Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [82]
I hold up a black and white photograph with one hand and the Stasi diagram with the other, ‘Technical Improvements on the National Border to Berlin (West)’. I want to see where the second fence, the sand strip, the tank traps, the guard towers, the light-pylons, the dog run and the trip-wires were. They are all gone. Then I remember that they were in front of the railway lines—they must have been in the stretch of grass I walked over between the garden plots and where I am now standing.
I take out Miriam’s sketch. It is a few lines on a page—for walls, for the kink in the wall where she stopped to breathe and lock eyes with the dog, for the trip-wire where she was caught. My hands are blue as I hold the paper up to the rusted diamonds of wire. I wonder if I am in the right place. Miriam said the bridge was about one hundred and fifty metres away from where she crossed. I move to my right till I think I’m in the same spot. Two trains cross; the rhythm of their wheels fuses and then parts again. When they are gone I peer at the railway lines. There are at least six of them, shunting trains from north to south and back. Then there’s an earth retaining wall, not particularly high, but the ground behind it is at another level. Is this where she climbed? I look for a kink, and I find one. Was that where she crouched?
It starts to get dark. The streetlights on the bridge glow their sick yellow light. I roll up the photo and the diagram and Miriam’s drawing and crumple them into my pocket. I put my fingers through the wire, and hang onto the fence for a while.
19
Klaus
‘Can I come over?’
‘Wuffor?’
I think I’ve woken him up. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. ‘A visit, Klaus, I need to get out of the house.’ What I need, in fact, is becoming a habit: an act of hops-and-malt chemistry. I need to feel good, temporarily, about plates and walls, old men and rules, bakeries and rug-work and corridor after corridor of rooms sealed with secret purpose. I need to see a survivor.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘not now though. Later.’
‘All right, see you later then.’
We’re onto our third beer and it’s only 6 pm. Klaus’s tremor has stopped, and he’s changed out of the dressing gown he was in when I arrived, to black jeans and a black windcheater. His hair is motley on his head, and motley in his beard. He has a crumpled face with brown teeth and squinty, smiley eyes. His hands are large and purplish, the hands of a dedicated smoker. He is grumpy and friendly at the same time, just warming up.
Like most people, I know a little about his life, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it from him, a night-time story. He grumbles at first—what self-respecting icon needs to say how they got that way? But we crack open more cans and he obliges me, relaxing into it. He sits soft-bodied in the chair; he assumes the shape of the furniture.
We face a coffee table with matches and tins on it and ashtrays already full of butts and papers and clumps of tobacco like hair. Behind that there’s a massive television set with stereo speakers. This room is also Klaus’s bedroom and office—there’s a mattress on the mezzanine to my left, and underneath it a fax machine, a computer and synthesizer.
The walls are lined with photographs and posters, and Klaus’s dark oil paintings. The one nearest my eyeline has a series of pictures etched into it; it’s the evolution of the breast, from pointy to pendulous. This room is Klaus’s life; it’s the inside of his head.
The early photographs show Klaus Jentzsch, before he took his mother’s maiden name as a stage-name: a clean-cut young man in 1958 wearing a suit and pencil tie, looking down modestly at his double bass. They track his development into a long-haired star with a sheepskin coat and a bass guitar. The most recent ones are tour posters: a group of six