The young student nurse looked up. It was the second day of her six-week rotation at the Lion’s Manor. She had high cheekbones and a prominent forehead. A slight laziness in one of her eyes gave them an attractive cast. “Does he have a way with them all?”
Sister Corinna was taken aback by the directness of the question. “You could say that.”
The young nurse began to speak, but seeing something in the other’s eye stopped herself.
Downstairs the door slammed and Sister Corinna felt her heart lift a little. Peter Hithersay never simply closed a door.
From along the corridor her newest patient continued to unleash her brimstone, but already Sister Corinna had tucked Frau Weschke’s file under her arm.
“Nadine, come and meet Herr Doktor Hithersay.”
Sister Corinna had worked at the Lion’s Manor eleven years, the last six with Doctor Hithersay. She had an intelligent face and thick chestnut hair tightly knotted in a green bow. She was widowed with two teenage daughters and at forty-seven was seven years older than Peter.
She slowed as his familiar figure came into view. He had on his blue wool Masaryk hat and under his coat the usual uniform. Black turtleneck. Black trousers. Dirty white trainers. She liked the way he violated the dress code. The sight of him inevitably produced a sense of life beyond the Lion’s Manor. He might be forty, but he had the shabbiness of someone still taking pleasure in being out of a school uniform. She understood why the nurses fell for him.
Sister Corinna watched Peter unbutton his coat, the only man she had let into her bed since her husband died. She remembered the moment in her office when she became aware of him standing behind her and seconds later his hands on her shoulder. Smelling of Pears soap, kebabs, strong English tea, his leather watch-strap. There was nothing of the dormant widow in her response. He touched her in places Thomas, her late husband, had always avoided and when he scurried his fingertips over the small of her back and between her buttocks, it excited her in a way she had not been excited since as a 9-year-old in Bremen she pretended to smoke one of her mother’s cigarettes. He had known exactly what to touch and how, and she recalled telling him that he had intelligent hands and then realising from his reaction that he had heard it before.
In fact, it took a remarkably short time for Sister Corinna to realise that Doctor Hithersay was not a one-woman man. Over a toasted cheese sandwich at the Hilfrich Klinik’s canteen, she had had to listen to a former student of hers – Sarah, another girl with cheekbones – crow about her nights with him. The girl was blissfully unaware that he juggled many women, but Sister Corinna had seen it for herself. Oh, yes.
One afternoon, coming silently through the swing door to fetch a glass of milk for a patient, she found Peter standing against a table in a corner of the kitchen. Kneeling before him was a woman in a plum-coloured shawl. Her head in his groin.
His eyes fell on Sister Corinna and there was something cut-off and grieving about them. He said nothing. She said nothing. His mouth was tight. And on the woman went, her lips against him in greasy ecstasy. The way a young girl might imitate a porn video.
He closed his eyes as if to say “Please go”, and hugged the woman to him, not happy, not really there at all, but taking stock from a distant place like someone temporarily staying an execution. And so she retreated. Creating the dimension that would make possible their own odd relationship.
Oh, men with sad, slanted, olive eyes, you should all have been drowned in a bucket at birth.
Half an hour later, the couple came into her office.
“Corinna, this is Frieda. She’s writing a profile of me for Tagesspiegel,” he said dismally, and Sister Corinna saw what had happened.
“How very nice to meet you,” and sweetly smiled at this slightly flushed woman with her shawl still hardly disturbed, who seemed to have no inkling that she had been observed. “I look forward to learning all about him.”
But later Sister Corinna would want to know, levering out a slice of cheesecake and transferring it to his white plate stamped with a lion rampant: “If you’re going to go after these girls, why not show more discretion? It’s as though you want to be caught. There are plenty of places in the Lion’s Manor to have a blow-job where you’re not going to be surprised. Why do I catch you every time? Oh, my God, maybe I’m not catching you every time. The mind boggles.”
He rubbed his face, his dented cheeks, and was contrite. It was terrible what Sister Corinna had had to witness. He had only consented to the interview on the understanding he talked about his research into the elderly. “But she started to get personal.”
Sister Corinna regretfully forgave him his seduction of the brooding young journalist. He always clammed up when people asked about his past. But even she could see that Frieda’s prying wasn’t entirely to blame. He was lonely and she flattered him. She knew about his life. He didn’t have anyone to have dinner with. In this desultory way they began their affair. He liked Frieda staying overnight every now and then, and she enjoyed being there. Until she found out she was pregnant and then she just went away, having already made up her mind that he would be a perfectly hopeless husband.
Sister Corinna had learned all this at first hand some months later, but she had backed off when Frieda became pregnant, and Peter had had the discretion not to call her. Although this was not a courtesy he extended to Sarah, who had wheeled Frieda in for an epidural not knowing that the journalist was having Peter’s baby, or indeed anything about his involvement with the woman shrieking on the trolley, and still ludicrously imagining that she and Peter might one day marry.
“Why didn’t I get pregnant?” Sarah despaired to Sister Corinna.
“Come on, Sarah, then you’d be shackled to him for life.”
Once was a time when Sister Corinna might have wished this fate for herself, but no longer. She had long ago recognised that he would never be her solution nor she his. There was something barren about Peter’s heart, something missing, something punitive about his unwillingness to give it all up – the 40-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, but mostly the 25-year-olds – in favour of settling down.
Sometimes when she caught his face in repose he looked like a man under the spell of a terrible passion that had torn up his life. She would have liked to ask him what was the source of his misery, but her will to improve Peter was not so powerful as her wish to preserve him as a colleague and a friend. She knew that if you went too close, or to where he had no wish to go, he simply glided away, as had threatened to happen some weeks before when she approached him with an invitation from the head of the medical council in Saxony. “Peter, I want you seriously to consider this. In the interest of reunification, I’ve been asked to persuade you to give a talk in Leipzig. It’s terribly important. They would love it and they’ll pay expenses. Here are the particulars. I’m willing to make all the arrangements. You’ll only be gone two days.”
“No, I won’t. I don’t want to go to Leipzig.”
“You didn’t even give that two minutes’ consideration.”
“I’m not going to discuss it, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“No, Corinna, I won’t change my mind.”
“Peter –”
“Schwester Corinna!”
It was their most difficult moment. She had gone away disappointed, but with their relationship intact.
Her passage from lover to friend had been smoothed to an extent she couldn’t have foreseen by the arrival of Milo. Soon after his son was born, she sent Peter a postcard: “Fifteen free hours of baby sitting.” It only happened two or three times a year and he didn’t take advantage of her kindness, but if something came up at the Hilfrich Klinik that threatened to chip away at his already limited day they had an agreement she would take care of Milo, whom he looked after every third weekend and whom Sister Corinna had first seen throwing his smiles from a pram, face just like his father’s.
Peter was always grateful for her help, not l
east because he didn’t want to prove himself unreliable to Milo’s mother, still less provide her with an opportunity to reduce his visiting rights. Frieda, as a result, was furious any time Corinna’s name was mentioned.
And stealthily he had crept back. He brought Milo over to watch videos and play with her two daughters, who loved the boy. Her family were convenient for him and the arrangement suited her precisely because she had two children and hardly any spare time. But she wasn’t deluding herself. She wasn’t a young thing vying for marriage or children, and when one night he asked “Shall I stay over?” she said, to his relief, “No, I’d rather we didn’t. We’ve had all that. I love Milo and I love you, but I’m not going to put my heart on the line. In fact, it’s marked in my diary. February 12. The day on which I promised myself I would stop dreaming about you.”
At the sound of the curses flailing down the stairs, Sister Corinna removed Frau Weschke’s file from under her arm.
“Coming,” she called in her soothing voice, the one that told a patient to sit up and eat or they wouldn’t sleep a wink. And went on down the stairs.
Peter looked up and his mouth cracked into a grin that made his face longer and, she thought, sadder. “Corinna!”
He finished tying Gus’s lead to the base of the hat-stand, and peeled off his hat and hung it over his coat. A fishbone of white scalp showed through his black hair.
“And who is this ravishing creature?” catching sight of the young nurse on the staircase, and crossing the hall with a bounce in his step.
After she had introduced Nadine and Nadine with a troubled look and a blush gathering on her cheek had walked away, he warmed his hands on Corinna’s chest. “So. Who do I start with today?”
The new patient’s name was Frau Weschke. She had arrived in an ambulance the previous Wednesday with her granddaughter from the Anderson-Nexö in Leipzig.
He brushed the snow from his collar and from behind his neck. “Why on earth send her here?”
“The home’s been closed for refurbishment. The superintendent persuaded Frau Metzel – her granddaughter – that in this particular case West was best.”
They climbed the staircase.
“Any children?”
“One daughter, who died some years ago. Frau Metzel is appointed next of kin. I think she was frankly just relieved to have found somewhere for her grandmother.”
They reached the landing and Peter took the file from her and flicked through it. “How old is she?”
“She’s 103.”
The only confirmation of Frau Weschke’s advanced age seemed to be a letter of congratulation from President Ulbricht on her seventieth birthday. In his letter, Ulbricht noted she had been a member of the Socialist Party since 1910 and paid tribute to her work as Secretary of the Socialist Women’s Union in Leipzig, and after the war – her husband had died in Theresienstadt – for her contributions to the Association of the Victims of the Nazi-terror. The letter was dated August 17, 1969, and had been forwarded from the Anderson-Nexö, a retirement home for “distinguished socialists” which she had entered in 1983.
“Frau Metzel apologises for the lack of paperwork. That’s all there is. The government’s been pressing her grandmother to exchange her GDR passport, but she refuses. She complains that she’s carried the passports of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and East Germany. She’s too old for another change of identity.”
“Don’t you sympathise?” groaned Peter.
“The last two years have been bad for her.” Sister Corinna pressed on ahead of him. “Her eyesight’s failing. She refuses her food. She lives on bread and wine.”
Sister Corinna tapped the door and went in. “Hello, Frau Weschke,” in a jocular tone.
On the bed lay a petite old lady with pink thin cheeks and, behind a pair of rimless glasses, eyes of a very light grey-blue. She had on a blue short-sleeve shirt and was sipping noisily from a porcelain spa-mug.
“Here is Herr Doktor Hithersay to see you.”
The old woman twisted her head and ignoring Peter gave Sister Corinna a vinegary stare. “Schwester Corinna, this fish is off.”
“What about the cake? Didn’t you like the cake?” Sister Corinna had bought it with her own money from the bakery beside the railway station.
Frau Weschke dismissed the cake with a wave of her tiny thin arm. “No.”
She opened one hand and counted off what she liked. Leek soup with marjoram. River crabs with carrots. Sweet and sour lentils, and a slice of Leipziger Lerche pie.
“But I thought you liked cake.”
Frau Weschke looked down at the slice on her plate as if she wished it would start eating itself. “I hate cake. I would rather be crushed into pulp a hundred million times than eat this cheesecake.”
“It’s not a cheesecake. It’s a Vollkorn.”
At that Frau Weschke suddenly asked, “Have you been to Leipzig?”
“No.”
She glared at the nurse. “Isn’t it exquisite that I who have eaten river crabs should be served cheesecake by a woman who has never been to Leipzig!”
Peter squeezed Sister Corinna’s elbow. “Leave us together.”
Frau Weschke scrutinised him after the door closed. She angled a hand over her brow and after a little grunt said, “I bet all the women in your life, Herr Doktor, have enabled you to do exactly what you wanted.”
He thought about what she said.
She laughed. “To be on good terms with that one you have to tell her to go right straight to hell. I shout to her: ‘Hedgehog! Cherry-picker! Berliner!’”
Her stern expression cracked. She glanced at something on her arm, slapped it. “Do you know the loveliest German word? It’s not Prussian. It’s Saxon.” Her voice had become round and soft. “Moodschegiebchen. Ladybird.”
Peter sat in the metal-framed chair beside her bed and experienced the sensation, as whenever he visited the tower-room, of being abnormally high up. It was a tall-walled, brightly lit and warm-smelling place, on the faded ceiling of which a fresco of two hunters in a forest looked down from another century. Dominating the room was a large window with a view through a corridor of lime trees to the Wannsee. Visible on one side was the kindergarten playground, with its rusted basketball hoop; on the other, an abandoned house with an overgrown garden and two ancient Citroëns without their tyres. All sheeted with snow.
He picked up Frau Weschke’s file. Typical multiple illness. Bad knee. Cancer. Heart. Oedema.
He took the stethoscope from his bag and placed it against her chest and listened to the blood-chatter.
She coughed.
“Lean forward.”
She moved her hips and lay on her side while he ran the stethoscope up and down her back.
“Any chest pains?”
“No,” she said.
“What happened to your knee?”
“I fell on the ice once.”
“You’re not short of breath?”
“No.”
He removed the tubes from each ear.
She turned and said: “Do you know what I would love? A sip of apple juice. You get so dry.” She held up the mug – the name Karlovy Vary glazed in azure florals on the side – and pointed to a plastic bottle on the sideboard.
He rose from the chair and unscrewed the top of the bottle and felt a pang when he smelled the contents.
“Give me the mug,” she called.
“Where did you get this wine?”
“None of your business. Give me the mug.”
She looked at him in a pinched, terrifying way that made Milo’s mother a Madonna by comparison.
He filled her mug to the brim. “You’re going to the bathroom on your own?”
She gestured at the end of the bed. Her furniture had shrunk to a lacquered black cane with a silver horse-head handle. “I have that,” taking the mug from him and fastening her lips to the porcelain straw.
“Do you have any questions?”
“No.”
“For your low spirits, there’s a new drug. In theory –”
“I don’t believe in theory. I’ve had to be a Monarchist, a National Socialist, a Marxist, a Capitalist. And now I’m a very old lady.” Her left hand went up to the film of white hair and she touched the scalp beneath, brown with age-spots. “No, young man, you can’t fool me with anything revolutionary. The greatest privilege I know is to be stupid, especially very stupid,” and her eyes flicked over the room as though every object that didn’t emanate from Leipzig affected her with disgust.
He followed her gaze. There was an old fur coat with a torn lining on the back of the door and on the dresser beside the door half a dozen books.
“Do you read?”
“I don’t want to, for some reason. I just want to be quiet.”
“What about photographs?”
“Photographs?”
“Of you younger. I bet you were good-looking.”
There was a loud colicky gurgle and silence. She watched him over the rim of the mug.
“I bet you were. Or what about a photograph of your daughter? Or granddaughter?” So that those who worked in the Lion’s Manor didn’t see Frau Weschke as a body in a bed. “You have to find the character of that person and make sure it never gets squashed.” That’s what he taught his students. What he had told Sister Corinna at their first meeting.
“No,” she said dourly. “No photographs.”
“What’s this?” He hadn’t noticed it at first. A board about 6 inches square. Lodged between the books. Flecked with strange beak or claw – or even paw – marks.
“My granddaughter. She made it.”
He looked at the painting for a while as though he could hear a sound coming out of it. “It’s good. I like it.”
“I don’t understand it,” she shrugged. “I prefer things I can understand.”
He propped it back and glanced at the newspaper discarded on her bed. “Would you rather be in Leipzig?”
She stared out of the window. Her face had become gaunt and he knew she was not looking at the skaters on the Wannsee. Her vision of the frozen lake was dissociated from what images raced before her glassed-over eyes.
Snowleg Page 20