Read Online Stasiland by Anna Funder - Free Book Online

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.