Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [44]
It was here that she met the Italian boyfriend. He asked her out almost immediately (‘they all thought we were for sale’), and she declined (‘I wasn’t’). Eventually, as you do, she said yes—because he persisted, because it might be fun, because what harm could come of it?
The Italian boyfriend was a man of thirty representing a northern Italian computer firm. He and Julia fell into the kind of unreal long-distance relationship in which longing, sustained by enough time apart, ripens of its own accord into love. He came to visit her twice a year—at Easter and Christmas, and they met for annual holidays in Hungary. Hungary was relatively free then, ‘for us almost like the west,’ she says. The rest of the time they telephoned once a week and wrote frequent letters. He became her most intimate penpal.
‘How long were you with him?’ I ask.
‘Two years. Oh God no, more like two and a half.’
Whenever he stayed with her, the surveillance was intense and overt. The couple could hardly leave the house without being stopped by the police and asked to account for themselves. Or the police would be waiting at a checkpoint on the outskirts of town. ‘It didn’t matter when we left the house, or where we were going, there’d be someone there to stop us,’ she says. Sometimes they went through the car. ‘If we said we were going to the pictures, they would disappear for long enough with my ID and his passport to make us miss the start.’
The Italian boyfriend was terrified at each search. ‘He’d start to sweat, then he’d go all pale and literally shake with terror.’ Julia, on her home ground, teased him while they waited to get their papers back. ‘Look, it can’t be that bad,’ she’d say. ‘What on earth do you imagine they are going to do with you? They’re not going to kill you!—this isn’t Latin America after all.’
‘I lived with this sort of scrutiny as a fact,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it but I thought: I live in a dictatorship, so that’s just how it is. It was clear to me as a simple act of GDR-logic: I am with a western foreigner; now I will be under observation.’
The Behrends had no telephone, so Julia went to her grandmother’s for the weekly call from the Italian boyfriend. His calls had to be booked through the authorities, and they both imagined it was possible they were being overheard. ‘When I hung up I’d say goodnight to him, then I’d say, “Night all,” to the others listening in,’ she chuckles. ‘I meant it as a joke. I didn’t let myself really think about whether there was another person on the line.’
It was a condition of sanity both to accept ‘GDR-logic’ and to ignore it. ‘If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!’ Julia laughs, but I am feeling agitated. The fluorescent light in the kitchen has started to vibrate. ‘I mean you’d go mad,’ she says, ‘if you thought about it all the time.’
Julia topped her year in middle school, and wanted to go to a senior high renowned for its language teaching. Instead, for reasons never made clear, the authorities sent her far away to a boarding school with no reputation at all. Her mother complained bitterly, but was told that nothing could be done. ‘I don’t know if it was because of the Italian boyfriend, or the penpals. Maybe they thought I had too much contact with the west and needed to be isolated.’ She has started to tap a pen on the table and not to look at me when she speaks. For a moment the only sounds are the tapping