Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [47]
Julia went to the Employment Office, took a number and stood in an interminable line. She was among people who might have had similar experiences, both explicable and not, to her own. She turned to the man behind her and asked, ‘So how long have you been unemployed?’
Before he could answer an official, a square-built woman in uniform, stepped out from behind a column.
‘Miss, you are not unemployed,’ she barked.
‘Of course I’m unemployed,’ Julia said. ‘Why else would I be here?’
‘This is the Employment Office, not the Unemployment Office. You are not unemployed; you are seeking work.’
Julia wasn’t daunted. ‘I’m seeking work,’ she said, ‘because I am unemployed.’
The woman started to shout so loudly the people in the queue hunched their shoulders. ‘I said, you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’ and then, almost hysterically, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’
In my mind I tote up further GDR fictions: that der Führer was excised not only from their history but also from their language; that the news was real on television; and, contrary to Julia’s lived experience, that there was no unemployment. By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.
Julia could either think she had failed at everything she had tried, or that they were out to get her. Or, she could try not to think at all. ‘It is true to say that from then on I sort of withdrew from things.’ She slept later and later each day. ‘I think I was depressed.’ She enrolled in another night-school course, this time in Spanish, but it seemed to her more and more like learning secret codes used outside your cave, spoken in places you would never see. After class she went, ‘nearly every night’ to the local nightclub. ‘My parents just sort of let me go. There wasn’t much else they could do. I think they felt sorry for me.’
It was at this time her younger sister Katrin noticed it. The car was white. She watched it three days in a row outside the house before she said anything. Julia hadn’t seen it. ‘As I said’—she looks at me—‘I knew that car was there for me.’
She knew, too, that getting on with her life would mean leaving it behind. She was going to have to marry the Italian boyfriend and get out. The idea frightened her. ‘That was part of my attraction for him—that I would be utterly dependent on him, in his home and his country and his language. At his mercy.’
She went to meet him for a holiday in Hungary. At the airport she was taken aside and her luggage searched. They unscrewed the hairdryer and emptied her boxes of tampons over the examination bench. In Hungary she told him it was over. ‘He was so controlling, so jealous.’ Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.
11
Major N.
Then a card came in the letterbox. ‘It seemed normal enough—a standard printed card as if I had to report to the police to have my ID renewed. It had spaces in it for them to handwrite my name, and the date and time of the appointment.’
She’s not looking at me. She’s hardly talking to me. Her eyes move around the room although there’s not much to see: behind me the hot-water cistern over the sink with its little blue flame, to my left the door to the hall. Candlelight catches her face, etches cheekbone and chin. She is remembering as I watch, summoning presences more real than mine.
‘There are some things—’ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.’
I stick to small facts. ‘Did you know what the card was about?’
‘I thought I had overstayed my visa in Hungary. Usually they would just restamp your ID at the border and let you back in. I started preparing excuses in my mind. At the same time I said