Snowleg (38 page)

“No wonder you're alone,” came a depraved, unstable cry.

And he had said, “No.”

The tram stopped. Three sets of eyes staring at him in his dark blue tie and his gloom.

“What you looking at? She a friend of yours? Know her, do you?”

“Yes!”

The girl didn't take on board that he had defended her. She hauled herself up and moved hastily to the exit. Seconds later, she passed beneath his window and he saw her looking back, fear on her face as she lumbered off. Other passengers followed and in a marshy corner of his mind he was aware of the tram draining, doors closing.

He raised his eyes. Only the three boys left. Their heads close-cropped in a uniform haircut as if with the same shaver.

The driver, enveloped by glass, concentrated on the tramlines.

Galvanised by Peter's answer, one of the boys ambled down the aisle and took up position a few inches in front of his face. Belt buckle. Black leather trousers. Maroon jacket of boiled wool.

Crudely sewn into the sleeve, the insignia Peter had mistaken for a college crest read: “The Run-Over Babies”.

The boy held out a brown paper bag in parody of a busker's hat. He had a referee's silver whistle in his mouth and blew it softly. A low glottal vibration.

Peter dug into his trousers and tossed two Marks into the paper bag.

The boy peered into the bag, then at Peter's clothes. His free hand, the one not holding the bag, reached out and rubbed Peter's tie between his fingers. With one of the fingers he tapped a turned-up nose of which the pores were collected with dark bits of night.

“I think you can do better than that,” he twinkled. “Don't you?”

Peter hesitated. “But I haven't –”

The boy drowned his reply with a louder whistle in which the glottal disappeared.

Peter looked around to see if the driver had taken notice.

The boy lowered his face to Peter's ear. Close to, he reminded Peter of no-one so much as Leadley. Sinuous and conniving with a mouth constructed from another part of his body. He blasted a third time. A piercing shriek that knifed through Peter's skull and skewered him against his seat.

He took out his wallet. The boy grabbed it, removed all the cash. Threw it back into his lap.

The tram stopped. Peter clutched at his wallet, his ears ringing, his mouth dry. He stood up to say something to the driver, but the three boys were behind him all at once.

He stumbled out. As soon as he stepped onto the road he realised it wasn't his stop. The door hissed shut and he heard a snigger. They had followed him off.

Peter tried to walk away as if he knew where he was. He slipped his wallet into his jacket and headed briskly down a road that soon tapered into a housing estate. The thought crossed his mind that this was probably where they lived. Suddenly, there was nobody around.

The walls on either side rose in a steep cliff of tower blocks and grey facades. Pocked, filthy with coal dust, the stucco peeled to the brickwork.

He was very frightened now.

And then he was being tackled below the knees. He had a tendency to fall easily on the soccer pitch and he buckled onto the gravel. But his hand in his pocket held onto his wallet and he wasn't able to protect his fall. The side of his head hit the ground and someone was grabbing his legs and another was clamping his head in the vice-like grip with which he used to hold down children when stitching their foreheads.

“Fucking foreigner.”

Hands were exploring his jacket, his pockets. “Look, Hans, look!” and held up his mobile like the captain of a winning team holding up a sports trophy.

Then a frightened voice said: “What's this?”

They had found his bleeper. From their reaction they must have thought he was a policeman. They stamped it to death and tossed it back to him. “Give that to your fucking pig friends.”

He clawed at the mangle of plastic and wire. Beyond his reach he saw a boy's thigh, fingers undoing a belt buckle, a knife. And heard the rumbling of his fear. A face loomed, a succulent malice in the eye, and a tongue wagged in a lewd way and there flashed on it, near the tip, a silver stud.

“Fucking, fucking foreigner, with fucking pig friends.”

The boy stepped back and unzipped his trousers.

He's going to rape me, he thought. He started to whimper. I'm going to die. Then something descended over his face and hovered there, obliterating his vision.

“Oh, Snowleg, where are you?” in sudden command of his voice. And something in his tone alarmed them.

He felt the grip on him loosening. He managed to sit up, but all that his desperation achieved was to bring himself closer to the curly black hair and the moist fold of skin and the cheeks parting an inch above him.

“Hurry! Hurry!” urged the frightened one who held down his head.

“Fuck off, I'm trying. Wait. It's coming, it's coming.”

The mouth puckered open, pink as a young tongue, and a fart blasted into his face.

“Here we go!”

Peter threw away his tie and staggered into a street, stopping an apprehensive jogger to ask the way to Kantstraße.

“But this is it.”

He bolted upstairs before Frau Hase had a chance to see or to smell him, retching as soon as he entered his room. Worried that he might be concussed, he started to run a bath and then realised that he didn't want to sit in the boy's excrement. He took a shower and afterwards sat on his bed and towelled himself dry. He yielded to sleep just as he was preparing to drag himself downstairs to telephone a doctor.

He woke with a headache and a full bladder, labouring to breathe, round about midnight. He winced to the bathroom. Pains shot through his back and shoulder joints where they had kicked him and there was a large tender swelling under his hair at the side of his head. But no concussion.

He walked back to bed and when he trod on Frau Weschke's walking stick he cursed aloud.

In the next room, reflected against the dark window of the house opposite, a light switched on. He propped the cane against the table and lay back rigid on the bed, conscious of someone listening. A minute later the light switched off.

He tried to sleep, but sleep scorned him. He smelled morbid, of carrion. To get rid of the foul smell, he got up to open the window, but the window remained stuck. A shadow created by the streetlight fell over his bruised stomach like a hand trying to discover a heart. He listened to his breathing. He heard nothing. A vast emptiness was taking root in him and he felt he had stumbled beyond the scope of anyone's forgiveness or care.

A group of berserkers passed below the window yelling the name of a football team. He turned and the streetlight followed him back into the room, casting wolf ears on the ceiling and picking out a few surfaces. The catalogue on the table. The cake-box. The silver horse-handle. He breathed in the stuffy air, the asphyxiating aroma of undried paint. This was the person he was.

Not yet ready to go back to bed, he unhooked the dressing gown from the back of the door and finding some coins in his trouser pocket went downstairs.

In his moment of need, a call to Sister Corinna was no longer an option. He had come up against a memory of his life that had blown her away.

Longing to tell the intimate details, he dialled his parents' home in England. He hoped that Snowleg had found someone to tell. He let the telephone ring and ring.

“I'm sorry. We're not here at the moment. But if you'd like to leave a message . . .” Rodney, speaking on a cheap machine. His voice warbling and uncertain, not confident he had been recorded.

Anyway, what was he going to tell Rodney – that he'd been crapped on by a Neo-Nazi thug? Or if his mother answered was he going to tell her, finally, about Snowleg? She had produced a life from one night. He had nothing to show. Nothing.

Despite the hour, he telephoned directory enquiries. “Berking,” he whispered, fearful of waking Frau Hase. Did she have an extension in her bedroom?

“Did you say Bernhard?”

Berking,” louder.

“Business or personal?”

“Personal.”

“Initial?”

“I'm afraid I don't know.”

”Address?”

“I don't know that either.”

“Please wait.”

Despair is not despair until you admit it, and then like your reflection in a tin tray, it has a face that goes on for ever. Before, when he read the words “despair” or “desire” or “shame” he believed he knew what these words meant, but his definitions were shallow compared to the emotions he was experiencing in the zealously polished hallway of the Pension Neptune. He thought that if he were to understand deeply he would go mad a second time.

“I'm sorry. We have no-one listed under Berking in the Leipzig area.”

He started sobbing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I
T DUMBFOUNDED
P
ETER NEXT
morning to look into the mirror and see no evidence of the assault. A stench rose from the bathtub, a smear of shit, piss, vomit and mud. Before he left his room he washed and washed the shirt and hung it in the bathroom.

In the hall, Frau Hase investigated with a mystified expression the payphone's mouthpiece.

“Herr Doktor! I was thinking of you. Have you found your old friend from the theatre?”

“No.”

“I'm sure you will find her today,” in the optimistic tone, tinged with urgency, of someone who had made a casual promise and was now concerned that her reputation, as well as that of the Pension Neptune, might be linked in an obscure way to its fulfilment. Peering closer: “Are you all right?”

“I'm quite all right, thank you, Frau Hase.”

“It's just that yesterday I don't remember you using a stick.”

At the Dresdner Bank in the Brühl he tried to draw out 1,000 Marks with his credit card. The machine refused, and he remembered that payments to Frieda were deducted at source at the end of every month. He tried again for 500 Marks and this time was accepted.

At 10.30 a.m. he limped into the offices of the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
. Twenty minutes later a copy-taker read back to him the words Renate had written with her pink felt-tip. Her formula.
On the evening of March 27, 1983, I was at the Astoria and the Rudolph Theatre. Were you there too?
The notice would run the following day.

A painful 15-minute walk to the Mädler-Passage, where he bought postcards of the Thomaskirche for Milo, Corinna, his family in England; and a special cream for Frau Lube. Along with his credit card, the thugs had left untouched a spare prescription form he always carried.

“Who is it for?” enquired the pharmacist.

“One of my patients. She's too ill to walk here.”

“You are prescribing it?”

“Not only am I prescribing it, I am paying for it and I am going to administer it.” He was on the point of asking whether he could in fact borrow the pharmacist's telephone to ring Frau Lube, and while he was about it to cancel his mobile, when he noticed, just across the mall, the window of the confectioner's. Damn it, he thought. I'll just turn up. She's at home anyway. She won't mind so long as I bring her chocolates.

The girl behind the counter was humming.

He ordered 500 grammes of liqueur chocolates. Fixing his stare on the mound of dark lumps the colour of fish blood rising in the bronze weighing bowl.

The gauge trembled at 600.

“Actually, that will be fine.”

The doorbell barked. Presently, a shuffling in the hall and the drawing of a bolt. Two eyes examined him over the chain.

“Herr Doktor Peter!” a smile climbing the web of her cheeks.

“Please. I have to see you.”

Frau Lube pulled back a cuff the colour of an old hymnbook and looked at her watch. “I didn't expect you so soon. Are you all right? Something's happened.”

“There were some young thugs in a tram.”

“Did they rob you?” closing the door after him.

“They didn't take much money, but they held me down” – he laughed nervously – “and made a filthy mess of my shirt.” A relief to say it. And then, immediately, the involuntary tug of English reins. “Nothing that couldn't be showered away.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“My back's a little painful, but I got off lightly. I should have seen it coming. I was so distracted, I wasn't paying enough attention.”

“This is what I mean. It's not safe to go out at night. Imagine how it is for old people! We live with this fear.”

“These things happen everywhere. In England, too.”

“Yes, but they didn't happen here. This is what twelve years of reunification brings!”

“Look, I've brought you something.”

Frau Lube was pleased with the cream. With greater circumspection, she accepted his Belgian chocolates. She lifted the brown packet. Scrutinised the name. Squeezed it a bit and frowned. Then put it away into a drawer that seemed to spill over with other such packets.

“No chocolates before church. Today you only get coffee. Unless it's something stronger you want?”

“Coffee would be fine.”

She took it to him in the main room where he stood beside Che Guevara.

To be in her good graces, Peter began to admire the photograph of her son. A tall young man in his early twenties with dark eyebrows and a boyish grin. Several years before his accident.