Snowleg Read Online Free PDF

she looked down. On one of his ankles a wristwatch.
    She made up a bed on the sofa and he spent the morning asleep. She washed his clothes and hung them close to the stove to dry and in the afternoon she sat on a chair beside him while his chest rose and fell and she read a history of polar exploration that she had begun in Clitheroe. After an hour she heard a noise and her attention stumbled from the cold south seas, the icy drizzle, the gulls beating against her cheeks, and she felt him leaning over her shoulder, alert olive eyes, reading the same page.
    He hadn’t read a book in 18 months. The only words he had seen were in the newspapers used to wrap the sausages his parents sent at Christmas, stained in blood. Mostly what he read were advertisements. “Linaugran: this highly valued health aid will give your bowels an education in regularity.” His shoulders cast a shadow on the page and she could tell that he was biting his lip.
    In Bautzen, he taught himself to banish language. He picked his words with care, neutralising them, blanching them of colour, shape, meaning, until the day came when all he would say was Yes or No – often by a shake of the head – and nothing that he was overheard saying was worth repeating, not even his name.
    She closed the book. Stood up. Held out her hand. “I’m Henrietta.”
    He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. When he squeezed, his knuckles cracked. “Peter.”
    They talked until evening. They lay beside each other on the sofa, his thin legs across her knees. He had learned his English from a tutor in Thuringia. He wasn’t allowed to study in the GDR because he was “landlord class” and so his father arranged for private lessons. The same tutor taught him French, Latin and Greek. He looked nearly thirty, but he was twenty-two.
    She listened to him describe his childhood in schoolboy English: the Protestant parents, the large estate, the house occupied by the same family since the seventeenth century. Following Germany’s defeat, his father, a paediatrician, was one of a handful of aristocrats who elected to stay on even after their lands were confiscated. The new Communist government permitted him to remain as a tenant in the house, but the estate had dwindled to a moat of grass on the outskirts of the village where he practised as the general physician.
    She asked, fingers playing piano on his ankles: “Why didn’t he leave?”
    Peter described the incident with an expressionless face. He was five at the time. It was almost his first memory. A hot day in 1943. The smell of pear blossom. The family having lunch outside. They had arranged their chairs around a blanket under the pear tree when a man, probably a Jew, was brought from across the field and hanged in front of them. He wore a dark green suit and two SS soldiers pushed him from behind.
    It happened quickly. The older soldier grabbed the chair Peter’s mother was sitting in and stood on it to tie a belt over a stumpy branch. The man in the green suit fixed the family with a nervous apologetic expression. The younger soldier punched him so that his face crumpled and the two soldiers lifted him, still wheezing, onto the chair and slipped the belt over his head. Their prisoner was tall and the branch selected not quite high enough so that when the chair was kicked back at the second attempt his feet brushed the ground. He strained on tiptoe to keep balance and the two soldiers had to kick his ankles several times until he suffocated. Then the younger soldier undid the trousers and groped inside. He grinned at Peter’s mother who was colicky from gulping her glass of Kalterer wine. Too late she hastened to cover her son’s eyes.
    He blushed when he told Henrietta what he saw.
    â€œLook,” the man snickered, unbuttoning the dead man’s flies and fondling the stiff penis. “It’s true.” He spoke with a Bavarian