The tram stopped. Peter clutched at his wallet, his ears ringing, his mouth dry. He stood up to say something to the driver, but the three boys were behind him all at once.
He stumbled out. As soon as he stepped onto the road he realised it wasn’t his stop. The door hissed shut and he heard a snigger. They had followed him off.
Peter tried to walk away as if he knew where he was. He slipped his wallet into his jacket and headed briskly down a road that soon tapered into a housing estate. The thought crossed his mind that this was probably where they lived. Suddenly, there was nobody around.
The walls on either side rose in a steep cliff of tower blocks and grey facades. Pocked, filthy with coal dust, the stucco peeled to the brickwork.
He was very frightened now.
And then he was being tackled below the knees. He had a tendency to fall easily on the soccer pitch and he buckled onto the gravel. But his hand in his pocket held onto his wallet and he wasn’t able to protect his fall. The side of his head hit the ground and someone was grabbing his legs and another was clamping his head in the vice-like grip with which he used to hold down children when stitching their foreheads.
“Fucking foreigner.”
Hands were exploring his jacket, his pockets. “Look, Hans, look!” and held up his mobile like the captain of a winning team holding up a sports trophy.
Then a frightened voice said: “What’s this?”
They had found his bleeper. From their reaction they must have thought he was a policeman. They stamped it to death and tossed it back to him. “Give that to your fucking pig friends.”
He clawed at the mangle of plastic and wire. Beyond his reach he saw a boy’s thigh, fingers undoing a belt buckle, a knife. And heard the rumbling of his fear. A face loomed, a succulent malice in the eye, and a tongue wagged in a lewd way and there flashed on it, near the tip, a silver stud.
“Fucking, fucking foreigner, with fucking pig friends.”
The boy stepped back and unzipped his trousers.
He’s going to rape me, he thought. He started to whimper. I’m going to die. Then something descended over his face and hovered there, obliterating his vision.
“Oh, Snowleg, where are you?” in sudden command of his voice. And something in his tone alarmed them.
He felt the grip on him loosening. He managed to sit up, but all that his desperation achieved was to bring himself closer to the curly black hair and the moist fold of skin and the cheeks parting an inch above him.
“Hurry! Hurry!” urged the frightened one who held down his head.
“Fuck off, I’m trying. Wait. It’s coming, it’s coming.”
The mouth puckered open, pink as a young tongue, and a fart blasted into his face.
“Here we go!”
Peter threw away his tie and staggered into a street, stopping an apprehensive jogger to ask the way to Kantstraße.
“But this is it.”
He bolted upstairs before Frau Hase had a chance to see or to smell him, retching as soon as he entered his room. Worried that he might be concussed, he started to run a bath and then realised that he didn’t want to sit in the boy’s excrement. He took a shower and afterwards sat on his bed and towelled himself dry. He yielded to sleep just as he was preparing to drag himself downstairs to telephone a doctor.
He woke with a headache and a full bladder, labouring to breathe, round about midnight. He winced to the bathroom. Pains shot through his back and shoulder joints where they had kicked him and there was a large tender swelling under his hair at the side of his head. But no concussion.
He walked back to bed and when he trod on Frau Weschke’s walking stick he cursed aloud.
In the next room, reflected against the dark window of the house opposite, a light switched on. He propped the cane against the table and lay back rigid on the bed, conscious of someone listening. A minute later the light switched off.
He tried to sleep, but sleep scorned him. He smelled morbid, of carrion. To get rid of the foul smell, he got up to open the window, but the window remained stuck. A shadow created by the streetlight fell over his bruised stomach like a hand trying to discover a heart. He listened to his breathing. He heard nothing. A vast emptiness was taking root in him and he felt he had stumbled beyond the scope of anyone’s forgiveness or care.
A group of berserkers passed below the window yelling the name of a football team. He turned and the streetlight followed him back into the room, casting wolf ears on the ceiling and picking out a few surfaces. The catalogue on the table. The cake-box. The silver horse-handle. He breathed in the stuffy air, the asphyxiating aroma of undried paint. This was the person he was.
Not yet ready to go back to bed, he unhooked the dressing gown from the back of the door and finding some coins in his trouser pocket went downstairs.
In his moment of need, a call to Sister Corinna was no longer an option. He had come up against a memory of his life that had blown her away.
Longing to tell the intimate details, he dialled his parents’ home in England. He hoped that Snowleg had found someone to tell. He let the telephone ring and ring.
“I’m sorry. We’re not here at the moment. But if you’d like to leave a message . . .” Rodney, speaking on a cheap machine. His voice warbling and uncertain, not confident he had been recorded.
Anyway, what was he going to tell Rodney – that he’d been crapped on by a Neo-Nazi thug? Or if his mother answered was he going to tell her, finally, about Snowleg? She had produced a life from one night. He had nothing to show. Nothing.
Despite the hour, he telephoned directory enquiries. “Berking,” he whispered, fearful of waking Frau Hase. Did she have an extension in her bedroom?
“Did you say Bernhard?”
Berking,” louder.
“Business or personal?”
“Personal.”
“Initial?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
”Address?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Please wait.”
Despair is not despair until you admit it, and then like your reflection in a tin tray, it has a face that goes on for ever. Before, when he read the words “despair” or “desire” or “shame” he believed he knew what these words meant, but his definitions were shallow compared to the emotions he was experiencing in the zealously polished hallway of the Pension Neptune. He thought that if he were to understand deeply he would go mad a second time.
“I’m sorry. We have no-one listed under Berking in the Leipzig area.”
He started sobbing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IT DUMBFOUNDED PETER NEXT morning to look into the mirror and see no evidence of the assault. A stench rose from the bathtub, a smear of shit, piss, vomit and mud. Before he left his room he washed and washed the shirt and hung it in the bathroom.
In the hall, Frau Hase investigated with a mystified expression the payphone’s mouthpiece.
“Herr Doktor! I was thinking of you. Have you found your old friend from the theatre?”
“No.”
“I’m sure you will find her today,” in the optimistic tone, tinged with urgency, of someone who had made a casual promise and was now concerned that her reputation, as well as that of the Pension Neptune, might be linked in an obscure way to its fulfilment. Peering closer: “Are you all right?”
“I’m quite all right, thank you, Frau Hase.”
“It’s just that yesterday I don’t remember you using a stick.”
At the Dresdner Bank in the Brühl he tried to draw out 1,000 Marks with his credit card. The machine refused, and he remembered that payments to Frieda were deducted at source at the end of every month. He tried again for 500 Marks and this time was accepted.
At 10.30 a.m. he limped into the offices of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Twenty minutes later a copy-taker read back to him the words Renate had written with her pink felt-tip. Her formula. On the evening of March 27, 1983, I was at the
Astoria and the Rudolph Theatre. Were you there too? The notice would run the following day.
A painful 15-minute walk to the Mädler-Passage, where he bought postcards of the Thomaskirche for Milo, Corinna, his family in England; and a special cream for Frau Lube. Along with his credit card, the thugs had left untouched a spare prescription form he always carried.
“Who is it for?” enquired the pharmacist.
“One of my patients. She’s too ill to walk here.”
“You are prescribing it?”
“Not only am I prescribing it, I am paying for it and I am going to administer it.” He was on the point of asking whether he could in fact borrow the pharmacist’s telephone to ring Frau Lube, and while he was about it to cancel his mobile, when he noticed, just across the mall, the window of the confectioner’s. Damn it, he thought. I’ll just turn up. She’s at home anyway. She won’t mind so long as I bring her chocolates.
The girl behind the counter was humming.
“My legs were too thin
You didn’t like my scent
You were rude to my friends
You never brought me presents
You cancelled every plan I made for yoo-oo-ou”
He ordered 500 grammes of liqueur chocolates. Fixing his stare on the mound of dark lumps the colour of fish blood rising in the bronze weighing bowl.
“You never washed up
You read my diaries, my letters . . .”
The gauge trembled at 600.
“Actually, that will be fine.”
The doorbell barked. Presently, a shuffling in the hall and the drawing of a bolt. Two eyes examined him over the chain.
“Herr Doktor Peter!” a smile climbing the web of her cheeks.
“Please. I have to see you.”
Frau Lube pulled back a cuff the colour of an old hymnbook and looked at her watch. “I didn’t expect you so soon. Are you all right? Something’s happened.”
“There were some young thugs in a tram.”
“Did they rob you?” closing the door after him.
“They didn’t take much money, but they held me down” – he laughed nervously – “and made a filthy mess of my shirt.” A relief to say it. And then, immediately, the involuntary tug of English reins. “Nothing that couldn’t be showered away.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“My back’s a little painful, but I got off lightly. I should have seen it coming. I was so distracted, I wasn’t paying enough attention.”
“This is what I mean. It’s not safe to go out at night. Imagine how it is for old people! We live with this fear.”
“These things happen everywhere. In England, too.”
“Yes, but they didn’t happen here. This is what twelve years of reunification brings!”
“Look, I’ve brought you something.”
Frau Lube was pleased with the cream. With greater circumspection, she accepted his Belgian chocolates. She lifted the brown packet. Scrutinised the name. Squeezed it a bit and frowned. Then put it away into a drawer that seemed to spill over with other such packets.
“No chocolates before church. Today you only get coffee. Unless it’s something stronger you want?”
“Coffee would be fine.”
She took it to him in the main room where he stood beside Che Guevara.
To be in her good graces, Peter began to admire the photograph of her son. A tall young man in his early twenties with dark eyebrows and a boyish grin. Several years before his accident.
“I almost told you yesterday how much you look like Wilhelm,” she said. “But seeing you again, it is rather remarkable. I’m sure you’ll agree.”
He stared at the face until he no longer saw it. “Similar colouring,” he said politely. Men in their forties, that’s when things happen. “What happened to Wilhelm?”
“A girl at the tourist office – although he didn’t tell me. It was something I discovered much later. Sometimes not even your children tell you their secrets. He said they’d just kissed in his car in the parking lot. But why else would his marriage have broken down so soon after? For a kiss? Not in my experience, Herr Doktor Peter. You don’t leave your wife for a kiss.” She gave him a look. “Any more than you go seeking someone you met once in a theatre. Not unless your heart is as soft as watermelon.”
“You’re right. What I told you yesterday, it wasn’t the whole story.”
“Is that so? No, wait. Before you go on, I’m going to set the alarm.”
She had hardly stepped back into the room when he confessed. “I did know her, Frau Lube. In fact, I had met her two days before. I had a girlfriend in Hamburg, but I’d fallen in love with Snowleg.”
She examined him sympathetically as if he were a beggar in the S-Bahn whom she might pity, but not trust.
“She wanted to leave the country and I was going to help her.”
With a little frown, she picked up the ointment and then her cup and led the way onto the terrace. Peter was determined to restrain himself, but he had to ask. “Frau Lube, what happened to her?”
“Look. The sun’s come out for you.” In her unhurried eyes a warning to proceed slowly. He hadn’t told his whole story. Why should she? He took 200 Marks from his wallet and tucked the notes on the low table, under a plastic bag with many coloured wools tumbling out.
“No,” she said. “You keep that. You’ve been robbed.”
“Give it to your charity, please.”
She left the notes where they were. “It will go to the church.”
He tried another tack. “Last night,” as they sat down, “I bumped into one of the festival girls. It turns out her cousin is married to Snowleg’s brother.”
“Who is that?”
“Renate.”
“Oh, yes? Renate was often at the Astoria. And did she help you?”
“I have to say that our encounter left a sour taste.”
“I suppose she tried to sell you her tarty clothes?” She opened the cap and began to rub in the cream.
“She did.”
“That shameless woman came here, to my door. I took one look. ‘Not for me, dear.’ Well, I mean to say, it was obvious she hadn’t anything for my kind. She told me about her new life. Her new name. Can you imagine? Changing your Christian name! To what, I can’t remember.”
“Christiane.”
“That’s it! She really wanted me to use it. So embarrassing.”
He put down his cup on the table. “She says Snowleg worked for the Stasi.”
Frau Lube pulled a face. “Well, she’d know about that.”
“What do you think?”
“You could tell me anything about those days, I’d believe it.”
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said No, impossible.”
She turned to him. “And today?”
“Tell me, where did she go that night? Did she have trouble?”
“Of course she had trouble. This was the system. But in the end she was all right.”
“In the end? What does that mean?”
“She might have had some problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“The kind of problems that happen after you burst into a Minister’s banquet and a guest of honour rejects you,” she said smoothly, leaning forward, rubbing in the cream. “There’d have been no Stasi for her if you’d been more of an English gentleman, Herr Doktor.” She sat back and gave him a good-natured smile. “You know what I thought yesterday, after you left? How you reacted in a way typical for an East German of 20 years ago – while she behaved like someone from the West.”
Again, the question escaped before he could stop it: “Where is she now?”
“How could I know? I’m not her keeper.”
“But you know something about Snowleg – more than you’ve been telling me.”
“To know and to tell are two different gifts. You should understand that. You of all people, Herr Doktor.”
“Frau Lube, please,” he sai
d huskily.
“Herr Doktor Peter,” she replied with exaggerated patience, “you ask me how it was, but to go back through one’s life is not so simple as crossing a city.” She squeezed out more cream, sniffed it and rubbed it into the other ankle. “Besides, we have met once – and on that occasion you were not, as you admit, entirely candid. Yes, you bring me money and fine chocolates and ointment. But maybe this ointment of yours won’t work. Maybe it will be just like your promise to help this girl. Or maybe it will be miraculous. We shall see.”
She stretched out. Exposing her sore legs to the sun. Enjoying herself. For many years she had eaten chocolates in the belief that they would cure her eczema.
Peter picked at his watch-strap. He was used to listening to patients for their sakes, but not to having to listen for his own sake. Frau Lube’s pace was agonising and there seemed no way to speed it up.
“Is there anyone else I could talk to?”
“Oh, I doubt many of them noticed Snjólaug. Most of us were professional non-observers.”
“You have a good memory.”
“I was just freer than most.”
“In what way free, Frau Lube?”
“My husband died young.” By which Frau Lube implied that widowhood had left her lonely, but it had carried certain privileges that were not available to her married or single friends. And she had her secret partner in God. “Let’s say there was less at stake for me to remember things.”
“Then, help me –” His gesture had snapped the stitches on the buckle and the watch face was dangling from its black leather strap. He hunted in his lap for the buckle and slipped the watch and useless strap into his pocket. “It’s just that I have no idea how I can find her . . .” He heard the crack in his voice and was aware of her looking at him as though she had glimpsed someone else through it. And having been resistant to his suave overtures, his Belgian liqueurs and his fancy lotions, she succumbed to this raw note.
“OK, Herr Doktor Peter, ask me something,” she said. “It’s a long time ago. I don’t promise that I have the answers. But ask your questions because I still don’t know what it is you want to hear.”
“Was she Stasi?”
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