Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [51]
I don’t know what she means by ‘the whole 1989 story’. I say I think it is extreme, what happened to her.
‘Yes, it is,’ she says, ‘when you become conscious of it. But the strange thing is it’s only now, in this room, that I feel the shudder run down my spine. At the time I criticised other things—not being allowed to study or have a career. But looking back on it, it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over your bound-aries—until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.’ She flicks her hair as if to get rid of something. ‘At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.’
She takes a piece of apple and seesaws its fleshy arc between two fingers on the table. The empty fridge shudders and stops; the kitchen is a deeper quiet. ‘People talk about the unconscious,’ she says, ‘and it becomes clear to me as I am telling you this, the effect this knowledge has had on my life.’ She takes a small bite of apple. ‘I think I am definitely psychologically damaged!’ She laughs, but she means it. ‘That’s probably why I react so extremely to approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another possible invasion of my intimate sphere.’ She watches my face. ‘I think it’s worse if you repress it.’ To dig it up, or to leave it lie in the ground?
When she left Room 118 Julia was all right until she got home. Then her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She made it to the bathroom and vomited. When she came out she noticed her voice trembled and she couldn’t set it straight. She told her parents and her sisters everything. That evening the family sat down to decide what to do.
‘My mother is a very pragmatic person,’ Julia says. ‘Irene said, “Right, you ended it with the Italian—I didn’t want to influence you, but I’m glad you didn’t marry him. Now, though, you have to think very coolly about what you do next.”’
Julia couldn’t quite believe that this was happening, that they were sitting in the living room at home talking about how she might live out the rest of her life. She was twenty years old. ‘We’d always discussed me going to live with the Italian boyfriend, as if it were an option. But that was more like a teenage adventure fantasy: thinking, I’m free to do that and no-one can stop me. Suddenly it was reality: I have to leave here forever—I have to leave my family, I will not see my sisters again, and I have to go to the west. Which, as I said, I had never wanted to do.’ Julia has started to speak into the jumper wrapped over her knee. ‘And I think too, I was disappointed in the state. I realised for the first time that it wasn’t really the good father state you have in the back of your mind. I saw it can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all.’
She would not become an informer. That left only one real option. ‘You’ll have to find someone else to marry so you can get out,’ Irene said. ‘That’s the only way.’ Then she voiced all of their doubts. ‘But do you really want to marry any old person?’ she said. Dieter sat hunched in rage and sadness at the end of the table. No-one spoke.
‘That’s when I thought of it,’ Julia says, ‘I thought, if there’s no way around it, we just have to crash through somehow. There was, apparently, this method called a Staatsratsbeschwerde for people to write directly to Erich Honecker if they needed something they couldn’t get, or to make a complaint’—she shakes her head—‘as if the citizen really did have a voice and rights. People would write saying they wanted to buy tiles for their bathroom or machine parts for their tractor and none had been available since August or whatever. Ordinary people would sometimes say, “Well, why don’t you stop complaining and just write to Erich!” So I thought to myself, why don’t we? I mean, if we examined it, what had happened was just not right.