Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [17]
‘Do I look insane to you?’ the lawyer said, very cold. ‘Do I? You don’t truly think I am going to trot down there and ask what happened, do you? For that you had better find yourself another fool, young lady.’
Miriam is upset again. Here, across the desk, was the face of the system itself: a mockery of a lawyer, making a mockery of her.
On Tuesday 21 October 1980, a Stasi man came to the door to tell Miriam that the corpse had been released from forensics, and that the ministry would like to be of service to her with the funeral arrangements. Miriam said she could manage on her own.
‘Of course, Mrs Weber,’ the man said, ‘but do you have a particular funeral parlour in mind?’
She told him to go to hell, and found a smallish funeral establishment. The woman behind the desk was old and kind. She said, ‘You know, Mrs Weber, you would really be better off going to the Southern Cemetery, because they will organise the whole thing from start to finish, and fill in all the forms on your behalf and so on. It would mean much less running around for you.’ Miriam didn’t think anything of it. She left, and went to the Southern Cemetery offices. She knocked on the door, and was told to come in.
‘You’re late—we were expecting you earlier,’ the man behind the desk said.
‘What? Who told you I was coming? I didn’t know myself I was coming here until half an hour ago.’
‘Uhh, I don’t know, don’t remember.’
First of all, he suggested cremation instead of burial.
Miriam said no.
Well, actually, they said, it was going to have to be cremation, because they had no coffins left.
Miriam bluffed: ‘I will bring you a coffin.’
The man left the room for a moment, then reappeared. ‘Today, Mrs Weber,’ he said, ‘is your lucky day. We have one last coffin left.’ Unfortunately, however, he added, it was not going to be possible to lay out the body for mourners to pay their last respects. He gave no reason.
‘If that’s the way it is,’ Miriam said, ‘I’m going to another funeral establishment and another cemetery.’
‘No, no, no, Mrs Weber, no need for that, we’ll see what we can do about a laying-out then.’
The day before the funeral Miriam and a friend took some of the wreaths she had received to the gravesite—there were too many to carry them all the next day. She noticed a fellow standing around, smoking, doing nothing much, watching.
A woman in the uniform of a cemetery official came up to her. ‘Are you with the Weber funeral?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I just wanted to say, don’t you get too upset tomorrow if there’s no laying-out, because it may just be that there isn’t.’
Miriam got her in full view, the smoker within earshot. ‘Let me tell you now, if there is no laying-out, there will be no funeral. I will call the whole thing off with everyone standing around here—I will make the kind of ruckus you have never seen. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’
The next day there was a laying-out. Miriam says the coffin was far away, behind a thick pane of glass, and the whole thing was lit from below with purple neon light. ‘Even in that terrible light, I could still see his head injuries. And I could see his neck—they’d forgotten to cover it up. There were no strangulation marks, nothing.’ She looks across at me. ‘You’d think they would make sure to cover his neck if they wanted to stick with their story that he hanged himself, wouldn’t you?’ From there the coffin was sunk to another level and reappeared on a trolley wheeled by cemetery employees to the gravesite. All these details are slowed down in time, stuck in the amber of memory. In the minutes between the coffin sinking from view and re-emerging, she says, there would have been time for a body to be taken out.
‘A great many people were at the funeral,’ Miriam tells me, ‘but I think there were even more Stasi