Renate ran to another chalet where she knew there was a doctor. He came back with her and looked at Dean and at the pills. He said Dean hadn't taken enough to kill himself. Just let him sleep it off, the doctor said.
Be watchful, the doctor added. Dean may wake in the night, he said. Dean did wake up. Naked, he stumbled toward the door; it was twenty degrees below zero. He was full of sleeping pills and he would have frozen to death if he had gone outside, said Renate.
"If you go out there, you will not only kill yourself, you'll kill Sasha and me," Renate shouted, pulling him back into the chalet with all her force.
It would have been a betrayal.
That was the word she had been looking for all day. Betray. Yes. Betray. That was it.
I waited. Clearly, Renate had never had anything to do with Dean's death, nothing at all. She had felt he was her partner, her lover, her man, as she had once said on a videotape. She had loved him; she still did. She had to believe his death was an accident, not a suicide. If it was a suicide, he had betrayed her love.
Just before he died, in spite of all their fights, silly fights about mowing the lawn, he told her how much he loved her. If he then went and killed himself, it was betraying her trust. She was very fierce about it. It was something that had been preying on her mind for a long time.
We walked together for a few yards, along the rural lane near the lake. It was two years since Dean had died on a summer night like this. I looked at the lake. I said I hoped that Renate would meet someone else nice some day.
"No," she said. "I hate men."
It would have been a betrayal.
On the morning of June 17,1986, Renate's neighbor came across the lawn to Renate's house. Renate could see her from the kitchen window and went outside to meet her. The neighbor smoothed her apron awkwardly.
"I think they've found Dean," she said.
Earlier, at 8:20 a.m. his body had been discovered in the Zeuthener See. "It was approximately 300 feet from the lakeside," noted the police report. Accidental death by drowning was the official verdict. No one believed it.
27
In Wheat Ridge, Colorado, the telephone rang in house. A machine with Dixie's voice on it answered.
"Dixie, this is Ruth Anna Brown, Dean's mother. Damn this machine! You never call me back, but I guess you've heard the terrible news about Dean? Call me this time, Dixie," she said.
"Hi, Dixie. This is Johnny. Call me! For God's sake, Dixie, call me!"
A reporter in Leipzig telephoned Vaclav Nectar in Prague. His life in fear, as he put it, began with that call; the news made him crazy; he felt Dean's death was a terrible omen for him.
Oleg Smirnoff heard the news in Moscow on TV.
"Dean first, me next," Oleg thought.
In Paris, Erik and Annalise Durschmied were in the Metro and he was reading the Herald Tribune when he turned so white he looked like a man in the middle of a heart attack. When the train stopped, he pulled Annalise onto the platform.
"What is it?" she asked urgently.
"Dean is dead," he said.
In the little house where they lived, Wiebke told Natasha as best she could that her father was dead. Natasha had seen Bobby die on Dallas and she knew that Bobby wasn't really dead.
She said to Wiebke, "Maybe Daddy is not really dead at all. Like Bobby on Dallas."
Gerrit List was put in charge of the funeraclass="underline" Renate was drugged like a stone. He sent her to a sanitorium, where she slept and slept. He organized everything. He notified the relatives. He received Mrs. Brown when she arrived. He collected Ramona and Patty from West Berlin. At Checkpoint Charlie, the daughter from Dean, as Gerrit called her, was weeping.
"My father is dead," she kept saying.
Patty told a Denver journalist that the authorities in East Berlin refused to let her or anyone else view Dean's body. It had been in the water for four days and had been partly devoured by fish. It was shocking and was not fit to be seen, the officials said. They were perfectly proper, but not forthcoming, and Mrs. Brown couldn't get much out of them. She said that the policeman she met with was mightily pompous.
"In the GDR we do not have crime," he said.
Eventually, the officials relented and days and days after Dean died - no one was sure exactly how many days - Patty went to the morgue. Renate couldn't bear to go.
In the morgue, in order to get a good look at Dean's body, Patty knelt down beside it as if she were praying. It was Dean's body, she said. She was sure. She told the Denver Post, "They were Dean's toes. My daughter has his toes."
Then the body was cremated.
Mrs. Brown had a lot of questions: If Dean meant to defect why did he take his important papers with him on the night he disappeared, but not his passport? Why was he wearing two coats on a warm June night? Why was he cremated so quickly? But it had been Gerrit List who gave the order for the cremation because it was the proper thing to do once the autopsy report was complete. Will Roberts, who had made American Rebel, the documentary about Dean, arrived in town and went a little nuts from grief. He said that Dean was murdered.
The night before the memorial service, there was some wrangling over the disposal of the remains: Will Roberts wanted to have parts of Dean sent to places he loved like Chile and Nicaragua. The women were horrified. Things were so tense in the house in Schmockwitz that Mrs. Brown couldn't stand it and went to stay in a hotel.
The memorial service was finally held on Tuesday, June 24, in East Berlin, the day that had been scheduled for the start of Bloody Heart.
All of the Reed women were there: Ruth Anna Brown, Patty, Wiebke, and Renate. They declared themselves sisters. They were all Reed women, they said, and held hands.
All of the children came, too: Ramona, Natasha, and Alexander, whom everyone called Sasha. Friends came from abroad, including Vaclav Nectar.
It was like a big Hollywood funeral with the bereft beautiful women, and famous faces, and powerful dignitaries who packed the hall and included the Deputy Minister of Culture, the Director General of the DEFA Film Studios, a member of the East German Communist Party Central Committee, the First Deputy Chairman and General Secretary of the German Democratic Peace Council, and the President of the Committee for Entertainment.
The service was organized by Gerrit List and his colleagues at DEFA and everything was correct, Gerrit said. It was a hero's send-off; Dean had been a hero in the DDR, honored, officially approved, supported, and loved.
Pink carnations decorated the hall and the overwhelming smell of the flowers made Wiebke feel sick; she had never been so queasy in her life and she thought she might faint. Renate was drugged like a stone. She used the expression over and over. She was up to six Valium a day.
Suddenly, Will Roberts got up, faced the crowd, and delivered a funeral oration. He said that Dean's ashes ought to be tossed across the oceans of the countries he loved. He said everyone should stand up and give a big hand for Dean and started clapping, but no one joined in. Gerrit List was mortified. It was not the way things were done in Germany. It ought to have been a somber occasion. There was a form to these things. But he rose, too, and began clapping and everyone else clapped now. It was surreal and a little macabre, the sober Germans in their dark suits, the Party officials, the Americans, all of them clapping for a dead man at his funeral.
As the service ended, Dean's peppy singing voice came over the loudspeaker. He was singing "Gimme me a guitar...' Many of the family stood and applauded. Mrs. Brown rose and said that Dean must be buried in East Berlin; here were his friends, she said.