Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [64]
She tells me her parents didn’t know how to help her. The authorities quickly caught the man, a serial rapist with a string of previous convictions. Julia became unable to continue her studies, afraid of the slightest things. She felt separated from everybody, again. At one point before the trial she took up an offer to be a teaching assistant for a semester in San Francisco, where she found people who talked about rape in ways that helped her. When she returned, she had to face him again.
‘I almost think the trial was the worst thing of all. If it happened to me again I would never bring charges,’ she says solemnly. ‘I would kill the man.’ Julia had trouble finding legal representation, and trouble affording it. While she was in America the man was convicted of another rape committed during the same spree, ‘an even worse one—that girl was hospitalised’. At Julia’s trial his lawyer argued diminished responsibility on the grounds of drunkenness, and attacked her credibility as a witness: ‘If this man’s hands were over your face,’ he said, ‘how could you not see what colour hair was on them?’ She said she didn’t know. The man’s wife testified he had been at home all evening. But his mother lived with them too. She said her son had dyed his hair black that day and gone out. He hadn’t come home till late at night, when he had burnt his clothes in the incinerator out the back. She looked across at Julia in the court and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The rapist was convicted, but Julia felt violated all over again.
After the trial she lived on her own in Lichtenberg in East Berlin. It was difficult for her to leave the apartment. ‘If I had to buy something at the shops,’ she says, ‘I would get up in the morning and put on all the loosest clothes I had, layers and layers of them to cover my body. Then I’d drink beer—in the morning!—until I was numb enough to be able to get out the door.’ Her mother Irene did not understand why she didn’t just get on with things. Julia was distressed, dropped out and suicidal, but once a week she dressed and drank and went to the station to call Irene from a phone booth and tell her everything was fine.
A cigarette sits forgotten in the ashtray. Its pale string of smoke responds to unseen currents in the room.
‘I wanted to die,’ Julia says. ‘I could not see how I could go on and live a life in this world, let alone a normal life.’ She considered throwing herself under a train at Lichtenberg station, but the idea of her sisters reading about it in the paper horrified her. Instead, she stopped eating. ‘It seemed like the course of least resistance,’ she says. ‘I was so disturbed, so right at the end of what I could manage.’ Her sister came over and watched what she ate. ‘I owe her my life really,’ Julia says. ‘I would tell her I’d had enough, but she counted the mouthfuls, and wouldn’t let me stop.’
Julia has been able to study, in fits and bursts, over the last six years. She’s had odd jobs to make ends meet, ‘whatever I could find and whatever came along’—some translation, work in a second-hand clothes shop, private tutoring, the work at the rental agency.
She is convinced that, in the amnesties of 1990, mistakes were made and the serial rapist was released. ‘It was terrible that this happened to me right at that time,’ she says. ‘It meant that before the good things about the west got to us, this negative thing—the letting loose of the criminals—affected me.’ She saw a documentary which claimed hardened criminals had been let loose in the scramble to free the political prisoners. Whether the man who raped her was among them, or whether he was just due for release (as he will be again soon) doesn’t change Julia’s experience: the end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security. The system which had imprisoned her had also, somehow, protected her. ‘They were much quicker in the