Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [92]
Over the next weeks, Torsten made slow but undeniable progress. ‘We were told that with this special nourishment and the medicine, he was likely to be able to develop normally,’ she says. She starts to cry, so silently it is more like leaking. Tears roll down her face and she mops them up. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘eat something.’ I put something in my mouth. I look around for family photographs, but there are none on the walls, and none that I can see in the cabinets.
On the night of 12–13 August the Berlin Wall was rolled out in barbed wire. Frau Paul lived then with her husband in this same half-house deep in the eastern sector. They didn’t see or hear anything of what was going on to divide the city but they woke to a changed world.
The next time Frau Paul went to the ministry for permission to collect the formula and medicines, it was refused. She remembers pleading with the official, telling him how sick her baby was, and how without these provisions he might die. ‘If your son is as sick as all that,’ the official told to her, ‘it would be better if he did.’ Frau Paul’s tears have stopped now, and her broad face is hot with anger. The couple had no choice but to switch Torsten to ordinary formula. He started spitting up blood again. They took him one midnight to the Charité, the big eastern hospital. The doctors kept him under observation and told Frau Paul to go home.
‘The next morning when I went to the hospital again to see my son he wasn’t there. No-one had spoken with me about it. There was no time to speak with me about it.’ When they realised they couldn’t help him, the eastern doctors managed to have the baby spirited across the new border, back to the Westend Hospital. Frau Paul doesn’t know how they did it, but she thinks that it saved his life. ‘I hold absolutely nothing against the doctors at the Charité. What it would mean for him, what would come of it for all of us, was not possible to foresee.’
Her baby was now on the other side of the Wall. Frau Paul and her husband went back to the health ministry to get permission to visit him. But crossing the ‘anti-fascist protective measure’ was now a matter for the Ministry of the Interior.
Frau Paul reaches down and passes me an old photograph. It is of her, smoother-faced, and with stiff, 1960s hair. She is holding a baby and smiling uncertainly. The child sucks his bottom lip and looks straight at the camera. His body is not visible. A man in a pastor’s black cassock and white collar stands next to them and they are flanked by nurses in hospital uniforms and wimples. ‘That was October 1961,’ Frau Paul says, ‘the emergency christening.’
After nine and a half weeks of separation from their baby, who once more seemed likely to die, Frau Paul alone had been issued a day pass and a visa to attend his christening. The authorities would not let her husband visit in case, together, they decided to remain in the west. She is weeping again, as if she is overflowing. Everything is silent here, there’s not even traffic noise. The only sound is her breath.
Each morning for an instant Sigrid Paul would wake up like her old self, before the image of Torsten’s small sick body flooded into her mind. His condition was not improving. He was operated on four times in the Westend Hospital. He had to have an artificial oesophagus, an artificial diaphragm, and an artificial pylorus inserted. He had to be artificially fed. His parents were told, again, he might die. ‘I went to see him that time and of course I wanted more,’ she says. ‘I wanted more.’
As Frau Paul puts it, in the language of the authorities, ‘My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR.’ She holds the handkerchief with both hands in her lap. ‘I am not your classic resistance fighter,’ she says. ‘I was not even part of the opposition. To this day I am not a member