Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [66]
A whistle sounds. What? The chicken woman looks smug; the round is over and she’s been declared a winner. A pool warden in too-small trunks comes to the edge to address me, and provide a diversion for the other paddlers. ‘There’s no swimming here,’ he says, ‘only bathing.’
Oh, God. ‘So when can I swim then, in this swimming pool?’
‘Let’s see,’ he says, ‘warm bathing is Tuesdays, women only Wednesday mornings, women with children Wednesday afternoons, hydrotherapy Friday mornings and, oh yes, there are lanes for swimming between 4 pm and 6 pm on Monday, Thursday and Fridays. Weekends are free bathing, like this.’
I see. I get out. So this is orderly chaos. We will have ‘free bathing’ between this time and that, which is now. We will allow unusual headgear and bombs, mole picking and washing and babies, but no swimming. There’s order everywhere else in German life—even the handicapped are labelled with yellow (yellow!) armbands. (These are meant to alert others that they might need help, but are shocking to outsiders: three yellow dots pinned on the clothing.) This pool must be the subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order.
What am I doing here? People are looking at me. I walk away, and see that the diving pool is utterly empty. I will obey. I won’t swim in the non-swimming time. I slip into the diving pool and sit in the corner. No-one can see me here, and there cannot be rules that I am breaking. What am I doing here?
My body is weightless and my legs out of perspective. They are both foreshortened, and far away. And then it comes. I’m making portraits of people, East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. And I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This is working against forgetting, and against time.
Another whistle sounds, very loud. I look up and the warden is standing over me, so close he could have whispered to get my attention. ‘This is a diving pool,’ he says. ‘It is only for diving.’ I’m speechless, so he adds for good measure, ‘You are not diving.’
He’s got me there. Then again, no-one else is diving either. But I can’t argue with a man armed with a whistle and prepared to use it, so I get out again.
In the changing room a rotund woman in some kind of uniform tells me my bathers are dripping on the floor.
‘That’s because they are wet,’ I say. She comes towards me, about to say something else, but I pick up my bag and go. Too many rules.
15
Herr Christian
Several days pass in which my main activity seems to be feeding and emptying the heater. Now I’m rugged up and off to the station. Near the entrance there’s a photographer’s studio. I always look in the window at the prints on display to see the locals as they want to be seen. There are bald babies with ribbons around their heads; there’s a wedding shot with the bride on a motorbike like a package deal; there’s a young man with a mullet haircut holding proudly onto his girlfriend as if he just caught her. The photos change from time to time but today, as always, there is one of a woman of staggering beauty, beauty so fine I stare at it as if it were a puzzle, or an answer.
On the train another beautiful woman sits opposite me. She has a baby in a halter on her chest. I wonder whether others notice the loveliness of the women here, or are used to it. The Turkish man next to me is otherwise absorbed. He can see his own reflection in the window next to the woman, so he pulls a comb from his pocket and draws it lovingly through his moustache. The young mother is looking down at her baby and I can’t take my gaze away from them. When she raises her head I see she has a pierced nose and that her blue eyes are crossed, just slightly, drawn to the stud as to a magnet.
I stand at the edge of the carpark at Potsdam station. All