Stasiland (6 page)

When he opened his file on the desk, it contained only a single sheet of paper: the delegated authority from Vogel to take on the case. Instead of telling her anything, he asked, ‘Mrs Weber, why don’t you tell me what
you
know?’

Miriam was wild. For days, she says, she had experienced the kind of anger that makes you not care any more, say things you would usually put a brake on. She replied that it was his job to investigate, so he should really be finding out and telling her. If he had done nothing for Charlie while he was in prison, she said, he could at least find out how he died.

‘Do I look insane to you?’ the lawyer said, very cold. ‘Do I? You don’t truly think I am going to trot down there and ask what happened, do you? For that you had better find yourself another fool, young lady.’

Miriam is upset again. Here, across the desk, was the face of the system itself: a mockery of a lawyer, making a mockery of her.

On Tuesday 21 October 1980, a Stasi man came to the door to tell Miriam that the corpse had been released from forensics, and that the ministry would like to be of service to her with the funeral arrangements. Miriam said she could manage on her own.

‘Of course, Mrs Weber,’ the man said, ‘but do you have a particular funeral parlour in mind?’

She told him to go to hell, and found a smallish funeral establishment. The woman behind the desk was old and kind. She said, ‘You know, Mrs Weber, you would really be better off going to the Southern Cemetery, because they will organise the whole thing from start to finish, and fill in all the forms on your behalf and so on. It would mean much less running around for you.’ Miriam didn’t think anything of it. She left, and went to the Southern Cemetery offices. She knocked on the door, and was told to come in.

‘You’re late—we were expecting you earlier,’ the man behind the desk said.

‘What? Who told you I was coming? I didn’t know myself I was coming here until half an hour ago.’

‘Uhh, I don’t know, don’t remember.’

First of all, he suggested cremation instead of burial.

Miriam said no.

Well, actually, they said, it was going to have to be cremation, because they had no coffins left.

Miriam bluffed: ‘I will bring you a coffin.’

The man left the room for a moment, then reappeared. ‘Today, Mrs Weber,’ he said, ‘is your lucky day. We have one last coffin left.’ Unfortunately, however, he added, it was not going to be possible to lay out the body for mourners to pay their last respects. He gave no reason.

‘If that’s the way it is,’ Miriam said, ‘I’m going to another funeral establishment and another cemetery.’

‘No, no, no, Mrs Weber, no need for that, we’ll see what we can do about a laying-out then.’

The day before the funeral Miriam and a friend took some of the wreaths she had received to the gravesite—there were too many to carry them all the next day. She noticed a fellow standing around, smoking, doing nothing much, watching.

A woman in the uniform of a cemetery official came up to her. ‘Are you with the Weber funeral?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I just wanted to say, don’t you get too upset tomorrow if there’s no laying-out, because it may just be that there isn’t.’

Miriam got her in full view, the smoker within earshot. ‘Let me tell you now, if there is no laying-out, there will be no funeral. I will call the whole thing off with everyone standing around here—I will make the kind of ruckus you have never seen. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’

The next day there was a laying-out. Miriam says the coffin was far away, behind a thick pane of glass, and the whole thing was lit from below with purple neon light. ‘Even in that terrible light, I could still see his head injuries. And I could see his neck—they’d forgotten to cover it up. There were no strangulation marks, nothing.’ She looks across at me. ‘You’d think they would make sure to cover his neck if they wanted to stick with their story that he hanged himself, wouldn’t you?’ From there the coffin was sunk to another level and reappeared on a trolley wheeled by cemetery employees to the gravesite. All these details are slowed down in time, stuck in the amber of memory. In the minutes between the coffin sinking from view and re-emerging, she says, there would have been time for a body to be taken out.

‘A great many people were at the funeral,’ Miriam tells me, ‘but I think there were even more Stasi there.’ There was a van with long-range antennae for sound-recording equipment parked at the gates. There were men in the bushes with telephoto lenses. Everywhere you looked there were men with walkie-talkies. At the cemetery offices building work was going on: Stasi agents sat in pairs in the scaffolding.

‘Everyone, every single one of us was photographed. And you could see in advance the path the procession was to take from the chapel to the grave: it was marked at regular intervals all along by the Stasi men, just standing around.’ When they reached the grave, there were two of them sitting there on a trestle, ready to watch the whole thing. ‘As soon as the last person threw on their flowers,’ Miriam says, ‘the cemetery people started piling on the earth and it was too quick. It was just too quick.’

Miriam walks barefoot across the room to a desk and picks up some papers in a plastic sheath. ‘I made a copy of this for you,’ she says, coming back to the table. It is part of the Stasi file on Charlie Weber: a handwritten report signed by a Major Maler. In it all the divisional plans are set out for the organisation and surveillance of the Weber funeral: Miriam’s telephone is to be tapped; she is to be called in for a ‘Clarification of Circumstances’ the day before; sound recording technology is to be used at the site; a ‘photographic documentation’ of the event is to be made; citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany attending the funeral are to be supervised to ensure they leave the GDR before curfew at the end of the day. ‘The name of the pastor who will conduct the service regrettably could not be ascertained by this operative. Should negative-enemy behaviour occur during the funeral all men are given orders to use force to quell it on the grounds that such actions would contravene the dignity of the cemetery premises.’ Major Maler noted that the head of the Southern Cemetery, a Herr Mohre, had guaranteed the Stasi complete freedom of movement for the Weber ‘action’, and that should any of the Stasi officers be questioned by workers at the cemetery, they should be referred to Colleague Mohre. Mohre knows that Maler is an officer of the Stasi, and also knows him by his true name, not his undercover identity.

All of this Miriam could have guessed, from what she saw on the day. She points to the next line and reads it aloud: ‘No definitive information is available as to the date for the cremation. This date can be ascertained from Colleague Mohre on or after 31.10.80.’

Miriam hands the file to me. ‘On 30 October we buried a coffin. We buried a
coffin
and they are setting the date for
cremation
the next day. Either there is no-one inside that thing, or there is someone else in it.’

Miriam went to the Interior Ministry, and added the claim of ‘Transportation of Coffin’ to her application to leave the GDR. She wanted to get out, and she wanted to rebury Charlie in West Germany.

Every month or so she would be called in to the Stasi for a chat. It went on for years. ‘What’s all this about transportation of the coffin?’ they asked her. ‘What do you want with the coffin?’

‘What do you think I want with the coffin? To take it for a Sunday stroll? I want to do with the coffin what one does with a coffin: I want to bury it.’

In 1985 they said to her, ‘You probably want to have the contents examined, do you?’

‘What if I do? What am I likely to find other than that he hanged himself, as you say?’

‘You know there will be nothing left in the coffin. You won’t be able to prove anything.’

‘Well, why are you so preoccupied with it, then?’ she said, and took it as an admission of guilt. After a time Miriam stopped obeying the cards that appeared in her letterbox summoning her to their offices to clarify some circumstances. The only thing that ever got clearer was that they had the power, in the circumstances.

‘It was silly. I stopped thinking I’d ever get out. They were playing with me like a mouse.’

At 8 am one morning in May 1989, Miriam’s phone rang. It was the Stasi. They couldn’t say why, but she was required to report to them without delay, this day, and bring her identity papers.

Miriam thought if it wasn’t cards in her letterbox summoning her to clarify circumstances they were giving her wake-up calls. She had had a late night. She slept some more, then got up and had a shower, made the first cup of tea.

At midday the doorbell sounded. A Stasi man, Division of the Interior. ‘Why are you still here?’ he said.

‘This is my home.’

‘You are required to report immediately to the ministry, and bring your identity papers with you.’

‘There’s plenty of time. The day is still long, my friend.’

He stationed himself outside her door.

She went down to the offices. An official took her ID papers, and said she was to go to a photographer, and that after that she had an appointment with a public notary. Then, she was to come back to collect her travel authority. ‘You are on a train tonight,’ he said.

‘That was when I understood,’ Miriam says. ‘I was in shock. I said to them, “It’s been eleven years since we lodged the application to leave, and now I can’t even say goodbye to my friends?”’

‘Mrs Weber, the travel authority you have been issued is valid until midnight tonight. If you are found to be on GDR territory after that time, you will be here illegally, and you will be arrested. I would remind you,’ he said holding them up to her in his hand, ‘that you no longer have any identity papers for this country.’

The train that night was crammed full of people being expelled from the GDR. It was as though anyone who might catch the glasnost virus had to be put over the Wall. Miriam had a small carrybag with two changes of clothes in it, and she was leaving her life behind. Her friends were going to pack up her apartment for her. For all she knew, she would never be back. No-one had any idea that the Wall would fall that November.

‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’ she says, ‘and six months too early.’

Night has fallen, and the city lights are spread out beneath us. In the dark, this could be any city, in any normal place.

Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past. For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died. Her memories of picnics or cooking meals or holidays, her real life, are memories where ‘she’ is a ‘we’ and those are the things she and Charlie did together. It is as if the time after his death doesn’t count; it has been a non-time, laying down non-history. She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.

‘Why did you come back to Leipzig?’ I ask.

‘Well, in this matter I’ve got going at the moment, it is better that I am here. It only takes me an hour to get to the offices of the investigators in Dresden,’ she smiles. ‘And I am hoping,’ she says, and I see that under the smile she is fighting back tears, ‘I am really hoping that the puzzle women in Nuremberg find out something about Charlie in all those pieces of files.’

Miriam wants Charlie’s body exhumed, so she can know for sure what happened to him.

I look out at the lights. She continues, ‘I don’t believe he would have killed himself. I don’t think he did. Of the two of us, he was always more worried it’d be me who would crack under all that pressure.’

Not knowing what happened to Charlie is so hard, because if it was suicide, she was abandoned. I wonder what will happen to her when they dig up the coffin. If he was cremated, there will be nothing there, or someone else’s remains. If it’s Charlie what could that tell her? Will she be released into a new life? Or will the current one lose its purpose?

Miriam can’t afford to have the exhumation performed privately, so she hopes it will be done in the course of the criminal investigation into his death that is now, apparently, being undertaken by the authorities of united Germany. But twice they have tried to suspend the investigation, and twice she has travelled to Dresden to ‘bang on their desks’. ‘You know, they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.’

Most recently, the DA wrote to Miriam saying that the investigation was to be suspended because a former employee of the Southern Cemetery had ‘credibly assured’ him that there had been nothing untoward about the Weber funeral. She sent him in the file, highlighting the parts that referred to the body coming from ‘Anatomie’ (code for the Stasi mortuary, as if somehow the corpses coming from custody were coming from the medical school); the surveillance detail for the funeral; the part about Herr Mohre knowing the true identity of the Stasi man who was making arrangements with him; and the part about the cremation, scheduled to take place the next day. ‘That stopped them,’ she says. ‘I wrote, “Do you still think there was ‘nothing untoward’ about the Weber funeral?”’ The DA replied that he hadn’t yet read that section of the file. When Miriam inquired at the Stasi File Authority she found that he hadn’t even lodged a request to see it.

‘Do you ever run into any Stasi men you recognise in the street?’ I ask. I think that is what would terrify me, in the nonsensical way in which it is horrible to run into someone who has wronged you.

‘No, thank goodness. But I did try to find the people involved in Charlie’s case.’

Shortly after the revolution in 1989 Miriam went to the cemetery to find Herr Mohre, but he had vanished as soon as the Wall came down. ‘The Stasi cremated a lot of people at the Southern Cemetery,’ she says.

Miriam did find Major Maler. She rang him and said she would like to meet to discuss the Weber case. They met in a cafe. Miriam took a friend along so she would have a witness. The friend sat at the next table, unknown to Maler.