I asked her how Dean would have felt about the Wall coming down.
She was correct, cheerful, and loyal to her dead husband.
"He would have been happy for a multi-party system, but worried about many problems, for he understood the need for the Wall. People in the East are very, very frightened. Everything is coming apart."
"And you?"
"Hitler, Stalin, Honecker, we believed them all. Now we believe in nothing. We know everything is bad. That we are bad people. We don't know what to believe."
A middle-aged couple nearby were kissing as if no one else existed. They kissed for a long time until, with a doleful gesture, the woman turned back towards the East and the man went through to West Berlin, and I remembered that Renate's first role was in a film called Divided Heavens. In it, a couple were separated by the Berlin Wall and because of the Wall, love died.
I started towards Checkpoint Charlie on foot and then turned back. Renate was standing near her red car, watching. She waved. I waved back. Then she got in her car and drove away. I crossed back to the West, where I looked at the phone booth where Dean had made his last, desperate calls to Dixie. The sheer sweep of his life got to me. I was glad I was alone.
It had never been his politics that hooked me. It was the scale of Dean's life and his determination to make something of himself, to be loved, to be a star. He had the aspirant energy of America in its prime. I wished he were alive.
For a while I walked along the Berlin Wall and watched people hammering out little pieces and listened to the clink, clink, clink. Something irrevocable was going on. It would change everything. The seeming certainties of the Cold War were over.
Then I put my hand through the Wall. I had no idea why I did it. I just went up to the concrete monolith and stood next to a teenager from New York City who was working away with a little hammer and chisel. He said hi, and I said hi back, and then I stuck my hand through it. It wasn't as thick as I had imagined. It felt like a prop wall. The remnants of another world.
It was getting dark. The November evening was setting in over Berlin. I poked my arm through the Berlin Wall one last time, put a few pieces of it in my pocket, and then I went home.
30
All through 1990, as the nightmare world of the Stasi was exposed, a billion pages of files on every aspect of life in the GDR, uncovered, it became clear that so many citizens had been involved one way or another, the files would have to be carefully archived, permanently sealed, burned. Some people thought it was simply wisest to burn the past.
Some files had already been shredded by the Stasi as the Berlin Wall was coming down, and people would spend years trying to paste the bits together again. If you wanted someone's records, you had to be family, you had to apply. There were too many possibilities for revenge. There was no way I could get access to Dean Reed's files.
But some time late that year, a letter surfaced. I heard about it long before I got it. I talked to Anne de Boismilion at CBS in Paris, who said that she, or maybe it was her researcher, had had a phone call from Will Roberts to say that someone, perhaps Renate, had seen Dean's Stasi file in Berlin.
As always, news of Dean came in a phone call carrying a rumor of a possible sighting by someone I could not reach because it would be the middle of the night in Berlin and anyhow the lines were always busy. It was all speculation, it was all hearsay, it was all a whispering gallery, but now there was talk of a suicide letter in Dean's files.
Under the US Freedom of Information Act, I finally got hold of Dean's FBI files - it had taken two years - but as always with these files the interesting stuff was blacked out. The rest I knew by heart.
One of the weird things was that nobody nad ever bothered me, no one had ever asked any questions, and it made me wonder if any government agency could have been involved. No Stasi? KGB? FBI? Not even in East Berlin had I ever been approached. Maybe I had read too many spy novels; maybe Dean Reed no longer mattered. Then suddenly, out of the blue it came back to me how one afternoon, probably in 1988, when we were driving out of an underground parking lot near the Grand Hotel in East Berlin, a man on the sidewalk had taken a picture of us. I called Leslie.
"Just a tourist," he said.
"Taking a picture of you and me in a Hertz rental car?"
Still, it seemed to have happened in the past in another age. Everything had changed. The drama-doc script we'd been working on was out of date, and instead Leslie Woodhead and I were making a documentary about Dean Reed for the BBC because at least with a documentary you could try to keep up with the changes.
In an astonishing poll, sixty-two percent of Americans said that, with Gorbachev in power, they trusted the Soviet Union. It was as if Darth Vadar had not only pulled up his vizor, he'd taken off the whole damn costume. Journalists who had covered the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe yearned for the old days, when they could take a night off for poker instead of working a twenty-hour shift because now everyone in the country had a story to tell.
When I got back to Moscow, this time with a documentary film crew, it was early 1990. Sheremetyevo Airport was awash in electronic junk as the new-style Soviet traveler returned from New York, humping his toys - computers, videos, television sets - fresh from Uncle Steve's warehouse on Canal Street. Uncle Steve's stocked answering machines geared specially to Soviet-style telephones.
Moscow itself was throbbing with Glasnost and Perestroika, free speech, anti-Semitism, hamburgers, hookers, private enterprise, and long lines that led to food stores which were completely empty - as if the city were trapped in some frenzied halfway house: it couldn't go backward; it couldn't go ahead. At the Sovincenter, half the lights were out.
The Sovincenter was Moscow's first mall. The huge complex on the banks of the Moskva River included a conference center, a hotel with see-through elevator pods that slid up and down its walls, an atrium with plastic trees, and a clock in the shape of a cockerel that crowed at regular hours. It had a credible imitation of an English pub with plaid carpets that purveyed stale beer and soggy fish and chips. Those who had the hard currency hurried in and out of the shops, buying fresh fruit, Tampax, and air tickets.
What had originally been a glistening testimony to the glories of free enterprise, the Sovincenter was in disrepair: the lights were out; hoods loitered in the lobby; hookers called rooms at random in the middle of the night and occasionally I got a call from Lovely Natasha. A BBC journalist I ran into told me about the night he opened his eyes to find a Lovely Natasha and several of her friends actually in his room, staring down at him from the foot of his bed.
The Sovincenter was the ugly face of Perestroika, this crappy steel and glass building, which seemed a miserable imitation of the West.
Outside, the chauffeurs smoked Marlboros and leaned against the Chaikas and Mercs, waiting for their clients. Ordinary Russians, who could not enter because they didn't have the hard currency, pressed their faces against the glass doors.
"At least when Stalin was in power, there was a real man and we had food on the table," said Vera Reich.
I met up with Vera and she told me that was what she heard in the line for meat. She heard it two or three times a week: "If only we still had Stalin."
"I am the Jesus of Cool," Art Troitsky said one night as we took the subway to Moscow University for a rock concert. When we got there, the auditorium was half empty. "People are scared to go out at night because of crime. Rock is dead in Russia, anyhow," he said, no longer laughing.