Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [21]
Inside, the lights are on.
A voice shrieks, ‘Don’t be frightened! Don’t be frightened!’
I am terrified.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ says the voice.
The pump in my chest pumps, hard. I drop my pack.
A woman up a ladder holds a large screwdriver. It’s Julia, from whom I rent. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says, turning towards me and lowering the screwdriver.
‘That’s OK,’ I say slowly, puffed.
‘I know exactly how it is,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you just want to get home and be by yourself.’ That would probably be, I think, because I live by myself. I don’t say anything.
‘I’m just unscrewing here,’ she says. ‘I’m taking these bookshelves, I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I need them at my place, there are none there.’
I have been living in this apartment for six months, and I am still not used to this. I think it must stop at some point, and I hope it’s while I still have a little furniture left. Julia worked at the rental agency I visited when I was looking for a place. She offered to sublet the apartment she’d been living in until her lease ran out. It had been a share house, but everyone was moving. The apartment was much too big for me, but it was in the old east where I wanted to be, and I could afford it.
And it was furnished if, as Julia warned me, ‘only sparsely’. This is even truer now.
I know Julia is concerned about how long it is taking her to move out, about the steady denuding of the apartment. I have comforted her before, saying all I need is a bed, a desk, a chair and a coffee pot. I meant it at the time, but two days ago when I found a pile of screwed up papers and old tissues and cassette wrappers I’d thrown under the desk where the waste-paper basket used to be I thought I must say something to her. Only right now I’m too too tired.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asks.
‘Leipzig.’
‘Ah,’ she says, ‘where it all started.’
‘Julia, I’m sorry, but I’m knackered. I need to go to bed. How about a cup of coffee some time? Why don’t you come over?’ During the day, I think.
She says she will, but we don’t make a time because Julia regards fixed appointments as intolerable constraints on her freedom. Which may account for how she lit upon this hour of the night for some home renovation.
I fall into bed and she continues her nocturnal disassembly so quietly I don’t hear a sound when she leaves with the boards and L-hooks and screws balanced in the basket of the bicycle she must have carried down the stairs.
In the morning the first thing I notice is that I can see my breath. One day without heating and the air here congeals with cold. My head is clear, but yesterday feels like a different country. The second thing I notice is that opposite the bed, where there were two blue milk crates that served as a bedside table-cum-dressing stool, is a freshly exposed piece of brown linoleum.
When I moved in I was pleased by the spareness of the place. I had two bedrooms, a huge living room with windows at tree height looking into the park, and a kitchen on the other side looking over the yard. This apartment was converted under the Communists into a place of concrete render on the outside and, on the inside, practical lino brownness, washed and waxed and charmless. But it was summer then and to me it was a place of air and light, with green on both sides.
I soon realised everything here was either broken or about to be. Each item had started life as a utilitarian piece of furniture in an eastern home well over a decade ago. After the Wall fell the students had moved in, and nothing that remains was good enough even for them to take when they left. The couch in the living room has developed lumps and is covered in a dark cloth I fear to disturb; the cord for the kitchen blind is permanently tethered to a plastic chair in order to stop it crashing down; my mattress springs are inching their way through the ticking;