The two glass jars contained strips of yellow material about 4 inches square which might have been scissored from Frau Hase’s duster. Something about the cloth strips – they resembled nothing so much as foetuses – took Peter back to his first medical experiment. Beside the jars a xeroxed page with typed instructions had turned grey. He paused to read and the heat rose in his bones.
How to preserve traces of smell
Every protagonist who comes into contact with the environment leaves behind, without noticing it, their own individual smell. Clothes or a chair can carry this smell. It’s always a place where there has been direct physical contact.
To preserve this smell you need a sterile cloth and a pair of sterile tongs (which must be sterilised after each use). With the tongs, take the sterile cloth out of the jar and lay it on the trace material. Cover the cloth with aluminium foil and place something heavy on it. Keep the empty jar closed. After a minimum of 30 minutes – when the temperature is extremely cold or hot you will require at least two hours; or if you have trace material that is burnt or wet at least four hours; or if the trace material is made of paper or cardboard at least 24 hours – process the cloth and place it in the jar. Close the lid and stick a label on it and write whatever is necessary on the label. If you have collected tiny pieces of evidence which carry the scent, put these with the cloth inside the jar.
Certain things you should be aware of:
– These smells can be damaged by other people, animals, car exhaust fumes. That’s why you must be quick and careful when getting the trace material. Before you start, think of where you will be most likely to find the individual scent of the protagonist. Think of how he/she might have acted so that you find the right place.
– Beware of getting your own scent on the aluminium foil. Please make sure you know exactly which person’s scent you have taken. The best trace materials are: a chair, a bed, a pencil – or whatever they are writing with. If possible, place the cloth under the protagonist’s belt between the T-shirt and underwear.
– Don’t forget to close the jars and write on the label the date, the time, the place.
A friendly seeming woman he hadn’t noticed sat at the reception desk and fanned her mouth as if she had eaten something hot. Mid-fifties, with short hennaed hair and the youthful complexion of the overweight, she glanced up at his approach and with a fine instinct for his mood enquired if he would like to know more about anything he had seen.
“Tell me about the jars,” hoarsely.
She put down her hamburger and jumped up. Somewhere – if she could lay her hands on it – there was a photograph. She unlocked a cabinet and tugged out a black folder.
Addressing him in the garrulous manner of someone who had waited a long time to be asked this information, she told him that the Stasi had conceived the idea relatively late, at the beginning of the 1980s. In their mania to control everything, and in every way, they assembled a voice collection, a fingerprint collection, a saliva collection and finally they decided on a collection of smells. One of their intentions was to establish a direct link between forbidden written material – underground literature, subversive leaflets, even graffiti on walls – and the person responsible for writing or distributing it. In 1982, a specially trained dog was bought from the police and kennelled in a villa in Leutzsch in the north-west of Leipzig. She had one word to describe the system: “Perverse”.
“How many smells were collected?”
“Thousands. Now we know why there was a shortage of jam jars!”
“Where were the jars stored?”
A plump index finger pointed at the ceiling.
“What happened to them?”
For the second time that morning he heard the phrase. “Please tell me if you find out.”
One winter night police had arrived at the Runde Ecke in a hired Volkswagen lorry and driven away the entire collection. On December 4, 1989, a large number of jars were discovered in police headquarters, including a complete collection of the Leipzig opposition. These jars had since disappeared, either smashed or confiscated. “No-one knows who took them, where they went.”
She produced a page-sized black and white photograph. “Here’s your dog.”
The Alsatian sat on a bare planked floor as though at the centre of a clock face. Arranged in a circle were a number of glass jars identical to those in the museum’s cabinet. Each contained a folded cloth impregnated with a suspect’s smell. To judge from the pose – eyes glittering at the photographer, front paws thrust forward – the dog had identified one of them.
Peter was surprised to feel a kinship with the animal, even a quiet envy. The dog was innocent. Moreover, it had found what it was looking for.
He returned the photograph. “Tell me, how would I track down someone from that time?”
“Someone whose scent the Stasi –”
“Maybe,” he said.
She stared at the dog. “I don’t know – unless you can speak to someone who was Stasi.” But as Peter doubtless was aware, the government had granted an amnesty to anyone working for the security service. “They keep themselves entirely to themselves.”
“If I wanted to talk to such a person, how would I find them?”
She shrugged and her voice was despairingly downbeat with none of his landlady’s polished cheeriness. “Luck? Coincidence? Serendipity?”
He headed along Dittrichring, head spinning. Exhilarated that a moment so transient might be preserved until now. At the same time fearful that he had pitched Snowleg into this evil, manic world.
His alertness spread into the street and set off the car alarm he heard. He liked the idea of a jar filled with Snowleg’s smell, then argued the thought away. Not everyone was investigated. Wasn’t he proof of that? It was naive and foolish – part of his romantic Western mythology – to suppose that because Snowleg had made an exhibition of herself in the Astoria her life would be endangered. The Croatian taxi-driver was right. Maybe she was dead or lived in the United States, Peru, Winnipeg. Maybe she had married a millionaire, like a depressed poet he had known. Maybe she lived in Charlottenburg!
He felt tender with hopelessness. He had found out nothing. He had no idea what to do next and coming to a little park he stopped to look at his tourist map to see if it might jog his memory. But the streets of Leipzig, like its university, operated under a new identity. Probably Snowleg had also changed her name, whatever it was. Anyway, she was bound to have a new name if she was married. And there was no point in looking for Bruno because Peter didn’t know his surname either.
He kept on walking, feeling his frustration and impotence, not knowing where he was going. The street ranged ahead of him and he pictured 132 kilometres made up of files. But how could Snowleg have disappeared? Someone must remember her. She was too lively to be forgotten. And in the same way that as a 17-year-old in Hamburg he sought his father, he caught himself peeping into the eyes of people squeezing by. He yearned to communicate what he felt to those going about their business. He wanted to rush up, seize their lapels and ask: “Have you seen Snowleg?” For the first time since his arrival in the city, it was imperative he find her and make amends. And if he couldn’t find her then at the very least to use this journey, which was going to be his last journey to Leipzig, to lay her ghost, cost what it may, suffer as he might. But where to begin, at least begin?
The railway station came back into sight and he recognised the word that jutted into the skyline, each purple letter the size of a man. The Astoria, at least, had remained faithful to itself. The day before, he had felt combative towards the hotel. But this feeling fizzled out and he looked with emotion at its entrance. Beyond that rusting brown canopy lay the room in which he had last spoken to Snowleg. Someone who had been in the Astoria that night, wouldn’t they be able to tell him what had happened to her?
He returned to the tourist agency. Bursting into the office as if someone was grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back to a long oval table.<
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The young man recognised him. He had on a different suit. “Is Frau Hase treating you well?”
“Tell me, how could I get to speak with someone who worked at the Astoria in 1983?”
“With difficulty. Unless you find an old telephone directory in a jumble sale!”
Peter opened his wallet. “I can offer 100 Marks.”
“What about Leni?” said a girl at the next desk.
“Leni. I forgot about Leni.”
“Leni worked in the Intershop,” the girl said. With the other’s approval, she looked up a directory and dialled a number.
The voice that answered sounded reluctant. Leni was too busy. She had to go to the dentist.
“But surely you know someone?” said the girl. “What about Wilhelm’s mother?”
Peter understood from their conversation that if Leni could help without being traced, she might be more open. “Tell her . . .”
The girl covered the mouthpiece. “What?”
“Tell her I’m trying to get in touch with old relatives.”
Soon the girl was writing down the number of a woman who had been in charge of the hotel’s kitchen. The young man took his money and passed him the piece of paper.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“I SUPPOSE YOU WANT to sell me a second-hand Golf?” the voice said with something almost like fury.
“No, no. It’s personal.”
“I already have a nice satellite dish, thank you.”
“I’m looking for a relative, a young woman you might have known.”
“Who gave you my number?”
“The tourist office.”
“What’s your relative’s name?”
“Her name is Snowleg.”
“You mean Snjólaug? No, I don’t know any Snjólaug. Where could I have known her? How could I have known her?”
“No?” unable to hide his disappointment. “Then I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
Frau Lube would tell Peter in due course that he had telephoned in the middle of prayers for World Peace. She was watching the afternoon service on television and had just completed a prayer for her late husband when she heard Peter’s foreign-accented voice ask if it could come and speak with her. And immediately she felt the old and irrational dread that she had done something wrong. She thought of the overdue telephone bills. She identified with the child-snatcher whose photofit was in the newspaper. All the crimes committed in Saxony over the past year lurched through her head.
“Goodbye, then.” On screen, the liturgy summoned her.
“Goodbye.” But still he hung on, like someone wanting to order another coffee after the bill is settled. “No, wait! Were you at the Astoria in 1983?”
“Let me see. Yes, I was in charge of kitchen staff.”
“Then I’d still like very much to talk to you.”
Peter was to discover that nothing upset Frau Lube’s enjoyment of her day so much as an interruption to the religious services she participated in from the comfort of her chair and which a satellite beamed to her from as far away as Wisconsin and the Philippines. And yet having decided the previous moment not to see him, she changed her mind. Her bad leg making it difficult to leave her apartment, her craving for company had deepened since her son had emigrated to Adelaide. As she would acknowledge early on in their first meeting, it was an awful thing to lose touch with a relative. Even if she couldn’t help the Herr Doktor, he would be someone to chat with for a while.
“OK, I will speak to you. But don’t come before four. And only for half an hour.” Her grandson – Wilhelm’s son – was coming to tea.
On the dot of 4 p.m. Peter climbed to the eighth floor of a prefabricated tower block in Zingster Straße. The landing smelled of fresh concrete and through a gap he saw the grey rim of a satellite dish and a skyline dominated by a metal flock of aerials and receivers and cranes.
He pressed the bellpush and waited. From behind the door came the tape-recorded barking of a dog.
The door opened and an old woman stood looking at him, lumpy but smartly groomed with curly, blue-tinted hair. A bottle-green dress fell over her large bosom and in one hand she held a Bible.
“You’re younger than your voice,” removing the pair of sandals from her doormat and fussing him in. “What is your accent? Are you from Berlin? You don’t sound like a Berliner.”
He smiled. Her face was powdered for God, or for Peter, like one of Rosalind’s floury scones. “How do Berlin people sound?”
“A Berlin accent is short and snappy and bites you.”
“I’m English.”
“English indeed?”
With eyes raised, she accepted the rather wilted hot-house lilies and hobbled before him into her living room.
On television the German Chancellor was delivering a speech. She turned down the volume and tugged a sleeve over the handkerchief wedged there. All at once her face looked anxious. She gave the impression that she didn’t know quite what to do with Peter or his flowers.
“Is that yours?” he said to start a conversation.
She followed his gaze to the poster of Che Guevara.
“No. It’s my son’s,” and waved with the lilies at a photograph on the television set of a young man in his twenties with ropy black hair. “That’s Wilhelm. Just before his accident.”
She told him the story. The boy who always wanted a Volkswagen. The unscrupulous dealer from the West. The gear that jammed in fourth. The silver birch on the bend outside Luckenwalde.
“He was in the burns unit for a month.”
With her free hand she picked up the photograph. Looked at it. Put it back. “Now he’s in Australia. See.”
On the wall a postcard of Ayers Rock, tucked into the frame of an old riverscape.
“Can it really be that colour?” She contemplated the rock, patting her hair. “That’s what Wilhelm says.”
“Why not?”
“Do you have children?”
“A son, 5 years old.”
“And how old are you, may I ask?”
“Forty.”
“Ah yes. Wilhelm’s forty-two. Men in their forties, that’s when things happen.”
Peter waited for her to explain, but already she was sliding open a door onto a glassed-in terrace. She looked upset. Something about his face troubled her. A strange Englishman was in her home. What did he want? Really?
On the terrace were two low and uncomfortable-looking chairs and a beach umbrella.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said, and went to hunt for a vase to put his bruised lilies in.
Peter walked to the edge and looked over. Below was a small lake which, Frau Lube explained through the sliding door, had once been an opencast lignite mine. Around 6 a.m. she liked to sit in her chair and watch the swimmers dip themselves in the freezing water. Just as she always slept well in rainstorms, so she felt warmed by the sight of those swimmers. Glad not to be in Rosentalgasse again.
She chattered on from inside the apartment and he was happy to listen. It was what he did well. His currency.
Frau Lube had abandoned her house in the old quarter with no regret. “Linoleum goes very cold in the Leipzig winter.” The cold floor had pressed up through her bones and played havoc with her feet. The roof had leaked. Bricks poked out of the plaster. Whenever she stepped into the entrance she was assaulted by a smell of decay and damp and old mops.
In a spirit of optimism five years ago she had come to this housing estate in Grünau. “I thought life would be cheaper, and so to begin with it was.” The only aspect she found distasteful was the dirty street leading through the estate. There was mud on her shoes whenever she walked up the steps, but it was a good new flat.
Slowly, her hopes had disintegrated. Wide cracks appeared in the concrete. If she turned off the radiator, the walls shook. The rent went up from 79 Marks to 710 – “with no improvements!” Her new neighbours were not so warm. “I liked the first ones, but they went to the West with their children.”
Frau Lube limped from the kitchen and after setting down a vase of water on the television set she made a face. On screen Chancellor Schröder continued his silent speech.
Peter cleared his throat. “You know, I hope that –”
She cut him off. “There’s something wrong with him. They say he dyes his hair!” and addressed the politician. “As long as people like you are in the Party, why would I want to be a member? First clear your Party! After what I’ve been through, don’t I have a right to have good people in charge?” She turned to Peter and rested a hand on each haunch, her eyes radiant. “I’m going to tell you something you may not believe. We were happy when we had the Wall! There, I’ve said it. We had no criminals. Or heroin. No fascism. No graffiti. And these are just a few examples! Then come the Wessis and Ossis are worth nothing. The Wessis know everything better, the Wessis can do everything better, the Wessis can speak better. In Saxony, we’re told that people don’t work, are stupid, don’t know enough.” Again, she spoke to Schröder, supplying the words. “But would a puppet like you have withstood 40 years of communism and problems and done as much as a Saxon?”
“It’s been a difficult time here, hasn’t it?”
“We are the bad conscience of a great people, Herr Doktor,” she said with melancholy, as if this was an expression she had acquired from her television screen. “I want to be German again.” And switched Schröder off. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Her words continued to reach him over the sound of the kettle filling. “The Wall was a part of me. I knew how far to go. Now I can’t handle what’s happening. It’s too fast. What people say is true. I feel like an emigrant in my own country. If you behave badly no-one cares. Then at least someone cared and came after you. Now you have to take care of yourself.” Like Schröder, she rattled away without being present. “I’m angry today, I’ll tell you why. Everything I found important in my life and fought for has been lost and devalued by dye-haired people like him. They behave as if 66 years has no more value than this mud on my shoes. And yet who is going to say of their life that it has been a history of mud? No-one!”
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