The whole planet shifted on its political axis. Hungary declared itself a republic. In Poland, Solidarity became a government. In Prague, where Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright, was made president, Alexander Dubcek, the now elderly leader of the Prague Spring and an epic figure, returned from exile in the countryside and appeared on a balcony in Wenceslas Square at Christmas. With the Velvet Revolution, the soundtrack went on again in Prague and the streets were vibrant with music and talk, discussion and politics.
And in Romania, where Dean shot some of his movies because the countryside looked a lot like the Old West and had hardly any television aerials, the television station became the headquarters for a revolution. After Ceausescu was executed, Romanians went into his office and rolled ecstatically around on the priceless Persian carpets, grinning, their Kalashnikovs beside them.
November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell.
It was breached by a bunch of kids with some hammers, and then they partied on top of it, dancing all night long.
Clink, clink, clink: you could hear the sound blocks away from Checkpoint Charlie.
"The sound of freedom," I said.
"The sound of money," said Leslie Woodhead and then took it back. "I don't want to be cynlcal," he added. "Not yet."
I went to Berlin in the middle of November. I got to Checkpoint Charlie and stood and gaped. What a prophet I had been. Even the summer before when I'd visited Renate, I was convinced nothing here would ever change, and now, just before Christmas, Bloomingdales was selling chunks of the Berlin Wall at twelve and a half bucks a pop in New York.
Clink, clink, clink. It reminded me of something but I was so dumbstruck by the thing itself, I couldn't come up with it at first.
Then, I remembered. The sound of the Wall coming down reminded me of a noise I had heard in Moscow when I passed a dog decked out with war medals like a little general. The medals went clink clink clink.
For a while after the Berlin Wall was torn down, a handful of idealistic East Germans imagined that there was a Third Way - a kind of fantasy combination of socialism and capitalism. It lasted i about as long as it took East Germany to disappear up the ass of the West. For a little while, though, in the beginning, everyone was caught up in the celebration; around the Wall, there was always a party.
That November day I walked up to the Berlin Wall and bought a piece of it from a boy from New Jersey who had set up shop. A burly ex-GI from Texas said hello and told me, "We come on over to get us a piece of that there Wall," and looked nervously at his friend while a gang of drunken teenagers did a rock version of "Winter Wonderland" for KOOL, America's oldest golden oldies station. KOOL was in town from Arizona, doing live remotes from the Berlin Wall.
"The rock and roll revolution is right here, babe!" the DJ screamed.
The nice ex-GI from Texas, who was in his fifties, and his pal, who had served with him in the army, asked me if I'd walk through Checkpoint Charlie with them; they were Cold War guys and a little bit nervous about Communists, they said. I said sure I'd walk with them and I said it with some bravado, but, as we went through, Checkpoint Charlie held no more terrors. I saw now that the daunting military uniforms the border guards wore were falling apart. Their epaulets were made of plastic; one hung by a thread from the shoddy shirt a young soldier wore; it seemed suddenly just a flimsy costume now, from a period film, shot on lousy stock.
"Have a nice day," said the border guard and smiled nervously.
On the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, Renate Reed was waiting for me with her bright red Peugeot. I gave her a piece of the Wall I had bought and she turned it over slowly in her hand. She looked terribly thin. Sasha was now in the army and she was living alone in the house in Schmockwitz. As always she was very warm and I thought again how much I liked her, how much I felt for her. It was as if she had experienced an earthquake with never-ending aftershocks: first Dean's death, then the Wall coming down, and then her son leaving home. She smiled, though, her heartbreaking smile and we shook hands.
We picked up Victor Grossman in front of his apartment building on the Karl Marx-Allee. Victor was busy because there were scores of Western journalists in East Berlin who needed an interpreter.
"Have you been to the West?" I asked Victor.
He shook his head and said equably, "No, it has been indicated to me that I would be arrested. I still owe the US Army some time. My wife has been."
I gave Victor a bag of avocados and he thanked me. Then we all got into Renate's red car and drove a while until she pulled up in front of a restaurant.
East Berlin was as gray as it always had been. Unlike Prague there seemed to be little joy, and unlike Moscow no craziness, no kitsch, no outrage. I was sure it was there, but it wasn't visible in the rain-soaked streets.
There were no taxis either. In those first few weeks of freedom, three hundred East German taxi drivers had simply gone west in their Trabants. (Volkswagen soon took over the Trabi factory.) There still were no Dean Reed records either in the Melodie record store on the Leipzigerstrasse, where I had begun almost exactly two years earlier.
Renate pulled up at the Moscow Restaurant and we went inside. Victor ordered a pair of steaks with brandied peaches on them like two big yellow breasts; Renate and I ordered steak, too, but she hardly touched hers.
Victor still believed in socialism and he was worried that the big West German companies would wipe out the gains made by East Germany. He was right. The West Germans moved in fast and took over pretty much everything, and they left a lot of East Germans feeling crushed, defeated, and lost.
What gains? I wanted to say. What bloody gains? News of the corruption inside the GDR was coming out every day. There were stories about the gold hoarded by government officials in Swiss banks and the grandeur of their country estates, the rigged football games, and the sale of arms to South Africa and human beings to the West for hard currency. Honecker had spent four hundred thousand dollars of state money for a watch that had belonged to Lenin.
Dean Reed had always criticized Imelda Marcos and Ronald Reagan. He talked about the horrors of capitalism, about its corruptions, but what about Honecker? He shook hands with Honecker, he took his lousy medals, he celebrated the triumphs of socialism in the GDR. Dean believed!
Gains? All I could see was the misery.
In those weeks after the Wall came down, a fog seemed to slide away from over East Germany, revealing a nightmare landscape: women forced to handle chemical wastes without gloves; a countryside poisoned by sulphur dioxide; secret police who destroyed thousands of people.
There were also frightening outbreaks of feverish violence on all sides: a mob in Leipzig, screaming "Communist swine," threatened to lynch the Stasi; delirious with freedom, a pack of hoodlums accosted a Jewish girl and cut the Star of David into her flesh with a knife.
What gains? And how many other Victors were there, how many true believers left behind in the East, stranded by their politics. What gains, I wanted to shout over lunch, but I knew there was no point. With the whole rotten enterprise revealed as a sham, Victor and others like him, having made a lifetime enterprise of their beliefs, were impaled on the necessity of believing. We ate and Renate listened quietly.
After lunch that day at the Moscow Restaurant, Renate dropped Victor off at his building. She took me back to Checkpoint Charlie but she seemed reluctant to let me go. I was sorry to leave her.