This interview was conducted by Sergeant Tancur Ozbal of the Security
Service of the Federal Police on April 26, 1997. The person being interviewed
is Dr. Alia Narruddin of the Saxon Refugee Centre, located in Dresden.  

Int: Dr. Narruddin, can you tell me a bit about your self.

AN: In what sense?

Int: Biographical information. Your career. How you found your way to
Chemnitz. 

AN: I was born in 1950 in Kabul, Afghanistan, where I was educated in
the German Embassy School. My parents were distant cousins of the
King, and they wanted to raise me as a modern woman. I completed the
general school program at 14 and was sent to study medicine at the
Humboldt University in the Democratic Republic. I completed a basic
medical education there in 1970, and then I went on to specialize in
Psychiatry at the Free University in West Berlin. I became interested
in the treatment of psychiatric disorders of young women, especially
in drug addiction and eating disorders. I lived in Germany until 1977,
when I returned to Kabul and to the University there, after the fall
of the King. I married a doctor in 1978, only to lose him to the
purges that followed the coup in 1979. When the Civil War began, I
found myself treating not the daughters of the rich, but young women
who had been captured and persecuted for not believing in the proper
creed. I had many patients who had been captured by the rebels and
raped or tortured while imprisoned. Within five years of their
release, over a third of them had committed suicide, while many of the
rest were broken, seemingly beyond repair. I managed to save some of
them. I married again, to a political science professor who kept his
job from the kingdom through both Communist regimes. He did not
survive the bombing of our home. I was imprisoned when the rebels took
Kabul, but they released me and soon I found that I was doing the same
work for country girls who had been captured by the Russians. Again, I
was able to save some of them. When the Taliban came in, they put me
in prison for longer. I escaped from prison after an air raid, and
joined my brother, who was operating a small store in Chemnitz.

Int: Were you tortured?

AN [long pause] The Taliban knew the work that I had done. They saw to it
that I suffered the same fate as those I once helped.

Int: How did you react?

AN: I fell apart. I remember little of the
experience, and I was told when I came to Germany that other women
prisoners had had to carry me out of the prison and into Pakistan in a
litter, I was so withdrawn. I only returned to myself in Germany. It
was a very slow process.  

Int: What did you do in Chemnitz? Were you able to get any help?

AN: I lived in the back of my brother's store. He was the smart
one. He got out after the first revolution. He started with nothing,
and then took over this little store in a poor part of Chemnitz after
the wall came down. All the rest of my family are dead. [Pause]
At first, I would not come out of the apartment, or go into the
store. Other people came to see me, mostly from the Mosque, but I was
still lost. He started to make up errands that would take him out of
the store for long periods, and asked me to watch over things. It
forced me out. It was terrible. The Germans who were poor, they looked at
me the same way the Taliban did. As if I were the devil's excrement,
and could pollute them through simply being seen. The only ones that I
could stand were the addicts. There were many heroin addicts in the
store. They were always stealing things.

Int: Dr. Narruddin, can you identify the woman that you knew as Yana
in any of these pictures?

AN: [Points to a picture of Katherine Pryde taken by an ATM machine
security camera] This one. This was what she looked like. She was one
of the addicts, but she was different from the rest.

Int: How could you tell she was an addict? How was she different?

AN: You could always spot addicts. They didn't have any hate left over
for you, they seemed to be too busy hating themselves to be much
concerned with anyone else. They were bound up with their needs, its
hard to say. You rarely saw needle marks, but you could always spot
the brain damage and the signs of AIDS or ARC. I can only tell you
what made her different by telling you how I first saw her. She came
in with that man, the drunkard. She was in very bad shape and she had
been neglecting her hygiene. She was supporting and guiding the man,
who was filthy and appeared to be incontinent. She left him leaning
against a wall and then she came over to me. She looked me in the eye,
which addicts almost never do and just stared. It was very
disturbing. I could not tear my eyes away. Then she said "You are just
like me." I was so upset I had to run into the back room and hide. I
felt so stupid afterwards, as I was sure that they would have emptied
the cash register, but when I came back the register was untouched and
they were gone. 

Int: You found here eyes very disturbing.

AN: Yes. There was something in them. Something struggling to stay
alive, but obviously failing. I feel stupid describing it in such non-medical
terms.

Int: When did you next see her?

AN: I avoided her, whenever she came into the store. It was always
with the man. She bought alcohol, and soup and junk food, and
laxatives. She always paid. After a few visits, my brother told me
that she had asked about me, and that she was very sorry if I had been
scared. She left me a note, which was written as if in a child's hand. It
was signed Yana X. After that I tried to talk to her when she came in.
She rarely had very much to say, but I became fascinated with her,
both as a person, and as a case. When she walked, you see the ghost of
the athlete she had obviously once been in little moments of graceful
movement. While much of her behaviour was infantile, her relationship
with the man was not. Once, I saw him trying to steal something, she
turned away from me to look at him. I couldn't see her face, but I
could see his. He was sick with fear. He put back what he had stolen,
and backed away from her looking absolutely terrified. When she turned
back to me she looked at me with an expression of totally false
innocence and explained that he was often a naughty boy, and that he
needed to be disciplined. Sometimes she came in with another girl,
very young and attractive, addicted, but not so far gone. The other girl
followed her around, as if under a spell, as if possessed. I only saw
her a few times, but it was clear that this young women had an
extraordinary effect on some people.

Int: When did you last see her?

AN: At the morgue.

Int: I'm sorry, I meant when did you last see her alive?

AN: On April 12, 1997. In the store. I was feeling very fatigued
that day, and she came into the store alone to buy some things. She
asked to see me, and I invited her into my room in the back of the
store. I had half an idea of interviewing her, although I knew I had to
be subtle about or she would run. Instead, she had her own ideas. She
asked for a pen and some paper, and she said "I am going to tell you
who I am" She sat down at a table in my room, and she drew non-stop
for 2 hours, hiding the paper from me whenever I came near. She was
concentrating as hard as she could, putting everything she had into
it. I could see that her left hand was damaged, with some of the
tendons cut, and that she was drawing with her right. She had been
left-handed, at one time. When she was done, she smiled a big
beautiful, child's smile, and gave this to me. [produces a sheet of
paper, covered in simple drawings in ball point pen; at the centre, a
rough drawing of a cat, holding a ball of wool in its paws. Along the
left side, dozens of identical stars of David, on the right side what
appear to be mathematical equations; some are recognizable, others
devolve into patterns of squares and triangles without completion.]
She said, "This is me. This is the real me." I was very confused.

Int: Had you known she was Jewish?

AN: No.

Int: Did it matter that she was?

AN [Pause] No. [Pause] Why did you ask me that?

Int: Routine question in such cases.

AN: Rubbish. Her religion was not an issue. 

Int: Ah.

AN: At any rate, All I could do was ask her why the kitten was holding
a ball of string. She said it was not a ball of string, it was a
symbol, and then she did something quite extraordinary. She stood
there concentrating hard, and then she pushed her hand through the
table.

Int: She broke the table?

AN: No, her hand became intangible, and it just passed through as if
she was a ghost. Then she smiled at me again, and said, as if she was
in a trance, "See? I can still do it. Did you know that I once saved
the Universe?" I asked her who the man was, and looked down at the
floor and then she looked up at me with fire in her eyes and said. "He
made me what I am today". Then she left. I was just standing there
like an idiot.  

Int: Did you know who she was?

AN: Not right away, but I knew that she was a mutant. I left the store
and went straight to the library. It took me an hour to find it,
because I had never been out of the store on my own before. I found
some old copies of Der Spiegel, and I looked up every reference to
mutants, until I found articles on the X-Men, the American group, and
Excalibur, the British group. Both groups had a young woman who could
become intangible, and she was presumed missing after those terrible
events in London. It was her. It had to be her.

Int: What did you do then?

AN: I enquired at the Mosque, to see if anyone knew how to contact
these X-Men. No-one knew. I could not go to the police, on account of
my status, but I began to search for her myself. I found the girl that
I saw her with, but neither her nor anyone else would tell me where she
was. I started checking the papers, and ten days later I found a
notice saying that two drug addicts had been found murdered in a
flat, and had remained unidentified. I managed to acquire some papers,
that identified me as a German resident, and I went to identify the
body with my brother. It was badly decomposed, but it was her. She had
been stabbed through the heart. There was another man there, who said that he
had known her, and I told him that she was Jewish, and deserved a
proper Jewish burial. Then I told him everything else. Then he told me
that he was a policeman. Then I passed out.

Int: This was Inspector Christodoulou?

AN: Yes. When I came round, he told me that he knew who I was, that he
was in the Security Service of the Federal Police. Then he told me
that I was needed in the New Germany, and that I should not have to
worry about anything. I was again left without words, but he was good
to his. He fixed my status, and found me the job that I now have with
the refugee centre. I help refugee women, who went through what I
did. I can still save some of them. I only wish that I could have
saved her, but she was lost long before she ever met me.

Int: Remarkable.

AN: Yes. She helped me save myself. I and a Rabbi and the inspector
were the only people at her funeral. The Rabbi found a relative, and had the
remains shipped back to the US for burial. 

Int: What about the man?

AN: He is dead, and I hope he rots in Hell.