I walk through a small park where people are eating lunch on benches. The air is quiet apart from birdsong and the soughing of trams, and a rolling sound behind me getting louder. I turn and two boys on skateboards are coming towards me, fast. Before I can decide which edge of the path to keep to, they separate around me in graceful formation, one on each side, then join up again. I watch them glide out of the park. They perform the same manoeuvre on a girl in a phone booth. She keeps talking as she leans out of the box to see them skate on.
When I am near the phone I find myself looking at the girl. She’s wearing a white midriff top and jeans, and chewing gum as she chats. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she’s completely absorbed in it, leaning one heel on her knee into the booth. She is probably sixteen, which means she was six years old when the Wall fell. She wouldn’t remember a time without telephone boxes.
Before I know why I am stopped here, she sees me and nods to let me know she won’t be much longer. I’m relieved for a moment to have found a purpose. But I’m stuck now. When she hangs up she waves and walks to her bicycle. I move to the booth. Sixteen, I think, sixteen was when she got on a train from here for Berlin and climbed the Wall. That’s all I think, but I open my address book at her number and dial.
‘Hello?’
‘Miriam, Miriam, it’s Anna Funder here. I’m—’
‘Anna! Where are you calling from? Are you back in Berlin?’
‘I’m—I’m actually in Leipzig,’ I say. ‘I thought of you, and thought I’d just call to say hi while I’m here. I didn’t know if you still had the same number. I’ve been in Nuremberg, and I’m on my way back to Berlin. I just—’
‘I’ll come and get you,’ she says. ‘Where are you?’
‘Near the station, I think.’
‘OK. I’ll be at the side entrance in ten minutes.’
I see her come towards me. She is dressed entirely in white: loose pants and a flowing top. She is my height, though finely built; when she hugs me I feel the wing-bones of her shoulder blades beneath my hands. She lifts her sunglasses and her eyes are the same blue. But the lines in her face are much more deeply drawn.
‘I’ve moved house since you were last here,’ she explains. We drive over cobbled streets from the station, under elms and plane trees and tram wires.
Miriam’s is a corner building, beautifully restored. Hand-painted flowers curl up the walls of the grand stairway, and at the back a discreet steel-and-glass lift takes us up. Once more, her apartment is on the top level. The living room straddles the corner and all the windows are open. I move to the sill. Across the street there’s another fine building with a glass atrium on its roof, and behind it a field of grass and trees, stretching as far as I can see.
‘That’s the Leipzig heath,’ she says behind me. ‘It’s lovely for a walk. We can go there later, if you like. The Leipzig zoo is there too, which is worth a look.’
‘What’s that smell?’ I ask.
‘It could be the big cat enclosure,’ she chuckles.
‘No, it’s sweet.’
‘Oh, that’s the acacias.’ She joins me at the window and points to the top of the glorious trees right below us. Cream flowers dangle in bunches like grapes. ‘It’s a beautiful perfume, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘More beautiful, at any rate, than the lions.’ She laughs and touches my arm.
Miriam makes tea and we sit to talk. She doesn’t seem surprised by my arrival, or not as surprised as I am to find myself with her. It is as if she always expected us to see one another again, almost like friends. What are a few missed phone calls between friends?
The scented air moves gently around us. The apartment has a parquetry floor, pale walls and a new kitchen at one end of this room. The adjoining room is a large space covered with a deep chalk-coloured carpet. It is lined with books and plants and there’s a computer in the corner, the screensaver on clouds. Everything is white and light and comfortable.
I tell Miriam about my travels, about Stasi men and Julia’s schoolgirl ordeal, about kidnappings and babies left on the wrong side of the Wall, about Renft and Professor Mushroom. I tell her I’ve just come from Nuremberg where I spoke with the puzzle women, who turned out to be men as well; a few dozen people doing something that will take a very long time. I find I can’t say, ‘Three hundred and seventy-five years.’
‘Everything in this place,’ she says, ‘takes a very long time.’ We are sitting at a glass-topped cane table. Miriam slips her sandals off and rests her feet on its supports. Her hair is still cropped short, but it is now dyed, a deep chestnut-brown. She wears the same small round eyeglasses and smiles the same kind and sudden smile, the shadows between her teeth overdefined by nicotine. ‘A very…long…time,’ she says again, lighting a cigarette. A breeze comes through, pushing her clothes against skin, revealing again for an instant how slight she is underneath—something I forget because of her magnificent voice.
Miriam works at a public radio station. Recently, she was asked to make a program on
Ostalgie
parties—where if you show an East German ID you get in for free, everyone calls one another ‘Comrade’ and the beer is only DM 1.30.
She says, ‘Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR—as if it had been a harmless welfare state that looked after people’s needs. Most of the people at these parties are too young to remember the GDR anyway. They are just looking for something to yearn for.’
Some of the men running the radio station are former Stasi informers, or, in one case, a former Stasi employee. This shocks me, but Miriam shrugs. ‘The old cadre are back in power,’ she says. She knows that one of them used to pass on listeners’ letters of complaint and comments to the Stasi, and he knows she knows. ‘He can’t look at me,’ she says. When she declined to make the
Ostalgie
program, he said to her, ‘You know what your problem is? Your problem is you don’t identify with the culture of the station.’ Miriam rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness of the former Stasi man recycling Stasi threats, substituting ‘station’ for ‘nation’. The program was made by someone else and broadcast anyway, feeding into the creeping nostalgia that, here, takes the place of a sense of belonging.
The put-put of Vespa motorbikes reaches us from below. The sound makes me think of beachy places, although we are landlocked deep in central Europe. I ask her what Charlie was like.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I haven’t sorted all my pictures yet—they are still in that old suitcase.’ She gets up and goes into her bedroom. I understand perfectly the impulse not to file him away under plastic in an album, or in a frame. And, suddenly, it is clear to me why the new museum was so irritating. Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over.
Miriam shows me a couple of old black and white photographs, and a Kodachrome colour snap like those from my childhood. I get a shock. ‘This is you?’ I ask. The photograph is of a young couple seated at a table. I recognise him from the last time: clear-faced, square-jawed Charlie. He’s wearing a top hat but no shirt, larking around. I would not have recognised Miriam. The girl is exquisite, extraordinarily beautiful. She is thin and smooth-skinned, with a chiselled face and a breathtaking smile. She is utterly natural, but she could have come out of any magazine, then or now. ‘That was after our wedding,’ Miriam says. ‘We went and had lunch.’ I remember the torn photo. I’m glad she has let herself remain in existence in this one.
There’s another picture of the two of them, she with her arms around him, looking at the camera. She is an apparition, a naughty angel caught flying over the Wall, put in a cage, and then let out, here with her beloved. In the third, a younger Miriam stares solemnly at the camera from under a fringe. She looks about twelve.
‘That one was just when I got out of prison,’ she says. ‘My grandmother made me that dress.’
‘But you look so young,’ I say.
‘I was, I guess,’ she says. ‘I was seventeen and a half.’ I look at her. She has no vanity, she has expected no reaction to the beauty in the pictures. The sun slants in, painting half her face golden. I would never have seen this girl in her.
‘There’s this too,’ she says. ‘I thought of it last time you were here, and I found it afterwards.’ She passes me a piece of paper folded into quarters. ‘I don’t think I’d looked through that stuff since Charlie died, actually.’ She breathes in. ‘It was hard for me to dig up.’ The page is yellow with age and slightly torn. On one side there are rows of handwriting in pencil crossed out and started again, on the back a clean version. ‘It’s a poem of Charlie’s,’ she says.
‘Can I make a copy?’
‘Please, just take it,’ she says, ‘Send it back to me sometime.’
‘What was he like?’ I ask again.
She flicks a lighter for flame, and leans back in her chair. ‘Well, he was a sensitive person,’ she says. ‘He was quite reserved—he noticed things. He had a good sense of humour, but underneath, I’d say, he took things to heart.’ She looks out the window, at the sky moving past. ‘He was individualistic—and an only child. That’s why it is so hard for my parents-in-law.’
Miriam gets up and collects a bowl of cherries from the kitchen. ‘Our friends thought our marriage was a catastrophe!’ she laughs, sitting down again. ‘But for us it was ideal.’
‘Why did they think that?’
‘Each of us did our own thing—to a certain extent, of course! It might be that one of us would want to go to the cinema and the other wouldn’t, so one would just go alone. We thought that was quite normal. Or I remember coming back from being away in Gera, and running into Charlie in the corridor. I said, “Are you coming or going?” He said, “I’m going out for a bit, see you tomorrow then.”’
Voices float up from the street, single notes of human music. ‘Our friends said, “But that’s no sort of marriage!” For us though, it was the only way we could be. That’s why it worked so well.’ She spits a cherry pip into her hand. ‘I think it came, at least on my side, from my experience in prison. I reacted extremely when I got out of there. I just couldn’t plan ahead. I couldn’t say to someone, “I’ll meet you on Sunday”—I found that sort of thing an unbearable obligation.’ She laughs. ‘I’m sure I was hard to get on with!’
I can’t imagine her being hard to get on with, but I know she is hard to pin down. And I know all of a sudden that she really is pleased to see me; that this is the continuation of a conversation begun three years ago. She got my messages and my letter and, from an impulse I now understand, did not tie herself down with a response. Having had her every move anticipated by them for so long, these days she just wants to let things unroll. And my turning up here is part of the unrolling.
‘After we wrote our applications to leave, things got pretty awful,’ she says. ‘They began to harass us on the street—we were constantly stopped. We were followed in the car quite a lot too—they really wanted to make life unpleasant for us. Eventually, Charlie was called in to the Department of the Interior for questioning. He said he just wanted an answer to his application: yes, or no? That was the first time they locked him up. After he was released the cards started appearing in the letterbox, calling him in to Room 111 at Dimitroffstrasse.’
Dimitroffstrasse was the police building, but Charlie Weber came to know that Room 111 meant an appointment with the Stasi. The complex had an internal yard, and ‘You could walk in thinking you were going to clear up an administrative quirk and suddenly find yourself in a room being interrogated by the Stasi, or even locked up on remand in a cell out the back.’ Miriam pauses. ‘The last time Charlie went in there, he went to his appointment in Room 111 and ended up in one of those.’
‘You wanted to exhume Charlie’s coffin,’ I ask. ‘What happened?’ She unwraps a new packet of cigarettes from its plastic. Her fingers are hard-looking and blue from lack of oxygen.
‘The district attorney’s office here just want to cover up everything that happened then, and most of all they don’t want to pursue any of the Stasi. There are a lot of reasons for this I imagine, but in part it must be because they are still working with people who were with the Stasi—they are their colleagues! The judge, for instance, who signed the warrant for Charlie’s arrest that last time he went into remand is still on the bench.’
But, it seems, there has been a development. The DA has found a witness to what happened in the cells the day Charlie died: another prisoner. ‘According to that person’s account,’ Miriam says, ‘there was a commotion in Charlie’s cell early in the morning. Something happened, and the guard called others who came running. Then they all left. The witness says everything was quiet until midday, when they came to bring the meal. Then the guard had to call more guards again, and voices were raised in the cell. You’d think this new evidence would give some impetus to the inquiries, but no. The DA later informed me that he’d found another former prisoner who “credibly assured” him that he heard nothing from the other cells that day. Once more, he wanted to use that as a reason to close the matter.’
Miriam has lost faith in this investigation. About a month ago, she sent the file and all the correspondence over the years directly to the Minister for Justice. ‘I haven’t got an answer from him yet,’ she says, ‘but I’m waiting.’ She has an elbow on the armrest and her chin in her palm. ‘And of course there are still the puzzlers,’ she says. ‘I know for a fact that there were lots of pieces of paper that they didn’t even put in the sacks, so they haven’t been gathered up and sent to Nuremberg yet. Maybe there’s something about Charlie in them.’
I don’t say anything for a moment. Then I ask her what she thinks happened that day in the cell.
‘Charlie was stubborn. I know from when he was in custody before, that he would refuse to co-operate—to speak or to go out into the exercise pen. I think maybe he wouldn’t answer them or something when they came to his cell in the morning, and they roughed him up and he hit his head against the wall. Then they probably left him in the cell and when they came back at lunchtime they found him where he’d fallen. He was most likely dead, or dying, and that’s why they called in the other guards then too.’