Julia adds, ‘You should be careful of those bums, you know.’
‘Oh, the drunks at least seem harmless enough.’
‘Well they’re not,’ she says. ‘One of them once climbed up that tree outside the living-room window and got in here.’
‘Really? What for?’ I realise I think of the road outside as some kind of moat between me and the park.
‘He took a cassette recorder.’
‘How do you know who it was?’
‘The neighbour said she saw him leaving the building,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t leave those front windows open.’
I find it hard to picture one of the rubber-legged drunks making his way across the road and shimmying up the ash tree into here.
‘It’s getting worse, I find,’ she says. ‘I mean not only that sort of thing, but just being on the street you get harassed nearly every day.’ She flips a lank piece of hair off her face, and it flips back.
Whatever and whoever they are, those drunks are not aggressive. Fuelled by beer, they have reached another world where their potency, albeit limitless, is entirely imaginary. They have never done anything more than nod a greeting as I walk by. Perhaps Julia needs to be able to pin down aggressors, to know exactly who and where they could be. But I am willing to admit that I notice staring men on the street. ‘I think that sort of thing happens to me more here than at home,’ I tell her. ‘Although it might be just that I notice things more here than at home.’
‘That would be because men can tell you’re foreign,’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’ I have always assumed I inherited enough from my Danish forebears to pass here incognito.
‘Well,’ Julia says, ‘You don’t look German.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’re too pale.’ I feel the colour draining from me. ‘Your skin is too pale. Your eyes are too pale. When a German has blue eyes for instance, they are really blue. Not your kind of pale colour.’
I am fading, blending in with the kitchen walls, which were once white but seem to me now an odd, remarkably flesh-like colour. I look at Julia and she reminds me of myself—straggly fair hair she doesn’t care much about, grey-green eyes and slightly crooked teeth that have seen a bit much nicotine. I wonder whether she started off a true German, much brighter. I don’t know what to say, but she’s lost in thought anyway.
‘I think it’s because my first boyfriend was such a macho,’ she’s saying, ‘that might be one reason I react so strongly to harassment.’
I’m still gazing at her, wondering just how it is that we can have such wrong ideas of what we look like, our colour and shape and the space we take up in the world.
‘Actually,’ Julia is chuckling, ‘he was macho autentico—he was Italian.’
‘How on earth did you find an Italian boyfriend?’ This conversation is getting weirder. Julia could never have travelled in the ‘non-socialist abroad’, as the rest of the world was known, and there was no Italian immigration into the GDR. Involuntarily, an Italian boyfriend of my own flashes to mind: an ice-cream vendor with a beautiful voice and a truck with bells, sweet Mr Whippy.
‘Long story,’ she mutters. ‘You know,’ she says, looking into her mug, ‘having lived in both east and west without moving house, I think I can tell you that there’s a difference between sexual stalking, and stalking, neat.’
She sits framed by the window onto the yard. The late afternoon light comes through her wisps of hair, illuminating them like live things around her head. In the yard sparrows wheel and duck through the empty chestnut tree. The sky hangs, pale and veined, over the rooftops.
‘Oh?’ I ask.
‘Yes. For instance, when we were teenagers the local lads would come by in summer time—my sisters and I would be on the balcony sunbaking. They’d hoon up and down on their motorbikes. Sometimes they’d take their shirts off for us. There was nothing scary about it. But there was also a car—for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada—that would sometimes come and crawl slowly along the street in front of our house. We lived in a detached house a bit outside the town, and there were no other houses around. The Lada had two men in it. That was creepy.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I have decided not to ask questions. I am hoping Julia will not slip back inside her shell. ‘Must have been different though if there were four of you—some safety in numbers.’
‘That car,’ she says deliberately, ‘was there for me.’
‘What?’
‘Long story…’ She takes a sip of coffee and is silent for a moment. ‘It had to do with the Italian boyfriend, actually.’
The laws of love I assume, like the laws of gravity, apply everywhere. We are back to boyfriends. ‘Things can end so badly,’ she says.
‘Not wrong there,’ I say, though I have been generally of the belief that the young heart is rubbery and unlikely to scar.
‘It was funny, really, I guess. I ended it with my Italian boyfriend when we were on holiday in Hungary.’
‘That would have been one great holiday.’ She ignores me.
‘…But that wasn’t the end of it at all.’
‘Never is really, is it?’
‘No, no,’ she says, ‘I mean something else. I ended up at the police.’
‘What?’
‘At least I thought I was at the police.’
‘How—?’
‘Long story,’ she says again. I am realising this is code for ‘no story’. Instead, she asks me about my trip to Leipzig. I tell her I met a woman whose life was shadowed and controlled by the Stasi, and about the row of Stasi men now lined up in my life. I say I’m looking out for other people too, who lived through Communism, the twentieth century’s experiment on humans.
Julia glances away. ‘I don’t have any story of the Stasi, or anything like that,’ she says.
The clock in this apartment works, and she looks up at it. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’ve got to go. Got a class.’
I am suddenly far away, thinking of old boyfriends, more experiments on humans. I remember the freedom of youth to mount exploratory expeditions into deeply inappropriate territory: the misjudged, the flaky, the devastatingly dim, the latent homosexual, the baby rock star who sang flat. Afterwards, there’s something one does to past lovers—a kind of post-mortem of memory manoeuvre that aspirates all the gooey parts leaving them dried and stable, unable to bite. The taxidermy of lost love. I don’t want to be left here alone now with all those stuffed heads in my attic, shaking in high winds. Old boyfriends seem like safer ground than old Stasi men. I want her to stay.
Julia puts her shoebox of love letters on her lap and pushes her chair out.
I can’t stop myself. ‘Please stay,’ I say.
She looks up and I can see that she’s surprised by my neediness. ‘OK then,’ she says. She puts the shoebox back on the floor with a small cardboard thud.
‘Right,’ I say, and then the gods abandon me and I blush from collarbone to brow, crimson.
I get up to heat more water in a saucepan on the stove. Standing, I can see the corner of the yard where the high stone walls meet, closing us in. A sandpit is tucked in there, and next to it a wooden table. Opposite, the crooked stables seem to be inching, almost audibly, towards the ground.
We drink more coffee and she stays. Later on we make a meal from what there is in the fridge—smoked halibut and bread and cheese, with fennel tea.
Julia and I were born the same year, 1966, which makes all kinds of maths in our parallel universes possible and immediate. She was twenty-three when the Wall fell, part of the fortunate younger generation which could catch up with its western contemporaries. She could get an education and a new life, instead, like many older people, of just losing her old one. But Julia is still studying some—by her own admission—obscure Eastern Bloc languages at Humboldt University, languages which can only be of use if she goes to hide out in the obscure places in which they are spoken. Students in Germany often stay at the university into their
late twenties, but it seems to me she is never going to leave. I’m curious about her: a single woman in a single room at the top of her block, unable to go forward into her future.
‘There are things I don’t remember,’ she says. I can’t tell whether she means she makes it a practice not to think of them, or she cannot recall. To my relief she has started to talk anyway, and she has the kind of finely articulated voice you occasionally come across here, which can turn this barking language into a song of aching beauty and finesse.
Julia Behrend is the third of four girls. Her parents, born during the early years of the war, were both high-school teachers in a town in Thüringen, the small state tucked in the south-western corner of East Germany.
Like many families, the Behrends were ambivalent about their country. ‘We weren’t dissidents; we weren’t in church groups or environmental groups or anything like that,’ Julia says. ‘We were an ordinary family. None of us had ever had a run-in with the state.’ Nevertheless, they lived with a distinct sense ‘from the minute we woke up’, of what could be said outside the home (very little), and what could be discussed in it (most things).
Julia’s parents had different ways of managing their relationship with the authorities. Her mother Irene is a practical woman. She didn’t expect a great deal from the state, and she didn’t rock the boat to change it. As a girl she had been a swimmer, a high jumper and a trapeze artist. She told her daughters they could be anything they wanted to be.
Julia’s father Dieter is a sensitive man. He wanted to better what he saw as a flawed system, but one which, from its founding premise, was fairer than capitalism. Unlike his wife, he was a joiner: he joined the Free German Youth (the Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ—the Communist successor to the Hitler Youth) and later, as many teachers were encouraged to do, he even joined the Party.
For his pains, his country made him a pariah and his life a misery. ‘Every Wednesday before the Party meetings Dad would be in a foul mood,’ Julia says, ‘really grim.’ Dieter spoke up against things he disagreed with, such as recruiting eighth-graders for the army, or teaching boring Russian socialist-realist writers. He would come home hollow. ‘They dressed him down like a child there.’
In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon, and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.
Many people withdrew into what they called ‘internal emigration’. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities. After 1989 Dieter retired from teaching as soon as he could. He was depressed, and required medication. ‘I think one could count him too, as a victim of the regime,’ Julia says. Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him.
Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds. Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.
Ever since she can remember, Julia was interested in languages. Before she could read she was fascinated by the Roman and Cyrillic letter systems she’d find around the house. At school they were taught English (‘very badly’) and Russian. Julia won first prize in the state Russian competition: a trip to Moscow. Curious about the world, she had penpals in Algeria, the Soviet Union and India. Her spare time was spent formulating letters in French, Russian and English, and sending them off to the outside world.
Julia wanted to be a translator and interpreter. ‘I was growing up in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War. People really thought that the US and Russia might start a nuclear confrontation, and in the GDR we were on the front line. It was sort of naïve, but I thought that by facilitating, even in this small way, communication among peoples I could make a contribution.’ She shakes her head at herself, as if embarrassed by the extravagance of her hopes. But I don’t see why a talented linguist who believed in her country should be embarrassed by this goal. Then again, I don’t see in front of me a talented linguist who believed in her country. I see a woman who leaves her past in a box but then comes to collect it; and whose part-time study and part-time rental agency work keep her only part-attached to the world.
Like her father, Julia believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west. ‘I wanted to explain to people overseas about the GDR—that Communism was not such a bad system.’ She didn’t want to leave. ‘We watched a lot of western television and I knew about unemployment, about homelessness, about hard drugs. And prostitution—prostitution! I mean how is it people think they can just buy a person? That was incredible to me.’ She doesn’t seem bitter about her belief in the GDR now. She seems, somehow, nostalgic.
She shivers. I go down to the cellar for more coal to feed the heater. When I come back into the kitchen Julia has not moved. I’m relieved: I half-expected to find one of the yellow sticky-notes she sometimes leaves for me in her fine handwriting: Just remembered an appointment. Sorry. J.
But she wants to keep talking. The edge of the linoleum table has come loose and without thinking she is stroking it flat. The memories do not come in the right order. As I listen, I think this is because she has not voiced them much before. But there may be another reason: something her mind keeps returning to which she veers away from telling.
10
The Italian Boyfriend
When she was sixteen Julia worked in the holidays as an usher at the Leipzig Fair, the famous international trade fair for which, twice a year, East Germany opened itself up to the outside world. Exhibitors of machinery and books, photocopiers and kitchen appliances all visited, along with members of the western press. They stayed in the Hotel Merkur, or were billeted to families who fought over them and the news from outside they might bring. Julia’s job, along with that of other young people—selected as much for their loyalty as their language skills—was to direct visitors around the fair and the city.
It was here that she met the Italian boyfriend. He asked her out almost immediately (‘they all thought we were for sale’), and she declined (‘I wasn’t’). Eventually, as you do, she said yes—because he persisted, because it might be fun, because what harm could come of it?
The Italian boyfriend was a man of thirty representing a northern Italian computer firm. He and Julia fell into the kind of unreal long-distance relationship in which longing, sustained by enough time apart, ripens of its own accord into love. He came to visit her twice a year—at Easter and Christmas, and they met for annual holidays in Hungary. Hungary was relatively free then, ‘for us almost like the west,’ she says. The rest of the time they telephoned once a week and wrote frequent letters. He became her most intimate penpal.
‘How long were you with him?’ I ask.
‘Two years. Oh God no, more like two and a half.’
Whenever he stayed with her, the surveillance was intense and overt. The couple could hardly leave the house without being stopped by the police and asked to account for themselves. Or the police would be waiting at a checkpoint on the outskirts of town. ‘It didn’t matter when we left the house, or where we were going, there’d be someone there to stop us,’ she says. Sometimes they went through the car. ‘If we said we were going to the pictures, they would disappear for long enough with my ID and his passport to make us miss the start.’
The Italian boyfriend was terrified at each search. ‘He’d start to sweat, then he’d go
all pale and literally shake with terror.’ Julia, on her home ground, teased him while they waited to get their papers back. ‘Look, it can’t be that bad,’ she’d say. ‘What on earth do you imagine they are going to do with you? They’re not going to kill you!—this isn’t Latin America after all.’
‘I lived with this sort of scrutiny as a fact,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it but I thought: I live in a dictatorship, so that’s just how it is. It was clear to me as a simple act of GDR-logic: I am with a western foreigner; now I will be under observation.’
The Behrends had no telephone, so Julia went to her grandmother’s for the weekly call from the Italian boyfriend. His calls had to be booked through the authorities, and they both imagined it was possible they were being overheard. ‘When I hung up I’d say goodnight to him, then I’d say, “Night all,” to the others listening in,’ she chuckles. ‘I meant it as a joke. I didn’t let myself really think about whether there was another person on the line.’
It was a condition of sanity both to accept ‘GDR-logic’ and to ignore it. ‘If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!’ Julia laughs, but I am feeling agitated. The fluorescent light in the kitchen has started to vibrate. ‘I mean you’d go mad,’ she says, ‘if you thought about it all the time.’
Julia topped her year in middle school, and wanted to go to a senior high renowned for its language teaching. Instead, for reasons never made clear, the authorities sent her far away to a boarding school with no reputation at all. Her mother complained bitterly, but was told that nothing could be done. ‘I don’t know if it was because of the Italian boyfriend, or the penpals. Maybe they thought I had too much contact with the west and needed to be isolated.’ She has started to tap a pen on the table and not to look at me when she speaks. For a moment the only sounds are the tapping pen, the vibrating light.