Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [126]
I don’t say anything for a moment. Then I ask her what she thinks happened that day in the cell.
‘Charlie was stubborn. I know from when he was in custody before, that he would refuse to co-operate—to speak or to go out into the exercise pen. I think maybe he wouldn’t answer them or something when they came to his cell in the morning, and they roughed him up and he hit his head against the wall. Then they probably left him in the cell and when they came back at lunchtime they found him where he’d fallen. He was most likely dead, or dying, and that’s why they called in the other guards then too.’
She stubbs out a cigarette, and keeps stubbing the butt.
She is probably right about what happened. But will digging him up reveal anything? Perhaps it might prove whether he died by hanging or not, but at whose hands? Or, if they cremated him as the file indicates, there will be nothing in the coffin that can tell her what happened and she will still be here, with only the frail comfort of theories.
For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know, is the need for justice. The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over.
We talk into the evening, and eat tomato and basil, prosciutto and melon. Miriam speaks of friends, but she has no partner in life. ‘Too hard,’ she says sadly, ‘to explain everything.’ I ask her about her family. Her mother, she says, is a social climber—‘you’d think that would have been hard under socialism, but she managed to give it a go!’ She laughs. Her sister is a dentist. ‘You would have seen her office downstairs in this building.’ I am glad her sister is close.
‘And your father?’
‘My father was a doctor,’ she says, ‘a very kind man. He died in the early ’70s, relatively young.’ She taps the cigarette packet on the table. ‘Of lung cancer.’
‘Oh.’
‘But the thing about that is,’ she says as she exhales, ‘it doesn’t take very long at all.’
Through the double doors into the next room, my eyes catch a doll’s china stare—it is an old puppet in a white silky suit, hanging limbs akimbo from its crucifix of strings on the corner of a bookshelf.
Miriam asks me to stay, and insists on giving me her bed. I wake in the night and need water and air. On the way from the bathroom to the window over the heath I see her in the moonlight and stop. She is asleep on the floor of the living room, in loose white pyjamas with a blindfold across her eyes. Her neck is bent and her arms and legs are spreadeagled over a round flat cushion. She’s so slender and crumpled her whole body nearly fits onto it, strings cut, in the spotlight.
In the morning Miriam takes me to the station. To my relief I find a copy shop, so I can give Charlie’s poem back to her. She comes to the platform and waits till the train moves out, silent and slow. The girl opposite me lip-smacks her puppy; on the platform an older dog huffs and rearranges itself in jealousy. Then Miriam waves and walks away, straightbacked into the sunlight.
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going. We are quickly outside Leipzig, moving past maize and wheat and medieval-looking water towers near each station: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Bitterfeld, Wannsee. In one field there’s a scarecrow equipped for all comers in a black motorcycle helmet; behind him a parachutist looks for touchdown. Two boys in a dinghy sit among the reeds in this vast flat sea of improbable green, fishing.
I move back from the window