Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [42]
Julia puts her shoebox of love letters on her lap and pushes her chair out.
I can’t stop myself. ‘Please stay,’ I say.
She looks up and I can see that she’s surprised by my neediness. ‘OK then,’ she says. She puts the shoebox back on the floor with a small cardboard thud.
‘Right,’ I say, and then the gods abandon me and I blush from collarbone to brow, crimson.
I get up to heat more water in a saucepan on the stove. Standing, I can see the corner of the yard where the high stone walls meet, closing us in. A sandpit is tucked in there, and next to it a wooden table. Opposite, the crooked stables seem to be inching, almost audibly, towards the ground.
We drink more coffee and she stays. Later on we make a meal from what there is in the fridge—smoked halibut and bread and cheese, with fennel tea.
Julia and I were born the same year, 1966, which makes all kinds of maths in our parallel universes possible and immediate. She was twenty-three when the Wall fell, part of the fortunate younger generation which could catch up with its western contemporaries. She could get an education and a new life, instead, like many older people, of just losing her old one. But Julia is still studying some—by her own admission—obscure Eastern Bloc languages at Humboldt University, languages which can only be of use if she goes to hide out in the obscure places in which they are spoken. Students in Germany often stay at the university into their late twenties, but it seems to me she is never going to leave. I’m curious about her: a single woman in a single room at the top of her block, unable to go forward into her future.
‘There are things I don’t remember,’ she says. I can’t tell whether she means she makes it a practice not to think of them, or she cannot recall. To my relief she has started to talk anyway, and she has the kind of finely articulated voice you occasionally come across here, which can turn this barking language into a song of aching beauty and finesse.
Julia Behrend is the third of four girls. Her parents, born during the early years of the war, were both high-school teachers in a town in Thüringen, the small state tucked in the south-western corner of East Germany.
Like many families, the Behrends were ambivalent about their country. ‘We weren’t dissidents; we weren’t in church groups or environmental groups or anything like that,’ Julia says. ‘We were an ordinary family. None of us had ever had a run-in with the state.’ Nevertheless, they lived with a distinct sense ‘from the minute we woke up’, of what could be said outside the home (very little), and what could be discussed in it (most things).
Julia’s parents had different ways of managing their relationship with the authorities. Her mother Irene is a practical woman. She didn’t expect a great deal from the state, and she didn’t rock the boat to change it. As a girl she had been a swimmer, a high jumper and a trapeze artist. She told her daughters they could be anything they wanted to be.
Julia’s father Dieter is a sensitive man. He wanted to better what he saw as a flawed system, but one which, from its founding premise, was fairer than capitalism. Unlike his wife, he was a joiner: he joined the Free German Youth (the Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ—the Communist successor to the Hitler Youth) and later, as many teachers were encouraged to do, he even joined the Party.
For his pains, his country made him a pariah and his life a misery. ‘Every Wednesday before the Party meetings Dad would be in a foul mood,’ Julia says, ‘really grim.’ Dieter spoke up against things he disagreed with, such as recruiting eighth-graders for the army, or teaching