Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [53]
Julia doesn’t know why the Stasi was afraid of them complaining to Honecker. Possibly because both her parents were teachers, and outwardly conformist, or because the Stasi had no ‘legal’ basis for what it had done to her. Who knows? It is one of the very rare occasions when the bluff was called and someone ‘won’ against the Firm.
‘The amazing thing was,’ Julia says, ‘the next week I was rung up about a job.’ She was taken on as a receptionist in a hotel. It looked like she would work there for her lifetime.
But then came 1989.
‘That’s a whole other story.’ She picks up her box of love letters. ‘It’s late, I should go,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d come and get these’—she pats the box—‘and have a look at them. I’m seeing a psychotherapist and we’ve got up to my relationships with men. I’m trying to remember them—they seem like another life.’ She smiles and the light catches her teeth. ‘These letters from the Italian boyfriend will be an aide memoire to all that,’ she says. I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over.
I see her out. In the hall she clicks the bike pump onto the crossbar of her beat-up bicycle and I open the door. As she goes down the stairs I feel there is something missing here. She does not seem like a girl who called their bluff, worked in a hotel for two years and was then liberated into her future by the 1989 revolution. No-one can tote up life’s events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the soul. But this is not the full sum of things, I think, as Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either.
12
The Lipsi
‘…you pigdogs think we all here forgotten what you nazis done and come in my home on my TV with you music and you news you fuckups better write me n—’
There’s a knock on my office door. It’s Uwe. ‘How about a lift home?’ he says.
‘That would be great.’ From some stupid impulse, I move to hide the letter in front of me, as if to spare him insult. I hold his gaze and pull it towards me across the desk. The printing is as large and uneven as a ransom note, so it catches his eye.
‘What’s that one?’ he asks.
‘It’s, uh, actually a piece of hate mail,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘yes.’ He knows immediately what that means: that the hate is not directed at a particular presenter or the station itself, but at the whole nation.
‘We usually respond to those in a moderate tone,’ he says, ‘and say that the National Socialist dictatorship was a terrible thing that happened to us. That it caused untold pain and suffering and so on, and that whatever attempts there have been to make reparations, amends can never truly be made, etc, etc.’
‘Yes,’ I say. But what does he mean, ‘that happened to us’? The Germans were wild about Hitler. It is true that after he was elected he changed the structures of power into a dictatorship, but it is also true that when the war was over the people might well have voted him in again. Everyone, always, is claiming innocence here.
‘Well then?’ he says. His eyes are red-rimmed. He doesn’t give himself much rest. ‘Do you want a lift?’
‘Yes. Thanks. Great.’
I am rarely in a car in Berlin. The train network under the streets is so dense I can go anywhere on it, popping out of the earth in one place or another. It is a skein of arteries, pumping people around the city. The surface is another world.
The streets are cobbled. Uwe drives fast. He wears leather gloves with press-studs on the wrists. His car is a new silver VW Golf, shiny and smelling of pineapple deodoriser.
‘Do you like Elton John?’ he says. Before I can answer he turns on the tape-deck full blast. He lights a cigarette from the dash lighter. He starts nodding his head and tapping the beat with a leather hand on the leather-covered steering wheel. He’s screaming down the streets, the tyres noisy over the cobbles. I hold onto the door handle with one hand and my little pack on my lap with the