Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [48]
Julia analysed the situation from every angle. In its later stages the regime stopped, for the most part, direct action (arrest, incarceration, torture) against its people. It opted instead for other ways of silencing them, methods that Amnesty would find harder to chronicle. ‘The typical thing that could happen to you in my day in the GDR—that your career was broken before it was begun—that had already happened to me! And now that I didn’t even have the Italian boyfriend any more—what else could they want?’
The police station had a vast waiting hall. People stood silently in two long queues curled around the room, each one joined to a counter. The lines hardly moved. ‘I took a number but then I realised I didn’t know which queue was the right one,’ she says. ‘So I went up to the policewoman who was overseeing things. She looked at my card and said straight away: “Ah Miss Behrend. You don’t need to queue at all. You are to go directly to Room 118.”’
Julia laughs at herself. ‘I was pleased at first! I thought I had got out of standing in line.’
Then she noticed that all the people in the queues were going into one of two rooms behind the counters, but neither of those was Room 118. ‘I had to go by myself up several flights of stairs and down a long corridor, left around a corner and then left again. There were no other people around. I saw no-one enter or leave any of the rooms I passed. Room 118 was way over on the other side of the building.’
She knocked.
‘Come in.’
There was a man alone behind a desk. The first thing she noticed was that he wore a western suit and a good tie. He stood up straight away, a small nod, his feet clicking together.
‘Miss Behrend, I am N., Major,’ he smiled and extended his hand. And then, clear as a bell, ‘Ministry of State Security.’
She felt fear, she says, ‘like a worm in my belly’.
The man was not yet forty, with a wide face, and receding hair. He wore small round eyeglasses. He had a glowing suntan. He was friendly—in fact for GDR standards, exaggeratedly polite. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘do sit down.’ They sat. She thought it might still, perhaps, be about the overstayed visa.
But N. began, ‘Such an attractive, intelligent young woman as yourself, Miss Behrend, perhaps you could explain to me why it is,’ he smiled, ‘that you are not working?’
This was it. Up until this moment it could all have been a product of her imagination: the boarding school, the headmaster’s visit, the constant street searches, the failed exam, the ‘friend’s’ warning, the cruising Lada, the extraordinary unemployment.
She was in shock. She spoke slowly.
‘You must know why I have no job,’ she said.
His voice was soft. He did not stop smiling. ‘How would I know that, Miss Behrend?’
Her mind flew. She could see where this was going: she was going to be kicked out of the country. ‘I thought it was my last chance to stay home,’ she says. So she told him, straight out, ‘Look, please, I don’t want—I don’t want to go to the west. But I think you people are forcing me out.’ She realised she was imploring him. ‘I must work somewhere. I am, after all, unemployed.’
‘But Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘how can that be?’ He laced his fingers together on the desk. ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.’
She could not answer.
He reached across his desk to a pile of papers and pulled them to him. ‘First, I have some questions,’ he said, ‘about these letters.’
Julia looked at his hand and saw, under it, her own handwriting. She was confused. She looked closer.
They were copies of her letters to the Italian boyfriend.
Julia had imagined all along that her mail might be being read. Sometimes letters she received from overseas had been brutally torn and taped back together with a sticker: ‘Damaged in Transit.’ ‘It was ridiculous really,’ she says. But, like all the other things, she had never thought about it for long.
Major N. laid the first letter flat