Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [52]
Major N.’s card lay on the table between them all. ‘You have the phone number,’ Irene said. ‘Call him up tomorrow and tell him that you and your parents are going to write to Honecker and make a complaint.’
‘I will never forget that night,’ Julia says. ‘I said to my parents: right then, that’s what we’ll do, and I went to bed. I had nightmares like I have never had before or since.’ Julia dreamt she was being pursued in a place where everything was familiar to her—the kitchen countertop, the view from her bedroom, the faces in a shop, the back of her sister’s head. But no-one recognised her and she was not at home. Her father started to die, wilting like a plant and calling for her but he couldn’t hear her responses, couldn’t see where she was. When she woke she didn’t know if she’d dreamt of where she was or wherever it was she was going. ‘The night was terrible, terrible. I don’t remember if I cried. I don’t think I did. I just sweated and sweated till the bed was wet. I woke up many times. It was truly terrifying what I lived through.’ She runs a hand through her hair. ‘It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.’
The next morning after everyone left Julia picked up the card and took it to her grandmother’s to make the call. She was alone in the house. She could smell disinfectant, and boiled potatoes. She looked at the numbers in black on the card. They moved. She saw her hand was shaking, and put the card down on the bench. In that moment she could no longer string together the reasons why she was making this call, how it came to this. She was just here, now, with this card and this name and the numbers that would make him speak to her again. She put her fingers in the loops to dial.
N. picked up straight away. When he realised what she was saying—you told others what we said? You are going to write what?—he was furious and demanded that Julia meet with him alone. She was to come to a covert apartment in town.
‘It was over, of all things, the travel agency,’ she says. She puts her lips together in a grim smile. ‘Of course I’d gazed in that window many times. I knew exactly where it was.’ N. told her there would be serious repercussions for her, and possibly for her family, from this breach of her undertaking of silence. He reminded her that her younger sister Katrin, was it not correct, dreamed of studying piano at the conservatory. He said he would contact his superior, the regional head, and see what action was to be taken from here.
The family waited a week before a card came in the letterbox. They were to be visited at home.
Two of them came: N. and his boss. ‘But it was not at all what we anticipated,’ Julia says. ‘N. looked completely different to me. He was sweating and uncomfortable. His boss didn’t look much better. We didn’t know what was going on.’
Dieter told them there was no reason—what reason could there be?—for all the things that had happened to their daughter. They had always been good citizens. Irene told them flatly that they were going to write to Honecker.
The men held their hands up: there was no need to overreact here. Surely, they said, things had not gone so far that they couldn’t be fixed locally—there was no need to get Berlin involved. This was a situation, they looked at Dieter and Irene, where the imagination of a young person—a good quality of course—might have come into play. Dieter and Irene and the girls were silent. Then the men asked to be given some time.
‘We couldn’t figure it out at first,’ Julia says. ‘But when they left we knew we’d won. We had never