Snowleg (46 page)

Uwe was saying, “Morneweg tried to have everything destroyed – tapes, reports, smell-samples. But for some reason I kept this. No, you might as well have it. It's no use to me.”

Overcome by gratitude, Peter said: “Listen, I'd like to buy lunch.” It was barbarous what this man had done, the manner of his interference in the lives of his people. And yet something in the red-rimmed eyes touched him. This was a man who would make up his own mind, who would bear the consequences and let no-one else, who would dispose of the rest of his life exactly as he himself pleased. At school, they might have been friends.

“No,” said Uwe with emphasis. “I am not Kresse.”

“At least let me pay for the wine.”

“Then I do the food. No argument.”

A waitress charged out of the kitchen in a busty hurry to take their order.

“What is the set lunch?” asked Uwe.

“Grünkohl.”

“That's for me.”

“And a bottle of this wine.”

“Not eating?” Uwe didn't conceal his relief.

“I'm not hungry.” It was more a state of fast, though.

Uwe drew out his cuffs and said evenly, “So what have you been doing with your life since you left Leipzig?”

“As I told you, I work as a doctor.”

“Never married?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Except to my boat!” and his laugh hung like a slack sail from the corners of his mouth while the waitress waited, rubbing her hand on her apron, for him to taste the wine. “Ah, that's from the right bottle!” licking his lips and nodding for her to pour Peter's glass.

The meal arrived – brown cabbage, bacon and sausage cooked in a pot – and between mouthfuls Uwe talked freely. After the Change he had worked as a detective in a shopping mall and was unemployed for two years before securing a job with the bread-machine company. The position wasn't as technical as he would have liked. He had long ago given up his dream of teaching the natural sciences.

Uwe was friendly with the waitress. He ordered a second bottle.

There was still an aspect of his life that he wanted to put back together before he parted with the package on the table. “We can all identify with the victims, it's a national necessity. What about the perpetrators?” He swirled the wine around his glass and removed a speck of cork. “You don't need a history lesson, but all this,” and made a vague gesture out of the window, over the passing cars, at the Leipzig skyline, “it was formed against fascists and extermination camps. And yes, it went wrong because our leaders themselves became outlaws in a certain way. But not in the beginning. I know this is hard to believe, but we felt we were in battle. We embraced life in the GDR as a true alternative to fascism and war crimes. But to keep our people safe we felt we had to know everything about them and to make this knowledge a respectable, responsible activity. And that's where we went wrong.”

His hand flinched away and he looked with distaste at the envelope. “All this information, who cares about it today? Who cares that you go to the lavatory three times a day and drink one seventh of a bottle of vodka or whether you pick your ear or nose or rub your hands? It was a terror. A greed. A dementia. We didn't understand that those who know everything – smell everything, hear everything – know nothing. I regret that your Snjólaug fell into this category, and so, Herr Doktor, did you. Do you think I might have another glass? No, let me speak. I know what you're thinking. ‘Why should I trust this man? Why is he telling me this?' Once an enemy . . . isn't that so?” and clinked Peter's glass with his own. “You know, I always thought the English cowards. Nothing personal. They won the war, they won both wars, but they didn't score many points over here. It was your treachery that landed us in the hands of the Russians. What you, Herr Doktor, did in the Astoria made it easy for us . . . But you see, I know you better than I should. We have never met, and yet I recognise you so well from your voice.”

Uwe had leafed through the Marla Berking file before coming to the zoo and its pages carried him back 19 years to a more innocent man than this exhausted, motherless figure blocking his ears to the thump, thump, thump of Kresse's frustration pounding through the wall. He recalled immediately the case of the English medical student and the recording of the Schreber garden in Aachener Straße. At Morneweg's instigation, he had played the tape over and over while she was in the cells. He knew what was fake. He had listened to other of Morneweg's recordings, was familiar with the repertoire of seduction and betrayal. The shrieks on the hotel beds. The lazy questions. The flattery. “The hours we wasted transcribing these shouting animals clambering over each other, slobbering into each other's ears night and day. You're lucky, Herr Doktor. You don't have to listen to that crap. I always thought you'd have to be colossally stupid to sleep with someone in East Germany. It meant either you hadn't been round the block or you'd been around the block and didn't give a shit. Very rarely did one hear anything interesting. Because, let's face it, what are you hearing? I tell you, the banality was indescribable.”

But the tape of Peter Hithersay and Marla Berking wasn't fake. This love, in so far as Uwe had heard it spoken or made, belonged to another category.

“Maybe I'm a little intrigued? And, yes, why should I deny it – now that we're one nation and none of this is supposed to matter – maybe even a little jealous, hmm?”

His awkward confession stung Peter, as if his biology teacher had announced that he was jealous of Rosalind or his mother. He swallowed his glass and filled another, feeling a protective swell of desire. The past was running towards him. He knew he would get drunk. “After you let her go, what happened to her?”

Uwe shook his head. “That's not such a good story. I'll be absolutely direct with you, Herr Doktor. It was a disgusting thing Kresse did to your young lady – a thing you wouldn't do to your worst enemy, not even as a last resort.”

“What thing?” And his voice, like a sick man wanting to be told everything, sounded less aggressive than pleading.

“Well, you must understand that after she left the Runde Ecke I didn't look for her. Because she wasn't a case any more. But that's not how Kresse saw it. There was something about her – you could even say it was intolerable to him. It was Kresse's idea, by the way, to stuff your basket with that rope. That was typical of Kresse. Every time you sent a letter he would show it round the department with great merriment. ‘Look, another one of these – from the Hamburg ninny!' He had to invent enemies. Build them up. Provoke them so that Morneweg wouldn't be disappointed. You were one of his enemies – and at the other end was Marla Berking. And being Kresse, he started to invent things about her.”

Uwe sat back, enjoying the wine. Talking had made him less sorrowful. In resuscitating Snowleg, he had pushed back the memory of his mother in Dösen Hospital. While Peter had taken on Uwe's mood of despair.

“Just imagine,” said Uwe. “It's Monday morning. You've got five or six officers around this table. Men like Kresse who'd like to have a decoration. All weekend, they've had to sit in church at peace meetings, listening to the Beatitudes. They've been up drinking the night before and they have to write a report on these enemies of the state. They're bored. They're creative. They're diabolic. Suddenly, they have some ideas.

“Kresse's were the most inventive, I have to say. And vindictive. He's the son of a writer – he even went as a Stasi observer to his father's reading and reported that he was no fucking good! Well, it was Kresse who spread these malicious stories.”

“You mean, her gonorrhoea – that was Kresse?”

“He thought he would send a summons to a pastor's wife. And it caught on. All these husbands asking their wives who they'd been with. I tell you, it planted great suspicion and caused a lot of emotional breakdown – which Kresse was able to exploit. Well, soon after I release her he decides to go to work on your Marla.

“I know nothing of this until one day he comes into my office. He's quiet and apologetic, which isn't Kresse at all. He behaves as though he's surprised himself in some unforgivable act. ‘Uwe, you'll never guess. Remember that girl from the Schreber garden – the one you sent me to arrest? Well, something strange has happened . . . She's disappeared.'

“When Kresse tells me what he's done, I'm disgusted. I want to apologise to her. You see, for the rest of us it's becoming more and more difficult to believe in what we do. It's becoming exactly how Kresse described your pantomime in his report. A ridiculous puppet play. Sometimes we have to will the stupidity to participate in this big joke. So many motivations, mixed messages, options. I don't know which one is correct. I feel I could choose and defend any one of them. Even as Morneweg was interrogating her, I felt this. She was a rare spark of spontaneity who'd floated up into my life at a time when I felt choked, worn out, frustrated.

“Now, I'm not saying she's necessarily the reason. What I am saying is that I'm noticing all sorts of things I'd never noticed before.” Ever since, it had seemed to Uwe that the world, like Kresse's moustache, was out of plumb. “I'll never forget how Morneweg reacted when she cut off his telephone. But I think I was more shaken than he. And why? Because of this passionate girl. She wanted something and she was going to go after it. Even if she didn't get it, she wanted it. She reminded me of something I'd lost in myself.

“So I tell Kresse that I will take responsibility, and I go to her building. I remember it was in Menckestraße because the orphanage was round the corner. It turned out that her grandmother had recently been moved to an old people's home and someone else was occupying the apartment.

“What emerged from the statements I was able to get from her neighbours was that Marla Berking had married and left the district. They didn't know where she'd gone, didn't care. They just wanted that fucking bitch out of there! I tell you, it horrified me the way people spoke of her. From an old man, an expression I hadn't heard since I was a boy. That was Kresse's method. He'd cast her as a drunkard, a Stasi snoop, a whore.

“Well, I wasn't able to discover where she'd gone – and I had a look in the file. The only person who knew would be Morneweg, or her grandmother.”

“What's her grandmother's name?”

“I don't know. I may never have known, but she's probably dead by now.”

“And Morneweg?” – a low-tide cormorant darting at a fisherman's scrap.

Uwe made a violent gesture, knocking into his wineglass. “Drowned two years ago in the Kulkwitzer See.”

“Dead? I thought he was in government.”

“Not Morneweg,” replenishing his glass. “I saw the body.”

The memory of that day hadn't faded. One morning – it was the beginning of the asparagus season – a former colleague had telephoned Uwe and alerted him to be at the boathouse in 15 minutes, no longer. Since reunification, Uwe's friends had found their niches in collecting stamps or fishing for Rotbarsch or tending their allotments. Uwe preferred to lose himself on the water. In the evenings he sculled along the Karl Heine canal and at the weekends he sailed on the lake he had known since childhood. “There he was. Bloated. Enormous. Big as a boat.”

The boat-keeper explained: in the early hours he had lowered his dinghy into the shallows and rowed along the southern shore, the sun misshapen in the clouds and the lights from Markranstädt winking. He had lifted his blades over the bones of earlier Saxons and hubcaps and was oaring through the shallows when the hull scrunched into what he took to be a log.

He twisted, shading his eyes. Morneweg in the oily water. He was floating 12 inches above the surface. His eyes were mongoloid and white like a fiercely peeled potato and he was floating on his back. From the muddy bottom numberless glass jars stared up through the rainbows and effluent. Uwe's smell-pantry.

Uwe's boss – with Kresse's help – had dumped the lot. But nothing in those jars was ever so potent as the stink coming off Morneweg.

“The smell was indescribable. I thought his back was covered in moss and then I realised the skin had turned green, like parsley. It took five of us to lift him. I felt if I pricked him all the voices of Leipzig would hiss out. A waterlogged Tower of Babel in the filth of the Kulkwitzer mud. Probably suicide. Or maybe not.”

“What became of Kresse?”

“Ah, Kresse. There's a question,” and stood uncertainly. “I need a slash. When I get back, we'll open that.”

“
There are thought to be no survivors.
”

Peter sat there, dabbing a finger in the red wine that Uwe had spilled, he noticed, onto the envelope. He put up his hand to ask for a cloth and put it down again. The waitress was making for the kitchen with her apron half across her face. Transfixed, the owner of the restaurant remained where he was, steadfastly admiring the breasts of the grieving woman.

Uwe sat down heavily and from the envelope drew out a folder the colour of old brick. On the cover, a label with a typewritten name: Marla Hedwig Berking.

“I want to put a record straight. I want to apologise for the behaviour of people like Kresse. Because of the way the world was, you were separated from your girl. The idea of that monster relic coming to take money off you was the last straw. I came here to say: first of all, you can have her file – as I told you, it's no use to me. On the other hand, I don't think you're going to find the information you want. She's disappeared from the face of this earth, and because she was no longer in the frame we never looked into where she might have gone. Perhaps you're interested to see once more the letters you wrote to her. Otherwise, I've pretty much told you everything you're going to find here.”