Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [33]
‘Are you closing up now?’ I ask. ‘Should I go?’
She smiles and pats the air with a pink plastic hand. ‘You’re all right,’ she says. ‘We’re the last people left, so we might as well leave together when I’m done.’
She starts spraying the tables with perfumed ammonia. I turn back to the film. It shows footage of the Stasi mortuary in Leipzig—bodies on slabs, including that of a young man with no apparent injuries. It switches to an interview with a worker at the Southern General Cemetery who explains that, ‘about twenty or thirty times’ he’d had a call to leave a certain oven open ‘so that the Stasi could do their business’. The man looks uncomfortable, but he also shrugs as if to say, ‘it was just my job’. The voice-over comments that some thirty urns were found at the Leipzig Stasi offices, unlabelled and unclaimed. I wonder whether Miriam knows this. I think I should call her.
The next item is an interview with a man with neat hair and a red moustache who was a Stasi psychologist. He is accounting for the willingness of people to inform on their countrymen, which he calls ‘an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing’. He doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘It comes down to something in the German mentality,’ he says, ‘a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.’
Stuff like that. There’s a cough behind me.
‘Of course I lived normally,’ the cleaning woman says. I turn around. She has a smoker’s lined face and hollow-chested thinness. ‘I conformed, just like everybody else. But it’s not true to say the GDR was a nation of seventeen million informers. They were only two in a hundred.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and then I’m stumped. Even with one informer for every fifty people, the Stasi had the whole population covered.
She gives up on me. ‘Can’t get these tables clean,’ she says, and turns back to her work.
When she finishes we start moving out through Mielke’s private quarters, his bathroom and his office. She locks the doors behind us as we go. ‘You know, there’s no real unity in this country,’ she says, ‘even after seven years. I don’t feel like I belong here at all. Did you know that in the suburb of Kreuzberg in West Berlin they wanted the Wall back! To protect them from us!’ She lights a cigarette. ‘Can you understand this German thinking?’
I hope it’s a rhetorical question. All I understand is that it only took forty years to create two very different kinds of Germans, and that it will be a while before those differences are gone.
We pass a toilet with ‘H’ for Herren on it. ‘They only needed a men’s bathroom,’ she says. ‘Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a Männerklub.’
She puts her head into a small room for a sentry. ‘Have a look at this,’ she says. Over the desk a calendar is still on January 1990. ‘No, over there.’ She points to the other wall, behind the desk. There’s a smudge on the paintwork. ‘That’s where the fella would have leant back on his chair and rested his fat greasy head on the wall.’ She’s disgusted. ‘Won’t come off.’
We move on, down the zigzag stairs past Marx and his billowing hair. The only sound is of our footfalls, and the only light now is from over the entrance downstairs. ‘Do you get spooked here, by yourself at night?’ I ask.
‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘but it was much worse back when we had just opened. At that time the whole building smelled—we cleaned and cleaned and we just couldn’t get rid of the smell.’
She stops walking and turns her face up to me. Even in the half-light her eyes are cornflower blue and pretty. She winces. ‘Do you know it?’ She does not wait for an answer. ‘It was the smell,’ she says, ‘of old men.’
8
Telephone Calls
The phone rings. I steel myself for another Stasi man. But it’s a woman’s voice.
‘Anna, Anna