“What did you tell him?”
“I said that Frau Weschke had gone to Leipzig to get some river crabs.”
“That’s kind, Corinna.”
He remembered nothing of his drive to the hospital.
In the ward Albert’s eyes were closed and his toes no longer moved. A junior doctor mopped his cheeks. He was 101 and his family in Linz had a street named after them.
“How is he?” Peter had looked after him for the past four years.
“Calmer,” said Frau Doktor Ekberg, relieved he had come back.
Peter picked up Albert’s hand and felt the weight of his once-green fingers. According to Albert’s daughter, he had been the best gardener in Linz. Grown the biggest apples. “They couldn’t grow bigger!” And then one day something fused in Albert’s head to make him dig up all his smallest apple trees and replant them upside down.
“Is that his X-ray?”
“We were unable to hold him still so it’s rather blurred.” She talked quickly. Oval face. Long nose. Hair cut short on jet earrings. “I thought the feeding tube would benefit him, because he’s still not eating.”
He looked to where her finger indicated. “That’s his pacemaker, not his feeding tube.”
“Then where –”
“There.”
She stared at the X-ray and her face drained of colour. “Oh shit. That explains everything.” She spoke urgently into her pager.
He said in a solicitous way, after she had finished speaking, “If his respiration rate drops below eleven breaths per minute contact the anaesthesiologist. I’ll ring you in a couple of hours.”
Peter entered the lift to go down, but it was going up. It stopped on the fourth floor and instead of pressing the button he stepped out. Swing doors led to the canteen. He chose a sandwich and joined the queue at the till. Two nurses were laughing over a date one of them had had with a real-estate agent from Wiepersdorf. “He gave me a way out so of course I stepped in.”
He had not eaten since breakfast. He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed slowly and didn’t take another bite. After a few minutes he rose and flicked the rest of the sandwich into a bin and when he left the canteen no-one looked at him.
On his ward round the patients came to Peter as through a gauze. He stood and listened to the low groans and snores and the men whispering in the mixed ward, like boys at school after lights-out. One of the doctors, a Bavarian with a pockmarked nose, walked up close and waved his hands, “Yoo-hoo, are you there?”
His second surgery was from 5 p.m. till 6 p.m. A patient was talking to him when Peter gasped.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he told the patient. “Go on.” But whatever was being said, he couldn’t take in. Frau Weschke’s words buzzed at him and the memory of a young woman rose up like boiled milk.
When he was done he went through the day’s charts. He checked the lab results. He dictated a letter to a referring physician. At 8 p.m., he telephoned Frau Doktor Ekberg. “How’s Albert?”
“Asking for a newspaper.”
“Eating?”
“They’re feeding him now.”
“That’s good.”
She said nervously, “Thanks for saving my bacon.”
“I’m sure you’ll find ways to do the same for me.”
Before he left for the night, he dialled the Lion’s Manor. Against every professional instinct, he hoped to hear that Frau Weschke had broken back into consciousness.
“Her throat’s inflamed,” said Sister Corinna.
“How much time left?”
“Her breathing is steady. I’d say you can go home.”
In Charlottenburg, a message on his machine. “What time can I expect you?” He had made a vague promise to have dinner with Nadine at her apartment on Friday.
He crawled into bed without turning on the light and was up early to find a letter from Rosalind.
Dear Bedevere,
How are you? You never write back so how can I know? Here it’s raining as usual. Daddy is asleep. He sleeps a lot these days. He has decided to hang up his camera (good) and is on a new course of pills (good) which make him very tired (bad). Mummy has driven to Tesco’s. She’s crankier than ever. She refuses to use the microwave, but is always asking me to heat up her tea/porridge/shepherd’s pie.
I won’t bore you with details of my business (good) or love life (chequered) or my last week’s snorkelling in Abyla (a bit of a disaster). My love to Milo, whom I’d like to see not just in a photograph. And to you. Although, my liege, I fear I have forgotten what you look like.
XXXXX Ros.
PS. I did a shooting party for Camilla the other day. Tristram (rather sexy!) kept asking after you – in rather a vindictive way, I thought. “When I think of your brother, I do think: one of those people who should have done better.” I showed him a photo I took of you in Berlin and all he said was: “If I hadn’t known him at school it would be easy to mistake him for a Kurdish refugee.” Blah blah blah. Camilla puts it down to the fact that he’s lost his job at Morgan Grenfell (taken over by the Germans?).
PPS Do you still play football?
She enclosed a tongue-in-cheek column from the Independent, inspired by an England–Germany soccer match. “They haven’t got a sense of humour. They are fat imbibers of beer, gobblers of sausages. Their country is boring. They are still Nazis. They are addicted to giving and receiving orders. And they are incredibly smug. We hate them all.”
To which she had added in her looping schoolgirl hand: “Except MY BROTHER!”
He folded the letter away – he would write to her, he would write to her – and telephoned the Lion’s Manor.
“Still unconscious,” said Sister Corinna.
Tiredness gnawed in his head. At 2 p.m. he shut the door to his office and closed the blinds and tried to sleep on the couch. He had been asleep for 20 minutes when he heard a rap on the window. He rose and walked to the blinds, prised back the slats and looked out.
The balcony might have been a hot skillet and the swallow a pat of butter melting away. Then the rolling stopped and the bird hung its head and shivered once. One eye stared at where its snapped beak left a reddening trail, and a few seconds passed and then the bird lifted its wings to arrange them more comfortably and was still. There was a tiny arc of bird breath on the glass. He watched it fade until it disappeared.
At 2.35 p.m. Angelika opened the door and looked in. “Schwester Corinna on the line, Herr Doktor.”
“Peter, you ought to come. Her feet are cold. She’s shutting down.”
He walked up the drive, feet slicing the snow and the soft flakes blowing into his eyes and gouts of breath pluming.
No-one in the lobby. On the first floor the sound of voices speaking in a hush. He climbed the staircase in long strides as if someone were following him. The words burst out when he saw the nurses in her room: “Dead? But I wanted to ask her something.”
Sister Corinna calmed him down. “She slipped off very suddenly – quietly . . .”
They parted for him. Frau Weschke lay shrunken in her bed-jacket. Her face composed, almost beautiful. The skin as delicate and white as sunbleached shell. She was quite wasted even from the person of a week ago, her cheeks smoothed of pain and concern and time, her body loose and separated from her, careless like a coat she had hurriedly put on to greet an interruption to a long siesta.
Peter rested his hand on Sister Corinna’s shoulder, but she moved away. He walked out of the room and down the stairs, thinking that now he was never going to have an answer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ALONG AM SANDWERDER, IT was a day like the day he had suppressed. The trees seemed frozen to death and when he looked through their branches at the lake his chest tightened and he felt his consanguinity with the snow.
He crossed the street. Next to the station was Meyer’s bakery, the haunt of single old ladies from Babelsberg. To knit himself to Frau Weschke, he ordered a beige
Torte and attacked it miserably with a spoon. But he couldn’t summon Frau Weschke. All he saw were the images stirred up by her last words and the tailfin of a 19-year passion.
I know what you got up to in Leipzig. It’s all right. None of us are very chivalrous or very brave.
He nursed the words. Her death had snapped him. All at once he felt himself fully emptied on this freezing Berlin afternoon, the white tonalities of the sky and the snow falling.
From her stool in the corner a lady with a face of burl walnut watched him push away his plate. She raised a violet-papered cigarette to her lips and what she breathed out was wispy and grey like riflesmoke.
Of course, she knew about Snowleg, he thought. Because I told her.
He rocked back in his chair. Until the dying old lady seized his wrist, he had almost succeeded in forgetting. But Frau Weschke had penetrated the permafrost in which he had existed since March 1983 and the memory of Snowleg standing at the table in the Hotel Astoria returned with extraordinary violence, the memory fresher to him than when he had lived it.
He closed his eyes in order not to see her. He reminded himself: All over Berlin at this moment people are dying. And yet when he opened his eyes it wasn’t Frau Weschke or Albert who stood, unageing, before him. He had battened down her memory for 19 years, but all the time she had been there. A white bird flying through the snow. Tracking him.
On Thursday morning, 9 a.m., he delivered a paper on geriatric recreation and after the seminar telephoned Frieda at her office. She answered, but he couldn’t speak. After he had hung up, she rang back: “Don’t ever do that again.”
“I was going to say that I’ve got to go to a service at the Lion’s Manor. I could collect Milo early if you like and drop him off later.”
Silence. Then: “All right,” unaccustomed to such gestures.
His tray spilled over with paperwork, but he made time to compose a letter to Frau Weschke’s granddaughter on his own stationery. He wrote in his assured hand: “My son had come to think of her as his own grandmother.” He signed his name and when he looked at the signature was overcome by an impression that he didn’t belong to himself, that a counterfeit Peter Hithersay was sitting at his desk. He folded the letter into an envelope and copied out the address that Sister Corinna had put on a telephone sticker.
His mother had written, enclosing an appeal from the St Cross Development Programme. She always wrote to him at the Klinik, perhaps in the hope that he would treat what she had to say more seriously. She was worried about Rosalind. “I think it would be brotherly if you invited her out again. She’s getting into a frightful rut and unless I’m much mistaken, Tristram Leadley has developed an unhealthy interest in her. Could you put her up in Berlin for a bit?” A PS from Rodney, which his mother would have been hopping mad to see, added: “Unless you would rather have Camilla? PPS A rather startling dividend has arrived from Silkleigh, so we’d pay for R’s fare.” He had included a photograph, a view from the ridge down to the house. Taken last summer.
At 11 a.m., Peter looked at the gift that his mother had presented to him on his sixteenth birthday (and which he had had repaired at tremendous expense in Bond Street). He changed his trainers for a pair of black shoes, put on his suit and tie and made his way to the chapel at the Lion’s Manor.
Sister Corinna sat in the front row. She had spent much of the past two days distraught, trying to contact Frau Weschke’s granddaughter. According to neighbours, Frau Metzel’s children, who might know where she was, had gone to stay with their father. In the end, there was nothing Sister Corinna could do. Frau Weschke’s cremation had, according to her explicit instructions, taken place yesterday. Today, likewise, was to be the simplest possible funeral service. The family were not to be put to any bother.
Everyone Frau Weschke had insulted was assembled in the chapel. A dozen nurses and old people sang two hymns in weak, rattling voices. The only outsider was the kindergarten teacher.
“Milo will be upset,” she said afterwards.
“I don’t know why she had this service,” interrupted Uli, gripping the pew in front for support. He wore dark lenses and the collar of his nightshirt poked up outside his dressing gown. “God is a fairy tale, that’s what she told me.”
Nadine looked round, gave Peter a wide-eyed look. He knew this look. It said: “Call me.”
Not until after the service did Peter learn that contact had been established with the granddaughter. The previous evening Frau Metzel had telephoned from London where she was organising an exhibition.
“She went all quiet when I told her Frau Weschke had died.” Sister Corinna was on her knees, packing the old lady’s belongings into a white cake-box that she had picked up from the bakery. “The poor dear was dreadfully flustered. She’s an artist and her exhibition opens tonight, you see. And I had the impression it was taking place in some village hall, not The White Chapel in London!”
“The Whitechapel?” Peter’s ears pricked up. He squatted down to help. “By the way, you never told me what she was like.”
“Just your type. Tall, blonde . . . booby.”
“I didn’t mean that . . .!”
“With glasses. Possibly bi-focals.”
“Corinna! Stop it. I meant, is she a chip off the old block?”
“Anyway, I’m pleased she rang,” said Sister Corinna, ignoring him. “Frau Weschke made me promise to take the ashes to her and to take this letter with them. Well, actually she asked you to deliver it, but I told her that was out of the question. You said you would never go to Leipzig.” She pointed with her finger at the envelope on the dresser. In a wavy line across the width of it, Frau Weschke’s handwriting like a bird-track read “Marla Metzel”. Also on the dresser was the small board painted with beak marks. Peter stood up and handed it to her, then the books underneath: Dreiser, Dumas and a copy of Gone with the Wind.
He pulled open both drawers. The empty wine bottles rattled with Frau Weschke’s inside-out laugh. Less than a week after arriving at the nursing home she had inveigled the kindergarten teacher, a teetotaller, into acting as her chief supplier. Usually, she made do with a Bulgarian white, Goldener Herbst, but her favourite was Saale-Unstrut, a rather dry white wine from Saxony.
One bottle of Saale-Unstrut remained. Peter put it in the cake-box, recognising with a twinge the page from the Leipziger Volkszeitung with the photograph of the Schreber garden. Sister Corinna had used the newspaper to wrap something. “What’s that?”
“Her ashes. They came half an hour ago,” and tucked the Karlovy Vary mug into a sleeve of the muskrat coat. “Everything? What about that?”
On the floor beneath the dresser was the shoe-bag. He took out the sketch of Leipzig zoo. “The cleaner must have tidied it away. Why don’t you have it?”
“Oh, Peter,” shaking her head. “If I hadn’t noticed, it would have stayed right there.”
“Please, I’d like you to keep it.”
She poked around inside the bag and retrieved her green bow. Four days she had worn her hair down – had he noticed? She flicked back her head, twisted up the thick chestnut hair into a formal knot. “I tell you what, I’ll put it on that wall.”
Peter held down the flaps of the box while she taped them together and in her efficient way wrote out Frau Metzel’s address with a felt marker. “There’s just one thing won’t fit,” and she nodded at the end of the bed.
He unhooked the cane. The black lacquer had flaked off in chunks, leaving a mottled look. The silver horse-head was tarnished, but fitted comfortably into his palm. He waved it at Sister Corinna in the way that he used to brandish his grandfather’s walking stick at Rosalind, and there shot through him – even as he raised the ferrule – the old, jubilant sensation that he wielded not an old lady’s cane, but an ancestral sword. “Couldn’t we send it with a tag on?”
“The post office won’t insure it. Not unless it’s properly wrapped.”
He looked at her uncomprehendingly. He had no patience for
this sort of thing. “Leave it to me. I’ll take it to the post office.”
“I promise you, you need to wrap it first – and they won’t have a box for that size.”
“For God’s sake, woman, of course they will!” Before she could argue, he had seized the envelope from the dresser, tucked the cake-box under his arm and gathered up the cane. “I do love you every second of your blessed existence and you’ve been more than your usual brick-like wonder with dear Frau Weschke, but sometimes . . .”
A moment later the door slammed and she thought for the umpteenth time: This kind of impulsive behaviour really must annoy Milo’s mother. And yet Peter’s behaviour this afternoon was bizarre even by his standards. Before, whenever a patient died, his habit was to melt away and allow Sister Corinna to do his difficult work for him, like a child held at a railway-carriage window to say goodbye. He had never responded in this way to a patient’s death.
Peter drove with Milo to the post office in Gartenstraße where the queue snaked as far as the stationery shelves. He selected two sheets of brown paper and a spool of tape and started to wrap the walking stick as the line hobbled forward. People in the queue watched with frank amusement as he struggled to copy Frau Metzel’s address onto the crumpled paper. He had nearly achieved the wrapping of the silver handle when he reached the counter. “I want to insure this.”
“No,” said the woman. “Not unless it’s in a box.”
“Where do I get a box?” he asked, irritated.
“Go out, turn left and when you reach Wallstraße there’s a store on the right, Krüger’s.”
He was marching Milo through the door when she summoned him back to pay for the paper and tape.
“I need a box,” he told the man in the store.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place!” On his doughy face the hint of a moustache. “What kind of box? We’ve got boxes for books, boxes for clothes, boxes for china. We’ve even got wardrobe boxes.”
“I want a box for this.”
The man cast an estimating glance at Frau Weschke’s cane and drew a long breath. “Not sure about a box for that.”
Snowleg Page 23