by Anna Funder
The next day there was a laying-out. Miriam says the coffin was far away, behind a thick pane of glass, and the whole thing was lit from below with purple neon light. ‘Even in that terrible light, I could still see his head injuries. And I could see his neck—they’d forgotten to cover it up. There were no strangulation marks, nothing.’ She looks across at me. ‘You’d think they would make sure to cover his neck if they wanted to stick with their story that he hanged himself, wouldn’t you?’ From there the coffin was sunk to another level and reappeared on a trolley wheeled by cemetery employees to the gravesite. All these details are slowed down in time, stuck in the amber of memory. In the minutes between the coffin sinking from view and re-emerging, she says, there would have been time for a body to be taken out.
‘A great many people were at the funeral,’ Miriam tells me, ‘but I think there were even more Stasi there.’ There was a van with long-range antennae for sound-recording equipment parked at the gates. There were men in the bushes with telephoto lenses. Everywhere you looked there were men with walkie-talkies. At the cemetery offices building work was going on: Stasi agents sat in pairs in the scaffolding.
‘Everyone, every single one of us was photographed. And you could see in advance the path the procession was to take from the chapel to the grave: it was marked at regular intervals all along by the Stasi men, just standing around.’ When they reached the grave, there were two of them sitting there on a trestle, ready to watch the whole thing. ‘As soon as the last person threw on their flowers,’ Miriam says, ‘the cemetery people started piling on the earth and it was too quick. It was just too quick.’
Miriam walks barefoot across the room to a desk and picks up some papers in a plastic sheath. ‘I made a copy of this for you,’ she says, coming back to the table. It is part of the Stasi file on Charlie Weber: a handwritten report signed by a Major Maler. In it all the divisional plans are set out for the organisation and surveillance of the Weber funeral: Miriam’s telephone is to be tapped; she is to be called in for a ‘Clarification of Circumstances’ the day before; sound recording technology is to be used at the site; a ‘photographic documentation’ of the event is to be made; citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany attending the funeral are to be supervised to ensure they leave the GDR before curfew at the end of the day. ‘The name of the pastor who will conduct the service regrettably could not be ascertained by this operative. Should negative-enemy behaviour occur during the funeral all men are given orders to use force to quell it on the grounds that such actions would contravene the dignity of the cemetery premises.’ Major Maler noted that the head of the Southern Cemetery, a Herr Mohre, had guaranteed the Stasi complete freedom of movement for the Weber ‘action’, and that should any of the Stasi officers be questioned by workers at the cemetery, they should be referred to Colleague Mohre. Mohre knows that Maler is an officer of the Stasi, and also knows him by his true name, not his undercover identity.
All of this Miriam could have guessed, from what she saw on the day. She points to the next line and reads it aloud: ‘No definitive information is available as to the date for the cremation. This date can be ascertained from Colleague Mohre on or after 31.10.80.’
Miriam hands the file to me. ‘On 30 October we buried a coffin. We buried a coffin and they are setting the date for cremation the next day. Either there is no-one inside that thing, or there is someone else in it.’
Miriam went to the Interior Ministry, and added the claim of ‘Transportation of Coffin’ to her application to leave the GDR. She wanted to get out, and she wanted to rebury Charlie in West Germany.
Every month or so she would be called in to the Stasi for a chat. It went on for years. ‘What’s all this about transportation of the coffin?’ they asked her. ‘What do you want with the coffin?’
‘What do you think I want with the coffin? To take it for a Sunday stroll? I want to do with the coffin what one does with a coffin: I want to bury it.’
In 1985 they said to her, ‘You probably want to have the contents examined, do you?’
‘What if I do? What am I likely to find other than that he hanged himself, as you say?’
‘You know there will be nothing left in the coffin. You won’t be able to prove anything.’
‘Well, why are you so preoccupied with it, then?’ she said, and took it as an admission of guilt. After a time Miriam stopped obeying the cards that appeared in her letterbox summoning her to their offices to clarify some circumstances. The only thing that ever got clearer was that they had the power, in the circumstances.
‘It was silly. I stopped thinking I’d ever get out. They were playing with me like a mouse.’
At 8 am one morning in May 1989, Miriam’s phone rang. It was the Stasi. They couldn’t say why, but she was required to report to them without delay, this day, and bring her identity papers.
Miriam thought if it wasn’t cards in her letterbox summoning her to clarify circumstances they were giving her wake-up calls. She had had a late night. She slept some more, then got up and had a shower, made the first cup of tea.
At midday the doorbell sounded. A Stasi man, Division of the Interior. ‘Why are you still here?’ he said.
‘This is my home.’
‘You are required to report immediately to the ministry, and bring your identity papers with you.’
‘There’s plenty of time. The day is still long, my friend.’
He stationed himself outside her door.
She went down to the offices. An official took her ID papers, and said she was to go to a photographer, and that after that she had an appointment with a public notary. Then, she was to come back to collect her travel authority. ‘You are on a train tonight,’ he said.
‘That was when I understood,’ Miriam says. ‘I was in shock. I said to them, “It’s been eleven years since we lodged the application to leave, and now I can’t even say goodbye to my friends?”’
‘Mrs Weber, the travel authority you have been issued is valid until midnight tonight. If you are found to be on GDR territory after that time, you will be here illegally, and you will be arrested. I would remind you,’ he said holding them up to her in his hand, ‘that you no longer have any identity papers for this country.’
The train that night was crammed full of people being expelled from the GDR. It was as though anyone who might catch the glasnost virus had to be put over the Wall. Miriam had a small carrybag with two changes of clothes in it, and she was leaving her life behind. Her friends were going to pack up her apartment for her. For all she knew, she would never be back. No-one had any idea that the Wall would fall that November.
‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’ she says, ‘and six months too early.’
Night has fallen, and the city lights are spread out beneath us. In the dark, this could be any city, in any normal place.
Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past. For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died. Her memories of picnics or cooking meals or holidays, her real life, are memories where ‘she’ is a ‘we’ and those are the things she and Charlie did together. It is as if the time after his death doesn’t count; it has been a non-time, laying down non-history. She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.
‘Why did you come back to Leipzig?’ I ask.
‘Well, in this matter I’ve got going at the moment, it is better that I am here. It only takes me an hour to get to the offices of the investigators in Dresden,’ she smiles. ‘And I am hoping,’ she says, and I see that under the smile she is fighting back tears, ‘I am really hoping that the puzzle women in Nuremberg find out something about Ch
arlie in all those pieces of files.’
Miriam wants Charlie’s body exhumed, so she can know for sure what happened to him.
I look out at the lights. She continues, ‘I don’t believe he would have killed himself. I don’t think he did. Of the two of us, he was always more worried it’d be me who would crack under all that pressure.’
Not knowing what happened to Charlie is so hard, because if it was suicide, she was abandoned. I wonder what will happen to her when they dig up the coffin. If he was cremated, there will be nothing there, or someone else’s remains. If it’s Charlie what could that tell her? Will she be released into a new life? Or will the current one lose its purpose?
Miriam can’t afford to have the exhumation performed privately, so she hopes it will be done in the course of the criminal investigation into his death that is now, apparently, being undertaken by the authorities of united Germany. But twice they have tried to suspend the investigation, and twice she has travelled to Dresden to ‘bang on their desks’. ‘You know, they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.’
Most recently, the DA wrote to Miriam saying that the investigation was to be suspended because a former employee of the Southern Cemetery had ‘credibly assured’ him that there had been nothing untoward about the Weber funeral. She sent him in the file, highlighting the parts that referred to the body coming from ‘Anatomie’ (code for the Stasi mortuary, as if somehow the corpses coming from custody were coming from the medical school); the surveillance detail for the funeral; the part about Herr Mohre knowing the true identity of the Stasi man who was making arrangements with him; and the part about the cremation, scheduled to take place the next day. ‘That stopped them,’ she says. ‘I wrote, “Do you still think there was ‘nothing untoward’ about the Weber funeral?”’ The DA replied that he hadn’t yet read that section of the file. When Miriam inquired at the Stasi File Authority she found that he hadn’t even lodged a request to see it.
‘Do you ever run into any Stasi men you recognise in the street?’ I ask. I think that is what would terrify me, in the nonsensical way in which it is horrible to run into someone who has wronged you.
‘No, thank goodness. But I did try to find the people involved in Charlie’s case.’
Shortly after the revolution in 1989 Miriam went to the cemetery to find Herr Mohre, but he had vanished as soon as the Wall came down. ‘The Stasi cremated a lot of people at the Southern Cemetery,’ she says.
Miriam did find Major Maler. She rang him and said she would like to meet to discuss the Weber case. They met in a cafe. Miriam took a friend along so she would have a witness. The friend sat at the next table, unknown to Maler.
Maler said he didn’t know anything. ‘No, the name Weber doesn’t say anything to me.’
‘Well why did you come here then?’ Miriam asked.
‘Uhh, I just wanted to see what you wanted.’
‘But I told you on the phone that what I wanted was to talk about the Weber matter.’
‘Oh, I thought you were going to tell me something.’
Did he want to know how much she knew, whether he was going to be uncovered, or whether he was to be blackmailed?
‘It is amazing,’ Miriam says, ‘what a revolution can do to people’s memories.’ A cloud of smoke covers her head and the high back of the chair. ‘There are some compensations though, for being here. This apartment, for one,’ she says, and she’s right. A siren wails past and subsides. She is a maiden safe in her tower.
‘And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum. A museum!’ She shakes her head and butts out her cigarette. ‘That’s one thing I love to do. I love to drive up to the Runden Ecke and park right outside. I just sit there in the car and I feel…triumph!’ Miriam makes a gesture which starts as a wave, and becomes a guillotine. ‘You lot are gone.’
5
The Linoleum Palace
It’s past midnight when I get back to Berlin. I’ve been on a tram, a regional train, the local line, and then walked through the park where things are only shapes, dark on dark. Miriam’s story has winded me. My head, no longer consumed by listening, started to pulse again as soon as I left her apartment. I dislike being made aware that my heart is just a small pump, pushing all that blood around. I am beyond tired. As I reach my place I’m in slow motion, crossing a finishing line.
My building is covered in grey sprayed-on concrete, but still has grand arched doors at its entrance. At the end of the carriage hall a matching set of doors leads into the yard with its chestnut tree and weedy cobbles. I live on the first floor past the letterboxes up the stairs on the right. I don’t check the mail but turn on the hall light and go straight up. The stairwell walls are covered in bright but inscrutable spraycan graffiti which could be expressions of joy or pain depending on how you look at them, but I don’t. I hurry to get my key in the lock before the hall bulb goes off its automatic timer. Home free, home safe.
Inside, the lights are on.
A voice shrieks, ‘Don’t be frightened! Don’t be frightened!’
I am terrified.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ says the voice.
The pump in my chest pumps, hard. I drop my pack.
A woman up a ladder holds a large screwdriver. It’s Julia, from whom I rent. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says, turning towards me and lowering the screwdriver.
‘That’s OK,’ I say slowly, puffed.
‘I know exactly how it is,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you just want to get home and be by yourself.’ That would probably be, I think, because I live by myself. I don’t say anything.
‘I’m just unscrewing here,’ she says. ‘I’m taking these bookshelves, I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I need them at my place, there are none there.’
I have been living in this apartment for six months, and I am still not used to this. I think it must stop at some point, and I hope it’s while I still have a little furniture left. Julia worked at the rental agency I visited when I was looking for a place. She offered to sublet the apartment she’d been living in until her lease ran out. It had been a share house, but everyone was moving. The apartment was much too big for me, but it was in the old east where I wanted to be, and I could afford it.
And it was furnished if, as Julia warned me, ‘only sparsely’. This is even truer now.
I know Julia is concerned about how long it is taking her to move out, about the steady denuding of the apartment. I have comforted her before, saying all I need is a bed, a desk, a chair and a coffee pot. I meant it at the time, but two days ago when I found a pile of screwed up papers and old tissues and cassette wrappers I’d thrown under the desk where the waste-paper basket used to be I thought I must say something to her. Only right now I’m too too tired.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asks.
‘Leipzig.’
‘Ah,’ she says, ‘where it all started.’
‘Julia, I’m sorry, but I’m knackered. I need to go to bed. How about a cup of coffee some time? Why don’t you come over?’ During the day, I think.
She says she will, but we don’t make a time because Julia regards fixed appointments as intolerable constraints on her freedom. Which may account for how she lit upon this hour of the night for some home renovation.
I fall into bed and she continues her nocturnal disassembly so quietly I don’t hear a sound when she leaves with the boards and L-hooks and screws balanced in the basket of the bicycle she must have carried down the stairs.
In the morning the first thing I notice is that I can see my breath. One day without heating and the air here congeals with cold. My head is clear, but yesterday feels like a different country. The second thing I notice is that opposite the bed, where there were two blue milk crates that served as a bedside table-cum-dressing stool, is a freshly exposed piece of b
rown linoleum.
When I moved in I was pleased by the spareness of the place. I had two bedrooms, a huge living room with windows at tree height looking into the park, and a kitchen on the other side looking over the yard. This apartment was converted under the Communists into a place of concrete render on the outside and, on the inside, practical lino brownness, washed and waxed and charmless. But it was summer then and to me it was a place of air and light, with green on both sides.
I soon realised everything here was either broken or about to be. Each item had started life as a utilitarian piece of furniture in an eastern home well over a decade ago. After the Wall fell the students had moved in, and nothing that remains was good enough even for them to take when they left. The couch in the living room has developed lumps and is covered in a dark cloth I fear to disturb; the cord for the kitchen blind is permanently tethered to a plastic chair in order to stop it crashing down; my mattress springs are inching their way through the ticking; and the bathroom, windowless and painted Extreme Dark Green, has plumbing that needed to be learnt.
In the hallway Julia has left a tin bucket full of coal. She must have gone down last night to the pitch-dark cellar to fill it. I feed firelighters and coal into the brown tiled heater. Although it will take hours to heat up, her kindness warms me already.
I don’t really hold it against Julia that she comes to take this flotsam from here. I know she has nothing better where she is now—a one-roomer at the back of a block not far away. I know that in summer the smells from the garbage bins in her yard rise up to her, almost visible. I know that year-round her neighbours are unfriendly, both to each other and within their households, and that she hears their squabbling as it reverberates around the yard. I know that she needs to be alone but suffers from it too and that her room is choked with cheap and broken things she feels she may want at some point in life but may not be able to afford if she abandons. And I know that her small cat is incontinent, which makes her place smell, somehow, of anxiety.
So I cannot resent it if she still has keys, and comes back to her old life, every now and again. I accustom myself to each unexpected absence—the rubber bathmat, the coffee machine, and now the milk crates. I acclimatise to the thinning of the atmosphere. I wear dust-free tracks on the linoleum from kitchen to desk, from bathroom to bed.