She devoured his troubled face with candid green eyes. “Don’t you want to have children?”

  “All these questions,” and took her gently by the arm. “They must be making you thirsty. Here, let’s go into the kitchen.” Opening the door on another affair.

  PART IV

  Berlin, 1996

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ANOTHER SIX YEARS WOULD go by after Peter’s interview with Frieda. A child born. A thousand and one deaths. If he looked back at this time he saw the tips of his fingers shushing a wide mouth and lips parting and small-boned hands tugging at his belt. He saw a sailing holiday in Hiddensee not long after Frieda told him, trying to see what could fly; the pearly heave of the sea, windmills rotating frantically on a flat grassy bank and his tiredness like the insects that appeared after the thunderstorm and crawled on his thumb and over his brow and flopped exhausted into her plate of herring and curry sauce. He saw himself looking at the rugby ball of pinkish grey tiss
ue and realising what it meant to be a father. He saw in a procession of staccato images, like cage flies pestering a bird: the evening when he offered to marry Frieda; the letter appointing him consultant gerontologist; the moment when he went into the room in Otto-Braun-Straße hoping at last to discover his father’s identity. In all of those years, with the exception of one visit home, he did not see his mother and his stepfather and his sister. Most of all he did not see Snowleg.

  PART V

  Berlin, England, 1996–2002

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MILO WAS BORN AT 9.02 a.m. at the Hilfrich Klinik on a beautiful Sunday morning with the sun still burning off the mist in the park. He weighed 5.5 kilos and measured 59 cm and was the biggest baby the midwife had ever delivered. He came out with a head elongated, rather like a crumpled bullet, his cone covered lightly in dark hair, and cried immediately.

  “That’s not a baby, that’s a giant,” the doctor said.

  Frieda held him. She had looked radiant throughout. After a while, she offered Peter the baby. He lay quietly sucking his thumb with soft slurping noises, his squashed ears like oysters and his nose speckled with milk spots. Then he opened his narrow right eye and a fierce blue disc measured his father with a hypnotic gaze. Neither hot nor cold, neither focusing nor focused, neither old nor new, but a film of coloured life poised between the extremely ancient and the just-begun.

  The heartbeat came regular and strong, like cavalry, on the monitor. Peter smiled at Frieda. “You realise he’s just completed the longest, most treacherous 6-centimetre journey of his life.”

  “Now we’ve got to find a name,” she said.

  Peter hadn’t given a thought to names. But the birth of his son had altered him. Going to wash his hands, he caught sight of his reflection and it was as if a hand had passed over his face.

  “Milo?” repeated Frieda on his next visit. “Not very German.”