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By Root 500 0

countryside again. The shops are open or closed, aproned women sweep footpaths where people sit drinking coffee, mothers run from under the umbrellas after straying children, road workers lean around in overalls. This is the world unfrozen. It’s black and white and snowing on my screen, but I know that it is really the bright yellow of rape, the green haziness of wheat, and the heavier green of summer oaks lining the road. Occasionally we stop at traffic lights, level with the hooded eye. Then on and on, moving magically through village after thawed village, places I have never been and may never go.

In my sleep I continue soundlessly through the countryside, exhilarated by the wind on my skin. Suddenly I am joined by another woman flying at the same height. There is a blur where her face should be, but that doesn’t bother me at all. She is naked, apart from pink rubber gloves. Her nipples are puckered a deeper pink and her pubic hair is luscious gold. I’m startled that I’m not alone in the air, that she’s naked. ‘The gloves, of course, are for driving,’ she says. I nod, and I look at my hands. I have no gloves. Then I look at my body and see that I am naked too. My feeling of wellbeing evaporates. I glance down over the main street of a village—there are people beneath us. The church bell starts to ring, it rings and rings and will not stop and soon I know I’ll drop—I have no driving gloves!—and they’ll all see me, fallen and naked and pointless.

I wake up to get the phone. The clock says 2.30 am—heart attack hour, the hour of bad news from home. Or another Stasi man? Telephone harassment is common, but I can’t be high on their list. It must be the fifteenth ring by the time I find the black phone, the duvet wrapped around me.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello my friend.’ A lubricated voice from my local pub, coming down the line through a mouth with a pipe in it, a thick Saxon accent and a beard. It’s Klaus. By the sound of it he’s holding his chin up with the receiver.

‘How’d you pull up after last time?’ he asks, ‘Feel like another drinking session?’

‘Klaus, it’s 2.30 in the morning.’

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘this time the other night you were just getting into it.’

I have no wish to be reminded of other nights. In my view one of the conventions among decent drinking partners is that where there isn’t actual amnesia it should be simulated. The other night we filled the air with words and smoke that are all gone now. My only memory is of the hangover I took with me to Leipzig.

‘I had a big day.’

‘It’s nice here,’ he says. ‘They’re playing our song.’

This is not a come-on. He means they’re playing his song.

Klaus Renft is the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc. He lives around the corner from me in a one-room apartment lined with videos and posters of his band, the Klaus Renft Combo. There are always sports bags full of beer and every kind of smoking equipment known to man. We are both regulars at the local pub, which we use, effectively, as a living room. The pub sound system is pumping out the plaintive and beautiful song ‘Hilflos’, re-recorded on their recent comeback album.

‘You still there?’ he says.

‘Yep. And I’m staying here.’

‘Sweet dreams then, kiddo,’ he slurs. When he hangs up the receiver misses its cradle and dangles upside-down in the air. I take the phone back to bed. I lie listening to ‘Hilflos’, and then I hang up.

I wake to the phone ringing. It’s morning.

‘Guten Tag. You put an advertisement in the Märkische Allgemeine.’

‘Yes. Thank you for calling. I am looking to speak with people who worked for the ministry, in order to be able to represent what it was like. I’m writing about life in the GDR.’

There is a pause. ‘The notice said you were Australian.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are Australian?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are from Australia?’

‘That’s right.’

In the GDR a great swathe of geography remained theoretical because people couldn’t travel outside the Eastern Bloc. If easterners thought about Australia at all, it was as an imaginary place to go in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.

‘You are writing in English