Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (35 page)

“Well, in the meantime, she should come to us for some advisory interviews, so that we can figure out if she's serious about quitting.” Looking back, I have a hard time finding fault with the drug counselors. With the few spots that they had available for addicts in rehab programs, they invariably had to make some tough choices.

So I never managed to get her a place in a rehab program. But when Christiane returned from spring vacation, I had the impression that she didn't need one anymore. She looked really refreshed and healthy. I thought that she had finally quit for good.

She also made a lot of disparaging remarks about her friend Babsi. She said that Babsi was selling herself to old men for heroin. Christiane insisted that she would never be able to do something like that. She talked a lot about how glad she was to be away from all that crap. She seemed dedicated to staying sober. I could've sworn that she really meant it.

However, after just a few days she slid right back into the same old behavior. I could tell by her tiny pupils. I didn't want to hear her lame excuses anymore. When I confronted her, she would say things like, “What? I just smoked a little weed, that's all. Relax!” This was the start of a very bad time. She told me bald-faced lies and stuck with them even when I knew she was lying and told her so. I grounded her, but she didn't care; she left the house anyway. I considered locking her up inside, but then
she would've jumped out of the window. We were in a second-floor apartment, and I didn't want to risk her injuring herself.

I was at the end of my rope; my nerves were completely frayed. I couldn't stand looking into her distant eyes anymore. Three months had gone by since I'd caught her in the bathroom. Every couple of days the newspapers reported on yet another heroin-related death. Most of the time they only dedicated a couple of lines to each incident. They reported on heroin overdoses as routinely and dispassionately as they covered traffic accidents.

I was a wreck—just so insanely worried all the time. Especially now that Christiane had stopped opening up. She wouldn't admit to anything, and the constant lies and deception were really unnerving to me. When she felt like I'd figured her out or if I caught her in a lie, she'd become obscene and aggressive. Slowly but surely, her personality began to change.

I worried about her survival. I stopped automatically providing her with her allowance of twenty marks. There was this constant fear living inside me: If I give her an allowance, then she'll buy herself a shot, and that could be the one that kills her. I could almost live with the fact that she was addicted. But it was the fear that the next shot could be her last that destroyed me. I was at least a little reassured by the fact that she was at home now; otherwise I'd be like Babsi's mom, who had to call me all the time, in tears, asking if I knew where her daughter was.

I was constantly on edge. When the phone rang, I feared that it was the police or the morgue or some other horrible place. To this day, I still sit bolt upright in bed when the phone rings at night.

There was absolutely no reasoning with Christiane anymore. When I'd address her addiction, she would just scream, “Leave me alone!” I got the impression that Christiane had given up on herself.

Even though she kept insisting that she was only doing pot now, and not heroin, I was able to see through those kinds of lines. I'd stopped deceiving myself.

I searched her room regularly and would often come across her drug paraphernalia. Two or three times I even found a syringe. I'd throw them at her feet, which only made her yell at me, totally offended. She said they were Detlef's, and that she'd taken them away from him.

One day when I came home from work, they were both sitting on her bed and had just heated up a spoon. I was dumb-founded by their audacity. All I could do was scream at them. “Get out!” I yelled. “Just leave! Now!”

After they'd left I broke down and cried. I felt an incredible rage toward the police and toward the government. I felt completely abandoned. One of the Berlin papers reported another death from heroin overdose. There had already been more than thirty victims in that year alone. And it was only May. I couldn't grasp any of it. You could see on TV what huge sums the government was spending on the fight against terrorism. But in Berlin the dealers were running around unencumbered, selling heroin like ice cream cones openly in the streets.

I was really getting myself worked up. Who knows what else was running through my mind at that moment? I sat there in my living room, looking at my furniture, piece by piece. I think I was in the right frame of mind to smash it all to bits. This furniture was all I had. This was the reward for all my hard work. I started to cry again.

That night, when Christiane returned, I had decided to give her some measure of real punishment. While I was waiting for her to come home, sitting alone on my bed, my thoughts ran wild with a mixture of fear, guilt, and regret. I felt like I'd failed, not only because my marriage had broken down, and because I
had so little time to for my kids, but also because I'd been too ashamed—too cowardly—to face up to the reality of Christiane's situation.

That evening I lost my last illusion.

Christiane didn't come home until after midnight. From my window I could see her get out of a Mercedes. She was dropped off right at the front door. My God, I thought, that's it. That's the end. She's given up all self-respect. The catastrophe was complete. I was shattered. I grabbed her and spanked her so hard and long that my hands hurt. In the end, we both sat on the carpet and cried. Christiane was in pieces. I looked her dead in the eyes and told her that I knew she was prostituting herself. She shook her head and sobbed: “But not in the way you think, Mom.”

I didn't want to hear about the details. I sent her off to take a bath and then get in bed. Nobody can imagine how I felt. The thought of her selling her body was killing me. It was even worse than the news about her heroin addiction.

I didn't get any sleep that night. What other options did we have? What could we still do? In my desperate state of mind, I even thought of putting her in an institution, but that would've only made things worse. Initially, they would've placed Christiane in the central home on Ollenhauer Street. And I'd already heard some negative things about that place. Apparently the girls there have a tendency to recruit each other into prostitution.

There was only one thing to do: I had to send Christiane away from Berlin immediately. Forever. Whether she wanted to go or not. She had to get away from this place, from this morass that sucked her down over and over again. She needed to go someplace far away from all this heroin.

My own mother, who lived in the state of Hessia, was willing to take Christiane in, as was my sister-in-law in Schleswig-Holstein. But when I told Christiane about my decision, she was
dejected, almost distraught. Still, I'd already begun making plans and preparations, and I would have followed through with them, but eventually Christiane came to me, meek and full of regret, and declared she was ready to begin with a rehab program. She'd already found a place that had an opening. A place called Narcotics Abusers Anonymous.

That was a weight off my shoulders. I wasn't sure if she could make it without any professional assistance, and I was also afraid that she might run away from my relatives.

I didn't know much about this Narcotics Abusers Anonymous program, but I had heard that it involved a substantial fee for services rendered. So two days before Christiane's fifteenth birthday, I called for a taxi and went with her to Narc Anon. A young man did the intake interview with us. He congratulated us on our decision and reassured me that from now on I didn't have to worry anymore. He said that the therapy at Narc Anon was usually successful. He seemed really confident, and, to be honest, I couldn't remember the last time I felt so relieved.

Then he put the contract in front of me and went over all the details of the program, including my own financial responsibility. It cost fifty-two marks a day, and the payment had to be made four weeks in advance. That was more than I made at work in that same amount of time. But what did that matter when you considered what was at stake? Besides, the representative indicated that I could probably get the costs for the program reimbursed by Social Services.

The next day I scraped together five hundred marks and brought them to the Narc Anon offices. Then I took out a loan for a thousand marks and made the payment at the next parents' evening. A group of reformed addicts ran these evenings. You couldn't tell that the one I saw used to be a junkie—at least I couldn't. He looked pretty normal. That was thanks to Narc
Anon, he said. After getting clean, he'd become a new person. That certainly impressed all the parents. And he assured me, in particular, that Christiane was making good progress.

It turned out that they were just putting on an act. Like everyone else, they just wanted our money. Later I found out, in a newspaper article, that Narc Anon belonged to a dubious American religious organization, and that it was profiting from parents' fears about their children.

But as usual, I didn't realize what was going on before much too late. Initially, I thought that Christiane was in the best of hands. I wanted to leave her there for as long as possible. But in order to do that, I needed money.

I ran from one government office to the next, from one department to the next. But nobody wanted to take any responsibility for Christiane. And at the same time, nobody told me what was really going on at Narc Anon. I felt discouraged. I felt conned. Everyone acted like I was just wasting their time. Then finally, somebody told me that I first needed to get a statement from a government-approved doctor certifying that Christiane was indeed a drug addict before I could even begin to apply for reimbursement of her therapy fees. I thought that was a joke. Anyone who knew even a little bit about this topic could plainly recognize the misery in Christiane's face. But those were the rules. The thing was, when I finally managed to get an appointment with the officially approved doctor (an appointment that took two weeks for me to get), Christiane had run away from Narc Anon again. It was already the third time.

I broke down and cried. I thought, Now it'll start all over again. We're back at square one. Every time that she returned, I was convinced that this was the time that she would finally make it, and every time, I was disappointed. My boyfriend and I went out to look for her. In the afternoons we'd check out the park
that young people often hung out at called Hasenheide
³⁶
; at night we'd go downtown and to the clubs, and in between we'd go scouring the subway stations. We went wherever the drugs were. With each new day, we'd renew the hunt. We even checked the public bathrooms all over the city, just in case. We'd reported her as missing, but they only said that they'd add Christiane to their missing-persons list. She'd show up again, they said.

All I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and disappear. I was consumed by fear. Fear of that phone call: Your daughter is dead. I was just a bundle of nerves. I wasn't interested in anything anymore, and I didn't want to do anything, I had to force myself to go to work. I started getting heart palpitations, and I could hardly move my left arm. At night it would tingle and go numb. My stomach was constantly upset. My kidneys hurt and my head felt like it was going to explode. I was physically and mentally spent.

I went to my doctor, who told me it was all nerves and prescribed me some Valium. When I told him why I was such a mess, he said that a couple of days ago another such young girl had come to him, confessed her drug addiction, and asked him for advice on what she should do. “And what did you tell her?” I asked.

“I told her to go and hang herself.” That was his answer. Just like that. It was hopeless.

When Christiane showed up again at Narc Anon a week later, I couldn't even bring myself to feel relief. It was like a part of me had died. I was of the opinion that I had done everything humanly possible, but nothing had helped. Whatever I did, things always got worse.

It was like a snowball tumbling downhill. Narc Anon had done more harm than good. Christiane had changed during her time there. She made a bad impression now—she was vulgar, almost to the point of repulsiveness—and had lost whatever girlish innocence she still had left.

I was suspicious even during my first visit to Narc Anon. Christiane had become a stranger to me already. Something had been destroyed. Up until then, despite everything, she'd still had a connection to me—but now that was gone. It was like she'd been brainwashed.

It was at this point that I asked my ex-husband to take Christiane out of Berlin, to Western Germany. But he preferred to take her in himself. He'd be able to deal with her, he said. And if she didn't cooperate, then maybe a little corporal punishment would help.

I didn't object. I'd reached the end of my rope. I'd already made so many mistakes and miscalculations that suddenly I was afraid to take any further actions of my own.