Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [41]
I am fading, blending in with the kitchen walls, which were once white but seem to me now an odd, remarkably flesh-like colour. I look at Julia and she reminds me of myself—straggly fair hair she doesn’t care much about, grey-green eyes and slightly crooked teeth that have seen a bit much nicotine. I wonder whether she started off a true German, much brighter. I don’t know what to say, but she’s lost in thought anyway.
‘I think it’s because my first boyfriend was such a macho,’ she’s saying, ‘that might be one reason I react so strongly to harassment.’
I’m still gazing at her, wondering just how it is that we can have such wrong ideas of what we look like, our colour and shape and the space we take up in the world.
‘Actually,’ Julia is chuckling, ‘he was macho autentico—he was Italian.’
‘How on earth did you find an Italian boyfriend?’ This conversation is getting weirder. Julia could never have travelled in the ‘non-socialist abroad’, as the rest of the world was known, and there was no Italian immigration into the GDR. Involuntarily, an Italian boyfriend of my own flashes to mind: an ice-cream vendor with a beautiful voice and a truck with bells, sweet Mr Whippy.
‘Long story,’ she mutters. ‘You know,’ she says, looking into her mug, ‘having lived in both east and west without moving house, I think I can tell you that there’s a difference between sexual stalking, and stalking, neat.’
She sits framed by the window onto the yard. The late afternoon light comes through her wisps of hair, illuminating them like live things around her head. In the yard sparrows wheel and duck through the empty chestnut tree. The sky hangs, pale and veined, over the rooftops.
‘Oh?’ I ask.
‘Yes. For instance, when we were teenagers the local lads would come by in summer time—my sisters and I would be on the balcony sunbaking. They’d hoon up and down on their motorbikes. Sometimes they’d take their shirts off for us. There was nothing scary about it. But there was also a car—for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada—that would sometimes come and crawl slowly along the street in front of our house. We lived in a detached house a bit outside the town, and there were no other houses around. The Lada had two men in it. That was creepy.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I have decided not to ask questions. I am hoping Julia will not slip back inside her shell. ‘Must have been different though if there were four of you—some safety in numbers.’
‘That car,’ she says deliberately, ‘was there for me.’
‘What?’
‘Long story…’ She takes a sip of coffee and is silent for a moment. ‘It had to do with the Italian boyfriend, actually.’
The laws of love I assume, like the laws of gravity, apply everywhere. We are back to boyfriends. ‘Things can end so badly,’ she says.
‘Not wrong there,’ I say, though I have been generally of the belief that the young heart is rubbery and unlikely to scar.
‘It was funny, really, I guess. I ended it with my Italian boyfriend when we were on holiday in Hungary.’
‘That would have been one great holiday.’ She ignores me.
‘…But that wasn’t the end of it at all.’
‘Never is really, is it?’
‘No, no,’ she says, ‘I mean something else. I ended up at the police.’
‘What?’
‘At least I thought I was at the police.’
‘How—?’
‘Long story,’ she says again. I am realising this is code for ‘no story’. Instead, she asks me about my trip to Leipzig. I tell her I met a woman whose life was shadowed and controlled by the Stasi, and about the row of Stasi men now lined up in my life. I say I’m looking out for other people too, who lived through Communism, the twentieth century’s experiment on humans.
Julia glances away. ‘I don’t have any story of the Stasi, or anything like that,’ she says.
The clock in this apartment works, and she looks up at it. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’ve got to go. Got a class.’
I am suddenly far away, thinking of old boyfriends, more experiments on humans. I remember the freedom of youth to mount exploratory expeditions into deeply inappropriate territory: the misjudged, the flaky, the devastatingly dim, the latent