While we waited for the telephone to ring - for Renate Reed to call Victor back - Victor pulled one leg over the other, polished his spectacles, and told his story which, like Dean's, was pretty incredible, another tale from the Cold War, another story of an American who had crossed over.
Victor, who had grown up in New York, went on to Harvard. In 1951, during the Korean War, he was drafted. The army asked if he belonged to certain left-wing organizations.
"Did you?" I asked.
"As many as I possibly could," Victor said.
"The Communist Party?"
"Yes, of course."
Refusing the draft was illegal. Being a Communist was illegal, too, if you were in the military. It was Catch-22 and Victor kept his mouth shut, joined up, went to West Germany, and served nearly his whole year without incident, although as a Jew he felt uneasy: there were still plenty of fascists around.
Then the letter came. The Judge Advocate, noting that Victor Grossman had concealed his illegal affiliations, ordered him to report to the nearest Military Court. Victor panicked.
In his head perhaps, he played out scenes of his Court Martial. Senator Joe McCarthy's voice plagued his sleepless nights: "Are you now, or have you ever been...?" Maybe agents in raincoats chased him through his nightmares. Images of prison haunted him, of hardened criminals and Victor among them, a kid who grew up in New York, whose parents sold books, a commie, a pinko traitor.
Victor ran. Making his way to the Danube, the river that was still divided between East and West, he jumped in. Just stuffed his papers in his pocket and jumped, just like that, swam across, and came up on the Russian side, clutching those papers, looking to defect.
He couldn't find a Russian.
For twenty-four nightmare hours Victor wandered around the Eastern sector, holding tight to his papers, looking for a Russian. By the time he found one it was pretty hard to explain where he had been all that time.
Still, they took him in, debriefed him, and resettled him. He went to university and moved on to East Berlin, where he married Mrs. Grossman, had a couple of sons, and got down to the business of being a journalist and translator. He had an East German passport with the word" American" stamped across it.
As a Jew, he said, he found West Germany scarier than the East. In East Berlin he never made a secret of his Jewishness. He believed the German Democratic Republic made a conscious effort to reject fascist ideology. He believed the GDR made an effort to evolve a just socialist society. Victor didn't have to buy into these views, to accept the socialist package. He had grown up on it. He believed.
He settled down in East Berlin, where he wrote books about folk music and he took his holidays in the Soviet Union, and, after thirty years, Victor Grossman still believed. He knew that it was not paradise on earth, but his basic convictions were intact: in the East there were great gains in education and in medical care and the arts. Neo-Nazis and big business ran West Germany, Victor believed; I. G. Farben was a name that often popped out of Victor Grossman's mouth.
What about the Stasi? What about the prison camps? Perhaps, Victor said, perhaps they existed, a few of them, and they were not unlike the prison farms of Arkansas.
Leslie asked if Victor felt oppressed at all by the system, by the lack of freedom to express his opinions, for instance. Victor said that he often heard a wide range of opinion expressed in East Berlin. Maybe you didn't hear the non-leftist view in political meetings, but you heard it at the supermarket. You heard discussions of West German TV, for instance, and people watched the American soaps obsessively. There were shortages, yes, but there was music, theater, art, opera. There were world-class sports.
"I don't actually care much for sports," Victor added with a self-deprecating smile.
In some ways, I thought that Victor was a man in a time warp. In spirit he was true to his origins. You could put him in a museum with a label: Young American Communist Man, circa 1952. He had grown up when the Soviets were America's brave wartime allies.
His role models must have been those urban coastal Jews in America, the union organizers in San Francisco, and the New York booksellers, like his parents, the believers who hoped for a better way of life for their kids and for the dispossessed, who thought, whatever its drawbacks, and all systems had drawbacks, that the socialist ideal, realized, would feed body and soul.
"All them cornfields and ballet in the evenings," Peter Sellers had said as the union man in I'm All Right, Jack. That was what the American dreamers imagined when they thought of the Soviet Union and even of its satellites: All them cornfields and ballet in the evenings.
In East Berlin, Victor Grossman was one of a tiny group of Western expatriates. He did not think he would ever see America again. He still owed the US army some time, so he was afraid to go back, but, as the years went by, if Victor missed America, it became more and more remote.
"Will you ever go back, do you think?" I asked.
He said, "I think this year we shall have our holiday in Soviet Georgia," he said.
Then in Victor's apartment, the telephone rang. Speaking briefly into it, he covered the mouthpiece.
"It's Renate. She says she will see you, but not before Sunday, if that is convenient for you."
One more delay. We had a thousand questions. Victor had to get to the travel agency.
In the elevator, he was silent, concentrating on his holiday, I thought. We shook hands and agreed to meet on Sunday - he would translate for Renate. Leslie and I were going back to West Berlin for the night, and then on to Prague.
"Is there anything you'd like from West Berlin?" I asked.
Victor hesitated.
"Please let me," I said.
"Well, I would like an avocado. It is thirty years since I last saw one," he said.
The metallic sound of the goose-stepping guard at the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism rang out with chilling irony as Leslie Woodhead and I drove away from Victor's, looking for something to do. Leslie had hardly said anything while we were at Victor's, and I knew something was bothering him.
At the Kino, Die Mission was playing. I wished it were Tootsie, which had been a big hit in East Berlin, and I could have used a laugh. Robert De Niro speaking German did not seem an appetizing way to spend the evening. I had watched him schlep his weapons in the string shopping bag up that mountain in English already, and once was enough. As he manfully shouldered his own good-hearted message around the globe, Dean would have identified with De Niro, Die Mission, and the penitent's net bag.
I suggested a visit to the opera, for which East Berlin was famous. Leslie looked horrified. Opera was something fat ladies did if they couldn't get a job with a rock and roll band.
"Let's have a drink instead," he said.
A few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie was the Grand Hotel, an island of comforting new Western decadence in the gray heart of the righteous socialist state, but a state that needed hard currency desperately in the late 1980s.
Inside the lobby, the illusion began to fall apart. It was as if hoteliers from another planet had reconstructed a hotel from a blueprint made after a single visit to Earth. The elaborately carved period furniture was imitation veneer on top of chipboard; the courteous young managers in striped pants had the beady eyes of security guards; there was a swimming pool in the hotel, but it was too small for real swimming, and the tropical solarium looked out on a sodden, chilly city.
In the cafe, a grave little all-girl orchestra played skillfully, but without any feeling, for the clientele were more interested in the enormous bowls of ice cream than in the pretty renditions of Brahms.
A young woman in stone-washed jeans - the uniform of the well-to-do youth of the East - sat at a table opposite her mother, who wore a hat and ate whipped cream off her spoon with her pinky raised in the air. Smiling, she nodded dreamily at her daughter, as if lost in the illusion that this was the Berlin of her gay youth and nothing at all had happened since.
When the woman in the hat got up to gaze at the cakes in a glass case, her daughter leaned over. She spoke good English.
"It is nice for her," she said to Leslie and me. "Next time, I will save enough to take her to the swimming baths, too."
I scrounged a few dollars from the bottom of my bag and gave them to the young waiter for a tip. He seemed worried. Then he smiled. He had it. "Have a nice day," he said. "Have a nice day."
The Grand Hotel accepted Diners Club, American Express, Visa, Eurocard, Eurocheques, Avis cards, Hertz cards, dollars, pounds sterling, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, French francs, and yen.
"Money makes the world go round," went the song in Cabaret. Money, money, money. I could hear the jingling of coins.
Not much in the East shocked me more than the way these countries degraded their own currency. It eroded the whole structure of society; it made people willing to sell themselves for a few bucks, and I hated it. When in the fall of 1989, East Germans began jamming the trains that would take them west through Hungary, they tossed their banknotes on the station platform with contempt and spat on them.
At the Grand Hotel was an Intershop, an official hardcurrency store. With their hoses literally pressed against the glass, locals, out for the evening, gazed at displays of leather coats, French perfume, and Italian silks. Without hard currency, they could only look; there was nothing else they could do. Why didn't they smash the windows? Why?
What did Dean make of it, with his medals from every dictator in the East? Did he have a secret agenda? Was he working for democracy from within, the worm in the apple? Maybe he remained a tourist in Berlin and Moscow, seeing only what officials intended him to see, unaware of the corruption.
I remembered something that Dean's mother had told me in Hawaii.