Lena realized then how much worse it could be than it was before. Her eyes burned, her blood was beginning to itch again, and she was angry with herself for trusting the cruel trick he had just played on her. She raged inside at her own stupidity and the sheer insolence of this man making her hold his cigarette—it was almost unbearable.
An hour later she was still staring at the wall, holding her arms out for his cigarettes. The burning in her eyes was altogether dwarfed by the achy, throbby pain in her shoulders and back as she struggled to keep her arms raised. She had made the mistake of letting them lower just a tiny bit, and this infraction was once again met with the scream of slicing pain across the back of her legs.
She was being assaulted on all five senses, along with a few she didn’t know that she had. Her eyes were blinded by the smoke and the wall, and the resulting headache was intolerable. The rest of her body hurt equally from the terrible sting in her legs, to the mounting pressure on her shoulders, and the phantom pain from not knowing what her captor had in store for her as he stood so close behind her. Her nose smelled the smoke, and the longing for just one more drag only intensified. She was consumed with pain, fear and longing; dying from outside in to inside out. “This is hell… I am in hell… this is what it is to burn alive…”
She tried to distract herself with thoughts of something else—anything else—but her brain screamed so many messages of imminent danger she couldn’t fathom even the smallest concern. She thought she might begin hyperventilating soon if she couldn’t figure a way out of here, but she knew she was stuck—she was so very stuck—right here, whether she liked it or not. She was the property of the State—a mere plaything.
“Lena…” the man spoke after what seemed like an hour of silence, with an utterly filthy tone in his voice, “What are you?”
“I’m a… I’m a…” Lena began to cry with tears of shame welling up in her eyes anew, “I’m a-a child, S-sir! I’m just a child! I’m nothing but a child! I’m nothing but a child!”
Großvater
“Clang clang clang clang clang…”
Once again the heavy metal stick beat against the outside of her cell door, and once again the voice yelled at her: “Sleeping time is over! Sit up! Hands behind head! Head forward…” The dizzyingly long series of instructions had become automatic for Lena. She knew them all by heart now—apparently, her captors had caught on to this because they had begun adding slight variations to the instructions. She had mistakenly placed her head at a 45-degree angle up instead of a 90-degree angle forward, which had earned her a round of bildungsbälle—a series of pepper balls fired at her through the food hole in her door. These stung terribly when they hit her; and they hit her everywhere—in her arms, in her stomach, and on her chest. She recoiled and desperately tried to assume the correct position, but once the pepper-gas filled her lungs, the violent, coughing choke became a more pressing issue than the intense stinging of the balls against her skin. As she choked and cried, she vowed to never miss an instruction again.
“Clang clang clang clang clang…”
Now it was the newly-modified contemplation position. Soon, it would be the eating position, then it would be the other modified contemplation position. After that it would be the Körperliche Gesundheit positions where she would do slow pushups, sit-ups, and other painful exercises designed to “promote wellness and good cheer through fitness.” This is what a guard had told her through the cell door, yet the giggling on the other side as she struggled to hold her body weight up told her that it wasn’t entirely for her good cheer.
After that, it was her daily interrogation where she would again stand facing that damn wall, with her arms outstretched, holding her interrogator’s cigarettes. He would ask her benign questions aimed at weakening her resolve and sense of ‘self’ as they listened to the radio. He would critique each song as it came on, berating it for how socially irresponsible it was.
“What are these idiots thinking?!” he would howl as “Love in a Void” by Siouxie and the Banshees would play. “You know their lead singer is a prostitute and heroin addict? They are all on heroin over there! No wonder the GDR defeats Britain in every single sports match… they all have hepatitis! You should see it on TV; it’s disgusting! They look like zombies, every last one!”
“The audacity!” he jeered, as Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” played. “We sent those ingrates in America our agricultural techniques, and this is how they express their newfound fortunes?! Writing songs about West German cars! This is capitalism, Lena: forgetting who your friends are! You know she drank herself to death in sorrow after writing this song, don’t you?”
“What nonsense is this?!” he ranted as Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” played. “Hypocrisy! You know the British and French are building walls of their own to keep out the influx of West German refugees? Not like here in the GDR where we let folks into our country freely! It’s not neighborly… its bad governing! The world has no place for their perversions of socialism!”
“Disgusting!” he wailed as Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” played. “Do you know that America has become swamped with AIDS? The bodies of men and women litter the streets, I’m told! It’s because of songs like this—homosexuality and inbreeding have ruined America! They have lost touch with good values… not like here in the GDR! You would never find the perverted being celebrated so in our country. It just goes to show…”
Lena was really trying to pay attention; she really was. It was just that her eyes hurt so bad, and her arms burned like fire, and her poor heart was deprived of nicotine, and everything… just, everything was so terrible. Under normal circumstances she might have had the wits to see through his propaganda and the thinly veiled attempts to turn her against her own beliefs and ideals; but he was just so angry about it all. In her weakened and confused state, her mind reasoned that at least some of what he said must have been true.
The first few interrogations she had been able to remain true to herself, but this became increasingly difficult with each session, as her identity began to melt away. At first, she had also been able to mark the passage of time; but this too was slipping away. One day—or night; she really didn’t know anymore—she had arrived to find the room in near-complete darkness, lit only by a spotlight aimed at the bright white wall. After that point, Lena gave up completely on figuring out what day or what when. It didn’t matter anymore. Very few things seemed to matter anymore. She had become less a human being and more a piece of furniture, rotting away in a dismal and forgotten place. She realized this when her interrogator had become warm one day. “What an unseasonably hot day it is!” he had said as he hung his heavy overcoat over one of her arms. That was a long day.
Less and less did her thoughts belong to her. The days of her former punk-rock self were so far away, it was as if they had never existed. She had become a walking shell, and survival was simply a series of instructions to follow. She refused to admit it to herself, but she was beginning to feel safe in the minute-by-minute instructions: Every barked command was simple, after all. She need only follow it exactly and she would be safe—if only for a few seconds. The better she listened, and the more careful she reacted to commands, the safer she would be. Her body didn’t belong to her anymore. In the first days she had rested comfortably inside her head, secure in the knowledge that her body was trapped; but her thoughts were her own. She would let her body be controlled by the barking orders while she experienced a little safety and freedom in that little space behind her eyeballs. They could torture her, pummel her flesh, burn her skin, even gas her, but they couldn’t hurt her. They were only hurting her body—her mind was still her own.