Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [124]
Some of the men running the radio station are former Stasi informers, or, in one case, a former Stasi employee. This shocks me, but Miriam shrugs. ‘The old cadre are back in power,’ she says. She knows that one of them used to pass on listeners’ letters of complaint and comments to the Stasi, and he knows she knows. ‘He can’t look at me,’ she says. When she declined to make the Ostalgie program, he said to her, ‘You know what your problem is? Your problem is you don’t identify with the culture of the station.’ Miriam rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness of the former Stasi man recycling Stasi threats, substituting ‘station’ for ‘nation’. The program was made by someone else and broadcast anyway, feeding into the creeping nostalgia that, here, takes the place of a sense of belonging.
The put-put of Vespa motorbikes reaches us from below. The sound makes me think of beachy places, although we are landlocked deep in central Europe. I ask her what Charlie was like.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I haven’t sorted all my pictures yet—they are still in that old suitcase.’ She gets up and goes into her bedroom. I understand perfectly the impulse not to file him away under plastic in an album, or in a frame. And, suddenly, it is clear to me why the new museum was so irritating. Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over.
Miriam shows me a couple of old black and white photographs, and a Kodachrome colour snap like those from my childhood. I get a shock. ‘This is you?’ I ask. The photograph is of a young couple seated at a table. I recognise him from the last time: clear-faced, square-jawed Charlie. He’s wearing a top hat but no shirt, larking around. I would not have recognised Miriam. The girl is exquisite, extraordinarily beautiful. She is thin and smooth-skinned, with a chiselled face and a breathtaking smile. She is utterly natural, but she could have come out of any magazine, then or now. ‘That was after our wedding,’ Miriam says. ‘We went and had lunch.’ I remember the torn photo. I’m glad she has let herself remain in existence in this one.
There’s another picture of the two of them, she with her arms around him, looking at the camera. She is an apparition, a naughty angel caught flying over the Wall, put in a cage, and then let out, here with her beloved. In the third, a younger Miriam stares solemnly at the camera from under a fringe. She looks about twelve.
‘That one was just when I got out of prison,’ she says. ‘My grandmother made me that dress.’
‘But you look so young,’ I say.
‘I was, I guess,’ she says. ‘I was seventeen and a half.’ I look at her. She has no vanity, she has expected no reaction to the beauty in the pictures. The sun slants in, painting half her face golden. I would never have seen this girl in her.
‘There’s this too,’ she says. ‘I thought of it last time you were here, and I found it afterwards.’ She passes me a piece of paper folded into quarters. ‘I don’t think I’d looked through that stuff since Charlie died, actually.’ She breathes in. ‘It was hard for me to dig up.’ The page is yellow with age and slightly torn. On one side there are rows of handwriting in pencil crossed out and started again, on the back a clean version. ‘It’s a poem of Charlie’s,’ she says.
‘Can I make a copy?’
‘Please, just take it,’ she says, ‘Send it back to me sometime.’
‘What was he like?’ I ask again.
She flicks a lighter for flame, and leans back in her chair. ‘Well, he was a sensitive person,’ she says. ‘He was quite reserved—he noticed things. He had a good sense of humour, but underneath, I’d say, he took things to heart.’ She looks out the window, at the sky moving past. ‘He was individualistic—and an only child. That’s why it is so hard for my parents-in-law.’
Miriam gets up and collects a bowl of cherries from the kitchen. ‘Our friends thought our marriage was a catastrophe!’ she laughs, sitting down again. ‘But for us it was ideal.’
‘Why did they think that?’
‘Each of