Snowleg (30 page)

“Shh.”

He started to kiss her into silence, but she twisted away.

“How long did it take to bring Schwester Corinna in here?”

At 3.45 p.m. he returned to the tower-room. Sister Corinna was standing at the head of the bed. He tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn't let him. All her professional focus on Frau Weschke.

The old lady's eyes were fixed on the ceiling. They moved back and forth over the fresco and she started to smile and then her face lost its expression and she looked frightened and frowned.

He leaned over her. What she was seeing showed in her face. She was acquiring lines of youth and joy and fear. “Frau Weschke?”

She began to mutter. “I left it out for you. I hoped you'd see it. I'm glad you saw it.”

“What are you saying?” asked Sister Corinna.

He leaned closer. “I can't hear you, Frau Weschke. Speak up.” He reached for her hand and she gripped him.

She moved her gaze from the ceiling. “I know what you got up to in Leipzig.”

He squeezed her hand as if there was no need to say anything more, but she wanted to speak. She raised her head and the large pale eyes in which Peter saw himself divided stared right through him. “It's all right,” and the thick nail of her thumb was pressing into his pulse. “None of us are very chivalrous or very brave.”

He went downstairs and poured himself a glass of milk from the fridge and pretty soon his heart felt steadier. He turned out the light in the kitchen and passed through the swing door into the lobby, and flung on his hat and coat.

“I'm going now,” he called to Sister Corinna and walked out, Gus at his heel, the door slamming behind them.

Outside, the snow piled up in dunes. He scraped it from his windscreen and climbed in and drove back to the Hilfrich Klinik. The car felt no warmer inside than out and his breath began to fog the windscreen. He wiped his hat over the glass, leaving streaks on it through which he dimly saw the street and the gobs of snow falling and below him the frozen lake and the lights pulsing on the far bank orange against the snow.

I know what you got up to in Leipzig
. Frau Weschke's words kept coming at him. He tried to drive them away, dispatch them over some boundary from where they couldn't pursue him, but like a batsman setting off for a run that wasn't there he was conscious of the words hurtling back. His eyes flickered over the road. The snow rendered everything it touched so uniform that he missed the turning and ended up in a flow of traffic that carried him towards the dual carriageway. He manoeuvred into the right-hand lane and turned off at the next exit, realising too late that he was on a slip road leading into a parking lot.

Behind him a car hooted. He retrieved the ticket from the automatic barrier and the pole jerked up and he drove over the ramp, looking for a space to park. At every level the long line of cars followed. He drove until he came out onto the roof.

He parked in a polar landscape, ran one hand over his face and stared ahead at the city.

After a while, he opened his Gladstone bag and took out his mobile and dialled. The number was busy. Ten minutes later he called again. “I'm sorry I left like that. How do you think she is?”

“She's dying.”

“Could I ask you to call when you think it's time? I'd like to be there.”

“Of course.”

“You promise?”

“Peter, I promise.”

“And we should contact her granddaughter.”

“I've been trying all day, but there's simply no answer.”

“Keep on trying.” Then: “Have the children arrived?”

“Don't worry. We've put Milo in with Uli.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said that Frau Weschke had gone to Leipzig to get some river crabs.”

“That's kind, Corinna.”

He remembered nothing of his drive to the hospital.

In the ward Albert's eyes were closed and his toes no longer moved. A junior doctor mopped his cheeks. He was 101 and his family in Linz had a street named after them.

“How is he?” Peter had looked after him for the past four years.

“Calmer,” said Frau Doktor Ekberg, relieved he had come back.

Peter picked up Albert's hand and felt the weight of his once-green fingers. According to Albert's daughter, he had been the best gardener in Linz. Grown the biggest apples. “They couldn't grow bigger!” And then one day something fused in Albert's head to make him dig up all his smallest apple trees and replant them upside down.

“Is that his X-ray?”

“We were unable to hold him still so it's rather blurred.” She talked quickly. Oval face. Long nose. Hair cut short on jet earrings. “I thought the feeding tube would benefit him, because he's still not eating.”

He looked to where her finger indicated. “That's his pacemaker, not his feeding tube.”

“Then where –”

“There.”

She stared at the X-ray and her face drained of colour. “Oh shit. That explains everything.” She spoke urgently into her pager.

He said in a solicitous way, after she had finished speaking, “If his respiration rate drops below eleven breaths per minute contact the anaesthesiologist. I'll ring you in a couple of hours.”

Peter entered the lift to go down, but it was going up. It stopped on the fourth floor and instead of pressing the button he stepped out. Swing doors led to the canteen. He chose a sandwich and joined the queue at the till. Two nurses were laughing over a date one of them had had with a real-estate agent from Wiepersdorf. “He gave me a way out so of course I stepped in.”

He had not eaten since breakfast. He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed slowly and didn't take another bite. After a few minutes he rose and flicked the rest of the sandwich into a bin and when he left the canteen no-one looked at him.

On his ward round the patients came to Peter as through a gauze. He stood and listened to the low groans and snores and the men whispering in the mixed ward, like boys at school after lights-out. One of the doctors, a Bavarian with a pockmarked nose, walked up close and waved his hands, “Yoo-hoo, are you there?”

His second surgery was from 5 p.m. till 6 p.m. A patient was talking to him when Peter gasped.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he told the patient. “Go on.” But whatever was being said, he couldn't take in. Frau Weschke's words buzzed at him and the memory of a young woman rose up like boiled milk.

When he was done he went through the day's charts. He checked the lab results. He dictated a letter to a referring physician. At 8 p.m., he telephoned Frau Doktor Ekberg. “How's Albert?”

“Asking for a newspaper.”

“Eating?”

“They're feeding him now.”

“That's good.”

She said nervously, “Thanks for saving my bacon.”

“I'm sure you'll find ways to do the same for me.”

Before he left for the night, he dialled the Lion's Manor. Against every professional instinct, he hoped to hear that Frau Weschke had broken back into consciousness.

“Her throat's inflamed,” said Sister Corinna.

“How much time left?”

“Her breathing is steady. I'd say you can go home.”

In Charlottenburg, a message on his machine. “What time can I expect you?” He had made a vague promise to have dinner with Nadine at her apartment on Friday.

He crawled into bed without turning on the light and was up early to find a letter from Rosalind.

She enclosed a tongue-in-cheek column from the
Independent
, inspired by an England–Germany soccer match. “They haven't got a sense of humour. They are fat imbibers of beer, gobblers of sausages. Their country is boring. They are still Nazis. They are addicted to giving and receiving orders. And they are incredibly smug. We hate them all.”

To which she had added in her looping schoolgirl hand: “Except
MY BROTHER
!”

He folded the letter away – he would write to her, he would write to her – and telephoned the Lion's Manor.

“Still unconscious,” said Sister Corinna.

Tiredness gnawed in his head. At 2 p.m. he shut the door to his office and closed the blinds and tried to sleep on the couch. He had been asleep for 20 minutes when he heard a rap on the window. He rose and walked to the blinds, prised back the slats and looked out.

The balcony might have been a hot skillet and the swallow a pat of butter melting away. Then the rolling stopped and the bird hung its head and shivered once. One eye stared at where its snapped beak left a reddening trail, and a few seconds passed and then the bird lifted its wings to arrange them more comfortably and was still. There was a tiny arc of bird breath on the glass. He watched it fade until it disappeared.

At 2.35 p.m. Angelika opened the door and looked in. “Schwester Corinna on the line, Herr Doktor.”

“Peter, you ought to come. Her feet are cold. She's shutting down.”

He walked up the drive, feet slicing the snow and the soft flakes blowing into his eyes and gouts of breath pluming.

No-one in the lobby. On the first floor the sound of voices speaking in a hush. He climbed the staircase in long strides as if someone were following him. The words burst out when he saw the nurses in her room: “Dead? But I wanted to ask her something.”

Sister Corinna calmed him down. “She slipped off very suddenly – quietly . . .”

They parted for him. Frau Weschke lay shrunken in her bed-jacket. Her face composed, almost beautiful. The skin as delicate and white as sunbleached shell. She was quite wasted even from the person of a week ago, her cheeks smoothed of pain and concern and time, her body loose and separated from her, careless like a coat she had hurriedly put on to greet an interruption to a long siesta.

Peter rested his hand on Sister Corinna's shoulder, but she moved away. He walked out of the room and down the stairs, thinking that now he was never going to have an answer.

CHAPTER THIRTY

A
LONG
A
M
S
ANDWERDER, IT
was a day like the day he had suppressed. The trees seemed frozen to death and when he looked through their branches at the lake his chest tightened and he felt his consanguinity with the snow.

He crossed the street. Next to the station was Meyer's bakery, the haunt of single old ladies from Babelsberg. To knit himself to Frau Weschke, he ordered a beige Torte and attacked it miserably with a spoon. But he couldn't summon Frau Weschke. All he saw were the images stirred up by her last words and the tailfin of a 19-year passion.

I know what you got up to in Leipzig. It's all right. None of us are very chivalrous or very brave
.

He nursed the words. Her death had snapped him. All at once he felt himself fully emptied on this freezing Berlin afternoon, the white tonalities of the sky and the snow falling.

From her stool in the corner a lady with a face of burl walnut watched him push away his plate. She raised a violet-papered cigarette to her lips and what she breathed out was wispy and grey like riflesmoke.

Of course, she knew about Snowleg, he thought. Because I told her.

He rocked back in his chair. Until the dying old lady seized his wrist, he had almost succeeded in forgetting. But Frau Weschke had penetrated the permafrost in which he had existed since March 1983 and the memory of Snowleg standing at the table in the Hotel Astoria returned with extraordinary violence, the memory fresher to him than when he had lived it.

He closed his eyes in order not to see her. He reminded himself: All over Berlin at this moment people are dying. And yet when he opened his eyes it wasn't Frau Weschke or Albert who stood, unageing, before him. He had battened down her memory for 19 years, but all the time she had been there. A white bird flying through the snow. Tracking him.

On Thursday morning, 9 a.m., he delivered a paper on geriatric recreation and after the seminar telephoned Frieda at her office. She answered, but he couldn't speak. After he had hung up, she rang back: “Don't ever do that again.”

“I was going to say that I've got to go to a service at the Lion's Manor. I could collect Milo early if you like and drop him off later.”

Silence. Then: “All right,” unaccustomed to such gestures.

His tray spilled over with paperwork, but he made time to compose a letter to Frau Weschke's granddaughter on his own stationery. He wrote in his assured hand: “My son had come to think of her as his own grandmother.” He signed his name and when he looked at the signature was overcome by an impression that he didn't belong to himself, that a counterfeit Peter Hithersay was sitting at his desk. He folded the letter into an envelope and copied out the address that Sister Corinna had put on a telephone sticker.