Miriam is seemingly the most important person Funder interviews, as evidenced by the placement of their two meetings bookending the text. Her story, which involves her attempted escape, capture and interrogation, release and then the possible killing of her husband has a huge emotional effect upon Anna. She is perhaps the person who still hurts from the wounds the Stasi has given her – her prison time, the loss of her husband. She constantly downplays the extent of her trauma as a method of self-protection, such as telling Anna “prison has left [her] with some funny tics... it’s not that she has anxiety about small spaces... it’s just that she starts to sweat and grow cold,” when they are precisely symptoms of anxiety. Her character arc also expresses the theme of the human perception of time in response to trauma, as she is thoroughly stuck in the past; “for Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died”.
When the story returns to Miriam in the final chapter, we expect, as we have been conditioned to by narratives, an answer to the mystery of Charlie’s death and closure for Miriam. Yet, as this is real life, this does not happen. “The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice.” This heart-breaking and unsatisfying conclusion is a metaphor for the fact that history is a living thing, not a chapter in a book that can be closed shut and tied up neatly at will. When a cruel, brutal era of history ends, Funder implies, the suffering does not disappear with it.
