The village of Schmockwitz was shut tight for winter. The pub was boarded up. At the end of the long, bleak road was the Reed house, with the carved R on a post.
We parked and, as we walked down the path to the front door, I could see the lake, gray and forbidding. Every time she looked out the window, I thought, Renate must have seen the lake where Dean died. On the doorstep were two pairs of rubber boots caked with mud. I wondered if they had been used the day Dean's body was dragged from the lake.
The house seemed silent. It had been the object of so much effort for so long that I sometimes dreamed about it. Suddenly, a light flashed on inside, the door opened, and Renate stepped out, smiled, and kissed Victor's cheek.
In black leather pants and a white silk shirt, Renate stood in the doorway and greeted us, smiling. She had an anxious, beautiful face and dark eyes. Renate gazed directly at you, kept you in her gaze, made you the center of her attention. She had that peculiar talent that people said Jackie Onassis had.
"Please," said Renate and opened the door wide and tilted her head in welcome.
"Thank you," I said, and gave her some chocolates.
"Thank you," she replied.
In the hall, Renate took my wet boots away and gave me furry slippers. A good hausfrau, I thought. Renate smiled; she knew what I was thinking. Still standing in the vestibule, she lit a cigarette. Her hand shook as she forced a lighter into life. But she grinned with unexpected good humor; she had a wry grasp of the situation, and I liked her instantly.
Victor, who had removed his own boots, was already in the sitting room. On a table in front of a tan corduroy sectional were blue and white cups, a coffeepot, the inevitable cake, and a plate of little chocolates.
"De'cor is Biedermeier Cowboy," Renate announced winningly.
The house was full of stuff: a carved dining-room suite, a cuckoo clock, a sofa, chairs, a big fireplace with a television set, video cassettes, plants, copper jugs filled with flowers, a miniature set of fire tongs, and a shovel. Over the fireplace hung Dean's guitar, and there were horse things - bridles, bits - props from a movie. In a picture in a fancy frame on the mantel, Dean and Renate kissed for the cameras. Beside it was a brass carriage clock, with an inscription from Dean to Renate that read, "I love you more every hour."
On the floor lay a dark brown animal skin, probably a bear, I thought; it seemed to have a bear's head. I had seen a video clip of Dean near that fireplace, holding his guitar, speaking to the camera:
"This guitar, this Martin guitar, which I took with me when I left, has been in the jungles with me in Brazil and Bangladesh, and this buckle [points to his belt buckle] are the only two things that I've kept for the twenty years since I left America. They have traveled throughout the world with me day by day, they know my life."
"Please, sit down." Renate gestured towards the sofa.
I sat down and fell out of the slippers, then I ate some cake. Leslie sat near Renate and listened intently.
Renate spoke German and Victor translated, although sometimes she slipped into English. She seemed fragile and sad and vulnerable. The big dark eyes locked mine into a tremulous gaze. My God, it must have been lonely down the end of that road with only her boy, Sasha, for comfort.
Like all teenagers, Sasha, who was fifteen, seemed to be perpetually in motion. Ill at ease, but handsome and polite, he shook our hands, kissed his mother, and hurried away to meet his friends, his long, skinny legs encased in black leather pants that gave him the look of a big bird.
"He is a good man. He is my little man," said Renate. "You would like to see the house?
It was a shrine. On a table were Dean's spurs from Chile. A saddle was tossed over the stair railing. On a wall, an American flag hung upside down; it was the flag Dean had washed in public in Santiago to protest the Vietnam War, the flag he said he had washed of the blood of the Vietnamese. It was hung upside down as an ironic comment on America.
We followed Renate up a flight of stairs, where she opened the door to Dean's study. I walked in and thought: the inner sanctum. You could almost smell him in here.
Through the window was a view of the lake and the woods beyond. On the wall were pictures and quotations from Fidel Castro and Jimmy Breslin. On the desk was his portable Olivetti typewriter and, under the glass top, snapshots. One was familiar.
"Oleg Smirnoff," I said.
"You know Oleg?" Renate smiled.
She was pleased because Oleg had been such a good translator for Dean. Dean said Oleg could do it almost better than he could. (I thought of Oleg's hatred of Germany, where, he said, the people say hello to the dogs but not to you.) Renate was happy that we knew Oleg.
Back downstairs in the living room, we exchanged pleasantries about Mrs. Brown and Phil Everly. I told her about Nikolai Pastoukhov and his tale of Dean's first trip to Moscow, when he sang all night in the private train that belonged to Deputy Premier Tikhonov.
Lost in reverie, Renate clasped her hands and perhaps imagined her handsome husband singing in the train that sped through the Tolstoyan night as if it were a scene from a Russian novel she'd read as a schoolgirl.
"So what is it exactly that we are here to talk about?" Renate asked.
The small talk was over, the cake eaten. Renate wanted to know what we wanted. Leslie talked about the drama-documentary that he wanted to make. He said that he liked to think of Costa Gavras's Missing as a model. Renate said it was among her favorite films. This was a good sign. She poured more coffee.
Leslie took charge and he was convincing.
"We want to work with you," he said. "To be absolutely candid, you are Dean's widow. You own the rights to his music. We need you."
Renate inquired politely about editorial control over the script. Could she see a script when one was ready? she asked.
"I really would like to," he said, "but I am forbidden to do so by Parliamentary law."
I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded convincing and I was impressed.
Renate nodded and she poured out white Hungarian wine into dainty Hock glasses with thin green stems.
Renate Blume was born in Dresden. She must have been a child during the firebombing that reduced the city to rubble, but she did not talk of such things. She was reserved and well bred. Her father had been an aviation engineer. Her brother was a mathematician. It had been expected of Renate that she would be a doctor. She wanted to dance, but her parents forbade it. "We are scientists in this family who do not fool around with such stuff," they said.
Still, she had her way and, having trained as a dancer, she got a place in Berlin's best acting school. Before she had even finished the course, she was cast in a film, The Divided Heavens.
Renate played the tragic heroines on stage in Dresden. She married a director, Frank Bayer; she worked in films and on television. For her portrayal of Jenny Marx in a Soviet series, she received a Lenin Prize.
Renate rose from the sofa now and took a mother-of-pearl box from a drawer in a table. In it was her Lenin Prize, a small, elegantly embossed medal.
"Dean also got one," she said. "He got his first, which was right, because he was the bigger star."
Shyly, she reached for the scrapbook beside her on the sofa and opened it for us. In it were fanzine snaps of Renate.
"A fan sent me this," she said self-consciously, giggling over a picture of herself in a miniskirt, her cheeks sucked in, her hair long, her lips white. "Terrible," she added. "Terrible pictures. But I have been so lucky in my work. Then I have had no luck at all when Dean died. The man I was looking for all my life and thought I would never find," she said piteously.