Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [63]
I pour more beer. It’s the second, or maybe the third, and it is loosening up the afternoon. For a moment I am an eye in the ceiling corner. I see two women, like reflections of one another, at an old table in an old kitchen in East Berlin. One has her sleeves rolled up, the other draws her black jumper over her fists, bringing them out only to smoke. This room seems small shelter from the outside world because the colours of the yard have seeped in here, grey and brown—apart from the tiny blue pilot light above the sink, and the remains of a pink sauce in a pan.
‘It’s hard to live in society if you can’t subordinate yourself to authority,’ Julia says, ‘particularly German society. I think the reason why I can’t has to do with a lot of things. Being trapped by the Wall before, and then working in jobs which were way under my capacities and where I had no choice—in the hotel, and then afterwards. I just can’t stand the sort of structures that keep you in, I guess.’ Her voice has gone very soft. ‘And as well as that,’ she says, ‘I was raped. That happened to me just after the Wall fell. It was in the east, and it was really the last straw.’
Now I am cold and sober and scared of what I am about to hear. I didn’t know then what it cost Julia to tell me what had happened to her, and maybe she didn’t either. A week later she rang and said that afterwards she had felt sick for three days.
Shortly after the Wall came down, prisoners held in the GDR, mostly political prisoners, were amnestied. Julia went back to Thüringen for a wedding. She was spending the night in the bride’s apartment, a one-roomer at the top of a high-rise, and her friend was going to stay the night at the groom’s. Julia accompanied her downstairs to a taxi. ‘You never know what can happen on those housing estates,’ she says. ‘Often there’s no-one around and it can be a bit creepy.’
When she got back inside the building, there was a man waiting for the lift. It came and they both entered and turned to face the closing doors. Julia says, ‘I knew then—there was a moment when I thought something was wrong and I should run back out through those doors. But you are taught to say to yourself, “Don’t be ridiculous,” so I stayed put.’
The man looked at the floor number she had pressed. He didn’t press one himself. The lift moved. Then he jammed it with the emergency button.
Some time later the janitor noticed that one of the lifts was stuck. He went to the roof and called down the shaft to see if anyone was inside or needed help. No answer came.
The man was huge. He bashed Julia and held his hands over her face. She thought he was wearing a black wig. He threatened to kill her if she screamed, to kill her if she called the police. When it was over she crawled from the lift to the apartment door. He ran down the stairs into the darkness.
Julia spent the night alone, terrified, in the apartment. There was no telephone. The man was at large, and he knew where to find her. The next day she managed to get herself to the police station. She received no counselling, no medical care, and no sympathetic treatment there. ‘Rape was taboo in the GDR,’ she says. The female police officer on duty declined to examine her and went outside for a cigarette instead, so a male colleague conducted a complete physical, Julia naked on a table. Then they took her straight back to where it happened and made her go through everything step by step, pressing the emergency button herself and re-enacting the attack. ‘It was as if they didn’t believe me,’ she says. He was at large, and they were offering her no protection.
Then she went to the wedding. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone. It would have ruined their day,’ she says. ‘I wore a lot of makeup, and somehow I got through it.’
We sit in the kitchen all