Stasiland (15 page)

‘But Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘how can that be?’ He laced his fingers together on the desk. ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.’

She could not answer.

He reached across his desk to a pile of papers and pulled them to him. ‘First, I have some questions,’ he said, ‘about these letters.’

Julia looked at his hand and saw, under it, her own handwriting. She was confused. She looked closer.

They were copies of her letters to the Italian boyfriend.

Julia had imagined all along that her mail might be being read. Sometimes letters she received from overseas had been brutally torn and taped back together with a sticker: ‘Damaged in Transit.’ ‘It was ridiculous really,’ she says. But, like all the other things, she had never thought about it for long.

Major N. laid the first letter flat on the desk and smoothed it out with both hands. He cleared his throat. To Julia’s horror, he started to read it aloud.

I think of the shame I would feel sitting opposite Major So-and-So in his office with these intimate things in his fingers. Shame at hearing your words turn into the universal banalities of love in his mouth.

Julia and her boyfriend wrote to one another in English. Major N. had underlined in each letter the words he had not been able to find in his German-English dictionary.

‘He sat there and he—’ Julia stops and takes a sip of tea. It must be cold by now. It goes down the wrong way. She coughs and coughs, but puts her hand out to stop me helping, ‘—and he asked me,’ she says in a choked voice, ‘what they meant.’

The hairs on my forearms stand up. I have stopped looking at Julia now because in this dimness she ceased addressing her words to me some time ago. I am humbled for reasons I cannot at this moment unravel. I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.

Major N. took his time perfecting his translation. The words that were not in the dictionary were, mostly, the words of their private lovers’ language. He asked her, ‘what is the meaning of this?’ and again, ‘would you mind, please, explaining this term?’ One long forefinger on her handwriting, or her lovers’. ‘What about this?’ he asked, touching the word
cocoriza
in a letter from her boyfriend.

‘
Cocoriza
,’ Julia told him, ‘is the Hungarian word for corn.’

‘What does this mean then, Miss Behrend, when your friend writes, “I want my little
cocoriza
”?’

She had to explain. On their holidays her hair had lightened to the colour of corn.
Cocoriza
was his pet name for her.

‘Thank you, Miss Behrend.’ Then, in his western suit, with his foreign manners and his exaggerated courtesy, Major N. proceeded through her relationship, one letter at a time.

‘It took quite a while,’ Julia says in a faraway voice. Her eyes are fixed in the middle distance. Major N. was thorough. There was a pile of her letters to the Italian. There was a pile of his letters back to her. This man knew everything. He could see when she had had doubts, he could see by what sweet-talking she had let herself be placated. He could see the Italian boyfriend’s longing laid bare, and his invention, for his own pleasure, of his faraway girl.

N. insinuated he knew—as Julia surely also realised—that the Italian had an image of her that didn’t quite hit the mark. He flattered her. ‘You are more complex, I think Miss Behrend, and much more intelligent than he gives you credit for.’ When he was done reading, pointing, probing, he straightened the two piles of letters and put them back to the side of the desk. ‘Let us discuss your friend for a moment now,’ he said, ‘shall we?’

He started to tell Julia about her boyfriend. ‘They weren’t particularly spectacular things,’ she says. ‘But they were things I could not have known because I couldn’t go to Italy and see for myself.’ Julia assumes that the Stasi had people in Italy. ‘He was even sort of witty about it, drawing me in as if we could both have a chuckle about aspects of my boyfriend’s life, as if we were both on the same side, and it was my friend not I who was the object of observation.’

‘As we know,’ N. said, ‘our friend is in the computer business.’

Julia nodded. ‘I’d never understood much about the sort of business he was in,’ she says, ‘and with my East German mindset not at all! He had told me it was trade in computer components.’

N. specified it for her. ‘He is a sales manager for the regional branch of the firm.’ Then he described the boyfriend’s family house in Umbria. He told her the make of car he drove. When he saw that this meant nothing to Julia, he interpreted it for her: in N’s estimation it was a ‘middle class’ sort of car, ‘so there’s no thinking he’s rich or anything’.

Julia wondered where this was going.

He opened his desk drawer and brought out a thick manila folder which he put, closed, on the desk.

‘Now Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘we come to you.’

He evaluated her life-in-progress. ‘He knew everything about me,’ she says. ‘He knew all the subjects I’d taken and how I did in them. He knew all about each of my sisters, my parents. He knew my youngest sister wanted to study piano at the conservatory.’ Major N. felt sufficiently informed to make some psychological assessments. He told her that there were clearly issues her father did not understand, that Dieter was ‘problematic’. Irene, by contrast, was much more loyal to the state.

‘It is clear to us on the evidence, Miss Behrend, that you take after your mother,’ he said. ‘Which, if I may be so bold as to say so, is a good thing.’

‘He was showing me that he had me in the palm of his hand,’ she says. Julia draws her knees up to her chest and places her heels on the seat. She stretches her jumper over the knees, making herself into a small black ball. ‘The only thing—’ she says, ‘—it’s ironic but the only thing that they seemed not to know, was that I’d broken up with my boyfriend!’ Since their split in Hungary, the Italian boyfriend had written several imploring letters. Julia had replied to the first one but then stopped writing.

‘Or at least the Major acted as if he didn’t know that we’d broken up,’ she says. ‘I thought it was strange that he didn’t know. Maybe he’d been on holidays and had missed the last couple of letters.’

Or, I think, he might have known, and thought his prospects with her then were better.

N. put the manila folder to one side next to the love letters. He joined the tips of his fingers together and leant forward. ‘As I’m sure you will have picked up, we are interested in your friend.’ And then it came. ‘We would propose,’ he said, ‘if you would assist us, that we meet every now and again. For a chat.’

Julia says, ‘I thought it was absurd. I thought: what on earth could interest them in him?’ She could not imagine that the Italian boyfriend was in any way a bigwig. ‘He did not have any high-up connections he ever mentioned, or any special expertise or training at all.’ It did not occur to her until she got home that it could have been her they wanted.

There was no question for Julia. She would not inform on him, or at all. ‘I am terribly sorry,’ she told Major N., ‘but I can’t help you because we split up on this last trip to Hungary. I want nothing more to do with him. He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ She added, ‘I never want to see him again, even as a friend.’

N. smiled. ‘If,’ he said, ‘after giving the matter some further thought you reach a different decision, you should not hesitate to call at any time.’ He gave her his card with his phone number on it. ‘Oh and Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘one more thing. You must not discuss our little talk with anyone—not your parents, not your sisters, not your closest friends. If you do, we will know about it. This afternoon has not occurred. You have never been to Room 118. If you see me on the street you are not to acknowledge me—you must walk on past. All this for obvious reasons, as I’m sure you will have understood long ago.’

She nodded.

And that was it. He had shown her that with one phone call to him she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.

‘And then he let me leave.’ The street was another world, the daylight bright and unnatural. Julia watched a class of small children being herded along the pavement. She felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life. ‘It was as though all at once I was on the other side,’ she says, ‘separate from everybody.’

Julia seems to have run out of words, so I pick up the plates and place them behind me in the sink. I look in the fridge for something else to eat, as if it might yield possibilities missed at first glance. There’s only a saggy old condom of liverwurst and an apple. I throw out the liverwurst and cut up the apple. Whilst I have my back to her, she starts to speak again. To listen to her is to witness the process, almost mechanical, of pulling things up from the past.

Her voice is slow. ‘I think I’d totally repressed that entire episode,’ she says. ‘Maybe what came later, the whole 1989 story, was so severe that other things just fell away. Otherwise, I can’t explain it.’

I don’t know what she means by ‘the whole 1989 story’. I say I think it is extreme, what happened to her.

‘Yes, it is,’ she says, ‘when you become conscious of it. But the strange thing is it’s only now, in this room, that I feel the shudder run down my spine. At the time I criticised other things—not being allowed to study or have a career. But looking back on it, it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I
know
how far people will transgress over your bound-aries—until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.’ She flicks her hair as if to get rid of something. ‘At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.’

She takes a piece of apple and seesaws its fleshy arc between two fingers on the table. The empty fridge shudders and stops; the kitchen is a deeper quiet. ‘People talk about the unconscious,’ she says, ‘and it becomes clear to me as I am telling you this, the effect this knowledge has had on my life.’ She takes a small bite of apple. ‘I think I am definitely psychologically damaged!’ She laughs, but she means it. ‘That’s probably why I react so extremely to approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another possible invasion of my intimate sphere.’ She watches my face. ‘I think it’s worse if you repress it.’ To dig it up, or to leave it lie in the ground?

When she left Room 118 Julia was all right until she got home. Then her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She made it to the bathroom and vomited. When she came out she noticed her voice trembled and she couldn’t set it straight. She told her parents and her sisters everything. That evening the family sat down to decide what to do.

‘My mother is a very pragmatic person,’ Julia says. ‘Irene said, “Right, you ended it with the Italian—I didn’t want to influence you, but I’m glad you didn’t marry him. Now, though, you have to think very coolly about what you do next.”’

Julia couldn’t quite believe that this was happening, that they were sitting in the living room at home talking about how she might live out the rest of her life. She was twenty years old. ‘We’d always discussed me going to live with the Italian boyfriend, as if it were an option. But that was more like a teenage adventure fantasy: thinking, I’m free to do that and no-one can stop me. Suddenly it was reality: I have to leave here forever—I have to leave my family, I will not see my sisters again, and I have to go to the west. Which, as I said, I had never wanted to do.’ Julia has started to speak into the jumper wrapped over her knee. ‘And I think too, I was disappointed in the state. I realised for the first time that it wasn’t really the good father state you have in the back of your mind. I saw it can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all.’

She would not become an informer. That left only one real option. ‘You’ll have to find someone else to marry so you can get out,’ Irene said. ‘That’s the only way.’ Then she voiced all of their doubts. ‘But do you really want to marry any old person?’ she said. Dieter sat hunched in rage and sadness at the end of the table. No-one spoke.

‘That’s when I thought of it,’ Julia says, ‘I thought, if there’s no way around it, we just have to crash through somehow. There was, apparently, this method called a
Staatsratsbeschwerde
for people to write directly to Erich Honecker if they needed something they couldn’t get, or to make a complaint’—she shakes her head—‘as if the citizen really did have a voice and rights. People would write saying they wanted to buy tiles for their bathroom or machine parts for their tractor and none had been available since August or whatever. Ordinary people would sometimes say, “Well, why don’t you stop complaining and just write to Erich!” So I thought to myself, why don’t we? I mean, if we examined it, what had happened was just not right.’ I see the mimic in her again. ‘I don’t even have this boyfriend any more, and I want to study and I want to stay in the GDR, and why not? We can just write to Erich and complain.’ She looks up at the ceiling. ‘There was a certain naivety in this that I see today—back then we thought that the Party and the state were one thing, and the Stasi another.’ She shakes her head and unravels herself from her jumper, placing both feet on the ground. She opens her hands wide. ‘I thought, well, what can they do to me?’

Major N.’s card lay on the table between them all. ‘You have the phone number,’ Irene said. ‘Call him up tomorrow and tell him that you and your parents are going to write to Honecker and make a complaint.’

‘I will never forget that night,’ Julia says. ‘I said to my parents: right then, that’s what we’ll do, and I went to bed. I had nightmares like I have never had before or since.’ Julia dreamt she was being pursued in a place where everything was familiar to her—the kitchen countertop, the view from her bedroom, the faces in a shop, the back of her sister’s head. But no-one recognised her and she was not at home. Her father started to die, wilting like a plant and calling for her but he couldn’t hear her responses, couldn’t see where she was. When she woke she didn’t know if she’d dreamt of where she was or wherever it was she was going. ‘The night was terrible, terrible. I don’t remember if I cried. I don’t think I did. I just sweated and sweated till the bed was wet. I woke up many times. It was truly terrifying what I lived through.’ She runs a hand through her hair. ‘It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.’