Free Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare

mother. It was time to swing into the saddle and discover his father’s culture.
    He spent his gap year in Hamburg. Speaking German more fluently. Becoming less and less English.
    His grandfather died in the summer and was buried in his wool cap. Peter couldn’t afford to be there for the funeral, Rodney having only been able to pay for a single ticket. He wrote, he telephoned, but for years he never went back to Wiltshire. Instead, he read Musil, Canetti, Fontane and looked up words like “Eisenwaren” in the dictionary. And learning about Emperor Barbarossa who sat alone for a thousand years on Kyffhäuser, and Christian Rosenkreuz, founder of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, who lived to 106 and whose body was discovered 120 years after his death, untouched, it was said, by decay. Reading a twelfth-century poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, he came across another hibernation – “half-death, half-asleep” – ascribed to the King of the Grail. He learned a lot, but not about himself.
    One Sunday afternoon, feeling a sudden loneliness and a fear that Germany might not assimilate him, he telephoned Kirsten. Her father answered. “Ah, the boy with cramp! Sorry, Kirsten’s in Insel. Training. Yes, I’ll pass on your regards.”
    The campus was situated in a dead corner of Eppendorf. A week before the beginning of term, he read on the department pinboard that a group of students in Eimsbüttel were seeking a room-mate. Two days later, he moved from the Youth Hostel to Feldstraße: a brown-painted building converted from a piano-maker’s factory, with low ceilings and no front garden and a second building in the small back yard where his room was, and which he decorated with a few objects from England. A cricket bat, the Blu-Tacked print of Bedevere, the antique oak table from Tansley.
    Thenceforth Peter was alone. His childhood was a well from which he feared to draw, and he had very little to cling to. Only the thought of his German father sustained him. He had a mechanical hope that sooner or later he would meet his father. Whether as head of a teaching hospital or part of the vilest, most repressive regime in the Communist bloc.

PART II
    Germany, 1983

CHAPTER EIGHT
    O NE NIGHT IN HIS third year at university, Peter was working late when there was a knock and through the door came a thin-framed young man with long, prematurely grey hair.
    Teo, who boarded in the room above, was a Konservatorium student who had given up the violin in favour of composition. (He once demonstrated to Peter, by twisting a knife in a cabbage, how to imitate the sound of someone’s head being battered with a club.) They didn’t know each other well, although once a week they played in the same soccer team.
    â€œLook here, Peter. I know it’s not the right moment, but an amazing opportunity has turned up.”
    Peter cleared the pile of books from the sofa and Teo sat down. “I see Anita hasn’t been in here,” grinning.
    â€œBanned – till after my Physikum.”
    â€œHow would you like to go to Leipzig?”
    â€œLeipzig?” He went over to close the curtain. It was hard to work in this cold. The snow wanting to fall. But his chest was beating.
    Quickly, Teo explained. He was part of a group of student actors who had been invited to perform in East Germany during the week of the Leipzig Trade Fair. This afternoon their stage-manager had pulled out. “You can open and close a curtain? It’s that simple. Otherwise, it’s a matter of taking a few props on stage and fiddling with some lights. Teach you in an hour.”
    â€œI don’t know anything about theatre,” Peter said guardedly. One of his least favourite experiences at St Cross had been to hold a lantern as a nightwatchman in Othello .
    â€œIt’s not strictly speaking theatre,” said Teo, skating over his reply. “It’s mime.”
    â€œMime!” Even worse.