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smiling, enjoying her fantasy of a man. ‘I told him that he was totally bald. Oh, and he had remarkably small feet.’
    I am laughing hard now, enjoying the child’s-eye detail.
    ‘Yep, there you have it. It was pretty much the chrome dome with the remarkably small feet! What’s more, I told Fleischer I had the impression he was a regular at Auerbach’s Cellar.’ She laughs too, pulling on a cigarette as she adjusts herself in her chair.
    Miriam had thought it all through—no matter how many small-footed bald men they found for a line-up, she would fail to recognise any of them.
    Two weeks passed before her next interrogation. She was summoned to Fleischer, not at 10 pm but in the afternoon. He had both hands on the table as if restraining himself from throwing it.
    ‘My people,’ he bellowed, ‘have gone and got themselves a case of frostbite on your account. How dare you tell such tales! What could have possessed you to make up such a story?’
    ‘I wanted to sleep.’
    Fleischer said her conduct amounted to Deception of the Ministry, which was a criminal offence. She would now be up for an even longer sentence. And it was going to be bad enough for her, considering she could have started a war.
    Miriam thought he must be crazy. Had she jumped over the last railing, he continued, the East German soldiers would have shot at her from behind, and the West Germans would have shot back. She could have been responsible for the outbreak of civil war. Then he softened. ‘But for your sake I will take this little episode out of your file. Never let it be said we didn’t give you a fair go.’
    Later, it was clear to Miriam that he had been protecting himself. Had she been asked in court why she invented such a story, she would simply have said, ‘Because they wouldn’t let me sleep.’ Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.
    As it was, the judge gave her one and a half years in Stauberg, the women’s prison at Hoheneck. And at the end of the three-day trial he said to her, ‘Juvenile Accused Number 725, you realise that your activities could have started World War III.’
    They were all crazy and they were locking her up.

4
Charlie
    ‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,’ Miriam says.
    On the first day at Hoheneck Miriam was required to undress, leave the clothes she came in and take in her hands the blue and yellow striped uniform. She was led naked down a corridor, into a room with a deep tiled tub in it. Two female guards were waiting. This was the Baptism of Welcome.
    It was the only time she ever thought she would die. The bath was filled with cold water. One guard held her feet and the other her hair. They pushed her head under for a long time, then dragged her up by the hair, screaming at her. They held her down again. She could do nothing, and she could not breathe. And up: ‘You piece of filth. You little upstart. You stupid traitor, you little bitch.’ And under. When she came up the insults were what she breathed. She thought they would kill her.
    Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.
    Miriam says the prisoners were brutal to each other too. She says the criminal prisoners received privileges for abusing the politicals. She says that for eighteen months she was addressed by number and never by name. She says there was a hoard-and-barter system, in fact a whole economy, in sanitary napkins. I can’t stay focused on the awfulness of it all, and my mind wanders, disobediently, to sitcoms. I think of the old TV series ‘Prisoner’, set in a women’s prison: clanging metal gates before each ad break and a kindly lesbian in the laundry, steaming away.
    But Miriam has found her stride again. She tells me at Hoheneck the prisoners worked in a sweatshop making sheets. An ordinary day started at 4.30 am with