Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [105]
I remark that for something so big, that shaped their lives so brutally, it’s hard now to find a trace of the Wall. I am about to say I think it’s odd to let everyone forget so quickly, when Torsten says, ‘I’m happy that it’s gone, and I’m happy too that there’s so little of it left to see. It would remind me that it could come back. That everything that’s happened might be reversed.’
‘But that wouldn’t be possible!’ I laugh.
He looks at me soberly. ‘But anything is possible,’ he says. ‘One can never say that something is not possible.’
His mother agrees. ‘Who would have thought that a wall could be built!’ she says. ‘That was also impossible! And who would have thought at the end that it might ever fall! That was also impossible!’
People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head. I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility.
Torsten offers to give me a lift to the station. Frau Paul kisses him and takes my hand with both of hers. Then she shrugs her shoulders. ‘That’s it,’ she says, as though, when she added up the parts of her life, it was a smallish thing.
Torsten’s car is an old-style BMW with a high seat custom-built behind the steering wheel. He puts on some music with a Latin beat, and it keeps strange, syncopated time with the windscreen wipers. We chat and he takes me past the station, nearly all the way to Alexanderplatz. Then he lets me out with a wave and drives on, crooked and crippled and living for the day.
24
Herr Bohnsack
I walk around to pick up my last Stasi man. In his street new tramlines are being laid, lengths of steel are strewn like licorice down the median strip. It’s lunchtime and the workers are nowhere to be seen. I ring the buzzer where it says ‘Bohnsack’. A man comes out putting on a smart tan overcoat. He’s tall and slightly stooped, thickset through the chest. His face is pleasant, with receding hair and full cheeks. He looks me straight in the eye and smiles a warm smile.
‘Let’s go to my local,’ he says.
The pub is a traditional Berlin Kneipe. It has a bar in dark wood with mirrors behind it, booth seats and lacy white curtains to shield people from the street. A shaft of light slips past them on an angle, slow afternoon light of lazy particles and beams. Two regulars watch their glasses. There are little pubs like this in both East and West Berlin, where everyone knows everyone else. I have occasionally walked in—for directions, or cigarettes—and each time I felt I had walked into someone’s living room uninvited. When a stranger enters, the hum of conversation breaks while people look up and hunch their shoulders. Here though, when the regulars see Herr Bohnsack, they nod. The publican smiles like a brother. ‘How are we?’ he asks, rubbing his hands together. ‘What it’ll be today then?’
‘We might go into the side room,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘if that’s all right. For a chat.’
‘Of course, of course.’ He shuffles out from behind the bar in his socks and slippers and shows us in. There are old advertisements for beer on the walls, pictures of glowing-cheeked maidens and horses and hops. I look at Herr Bohnsack. In the light from the windows at his back he seems to have a bit of a glow about him, too.
‘What can I get for the lady and the gentleman?’
‘I’ll have a wheat beer and a Korn,’ he says, ‘and you?’ It’s early. I order a beer and forgo the schnapps. Günter Bohnsack’s voice is deep and slightly slurred, like a person with ill-fitting