Snowleg (11 page)

He didn't notice them at first: camouflaged with dirt, the mouldings of three faces. A Chinaman. An African. A Red Indian.

“There's a story of a Canadian trapper. He sent a letter to ‘Brühl' – just the one word. It started in February in Montreal. From there it was sent to Bremen and it was here in Leipzig by March.”

Without waiting for his reaction, she steered him by the hand to a three-storey building covered in green tiles of which many were cracked or missing.

“All you have to do is raise your eyes and you'll see traces from all over the world, but no-one looks up. They look down and walk along – just like you,” and her face was no longer grave but had a mocking smile.

“You should be on commission for the city.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you seem to know a lot.”

“Ah, this is what I want to show you,” ignoring him.

It was the entrance to a once grand house, its facade now layered with the same coloured filth – the grey of Rodney's anchovy paste – as the buildings on either side. Over the doorway was the ceramic of a man naked save for a fur cape. In different panels the figure had on a fur hat, fur boots, a fur stole, a pair of gloves and a muff.

“You like fur, don't you?”

“Oh, yes. Muffs are my favourite.”

She couldn't have been aware of what connotations the word might have for him. Nor did she fear his judgment. A moment before she had seemed regretful, solemn, officious. Now she had the confidence of the old city. He felt drawn to her in a way he never had with Anita.

“My grandfather was a furrier,” and gestured at the neglected, begrimed door. “He began here.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Look!” Under the dull grey paint, a red scratch-mark. She licked a finger and rubbed at the mark, her spittle deepening the colour. “It's the original porphyry. They try to copy this by painting the windows red, but it doesn't work.” Even this trivial gesture moved him.

“By the way, my name is Peter Hithersay.”

“I am boring you.” She began to button her coat.

“And you?”

“I have to go,” she decided.

“You mean, I don't get to know your name?”

She smiled her mocking smile. “Why should you want to know, you who go away in a day or two?”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Then, what does your mother call you?”

Her mouth hung open and her face had a look of uncertainty.

“My mother's dead. My grandmother calls me Snjólaug.”

“Snowleg?”

She corrected his pronunciation. “Snjólaug. It's Icelandic.”

He uttered the name slowly as if it was an object in his mouth. It still sounded like Snowleg.

“Why does she call you that?” searching for a way to delay her.

“You're right. It's not interesting.”

He couldn't believe he was asking, but he knew he must. In the same voice that he adopted when urging his grandfather to speak, he said: “No, please. I'd like to hear. Why are you called Snowleg?”

The name, she told Peter, had belonged to a Canadian woman, a friend of her grandfather. She had never met her grandfather – he had died in the Second World War – but her grandmother, with whom she lived during the week, had spoken of him incessantly. As a child she believed she only had to rub the glass eyes of the stuffed muskrat that had been his prized possession and he would materialise before her, soft-voiced and bent and with a cigar roaming under his nut-brown hat.

“I knew him only as a photograph.” From the cherry-wood table beside her grandmother's bed, he looked back at her through the veil of tobacco smoke in the way she imagined he examined his pelts, with the gaze of someone not afraid to blow the fur apart and scrutinise the leather and mutter aloud: “Dyed skin!”

As a young man he had worked at 71 Brühl for a Jew from Brody, but he served his most valuable apprenticeship during two years he spent in Canada. In 1925, with the low price of squirrel in Leipzig, a limited quantity of rats were shipped from Rainy Lake on a gas-schooner. “There was a berth vacant on the return journey and he took it.”

“The hunter needs to see the wolf,” he told her grandmother on the evening he asked her to marry him. He had flung at least a hundred categories of pelt out of his employer's windows to dry on the railings, including cross fox, silver fox, hare flank, opossum, fitch, vicuna, wallaby and Tibetan lamb. “But I haven't seen one in the flesh.”

He spent a summer with three trappers at Fort Chipewyan, working at night because of the deer flies. At dawnbreak on the fifth day he wrote to his fiancée: “I've skinned my first animal – a buffalo.” He smeared the fleshed skin with fish oil and drummed it in sawdust and that winter used it as a sleigh robe, heading east through the unanimous snowscapes of Manitoba.

Over the following year, he learned that riding in a sleigh wears out a fur more quickly than walking. He wore out the furs of a moose, a lynx and a priceless black fox.

His favourite fur – it became his favourite word – was the muskrat. In Gimli, he lived for a season with an Icelandic Indian and his wife Snjólaug who taught him how to slit the skin at both hind legs from heel to vent, skin out the toes and leave them with the claws on, and pull the skin from the body. From that day on he could never pass a muskrat coat without stroking it, still seeing the animal which had given up its fur, its white bones on the prairie and the coyotes gnawing at the frosted meat. Before he sailed for Germany, he had a muskrat stuffed by a taxidermist in Toronto.

One winter night, three hours down-country from Kenora, his trap caught a wolf. Saliva frothed in the starlight and yellow eyes stared at him, insane and fretful and wild. He saw the bloody knee and heard the rasp of tattered gums on the metal and decided it was time to go home.

He arrived back in Leipzig in time for the first World Fur Congress. He heard Ernst Poland's rousing opening speech and attended a lecture on ear mange in silver foxes and another lecture on the extreme difficulties of bleaching skins. In Gimli, Snjólaug had taught him how to hand-bleach rabbit skin. Within six months he had started his own business in the Brühl, developing her process.

“That's why my grandmother calls me Snjólaug. Because of her, they were able to live.”

Peter tore his eyes from the tiled figure above the doorway. Her enthusiasm had infected him. “You can't know, but this might have been my city. Maybe it can be my city. Maybe I can come and study here.”

“Why, what do you have to do with us?”

He explained how once upon a time an English girl from Lancashire went to sing in a Bach competition in Leipzig and sheltered a man on the run. “Let me ask: how would
you
go about finding him?”

“Listen,” she said, wetting her finger and rubbing at the wall. “You're here for a weekend. You're not going to be able to reach anyone. The only people who have any idea or who would be able to help are Party or police.”

“I've been told I can't go to the police.”

“Of course you can. These people are on our side. They're here to provide protection.”

“Do you know someone?”

“I know someone in the Party,” revealing more porphyry. “He might be able to help.”

“Could you speak to him?”

“Gladly. Give me your address. I could write to you.”

He hunted without success for a piece of paper.

“Write it here,” holding up the novel.

On the inside back cover he wrote down his address and telephone number. “If I ever come and study in Leipzig, will you be here?”

“Come on, we've only just met.”

“I think you're lovely.”

She looked at him with a grave expression. “You don't have a right to say that.”

He wasn't listening. He sensed a thickening in his throat, spreading into his chest. An overpowering desire to kiss her. At that moment the buildings around them exploded into light.

Not until the streetlamps snapped on did Peter realise how dark it had become. She led him into a square and he recognised where they were. “We're back here?” unable to stifle his disappointment.

“The centre of Leipzig is not even one square kilometre,” she said lightly. “Anyway, what would you study here?”

“Medicine.”

Her smile vanished. “Really? You've chosen a corruptible profession, doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it. I have to go,” and her eyes had the focus of someone with a lot to do all of a sudden.

“Wait. Have you time for a beer?”

She frowned at a clock face on a tower. Five o'clock. “There's someone I must speak to.”

“Can't you put them off?”

“No.”

“What about another cigarette?” to keep her.

Again she glanced at the clock. Her face saying, We must stop this.

He tapped out two West Lights and lit them.

“Have you been to the Auerbach's Cellar?” she asked.

“No.”

“You can't see Leipzig and not see the Auerbach's Cellar! ‘Our Leipzig is renowned, A little Paris . . .'” But there was no cheer in her voice.

She took him into a glazed mall where a dense crowd, many in business suits, shuffled beneath a statue and down a stone staircase. They began to follow, but a uniformed attendant prevented them. The Auerbach's Cellar was closed – a special event connected with the Trade Fair.

At the ragged end of the mall was a wine bar. An effeminate waiter led them to a round glass table in a corner. Seated by the window an old lady, her face roofed in with a tight black hat, stared into a flute of white wine. Otherwise, the place was empty.

“You know what I'd like more than anything?” She put down her book on the table, causing the Tiffany-style lamp to flicker. “A vodka.”

The lampshade was patterned with red stained glass in the shape of dragonflies. Even after Peter had ordered two vodkas she went on fidgeting with it. When their drinks arrived she retrieved the plastic swizzlestick from her glass and gulped down the vodka in the manner of someone fortifying herself.

He said, “You mentioned I had chosen a corruptible profession. Why?”

She glanced around. The waiter had disappeared into the kitchen and the old lady sat with her eyes closed. “Tell me,” she bent forward, speaking in a low voice. “Do you know much about throats?”

He was not sure he had properly heard. “Throats? Why do you ask?”

“I know this sounds strange, but would you look at my epiglottis and tell me what you see?”

“You realise,” he said deliberately, “that if I'm going to make a full examination of your throat, I will have to charge a fee.”

“What kind of fee?”

“Do you mind very much if I kiss you?”

She absorbed his words and smiled. Nor did she pull away.

“Thank you,” his voice very quiet. “I very much needed to do that.” Able to take in her features for the first time. The height of her cheeks. The green slightly oriental eyes. The dark hair.

Abruptly, she recoiled.

“Why?”

“I'm afraid I may have an infectious condition.”

He pulled the lamp close. “Let's see,” and tilted the flickering shade towards her.

Again she parted her lips.

He stared down. “I'd say you have beautiful white teeth and rather a long tongue.”

“No, no – my vocal cords?”

“To be honest, I can't see in this light.”

“Come on. Try,” with a smile of encouragement.

“I need proper instruments. Maybe if I had a mirror.”

“I'll ask that lady.”

A bag was unfastened and out came a tortoiseshell comb inlaid with a mirror. They moved to another table, where he rested back her head against his hand. “Have you had any pain, bleeding, hoarseness of voice?” trying to sound professional.

“No, no, no.”

“Open really wide,” depressing her tongue with the swizzle-stick and positioning the comb against his forehead until the mirror reflected the light into her throat. Her breath smelled of vodka and he was aware of breathing it in. He wanted to kiss her again. He had never wanted to kiss anyone so much.

“All right, what's the answer?”

Beyond the trachea the light fell on a pale pink tissue of skin in the shape of a miniature spade. “I'm bound to say I see a perfectly healthy, in fact a rather beautiful, epiglottis.”

“What! Are you sure? Be honest.”

“I swear. It's not much of a line anyway.”

“No, really. Is there any sign of something?”

He had her total attention. “Like what?”

“Is this the worst epiglottis you've seen in a woman of my age?”

“What sort of rubbish is that?”

She laughed in a rueful way. “It's a long story. Let's just say not everyone finds my vocal cords healthy.” But her voice trembled. Her eyes were filling up. She swallowed her vodka. Once again he had the impression that she was whipping herself up for something she didn't want to do. “Look, I've got to go.”

“Excuse me,” said the old lady. Come to retrieve her comb. She snatched it and left hurriedly as if she didn't want to be involved.

Snowleg gathered her coat. “Good luck tonight.”

“Wait. Maybe you'd like to come and see us?”

“No, I hate theatre.”

He laughed. “So do I.”

At the door she turned. “Look, we'll meet again. Come to my brother's party tomorrow.”