Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [110]
The morning I leave I try again and the phone rings out. The answering machine isn’t even connected any more.
When they come to collect me I do recognise Frederica—she is a beautiful Venezuelan with a mole at the corner of her mouth and together she and Uwe are electric. He drives calmly to Tegel, solicitous of a world that has, finally, looked after him.
It took nine months for my mother to die, and each day except for the last three she was conscious. Conscious that the days were, as they say, numbered, and that the number was not a big one. And the feeling of being robbed of all the things you were going to do in the future, but seeing at the same time that they were not important, it was simply the future itself, a bigger number, that was.
After she died, grief came down on me like a cage. It was another eighteen months before I could focus on anything outside an immediate small area of sadness, or could imagine myself into anyone else’s life. All up it was nearly three years before I came back to Berlin.
25
Berlin, Spring 2000
Berlin is green, a perfumed city. I realise I have never been here in full spring. Even from my old nightly flying television excursions into summer, I could never have imagined this. The trees are huge and lush, light green. Sunlight filters through them, soft and scented over the pavements and parks, squares and schools and cemeteries. Outside my windows, the chestnuts are magical. They bear white flowers in upright stacks—candelabra produced by a trick of nature. Their heady sweetness floats in the air like the memory of kinder times.
I contacted the rental agency. In a piece of freaky good luck my old apartment had, suddenly, become available. It was about to be renovated, so the students had left. ‘Because of its pre-renovation condition,’ the agency wrote, ‘we make no assurances that the apartment is suitable, or, indeed, liveable.’ I’ll take my chances, I thought. I bought stationery, bed linen and a coffee maker, and moved in.
I walk through it now, folding and unfolding a copy of the letter. I sent it from Australia to her old address.
Dear Miriam,
It is some time ago now, but you might remember we spent an afternoon and evening together. Afterwards, I tried to write your story, but found I needed to explain other things around it, so the work took a course of its own. I wrote about the GDR and about the Stasi, and then I spoke with other people—some who had been followed by the Stasi, and some who had worked for them. I was trying, I think, to get a perspective on this lost world, and the kinds of courage in it.
I’m coming back to Berlin, and was wondering if we might meet again. I’d like to ask you whether you have got any further with the DA in Dresden, and whether the puzzle women in Nuremberg have discovered any news about Charlie. I want to make sure, too, that I have everything right.
I am sorry I have been such a long time coming back to you. I have been working on this only on and off.
I’m looking forward to summer in Berlin, and, perhaps, to visiting Leipzig…
No reply came, but the letter didn’t return to me either. Before I left, I emailed Julia too. She wrote back in English:
Hi Anna
Good to hear from you! I am in San Francisco—I left Berlin 8 months ago for the States. I was just living with too many things from my past that could come find me there.
I am ‘doing great’ as they say here. I am working in a feminist bookshop near Berkeley, and have made some friends. We went on a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march recently, something that made me feel real positive, and far away from Thüringen and everything that happened here. They honour their victims here—really, everyone seems to have a story of something that happened to them. I’m sure it could go too far, but for me, now, it is a good thing.
I am foreign here and speak with an accent but am much more at home than in my own country! Funny,