by Anna Funder
N. insinuated he knew—as Julia surely also realised—that the Italian had an image of her that didn’t quite hit the mark. He flattered her. ‘You are more complex, I think Miss Behrend, and much more intelligent than he gives you credit for.’ When he was done reading, pointing, probing, he straightened the two piles of letters and put them back to the side of the desk. ‘Let us discuss your friend for a moment now,’ he said, ‘shall we?’
He started to tell Julia about her boyfriend. ‘They weren’t particularly spectacular things,’ she says. ‘But they were things I could not have known because I couldn’t go to Italy and see for myself.’ Julia assumes that the Stasi had people in Italy. ‘He was even sort of witty about it, drawing me in as if we could both have a chuckle about aspects of my boyfriend’s life, as if we were both on the same side, and it was my friend not I who was the object of observation.’
‘As we know,’ N. said, ‘our friend is in the computer business.’
Julia nodded. ‘I’d never understood much about the sort of business he was in,’ she says, ‘and with my East German mindset not at all! He had told me it was trade in computer components.’
N. specified it for her. ‘He is a sales manager for the regional branch of the firm.’ Then he described the boyfriend’s family house in Umbria. He told her the make of car he drove. When he saw that this meant nothing to Julia, he interpreted it for her: in N’s estimation it was a ‘middle class’ sort of car, ‘so there’s no thinking he’s rich or anything’.
Julia wondered where this was going.
He opened his desk drawer and brought out a thick manila folder which he put, closed, on the desk.
‘Now Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘we come to you.’
He evaluated her life-in-progress. ‘He knew everything about me,’ she says. ‘He knew all the subjects I’d taken and how I did in them. He knew all about each of my sisters, my parents. He knew my youngest sister wanted to study piano at the conservatory.’ Major N. felt sufficiently informed to make some psychological assessments. He told her that there were clearly issues her father did not understand, that Dieter was ‘problematic’. Irene, by contrast, was much more loyal to the state.
‘It is clear to us on the evidence, Miss Behrend, that you take after your mother,’ he said. ‘Which, if I may be so bold as to say so, is a good thing.’
‘He was showing me that he had me in the palm of his hand,’ she says. Julia draws her knees up to her chest and places her heels on the seat. She stretches her jumper over the knees, making herself into a small black ball. ‘The only thing—’ she says, ‘—it’s ironic but the only thing that they seemed not to know, was that I’d broken up with my boyfriend!’ Since their split in Hungary, the Italian boyfriend had written several imploring letters. Julia had replied to the first one but then stopped writing.
‘Or at least the Major acted as if he didn’t know that we’d broken up,’ she says. ‘I thought it was strange that he didn’t know. Maybe he’d been on holidays and had missed the last couple of letters.’
Or, I think, he might have known, and thought his prospects with her then were better.
N. put the manila folder to one side next to the love letters. He joined the tips of his fingers together and leant forward. ‘As I’m sure you will have picked up, we are interested in your friend.’ And then it came. ‘We would propose,’ he said, ‘if you would assist us, that we meet every now and again. For a chat.’
Julia says, ‘I thought it was absurd. I thought: what on earth could interest them in him?’ She could not imagine that the Italian boyfriend was in any way a bigwig. ‘He did not have any high-up connections he ever mentioned, or any special expertise or training at all.’ It did not occur to her until she got home that it could have been her they wanted.
There was no question for Julia. She would not inform on him, or at all. ‘I am terribly sorry,’ she told Major N., ‘but I can’t help you because we split up on this last trip to Hungary. I want nothing more to do with him. He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ She added, ‘I never want to see him again, even as a friend.’
N. smiled. ‘If,’ he said, ‘after giving the matter some further thought you reach a different decision, you should not hesitate to call at any time.’ He gave her his card with his phone number on it. ‘Oh and Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘one more thing. You must not discuss our little talk with anyone—not your parents, not your sisters, not your closest friends. If you do, we will know about it. This afternoon has not occurred. You have never been to Room 118. If you see me on the street you are not to acknowledge me—you must walk on past. All this for obvious reasons, as I’m sure you will have understood long ago.’
She nodded.
And that was it. He had shown her that with one phone call to him she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.
‘And then he let me leave.’ The street was another world, the daylight bright and unnatural. Julia watched a class of small children being herded along the pavement. She felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life. ‘It was as though all at once I was on the other side,’ she says, ‘separate from everybody.’
Julia seems to have run out of words, so I pick up the plates and place them behind me in the sink. I look in the fridge for something else to eat, as if it might yield possibilities missed at first glance. There’s only a saggy old condom of liverwurst and an apple. I throw out the liverwurst and cut up the apple. Whilst I have my back to her, she starts to speak again. To listen to her is to witness the process, almost mechanical, of pulling things up from the past.
Her voice is slow. ‘I think I’d totally repressed that entire episode,’ she says. ‘Maybe what came later, the whole 1989 story, was so severe that other things just fell away. Otherwise, I can’t explain it.’
I don’t know what she means by ‘the whole 1989 story’. I say I think it is extreme, what happened to her.
‘Yes, it is,’ she says, ‘when you become conscious of it. But the strange thing is it’s only now, in this room, that I feel the shudder run down my spine. At the time I criticised other things—not being allowed to study or have a career. But looking back on it, it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over your bound-aries—until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.’ She flicks her hair as if to get rid of something. ‘At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.’
She takes a piece of apple and seesaws its fleshy arc between two fingers on the table. The empty fridge shudders and stops; the kitchen is a deeper quiet. ‘People talk about the unconscious,’ she says, ‘and it becomes clear to me as I am telling you this, the effect this knowledge has had on my life.’ She takes a small bite of apple. ‘I think I am definitely psychologically damaged!’ She laughs, but she means it. ‘That’s probably why I react so extremely to approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another possible invasion of my intimate sphere.’ She watches my face. ‘I think it’s worse if you repress it.’ To dig it up, or to leave it lie in the ground?
When she left Room 118 Julia was all right until she got home. Then her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She made it to the bathroom and vomited. When she came out she noticed her voice trembled and she couldn’t set it straight. She told her parents and her sisters everything. That evening the family sat down to decide what to do.
‘My mother is a very pragmatic person,’ Julia says. ‘Irene said, “Right, you ended it with the Italian—I didn’t want to influence you, but I’m glad you didn’t marry him. Now, though, you have to think very coolly about what you do next.”’
Julia couldn’t quite believe that this was happening, that they were sitting in the living room at home talking about how she might live out the rest of her life. She was twenty years old. ‘We’d always discussed me goi
ng to live with the Italian boyfriend, as if it were an option. But that was more like a teenage adventure fantasy: thinking, I’m free to do that and no-one can stop me. Suddenly it was reality: I have to leave here forever—I have to leave my family, I will not see my sisters again, and I have to go to the west. Which, as I said, I had never wanted to do.’ Julia has started to speak into the jumper wrapped over her knee. ‘And I think too, I was disappointed in the state. I realised for the first time that it wasn’t really the good father state you have in the back of your mind. I saw it can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all.’
She would not become an informer. That left only one real option. ‘You’ll have to find someone else to marry so you can get out,’ Irene said. ‘That’s the only way.’ Then she voiced all of their doubts. ‘But do you really want to marry any old person?’ she said. Dieter sat hunched in rage and sadness at the end of the table. No-one spoke.
‘That’s when I thought of it,’ Julia says, ‘I thought, if there’s no way around it, we just have to crash through somehow. There was, apparently, this method called a Staatsratsbeschwerde for people to write directly to Erich Honecker if they needed something they couldn’t get, or to make a complaint’—she shakes her head—‘as if the citizen really did have a voice and rights. People would write saying they wanted to buy tiles for their bathroom or machine parts for their tractor and none had been available since August or whatever. Ordinary people would sometimes say, “Well, why don’t you stop complaining and just write to Erich!” So I thought to myself, why don’t we? I mean, if we examined it, what had happened was just not right.’ I see the mimic in her again. ‘I don’t even have this boyfriend any more, and I want to study and I want to stay in the GDR, and why not? We can just write to Erich and complain.’ She looks up at the ceiling. ‘There was a certain naivety in this that I see today—back then we thought that the Party and the state were one thing, and the Stasi another.’ She shakes her head and unravels herself from her jumper, placing both feet on the ground. She opens her hands wide. ‘I thought, well, what can they do to me?’
Major N.’s card lay on the table between them all. ‘You have the phone number,’ Irene said. ‘Call him up tomorrow and tell him that you and your parents are going to write to Honecker and make a complaint.’
‘I will never forget that night,’ Julia says. ‘I said to my parents: right then, that’s what we’ll do, and I went to bed. I had nightmares like I have never had before or since.’ Julia dreamt she was being pursued in a place where everything was familiar to her—the kitchen countertop, the view from her bedroom, the faces in a shop, the back of her sister’s head. But no-one recognised her and she was not at home. Her father started to die, wilting like a plant and calling for her but he couldn’t hear her responses, couldn’t see where she was. When she woke she didn’t know if she’d dreamt of where she was or wherever it was she was going. ‘The night was terrible, terrible. I don’t remember if I cried. I don’t think I did. I just sweated and sweated till the bed was wet. I woke up many times. It was truly terrifying what I lived through.’ She runs a hand through her hair. ‘It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.’
The next morning after everyone left Julia picked up the card and took it to her grandmother’s to make the call. She was alone in the house. She could smell disinfectant, and boiled potatoes. She looked at the numbers in black on the card. They moved. She saw her hand was shaking, and put the card down on the bench. In that moment she could no longer string together the reasons why she was making this call, how it came to this. She was just here, now, with this card and this name and the numbers that would make him speak to her again. She put her fingers in the loops to dial.
N. picked up straight away. When he realised what she was saying—you told others what we said? You are going to write what?—he was furious and demanded that Julia meet with him alone. She was to come to a covert apartment in town.
‘It was over, of all things, the travel agency,’ she says. She puts her lips together in a grim smile. ‘Of course I’d gazed in that window many times. I knew exactly where it was.’ N. told her there would be serious repercussions for her, and possibly for her family, from this breach of her undertaking of silence. He reminded her that her younger sister Katrin, was it not correct, dreamed of studying piano at the conservatory. He said he would contact his superior, the regional head, and see what action was to be taken from here.
The family waited a week before a card came in the letterbox. They were to be visited at home.
Two of them came: N. and his boss. ‘But it was not at all what we anticipated,’ Julia says. ‘N. looked completely different to me. He was sweating and uncomfortable. His boss didn’t look much better. We didn’t know what was going on.’
Dieter told them there was no reason—what reason could there be?—for all the things that had happened to their daughter. They had always been good citizens. Irene told them flatly that they were going to write to Honecker.
The men held their hands up: there was no need to overreact here. Surely, they said, things had not gone so far that they couldn’t be fixed locally—there was no need to get Berlin involved. This was a situation, they looked at Dieter and Irene, where the imagination of a young person—a good quality of course—might have come into play. Dieter and Irene and the girls were silent. Then the men asked to be given some time.
‘We couldn’t figure it out at first,’ Julia says. ‘But when they left we knew we’d won. We had never really known where the battle was,’ she smiles, ‘but we knew we’d won.’
Julia doesn’t know why the Stasi was afraid of them complaining to Honecker. Possibly because both her parents were teachers, and outwardly conformist, or because the Stasi had no ‘legal’ basis for what it had done to her. Who knows? It is one of the very rare occasions when the bluff was called and someone ‘won’ against the Firm.
‘The amazing thing was,’ Julia says, ‘the next week I was rung up about a job.’ She was taken on as a receptionist in a hotel. It looked like she would work there for her lifetime.
But then came 1989.
‘That’s a whole other story.’ She picks up her box of love letters. ‘It’s late, I should go,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d come and get these’—she pats the box—‘and have a look at them. I’m seeing a psychotherapist and we’ve got up to my relationships with men. I’m trying to remember them—they seem like another life.’ She smiles and the light catches her teeth. ‘These letters from the Italian boyfriend will be an aide memoire to all that,’ she says. I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.
I see her out. In the hall she clicks the bike pump onto the crossbar of her beat-up bicycle and I open the door. As she goes down the stairs I feel there is something missing here. She does not seem like a girl who called their bluff, worked in a hotel for two years and was then liberated into her future by the 1989 revolution. No-one can tote up life’s events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the soul. But this is not the full sum of things, I think, as Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either.
12
The Lipsi
‘…you pigdogs think we all here forgotten what you nazis done and come in my home on my TV with you music and you news you fuckups better write me n—’
There’s a knock on my office door. It’s Uwe. ‘How about a lift home?’ he says.
‘That would be great.’ From some stupid impulse, I move to hide the letter in front of me, as if to spare him insult. I hold his gaze and pull it towards me across the desk. The printing is as large and uneven as a ransom note, so it catches his eye.
‘What’s that one?’ he asks.
‘It’s, uh, actually a piece of hate mail,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘yes.’ He knows immediately what that means: that t
he hate is not directed at a particular presenter or the station itself, but at the whole nation.
‘We usually respond to those in a moderate tone,’ he says, ‘and say that the National Socialist dictatorship was a terrible thing that happened to us. That it caused untold pain and suffering and so on, and that whatever attempts there have been to make reparations, amends can never truly be made, etc, etc.’
‘Yes,’ I say. But what does he mean, ‘that happened to us’? The Germans were wild about Hitler. It is true that after he was elected he changed the structures of power into a dictatorship, but it is also true that when the war was over the people might well have voted him in again. Everyone, always, is claiming innocence here.
‘Well then?’ he says. His eyes are red-rimmed. He doesn’t give himself much rest. ‘Do you want a lift?’
‘Yes. Thanks. Great.’
I am rarely in a car in Berlin. The train network under the streets is so dense I can go anywhere on it, popping out of the earth in one place or another. It is a skein of arteries, pumping people around the city. The surface is another world.
The streets are cobbled. Uwe drives fast. He wears leather gloves with press-studs on the wrists. His car is a new silver VW Golf, shiny and smelling of pineapple deodoriser.
‘Do you like Elton John?’ he says. Before I can answer he turns on the tape-deck full blast. He lights a cigarette from the dash lighter. He starts nodding his head and tapping the beat with a leather hand on the leather-covered steering wheel. He’s screaming down the streets, the tyres noisy over the cobbles. I hold onto the door handle with one hand and my little pack on my lap with the other. I wonder whether the pack might have some airbag effect. He’s humming and smoking and tapping and ashing out the window in a frenetic demonstration of how laid-back he is. He shouts something through the music and smoke and din. All I catch is that he’s taking drum lessons ‘to get’—I watch his mouth—‘better rhythm’.