But Herr Winz is warming to his tale. ‘The CIA—now they were bandits! A very nasty crew. Did you know they made twenty attempts on Fidel Castro’s life?’
‘They couldn’t have been very good then,’ I smile. He looks startled. He is not amused.
‘Bandits!’ he shouts, ‘I said they were bandits!’
I cast a look behind him in the direction of the waiter, shuffling busily at his station. If he had any curiosity about this man’s origins, it is now well and truly sated.
‘How are you treated today, as a former Stasi man?’ I ask. I would like to find out why he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people. But in Potsdam people come up and say’—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘“You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!”’
You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.
‘This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal. The rich get richer and the masses get steadily poorer. And capitalism makes war! German imperialism in particular! Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!’ He takes a sip of coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking any more questions.
‘Capitalism plunders the planet too—this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution—we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!’
There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent. And it becomes clear as he speaks that socialism, as an article of faith, can continue to exist in minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. This man is disguised as a westerner, the better to fit unnoticed into the world he finds himself in, but the more he talks the clearer it becomes that he is undercover, waiting for the Second Coming of socialism.
He pulls himself together and lowers his voice, leaning towards me in a conspiratorial way. His breath is hot and bitter from coffee and small flecks of brownish spittle spray over the cardboard thesis cover. ‘Have this.’ He passes me
The Communist Manifesto
from the top of his pile. It looks well-loved. ‘You should read it,’ he hisses. ‘Then you will understand a great deal more. There is, even today, no better analysis of capitalism. It’s a present from me.’ He takes out a pen and inscribes it to me ‘as a memento of our Potsdam discussion’.
‘Thank you very much.’
Herr Winz collects his material and stands up to go. Then he puts one set of knuckles down on the table and pushes his face close to mine. ‘You can take it from me,’ he says. ‘I have lived through a revolution already—in 1989—and I know the signs.’ His voice is getting louder. I can see the veins in his forehead. ‘This system is on its last legs! Its days are numbered! Capitalism will not last! The revolution’—he raises his fist off the table—‘is coming.’
Then he marches through the lobby out the front door, and the waiter brings me the bill.
A cheery voice: ‘No-one can come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, someone will call back as soon as possible. If it’s good news, even sooner. Bye.’
‘Miriam, it’s Anna,’ I start. Then I hear the electronic beep. I start again. ‘Miriam, it’s Anna calling. Just to say hello really. No news. I’ll call back another time, or you can reach me on the Berlin number. Hope all’s well.’ I can’t think of any other small thing to say. ‘Bye.’
For a few days afterwards each time the phone rings I think it might be her, but it’s mostly Stasi men. After a week or so, despite the Stasi men, I somehow remain hopeful when the phone rings. Another week passes and this feeling coagulates into something grimmer: have I offended her? I fill her silence with possible scenarios: ‘she’s lost my number’, ‘she’s on holiday’ and even the full-blown, ‘now that she has re-lived her story it’s all too much and she’s swinging from a rope in her tower’. Despite the vividness of this last, I decide to give it another fortnight or so before I call again. At some level, at least, I am aware that I am following a person who has been hounded enough.
Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?
After work I catch the underground to Rosenthaler Platz and then walk home through the park. Away from the corner the grass slopes into a hill, rare for this swamp city. At the top there is a community centre with a terrace café that serves coffee and beer. Saturday afternoons the centre fills with dancing pensioners moving in tender, timeless coupledom.
The pensioners are just visiting—the park belongs to the drunks and the punks. The drunks dress either in tracksuits or old business suits. Each morning they emerge from the corners of the park and shuffle together in an amphitheatre arrangement around the statue of Heine. All day long they hold what look like philosophical discussions, gesticulating slowly with their free hands and clasping tins of beer with the other. They seem to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.
Closer to the station are the young people. Here, there are women as well as men. They have as much beer and as many cigarettes as the drunks, but a lot more rancour. Their heads are partially shaved or covered with dreadlocks in blue and deep black, their faces pierced, limbs tattooed. Their appearance says both ‘Look at me’ and ‘Fuck off’. There are fights and tears; terrible pain, public in the park. Sometimes they ask for money. Unlike the drunks who claim the benches and tram shelters, the young people sit or sleep on the ground, with only their dogs for warmth. The dogs often look better groomed than the humans. But this afternoon, passing one young man, I realise I probably underestimate the effort required to maintain a cockscomb of eight 12-inch cones of hair erect and green, every day.
My door is unlocked. Pushing it open, I can see through to the living room. It looks like a giant cat has pissed, twice, on the lino. Then I hear a sound I know instinctively from my childhood: possums in the roof. Only the roof of this building is four storeys higher. I turn around and there’s a ladder set up against the wall in the hallway to the height of the mezzanine, about a metre under the ceiling.
‘Only me, only me,’ a muffled voice says. A small behind in army pants is backing out. ‘I came over to water the plants,’ Julia turns to me. ‘I thought I’d just get some of this old stuff while I was here.’ She passes me a bike pump like a relay baton and climbs down with a shoebox under one arm.
‘Old love letters,’ she says apologetically, and to my surprise she turns red. The blush begins at the neck and moves rapidly up to her yellow hair. This used to happen to me until some merciful god put an end to it so I don’t look, but walk straight through to the kitchen.
Julia has started to use the plants as a reason to drop by, both as if she is saving me the trouble of watering them, and by way of gentle rebuke. ‘The plants’ are two skinny crooked bald-trunked palm things in pots in the living room and not only is it true that I forget to water them—I forget their existence altogether. Subconsciously I have come to think of this apartment as some kind of closed and self-sustaining universe, with its own laws of nature. It tolerates my presence but demands as little interference from me as possible. I just keep to my tracks: bed to bath, window to desk.
Julia comes through to the kitchen. Along with the army pants, she is wearing her usual assortment of black: black boots, black baggy jumpers and a black scarf twisted like a dishrag around her neck. Right now she is black, red and yellow, uncharacteristically patriotic in the colours of the German flag.
‘Coffee?’ I ask.
‘Love some. I ran out two days ago.’
I look at her and I know that under all those layers of black is a wiry body and a sharp-sharp mind, but there is something about Julia that breaks my heart. She has an honesty I have started to think of as East German, a transparent fairness with all things that leaves her so open. But it’s not that. She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact. It’s not that either. I don’t know what it is.
‘I’ve been thinking lately about all the drunks and the homeless in the park,’ I say.
‘There were no drunks before the Wall came down,’ Julia says. ‘I mean,’ she corrects herself, ‘in the park. No-one was homeless as they are now.’
They might not have been in the park, but there certainly were drunks. Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts. Sometimes they had to live in untenable arrangements because of the lack of housing: divorced couples still together, or newlyweds with the in-laws. Whatever the other shortages were, you could always, always buy beer and schnapps. People were drunk on the job, drunk after work, and drunk at home putting up with one another in a place from which there was no escape.
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.’