I begin by asking whether she saw her life unfolding differently after the Wall came down. I wonder what it would have been like to watch the barrier that had held you in disappear and the whole world open up like some strange and new dreamt-of thing.
‘Well, it’s complicated,’ she says, running a hand through her hair. Static from her sleeve raises single strands into the air. ‘I think…I am perhaps.’ She pauses. ‘I notice that I still.’ She breathes in. ‘There are some things for instance…’ She stops. ‘The whole thing really threw me,’ she says, exhaling. ‘Not only that but also afterwards. Lots of things, personal things. I think that the whole Wende in 1989 and everything I went through around it—I think that I experienced it more intensely than others.’
She’s found the old place where the lino is leaving the tabletop and starts to worry it with a fingernail. ‘I’ve been talking about it with my therapist, and she keeps coming back to a theme—one that is quite uncomfortable for me. It has to do with how I can’t subject myself to any sort of authority. It’s now to the point where I can’t commit myself to coming anywhere on time’—she smiles—‘as you saw. I just can’t have structure imposed on me.’
I pour more beer. It’s the second, or maybe the third, and it is loosening up the afternoon. For a moment I am an eye in the ceiling corner. I see two women, like reflections of one another, at an old table in an old kitchen in East Berlin. One has her sleeves rolled up, the other draws her black jumper over her fists, bringing them out only to smoke. This room seems small shelter from the outside world because the colours of the yard have seeped in here, grey and brown—apart from the tiny blue pilot light above the sink, and the remains of a pink sauce in a pan.
‘It’s hard to live in society if you can’t subordinate yourself to authority,’ Julia says, ‘particularly German society. I think the reason why I can’t has to do with a lot of things. Being trapped by the Wall before, and then working in jobs which were way under my capacities and where I had no choice—in the hotel, and then afterwards. I just can’t stand the sort of structures that keep you in, I guess.’ Her voice has gone very soft. ‘And as well as that,’ she says, ‘I was raped. That happened to me just after the Wall fell. It was in the east, and it was really the last straw.’
Now I am cold and sober and scared of what I am about to hear. I didn’t know then what it cost Julia to tell me what had happened to her, and maybe she didn’t either. A week later she rang and said that afterwards she had felt sick for three days.
Shortly after the Wall came down, prisoners held in the GDR, mostly political prisoners, were amnestied. Julia went back to Thüringen for a wedding. She was spending the night in the bride’s apartment, a one-roomer at the top of a high-rise, and her friend was going to stay the night at the groom’s. Julia accompanied her downstairs to a taxi. ‘You never know what can happen on those housing estates,’ she says. ‘Often there’s no-one around and it can be a bit creepy.’
When she got back inside the building, there was a man waiting for the lift. It came and they both entered and turned to face the closing doors. Julia says, ‘I knew then—there was a moment when I thought something was wrong and I should run back out through those doors. But you are taught to say to yourself, “Don’t be ridiculous,” so I stayed put.’
The man looked at the floor number she had pressed. He didn’t press one himself. The lift moved. Then he jammed it with the emergency button.
Some time later the janitor noticed that one of the lifts was stuck. He went to the roof and called down the shaft to see if anyone was inside or needed help. No answer came.
The man was huge. He bashed Julia and held his hands over her face. She thought he was wearing a black wig. He threatened to kill her if she screamed, to kill her if she called the police. When it was over she crawled from the lift to the apartment door. He ran down the stairs into the darkness.
Julia spent the night alone, terrified, in the apartment. There was no telephone. The man was at large, and he knew where to find her. The next day she managed to get herself to the police station. She received no counselling, no medical care, and no sympathetic treatment there. ‘Rape was taboo in the GDR,’ she says. The female police officer on duty declined to examine her and went outside for a cigarette instead, so a male colleague conducted a complete physical, Julia naked on a table. Then they took her straight back to where it happened and made her go through everything step by step, pressing the emergency button herself and re-enacting the attack. ‘It was as if they didn’t believe me,’ she says. He was at large, and they were offering her no protection.
Then she went to the wedding. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone. It would have ruined their day,’ she says. ‘I wore a lot of makeup, and somehow I got through it.’
We sit in the kitchen all afternoon. At one point it begins to hail, pieces of shattered sky falling against the window. Julia half-smokes cigarettes and tells her story. There are no tears; it is as if she has no self-pity at all.
She tells me her parents didn’t know how to help her. The authorities quickly caught the man, a serial rapist with a string of previous convictions. Julia became unable to continue her studies, afraid of the slightest things. She felt separated from everybody, again. At one point before the trial she took up an offer to be a teaching assistant for a semester in San Francisco, where she found people who talked about rape in ways that helped her. When she returned, she had to face him again.
‘I almost think the trial was the worst thing of all. If it happened to me again I would never bring charges,’ she says solemnly. ‘I would kill the man.’ Julia had trouble finding legal representation, and trouble affording it. While she was in America the man was convicted of another rape committed during the same spree, ‘an even worse one—that girl was hospitalised’. At Julia’s trial his lawyer argued diminished responsibility on the grounds of drunkenness, and attacked her credibility as a witness: ‘If this man’s hands were over your face,’ he said, ‘how could you not see what colour hair was on them?’ She said she didn’t know. The man’s wife testified he had been at home all evening. But his mother lived with them too. She said her son had dyed his hair black that day and gone out. He hadn’t come home till late at night, when he had burnt his clothes in the incinerator out the back. She looked across at Julia in the court and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The rapist was convicted, but Julia felt violated all over again.
After the trial she lived on her own in Lichtenberg in East Berlin. It was difficult for her to leave the apartment. ‘If I had to buy something at the shops,’ she says, ‘I would get up in the morning and put on all the loosest clothes I had, layers and layers of them to cover my body. Then I’d drink beer—in the morning!—until I was numb enough to be able to get out the door.’ Her mother Irene did not understand why she didn’t just get on with things. Julia was distressed, dropped out and suicidal, but once a week she dressed and drank and went to the station to call Irene from a phone booth and tell her everything was fine.
A cigarette sits forgotten in the ashtray. Its pale string of smoke responds to unseen currents in the room.
‘I wanted to die,’ Julia says. ‘I could not see how I could go on and live a life in this world, let alone a normal life.’ She considered throwing herself under a train at Lichtenberg station, but the idea of her sisters reading about it in the paper horrified her. Instead, she stopped eating. ‘It seemed like the course of least resistance,’ she says. ‘I was so disturbed, so right at the end of what I could manage.’ Her sister came over and watched what she ate. ‘I owe her my life really,’ Julia says. ‘I would tell her I’d had enough, but she counted the mouthfuls, and wouldn’t let me stop.’
Julia has been able to study, in fits and bursts, over the last six years. She’s had odd jobs to make ends meet, ‘whatever I could find and whatever came along’—some translation, work in a second-hand clothes shop, private tutoring, the work at the rental agency.
She is convinced that, in
the amnesties of 1990, mistakes were made and the serial rapist was released. ‘It was terrible that this happened to me right at that time,’ she says. ‘It meant that before the good things about the west got to us, this negative thing—the letting loose of the criminals—affected me.’ She saw a documentary which claimed hardened criminals had been let loose in the scramble to free the political prisoners. Whether the man who raped her was among them, or whether he was just due for release (as he will be again soon) doesn’t change Julia’s experience: the end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security. The system which had imprisoned her had also, somehow, protected her. ‘They were much quicker in the east to find and convict people,’ she says. Deep down, and for so far indelible reasons, she associates the fall of the Wall with the end of what had remained of her private sphere after the Stasi had finished with it.
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 drugged and the huge, the men-women and the girl wonders, but for one instant I’m our Dawnie, I’m Shane Gould, I’m Susie O’Neill, I’m the human eggbeater churning up water. Yellow schmellow. I haven’t seen her either. What is the matter with me?
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 ano
ther 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 the other passengers stream ahead past me, to cars and trams and places they know. When they’re gone I am alone, except for a man in jeans leaning on the bonnet of the biggest, blackest BMW I have ever seen. He waves at me. This is my lift. This is my latest Stasi man.
Herr Christian shakes my hand warmly. He has a big crooked smile. ‘I thought a tour would be a good idea,’ he says, his voice airy and smoky, ‘to show you some of the places we operated.’
‘Great.’
He opens the car door for me, springs around the other side and jumps in.
I look across. It’s quite a long way. Herr Christian is in his mid-forties, with a young flat face and a nose that has been broken several times. His hair is bunched in wiry blond curls close to his head, his eyes are small and blue and sparkly. He looks straight at me, smiling his lopsided smile like a gangster, or an angel.
‘Let’s go,’ he says and I notice he lisps. He puts his sunglasses on, and turns the ignition.
The machine coasts the roads like a cruiser. He handles it lightly, more like a boy with a toy than a man with a vast black asset. We drive through the streets of Potsdam, over cobbles we don’t feel and past grand buildings in various states of disrepair. The windows are dark and no-one can see us in here.
We pull up in front of a well-kept yellow mansion with white lintels and a hedge garden. ‘This,’ he says, ‘was the “Coding Villa”.’ Herr Christian used to work here, encoding transcripts of telephone conversations intercepted from carphones and police walkie-talkies in the west. ‘They’d come in by telex, and we’d turn them into code and send them on to Berlin.’ He chuckles. ‘We’d encode every last thing that was said, including Ja, Guten Tag and what they had for lunch. In Berlin, they had to know everything. Mind you, we did catch a lot of western politicians talking among themselves too.’