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an alarm. When the warden’s key rattled in the door all the prisoners stood to attention against the wall. This was roll call by number. They were counted as well. They went to breakfast, and then to the workroom, where they were counted again. ‘To make sure no-one had run off between the cell and the canteen.’ If Miriam wanted to go to the toilet, she stood to attention and called, ‘Juvenile Prisoner Number 725 requests toilet permission.’ When she got back she stood to attention again. ‘Juvenile Prisoner Number 725 requests permission to resume.’ Before going to lunch they were counted. After lunch they were marched around a yard for exercise and then counted again. The prisoners were counted and re-counted from the moment they woke to the moment they went to sleep, and, as Miriam says, chuckling, ‘You know what?—the numbers were always right. Everyone was always there.’
    ‘Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ She has taken all the doors off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It’s not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it’s just that she starts to sweat and go cold. ‘This apartment is perfect for me,’ she says, looking around the open space.
    ‘How about elevators?’ I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
    ‘Exactly,’ she replies, ‘I don’t like them much either.’
    One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm up to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say ‘That’s outrageous’, or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs—it was an automatic flight reaction. Charlie came out to coax her back up. He was distraught. She surprised them both with her tics in the first years they were together.
    All of a sudden I am very tired, as though my bones have gone soft. I look up and it is dark outside. I want someone to give her a rub. I want someone to give me a rub. I want the benevolent prison governess of TV land to have existed, I want the lesbian with the heart of gold to have protected the little girl, and I think of what is still to come.
    When Miriam was released, in 1970, she was seventeen and a half. Her sister took her to a lake to bathe. The lifesaver asked her out but she was unable to respond. His name was Karl-Heinz Weber, but everyone called him Charlie. When Miriam didn’t answer, he pursued her through her sister. He thought she was so odd, and so quiet. He wanted to get to the bottom of it.
    ‘What were you like?’ I ask her.
    ‘Well, you’d really need to ask him that,’ she says. ‘He was the one who brought me round again.’ Miriam crosses the room to a worn suitcase, which spills her photographs onto the floor. She finds one of Charlie. It is of a man in his twenties, with light brown hair and a neat face, looking straight at the camera. He is positioned oddly close to the left-hand edge of the photo.
    ‘Oh, that’s because I cut myself out of it,’ Miriam says. Then she says, ‘That was our wedding photo.’ I want to ask but I sit tight.
    Miriam and Charlie moved in together. Charlie had trained as a sports teacher, studying physical education and biology. In the GDR, sport was closely linked with politics. The government screened youngsters for their potential and fed them into training institutes for the glory of the nation.
    ‘Did he know about the doping?’ Children at sports schools were given hormones under the guise of vitamins. In a scandal that has come to light since the Wall fell, the pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned the little girls halfway into boys.
    ‘Yes, he knew from two different people about that. I remember he once told friends of ours to keep their daughter out of one of those institutes. But that wasn’t why