Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [39]
Then he marches through the lobby out the front door, and the waiter brings me the bill.
A cheery voice: ‘No-one can come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, someone will call back as soon as possible. If it’s good news, even sooner. Bye.’
‘Miriam, it’s Anna,’ I start. Then I hear the electronic beep. I start again. ‘Miriam, it’s Anna calling. Just to say hello really. No news. I’ll call back another time, or you can reach me on the Berlin number. Hope all’s well.’ I can’t think of any other small thing to say. ‘Bye.’
For a few days afterwards each time the phone rings I think it might be her, but it’s mostly Stasi men. After a week or so, despite the Stasi men, I somehow remain hopeful when the phone rings. Another week passes and this feeling coagulates into something grimmer: have I offended her? I fill her silence with possible scenarios: ‘she’s lost my number’, ‘she’s on holiday’ and even the full-blown, ‘now that she has re-lived her story it’s all too much and she’s swinging from a rope in her tower’. Despite the vividness of this last, I decide to give it another fortnight or so before I call again. At some level, at least, I am aware that I am following a person who has been hounded enough.
Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?
9
Julia Has No Story
After work I catch the underground to Rosenthaler Platz and then walk home through the park. Away from the corner the grass slopes into a hill, rare for this swamp city. At the top there is a community centre with a terrace café that serves coffee and beer. Saturday afternoons the centre fills with dancing pensioners moving in tender, timeless coupledom.
The pensioners are just visiting—the park belongs to the drunks and the punks. The drunks dress either in tracksuits or old business suits. Each morning they emerge from the corners of the park and shuffle together in an amphitheatre arrangement around the statue of Heine. All day long they hold what look like philosophical discussions, gesticulating slowly with their free hands and clasping tins of beer with the other. They seem to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.
Closer to the station are the young people. Here, there are women as well as men. They have as much beer and as many cigarettes as the drunks, but a lot more rancour. Their heads are partially shaved or covered with dreadlocks in blue and deep black, their faces pierced, limbs tattooed. Their appearance says both ‘Look at me’ and ‘Fuck off’. There are fights and tears; terrible pain, public in the park. Sometimes they ask for money. Unlike the drunks who claim the benches and tram shelters, the young people sit or sleep on the ground, with only their dogs for warmth. The dogs often look better groomed than the humans. But this afternoon, passing one young man, I realise I probably underestimate the effort required to maintain a cockscomb of eight 12-inch cones of hair erect and green, every day.
My door is unlocked. Pushing it open, I can see through to the living room. It looks like a giant cat has pissed, twice, on the lino. Then I hear a sound I know instinctively from my childhood: possums in the roof. Only the roof of this building is four storeys higher. I turn around and there’s a ladder set up against the wall in the hallway to the height of the mezzanine, about a metre under the ceiling.
‘Only me, only me,’ a muffled voice says. A small behind in army pants is backing out. ‘I came over to water the plants,’ Julia turns to me. ‘I thought I’d just get some of this old stuff while I was here.’ She passes me a bike pump like a relay baton and climbs down with a shoebox under one arm.
‘Old love letters,’ she says apologetically, and to my surprise she turns red. The blush begins at the neck and moves rapidly up to her yellow hair. This used to happen to me until some merciful god put an end to