It was a cold November day in Berlin, with an obscuring mist and a brimstone smell of sulfur in the air from the smoky factories in the infernal East. Tanya, hastily transferred here from Warsaw to help cover the mounting crisis, felt that East Germany was about to have a heart attack. Everything was breaking down. In a remarkable repeat of what had happened in 1961 before the Wall went up, so many people had fled to the West that schools were closing for lack of teachers and hospitals were running on skeleton staffing. Those who remained behind became more and more angry and frustrated.
The new leader, Egon Krenz, was focusing on travel. He hoped that if he could satisfy people on that issue, other grievances would fade away. Tanya thought he was wrong: demanding more freedom was likely to become a habit with East Germans. Krenz had published new travel regulations on November 6 that would permit people to go abroad, with permission from the Interior Ministry, taking with them fifteen deutschmarks, about enough for a plate of sausages and a stein of beer in West Germany. This concession was scorned by the public. Today, November 9, the increasingly desperate leader had called a press conference to reveal yet another new travel law.
Tanya sympathized with the yearning of East Germans to be free to go where they wished. She longed for the same liberty for herself and Vasili. He was world famous, but he had to hide behind a pseudonym. He had never left the Soviet Union, where his books were not published. He should be able to go and accept in person the prizes his alter ego had won, and bask a little in the sunshine of acclaim—and she wanted to go with him.
Unfortunately she did not see how East Germany could ever set its people free. It could hardly exist as an independent state: that was why they had built the Wall in the first place. If they let their citizens travel, millions would leave permanently. West Germany might be a prissily conservative country, with old-fashioned attitudes on women’s rights, but it was a paradise by comparison with the East. No country could survive the exodus of its most enterprising young people. Therefore Krenz would never willingly give East Germans the one thing they wanted above all else.
So it was with low expectations that Tanya went to the International Press Center on Mohren Strasse a few minutes before six in the evening. The room was packed with journalists, photographers, and television cameras. The rows of red seats were full, and Tanya had to join the crowd around the sides of the room. The international press corps was here in force: they could smell blood.
Krenz’s press officer, Günter Schabowski, came into the room with three other officials at six sharp and sat at the table on the platform. He had gray hair and wore a gray suit and a gray tie. He was a competent bureaucrat whom Tanya liked and trusted. For an hour he announced ministerial changes and administrative reforms.
Tanya marveled at the sight of a Communist government scrambling to satisfy a public demand for change. It was almost unknown. And on the rare occasions when it had happened, the tanks had rolled in soon afterward. She recalled the agonizing disappointments of the Prague Spring in 1968 and Solidarity in 1981. But, according to her brother, the Soviet Union no longer had the power or the will to crush dissent. She hardly dared to hope it was true. She pictured a life in which she and Vasili could write the truth without fear. Freedom. It was hard to imagine.
At seven Schabowski announced the new travel law. “It will be possible for every citizen of East Germany to leave the country using border crossing points,” he said. That was not very illuminating, and several journalists asked for clarification.
Schabowski himself seemed uncertain. He put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and read the decree aloud. “Private travel to foreign countries can be applied for without presentation of existing visa requirements or proving the need to travel or familial relationships.”
It was all written in obfuscatory bureaucratic language, but it sounded good. Someone said: “When does this new regulation come into effect?”
Schabowski clearly did not know. Tanya noticed that he was perspiring. She guessed that the new law had been drafted in a rush. He shuffled the papers in front of him, looking for the answer. “As far as I know,” he said, “immediately, without delay.”
Tanya was bewildered. Something was effective immediately—but what? Could anyone just drive up to a checkpoint and cross? But the press conference came to an end without any further information.
Tanya wondered what to write as she walked the short distance back to the Hotel Metropol on Friedrich Strasse. In the grubby grandiosity of the marble lobby, Stasi agents in their customary leather jackets and blue jeans lounged around, smoking and watching a television set with a bad picture. It was showing film from the press conference. As Tanya got her room key, she heard one receptionist say to another: “What does that mean? Can we just go?”
No one knew.
• • •
Walli was in his West Berlin hotel suite, watching the news with Rebecca, who had flown in to see Alice and Helmut. They were all planning to have dinner together.
Walli and Rebecca puzzled over a low-key report on ZDF’s seven o’clock Today program. There were new travel regulations for East Germans, but it was not clear what they meant. Walli could not figure out whether his family would be allowed to visit him in West Germany or not. “I wonder if I might even see Karolin again soon,” he mused.
Alice and Helmut arrived a few minutes later, pulling off their cold-weather coats and scarves.
At eight Walli switched over to ARD’s Day Show, but did not learn much more.
It seemed impossible that the Wall that had blighted Walli’s life could be opened. In a flash of memory that was all too familiar, he relived those few traumatic seconds at the wheel of Joe Henry’s old black Framo van. He recalled his terror as he saw the border guard kneel down and aim the submachine gun, his panic as he swung the wheel and drove at the guard, his confusion as bullets shattered his windscreen. He was sickened as he felt the sensation of his wheels bumping over a human being. Then he crashed through the barrier to freedom.
The Wall had taken his innocence. It had also taken Karolin from him. And his daughter’s childhood.
That daughter, now a few days from her twenty-sixth birthday, was saying: “Is the Wall still the Wall, or not?”
Rebecca said: “I can’t make it out. It’s almost as if they’ve opened the border by mistake.”
Walli said: “Shall we go out and see what’s happening on the streets?”
• • •
Lili, Karolin, Werner, and Carla regularly watched ARD’s Day Show, as did millions of people in East Germany. They thought it told the truth, unlike their own state-controlled news shows, which depicted a fantasy world no one believed in. All the same, they were puzzled by the ambiguous eight o’clock news. Carla said: “Is the border open or not?”
Werner said: “It can’t be.”
Lili stood up. “Well, I’m going to have a look.”
In the end all four of them went.
As soon as they stepped out of the house and breathed the cold night air, they felt the emotional charge in the atmosphere. The streets of East Berlin, dimly lit by yellow lamps, were unusually busy with people and cars. Everyone was headed the same way, toward the Wall, mostly in groups. Some young men were trying to thumb a ride, a crime that would have got them arrested a week ago. People were talking to strangers, asking what they knew, whether it was really true that they could go to West Berlin now.
Karolin said to Lili: “Walli is in West Berlin. I heard it on the radio. He must have come to see Alice.” She looked thoughtful. “I hope they like each other.”
The Franck family walked south on Friedrich Strasse until they saw, in the distance, the powerful floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie, a compound that occupied the street for an entire block, from Zimmer Strasse on the near, Communist side, to Koch Strasse, which was free.
Coming closer, they saw people pouring out of the Stadtmitte subway station, swelling the crowd. There was also a line of cars, their drivers clearly unsure whether to approach the checkpoint or not. Lili sensed the feeling of celebration, but she was not sure they had anything to celebrate. As far as she could see, the gates were not open.
Many people held back, just out of range of the floodlights, afraid to show their faces; but the bolder ones approached nearer, committing the criminal offense of “unwarrantable intrusion into a border area,” despite the risk of arrest and a sentence of three years in a labor camp.
The street narrowed as it approached the checkpoint, and the crowd thickened. Lili and her family pushed through to the front. Before them, under lights as bright as day, they could see the red-and-white gates for pedestrians and cars, the lounging border guards with their guns, the customs buildings, and the watchtowers rising over it all. Inside a glass-walled command post, an officer was talking on the telephone, making large, frustrated arm-waving gestures as he spoke.
To the left and right of the checkpoint, stretching away along Koch Strasse in both directions, was the hated Wall. Lili felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. This was the edifice that for most of her life had split her family into two halves that almost never met. She hated the Wall even more than she hated Hans Hoffmann.
Lili said aloud: “Has anyone tried to walk through?”
A woman next to her said angrily: “They turn you away. They say you need a visa from a police station. But I went to the police station and they didn’t know anything about it.”
A month ago, the woman would have shrugged her shoulders at this typical bureaucratic foul-up and gone home, but tonight things were different. She was still here, unsatisfied, protesting. No one was going home.
The people around Lili broke into a rhythmic chant: “Open up! Open up!”
When they trailed off, Lili thought she could hear chanting from the far side. She strained her ears. What were they saying? Eventually she made it out: “Come over! Come over!” She realized that West Berliners, too, must be gathering at checkpoints.
What was going to happen? How would this end?
A line of half a dozen vans came along Zimmer Strasse to the checkpoint, and fifty or sixty armed border guards got out.
Standing beside Lili, Werner said grimly: “Reinforcements.”
• • •
Dimka and Natalya sat on the black leather chairs in Gorbachev’s office feeling excited and tense. Gorbachev’s strategy, of letting the Eastern European satellites go their own way, had led to a crisis that seemed about to boil over. This could be either dangerous or hopeful. Perhaps it was both.
For Dimka the issue was, as always, the sort of world his grandchildren would grow up in. Grigor, his son with Nina, was already married; Dimka’s and Natalya’s daughter, Katya, was at university; both would probably have children in the next few years. What did the future hold for those kids? Was old-fashioned Communism really finished? Dimka still did not know.
Dimka said to Gorbachev: “Thousands of people are gathering at the Berlin Wall checkpoints. If the East German government does not open the gates, there will be riots.”
“That’s not our problem,” said Gorbachev. It was a litany. He always said it. “I want to speak to Chancellor Kohl of West Germany,” he went on.
Natalya said: “He’s in Poland tonight.”
“Get him on the phone as soon as you can—not later than tomorrow. I don’t want him to start talking about German reunification. That would escalate the crisis. The opening of the Wall is probably all the destabilization that East Germany can deal with right now.”
He was dead right, Dimka thought. If the border was opened, a united Germany could not be far in the future; but it was better not to raise such an inflammatory issue right now.
“I’ll get on to the West Germans right away,” said Natalya. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you.”
Natalya and Dimka stood up. Gorbachev still had not told them what to do about the immediate crisis. Dimka said: “What if Egon Krenz calls from East Berlin?”
Dimka and Natalya left the room.
Outside, Dimka said: “If he doesn’t do something soon, it will be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Natalya asked.
“Too late to save Communism.”
• • •
Maria Summers was at Jacky Jakes’s home in Prince George’s County, having early supper with her godson, Jack. The TV was on, and she saw Jasper Murray, in a coat and scarf, reporting from Berlin. He was on the western, free side of Checkpoint Charlie, standing in a crowd near the little Allied guard post that had been built in the middle of Friedrich Strasse, beside a sign that said YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR in four languages. Behind him she could see floodlights and watchtowers.
Jasper said: “The crisis of Communism is reaching a new peak of tension here tonight. After weeks of demonstrations, the East German government today announced the opening of the border with the West—but it seems no one has told the border guards or the passport police. So thousands of Berliners are gathering on both sides of the infamous Wall, demanding to exercise their brand-new right to cross over, while the government does nothing—and the armed guards grow increasingly nervous.”
Jack finished his sandwich and went off for his bath. “He’s nine years old, and newly shy,” Jacky said with a wry smile. “He tells me he’s too old to be bathed by his grandmother.”
Maria was fascinated by the news from Berlin. She was remembering her lover, President Kennedy, saying to the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
“I’ve spent my life working for the American government,” she said to Jacky. “All that time, our aim has been to defeat Communism. But, in the end, Communism defeated itself.”
“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.”