Maler said he didn’t know anything. ‘No, the name Weber doesn’t say anything to me.’
‘Well why did you come here then?’ Miriam asked.
‘Uhh, I just wanted to see what you wanted.’
‘But I told you on the phone that what I wanted was to talk about the Weber matter.’
‘Oh, I thought you were going to tell
me
something.’
Did he want to know how much she knew, whether he was going to be uncovered, or whether he was to be blackmailed?
‘It is amazing,’ Miriam says, ‘what a revolution can do to people’s memories.’ A cloud of smoke covers her head and the high back of the chair. ‘There are some compensations though, for being here. This apartment, for one,’ she says, and she’s right. A siren wails past and subsides. She is a maiden safe in her tower.
‘And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum. A museum!’ She shakes her head and butts out her cigarette. ‘That’s one thing I love to do. I love to drive up to the Runden Ecke and park right outside. I just sit there in the car and I feel…
triumph
!’ Miriam makes a gesture which starts as a wave, and becomes a guillotine. ‘You lot are gone.’
It’s past midnight when I get back to Berlin. I’ve been on a tram, a regional train, the local line, and then walked through the park where things are only shapes, dark on dark. Miriam’s story has winded me. My head, no longer consumed by listening, started to pulse again as soon as I left her apartment. I dislike being made aware that my heart is just a small pump, pushing all that blood around. I am beyond tired. As I reach my place I’m in slow motion, crossing a finishing line.
My building is covered in grey sprayed-on concrete, but still has grand arched doors at its entrance. At the end of the carriage hall a matching set of doors leads into the yard with its chestnut tree and weedy cobbles. I live on the first floor past the letterboxes up the stairs on the right. I don’t check the mail but turn on the hall light and go straight up. The stairwell walls are covered in bright but inscrutable spraycan graffiti which could be expressions of joy or pain depending on how you look at them, but I don’t. I hurry to get my key in the lock before the hall bulb goes off its automatic timer. Home free, home safe.
Inside, the lights are on.
A voice shrieks, ‘Don’t be frightened! Don’t be frightened!’
I am terrified.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ says the voice.
The pump in my chest pumps, hard. I drop my pack.
A woman up a ladder holds a large screwdriver. It’s Julia, from whom I rent. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says, turning towards me and lowering the screwdriver.
‘That’s OK,’ I say slowly, puffed.
‘I know exactly how it is,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you just want to get home and be by yourself.’ That would probably be, I think, because I live by myself. I don’t say anything.
‘I’m just unscrewing here,’ she says. ‘I’m taking these bookshelves, I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I need them at my place, there are none there.’
I have been living in this apartment for six months, and I am still not used to this. I think it must stop at some point, and I hope it’s while I still have a little furniture left. Julia worked at the rental agency I visited when I was looking for a place. She offered to sublet the apartment she’d been living in until her lease ran out. It had been a share house, but everyone was moving. The apartment was much too big for me, but it was in the old east where I wanted to be, and I could afford it.
And it was furnished if, as Julia warned me, ‘only sparsely’. This is even truer now.
I know Julia is concerned about how long it is taking her to move out, about the steady denuding of the apartment. I have comforted her before, saying all I need is a bed, a desk, a chair and a coffee pot. I meant it at the time, but two days ago when I found a pile of screwed up papers and old tissues and cassette wrappers I’d thrown under the desk where the waste-paper basket used to be I thought I must say something to her. Only right now I’m too too tired.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asks.
‘Leipzig.’
‘Ah,’ she says, ‘where it all started.’
‘Julia, I’m sorry, but I’m knackered. I need to go to bed. How about a cup of coffee some time? Why don’t you come over?’ During the day, I think.
She says she will, but we don’t make a time because Julia regards fixed appointments as intolerable constraints on her freedom. Which may account for how she lit upon this hour of the night for some home renovation.
I fall into bed and she continues her nocturnal disassembly so quietly I don’t hear a sound when she leaves with the boards and L-hooks and screws balanced in the basket of the bicycle she must have carried down the stairs.
In the morning the first thing I notice is that I can see my breath. One day without heating and the air here congeals with cold. My head is clear, but yesterday feels like a different country. The second thing I notice is that opposite the bed, where there were two blue milk crates that served as a bedside table-cum-dressing stool, is a freshly exposed piece of brown linoleum.
When I moved in I was pleased by the spareness of the place. I had two bedrooms, a huge living room with windows at tree height looking into the park, and a kitchen on the other side looking over the yard. This apartment was converted under the Communists into a place of concrete render on the outside and, on the inside, practical lino brownness, washed and waxed and charmless. But it was summer then and to me it was a place of air and light, with green on both sides.
I soon realised everything here was either broken or about to be. Each item had started life as a utilitarian piece of furniture in an eastern home well over a decade ago. After the Wall fell the students had moved in, and nothing that remains was good enough even for them to take when they left. The couch in the living room has developed lumps and is covered in a dark cloth I fear to disturb; the cord for the kitchen blind is permanently tethered to a plastic chair in order to stop it crashing down; my mattress springs are inching their way through the ticking; and the bathroom, windowless and painted Extreme Dark Green, has plumbing that needed to be learnt.
In the hallway Julia has left a tin bucket full of coal. She must have gone down last night to the pitch-dark cellar to fill it. I feed firelighters and coal into the brown tiled heater. Although it will take hours to heat up, her kindness warms me already.
I don’t really hold it against Julia that she comes to take this flotsam from here. I know she has nothing better where she is now—a one-roomer at the back of a block not far away. I know that in summer the smells from the garbage bins in her yard rise up to her, almost visible. I know that year-round her neighbours are unfriendly, both to each other and within their households, and that she hears their squabbling as it reverberates around the yard. I know that she needs to be alone but suffers from it too and that her room is choked with cheap and broken things she feels she may want at some point in life but may not be able to afford if she abandons. And I know that her small cat is incontinent, which makes her place smell, somehow, of anxiety.
So I cannot resent it if she still has keys, and comes back to her old life, every now and again. I accustom myself to each unexpected absence—the rubber bathmat, the coffee machine, and now the milk crates. I acclimatise to the thinning of the atmosphere. I wear dust-free tracks on the linoleum from kitchen to desk, from bathroom to bed.
All I feel today in fact, as I pass where the bookshelf used to be in the hall, is the sudden predominance of linoleum in my life. Altogether I can count five kinds of linoleum in this once grand apartment, and they are all, each one of them, brown. Degrees of brown: dark in the hallway, fleck in my bedroom, a brown in the other bedroom that may have once been another colour before succumbing to house rule, brown-beige in the kitchen and, my favourite, imitation parquetry-in-lino in the living room.
In the kitchen I make coffee in the thermos. What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.
I take my cup to the living-room window. In the park there is snow on the ground and the trees, light on light. My breath mixes with coffee steam on the glass. I wipe it away. In the distance lies the city, the television tower at Alexanderplatz like an oversized Christmas bauble, blinking blue.
I can’t see it but I know that just near there, on the site of the old Palace of the Prussian Emperors pulled down by the Communists, is the parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik. It is brown and plastic-looking, full of asbestos, and all shut up. It is not clear whether the fence around it is to protect it from people who would like to express what they thought of the regime, or to protect the people from the Palast, for health reasons. The structure is one long rectangular metal frame, made up of smaller rectangles of brown-tinted mirror glass. When you look at it you can’t see in. Instead the outside world and everything in it is reflected in a bent and brown way. In there, dreams were turned into words, decisions made, announcements applauded, backs slapped. In there could be a whole other world, time could warp and you could disappear.
Like so many things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again. Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decide about that either—a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end, the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?
Between the Palast der Republik and my apartment lies the neigh-bourhood of Mitte, the old centre of Berlin, with its grey buildings and white sky and naked trees. Streets near here are being renamed: from Marx-Engels-Platz to Schlossplatz, from Leninallee to Landsberger Allee, from Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse to Torstrasse, in a massive act of ideological redecoration. Most of the buildings though, are not yet renovated. They have largely lost their plaster and are scraped back to patches of brick; they look like tattered faces after plastic surgery. They are as they were before the Wall fell, except for the sprouting of domestic-size satellite dishes from the window-frames; a sudden white fungus, tuned to outer space. The trams are western now—they were among the first things to cross over here after the Wall came down. They are a flash of sighing yellow suspended from strings, shifting through this greyscape.
A tram stops right outside my apartment. It obeys a set of lights here under the window, though on the other side of the street there are none to match. I see the driver has the tabloid—screaming red-and-black headlines—on the control dash. Behind him sit tired-looking people for whom this day has come too soon.
I cannot fathom why these lights make the tram halt under my window. The stop itself is half a block away at the corner. Right here, the doors never open for passengers; they just sit, arrested and accepting. It is odd, the sight of a tram with a row of cars behind it stopped here for no pedestrians, no passengers, no reason, while on the other side vehicles continue unimpeded up the hill into Prenzlauer Berg. The lights change and the driver, still looking at the paper, moves a lever and slides the tram into action.
I go out for the paper and bread, and walk through the park. In summer this park is festooned with motley groups of drunks and punks. In winter the punks claim the underground stations for warmth, while the drunks install themselves in tram shelters. Today the corner stop is occupied by an old man with a mane of matted locks, a huge felt beard and flowing black robes. His belongings, in plastic bags around him, double as pillows. He is timeless and grand like someone walked in from another century—a Winter King. As passengers alight from trams he acknowledges them as if they were supplicants paying their respects to his throne, nodding to each and waving them on their way.
I cross to the bakery past a billboard that reads ‘Advertising Makes Better Known’. My baker holds, to some extent, with tradition. He makes wholegrain and rye and country loaves, stacked as oblong bricks on the back wall. But now, freed of state-run constraints on his ingenuity, he appears to be conducting his own personal experiment in bestsellerdom. On the left-hand side under the glass counter are the baked goods: iced donuts and cheesecake and blueberry crumble. On the other side, also under the glass and laid out just as neatly, is a bewildering assortment of fat paperbacks with embossed titles.
I am served by a woman with a bad perm. She’s wearing a T-shirt which has a lion’s face on it—the lion has winking sequins for eyes placed exactly where her nipples must be. I buy half a loaf of rye and ask no questions about the books. When I reach my building I see that the Winter King has crossed here to the place where the tram stops for no reason. He waits, but no passengers emerge for him to receive. Instead, as I approach, he turns to me and bows, long and dangerously low.
Over the next week I think about Miriam and I think about Stasi men. I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear. I draft an advertisement and fax it to the personal columns of the Potsdam paper.
Seeking: former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. Publication in English, anonymity and discretion guaranteed.