Edge of Eternity (125 page)

“Why is it happening?” said Jacky. “I can't make it out.”

“A new generation of leaders came to power, most importantly Gorbachev. When they opened the books and looked at the numbers, they said: ‘If this is the best we can do, what's the point of Communism?'
I feel as if I might as well never have joined the State Department—me and hundreds of other people.”

“What else would you have done?”

Without thinking, Maria said: “Got married.”

Jacky sat down. “George never told me your secrets,” she said. “But I thought you must be in love with a married man, back in the sixties.”

Maria nodded. “I've loved two men in my life,” she said. “Him, and George.”

Jacky said: “What happened? Did he go back to his wife? They usually do.”

“No,” said Maria. “He died.”

“Oh, my goodness!” said Jacky. “Was it President Kennedy?”

Maria stared at her in astonishment. “How did you figure that out?”

“I didn't, I guessed.”

“Please don't tell anyone! George knows, but no one else does.”

“I can keep secrets.” Jacky smiled. “Greg didn't know he was a father until George was six.”

“Thank you. If it ever gets out I'll be all over those trashy supermarket newspapers. Goodness knows how much damage that would do to my career.”

“Don't worry. But listen. George will be home soon. You two are practically living together now. You're so well matched.” She lowered her voice. “I like you much better than Verena.”

Maria laughed. “And my folks would have preferred George to President Kennedy, if they had known, you can bet on that.”

“Do you think you and George might get married?”

“The problem is that I couldn't do my job if I were married to a congressman. I have to be bipartisan, or at least appear so.”

“You'll retire one day.”

“Another seven years and I'll be sixty.”

“Will you marry him then?”

“If he asks me—yes.”

•   •   •

Rebecca was at Checkpoint Charlie, on the western side, with Walli, plus Alice and Helmut. Rebecca was being careful to avoid Jasper
Murray and his television cameras. She felt that joining a street mob was not the right thing for a Bundestag deputy, let alone a government minister. But she was not going to miss this. It was the greatest ever demonstration against the Wall—the Wall that had crippled the man she loved and blighted her life. The East German government could not possibly survive it—could they?

The air was cold, but she was warmed by the crowd. There were several thousand people in the stretch of Friedrich Strasse leading to the checkpoint. Rebecca and the others were near the front. Just past the Allied hut, a white line was painted across the road where Friedrich Strasse intersected Koch Strasse. The line showed where West Berlin ended and East Berlin began. On the corner, the Café Adler was doing a roaring trade.

The Wall ran along the cross street, Koch Strasse. There were in fact two walls, both made of tall concrete panels, separated by a strip of cleared land. On the Western side, the concrete was covered with colorful graffiti. Opposite where Rebecca stood was a gap beyond which were several armed guards standing in front of three red-and-white gates, two for vehicles and one for pedestrians. Behind the gates were three watchtowers. Rebecca could see soldiers behind the glass windows, scanning the crowd malevolently through binoculars.

Some of the people near Rebecca were talking to the guards, imploring them to let the people through from the East. The guards did not respond. An officer came up to the crowd and tried to explain that there were as yet no new regulations about travel from the East. No one believed him: they had seen it on TV!

The press of the crowd was irresistible, and gradually Rebecca was forced forward until she crossed the white line and found herself technically in East Berlin. The guards looked on helplessly.

After a while the guards retreated behind the gates. Rebecca was astounded. East German soldiers did not normally withdraw from a crowd: they controlled it, using whatever brutality was necessary.

Now the crossroads was clear of guards, and the crowd continued to edge forward. Either side of them, the double wall dead-ended in a short cross-wall linking inner and outer barriers and blocking access to the cleared strip. To Rebecca's amazement, two bold protesters
climbed the wall and sat on the rounded upper edges of the concrete panels.

Guards approached them and said: “Please come down.”

The climbers politely refused.

Rebecca's heart was thudding. The climbers were in East Berlin—as was she—and so could be shot by the guards for transgressing the Wall, as so many others had been in the last twenty-eight years.

But there was no shooting. Instead, several other people climbed the Wall in different places and sat on top, dangling their legs either side, defying the guards to do something about it.

The guards returned to their positions behind the gates.

This was amazing. By Communist standards it was lawlessness, anarchy. But no one was doing anything to stop it.

Rebecca remembered that Sunday in August 1961, when she was thirty, and she had left home to walk to West Berlin and found all the crossing points blocked by barbed wire. The barrier had now been there for half her lifetime. Could that era be coming to an end at last? She longed for it with all her heart.

The crowd was now in open defiance of the Wall, the guards, and the East German regime. And the mood of the guards was changing, Rebecca saw. Some talked to the protesters, which was forbidden. One protester reached out and snatched a guard's cap, putting it on his own head. The guard said: “Please may I have it back? I need it or I'll be in trouble.” The protester good-naturedly handed it back.

Rebecca looked at her wristwatch. It was almost midnight.

•   •   •

On the eastern side, the people around Lili were chanting: “Let us go! Let us go!”

From the west side of the checkpoint came an answering chant: “Come! Come! Come!”

The crowd had inched closer to the guards, minute by minute, until now they were within touching distance of the gates, and the guards had retreated inside the compound.

Behind Lili a throng of tens of thousands, and a line of cars, stretched along Friedrich Strasse farther than she could see.

Everyone knew the situation was dangerously unstable. Lili feared the guards would just start firing into the crowd. They did not have enough ammunition to protect themselves from ten thousand angry people. But what else could they do?

In the next instant, Lili found out.

Suddenly an officer appeared and shouted: “
Alles auf!
”

All the gates swung open at once.

A roar went up from the waiting crowd, and they surged forward. Lili struggled to stay near her family as everyone flooded through the pedestrian and vehicle gateways. Running, stumbling, shouting and screaming for joy, they passed through the compound. The gates on the far side were also open. They surged through, and East met West.

People were weeping, hugging, and kissing. The waiting crowd had bunches of flowers and bottles of champagne. The noise of rejoicing was deafening.

Lili looked around. Her parents were close behind her. Karolin was just in front. She said: “I wonder where Walli and Rebecca are?”

•   •   •

Evie Williams's return to America was a triumph. She got a standing ovation on the first night of
A Doll's House
on Broadway. Ibsen's bleak, introspective drama was perfect for the brooding intensity of her best acting.

When at last the audience tired of applauding and left the theater Dave, Beep, and their sixteen-year-old son, John Lee, made their way backstage to join the crowd of admirers. Evie's dressing room was full of people and flowers, and there were several bottles of champagne on ice. But, strangely, the people were silent and the champagne was unopened.

There was a TV set in one corner, and most of the cast were crowded around it, silent, watching the news from Berlin.

Dave said: “What is it? What's happening?”

•   •   •

Cam was in his office at Langley with Tim Tedder, watching television and drinking Scotch. Jasper Murray was on the screen, live from Berlin,
yelling excitedly: “The gates are open and the East Germans are coming! They're flooding through in their hundreds, in their thousands! This is a historic day! The Berlin Wall has fallen down!”

Cam muted the sound. “Would you believe it?”

Tedder held up his glass in a toast. “The end of Communism.”

“It's what we've been working toward all these years,” said Cam.

Tedder shook his head skeptically. “Everything we did was completely ineffective. Despite all our efforts Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua became Communist countries. Look at other places where we tried to prevent Communism: Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cambodia, Laos . . . None of them does us much credit. And now Eastern Europe is abandoning Communism with no help from us.”

“All the same we should think of a way to take the credit. Or let the president take it, at least.”

“Bush has been in office less than a year, and he's been behind the curve all along,” Tim said. “He can't claim to have caused this: if anything, he tried to slow it down.”

“Reagan, maybe?” Cam mused.

“Be sensible,” said Tedder. “Reagan didn't do this. Gorbachev did it. Him and the price of oil. And the fact that Communism never really worked anyway.”

“What about Star Wars?”

“A weapons system that was never going to get beyond the science fiction stage, as everyone knew, including the Soviets.”

“Reagan made that speech, though. ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' Remember?”

“I remember. Are you going to tell people that Communism collapsed because Reagan made a speech? They'll never believe that.”

“Sure they will,” said Cam.

•   •   •

The first person Rebecca saw was her father, a tall man with thinning fair hair, a neatly knotted tie visible in the V of his coat. He looked older. “Look!” she screamed at Walli. “It's Father!”

Walli's face broke into a wide grin. “So it is,” he said. “I didn't think we'd find them in this multitude.” He put his arm around Rebecca's
shoulders and together they pushed through the crush. Helmut and Alice followed close behind.

Movement was frustratingly difficult. The crowd was thick, and everyone was dancing, jumping for joy, and embracing strangers.

Rebecca saw her mother next to her father, then Lili and Karolin. “They haven't seen us yet,” she said to Walli. “Wave!”

There was no point in shouting. Everyone was shouting. Walli said: “This is the biggest street party in the world.”

A woman with her hair in curlers cannoned into Rebecca, and she would have fallen but that Walli's arm supported her.

Then the two groups at last reached one another. Rebecca threw herself into her father's arms. She felt his lips on her forehead. The familiar kiss, the touch of his slightly bristly chin, the faint fragrance of his aftershave, filled her heart to bursting.

Walli hugged their mother. Then they swapped. Rebecca could not see for tears. They embraced Lili and Karolin. Karolin kissed Alice, saying: “I didn't think I'd see you again so soon. I didn't know if I'd see you again ever.”

Rebecca looked at Walli as he greeted Karolin. He took both of her hands, and they smiled at one another. Walli said simply: “I'm so happy to see you again, Karolin. So happy.”

“Me, too,” she said.

They formed a ring, arms around each other, there in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, in the middle of Europe. “Here we are,” said Carla, looking around the circle at her family, smiling broadly, happy. “Together again, at last. After all that.” She paused, then said it again. “After all that.”

T
hey were a strange family group, Maria reflected, looking around the living room of Jacky Jakes's house at a few seconds before midnight.

There was Jacky herself, Maria's mother-in-law, eighty-nine years old and feistier than ever.

There was George, Maria's husband for the last twelve years, now white-haired at seventy-two. Maria had been a bride for the first time at the age of sixty, which would have embarrassed her if she had not been so happy.

There was George's ex-wife, Verena, undoubtedly the most beautiful sixty-nine-year-old woman in America. She was with her second husband, Lee Montgomery.

Then there was George's son with Verena: Jack, a lawyer, age twenty-eight, with his wife and their pretty five-year-old daughter, Marga.

They were watching TV. The broadcast was coming from a park in Chicago where two hundred forty thousand ecstatically happy people had gathered.

Onstage was an African American family: a handsome father, a beautiful mother, and two sweet little girls. It was election night, and Barack Obama had won.

Michelle Obama and the girls left the stage, and the president-elect went to the microphone and said: “Hello, Chicago.”

Jacky, the matriarch of the Jakes family, said: “Hush, now, everybody. Listen up.” She turned up the volume.

Obama wore a dark-gray suit and a burgundy tie. Behind him, rippling in a gentle breeze, were more American flags than Maria could count.

Speaking slowly, pausing after each phrase, Obama said: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy—tonight is your answer.”

Little Marga came up to Maria where she sat on the couch. “Granny Maria,” she said.

Maria lifted the child onto her lap and said: “Hush, now, baby, everyone wants to listen to the new president.”

Obama said: “It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled—Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals, or a collection of red states and blue states: we are, and always will be, the
United
States of America.”

“Granny Maria,” Marga whispered again. “Look at Granddad.”

Maria looked at her husband, George. He was watching the television, but his lined brown face was streaming with tears. He was wiping them away with a big white handkerchief, but as soon as he dried his eyes the tears came again.

Marga said: “Why is Granddad crying?”

Maria knew why. He was crying for Bobby, and Martin, and Jack. For four Sunday school girls. For Medgar Evers. For all the freedom fighters, dead and alive.

“Why?” Marga said again.

“Honey,” said Maria, “it's a long story.”