Stasiland

Back in Berlin, Funder walks through the park on a beautiful spring day. She moves back into her old apartment. She takes out and rereads a letter she sent to Miriam that explains how writing about Miriam’s story caused it to take on a life of its own. Funder did not receive a reply from Miriam, but she did get one from Julia, whom Funder also wrote to. Julia is working in a feminist bookshop in San Francisco and is very happy leaving her past behind.

Funder sits in the park. One man, wearing a medal on a ribbon around his neck, strikes up a conversation with a man named Harry, who says he’s been hunting elephants in Mexico and Funder speculates that “perhaps this is really a society of poets and priests where all stories are metaphorical. Or perhaps reality has been so strange here that anything else is welcome to take its place” (249).

The man with the metal invites Funder to come mushrooming with the men, and Funder wonders if he’s joking. It turns out he is not. He calls himself a professor of mushroom-picking and talks about the old days of the east, when everything from alcohol to medicine was cheap.