Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [119]
Herr Raillard misreads my face. ‘Yes, it’s a lot of work, as you can see,’ he says.
The next room is similar. This person, also on a break, seems to be sorting the material from the sacks first into cut-off cardboard boxes and then all over the desk. A woman’s eye from a torn photograph looks out at me from one of the boxes; on the table I glimpse the name of the writer Lutz Rathenow on a shred of paper. There’s a roll of double-sided sticky tape near the chair and a partially completed page in front of it: a corner, and the left-hand edge.
In the next room the pieces are even smaller. ‘It’s painstaking work,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘the most pieces in one page so far has been ninety-eight.’ This person has nearly completed a sheaf of pages that rest in an open manila folder. The pages are all there, piled on top of each other except for a piece or pieces missing in the middle, making a neat hole. ‘It takes brute strength to tear that many pages at once.’ Herr Raillard shakes his head. ‘That Stasi man would have hardly been able to move his fingers the next day.’
On the way to meet the workers, I ask Herr Raillard about security. He tells me that everyone who works here, including the cleaning staff, is checked to make sure they have not had any involvement with the Stasi in the past, even though they are all westerners. He says his workers are told not to speak about the content of the files they piece together. Sometimes this needs to be stressed. ‘If they find, say, a file on an important West German politician, then I’ll go in and have a word and remind them not to mention it at all,’ he says. I ask about electronic surveillance of the rooms, because I imagine there are people out there who would pay a high price to stop some of this information coming to light. ‘No, no,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘sometimes they sit two to a room. But that’s more to alleviate boredom than anything else. And I make sure I put the alarm on when I leave of an evening.’ This is not what I expected. It is friendly and small and low-key. It is something between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives.
Herr Raillard introduces me and leaves. There are three women and two men sitting at a table with fruit juice, biscuits and a thermos of coffee on it. They have left room for me at the head of the table. The two women on my right are both plump, made-up and middle-aged. On my left there’s a young woman with freckles and shoulder-length dark hair, next to her a small brown-haired man with glasses, and at the end a large gentle-looking fellow with fair hair and eyes as blue as marbles. I ask them how they go about their work each day.
The furthest middle-aged woman says, ‘It’s really just like a puzzle at home. You start with the corners, and fill in the rest from the shape of the edges. We get clues too from the sort of paper it is, the typeface or handwriting and so on.’
‘Do you do puzzles at home?’ I ask her.
‘Yes!’ she says, ‘I must be crazy.’ They all laugh.
The woman next to her started here only two months ago. She has painted nails and a gap between her two front teeth. ‘They opened a sack to show me and I saw the really tiny pieces inside and I thought, Oh my God, I can’t do that.’ The sacks are over a metre tall and paunchy as a person. ‘But every sack is different,’ she says, ‘and I have to say there are things that are interesting.’
The dark man appears to be the most senior person here. He has deep-set eyes and a calm voice. The others listen closely when he speaks. He says, ‘Sometimes the satisfaction is in knowing that when people find out what happened to them it might give them some peace of mind—why they lost their place at the university, or what happened to the uncle who disappeared or whatever. It gives those affected an insight into their own lives.’
The others pour coffee and pass long-life milk down the table. I imagine getting more news about myself from a file. You