Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [104]
Torsten is not sure whether he remembers meeting his parents for the first time. ‘I’ve seen the photos,’ he says, ‘and it’s hard to distinguish what I remember from what I’ve since seen. I know from being told that I addressed them with the formal “Sie” because I didn’t know what a parent was. Sometimes I have an inkling of the meeting, in the dark past like a fata morgana, but not consciously so, no.’ His voice is very soft.
I want to know if he thinks his mother made the right decision not to come to him, so I ask him directly. He is relaxed. ‘I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision,’ he says, ‘or looked at them like the Stasi did, as criminals or anything like that—quite the opposite: I admire them for what they did.’ He seems to have learned to contain both longing and regret. ‘It doesn’t occur to me,’ he says, ‘to think that perhaps they might have done things differently and things might have worked out differently.’
‘But then again,’ I offer, ‘I suppose one visit wouldn’t have made much difference—’ I wasn’t trying to take any of her heroism away. I was trying to find a way of thinking about her choice that wasn’t such a drastic abandonment of him. But he gently cuts me off and thinks of it from his mother’s point of view. ‘Well yes,’ he says, ‘but if you think someone is dying you probably want to see them just one more time before they do. That would make a difference to you, even if it doesn’t change anything.’
Torsten supplements his invalid pension by working with bands in the electronic music scene. It is something he has done, in one form or another, since before the Wall fell. Back then, because of his invalid status, he was permitted to travel to the west once a fortnight. He would be commissioned by rock musicians in the GDR to smuggle back spare parts for them. Torsten was well known to the border guards, and was searched ‘about 90 per cent of the time’, he says, smiling. ‘I was frequently caught, but luckily the consequences weren’t so bad for me. They did accuse me though, of “dangerous trade with musical instruments and musical electronics,”’ he laughs.
Despite his family history, the Stasi went after Torsten to see if he would inform for them. First, they gathered compromising material on his smuggling. Then they brought him in for questioning. Torsten went mum, so the same material that would have been used to pressure him into informing became instead evidence of his unsuitability for it. A final report of 17 June 1985 is two sentences long. ‘R. is not suited for an unofficial collaboration with the Ministry. (R. participates in criminal activity).’ It was clearly not an option to write, ‘R. refuses, on principle, to collaborate.’
I ask Torsten whether he thinks of his life as having been shaped by the Wall.
‘I find it hard to tell exactly, in what sense my life has been shaped by the Wall—how it might have been different otherwise,’ he says, ‘but that it has been, I have no doubt.’
He has learned not to play the ‘if only’ game: if only there had been no Wall I might not have relapsed; I might have grown up with my parents; they might not have gone to prison; I might have had a healthy body, a job, a partner. He shifts in his seat to look at me straight on. ‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.’
‘And how do you?’ I am facing him, looking at his twisted body, and listening to him breathe through the tubes they placed inside him.
‘Well, it is an issue for me. I think life can end much too quickly, so I have no long-term aspirations. Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today. I have no patience for saving