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while I’d look at the eye in the peephole as he was hitting the door and I’d think, “Why don’t you just piss off for a change?” and keep dozing. Then he’d come in, shake me, and take the mattress off the bench so there’d be nothing left to sit on. They really made sure that I didn’t sleep. I cannot explain how kaput it makes you.’
    Afterwards, I looked it up. Sleep deprivation can mimic the symptoms of starvation, particularly in children—victims become disoriented and cold. They lose their sense of time, becoming locked in an interminable present. Sleep deprivation also causes a number of neurological dysfunctions, which become more extreme the longer it continues. In the end, your waking hours take on the logic of a dream, where odd things are connected, and you are just angry, angry, angry with the world that will not let you rest.
    For the Stasi it was beyond comprehension that a sixteen-year-old with no tools, no training, and no help, could crawl across their ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Measure’ on her hands and knees. Involuntarily revealing his admiration, the guard who first took her to the interrogation room wanted to know what sports clubs she was in. She wasn’t in any.
    But the main point of the questioning, night after night, was to extract the name of the underground escape organisation that had helped her. They wanted the names of members, physical descriptions. Whose scheme was it to go on New Year’s Eve, when the night was full of noise? How did she know to go to the Bornholmer garden plots if she had never been to Berlin before? Who had taught her to climb barbed wire? And, most insistently, who told her how to get past the dogs?
    ‘They just could not fathom how I’d got past that dog,’ she says. ‘Poor dog.’
    They were not above spite. Miriam was told that even if she had made it over she would have been sent back because she was underage. She protested. ‘There’s no way the westerners would have sent me back here,’ she told the interrogating officers. ‘Because I am a refugee from political persecution by you people which all started when I put up leaflets.’ Miriam puts her chin out, imitating a cheeky kid who still thinks there is a safety net to catch her.
    There was one main interrogator, Major Fleischer, but sometimes there were two of them. They both had moustaches and bristly short haircuts, grey uniforms done up tight. The younger one was so stiff he could have had a baking tray stuffed down his coat. Major Fleischer had hair in his ears. Sometimes he pretended to be her friend, ‘like a good uncle’. Other times he was threatening. ‘There are other ways we could do this, you know.’ Her answers remained the same. ‘I got a train from Leipzig, I bought a map at the station, I climbed over with a ladder, I went under on my belly, and then I made a run for it.’
    Ten times twenty-four hours in which you hardly sleep. Ten times twenty-four hours in which you are hardly awake. Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.
    Q: What does the human spirit do after ten days without sleep, and ten days of isolation tempered only by nocturnal threat sessions?
    A: It dreams up a solution.
    On the eleventh night, Miriam gave them what they wanted. ‘I thought, “You people want an underground escape organisation? Well, I’ll give you one then.”’
    Fleischer had won.
    ‘There then,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t so bad now, was it? Why didn’t you tell us earlier and save yourself all this trouble?’ They let her sleep for a fortnight, and gave her one book each week. She read it in a day, then started memorising the pages, walking up and down in the cell with the book to her chest.
    ‘In retrospect it’s funny,’ Miriam says, ‘but at the time it was pure, unalloyed frustration. I cooked them up a story I would not have believed myself, even then. It was utterly absurd. But they were so wild