Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [36]
‘In English.’
‘I will meet with you,’ he says. ‘In order to set the record straight. It is possible that in Australia your media has not tainted people against us, and that there at least, we can put our side. With objective information and analysis. Are you available tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Potsdam, in the afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I will meet with you as follows: I will be outside the church on market square at fifteen hundred hours. I will have tomorrow’s Märkische Allgemeine rolled up under my left arm. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ I say obediently, although I am incredulous that this man wants to play spy games seven years after the fall of the Wall. And then I ask, ‘What is your name?’
Another pause. ‘Winz.’
‘Till tomorrow then, Herr Winz.’
I’m early to the church and stand alone in its forecourt. The sky is blanket-grey and close. I am wearing all-purpose black boots and a black coat with fake fur trim and I stand out a mile. I have so obviously nothing to do but wait for an assignation. At the market next to the church, women in bright scarves and woollen gloves push their strollers around caravan stalls, nosing under the red-and-white striped awnings. They buy potatoes and pickles from vats, and chunks of pink liverwurst. At the deli a man with ham-hock forearms serves a council worker a sausage and a piece of bread on a paper plate. The bells chime three times. I hop from one cold leg to the other.
After ten minutes a man approaches with a newspaper rolled under his left arm. He’s about sixty, paunchy and jowly as a hound-dog. He’s wearing a foreign-looking tweed suit coat. When he takes the newspaper from under his arm to greet me, I see it even has leather elbow patches: he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The parking here is terrible,’ Herr Winz says by way of apology for being late, but also as if it were my fault. He speaks in authoritative barks. ‘I suggest we go to a neutral place,’ he says. ‘I usually use the Hotel Merkur.’
Neutral? Usually? ‘Fine by me, Herr Winz,’ I say, and we set off on foot to the hotel, a good fifteen minutes from here. It occurs to me that he has hidden his car somewhere so that, should I succumb to the urge, I can’t tail him. I’m glad to get moving anyway.
The hotel has a low-ceilinged lobby with brown booth seats and a lot of plastic plants. There is no-one else here. We order coffee from a waiter with a strawberry mark over one side of his nose and I start to explain to Herr Winz my interest in speaking with former Stasi employees. He waves me silent. He waits until the waiter is well out of earshot. Then he leans forward. ‘One cannot be too careful these days,’ he says, tapping his nose and glancing towards the waiter’s back. Then he eyeballs me. ‘First, please show me your ID,’ he says.
‘Bitte?’
‘I would like to see your identity card,’ he says.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘In Australia we don’t have ID cards.’
He is speechless. He looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered.
I give in. ‘But I have a passport,’ I say and pull it out of my bag. There are a great many things one cannot do anonymously here—from buying a mobile phone card to travelling on a train. I have had to prove my identity so frequently that I now carry my passport around with me like a fugitive.
He reads my date of birth and checks me against my younger self. Then he flicks through its pages to see where I have been in the last few years. ‘Ah, Czechoslovakia,’ he mutters at one point. Then he sees that back in 1987 I was in the GDR. ‘So you visited my country,’ he says approvingly.
‘Yes, I came here to Potsdam and I went to Dresden,’ I say, ‘and I went to a party once with some friends in East Berlin.’
I remember a cold grey day in Potsdam like this one, the streets deserted. Our busload of undergraduates visited only the paved and gilded parts of this show-town, selected streets made into a neat sheep-run for tourists. In Dresden we were shunted