Ashamed of his intensity, he tried to transfer it onto the novel. “What's it about?”
The story sounded more like a novel for young adults. A boy breeds swans for a splendid, orderly park that he is never permitted to leave. Restless to escape, he one day hatches a plan to gather thirty swans and lash himself to their feet. He hopes that if he fires a gun to scatter them into the air the swans will carry him over the tall fence to freedom.
“And does he escape?” asked Peter, knowing that he had to yield to the chit-chat and yet grateful to the book for bringing them together like this.
“I haven't found out.”
Peter thought of an adolescent boy attached to the legs of thirty white birds. It was impossible, ludicrous. Thirty swans couldn't lift you up. Even if you did manage to scare the swans into the air, they would tangle. This was why he didn't like novels. But he went on with his questions. “Do you think it's possible for swans to carry our weight?”
“I imagine it depends on the swans,” she replied, with a child's need for sincerity. “Whether each of them takes off in a different direction. Or whether they decide to swarm in a single flock. And I suppose you don't know what will happen until that moment and neither do they.”
“Does Bruno?”
His mention of her brother upset her. “Actually, could I ask a favour? Could you take it off my hands?”
“You don't want to know how the story ends?”
“It's not that.”
“What would you like me to do with it?”
“Read it, give it away, send it back to the author. I don't know. It will disappear in the West. Here, it's like having nitroglycerine in my bag.”
He pulled out the card that marked her place.
“My medical card! Thank goodness you saw it,” and tidied it into her bag.
“So,” he said, looking around. “Where are we?”
In the street, she had been infuriated and silent. Now she appeared nervous at her own audacity. As if she had been misbehaving and this was where it was leading to. In a faltering voice she told him that the hut had belonged to her grandmother. “It was a place I used to adore. Whenever we had a weekend free, I wanted to spend it here, helping in the garden, planting bulbs.” She gave a quick smile, touching her lip. “My grandmother said my mouth was so big because as a child I'd put it around whole carnations. And I believed her!”
“Why do you say âused to'?”
It was Bruno's fault. When he married Petra he had wheedled their grandmother into giving him the allotment as his wedding present. He had pleaded and insisted and worn her down until she relented. Not once since then had he invited Snowleg to visit.
“It's a joke â he's never gardened in his life.”
“Could he have been trying to protect you? He must have been planning to leave for a while.”
She wasn't convinced. Her anger suggested that her brother had betrayed not only her, but their grandmother as well.
“You sound as if you're close to your grandmother?”
“Yes. I like listening to her. A lot of people don't talk, don't want to make judgments, don't want to expose themselves. But she does.”
“What does she tell you?”
“If you do things, do them properly, one at a time, with your whole attention. When you eat, eat. When you love, love. When you listen to a person, listen to them, don't let your eye stray across the room and don't think about what you're going to say next.”
She rested her hands together between her knees and her eyes darkened and he felt a feathered swish inside him.
He peeled off his hat. She stood to fetch something, but he stopped her. He took her hands and separated them and rubbed one after the other until they were warm and then he raised the heel of her right hand to his chin. The light winked off her cheek and he collected droplets of melted snow from her hair with his tongue.
He led her over to the bed, removed the scarf from her shoulders.
She sat down and lifted her sweater. Underneath, a faded red silk shirt. He moved to unbutton it, but she held his hand and prevented him and as he lowered his hand she kept on grasping it.
He climbed onto the bed. She lay back awkwardly and he steered his head over her stomach, his lips kissing her skin where the book had been, where she had hidden it, slipping his fingers at the same time under the rim of her jeans, pulling down her pants with the jeans.
She pressed her legs together and rolled over. He kissed her bottom, kissing the crease between her closed legs, and slowly turned her on her back.
“I'm a virgin,” looking down at him.
“You're what?”
“For this.”
She pulled his hair for him to come up. He kissed her and then he lowered his head and she pulled his scarf over her face and he sensed her relax, one hand cupping his neck, pressing his mouth further into her until she fell back on the pillow, long legs up around his neck, and he saw the arch of her throat and the summit of her chin and the blackberry undercurrent to her hair.
In a while she drew herself up and looked down on him with a fleeting expression of regret and then she leaned forward and helped him off with his trousers and feeling his hardness between her breasts she widened her legs and guided him to where his tongue had been, her body warm and liquefying beneath him, his mouth seeking hers, until a long thin sound tore from her throat and for a precarious moment everything in their lives converged.
“What are you looking at?” she asked later.
“Nothing.”
She got up from the bed and he thought she was going to wash herself, but she blew out the candle and came back to him. He held her from behind and he held her tight. Tracing the lines of her back under the thin red silk of her shirt until the muscles grew less tense.
He murmured, “I'd love to fold you in my dressing-up box and take you away.”
She said, “If you go on doing that, you can.”
“Why did you turn out the light?”
She didn't reply and he realised he was inhaling the scent of her sleeping breath and that she had a different smell when she slept.
He woke. A lozenge of sunlight slanted across her face. She was propped on an elbow. Green eyes big and open. Staring down at him with the dawn. The tip of her finger pressed his chin and drew a line up to his ear.
“I had a good feeling about you, but you can have a good feeling about someone and it comes to nothing.”
He touched the necklace that still circled her throat. “Big Brother watching me.”
She laughed, drawing back. “Who, Bruno?”
“Your secret police,” covering the marbles with his palm. “I was warned you can't speak to anyone.”
“Bullshit.”
“I also read it.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, it isn't.”
“The hell it isn't. I know who to speak to. I know exactly who I can speak to.” She came close again. Her fingers crept under his hand and played with the shaft of hollow bone and the glass eyes, separating them.
“Actually,” he looked up at her and the tension between them was enjoyable, “what is that?”
It was a bone from her grandfather's muskrat. “Granny had it made into a necklace after he died.”
He stroked her breast under the red shirt that she still hadn't taken off.
“This is hers, too,” looking down. Covering herself with the shirt.
“It must be very old.”
“She said you should only buy the best,” and her voice imitated an old lady: “âI am not so rich as to buy cheap things!'”
“Any other words of wisdom?”
She smiled. “I've already told you.”
“Tell me some more.”
“âIt's not necessary to feel guilty, but it's necessary to feel shame.'”
“You're close to your granny?”
“You asked that before. Don't you listen?”
He didn't answer, but started to unbutton her shirt and this time she appeared to make a decision. She waited for his fingers to reach her shoulders, bracing herself for the question, and as his hands mounted her back she didn't breathe out. She felt his fingers discover the first pleated ridges of skin. Watched him inhale. Catch himself. Press his thumbs hard as if testing the skin â “I can feel that” â and continue their journey.
He tickled her and she shook her head out of the spell. “I love that.”
And because he never asked the question she told him.
She was playing with Bruno in the kitchen. Her head hit the handle of a pot of coffee on the stove. It spilled over them both. She was 9 years old.
She hoisted the shirt and sat still for Peter to see where the boiling liquid had melted the skin.
He had known what it was straight away and was moved by her loveliness within it. Even so, it surprised him to see the burn-mark. The scar quite waxy and pearly, like hoar frost, and covering her shoulders.
He was aware that she was worried by his response. She was saying, “I used to wear my hair long to cover it,” when he brushed her lips to be quiet and turned her over onto her stomach.
Afterwards, she rubbed the tears from her smiling face. “Once is never enough.”
He looked at her quizzically. She rolled over and lay on her back and raised one arm straight in the air. “That's also something my grandmother likes to say. That's her best advice.”
It was cold in the room and she snuggled against him.
“What happened to Bruno? Wasn't he burned?”
She shook her head. “Everyone said
that
was the miracle.”
“Did you blame him?”
“Oh, no. I idolised him.”
He said he wanted to know everything and so she told him. In the cold her words made twice their impression.
As children they had done everything together. Bruno took her to the Natural History Museum in East Berlin to stand before the dinosaurs. He smuggled her into the cinema in Grimmaische StraÃe, her shoes on his shoes, walking in step under his long coat, to watch a forbidden film. Once in the spring after their mother died they hiked for three days along the Baltic coast.
“And then he fell in love.”
Petra came from Dresden, but she had family in the West. She was possessive of Bruno from the first. After their marriage, Snowleg hardly saw him. They last spoke at a party thrown by their grandmother to celebrate the results of her Vorphysikum.
“This was when?”
“Three years ago.”
Bruno arrived alone. He had filled his white Trabi with flamingo flowers as high as fenceposts and before leaving in a rage he gave her 200 Ostmarks. They had the briefest conversation. She told him she wanted to be a psychiatrist, do something serious with her life, and he encouraged her.
“You should, little sister. You should do what you want.”
Then the celebration turned into a quarrel with her father and grandmother and no-one explained to her what the argument was about. Bruno had stormed off and she hadn't seen him since, not until the party last night.
“I hear nothing from him until a few days ago Stefan tells me, did I know, Bruno's going to the West? I'm astonished, but I'm even more astonished when I discover I'm being punished for it.”
“In what way punished?”
The patch of sunlight had shifted from the bed to the floor and was creeping over the red shirt discarded there by the time she finished explaining how stunned she was by the events of the past 24 hours. How her every basis for trust had been shaken to the root.
Until very recently she never had any reason to cross the system. She was considered very bright at school. Had been active in the Freie Deutsche Jugend. Organised concerts and readings. She believed what she was told, that the German Democratic Republic was truly democratic and that her liberty was guaranteed by the constitution. She believed that her country was the “good Germany” and that the Federal Republic, on the other hand, was home to fascists who every day scratched their heads to think of new ways to undermine the GDR. Long before she went to university she knew that she wasn't supposed to watch Western television and that the public telephone in the street was bugged and that there existed people in the regime who might do strange things to those who threatened its achievements. But she thought if she was a good girl things would work out. Things would be different. They wouldn't pick on her. “I never took the regime seriously.”
A fortnight before, she expected to hear that she had qualified for a postgraduate place at Karl Marx University to specialise in psychiatry. “Everyone told me I'd get it. Even if I still doubted myself, I was fairly confident that I had done well in my exams.” The head of faculty had assured her of a place. So had the dean. She had no reason to doubt the future towards which conscientiously she had been working. “You see, it's a crime not to have a job and I had committed no crime. This was what I always wanted to do.”
When the rejection came she didn't link it with Bruno. Her voice shrank as she recalled how, twelve days earlier, she had returned to her grandmother's apartment and found her father waiting in the kitchen.
“They've failed you.” The letter in his hand trembled against the stove. “My daughter.”
“Have they given a reason?”
“No reason.” He was a miner, a Party member, a fervent admirer of Honecker. “There may be a possibility for other employment. But you have to wait a week.”
The same evening she overheard him shouting at her grandmother. “This is Bruno's fault!”
Her story brought back to Peter the unendurable loneliness he had felt in his last two years at St Cross. Not knowing who to trust, who he was. He drew her closer and feeling the texture of her back against his chest he caressed the pleated ridges of skin with his lips and fingers, surveying it.