Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [40]
Julia has started to use the plants as a reason to drop by, both as if she is saving me the trouble of watering them, and by way of gentle rebuke. ‘The plants’ are two skinny crooked bald-trunked palm things in pots in the living room and not only is it true that I forget to water them—I forget their existence altogether. Subconsciously I have come to think of this apartment as some kind of closed and self-sustaining universe, with its own laws of nature. It tolerates my presence but demands as little interference from me as possible. I just keep to my tracks: bed to bath, window to desk.
Julia comes through to the kitchen. Along with the army pants, she is wearing her usual assortment of black: black boots, black baggy jumpers and a black scarf twisted like a dishrag around her neck. Right now she is black, red and yellow, uncharacteristically patriotic in the colours of the German flag.
‘Coffee?’ I ask.
‘Love some. I ran out two days ago.’
I look at her and I know that under all those layers of black is a wiry body and a sharp-sharp mind, but there is something about Julia that breaks my heart. She has an honesty I have started to think of as East German, a transparent fairness with all things that leaves her so open. But it’s not that. She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact. It’s not that either. I don’t know what it is.
‘I’ve been thinking lately about all the drunks and the homeless in the park,’ I say.
‘There were no drunks before the Wall came down,’ Julia says. ‘I mean,’ she corrects herself, ‘in the park. No-one was homeless as they are now.’
They might not have been in the park, but there certainly were drunks. Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts. Sometimes they had to live in untenable arrangements because of the lack of housing: divorced couples still together, or newlyweds with the in-laws. Whatever the other shortages were, you could always, always buy beer and schnapps. People were drunk on the job, drunk after work, and drunk at home putting up with one another in a place from which there was no escape.
Julia adds, ‘You should be careful of those bums, you know.’
‘Oh, the drunks at least seem harmless enough.’
‘Well they’re not,’ she says. ‘One of them once climbed up that tree outside the living-room window and got in here.’
‘Really? What for?’ I realise I think of the road outside as some kind of moat between me and the park.
‘He took a cassette recorder.’
‘How do you know who it was?’
‘The neighbour said she saw him leaving the building,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t leave those front windows open.’
I find it hard to picture one of the rubber-legged drunks making his way across the road and shimmying up the ash tree into here.
‘It’s getting worse, I find,’ she says. ‘I mean not only that sort of thing, but just being on the street you get harassed nearly every day.’ She flips a lank piece of hair off her face, and it flips back.
Whatever and whoever they are, those drunks are not aggressive. Fuelled by beer, they have reached another world where their potency, albeit limitless, is entirely imaginary. They have never done anything more than nod a greeting as I walk by. Perhaps Julia needs to be able to pin down aggressors, to know exactly who and where they could be. But I am willing to admit that I notice staring men on the street. ‘I think that sort of thing happens to me more here than at home,’ I tell her. ‘Although it might be just that I notice things more here than at home.’
‘That would be because men can tell you’re foreign,’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’ I have always assumed I inherited enough from my Danish forebears to pass here incognito.
‘Well,’ Julia says, ‘You don’t look German.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’re too pale.’ I feel the colour draining from me. ‘Your skin is too pale. Your eyes are too pale. When a German has blue eyes for instance, they are really blue. Not your kind of pale