Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [65]
Julia says she must go, she’s meeting her sister.
‘Yes, of course,’ I say, but I can’t think of anything else. She sees I’m stuck.
‘I think it’s important, what you’re doing,’ she says, as if to comfort me, and I am ashamed. ‘For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers.’ Her eyes, grey-green, have a dark shape in them. When it moves, I see that it is me. ‘You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.’
‘I think I’m losing track of normal.’
‘Yes,’ she says, smiling, ‘I know it’s relative. We easterners have an advantage, perhaps, in that we can remember and compare two kinds of systems.’ Her mouth twists into a smile as she collects her cigarettes and lighter and puts them in her pocket. ‘But I don’t know if that’s an advantage. I mean you see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other.’ She laughs wryly. ‘And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.’
She leaves, and I move to the front windows to watch over her when she reaches the front of the building. I see the crown of her head, messy blond and vulnerable as a child’s as she bends to tuck one leg of her jeans into her sock. Then she puts the other foot on the pedal and pushes off, Tiresias on a bike.
I call Klaus. ‘Wanna get drunk?’
‘Sure. You OK?’
‘Yep.’ He doesn’t believe me, but he is a co-operative soul, and we meet down the pub.
I wake up and my head hurts if I move it. I need water. I look at the withered palms in the living room (I’ve crashed on the couch). They reflect my inner state of being. More awful though than my head, my mouth and my poor wretched lungs, is a vague feeling of regret. What did I say? I try to think back and try to remember who else was in the pub besides Klaus, and how drunk they were. I can’t. In some kind of cosmic penance, I spend the day in bed.
Late in the afternoon I decide to go for a swim. At my local pool you pay an entry price determined by how long you would like to spend there, starting at an hour and a half. This made no sense to me (who can swim laps for that long?) until I realised that people use the pool as a bath.
I want to do laps. There are bodies everywhere, swimming or paddling or what looks like actually washing themselves in the pool. There are no lanes. There is no agreed direction. People are breaststroking diagonally across, heads out like ducks. One man still has his glasses on. Kids jump in off the sides and an old fellow resting in a corner is fiddling with the hair on a mole under his arm.
I need to swing my limbs around and get some air in my lungs. It must be possible to do a lap or two. Perhaps there is a system of passing one another that I don’t yet know, like boat rules. I choose a part of the pool that seems less crowded and begin with some freestyle. But it’s not quite the stroke I’m used to because I have to keep a lookout ahead for obstacles. Not only ahead: a teenager swiming cross-wise through the pool is headed my way. As I turn to the other side to breathe, a kid with floaties on her arms jumps in and narrowly misses me. I look up. A woman in a yellow bikini has set off in my direction, dog-paddling to keep her makeup dry. There is no way out.
I stop and tread water and consider my next move. Whilst I’m plotting a course, I am visited by a blinding question: what am I doing in this chaos anyway? In this chaotic city?
The woman in the yellow bikini is pretending she has not seen me. What is this? Swimming chicken? I’ve had it with this place. I decide to plough on. I think brute force may just win through and I beat my arms fast. I’m no great swimmer and I know this is eastern Germany, home of the