By and large, life with Dean was idyllic, Renate said, conjuring up scenes of domestic bliss. They had busy lives, but, from time to time, they stole an evening together. Dean would sit near the fire and play the guitar, with Renate stretched out beside him on the bear-skin rug. They talked about Bloody Heart and how they would spend the summer of 1986 filming it together in Yalta, and they looked into each other's eyes.
Bloody Heart was to be their movie - Renate's and Dean's. Dean was to star, write, and direct the film about Wounded Knee. A German-Soviet coproduction, it was a love story, set against the Indian uprising at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, which ended with a violent shoot-out between the Indians and the FBI. It was a perennial favorite of socialist propaganda and it had everything movie-goers in the East loved: war, horses, big set pieces. Most of all, it had Indians.
In the Soviet Union and the East, but especially the USSR, people were obsessed with American Indians. Particularly around Leningrad, kids with a taste for exotica joined Indian clubs, wore feather headdresses, practiced Indian love calls, and mourned the death of the great native culture.
Dean and Renate were to star in the film as a divorced couple, she as a reporter, he as a photographer. On assignment at Wounded Knee they are reunited, but, in the tragic finale, Renate's character is shot dead. Already in 1985 they were thinking about Bloody Heart.
In the fall of 1985, Dean went to America. Nothing was ever the same again, Renate said.
"Did Dean want to return to America? Would you have gone with him?"
"I would have no audience there. I would have no career, no job. I do not speak enough English, and I am not young," she said. "After his trip to Colorado he missed his homeland very much. He was very homesick. He talked of nothing else."
Dean had come back to her full of hope, wanting to live in America which, to her, was a strange land.
Renate loved Dean deeply; she loved his courage, his thinking, his personality, she said. He was the man she had been waiting for all her life and whom she thought she would never find. He was her companero. Now he was dead.
"After Dean died, I put away all the boxes, all the pictures, everything. For a while, I could only look at the pictures and cry," Renate said.
She got up and wandered over to the window; it was completely dark outside. She shivered and drew the blinds against the night, then turned around and smiled.
"Are you hungry? I have some steaks I could fry," Renate said eagerly.
Looking at his watch, Victor shook his head. Perhaps he was thinking about his vacation, perhaps polite.
Renate would have liked the company, I thought. It was miserable at the end of that road, near the frozen lake in a silent house that was inhabited by ghosts. When she talked of Dean, she was perfectly loyal, but there was an undercurrent; I thought she was angry with him for leaving, and very lonesome.
We put on our coats. We left the house. Leaving Victor and Leslie near the car, Renate walked me to the little cemetery. In her red coat, she put her hand on my shoulder, as if to steady herself. A bunch of wet flowers lay on Dean's grave, where a rough stone was engraved with the words THE COUPLE REED.
Renate said softly, "When Dean was leaving for America, I was so unhappy. I thought he was never coming back. He got the stone and he showed me. He said, 'I love you and I am coming back and some day we are being buried together under that stone.'" Renate looked at me and said, "You understand? I think he believed this."
16
"My brother called me and said, 'Quick, turn to Channel Four, NBC News, Dean's on,'" Johnny Rosenburg reported when I visited him in Loveland, Colorado, in the winter of 1988.
It had been the summer of 1984 when Johnny took his brother's call. Now he said, "And I turned it on and, sure enough, there he was. But a big star in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. I couldn't believe it. I mean I can't even begin to tell you the emotions that went through me at that time."
With Dean on the TV screen, the reporter's voice was saying, "Who is this man, the one being hounded for autographs in downtown Moscow? You probably don't recognize him. Most Soviets would since he's considered to be the most popular, best known American in the Soviet Union. And most Soviets are quite startled to learn that most Americans have never heard of him." The picture cut to a Soviet woman with a few teeth missing, who said, "He is the best singer in the world."
Johnny was pretty much bug-eyed.
"My God," he thought. "It's Dean!"
Johnny's back had been giving him some pain that day, but he hardly noticed it now. He turned up the volume on the TV. Yes, by God, it was Dean. It was him. On national TV in, where? In Russia. My God. Johnny was stunned.
"Mona, Mona? Mona!" he had called to his wife. "C'mon in here."
Then Johnny got his scrapbook off a shelf and looked up that last postcard he had from Dean in 1962: Merry Christmas from South America. All those years since he and Dean had roomed together in their manager's house in Canoga Park in Los Angeles, he had had no idea if Dean was dead or alive. Since the postcard, Johnny never heard from him again. Seeing Dean turned out to be a much more fateful event for both of them than either Johnny or Dean could have imagined.
Now Johnny looked at me pleasantly. I was sitting on the two-seater couch in his living room in Loveland, near the same TV where he had seen Dean. His memories of the event and the reunion with Dean that followed were absolutely fresh.
"I sure have had a lot of company since meeting up with Deano again," Johnny said to me.
The Rosenburg living room had the couch and chair and the TV set and a coffee table. An archway led into a kitchen, where the fridge was dotted with magnets shaped like fruits. On the wall was a collection of fancy commemorative plates.
On the table next to the chair where Johnny sat was a well-worn bible, with a brass cross for a bookmark sticking out of it. From time to time as we talked, Johnny reached over and touched his bible.
In his late forties, he wore a plaid shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, and he shifted his weight in his chair like a man in constant pain. All his life he'd had the bad back. Or maybe he was just weary of the constant visitors who'd turned up at his screen door since Dean died.
Out of the window you could see the neat houses in Janice Court where the Rosenburgs lived. Beyond their yard were more houses, big green pines, and in the background the outline of the Rockies.
On the way up from Denver to Loveland, the road was dead flat and the countryside looked half-an-hour old. The snow had melted, the sun was warm and it shone on a scatter of wooden buildings set down at random on the raw yellow scrublands.
Denver wasn't a mountain town at all; it was the last stop at the edge of a huge prairie, flat as a pancake and barely domesticated. This had been the end of the world for the pioneers, the last outpost before they launched themselves with incredible will over the Rocky Mountains and on to God knew what beyond. For the early settlers, so remote was California and the coast, they might as well have been headed for the moon.