Snowleg (7 page)

In his studio, Rodney was replying to a letter.

“Dad?” and Peter watched his stepfather turn stiffly to greet him. Feeling the first spike of worry. The first glimpse of Rodney's frailty.

Rodney listened carefully. “Of course, you must go. No question about it.” He would just have to take a lot more photographs, that was all. He gave a ghost of a smile. “And maybe this will bring in some money,” holding up a strange letter he had received. An old school-friend – someone he hadn't seen for many years – had written from North Africa with a business proposition.

Only Rosalind didn't understand. “Teaching a
speedskater
? Why would a speedskater need to speak English?”

For three weeks Peter stayed in a turn-of-the-century white stucco house in Ottensen with wide windowsills and full of pot plants. He had never left England before. At every step he came to know the meaning of the word “foreign”. He scrutinised the giraffes and marmots in Hamburg zoo, the watch shops in Gänsemarkt, the windows stacked with cakes and furs and smoked meats. He thought, Is this where my roots are?

His postcard home read: “I am enjoying myself very much.” But he was miserable. He regretted more than he could say the waste of Rodney's money. The pot plants. His pupil.

Kirsten was a tall blonde German speedskater who had an uncomfortably open relationship with her parents. At his introductory meal with the Viebach family she told Peter about her first kiss and Peter was asked to supply the words in English. Her father nodded and smiled while her mother grew red-faced and said: “Sssh, Kirsten.” Even though she didn't speak much English, Frau Viebach was aware that her daughter had gone too far.

Away from her adoring parents, Kirsten was less full of herself. One night Peter collected her from the rink in her father's Mercedes-Benz. He watched the athletes, most of them older than he was, loitering animal-like before they disbanded, having completed their two-hour
fartlek
, a Swedish word, Kirsten explained, that meant “speedplay – a combination of running and intensive callisthenics”. Lazily, the girls zipped up their vivid warm-ups and dispersed on bicycles, eyeing Peter. And he couldn't help seeing himself through their eyes in his borrowed car, his English flannels, his stiff, non-athletic body. A different species.

“Goodbye, Kirsten,” shouted one of them, refastening her pony-tail. “Be a good girl!” she added in English, and her words injected into the car the atmosphere of a nervous first date.

Kirsten's parents were out for the night. She suggested they stop for a hot cocoa. They ended up drinking beer and then on the way home she directed him along Hafenstraße and into a parking lot beside the Elbe where workers for the shipyards caught the ferry. After a nervous conversation, she let him undress her. She smiled distantly as he peeled off her layers, beginning with the warm-up pants and ending with a sheath of navy Lycra. He saw the stars through the rigging and became senseless with panic. His anxiety and desire so great he could hardly breathe. At St Cross he used to pray that he wouldn't die before this moment. When the moment came, he yelled in pain and grabbed at his calf.

Kirsten knew better what the problem was and that he was an innocent in the country of sex. “You're having a cramp. Magnesium deficiency. You should eat more bananas.”

At the end of their next lesson – to which she arrived very late – he asked in a significant way if they could go back to the parking lot on Hafenstraße.

“Oh, no. I can't. I'm meeting a friend. Bye.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

Kirsten shook her head. “No, Peter,” in a faraway voice, as if it wasn't his tongue that had circled her breasts a few hours earlier, or her calves that had stiffened against his neck in the seconds before his unfortunate and disturbing seizure. “You are here to teach me English.”

So instead of undressing Kirsten again, in the afternoons when she was training at the oval, he walked through Hamburg. Up the Reeperbahn, down through the port, along the Alster. Only the stucco buildings in Eppendorf had resonance for him, their tall windows and tidy front gardens reminding Peter of photographs in his mother's blue calf album of a house in Notting Hill. And Sierichstraße: a street down which the traffic flowed one way until noon – and for the rest of the day in the opposite direction.

In this mood – fluctuating, rejected, homesick – he had his first glimpse of East Germany.

One Saturday morning, early, he boarded a bus to a small harbour on the border. A fisherman stood by the water's edge, surrounded by cormorants, while on the marina a father and son unstudded the tarpaulin from the deck of a speedboat with an English name,
Follow Me
. The father, a pipe-smoker with a sunburnt face, in narrow black jeans, ducked inside and emerged with a duvet decorated with an enormous strawberry. He was laying it out on the rails to dry when Peter called down to him.

They had a conversation after which the man tapped his pipe against his palm and gave Peter directions.

He didn't attempt to cross into East Germany. On this morning it was enough to stand near a wire fence and gaze at the forbidden country. He had no inkling of the whereabouts of his father's village, but he composed in his mind a white-turreted house and a tall-ceilinged corridor hung with the portraits of previous Junkers. (A week later, his German master dismissed his reverie as absurd. After 1950, and Ulbricht's collectivisation of the farms, whatever life the family led would have vanished. “Besides, Hithersay, there were no Junkers in Saxony.”) He stayed an hour, then walked back towards the toothpick masts. His head boiling with the same questions. Was his father still in prison? If not, what had happened to him? His mother had believed in him utterly, but what if his grandfather was right and he was not to be believed?
Let me tell you a couple of things about Germans . . .
Could he have been “re-educated”, become a functionary in the Communist regime? Or had he achieved his ambition and made it to the West? Become like the man who pointed him towards the border, a successful surgeon with a speedboat he had restored, turning lobster-red in the sun and smoking Dutch tobacco?

Peter searched for the sleek black hull of
Follow Me
and thought of the pipe-smoker's reaction. “Watch out! The only liberty East Germans have is to sail without any clothes on!” The speedboat had slipped her berth.

He stared into the empty space and found himself looking for the first time through Eastern eyes. The smooth water of the harbour amplified each sound. The distant yell of the fisherman. The cormorant that plunged, croaking, towards whatever scraps were being tossed away. The bark of a dog on the opposite bank. Someone shook their raincoat, but it was a swan taking off.

At the end of August he said goodbye to the Viebachs. He had sat out his remaining meals trying to avoid seeing in their expressions a sign that he had become dinner-party fodder.

“You are welcome here any time,” said Kirsten's mother solemnly.

Next day found him in Holland. In a bakery, overhearing his accent, a man mistook Peter for a German and spat in his face. A small part of him was relieved: his German must be getting better.

He had not found the language easy to learn. His schoolroom German wasn't the German he heard spoken in Hamburg. But his desire to communicate with Kirsten had had a liberating effect and in the following term he rose to near top of his class. Nervous of Peter's sudden fluency, his teacher – a frilly, Gothic script of a man who had until now insisted on calling him Höthersay, thinking he was doing Peter a favour – stopped singling him out.

His German master wasn't alone in observing a change. He had returned to St Cross more dissatisfied and confused. More defiant. One evening after “namers” Mr Tamlyn took Peter aside. “Is everything all right at home?”

“Everything's absolutely fine.”

“It's good to talk about these things.”

“Really, sir. Everything is fine. Couldn't be better.”

He retreated deeper into his toyes, spending his last pocket money on a subscription to the German soccer magazine
Kicker
. He covered the walls with team photographs of Hamburger SV and at their centre pinned a poorly taken snap of Kirsten after a race, her suit of silver Lycra barely distinguishable against the snowbank.

Until he was sixteen, he had assumed he would marry an English girl. Had built a picture of her in his mind, a sort of composite model of a young woman on a beach who happened to be one of Rosalind's friends. But now? With each passing week, he sensed himself divided from his fellows, even Brodie. His German summer had taught him that there was a European culture and he was not part of it. In England, he felt small and restless. At the same time, his experience in Hamburg had led him to fear, even to dislike, a part of himself he couldn't know.

To vanquish this dragon he determined to ride out to meet it. As Bedevere might have done.

He settled into his studies, making himself into a German and also qualifying himself to escape. If his decision to go to Hamburg marked the first jutting of the jaw, the second was demonstrated by his choice of university. He would become what his mother wanted, but that was incidental as it was also what his father had wanted – and now what he wanted, too.

Eighteen months since his 16th birthday and he was ready to make the break. To go against every grain. To find himself by taking not Leadley's obvious path through an Oxford quad and dark panelled rooms to an institution in the City, but the route which led in the opposite direction, among a people whose language he falteringly understood, past the rough streets of the Reeperbahn where he had heard shots in the night, past the grim housing projects, to the teaching hospital.

His mother couldn't contain her joy. “Medicine? But how wonderful, darling. Where will you go? Oxford or Cambridge?”

“Hamburg.”

“Hamburg?” she said and looked down at her book – she was reading
Maurice Guest
. “That's a good university, I'm sure. If you can do it, you can do it.” What else could she say?

The Universitätsklinik Eppendorf, or UKE, was not Peter's first choice. He had looked into studying medicine in Leipzig, but the process was full of red tape and after contacting the new East German embassy in Belgrave Square he couldn't see a way, at least not until he graduated. And so he decided on the city his father was aiming for when he was captured and where he himself had first tasted Germany.

Thanks to Mr Tamlyn's efforts, an interview was arranged at UKE in the Easter of Peter's last year at St Cross. Over a leisurely meeting he was tested for his knowledge of the German language, biology, chemistry and Latin. The admissions tutor was an Anglophile with a reedy voice who kept insisting that medical education was so much better in England. Nonetheless, he was prepared to accept Peter's four A levels in lieu of a baccalaureate, the offer conditional on his results and on his agreement to spend the gap year improving his German. “University study is free. Accommodation you will have to pay for.”

“Tremendous news,” said Rodney. “Of course, I'll foot the bills.”

Feebly his mother said, “You do realise, darling, Hamburg is a very different place from Leipzig.”

Rendered more and more incoherent by Alzheimer's, his grandfather told Peter his opinion. His mind was perishing and he fuddled through his days and nights without recourse to the Black Dog. “Walter Hammond was the finest cover fielder that England has ever had. You can take Bradman out and pee all over him.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

O
N THE EVE OF
Peter's departure for Germany, Rodney's old school chum Joseph Silkleigh came to dinner. Rodney had been a little startled to hear from him. He had only the dimmest recollection of Silkleigh at school. Nor could Peter's mother understand why they had to entertain a virtual stranger on Peter's last night.

“I've never heard you mention his name before.”

“I tried to put him off,” said Rodney, defensively, “but he's in England only till tomorrow. He has some wheeze to sell printing-machines in North Africa.”

His mother had wanted the occasion to be a special one, but Silkleigh's arrival threw her into such turmoil that she burned the sprouts. Not that Silkleigh minded. “I say, Mrs Hithersay, these are splendid.”

Despite the fact that Silkleigh didn't draw breath all through dinner, Peter was at a loss to understand what he did. He seemed to spend a lot of time frog-diving off a Spanish enclave named Abyla (“a place of contradictions where anything can happen”). He was also writing a book about his life. He had stalled on this for several years while the title eluded him, but now he had it.

“I'm well into volume one, old soul. Well in. The whole thing's going swimmingly.”

“What's it called?” asked Rodney politely. He pushed away his plate.

“
Pain Has No Memory
.”

Peter wondered if Silkleigh was joking, but he didn't seem to be. When Rosalind giggled, Rodney asked swiftly: “And you have a publisher?”

“Not yet, not yet. As a matter of fact I was rather hoping, following this sumptuous repast,” winking at Peter's mother, “you might point me in the right direction. You see, Abyla's a little out of the literary loop. So I racked my brains and I remembered you, Rodders. I have to tell you, young Peter, your father was a bit of a poet at school, weren't you, old soul?”

“Were you, Rodney?” asked Peter's mother with a dubious look.

“I did write one or two poems,” he admitted, “but I seem to recall they were pretty dire.”

“Oh, but one had to be kind to one's young self,” said Silkleigh.