"Have you been to the West?" I asked Victor.
He shook his head and said equably, "No, it has been indicated to me that I would be arrested. I still owe the US Army some time. My wife has been."
I gave Victor a bag of avocados and he thanked me. Then we all got into Renate's red car and drove a while until she pulled up in front of a restaurant.
East Berlin was as gray as it always had been. Unlike Prague there seemed to be little joy, and unlike Moscow no craziness, no kitsch, no outrage. I was sure it was there, but it wasn't visible in the rain-soaked streets.
There were no taxis either. In those first few weeks of freedom, three hundred East German taxi drivers had simply gone west in their Trabants. (Volkswagen soon took over the Trabi factory.) There still were no Dean Reed records either in the Melodie record store on the Leipzigerstrasse, where I had begun almost exactly two years earlier.
Renate pulled up at the Moscow Restaurant and we went inside. Victor ordered a pair of steaks with brandied peaches on them like two big yellow breasts; Renate and I ordered steak, too, but she hardly touched hers.
Victor still believed in socialism and he was worried that the big West German companies would wipe out the gains made by East Germany. He was right. The West Germans moved in fast and took over pretty much everything, and they left a lot of East Germans feeling crushed, defeated, and lost.
What gains? I wanted to say. What bloody gains? News of the corruption inside the GDR was coming out every day. There were stories about the gold hoarded by government officials in Swiss banks and the grandeur of their country estates, the rigged football games, and the sale of arms to South Africa and human beings to the West for hard currency. Honecker had spent four hundred thousand dollars of state money for a watch that had belonged to Lenin.
Dean Reed had always criticized Imelda Marcos and Ronald Reagan. He talked about the horrors of capitalism, about its corruptions, but what about Honecker? He shook hands with Honecker, he took his lousy medals, he celebrated the triumphs of socialism in the GDR. Dean believed!
Gains? All I could see was the misery.
In those weeks after the Wall came down, a fog seemed to slide away from over East Germany, revealing a nightmare landscape: women forced to handle chemical wastes without gloves; a countryside poisoned by sulphur dioxide; secret police who destroyed thousands of people.
There were also frightening outbreaks of feverish violence on all sides: a mob in Leipzig, screaming "Communist swine," threatened to lynch the Stasi; delirious with freedom, a pack of hoodlums accosted a Jewish girl and cut the Star of David into her flesh with a knife.
What gains? And how many other Victors were there, how many true believers left behind in the East, stranded by their politics. What gains, I wanted to shout over lunch, but I knew there was no point. With the whole rotten enterprise revealed as a sham, Victor and others like him, having made a lifetime enterprise of their beliefs, were impaled on the necessity of believing. We ate and Renate listened quietly.
After lunch that day at the Moscow Restaurant, Renate dropped Victor off at his building. She took me back to Checkpoint Charlie but she seemed reluctant to let me go. I was sorry to leave her.
I asked her how Dean would have felt about the Wall coming down.
She was correct, cheerful, and loyal to her dead husband.
"He would have been happy for a multi-party system, but worried about many problems, for he understood the need for the Wall. People in the East are very, very frightened. Everything is coming apart."
"And you?"
"Hitler, Stalin, Honecker, we believed them all. Now we believe in nothing. We know everything is bad. That we are bad people. We don't know what to believe."
A middle-aged couple nearby were kissing as if no one else existed. They kissed for a long time until, with a doleful gesture, the woman turned back towards the East and the man went through to West Berlin, and I remembered that Renate's first role was in a film called Divided Heavens. In it, a couple were separated by the Berlin Wall and because of the Wall, love died.
I started towards Checkpoint Charlie on foot and then turned back. Renate was standing near her red car, watching. She waved. I waved back. Then she got in her car and drove away. I crossed back to the West, where I looked at the phone booth where Dean had made his last, desperate calls to Dixie. The sheer sweep of his life got to me. I was glad I was alone.
It had never been his politics that hooked me. It was the scale of Dean's life and his determination to make something of himself, to be loved, to be a star. He had the aspirant energy of America in its prime. I wished he were alive.
For a while I walked along the Berlin Wall and watched people hammering out little pieces and listened to the clink, clink, clink. Something irrevocable was going on. It would change everything. The seeming certainties of the Cold War were over.
Then I put my hand through the Wall. I had no idea why I did it. I just went up to the concrete monolith and stood next to a teenager from New York City who was working away with a little hammer and chisel. He said hi, and I said hi back, and then I stuck my hand through it. It wasn't as thick as I had imagined. It felt like a prop wall. The remnants of another world.
It was getting dark. The November evening was setting in over Berlin. I poked my arm through the Berlin Wall one last time, put a few pieces of it in my pocket, and then I went home.
All through 1990, as the nightmare world of the Stasi was exposed, a billion pages of files on every aspect of life in the GDR, uncovered, it became clear that so many citizens had been involved one way or another, the files would have to be carefully archived, permanently sealed, burned. Some people thought it was simply wisest to burn the past.
Some files had already been shredded by the Stasi as the Berlin Wall was coming down, and people would spend years trying to paste the bits together again. If you wanted someone's records, you had to be family, you had to apply. There were too many possibilities for revenge. There was no way I could get access to Dean Reed's files.
But some time late that year, a letter surfaced. I heard about it long before I got it. I talked to Anne de Boismilion at CBS in Paris, who said that she, or maybe it was her researcher, had had a phone call from Will Roberts to say that someone, perhaps Renate, had seen Dean's Stasi file in Berlin.
As always, news of Dean came in a phone call carrying a rumor of a possible sighting by someone I could not reach because it would be the middle of the night in Berlin and anyhow the lines were always busy. It was all speculation, it was all hearsay, it was all a whispering gallery, but now there was talk of a suicide letter in Dean's files.
Under the US Freedom of Information Act, I finally got hold of Dean's FBI files - it had taken two years - but as always with these files the interesting stuff was blacked out. The rest I knew by heart.
One of the weird things was that nobody nad ever bothered me, no one had ever asked any questions, and it made me wonder if any government agency could have been involved. No Stasi? KGB? FBI? Not even in East Berlin had I ever been approached. Maybe I had read too many spy novels; maybe Dean Reed no longer mattered. Then suddenly, out of the blue it came back to me how one afternoon, probably in 1988, when we were driving out of an underground parking lot near the Grand Hotel in East Berlin, a man on the sidewalk had taken a picture of us. I called Leslie.
"Just a tourist," he said.
"Taking a picture of you and me in a Hertz rental car?"
Still, it seemed to have happened in the past in another age. Everything had changed. The drama-doc script we'd been working on was out of date, and instead Leslie Woodhead and I were making a documentary about Dean Reed for the BBC because at least with a documentary you could try to keep up with the changes.
In an astonishing poll, sixty-two percent of Americans said that, with Gorbachev in power, they trusted the Soviet Union. It was as if Darth Vadar had not only pulled up his vizor, he'd taken off the whole damn costume. Journalists who had covered the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe yearned for the old days, when they could take a night off for poker instead of working a twenty-hour shift because now everyone in the country had a story to tell.
When I got back to Moscow, this time with a documentary film crew, it was early 1990. Sheremetyevo Airport was awash in electronic junk as the new-style Soviet traveler returned from New York, humping his toys - computers, videos, television sets - fresh from Uncle Steve's warehouse on Canal Street. Uncle Steve's stocked answering machines geared specially to Soviet-style telephones.
Moscow itself was throbbing with Glasnost and Perestroika, free speech, anti-Semitism, hamburgers, hookers, private enterprise, and long lines that led to food stores which were completely empty - as if the city were trapped in some frenzied halfway house: it couldn't go backward; it couldn't go ahead. At the Sovincenter, half the lights were out.
The Sovincenter was Moscow's first mall. The huge complex on the banks of the Moskva River included a conference center, a hotel with see-through elevator pods that slid up and down its walls, an atrium with plastic trees, and a clock in the shape of a cockerel that crowed at regular hours. It had a credible imitation of an English pub with plaid carpets that purveyed stale beer and soggy fish and chips. Those who had the hard currency hurried in and out of the shops, buying fresh fruit, Tampax, and air tickets.
What had originally been a glistening testimony to the glories of free enterprise, the Sovincenter was in disrepair: the lights were out; hoods loitered in the lobby; hookers called rooms at random in the middle of the night and occasionally I got a call from Lovely Natasha. A BBC journalist I ran into told me about the night he opened his eyes to find a Lovely Natasha and several of her friends actually in his room, staring down at him from the foot of his bed.
The Sovincenter was the ugly face of Perestroika, this crappy steel and glass building, which seemed a miserable imitation of the West.
Outside, the chauffeurs smoked Marlboros and leaned against the Chaikas and Mercs, waiting for their clients. Ordinary Russians, who could not enter because they didn't have the hard currency, pressed their faces against the glass doors.
"At least when Stalin was in power, there was a real man and we had food on the table," said Vera Reich.
I met up with Vera and she told me that was what she heard in the line for meat. She heard it two or three times a week: "If only we still had Stalin."
"I am the Jesus of Cool," Art Troitsky said one night as we took the subway to Moscow University for a rock concert. When we got there, the auditorium was half empty. "People are scared to go out at night because of crime. Rock is dead in Russia, anyhow," he said, no longer laughing.
It was hyperbole; people still listened to rock. But as a political act, as the music that let you declare your otherness, when the state withdrew its opposition, rock and roll lost its heart. Fed up, even Boris Grebenshikov left Leningrad and went to London, where he wore baggy brown corduroys and spent most of his time painting pictures and drinking malt whisky.
"I'm tired of being the ambassador of rock in a country that's got no rhythm," he said.
All the myths were banging around in some crazy, unpredictable fashion and Art was gloomy. He could hear the sound of breaking Glasnost, he said over and over. "Breaking Glasnost." Good line, I said, and he nodded agreement, and we said it one more time in unison: BREAKING GLASNOST.
Art felt that civil war was coming to the Soviet Union - Lithuania, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, all ready to rebel. Art could not quite explain how it was coming, but it was inevitable.
"Why don't you leave?" I asked. "If what's coming is what you say and you stay, it's a prescription for your own death."