Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  She never got on with school and left to become an apprentice at a textile factory in a town just outside Berlin, which improved things because she could move out of the family home and live in a hostel. It was OK at first, but the boredom was like acid. She had a bad temper, and sometimes got into fights. One day some old piss schnapps cabbage man called her into an office and gave her an official warning. She already had a mark against her because she didn’t want to join the Free German Youth.

  Every weekend she would take the train back to the city. The first time she saw punks, it was amazing, like being electrocuted, jolted out of her dead skin. A couple sitting in a square in Friedrichshain, like two peacocks. They just didn’t give a shit. The boy had a leather jacket and his hair was spiked up. The girl wore a dog collar and her head was shaved so that only a sort of lock or tuft hung down at the front. Monika herself had—you couldn’t call it a haircut. At first she didn’t even know there was music to go with the clothes. She sort of pieced the whole thing together. Someone had to show her pictures of the bands in a smuggled West German magazine.

  She didn’t have to think twice. She hacked off her hair, dyed the tufts with watercolors and spiked them up with soap. Then she went back to look for the punks. Why not? She had nothing else going on. Even then it wasn’t as if she was really doing anything. Taking the train, drinking, wandering around, drinking more, hoping for something to happen. But that was all anyone was doing. It was what there was to do. Soon she knew most of the crew, at least by sight. The peacock couple, everyone. The boys from Köpenick, the idiot with the army greatcoat who stabbed his own leg for a dare. It wasn’t such a big scene. Most people just went by nicknames. Ratte, Pankow, the girl everyone called Major. Bored kids. She went to a party where a band played in the attic of someone’s house. Fifty of them in there, throwing themselves around, drinking and dancing and smoking cigarettes. It was the greatest evening of her life.

  All they wanted was to jump around. You’d think it wasn’t a big deal, but it sent the piss schnapps cabbage men crazy. They thought the punks were agents of the CIA. It was the way they looked, mostly. By then lots of people had long hair, but this was something else. Poison from the West, a threat to good order. Not that you could get any of the real punk clothes unless you knew someone who could cross over. They had to improvise, make studs and patches and buttons themselves out of whatever was available. They sat on park benches in their homemade outfits. You couldn’t stay still ten minutes without the cops coming.

  At the factory she got another talking to, and they told her someone else needed her place at the hostel. It was a punishment, of course, they didn’t really bother hiding it. What could she do? Better to lie down on the track than go back to live with her doormat of a mother and her piss schnapps cabbage dad. There seemed to be no third option, so she went into the city and got fucked up on paint thinner and tried to shake her head off her shoulders, pogoing in a courtyard behind a church in Prenzlauer Berg as a band thrashed cheap guitars and a singer rhymed shit and boredom have no borders with everyone is taking orders. Two cool girls were dancing next to her, jerking their heads and punching the air. When some limp-dick tried to hit on one of them, Monika gave him a shove, sent him sprawling. He was drunk and he got up and came at her, it looked like he was going to take a swing, but all three of them faced him down, told him to fuck off, which he did, grumbling in an old-mannish tone that made them double up with laughter. The last they saw he was passed out in a corner with a lapful of vomit.

  We need a drummer, said the girl with the bleached crop. She told her she couldn’t play drums. That’s OK, she said. It doesn’t matter. And just like that, a third option opened up. The girls, Katja and Elli, were living black in a place on Linienstrasse, with a rotating cast of boyfriends to carry furniture and fix things. It was a tenement that had officially been declared unfit for habitation—on one side there was nothing but rubble, on the other a building whose frontage had collapsed, a sort of skeleton that no one had got round to demolishing—but several of the apartments were occupied by young people who didn’t have a hope of getting on the list for official housing. That’s where they took her to jam, in this building whose frontage was pocked with thousands of wartime bullet holes, and it was sort of understood, without her needing to ask, that she was going to move in. The equipment was set up in their living room. The guitar and vocal plugged into a single amp. She bashed away at someone’s borrowed kit. She didn’t know what to do, so at first she did everything at the same time, hit with the sticks and stamped on the pedal, making a big lumbering primitive noise. She would get better, but not much.

  Then it was the three of them. Katja sang and Elli played guitar. Monika had never met anyone like them, girls from art school who spent their days making things, as if it were a job. They weren’t ashamed of being different. They laughed at the idea that they could ever end up as net curtain twitchers, disgusting baby factories doing the ironing while some man drank himself stupid in front of the TV. Katja declaimed her crazy poetry into the microphone, all this gothic stuff about blood and graves and ravens, while Elli threw poses and windmilled her arm as she slammed down on the strings.

  Elli was shy, except when she played guitar. Katja was a social force. She seemed to have an almost-supernatural ability to make things happen. Whatever you needed, whatever plot you’d just hatched in the bar, she would be there with an idea, a connection. It would turn out she’d recently talked to someone or seen exactly the thing you needed discarded in the street, or bumped into someone from the old days—Katja had old days, it was one of the sophisticated things about her—a guy who liked her and could be persuaded to help. One day she breezed in and told them she’d got the band a gig. She said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but to Monika the prospect was terrifying. Getting up in front of people, making a spectacle of herself. Of course all three of them were nervous. They all dressed to kill, or as near as they could get, Elli with her cropped hair freshly colored orange, Katja in what Monika thought of as her moth-eaten-bride look, lots of eyeliner, an old black dress and a shawl. Monika couldn’t remember what she wore. Why would she? She was the drummer. She sat at the back.

  In the GDR you needed permission from the authorities to play music in front of an audience. You had to audition for a committee. The official pop musicians were all balding men who’d done their military service and trained at the conservatory. Of course no one was ever going to give the green light to some dirty punk girls, so they had no option, really. The gig was a secret, or as much of a secret as something like that can be.

  So there were official bands and unofficial bands, but few as unofficial as Die Gläsernen Frauen. They’d needed a name, and of course Katja had one. The Transparent Women. There had once been a transparent woman and a transparent man, anatomical models made out of some kind of see-through plastic, technological marvels of the nineteen-twenties that children were taken to see on school trips to the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. It was a good name, Monika thought, a defiant name. They wrote a song:

  You want to look?

  Go ahead!

  Go ahead!

  Are you happy now?

  The concert wasn’t much. A couple of dozen people in a dusty room, the cellar of a building where some friend of Katja’s worked or lived, Monika wasn’t exactly clear. They borrowed another amp and found a drum kit that was a little better than the first, though one of the heads was patched with tape, and the cymbals were the kind with leather straps, made to be used in an orchestra or carried in a marching band. The kit’s owner had hung them awkwardly from a pair of homemade stands. There wasn’t a stage, they just walked out into silence, some scattered clapping. And then they attacked. One two three four, into their first number, which was just Katja shouting “Stupid bear! Stupid bear!” while Elli played some chords she’d copied from a Ramones song. Everyone was surprise
d, of course—three girls playing instruments—but soon they were dancing. Katja and Elli’s art school friends, the kids from the park. A few apprentices from the meatpacking plant hung at the edges while the punks fought in the mosh pit. She battered her kit and it sounded like dead bodies hitting the ground and the guitar and the vocal fed back so the whole thing was just a mess of distortion, you couldn’t say what it was, or if it was music exactly, but it had something. Energy. Life.

  After that there was another gig, and another. One of Katja’s boyfriends had a van and drove them to Leipzig, where they were supposed to play at a sort of festival with three other acts, all totally illegal of course, and when they arrived, the police had got wind of it and the venue was locked up. They slept on the floor of someone’s apartment and drove back home.

  Of course the factory hadn’t lasted, but she needed to do something, it was illegal not to have a job, and after a lot of hassle she found one in the neighborhood, at a little workshop where they electroplated bathroom fixtures. One evening, as she was sweeping up, her last task before leaving, a man in a roll neck sweater let himself in through the door and stood watching her. He had that look. They all had it, that unclean cleanliness.

  He offered her a cigarette. He was older than her, but not by much. In some places, he would have been considered handsome. What are you doing here, he said. This place is not for you. Like a lover, a leading man in a movie. It was absurd. He told her she ought to travel. She had never seen this man in her life before.

  What did he want? Nothing bad. He wanted her to be able to stretch her creative wings. He did a little drumming mime. He swept his hair back from his face and lit a cigarette, doing some kind of cool cat business with his lighter. He said he had a car outside, could he give her a ride home? No? Well then, he could take her out instead. He would buy her a drink, hear about her big dreams. She was a girl with big dreams, he could tell. She wanted nothing to do with him. Everything about him was wrong. Go away, she said, but he wouldn’t stop talking. Finally she waved the broom, made as if she were going to hit him with it. He laughed. OK, OK, holding up his hands. He didn’t take her seriously at all. I left you something, he said. In your locker.

  When she was sure he’d gone, she checked. Her little lock was still attached, but inside was something she hadn’t put there. A record. It was an LP by an all-girl band from London. She knew them. She had a tape—maybe Elli had copied it from one of her friends—with a couple of their songs on it. They were good, but this album had a sort of soft-porn cover, the three band members topless and covered in mud, like sexy savages. It was supposed to be shocking. As a present from that guy it was just sleazy. He knew so much about her taste and at the same time he’d found a way to leer at her. She thought about throwing the record away, but despite the shitty cover, the band was good, and if she decided not to keep it she could swap it for something, so she put it in her bag and took it home. The way she thought about it, if that asshole wanted to give her a record, it was his problem.

  He left it two weeks. Long enough for her to think he’d got the message. He made her jump, of course. He was that type. You could go to music school, he said, leaning out of a car window. Another man was driving, matching her pace as she walked home from work. You could get some time in a recording studio, whatever you want. She could do this, she should do that. She told him to stick his studio up his ass and he made a sad clown face. Honey, don’t be like that. You ought to be sweet to me. You wouldn’t want anything to go wrong in your life. You wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

  You tell them to go away but it’s not like they give in. They don’t say OK, no problem, sorry to have bothered you. He gave her a time, an address, held out a piece of paper with the details. When she wouldn’t take it, he finally stopped the car and came after her. He blocked her path and stuffed the paper into the front pocket of her jeans, pulling her close to him and grinding his knuckles against her belly. She would be there or else he would “spank her bottom.” Hearty chuckles as the car pulled away. When she got into work the next day, there were three more records in her locker. She left them where they were. She didn’t even want to touch them.

  She didn’t go to the meeting. She had what she thought of as a perfect excuse. The band was heading out on the road. Ten days of Katja singing better off dead than getting kicked in the head, Katja singing only if I’m dreaming can I say I’m free. Leipzig, Dresden, Halle. Barns and cellars and old factories. Fuck him, she thought. That pig didn’t know so very much about her if he didn’t know about the tour. In each place there were young people, floors and couches to crash on, hands to pass a bottle or a cigarette. So, yes, she felt hopeful. There were people like her. That didn’t mean their lives were “nice.” Or “liberating.” Mostly they were tired and scared. They were making do, getting wasted on whatever was to hand. There was always a bad atmosphere when DGF played, an edge of violence. Onstage in Dresden, someone threw a glass bottle at Elli, which hit her on the side of the head. She staggered, then went down on her hands and knees. Monika stopped playing, thinking she was badly hurt, but she was only trying to find the bottle to throw back.

  Monika didn’t tell the others about the man in the roll neck sweater. It wasn’t the sort of conversation you wanted to start about yourself. Rumors had a way of snowballing. It was on everybody’s minds, who might be working with the Stasi. Everyone knew someone who had been arrested, or gone to prison. If you said something odd or put someone else in danger, of course there was suspicion. People were just trying to protect themselves. The problem was how hard it was to untangle sinister causes from the ordinary muddle of people’s lives. Everyone borrowed or stole things or cheated on each other or got drunk and divulged secrets. Not all of it was motivated by the secret police. Like everyone, she was constantly revising a mental list of the people in her life she believed she could trust. Who was it safe to speak to? When was a conversation really private? A bass player in another band was given a prison sentence because he passed someone an environmental leaflet. Others had been charged with delinquency. There were definitely people in the scene who were giving information to the secret police.

  When they got back to Berlin, she knew there’d be a reckoning, but she didn’t think it would be so quick or brutal. When she went to work, her boss, a nice old man who’d never seemed to mind how she looked or where she spent her leisure time, told her that he was sorry but he couldn’t keep someone like her around anymore. She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Could she clear out her locker? Yes, he did mean right away. The records were still in there. She didn’t know what to do with them, so she stuffed them into a borrowed shopping bag along with the rest of the locker’s contents—her lunchbox, her spare clothes. And of course when she walked out onto the street, the man in the roll neck sweater was waiting with his smirking friend. Two junior piss schnapps cabbage men, leaning on their piss schnapps cabbage car. She tried to give him back the records. He’d had his fun, now he could leave her alone. This time he didn’t pretend to find her cute. Silly bitch, did she think she could just mess him around? He told her to get in the car. It was time she understood a few things.

  They drove for a short while and pulled into a courtyard, next to a delivery truck with a picture of fruit and vegetables on the side. A man in blue overalls was leaning on the hood. As they drew up, he ground out a cigarette with his boot. They took her from the car and told her to get in the back of the truck. She was confused and they were rough as they pushed her inside. She had a moment to see that the interior was divided into little windowless compartments, before she was shoved into one and the door locked behind her. She was left in complete darkness, sitting on some kind of stool. The engine started and she groped around to see if there was a bar or handle, something to hold on to.

  These things are easy enough to read about. Transported in total darkness, brought out into a punishingly bright place, ba
nks of neon strip lights trained down on a garage with reflective white walls. The transition from darkness to dazzling light, a shock designed to induce a physical crisis, to reduce the subject to a state of abjection, nothing but a half-blind animal, stunned and panicking.

  An uncertain number of uniformed men, a hand pushing down on the back of her head, forcing her to look at the patterned lino on the floor as they marched her along a corridor. There was a room. They were quick but thorough, photographing her, taking fingerprints. Another corridor. Lozenges, a pattern of lozenges, scuffed and worn, interlocking geometric shapes picked out in brown on a piss yellow background, ending at a gray cell door. It was actually a relief to be pushed inside. She sat down on a bench, or rather hovered over it with her arms braced, unable to relax. She felt as if she were still moving, still being dragged along. She tried to slow her breathing. Her chest was tight. She didn’t normally suffer from panic attacks, but something primitive had been activated, something that was causing her to bare her teeth and pant like an animal. In the cell there was only the bench and a lidless toilet. A low-wattage bulb in a mesh-covered ceiling fixture gave off a sickly yellow light.

  They didn’t leave her long. A pair of guards entered and told her to stand up. They were young, her own age, spotty-faced boys who couldn’t meet her eye. Another corridor, rows of identical cell doors. Who was behind all those doors? The interrogation room was furnished in the style of any other government office. A pair of wood-veneer desks were arranged in a T-shape. At the window hung a dirty lace curtain. The lace curtain was funny, she supposed. The roll neck man probably had a sow wife at home twitching one just like it as she spied on the neighbors.