Snowleg

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “This was after the mime?”

  “Mime? What are you saying, Peter? I don’t remember any mime.”

  By 10 a.m., three other callers had rung. A nasal voice had requested 500 Marks before he would speak further, ringing off when asked to describe Pantomimosa. Another caller was apparently on a ceaseless quest for a wife he had last seen during the interval in the Rudolph Theatre. In the middle of a performance of Heiner Müller’s Quartett in 1982, he said.

  The third one was obviously calling from a public booth.

  “Is it a particular woman you’re after?” The voice was local. Rolling r’s. Petulant. High-pitched.

  “Yes.”

  “I worked for some people who might have known her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I knew her by her working name. She was called Marla.”

  Peter asked for a description. The man couldn’t remember her face too well, not after this time. But something about her he hadn’t forgotten. “She wore this thing round her neck, not exactly a necklace –”

  “Where is she?”

  Silence. The sound of people talking echoed down a corridor.

  “You want information? It will cost you. I’ll have to dig about. Give me an idea of what it’s worth to you.”

  “What about three thousand Marks?”

  The snort was almost vicious. “That won’t get far. We’re talking about unlocking an archive. I happen to know the file isn’t where it ought to be – just as well, or it would have been burned to ashes. But under certain circumstances I know how to reach it.”

  “Four thousand Marks, then – if you produce information that gets to her.”

  “You don’t sound like a gentleman from Leipzig. You wouldn’t be familiar with the procedures. This is going to be so dangerous, so tricky . . . I would say it’s the equivalent of five thousand Marks.”

  “All right, all right.” Then: “Where do I meet you?”

  “You free this afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. “I will ring back.”

  Peter waited 40 minutes. Shortly before 11 a.m., the landlady appeared at his shoulder. Another guest was anxious to use the telephone.

  “Remind me, Frau Hase, how does one redial the number of the last caller?”

  She told him.

  After a long time, a hesitant voice said: “Hello?”

  “Please can you tell me,” Peter asked, “where you’re answering from?”

  “I’m in a ward. I don’t know where I am. I was waiting outside and I heard the phone go.”

  “A ward where?”

  “Dösen Hospital.”

  Frau Hase brought him a cup of coffee. “No, no, it’s on the house. Tell me, how is it going?”

  “Not very well.”

  “I’ll be here if anyone rings,” she said.

  He left the house and walked to a park. There was a pale blue sky and the thaw was deepening. In the space of two days wintry March seemed to have turned into early summer.

  He slumped down on a bench and was left to reflect on the man who had telephoned from the hospital. Why a hospital? Another red herring perhaps – or had the necklace belonged to Snowleg? He rested Frau Weschke’s cane against the arm-rest and the past, drifting up in bubbles, absorbed him completely. He dozed in the weak sun.

  A bell tinkled like a chemist’s door. He pulled his legs back from the path and three girls bicycled by, yellow hair frothing in the wind.

  He stood up. Balancing on the cane, he dug a hand into his pocket where his fingers encountered something sticky. Frau Lube’s toffee-whirl had leaked all over his watch-strap.

  To get change for the payphone, he bought a copy of the Leipziger Volkszeitung carrying his advertisement and returned to the Pension Neptune.

  “Did he ring back?” he asked Frau Hase.

  “Oh dear, no.”

  “Any other calls?”

  She shook her head, more disappointed than he.

  He telephoned Frieda. “It’s me.”

  “Milo!” she called. “Your daddy.”

  “Wait, it’s you I want to speak to.”

  “Me?” suspicious.

  He looked around nervously, but he couldn’t see Frau Hase. “I want to apologise for the crappy things I’ve done.”

  “What, all of them? I don’t have that much time, Peter.”

  “I mean it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? If you’re talking about the dog, that would be one place to begin. I tell you, I’ve had your dog up to my ears. Last night it vomited over my favourite shawl.”

  “I actually wanted to apologise for making the situation worse than it is. I want it to work better from now on. I mean . . . we’re parents.”

  “Peter,” she said penetratingly, “this is not the time and wherever you are this is not the place for you to be having this conversation with me. If you were sitting on the other side of a table maybe I’d give you five minutes. Hey, Gus, stop that!”

  “I just want to be involved with Milo and I’ve been neglectful and I’m sorry for that.”

  “Here’s Milo,” she said eventually, upset.

  “Daddy, Daddy, have you seen Frau Weschke? She promised to catch me a river crab.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” heartened to hear his little familiar voice. “But that probably means she’s catching it right this minute.” He rehearsed the pain he would feel if Frieda took Milo to another country. “Darling, it would be a very great help to me if you brushed your teeth tonight.”

  “Actually, Gus has eaten my toothbrush.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “But that’s not all,” said Milo heavily.

  “I’m not sure I can take much more,” said Peter.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He pulled the computer off Mummy’s desk.”

  Peter’s last call was to his telephone company to cancel his mobile. Then he climbed to his room and lay down and shivered. He wiped the perspiration from his face. Exhausted by this remembering.

  He thought, What have I got out of this? Here am I chasing dead people when I’m not taking enough care of those closest to me.

  It had cost him a fortune to find out exactly what? That Snowleg had been interrogated by the Stasi. That she was Stasi. That she was married with two children. That her name might be Marla Berking. He couldn’t think of her as Marla Berking, any more than he could see her as older than twenty-three, or without the doorman holding her shoulders. All I can think of, he told himself, is this butterfly pinned down, this crucifixion. It’s too sickening. I have to assume that she died in that moment and rose again into another life and is perfectly all right. In any case, I can’t find her. Despite his best efforts she remained a prospective fantasy like the model in Renate’s catalogue. If ever he did track her down she would probably have become a Renate, selling satin underwear to make a living. It was time to stop looking. Time to be a father to Milo. Time to be the father he had never had. Anyway, where on a Sunday would he find 5,000 Marks? He would go downstairs and tell Frau Hase that he was calling off his search. He was terribly happy he had put an ad in the paper, but the answers he had got were more than heartbreaking. They were a freak show. A sad old buffer, an off-the-wall woman and what sounded like a very unpleasant person who had not rung back. No, he would close the case, pretend that Snowleg was a patient who had died.

  A rapping at the door. Frau Hase. “Telephone!”

  No background noise this time. The man spoke urgently. “I’ll meet you at four o’clock.”

  “Wait. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

  “I reckon you must be the Englishman from the Schreber garden.”

  Without a pause, Peter asked: “Where can we meet?”

  “At the zoo. The giraffe compound.”

  “How will I recognise you?”

  “I have reddish hair, but anyway I’ll recognise you.”

  “About the money –” But he had rung off.


  Below on a rock in its moat, a polar bear watched with impatience as the keeper gave Peter directions. Then opened its jaws to field the next tossed fish.

  The giraffe compound was the other side of the bird cages. Peter came up the cinder path, hot and perspiring. So impatient to be here that he had come without his coat and the cane. He looked to the left and right for a figure he had come to associate in his mind with the Black Knight – one of those responsible for daily, hourly suffering. But there was no-one there.

  He leaned on the rail, one foot up, breathing deeply. The last of the snow lay in patches along a bank, grey and melted from within as if a straw were sucking it away through the soil. Half asleep, a male giraffe eyed him from across a pond. The water threw back the reflection of its neck. The chestnut hair broken into blotches the shape of stars.

  The female stood alert over her newborn, scanning the rail. Her eyes in contrast were dark wells, the rippled pattern on her coat as though a stone had been hurled into a pool. When she registered the way Peter stared, she gave a raucous cough. She snapped her head back and her hoofs stamped into the grass.

  Unhurried, the calf left her side and moved in an elegant-awkward amble towards the pond. She splayed her forelegs and quickly bobbed down her head and started to drink.

  Snowleg had reminded him of a giraffe. Such sweet animals.

  The mother’s turn to drink. She looked at Peter with a reproachful gaze. Large eyes behind long lashes shying from a flame. And giving him the sense that he had stood at this rail before. But when? Seconds passed. Not him – rather, a quickly sketched figure in the watercolour he had bought for Frau Weschke.

  “The head is lower than the heart – a phenomenon that fascinates psychologists.”

  The man spoke in English. He had the look of one of Peter’s biology masters who was good at cricket. Tall, a year or two older than Peter, with a worn friendly face beneath the cloth cap. He rested his crossed arms on a large padded envelope, and sticking from his ankle-length black coat was a sailing magazine.

  “You or me, we’d be giddy by now, we’d black out,” and a hand slid under his cap and scratched his head.

  It wasn’t the person who had telephoned. This man talked in an educated, measured voice. His thinning hair was grey.

  He didn’t turn to look at Peter. “Another thing: they never scream. Not even when a lion attacks.”

  A panic seized Peter. It’s no good, he thought. It’s not him. He twisted from the rail, shards of cinder crackling under his heel – and was about to walk away when the man said: “You advertised.”

  “That’s right,” stopping.

  “You were expecting to meet my colleague. My colleague is a tiny bit indisposed.” The words had a sorrowful quality. His eyes, red-rimmed and narrow, were tired. He could have been the last survivor of his race. “Anyway, I’ve brought the files. And I want to make this very clear from the beginning: I’m not here for money.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  HE SAID HE WAS called Uwe. He knew who Peter was. He hadn’t seen Peter’s advertisement because this morning he had been otherwise engaged: his mother had passed away in front of him.

  For five months, her spinal cancer had eaten his life into large holes of which Sundays formed the largest. On Friday, he had come to realise that he wouldn’t be taking her home and asked for the machine to be switched off. Ever since, he had wanted to give away her things, but he couldn’t really do this, not until she died. This morning had been the third day of her coma. He had been sitting beside her bed at a loss to know what to do, watching her hand roam over her cheeks where an oxygen tube used to be and thinking dully that he might take advantage of the thaw and go sailing, when an orderly came in and said: “You have a visitor.”

  Uwe recognised the voice humming to itself and then around the curtain came that sullen face with its bulging eyes. Kresse. He had grown an uneven moustache, one side half an inch longer than the other.

  “Boss! So glad to run into you. I need your help. Look.” Across the bed with his mother’s wheezing body Kresse told him about the notice in the Leipziger Volkszeitung. “The Englishman’s come back. Finally, the man’s come back – and I’ve spoken to him. I’m seeing him this afternoon. But I need the stuff.”

  “Explain yourself, Kresse,” fighting an urge to laugh. The moustache looked like something stuck on in a hurry and in slightly the wrong place.

  “You remember that Marla Berking?” Kresse drew up a chair and sat down. “Remember that girl who didn’t go away in the dressing-up trunk? Did you hang on to her file?”

  “You know perfectly well what happened.”

  “I know perfectly well what was supposed to have happened, but this is the position, boss. I’ve got to have the whereabouts of this girl, and I have some idea that her file is not destroyed.”

  “Blackmail, is that it?”

  “Yes, of course, what do you expect? But I can’t recall what became of her.”

  “This isn’t the time, you cunt,” and his eyes flew back to the pillow where life was throbbing away.

  Kresse, indifferent to the dying mother, moved closer until his elbows were resting on the blanket. A stranger coming in might have thought they were from the same family, praying.

  “What’s the name of her husband?” The breath reached Uwe over the still legs, gaseous and smelling of the past. His nostrils picked out mechanically the yeasty bread, the hard-boiled egg, the instant coffee with the long-life milk.

  “I don’t know. Maybe if you hadn’t got rid of the bottles . . .” It still had the power to rankle, even after all this time, even at this moment. While Uwe was burning files, Kresse was going down to the lake and tipping Uwe’s bottles into the water. All his years of smell-hunting, his samples – he had emptied the whole laboratory.

  Kresse opened his mouth, and it vaguely interested Uwe to see that there was no longer a gap in those tartarous teeth. “Give me her file, boss. You can have half the reward.”

  “I’m very sorry. That’s all finished. It’s a new world.”

  “I’ve tested the water. He’s got money. But we can get more – a lot more, I reckon.”

  “How much?” His eyes returned to his mother’s face, the skin around the eyes and mouth folded over itself.

  “Well, he’s agreed on five thousand Marks. But I wasn’t going to give him the file – just show him we’ve got it. What do you think, boss? What’s it worth? What’s a doctor in West Germany make? How much liquid will he have? He can scream and yell, but he’s going to have to go back to his West German city and collect it.”

  “You’re going to take five thousand Marks and not let him read the file?” He asked the question almost pedantically.

  “That’s the way of the world, boss. Wake up. Where’ve you been?”

  Uwe had been put under pressure in his time, but he was a calm person. There was no stopping his outrage when it came. “You were always the scum of the earth. All you ever were was a nauseating little capitalist. Get out of my sight.”

  “Don’t give me that, boss. I need the file. It’s worth a lot of money.”

  “Piss off.”

  Between them rose another leathery gasp. Kresse looked down and there spilled out of his eyes, as from the containers that bring minerals up out of the mine, all the impurities of which he was host. “Just as well your mother’s been unplugged, boss. Or I might have done it for you.”

  The curtain fell back. Gone. But their conversation had been too much for the body on the bed. Uwe held the inert wrist, knowing he squeezed it for the last time, and for some reason remembered a day on the Kulkwitzer See when he was seven, watching the sails. His mother standing on the bank – yelling to him, pulling him by his hand, ticking him off for going too near the water – and his father saying, “What makes you think he’s going to listen? He’s just like you.”

  After he had brushed her hair, he called the nurse. He stayed to sign a couple of pieces of paper and went home. />
  Uwe’s apartment occupied half the basement of a nineteenth-century building in Rosentalgasse. It faced west and he had chosen it because of the ancient wine cellar at the back. He had got in touch with the security firm in Munich through a work contact, and had had a reinforced door and another very good door put in. The oldest files, like fine wines, were stored in the stone racks according to their dates.

  Initially, he had taken the files for his freedom. But they were also his security, to protect him from people like Morneweg and Kresse. And maybe the time would come when he could do someone a favour. Those people who had been, for whatever reason, unreasonably arrested or tortured outrageously. Because that was not what it had been about, not what he had worked for at all.

  He turned into his street and his hopes, his aspirations before he met Morneweg surged back to him. For an ardent moment he was twenty-four again. At night he would go rowing on bad-smelling canals, but in his imagination he was pulling towards the university in Dessau where he would teach the natural sciences. And then his father died. He remembered the curious old man at the funeral – the brown suit and the low cough, the card with the name on it, the glass of sweetish white wine in the Bodega. He had never been a Party animal, but he found it surprisingly easy to be loyal to a man like Morneweg who treated him in a paternal fashion, who allowed him to go on believing in the State with an only child’s conviction. He had a sense – even in his grief – of being welcomed.

  “We need scientists,” Morneweg had said, taking off his glasses to reveal his owl’s face and breathing on one lens and then the other. “Your doctorate, I’m told, is on the smelling senses.”

  The door to the street opened to Uwe’s touch. Down the passage he could see his own front door ajar, and he wondered gloomily if his neighbour, who had a key, might have come in to borrow his new vacuum cleaner. He looked with unease into what should have been a neat entrance hall – the paddle against the wall, the boar’s head supporting on one tusk an orange life jacket, the brush mat. His visitor had not paused to clean his feet. Across the carpet towards the bedroom door led a set of prints outlined in mud and melting grey ice.