Edge of Eternity (39 page)

“No,” she said. “I see that.”

“Well,” said Dimka, “at least we avoided a nuclear war.”

“Yes,” she said. “We're alive. That's something.”

T
he smell of coffee woke Maria. She opened her eyes. President Kennedy was in bed beside her, sitting upright with several pillows propping him, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday edition of
The
New York Times
. He was wearing a light-blue nightshirt, as was she. “Oh!” she said.

He smiled. “You sound surprised.”

“I am,” she said. “To be alive. I thought we might die in the night.”

“Not this time.”

She had gone to sleep half-hoping it would happen. She dreaded the end of their love affair. She knew it had no future. For him to leave his wife would destroy him politically; to do so for a black woman was unthinkable. Anyway, he did not even want to leave Jackie: he loved her, and he loved their children. He was happily married. Maria was his mistress, and when he tired of her he would discard her. Sometimes she felt she would prefer to die before that came to pass—especially if death could come while she was at his side, in bed, in a flash of nuclear destruction that would be over before they knew what was happening.

She said none of this: her role was to make him happy, not sad. She sat upright, kissed his ear, looked over his shoulder at the newspaper, took his cup from his hand, and drank some of his coffee. Despite everything, she was glad she was still alive.

He had not mentioned her abortion. It was almost as if he had forgotten about it. She had never raised it with him. She had called Dave Powers and said she was pregnant; and Dave had given her a phone number and said he would take care of the doctor's fee. The only time the president had spoken about it had been when he phoned her after the procedure. He had bigger worries on his mind.

Maria thought about raising the subject herself, but quickly decided against it. Like Dave, she wanted to shield the president from care, not give him additional burdens. She felt sure this was the right decision, though she could not help feeling sorry, and even hurt, that she was not able to talk to him about something so important.

She had feared that sex might be painful after the procedure. However, when Dave had asked her to go to the residence last night, she had been so reluctant to decline the invitation that she had decided to take the risk; and it had been fine—wonderful, in fact.

“I'd better move,” the president said. “I'm going to church this morning.”

He was about to get up when the bedside phone rang. He picked it up. “Good morning, Mac,” he said.

Maria guessed he was talking to McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser. She jumped out of bed and went to the bathroom.

Kennedy often took calls in bed in the morning. Maria assumed that the people who phoned either did not know or did not care whether he had company. She saved the president embarrassment by making herself scarce during such conversations, just in case they were top secret.

She peeped out of the door in time to see him hang up the phone. “Great news!” he said. “Moscow Radio announced that Khrushchev is dismantling the Cuban missiles and sending them back to the USSR.”

Maria had to restrain herself from shouting for joy. It was over!

“I feel like a new man,” said the president.

She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “You saved the world, Johnny,” she said.

He looked reflective. After a minute he said: “Yeah, I guess I did.”

•   •   •

Tanya was standing on her balcony, leaning on the wrought-iron parapet, breathing deeply of the damp Havana morning air, when Paz's Buick pulled up below, completely blocking the narrow street. He jumped out of the car, looked up, saw her, and yelled: “You betrayed me!”

“What?” She was astonished. “How?”

“You know.”

He was a passionate and mercurial character, but she had never seen him this angry, and she was glad he had not come up the stairs to the apartment. However, she was baffled as to the reason for his rage. “I've told no secrets, and I haven't slept with another man,” she said. “So I'm sure I haven't betrayed you.”

“Then why are they dismantling the missile launchers?”

“Are they?” If that was so, the crisis was over. “Are you sure?”

“Don't pretend you don't know.”

“I'm not pretending anything. But if it's true, we're saved.” Out of the corner of her eye she noticed neighbors opening windows and doors, to watch the row with unabashed curiosity. She ignored them. “Why are you angry?”

“Because Khrushchev made a deal with the
yanquis
—and never even discussed it with Castro!”

The neighbors made disapproving noises.

“Of course I didn't know,” she said with annoyance. “Do you imagine Khrushchev talks to me about such things?”

“He sent you here.”

“Not personally.”

“He talks to your brother.”

“You really believe I'm some kind of special emissary of Khrushchev?”

“Why do you suppose I have gone everywhere with you for months?”

In a quieter voice, she replied: “I imagined it was because you liked me.”

The listening women made sympathetic cooing sounds.

“You're not welcome here any longer,” he yelled. “Pack your suitcase. You are to leave Cuba immediately. Today!”

With that he jumped back into his car and roared away.

“It was nice knowing you,” said Tanya.

•   •   •

Dimka and Nina celebrated by going to a bar near her apartment that evening.

Dimka was determined not to think about his unsettling conversation with Natalya. It changed nothing. He put her to the back of his mind. They had had a brief fling and it was over. He loved Nina, and she was going to be his wife.

He bought a couple of bottles of weak Russian beer and sat beside her on a bench. “We're going to be married,” he said tenderly. “I want you to have a wonderful dress.”

“I don't want a lot of fuss,” Nina said.

“Nor do I, for myself, but that could be a problem,” Dimka said with a frown. “I'm the first of my generation to get married. My mother and grandparents will want to throw a big party. What about your family?” He knew that Nina's father had died in the war, but her mother was still alive, and she had a brother a couple of years younger than she.

“I hope Mother will be well enough to come.” Nina's mother lived in Perm, nine hundred miles east of Moscow. But something told Dimka that Nina did not really want her mother to come.

“What about your brother?”

“He'll ask for leave, but I don't know if he'll get it.” Nina's brother was in the Red Army. “I have no idea where he's stationed. He could be in Cuba, for all I know.”

“I'll find out,” Dimka said. “Uncle Volodya can pull a few strings.”

“Don't go to too much trouble.”

“I want to. This will probably be my only wedding!”

She snapped: “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.” He had meant it lightheartedly, and he was sorry to have irritated her. “Forget I said it.”

“Do you think I'm going to divorce you as I did my first husband?”

“I said exactly the opposite, didn't I? What's the matter with you?” He forced a smile. “We should be happy today. We're getting married, we're having a baby, and Khrushchev has saved the world.”

“You don't understand. I'm not a virgin.”

“I guessed that.”

“Will you be serious?”

“All right.”

“A wedding is normally two young people promising to love one another forever. You can't say that twice. Don't you see that I'm embarrassed to be doing this again because I've already failed at it once?”

“Oh!” he said. “Yes, I do see, now that you've explained it.” Nina's attitude was a little old-fashioned—lots of people got divorced nowadays—but perhaps that was because she came from a provincial
town. “So you want a celebration appropriate to a second marriage: no extravagant promises, no newlywed jokes, an adult awareness that life doesn't always go according to plan.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, my beloved, if that's what you want, I will make sure you have it.”

“Will you, really?”

“Whatever made you think I wouldn't?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Sometimes I forget what a good man you are.”

•   •   •

That morning, at the last ExComm of the crisis, George heard Mac Bundy invent a new way of describing the opposite sides among the president's advisers. “Everyone knows who were the hawks and who were the doves,” he said. Bundy himself was a hawk. “Today was the day of the doves.”

But there were few hawks this morning: everyone was full of praise for President Kennedy's handling of the crisis, even some who had recently argued that he was being dangerously weak, and had pressed him to commit the United States to a war.

George summoned up the nerve to banter with the president. “Maybe you should solve the India-China border war next, Mr. President.”

“I don't think either of them, or anyone else, wants me to.”

“But today you're ten feet tall.”

President Kennedy laughed. “That'll last about a week.”

Bobby Kennedy was pleased at the prospect of seeing more of his family. “I've almost forgotten my way home,” he said.

The only unhappy people were the generals. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting at the Pentagon to finalize plans for the air attack on Cuba, were furious. They sent the president an urgent message saying that Khrushchev's acceptance was a trick to gain time. Curtis LeMay said this was the greatest defeat in American history. No one took any notice.

George had learned something, and he felt it was going to take him
a while to digest it. Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic program, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected. This realization had implications for George's career that he needed to mull over.

When ExComm broke up George kept his suit on and went to his mother's house. It was a sunny autumn day, and the leaves had turned red and gold. She cooked him supper, as she loved to do. She made steak and mashed potatoes. The steak was overdone: he could not persuade her to serve it in the French style, medium rare. He enjoyed the food anyway, because of the love with which it was made.

Afterward she washed the dishes and he dried, then they got ready to go to the evening service at Bethel Evangelical Church. “We must thank the Lord for saving us all,” she said as she stood in front of the mirror by the door, putting on her hat.

“You thank the Lord, Mom,” George said amiably. “I'll thank President Kennedy.”

“Why don't we just agree to be grateful to both?”

“I'll buy that,” said George, and they went
out.

J
oe Henry's Dance Band had a regular Saturday night gig in the restaurant of the Europe Hotel in East Berlin, playing jazz standards and show tunes for the East German elite and their wives. Joe, whose real name was Josef Heinried, was not much of a drummer, in Walli's opinion; but he could keep the beat, even when drunk, and besides, he was an official of the musicians' union, so he could not be fired.

Joe arrived at the staff entrance of the hotel at six
P.M
. in an old black Framo V901 van with his precious drums in the back packed tight with cushions. While Joe sat at the bar drinking beer, it was Walli's job to carry the drums from the van to the stage, unpack them from their leather cases, and set up the kit the way Joe liked it. There was a bass drum with a kick pedal, two tom-toms, a snare drum, a high hat, a crash cymbal, and a cowbell. Walli handled them as gently as if they were eggs: they were American Slingerland drums that Joe had won from a GI in a card game back in the 1940s, and he would never get another set like it.

The pay was lousy, but as part of the deal Walli and Karolin performed for twenty minutes in the interval, as the Bobbsey Twins, and, most importantly, they got musicians' union cards, even though Walli at seventeen was too young.

Walli's English grandmother, Maud, had chortled when he told her the name of the duo. “Are you Flossie and Freddie, or Bert and Nan?” she had said. “Oh, Walli, you do make me laugh.” It turned out that the Bobbsey Twins were not a bit like the Everly Brothers. There was a series of old-fashioned books for children about the impossibly perfect
Bobbsey family with two sets of beautiful rosy-cheeked twins. Walli and Karolin had decided to stick with the name anyway.

Joe was an idiot but Walli was learning from him just the same. Joe made sure the band was too loud to be ignored, though not so loud that people complained they could not converse. He gave each band member the spotlight in one number, keeping the musicians happy. He always opened with a well-known number, and he liked to finish while the dance floor was packed, leaving people wanting more.

Walli did not know what the future held, but he knew what he wanted. He was going to be a musician, the leader of a band, popular and famous; and he was going to play rock music. Perhaps the Communists would soften their attitude to American culture, and permit pop groups. Maybe Communism would fall. Best of all, Walli might find a way to go to America.

All that was a long way off. Right now his ambition was that the Bobbsey Twins would become popular enough for him and Karolin to become full-time professionals.

Joe's musicians drifted in while Walli was setting up, and they began to play at seven sharp.

Communists were ambivalent about jazz. They were suspicious of everything American, but the Nazis had banned jazz, which made jazz anti-Fascist. In the end they permitted it because so many people liked it. Joe's band had no vocalist, so there was no problem about songs that celebrated bourgeois values, such as “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” or “Puttin' on the Ritz.”

Karolin arrived a minute later, and her presence lit up the shabby backstage area with a glow like candlelight, bathing the gray walls in a rosy wash and making the grimy corners vanish into shadow.

For the first time, there was something in Walli's life that mattered as much as music. He had had girlfriends before, in fact they came without much effort by him. And they had usually been willing to have sex with him, so intercourse for Walli was not the unattainable dream it was for most of his schoolmates. But he had experienced nothing like the overwhelming love and passion he felt for Karolin. “We think the same way—we even say the same thing sometimes,” he had told Grandmother Maud, and she had said: “Ah—soul mates.” Walli and
Karolin could talk about sex as easily as they talked about music, confiding what they liked and did not like—though there was not much that Karolin did not like.

The band would play for another hour. Walli and Karolin got into the back of Joe's van and lay down. It became a boudoir, dimly lit by the yellow glow from the car park lights; Joe's cushions were a velvet divan, and Karolin a languorous odalisque, opening her robes to offer her body to Walli's kisses.

They had tried sex using a condom, but neither of them liked it. Sometimes they had intercourse without a condom, and Walli withdrew at the last moment, but Karolin said that was not really safe. Tonight they used their hands. After Walli had come into Karolin's handkerchief, she showed him how to please her, guiding his fingers, and she came with a little “Oh!” that sounded more like surprise than anything else.

“Sex with the one you love is the second-best thing in the world,” Maud had said to Walli. Somehow a grandmother could say things that a mother could not.

“If that's second best, what's first?” he had asked.

“Seeing your children happy.”

“I thought you were going to say: ‘Playing ragtime,'” Walli had said, and she had laughed.

As always, Walli and Karolin went from sex to music with no break, as if it were all one. Walli taught Karolin a new song. He had a radio in his bedroom and he listened to American stations broadcasting from West Berlin, so he knew all the popular numbers. This one was called “If I Had a Hammer,” and it was a hit for an American trio called Peter, Paul and Mary. It had a compelling beat, and he felt sure the audience would love it.

Karolin was doubtful about the lyrics, which mentioned justice and freedom.

Walli said: “In America, Pete Seeger is called a Communist for writing it! I think it annoys bullies everywhere.”

“How does that help us?” Karolin said with remorseless practicality.

“No one here will understand the English words.”

“All right,” she said, giving in reluctantly. Then she said: “I have to stop doing this, anyway.”

Walli was shocked. “What do you mean?”

She looked somber. She had saved some piece of bad news so that it would not spoil the sex, Walli realized. Karolin had impressive self-control. She said: “My father has been questioned by the Stasi.”

Karolin's father was a supervisor at a bus station. He seemed uninterested in politics, and was an unlikely suspect for the secret police. “Why?” said Walli. “What did they question him about?”

“You,” she said.

“Oh, shit.”

“They told him you were ideologically unreliable.”

“What was the name of the man who interrogated him? Was it Hans Hoffmann?”

“I don't know.”

“I bet it was.” If Hans was not the actual interviewer, he was surely responsible, Walli thought.

“They said Dad would lose his job if I continued to be seen in public singing with you.”

“Do you have to do what your parents say? You're nineteen.”

“I'm still living with them, though.” Karolin had left school but was at a technical college studying to be a bookkeeper. “Anyway, I can't be responsible for my father getting the sack.”

Walli was devastated. This blighted his dream. “But . . . we're so good! People love us!”

“I know. I'm so sorry.”

“How do the Stasi even know about your singing?”

“Do you remember the man in the cap who followed us the night we met? I see him occasionally.”

“Do you think he follows me all the time?”

“Not all the time,” she said in a lowered voice. People always spoke quietly when mentioning the Stasi, even if there was no one to overhear. “Maybe just now and again. But I suppose that sooner or later he noticed me with you, and started tailing me, and found out my name and address, and that's how they got to my father.”

Walli refused to accept what was happening. “We'll go to the West,” he said.

Karolin looked agonized. “Oh, God, I wish we could.”

“People escape all the time.”

Walli and Karolin had talked of this often. Escapers swam canals, obtained false papers, hid themselves in truckloads of produce, or just sprinted across. Sometimes their stories were told on West German radio stations; more often there were all kinds of rumors.

Karolin said: “People die all the time, too.”

At the same time as Walli was eager to leave, he was tortured by the possibility that Karolin would be hurt, or worse, in the escape. The border guards shot to kill. And the Wall changed constantly, becoming more and more formidable. Originally it had been a barbed-wire fence. Now in many places it was a double barrier of concrete slabs with a broad floodlit middle patrolled by dogs and guarded by watchtowers. It even had tank traps. No one had ever tried to cross in a tank, though border guards fled frequently.

Walli said: “My sister escaped.”

“But her husband was crippled.”

Rebecca and Bernd were married now and living in Hamburg. Both were schoolteachers, even though Bernd was in a wheelchair: he had not yet recovered completely from his fall. Their letters to Carla and Werner were always delayed by the censors, but they got through in the end.

“I don't want to live here, anyway,” said Walli derisively. “I'll spend my life singing songs that are approved by the Communist Party, and you'll be a bookkeeper so that your father can keep his job in the bus garage. I'd rather be dead.”

“Communism can't last forever.”

“Why not? It's lasted since 1917. And what if we have children?”

“What makes you say that?” she asked sharply.

“If we stay here, we're not just condemning ourselves to a life in prison. Our children will suffer, too.”

“Do you want to have children?”

Walli had not intended to raise this subject. He did not know whether he wanted children. First he needed to save his own life. “Well, I don't want to have children in East Germany,” he said. He had not thought of this before, but now that he had said it he felt sure of it.

Karolin looked serious. “Then maybe we should escape,” she said. “But how?”

Walli had toyed with many ideas, but he had a favorite. “Have you seen the checkpoint near my school?”

“I've never really looked.”

“It's used by vehicles carrying goods to West Berlin—meat, vegetables, cheese, and so on.” The East German government did not like feeding West Berlin, but they needed the money, according to Walli's father.

“And . . . ?”

Walli had worked out some details in his fantasy. “The barrier is a single length of timber about six inches thick. You show your papers, then the guard swings up the barrier to let your truck in. They inspect your load in the compound, then there's another similar barrier to the exit.”

“Yes, I recall the setup.”

Walli made his voice more confident than he felt. “It strikes me that a driver who had trouble with the guards could probably crash through both barriers.”

“Oh, Walli, it's so dangerous!”

“There's no safe way to get out.”

“You don't have a truck.”

“We'll steal this van.” After the show, Joe always sat in the bar while Walli packed up the drum kit and loaded the van. By the time Walli was finished, Joe was more or less drunk, and Walli would drive him home. Walli did not have a license, but Joe did not know that, and he had never been sober enough to notice Walli's erratic driving. After helping Joe into his apartment, Walli had to stash the kit in the hallway, then garage the van. “I could take it tonight, after the show,” he said to Karolin. “We could go across first thing in the morning, as soon as the checkpoint opens.”

“If I'm late home my father will come looking for me.”

“Go home, go to bed, and get up early. I'll wait for you outside the school. Joe won't surface before midday. By the time he realizes his van is missing, we'll be strolling in the Tiergarten.”

Karolin kissed him. “I'm scared, but I love you,” she said.

Walli heard the band playing “Avalon,” the closing number of the first set, and he realized they had been talking a long time. “We're on in five minutes,” he said. “Let's go.”

The band left the stage and the dance floor emptied. It took Walli less than a minute to set up the microphones and the small guitar amplifier. The audience returned to their drinks and their conversations. Then the Bobbsey Twins came on. Some customers took no notice; others looked on with interest: Walli and Karolin made an attractive couple, and that was always a good start.

As usual they began with “Noch Einen Tanz,” which got people's attention and made them laugh. They sang some folk songs, two Everly Brothers numbers, and “Hey Paula,” a hit for an American duo very like themselves called Paul and Paula. Walli had a high voice, and sang harmonies over Karolin's tune. He had developed a fingerpicking guitar style that was rhythmic as well as melodic.

They finished with “If I Had a Hammer.” Most of the audience loved it, clapping along with the beat, though there were a few stern faces at the words
justice
and
freedom
in the refrain.

They came off to loud applause. Walli's head swam with the euphoria of knowing he had enchanted an audience. It was better than being drunk. He was flying.

Passing them in the wings, Joe said: “If you ever sing that song again, you're fired.”

Walli's elation was punctured. He felt as if he had been slapped. Furious, he said to Karolin: “That settles it. I'm leaving tonight.”

They returned to the van. Often they made love a second time, but tonight both were too tense. Walli was boiling with rage. “What's the earliest you could meet me in the morning?” he said to Karolin.

She thought for a minute. “I'll go home now and tell them I need an early night, because I have to get up early in the morning . . . for a rehearsal of my college's May Day parade.”

“Good,” he said.

“I could be with you by seven without arousing suspicion.”