Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (37 page)

Also, at around this time I realized that in order to get all the money we needed, I would have to start working at Zoo Station again. I kept that fact secret from Detlef. But my feelings of optimism and hope were being gradually eroded as I was drawn into the junkie's routine all over again. The honeymoon period after withdrawal—the time when you can just relax and not worry about the pressure of scoring—was decreasing with every successive withdrawal.

About a week after Detlef came back, Rolf turned up at Hasenheide park. He was distraught and told me that the police had caught Detlef. They'd picked him up during a drug raid, and while they were at it, they also slapped him with the burglary charge. The guy who bought the checks from them had ratted him out.

I went to the bathrooms at the Hermannplatz, locked myself in, and cried until I felt totally drained. We'd flushed everything down the drain again. I was back in the real world, where I felt more hopeless than ever. I was scared about how much I was craving my next fix already. I just couldn't bear the thought of having to sit next to the Arab guys, calmly spitting out sunflower seeds and just waiting for them to offer me a snort. So instead, I took the subway to Zoo Station, sat on a ledge, and waited for customers. It was dead at the station, however, because apparently there was some big soccer game on TV.

But eventually someone showed up, and it turned out to be someone I knew. It was Heinz, who'd been Stella's and Babsi's regular. He was the guy who always paid in heroin and would add syringes as a bonus—but the thing was, he wanted to have sex. I didn't care anymore though. I knew that Detlef would be in jail for a long time. I walked over to him. He didn't recognize me at first, so I introduced myself again. “I'm Christiane,” I told him. “Babsi's and Stella's friend.” That got his attention. He asked me if I wanted to go with him and offered me two quarters.

We used the same currency, and that was nice. In fact, it was his best quality. Two quarters was good pay—about eighty marks when converted into cash. I negotiated some extra change for cigarettes, soda, and stuff, and off we went.

Heinz stopped at a corner on the way to buy some dope because I guess his reserves had run dry. It was kind of funny to see this accountant-type guy skulking in the shadows with the dealers. But he knew what he was doing. He had a reliable dealer here who always got him really good shit.

I had the itch pretty bad and could feel the withdrawal symptoms coming on. I would have preferred to shoot up right then and there in the car. But Heinz wasn't offering.

On the way to his apartment, he insisted on taking me to the stationery store that he owned, at street level. When we got there,
he pulled open a desk drawer and showed me some photos he had taken. Just some trashy nude pictures of at least a dozen girls or so. Sometimes their whole body was in the photo; other times it was just a close-up. It was like being in a gynecologist's office. And all I could think was, You sad, pathetic asshole. In the meantime, I was still fixated on the dope in his pockets. I only started paying attention to the photos again when I recognized Stella and Babsi.

“Great photos,” I said. “But now let's get down to business. I need a shot.” We went upstairs to his apartment. He gave me my dope and also brought a tablespoon out for cooking it up. He apologized that he was out of teaspoons. (They'd all been taken by the other girls who had been over.) I banged in the shot, and then he brought me a bottle of nonalcoholic beer. After that, he left me alone for fifteen minutes. He had enough experience with junkies to know that they needed fifteen minutes of quiet afterward.

His apartment didn't look like it belonged to a businessman. And that's what Babsi and Stella had always said he was. In the old living room hutch I found some of his ties along with cheesy porcelain trinkets and a bunch of empty Chianti bottles. The curtains (which were yellow with dirt) were drawn, so that nobody could look into his shabby surroundings. There were two old sofas pushed together against the wall, and that's where we hooked up—on top of an old checkered wool blanket that had fringes at the end. There weren't any linens around here.

This Heinz guy wasn't that rude or mean or anything, but he definitely got on your nerves. That was his main talent. He was so persistent and so annoying that in the end I agreed to sleep with him so that he would finally leave me in peace and let me go home. He also insisted that I enjoy it myself, and so I pretended that I did. At least he paid well.

After that, I became Heinz's regular girl—just like Stella and Babsi had been. At first, I thought that the arrangement was really practical and convenient because he saved me a lot of time. I didn't have to hang around the park for hours just for one tiny snort, I didn't have to wait around at Zoo Station for johns, and I didn't even have to go to the corner to score my dope. So now I was able to take care of the house again, tend to the pigeons, and get all my shopping done without all the old stress.

I spent almost every afternoon with Heinz, and to tell the truth, I didn't really mind him anymore. He loved me, in his strange way. He constantly told me that he loved me, and I had to tell him that I loved him back because he would get mad if I didn't reciprocate. He was super jealous and was always afraid that I was still working Zoo Station. But all in all, he was pretty nice.

He was the only person left that I could still talk to. Detlef was in jail. Bernd was in jail. Babsi was in rehab. Stella had somehow fallen off the face of the earth. My mom didn't want to have anything to do with me. And as for my dad, I had to constantly lie to him. Every sentence that I told him was a lie of one kind or another. Heinz was the only one I could be honest with, the only one who I didn't have to hide things from. The one exception to that rule, of course, was the fact that we couldn't ever talk honestly about our own relationship.

Sometimes, when Heinz held me, it just felt so good. I got the feeling that he respected me and that I meant something to him. Who else respected me? When we weren't on his grungy couch, I felt more like his daughter than his lover. But he really did have a talent for annoying people, and that problem only got worse the more time you spent with him. He wanted me to be with him constantly. I had to help him in his store and was supposed to be there when he wanted to show me off to his so-called friends. In truth, he didn't have any friends.

The amount of time that Heinz required of me was making my dad suspicious again. It was putting me under pressure.

My dad was constantly snooping around in my stuff, so I was careful not to bring anything that would be at all suspicious into the apartment. I encoded all the phone numbers and addresses that were connected to drugs or prostitution. For example, Heinz lived on Forest Street. So I drew some trees in my notebook. House number and phone number I converted to currency figures. The phone number 395-4773 I wrote out as: 3.95 marks plus 47 pfennigs plus 73 pfennigs. And then I also worked out the answer like a good girl. So I hadn't totally abandoned math in the end.

One day, Heinz solved the mystery of where Stella had gone: She was in jail. I hadn't heard anything about it before he told me since I didn't spend any time at Zoo Station anymore. Heinz was pretty shocked by the news. Not because of Stella—but because of the cops. He was terrified of them. He was afraid that Stella would turn him in. In the course of this conversation, I learned that a while back the police had begun to put together a case against Heinz, on suspicion of seducing minors and some other stuff. Up to that point, he hadn't let it bother him, even though he had in fact been previously convicted. He said he had the best lawyer in Berlin. But now he was scared to death by the thought that Stella would tell the police about how he paid the girls in dope.

I was shocked, too. And like Heinz, it wasn't Stella that I was worried about, but me. If they put Stella in jail at fourteen, then they certainly wouldn't hesitate to do the same to me. That was not my idea of a good time.

I called Narc Anon to give Babsi the bad news. We usually talked on the phone about once a day. Up to that point, she'd agreed that the withdrawal therapy at Narc Anon was okay— although it should be noted that she had already slipped out twice
to get a quick fix. But when I called in, they told me that Babsi was in the West End hospital with jaundice.

It seemed like Babsi and I tended to stumble over a lot of the same obstacles. She was just as fragile as I was. As soon as we started withdrawing, we both got jaundice. Babsi had tried to get clean countless times before. The last time she'd even gone all the way to Tübingen
⁴⁰
with a drug counselor to begin a therapy program there. But she'd chickened out at the last second because of how strict the program was supposed to be. We always kept a close eye on each other. We could always tell how run-down the other one was because we were usually dealing with the same issues, the same illnesses.

The first thing the next morning, I left to visit her at the West End hospital. I took the subway with Janie to Theodor-Heuss Place, and then we ran through the district of West End. It's a really cool area. Beautiful villas and lots and lots of trees. I had no idea that a place like this existed in Berlin. It made me realize that when it really came down to it, I didn't know the city that well after all. I knew how to get around in Gropiusstadt and the surrounding areas, and I'd spent a lot of time in the little quarter of Kreuzberg where my mom's apartment was, and I knew my way around the four main drug markets, but that was it.

It was pouring. Janie and I were soaked. But we were both in a great mood. We were happy about having all these trees around us, and I was especially happy that I would get a chance to see Babsi soon.

After we got to the hospital, we ran into a little problem that I hadn't quite anticipated: Janie wasn't allowed inside. But one of the doormen was great. He offered to take Janie into his little kiosk and look after her. I asked him the way to the ward where Babsi was, and when I got there, I asked the first doctor I saw where she was. He said, “Well, that's what we'd like to know, too.” Babsi had taken off the day before. He said that if she did any drugs right now it could be fatal because she hadn't yet recovered from the jaundice, and her liver wouldn't be able to take much more.

Janie and I walked back to the subway. I considered the fact that my own liver was probably just as poor off as Babsi's. Our lives already had so many parallels. I missed Babsi and I longed to see her. I'd forgotten all about our fights. We both needed each other—now more than ever. I wanted to let her talk about whatever she wanted to talk about and for as long as she wanted to talk. And I wanted to convince her to check herself back into the hospital.

But then I sobered up again. I knew that Babsi wouldn't go back to the hospital after she'd been on H again for two days. I knew what I would do myself. I wouldn't have gone back either. she and I were so damn similar. But I didn't know where I should be looking for her. She was either flitting around on one of the drug scenes or working the streets, or she was with one of her regulars. I didn't have time to look for her everywhere because my dad was due to make his checkup calls home. So I did what any self-respecting addict would do: I looked after myself. I went home. I still had dope from Heinz, so I didn't have any reason to head out to the streets or to the station.

The next morning, I went downstairs to get the paper, the
B.Z.
⁴¹
Ever since my mom had stopped confronting me with all the death notices, I'd started buying the paper myself—and without even thinking about it, I still searched the paper for news about heroin victims before I read anything else. As the heroin-related deaths increased, the write-ups got smaller and smaller. But the more I read, the more people I was able to recognize. A lot of them had been found with a needle still stuck in their arm.

So on that particular morning, I was making myself toast with jam while flipping through the paper. On the first page was a headline in giant print: “She Was Only 14.” I didn't even need to read the rest of the article. I knew right away. I'd had a feeling it was coming. Babsi was gone. I don't know what I was feeling. It felt like nothing. It felt like I was dead—like I was reading my own obituary.

I went into the bathroom and shot up. That helped me to cry a little. I wasn't sure if I was crying about Babsi or myself. I sat on my bed and lit a cigarette, and then I read the rest of the article. It was written up like a sensational entertainment piece:

When they found her, the syringe was still stuck in the vein of her left hand. The name of this young girl: Babette D. (14), a student from Schöneberg. Dead. The youngest victim yet in Berlin's heroin epidemic. Nadjy R. (30), the acquaintance who found her, explained to the police that he'd picked the girl up at “The Sound,” a club on Genthiner Street. Since she didn't have a place to stay, he took her to his apartment. Babette is the 46th drug victim in Berlin this year.

And so on. Pleasantly callous, and so simplistic. In the papers, every junkie was the same. Even the magazines got in on the story because up to that point she was still the youngest victim of a heroin overdose in all of Germany.

Around noon I'd recovered enough to experience a feeling of intense, wild rage. I was convinced that some slimy dealer had tried to make a few extra marks by selling Babsi a bag of dope that was laced with some cheap poison, maybe even strychnine. Every month, more and more strychnine found its way into the dope that was sold on the streets. I took the subway and went to
the police. I ran straight into Mrs. Schipke's office without knocking and started to just vent. I told her everything I knew about corrupt dealers and about pimps who were in the heroin business and about The Sound. Most of it didn't seem to interest her very much. At the end of it all, she just repeated her standard goodbye: “Well then, until next time, Christiane.”

I thought the cops didn't give a shit if someone sold dirty dope. They were just glad when they could cross another addict off their lists. I swore to myself to find Babsi's murderer on my own.