Edge of Eternity (124 page)

And the crowd went wild.

•   •   •

Bonn was a provincial town on the banks of the Rhine River. It was an unlikely choice for a national capital, and had been picked for precisely
that reason, to symbolize its temporary nature, and the faith of the German people that one day Berlin would again be the capital of a reunited Germany. But that had been forty years ago, and Bonn was still the capital.

It was a boring place, but that suited Rebecca, for she worked too hard to have a social life, except when Fred Bíró was in town.

She was busy. Her area of expertise was Eastern Europe, which was in the throes of a revolution whose end no one could see. Most days she had working lunches, but today she took a break. She left the Foreign Office and walked on her own to an inexpensive restaurant where she ordered her favorite dish,
Himmel und Erde,
heaven and earth, made of potatoes and apples with bacon.

While she was eating, Hans Hoffmann appeared.

Rebecca pushed back her chair and stood up. Her first thought was that he had come to kill her. She was on the point of screaming for help when she noticed the expression on his face. He looked defeated and sad. Her fear vanished: he was no longer dangerous.

“Please don't be afraid, I mean no harm,” he said.

She remained standing. “What do you want?”

“A few words. A minute or two, no more.”

For a moment she wondered how he had managed to come from East to West Germany, then she realized that travel restrictions did not apply to senior officers in the secret police. They could do anything they liked. He had probably told his colleagues that he had an intelligence mission in Bonn. Perhaps he did.

The restaurant proprietor came over and said: “Is everything all right, Frau Held?”

Rebecca stared at Hans a moment longer. Then she said: “Yes, thank you, Günther, I think it's okay.” She sat down again and Hans sat opposite.

She picked up her fork and put it down again. She had lost her appetite. “A minute or two, then.”

“Help me,” he said.

She could hardly believe her ears. “What?” she said. “Help
you
?”

“It's all falling apart. I have to get out. The crowds laugh at me. I'm afraid they'll kill me.”

“What on earth do you imagine I might do for you?”

“I need a place to stay, money, papers.”

“Are you out of your mind? After all you've done to me and my family?”

“Don't you understand why I did those things?”

“Because you hate us!”

“Because I love you.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“I was assigned to spy on you and your family, yes. I dated you in order to get inside the house. But then something happened. I fell in love with you.”

He had said this once before, on the day she escaped over the Wall. He really meant it. He
was
out of his mind, she decided. She began to feel scared again.

“I told no one of my feelings,” he said, smiling nostalgically, as if he were recalling an innocent youthful romance rather than a wicked deception. “I pretended to be exploiting you and manipulating your feelings. But I really loved you. Then you said we should get married. I was in heaven! I had the perfect excuse to give my superiors.”

He was living in a dream world, but was that not true of the entire East German ruling elite?

“That year that we spent together, as man and wife, was the best time of my life,” Hans said. “And your rejection broke my heart.”

“How can you say that?”

“Why do you think I haven't remarried?”

She was stupefied. “I don't know,” she said.

“I have no interest in other women. Rebecca, you are the love of my life.”

She stared at him. She realized that this was not just a stupid story, a hopeless attempt to gain sympathy. Hans was sincere. He meant every word.

“Take me back,” he pleaded.

“No.”

“Please.”

“The answer is no,” she said. “It will always be no. Nothing you could say would change my mind. Please don't force me to use harsh words to
make you understand.” I don't know why I'm reluctant to hurt him, she thought; he never hesitated to be cruel to me. “Just accept what I have said to you and leave.”

“All right,” he said sadly. “I knew you'd say this, but I had to try.” He stood up. “Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for that year of happiness. I will always love you.” He turned away and walked out of the restaurant.

Rebecca stared after him, still deep in shock. God in heaven, she thought; I wasn't expecting that.

I
t was a cold November day in Berlin, with an obscuring mist and a brimstone smell of sulfur in the air from the smoky factories in the infernal East. Tanya, hastily transferred here from Warsaw to help cover the mounting crisis, felt that East Germany was about to have a heart attack. Everything was breaking down. In a remarkable repeat of what had happened in 1961 before the Wall went up, so many people had fled to the West that schools were closing for lack of teachers and hospitals were running on skeleton staffing. Those who remained behind became more and more angry and frustrated.

The new leader, Egon Krenz, was focusing on travel. He hoped that if he could satisfy people on that issue, other grievances would fade away. Tanya thought he was wrong: demanding more freedom was likely to become a habit with East Germans. Krenz had published new travel regulations on November 6 that would permit people to go abroad, with permission from the Interior Ministry, taking with them fifteen deutschmarks, about enough for a plate of sausages and a stein of beer in West Germany. This concession was scorned by the public. Today, November 9, the increasingly desperate leader had called a press conference to reveal yet another new travel law.

Tanya sympathized with the yearning of East Germans to be free to go where they wished. She longed for the same liberty for herself and Vasili. He was world famous, but he had to hide behind a pseudonym. He had never left the Soviet Union, where his books were not published. He should be able to go and accept in person the prizes his alter ego had won, and bask a little in the sunshine of acclaim—and she wanted to go with him.

Unfortunately she did not see how East Germany could ever set its
people free. It could hardly exist as an independent state: that was why they had built the Wall in the first place. If they let their citizens travel, millions would leave permanently. West Germany might be a prissily conservative country, with old-fashioned attitudes on women's rights, but it was a paradise by comparison with the East. No country could survive the exodus of its most enterprising young people. Therefore Krenz would never willingly give East Germans the one thing they wanted above all else.

So it was with low expectations that Tanya went to the International Press Center on Mohren Strasse a few minutes before six in the evening. The room was packed with journalists, photographers, and television cameras. The rows of red seats were full, and Tanya had to join the crowd around the sides of the room. The international press corps was here in force: they could smell blood.

Krenz's press officer, Günter Schabowski, came into the room with three other officials at six sharp and sat at the table on the platform. He had gray hair and wore a gray suit and a gray tie. He was a competent bureaucrat whom Tanya liked and trusted. For an hour he announced ministerial changes and administrative reforms.

Tanya marveled at the sight of a Communist government scrambling to satisfy a public demand for change. It was almost unknown. And on the rare occasions when it had happened, the tanks had rolled in soon afterward. She recalled the agonizing disappointments of the Prague Spring in 1968 and Solidarity in 1981. But, according to her brother, the Soviet Union no longer had the power or the will to crush dissent. She hardly dared to hope it was true. She pictured a life in which she and Vasili could write the truth without fear. Freedom. It was hard to imagine.

At seven Schabowski announced the new travel law. “It will be possible for every citizen of East Germany to leave the country using border crossing points,” he said. That was not very illuminating, and several journalists asked for clarification.

Schabowski himself seemed uncertain. He put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and read the decree aloud. “Private travel to foreign countries can be applied for without presentation of existing visa requirements or proving the need to travel or familial relationships.”

It was all written in obfuscatory bureaucratic language, but it sounded good. Someone said: “When does this new regulation come into effect?”

Schabowski clearly did not know. Tanya noticed that he was perspiring. She guessed that the new law had been drafted in a rush. He shuffled the papers in front of him, looking for the answer. “As far as I know,” he said, “immediately, without delay.”

Tanya was bewildered. Something was effective immediately—but what? Could anyone just drive up to a checkpoint and cross? But the press conference came to an end without any further information.

Tanya wondered what to write as she walked the short distance back to the Hotel Metropol on Friedrich Strasse. In the grubby grandiosity of the marble lobby, Stasi agents in their customary leather jackets and blue jeans lounged around, smoking and watching a television set with a bad picture. It was showing film from the press conference. As Tanya got her room key, she heard one receptionist say to another: “What does that mean? Can we just go?”

No one knew.

•   •   •

Walli was in his West Berlin hotel suite, watching the news with Rebecca, who had flown in to see Alice and Helmut. They were all planning to have dinner together.

Walli and Rebecca puzzled over a low-key report on ZDF's seven o'clock
Today
program. There were new travel regulations for East Germans, but it was not clear what they meant. Walli could not figure out whether his family would be allowed to visit him in West Germany or not. “I wonder if I might even see Karolin again soon,” he mused.

Alice and Helmut arrived a few minutes later, pulling off their cold-weather coats and scarves.

At eight Walli switched over to ARD's
Day Show,
but did not learn much more.

It seemed impossible that the Wall that had blighted Walli's life could be opened. In a flash of memory that was all too familiar, he relived those few traumatic seconds at the wheel of Joe Henry's old black Framo van. He recalled his terror as he saw the border guard
kneel down and aim the submachine gun, his panic as he swung the wheel and drove at the guard, his confusion as bullets shattered his windscreen. He was sickened as he felt the sensation of his wheels bumping over a human being. Then he crashed through the barrier to freedom.

The Wall had taken his innocence. It had also taken Karolin from him. And his daughter's childhood.

That daughter, now a few days from her twenty-sixth birthday, was saying: “Is the Wall still the Wall, or not?”

Rebecca said: “I can't make it out. It's almost as if they've opened the border by mistake.”

Walli said: “Shall we go out and see what's happening on the streets?”

•   •   •

Lili, Karolin, Werner, and Carla regularly watched ARD's
Day Show,
as did millions of people in East Germany. They thought it told the truth, unlike their own state-controlled news shows, which depicted a fantasy world no one believed in. All the same, they were puzzled by the ambiguous eight o'clock news. Carla said: “Is the border open or not?”

Werner said: “It can't be.”

Lili stood up. “Well, I'm going to have a look.”

In the end all four of them went.

As soon as they stepped out of the house and breathed the cold night air, they felt the emotional charge in the atmosphere. The streets of East Berlin, dimly lit by yellow lamps, were unusually busy with people and cars. Everyone was headed the same way, toward the Wall, mostly in groups. Some young men were trying to thumb a ride, a crime that would have got them arrested a week ago. People were talking to strangers, asking what they knew, whether it was really true that they could go to West Berlin now.

Karolin said to Lili: “Walli is in West Berlin. I heard it on the radio. He must have come to see Alice.” She looked thoughtful. “I hope they like each other.”

The Franck family walked south on Friedrich Strasse until they saw, in the distance, the powerful floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie,
a compound that occupied the street for an entire block, from Zimmer Strasse on the near, Communist side, to Koch Strasse, which was free.

Coming closer, they saw people pouring out of the Stadtmitte subway station, swelling the crowd. There was also a line of cars, their drivers clearly unsure whether to approach the checkpoint or not. Lili sensed the feeling of celebration, but she was not sure they had anything to celebrate. As far as she could see, the gates were not open.

Many people held back, just out of range of the floodlights, afraid to show their faces; but the bolder ones approached nearer, committing the criminal offense of “unwarrantable intrusion into a border area,” despite the risk of arrest and a sentence of three years in a labor camp.

The street narrowed as it approached the checkpoint, and the crowd thickened. Lili and her family pushed through to the front. Before them, under lights as bright as day, they could see the red-and-white gates for pedestrians and cars, the lounging border guards with their guns, the customs buildings, and the watchtowers rising over it all. Inside a glass-walled command post, an officer was talking on the telephone, making large, frustrated arm-waving gestures as he spoke.

To the left and right of the checkpoint, stretching away along Koch Strasse in both directions, was the hated Wall. Lili felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. This was the edifice that for most of her life had split her family into two halves that almost never met. She hated the Wall even more than she hated Hans Hoffmann.

Lili said aloud: “Has anyone tried to walk through?”

A woman next to her said angrily: “They turn you away. They say you need a visa from a police station. But I went to the police station and they didn't know anything about it.”

A month ago, the woman would have shrugged her shoulders at this typical bureaucratic foul-up and gone home, but tonight things were different. She was still here, unsatisfied, protesting. No one was going home.

The people around Lili broke into a rhythmic chant: “Open up! Open up!”

When they trailed off, Lili thought she could hear chanting from the far side. She strained her ears. What were they saying? Eventually she made it out: “Come over! Come over!” She realized that West Berliners, too, must be gathering at checkpoints.

What was going to happen? How would this end?

A line of half a dozen vans came along Zimmer Strasse to the checkpoint, and fifty or sixty armed border guards got out.

Standing beside Lili, Werner said grimly: “Reinforcements.”

•   •   •

Dimka and Natalya sat on the black leather chairs in Gorbachev's office feeling excited and tense. Gorbachev's strategy, of letting the Eastern European satellites go their own way, had led to a crisis that seemed about to boil over. This could be either dangerous or hopeful. Perhaps it was both.

For Dimka the issue was, as always, the sort of world his grandchildren would grow up in. Grigor, his son with Nina, was already married; Dimka's and Natalya's daughter, Katya, was at university; both would probably have children in the next few years. What did the future hold for those kids? Was old-fashioned Communism really finished? Dimka still did not know.

Dimka said to Gorbachev: “Thousands of people are gathering at the Berlin Wall checkpoints. If the East German government does not open the gates, there will be riots.”

“That's not our problem,” said Gorbachev. It was a litany. He always said it. “I want to speak to Chancellor Kohl of West Germany,” he went on.

Natalya said: “He's in Poland tonight.”

“Get him on the phone as soon as you can—not later than tomorrow. I don't want him to start talking about German reunification. That would escalate the crisis. The opening of the Wall is probably all the destabilization that East Germany can deal with right now.”

He was dead right, Dimka thought. If the border was opened, a united Germany could not be far in the future; but it was better not to raise such an inflammatory issue right now.

“I'll get on to the West Germans right away,” said Natalya. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you.”

Natalya and Dimka stood up. Gorbachev still had not told them what to do about the immediate crisis. Dimka said: “What if Egon Krenz calls from East Berlin?”

“Don't wake me up.”

Dimka and Natalya left the room.

Outside, Dimka said: “If he doesn't do something soon, it will be too late.”

“Too late for what?” Natalya asked.

“Too late to save Communism.”

•   •   •

Maria Summers was at Jacky Jakes's home in Prince George's County, having early supper with her godson, Jack. The TV was on, and she saw Jasper Murray, in a coat and scarf, reporting from Berlin. He was on the western, free side of Checkpoint Charlie, standing in a crowd near the little Allied guard post that had been built in the middle of Friedrich Strasse, beside a sign that said
YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR
in four languages. Behind him she could see floodlights and watchtowers.

Jasper said: “The crisis of Communism is reaching a new peak of tension here tonight. After weeks of demonstrations, the East German government today announced the opening of the border with the West—but it seems no one has told the border guards or the passport police. So thousands of Berliners are gathering on both sides of the infamous Wall, demanding to exercise their brand-new right to cross over, while the government does nothing—and the armed guards grow increasingly nervous.”

Jack finished his sandwich and went off for his bath. “He's nine years old, and newly shy,” Jacky said with a wry smile. “He tells me he's too old to be bathed by his grandmother.”

Maria was fascinated by the news from Berlin. She was remembering her lover, President Kennedy, saying to the world: “
Ich bin ein Berliner.
”

“I've spent my life working for the American government,” she said to Jacky. “All that time, our aim has been to defeat Communism. But, in the end, Communism defeated itself.”