"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.
"When he first arrived over there in Germany, he was like something from outer space," she said. "He never got used to Germany, though. He was always a tourist."
"How could he be?" said Leslie, who had barely said a word all day long. "How the hell could he be unaware?"
All day, Leslie drove, he took notes, he ate cake, but he kept a thin-lipped silence, which was unlike him, for he was always ready for a laugh. East Berlin got to him, and I knew he was beginning to take against Dean Reed; more than anything, he could not stand the naivete.
"I don't get his politics, you know," Leslie said.
Dean Reed's politics were very simple: US democracy was only a choice between Pepsi and Coke; imperialism ruled the West; the East featured benign state socialism and free medical care. Dean had a rationalization for everything, even the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union; the Afghans denied women their rights he said.
He had the line down pat and was much given to shtick about the arms race and the human race. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes told him he sounded like an editorial in Pravda.
I made a half-hearted stab at explaining to Leslie that I thought Dean was, at least, sincere. Leslie didn't care. He was also desperate to get out of East Berlin now. At the border, we discovered we still had East German money. You were forbidden to take it to the West.
The bank at Checkpoint Charlie had closed. The guard directed us to a bank back in the Alexanderplatz and we turned the car around, and started driving, peering out into the empty city, looking for the bank.
Suddenly, Leslie stepped hard on the brakes, the car stopped, he got out and I followed. He looked around the dark empty city, the rain falling in gray sheets.
"It's crap," he said. "Crap. All of it crap. The politics are crap. The money is crap. The furniture, the clothes, the schools. Crap. It's a conspiracy of mediocrity. From the Berlin Wall to Vladivostok, they've cheated everyone and everything is crap."