Peter felt despair rising at the torrent his visit had undammed. He wasn’t here on a geriatric round. Unusually, he found it hard to concentrate. He considered standing up. Taking command of the situation. But her monologue had a muting effect and he wondered if she wasn’t silencing him in the way she had silenced the Chancellor. He began to shadow Frau Lube’s words like an exterminating knight. Looking for a chink, an opening. Somewhere to land his thrust in this claustrophobic apartment. For that was now the shape his quest had taken.
Eventually, she appeared on the terrace with a tray. “Do you like sugar or milk?”
“Milk,” he said.
She sat down. “Of course, we did things differently. But we did things. Men like Schröder, they have turned our world upside down. You know what’s wrong today? They have created a world in which you can’t afford essentials.”
“Frau Lube –” and he tried to massage a question into this outpouring, but she was chinkless.
“Bread, transport, heating, rent – they’re too expensive. You can only afford luxuries. Here, have one of these.”
The box was labelled “Cologne Specialities”. Since the Wall had come down, she was able to indulge in two luxuries only imaginable in her previous life. She had, via satellite, discovered a universal God. And she had discovered West German chocolates. Infinitely superior they were to the Russian mints that were left on the Astoria’s pillows and which she had regularly pinched.
Nearly every chocolate in the box had tooth marks.
“Or don’t you like chocolates?” she said cheerfully.
“I was thinking of my grandfather. He used to keep them in the freezer.”
“I hate the creams,” oblivious to Milo Potter.
He selected a strawberry cream with a corner missing and placed it on the saucer of his milkless coffee.
Frau Lube scratched her leg. “I’m not saying –”
But he was looking down. “What have you got there?” Without reflecting, he seized her leg and without resisting Frau Lube offered it up to him.
“That’s quite a bad eczema.”
“Is that what it’s called? These doctors, I never understand what they tell me.”
“What are you doing for it?”
“Doing for it? I’m scratching it.”
“There’s something you can use which would be quite straightforward.”
“It’s easier to scratch.”
“I’ll get you some cream.”
A suspicious expression entered her face. Was he being showy? She gathered her leg. Leaned back. Picked up the box.
“These are my balm. Herr Doktor Peter, have another one. But you still haven’t eaten the first. I tell you what, store this in your pocket. You never know when you might need a toffee-whirl,” and passed him the only chocolate to survive intact the investigation of her teeth and thumbs.
He put it on his saucer, next to the other one.
She smoothed out her dress. “I warned that you were wasting your time,” abruptly tucking her leg under her. “Who is this girl Snjólaug? A relative, you say?”
He prodded tentatively at the strawberry cream, rearranging it. “Let me come clean with you, Frau Lube.”
One tells it best to strangers. And yet even as Peter described his meeting with Snowleg, he told the version that he had told his schoolfriends at the Garrick. The one he could live with.
Frau Lube sat very still. Only her mouth moving. No longer looking at him, but between two window boxes of black-eyed Susans.
“I will never forget her eyes as she stepped backwards,” he said. “It’s how I never wanted to treat someone – how I never wanted to be treated.”
When he had finished he couldn’t decide if what he had said meant anything to her or not. All the powers of her expression were in her mouth, eating a chocolate.
“Frau Lube, do you have any recollection of this young woman?”
She gave him a satisfied smile. “Oh, there are always girls like this. But they blur in my mind. Herr Doktor, this was a long time ago. Do you realise how many girls must have passed through the hotel?”
He opened his wallet and took out some banknotes. “What about this girl? Someone would have noticed her – surely?”
Frau Lube looked at the money. “All this for a simple drink at a crush bar?”
“That’s not the point,” he said quickly. Feeling the guilt and hunger of 19 years.
Frau Lube, who in her life had experienced hunger, folded away the banknotes and selected a hazelnut whip.
“And why do you want to see her?”
“I want to see her . . . To ask her – to see that she’s all right,” and he tried to make it less serious by laughing.
Slowly, she rolled her hazelnut. Sucking it clean. Her nervousness melting with the thin layer of chocolate. “Snjólaug, you say,” pronouncing it correctly. “No, I don’t know that name. And you do realise it may not even be her name?”
“What do you mean?”
“Many of the girls had special names. This name sounds very special, wouldn’t you say? Maybe she was a whore. Maybe her name wasn’t Snjólaug at all. Maybe the one thing you seem to know about her might be wrong.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” And the futility of it dejected him, sitting here on this chill terrace under a Bulgarian beach umbrella while a woman dressed for afternoon service ate chocolates. “But all I can do is ask and maybe someone will remember something, a detail, which will lead me to her.”
Her face softened. “OK, you want details. Let me think. Details.” She stored the nut in her cheek. Her hand touched a thick neck and then reached down to scratch her ankle. “There was a girl.”
He looked up.
“If this was the incident you’re talking about, which I don’t say it is, it was much discussed in the kitchen. And while we don’t agree on who she is, this girl, we all ask ourselves the same question. Why did the doorman allow her back in and not just get rid of her? I remember the cook saying, ‘It’s obvious who she is, otherwise why would he have taken such a risk? That’s a Konsum girl’ – what you would call a Stasi girl. There are many such girls in this time, you understand. The hotel is full of them. And there were others, students who prostituted themselves for money during the Book Fair. You know, for pantyhose or dollars. For very little anyway. And that’s what one of the staff believes. He is vehement on the subject.
“So we don’t all agree. This is sometimes the nature of our work, to amuse ourselves in the kitchen. And let me see what I say. Um, I say, this is a girl who may be very naive. She may be full of vodka. Or she may . . . no, to me, it’s obvious, she’s absolutely in love. And such a girl in such a state is capable of many things. She’s capable of courage she doesn’t normally have. This is a girl drowning, she has ten times her normal strength. The strength of a mother who can throw a car off her child. Do I need to go on? Yes, this girl knows what she wants.”
“So you remember her!”
“A very short skirt, could she have had?”
“That’s right!” his heart beating as if it was taking off.
“She was standing with the doorman in the staff corridor. To start with, I think it’s one of the festival girls from the way she’s dressed. She’s young and I can see she’s upset by something. For the first time in a situation, Anton – he’s the doorman – doesn’t know what to say or do. He’s trying to calm her down. It’s strange, but I feel an immediate pity for her. I ask her what’s wrong. She’s been done over by a Westerner, basically,” and Frau Lube gazed down at her cup. The reflection of the coffee made a halo on her face. “I next recall seeing her in the bathroom. She’s in front of the mirror and scrubbing off all her make-up as if it’s terrible to her. And when she finishes the job she looks in the mirror for a long time. She didn’t know I was watching –”
“Where she is now? Do you know?”
“This is many years ago. How can I know this?”
Now it was his
turn not to believe her. He flung back his head. “Because you seem to know everything.”
“Ah, Herr Doktor Peter, this is what young women want to hear. I’m too old. Now drink your coffee or it will get cold.”
This was her only power left. To deflect him. And it seemed to Peter as though Frau Lube, pulling out all the defences of old age, had found to her surprise that she was less charmed by the man sitting beside her on the terrace than she was by herself.
The doorbell sounded, setting off a mechanical yapping. “That will be my grandson.”
“Frau Lube, if I wanted to find young people, theatre people, anyone who might conceivably have been involved in the Astoria years ago . . .”
“Slightly younger than me?”
“Yes, where would they go? Where would they be drinking?”
She pondered the question. In the hallway, the dog continued barking. “You have to go to the Mädler-Passage. Down the steps. I can’t go down there any more. Auerbach’s Cellar, it’s called.”
He licked his lips. “Look, I still need to talk to you. Can I come back tomorrow?”
A strong breeze had blown up, flapping her umbrella. “That’s a rotten wind. Listen to it,” she said happily, and struggled to her feet. “Maybe tomorrow you will come with another box of chocolates and I will remember something else. I prefer liqueurs to creams. My grandchildren don’t get into them.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
PETER HAD NOT FORESEEN the relief he would feel, talking about Snowleg. When he mumbled her name to Frau Lube it became a solid wafer-like thing that drew the moisture from his tongue. Once he had told her story – even if it wasn’t the whole story – she was there. Like a declaration.
He walked along Zingster Straße growing lighter with each step and with the sense of having seen a small bubble rise. Like a bubble on the Itchen that told him where a trout was feeding. By the time he reached the S-Bahn he was whistling to himself.
A train took him back to the centre. It was good not to be at the Hilfrich Klinik. In his new mood of liberation, he hunted out the building where Snowleg’s grandfather had worked as a furrier.
A mania for restoration had swept through the Brühl. All around he heard hammering and banging and yelling. Suspended on platforms, figures in orange helmets sandblasted the blackened limestone and out of the grime and grease and soot of the old city the face of a younger Leipzig was emerging.
At last he found the building. A Red Indian in a red feathered headdress grinned down from the cleansed facade of the Dresdner Bank. From another doorway two eyes looked out at him, gummed and shiny. “Haven’t heard that song in years.”
Still whistling, he walked into the Market Square and registered the changes. The air in the back of his throat tasted of hamburgers, not coal. Couples sat eating under Peter Stuyvesant umbrellas and water splashed into the fountain where he had waited for her.
It was a bitter blow, therefore, to discover the Thomaskirche sheeted in tarpaulins. A “Bronto Skylife” crane blocking the entrance and an electric saw shrieking from inside. In his unbalance, Peter walked to the rear of the church where a notice declared the Thomaskirche closed for renovations. One glance at the double doors and he was coming out of them again. He saw the slimmer figure of his youth run down the steps and a green raincoat bobbing between grey faces, across the flagstones, into the brick building on the corner. There were seagulls on the roof and her image hovered before him like a bird.
What was she looking at now, at this moment? If only he could stand there and interrupt it.
It was striking six o’clock when he walked into the Mädler-Passage. The chimes vibrated into him, and catching sight of himself in the boutique windows, his dark blue tie like a pennant, he had a sense of time leaking away. He quickened his step as though he was trying to keep up with someone. Wishing her back into this mall so he might change what had happened.
Halfway along the Mädler-Passage he saw two statues, one on each side of the mall. This vision of Faust and Mephistopheles sharpened his recollection. He rested a hand on Faust’s square-capped bronze toe as he once had seen Snowleg do, and cast his eyes over the shop windows for the wine bar. Nothing. Where his memory situated an art deco lamp were glass shelves stacked with Belgian chocolates.
And then he saw: the statue guarded the entrance to the Auerbach’s Cellar.
Down, down, down he went. Through a warm hallway. Into a low spacious room with a vaulted brick ceiling. The place where Snowleg had wanted to take him. “You can’t see Leipzig and not see the Auerbach’s Cellar!”
His thirst increased at the sight of so many people drinking. He ordered a Weißen and drew back a chair and sat down, browsing the room.
Overvarnished paintings on the walls depicted scenes from Goethe’s play. They had been restored so often that the original characters were somehow lost, but one in particular drew Peter’s eyes – a panel of Faust mounted on a barrel as if it was a horse – and there rose, suggested by the cape and ruff, the image of himself as a medical student dressed up for the mime. The painting reminded Peter that Faust was a doctor too. Out of a sense of superstition he tried to make a connection between their two situations, but he couldn’t.
He had been observing the drinkers at the bar as they assembled in tailor-made suits and sleek broad ties and as he watched them nudge one another – the way they clapped each other’s shoulders, grinned, their cartoon welcomes and departures – he became aware of a woman with garnet-coloured lipstick taking him in. She sat at the bar and from time to time glanced round. Dressed in electric colours like a tropical fish, the bulk in her shoulders suggested someone aspiring to a corporate image.
At last she picked up her glass of wine and handbag and gravitated over toward him. “Are you an actor?”
“No,” he said.
“Singer?”
“No.”
“Schoolmaster?” enjoying the game.
“Why schoolmaster?”
“You look unhappy.” She drew up a chair and sat down. “It’s a true proverb,” in a glib, seductive tone. “In Leipzig we say when there’s room enough for one, there’s room enough for two.”
She took from her handbag a catalogue with a mannequin on the cover and dropped it on the table between them. She might have been trying to sell roses for a sweetheart. “Sure you wouldn’t like something special for the lady in your life? Sometimes women are too shy.”
He looked at the model and thought of a woman on a beach advertising Lamb’s Navy Rum. “No, thanks.”
She flipped open the catalogue. “Now, wouldn’t it be fun to get up to a little cheekiness in that?” Amused, she repeated the description underneath. “The colour of morning’s first light on the horizon . . . The ladies’ styles are trimmed with feather-soft fluff and are perfect to tickle your man’s fancy.”
“No, thanks, really.”
Her eyes delved into his. Her pitted complexion grouted with face-cream and her forehead scattered with bumps like a tablecloth with crumbs on it. “I never forget a face,” and licked her lips. She may have been a little drunk. “I have a photographic memory for faces. I’ve seen you before. Where are you from? You’re from England, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
He saw her trying to place him as if he had been a client. And then she sat back nodding to herself. “OK, I’ve got it. If you buy me a drink, I’ll tell you who I am.”
He thought, God, have I slept with her somewhere?
“Have we . . .?”
“No, sugar, it wasn’t me you fucked.”
“Listen, I think you’re mistaken.”
“It was Snjólaug.”
Peter gave a little gasp as though she had hit him.
“Hotel Astoria. You stood her up in, let me think, eighty –,” and paused. “Nineteen eighty-three. The year the canal froze over. That was the year I broke my ankle and had to leave the profession.”
The time stretched over her face and in vain he
tried to read it. She sucked in her cheeks to help him. Put a hand to her head. “My hair, it used to be red. What if I said Renate?”
He battled to picture a slim woman with short marmalade hair, dark eyes and nibbled fingernails. In the line of her back, only, was there a vestige of the girl who had held Teo’s hand in the taxi.
“Renate!” pulling forward his chair. “Of course. Renate!”
“I’m not Renate now. I have a different name – I’m Christiane.” Changed it because she’d got married and had a daughter and hadn’t wanted her daughter to know about her old life.
“What are you doing in Leipzig?”
Today, she sold lingerie in people’s houses. “Direct sales, you’d call it. It seemed an obvious choice. I was used to dealing with the public,” and winked. “It’s sexy, but it’s not raunchy, if you know what I mean. Grey singlets, stretch lace – satin’s really popular. I’ve got a good eye for women’s sizes. I can look at someone and see what size cup they are, what will look nice on them, what won’t. Is this boring?”
“Oh, no. Fascinating. Do continue.” And focused on her all his powers of attention as though what she had to say was bound up with his continued existence.
“In the old days,” she went on, enjoying his concentration, “I’d go up to town and have my bras fitted and there’d be a lady who went into the dressing room with me. It would take three hours and I’d come home in tears. I’d come back with nothing! It’s particularly bad for women with children. If you live in a village, you can’t just go into a shop and buy something. You have to go to town and there’s fifty million other things to do and shopping for a convertible bra ends up bottom of your list.”
She raised a plump orange arm to attract the waiter. “It’s done by referral, pretty much.”
“Tell me –”
“We sit over coffee, wine, whatever. Look at the clothes. Try them on. In no time, they’re all running to the dressing room and saying: ‘Well, what do you think?’ Women like to have other people’s opinions. You can’t trust the shop assistant, but you can trust your friend to say: ‘That makes you look like a whale.’”
Snowleg Page 27