Snowleg (35 page)

“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!”

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.