Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [14]
‘How about elevators?’ I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
‘Exactly,’ she replies, ‘I don’t like them much either.’
One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm up to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say ‘That’s outrageous’, or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs—it was an automatic flight reaction. Charlie came out to coax her back up. He was distraught. She surprised them both with her tics in the first years they were together.
All of a sudden I am very tired, as though my bones have gone soft. I look up and it is dark outside. I want someone to give her a rub. I want someone to give me a rub. I want the benevolent prison governess of TV land to have existed, I want the lesbian with the heart of gold to have protected the little girl, and I think of what is still to come.
When Miriam was released, in 1970, she was seventeen and a half. Her sister took her to a lake to bathe. The lifesaver asked her out but she was unable to respond. His name was Karl-Heinz Weber, but everyone called him Charlie. When Miriam didn’t answer, he pursued her through her sister. He thought she was so odd, and so quiet. He wanted to get to the bottom of it.
‘What were you like?’ I ask her.
‘Well, you’d really need to ask him that,’ she says. ‘He was the one who brought me round again.’ Miriam crosses the room to a worn suitcase, which spills her photographs onto the floor. She finds one of Charlie. It is of a man in his twenties, with light brown hair and a neat face, looking straight at the camera. He is positioned oddly close to the left-hand edge of the photo.
‘Oh, that’s because I cut myself out of it,’ Miriam says. Then she says, ‘That was our wedding photo.’ I want to ask but I sit tight.
Miriam and Charlie moved in together. Charlie had trained as a sports teacher, studying physical education and biology. In the GDR, sport was closely linked with politics. The government screened youngsters for their potential and fed them into training institutes for the glory of the nation.
‘Did he know about the doping?’ Children at sports schools were given hormones under the guise of vitamins. In a scandal that has come to light since the Wall fell, the pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned the little girls halfway into boys.
‘Yes, he knew from two different people about that. I remember he once told friends of ours to keep their daughter out of one of those institutes. But that wasn’t why he left teaching.’
In his early twenties, Charlie and a friend holidayed up on the Baltic Sea. When a Swedish boat came near the coast, they decided to swim out to it just to see how far they could get.
‘I don’t think they wanted to board it or anything,’ she says. ‘It was a bit provocative, but it was just a game.’
The authorities brought them in on suspicion of wanting to leave the country. That was the beginning of Charlie Weber’s pursuit by the Stasi.
Charlie didn’t feel that he could represent to his students the state that was doing this to him. He left teaching and started to write. He wrote articles for the underground satirical publication Eulenspiegel, and treatments for television programs. He had jobs as a line producer on films, and some work in the theatre. He wrote ‘a small book’, Miriam says, called Gestern Wie Heute (Yesterday, Like Today), ‘about the way that one dictatorship here is the same as another’. He sent it to West Germany where it was published.
‘After we started living together—me, an ex-criminal, and he under surveillance—they would come over and search the house from time to time,’ she says. ‘When our neighbour, an old woman, saw this happening she offered to keep a