"I've found it!"
Triumphant, Boris emerged with a sheaf of papers. On June 10, 1986, the final contract for the Soviet-German coproduction of Bloody Heart had been signed by a Mr. Gerrit List, a representative of the German film studios at Potsdam. Boris passed the contract down the table to us.
I stared at the bits of paper written in languages I did not understand, signed a few days before Dean died. Suicide seemed much less likely now. He had been working for years towards the movie and it had been given the go-ahead. Green-lighted. It was OK.
Had Dean been murdered then? And why? It didn't make sense. None of it made any sense. Maybe it had been an accident after all..
Boris shuffled more paper. Shooting was definitely to have begun on June 24 in East Germany and on August 11 in the Soviet Union.
"Everything was set," he said. "Even the music director, who was from Prague. He was called Svoboda. Everybody in Prague is called Svoboda. Unless they are called prisoner," he added with a straight face.
I didn't get it.
"Svoboda means freedom," Leslie whispered.
"When Dean died, everything was canceled," Boris said. "Without Dean there was no movie. He was the movie."
Boris produced another piece of paper. It was a termination contract for Bloody Heart. It was dated July 15, 1986. The contract for the picture was declared null and void. Dean's body was discovered on June 17, so they hadn't wasted much time.
The room was quiet. Lilia Liepine wiped her eyes. Vera stopped translating. Boris looked sad and for a minute he sat perfectly still, lost in some impenetrable Russian reverie. Then he smiled cheerily and packed up his lawyer's briefcase.
"Things change," he said.
23
By 1988 there was a cooperative toilet with real toilet paper and piped-in muzak in downtown Moscow and for fifty kopeks you could sit peacefully for as long as you liked. People said this was perestroika at work, a sign of financial restructuring, the coming of a brand new form of private enterprise. You couldn't see it in Moscow's hotels, though. I knew someone who was thinking of making a documentary about them and calling it Hotel Fawlty.
We were in the Hotel Budapest. My room had a drain in the middle of the floor and indolent cockroaches lazed in a puddle in the bathroom. Something unspeakable discolored the sheets and the only amenity was a green plastic radio beside the bed, which bore the mysterious sticker: "Inspected by Mildred."
Leslie Woodhead's room wasn't much better. It had a large refrigerator that did not work. The orange paper curtains on the window didn't meet and, when he opened the window, they fell on his head. Vera Reich, the translator who had become a friend was determined to do better for us, so now we stood in the lobby of the Rossiya Hotel. It had 3000 rooms and a concert hall.
When John Denver came to Moscow in 1985, he had played the Rossiya. People in the Soviet Union liked Denver for his music and his politics, though some of them made fun of his pimples. When he heard Denver was scheduled to play the Rossiya, Dean flew in from East Berlin on an impulse. He didn't have a visa, but he was Dean Reed after all and he felt he was a kind of soul mate of John Denver's. The officials at Sheremetyevo Airport kept him waiting and, by the time he got to the Rossiya, he had missed the show.
"Why can't I be John Denver? I'm from Denver, too," he often said.
In the cavernous lobby of the Rossiya I fantasized that Dean was alive and would come striding in. Laughing, he would make the crowds at the check-in desk laugh. But Dean was dead, and it was all just idle speculation to help kill the time, and all there was in the lobby of the Rossiya was a sign for Diners Club that read: RUNNING OUT OF RUBLES?
As she negotiated with the reservations clerk at the Rossiya, outrage crossed Vera Reich's face. Then she turned to us.
"Everything is fixed, you have rooms here," Vera said, wiping away her make-believe tears.
"How do you do it?" I said.
"I just keep talking until they can't stand me anymore, and I cry," she said, and then we all went upstairs.
The Rossiya was so big that you literally needed a map to get around, but having navigated the corridors, we found my room and sat down there and drank a lot of Scotch out of the one glass from the bathroom. Vera talked about her memories of Dean Reed.
At Vera's language school in the early 1970s, rumors began to go around that Dean Reed was coming. All through the school you could hear the whispers. Along the corridors, before class began, in the recess, at lunch, they whispered it: Dean Reed. Dean Reed.
"Dean Reed is coming."
"Like the Pied Piper," said Vera.
"Was he good? Was he a good singer?"
Vera grinned. Who could tell? Who cared! He was so handsome and he was wearing very tight pants. He sang rock and roll. He brought us this gift. He was American.
"I guess Dean was also popular because he espoused socialist values," Leslie Woodhead said.
Vera chortled politely.
"What you must understand is that we believed the exact opposite of the propaganda," she said. "If the television said, America is slums, poverty, crime, we believed the opposite." It was what Vladimir Pozner had said. "May I ask you something?' Vera inquired delicately.
"Sure."
"How it is that some people in United States have joined the Communist Party?"
I told her that everything was not quite perfect in America. I said that there were many people who were illiterate, hungry, and homeless.
"But, surely, they are just bums," said Vera.
For the time being, I left Vera to her dreams about the streets that were paved with gold.
"I guess Dean's problem going home to America was that people in America weren't too keen on socialism," Leslie said.
Vera said, "They're not too keen on it in the Soviet Union either."
She pulled on her knitted hat. Vera was going home to some remote corner of Moscow and would pick us up the next morning. I thanked her for fixing the rooms and tried to give her a box of fancy soap, but she shook her head and refused.
"This is my job," she said politely.
Vera visited the West for the first time that year and she wrote to me to say she didn't care for the supermarkets in England because the variety of goods made her hyperventilate. What she loved most about the West was that relationships were not degraded by need. Vera loved the West for its friendliness. Eventually, she went to live in Arizona.
The next day I met Xenia Golubovitch, a sixteen-year-old Moscow student who had met Dean Reed first when she was a little girl. Xenia, dark and intense, showed me the poster of Dean on the wall of her bedroom.
She said in perfect English, "He was the embodiment of the whole country's dream about America. In their secret hearts, people have the American dream. The point was that they were trying to project the way they wanted America on to Dean." She pointed at the poster and read out the hand-written dedication on it: "'To Xenia, I thank you for your love and friendship and for your tears. Be brave, plus happy, plus truthful, love Dean Reed.' That's what he wrote to me when I was five."
The poster had been on her wall all of Xenia's life. As a five year old, Xenia had seen El Cantor on television. (It was the story of the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara who had been a friend of Dean's and was murdered in the soccer stadium in Santiago by Pinochet's goons.)
Xenia said, "I saw Dean Reed in a film about Victor Jara on Soviet TV and they killed Jara and I cried. They were such humble people and I have such an image of them and their ponchos."