The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long. She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. Stasiland, hailed as a ‘classic’, tells true stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of others who worked for the Stasi. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland and All That I Am, and the novella The Girl with the Dogs. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. “Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line.
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