SLICK FOG CLUNG TO Berlin, damping the tension of the divided city. At dawn, starlings left their roosts in outlying farmlands and marshes. They flew in lines, just above treetops and spires, aiming for bits of breakfast-on-the-run soon to be dropped in the city squares.
Herb had only slept three hours on the transatlantic flight. In the bus from Tegel airport to West Berlin’s central railway station, his eyes resisted daylight despite the shielding fog and tinted windows. It was eleven at night according to his biologic clock. Yet being tired and disoriented was pleasant, taking the edge off the anxiety he had tried to suppress all week.
Traffic moved quickly in the morning rush hour. He was at his hotel by ten o’clock. A room was available, but he wasn’t interested in showering or changing clothes. He pocketed a city map, headed back to the train station, and bought a subway pass.
The fog was lifting when he exited at Reichssportfeld. He walked toward an immense field where seven chiseled stone columns built for the 1936 Olympic Games stood as pagan sentries. Herb had written of these “neolithic pillars set in an earthly garden for the Valkyries’ afternoon tea” in the diary he kept the summer of 1959. The night before leaving San Francisco, he reread it for the first time in decades, wincing at his naïve, misplaced romanticism.
He found the swimming stadium, climbed down its limestone tiers, and sat envisioning, as he had thirty years ago, the empty pool filled with emerald water, the cadence of glistening arms rising up and dipping down.
He saved the great track and field stadium for last. The pocked, marble plaque that enthralled him in 1959 was still there. He retraced the carved letters— “100m OWENS USA, 200m OWENS USA.”
Herb spent the rest of the day wandering through West Berlin neighborhoods and visiting a museum of Art Deco furniture. He returned to the hotel, took a short nap, woke up refreshed, showered, changed, and joined the other invited speakers at a welcome dinner on the fourteenth floor.
He sat next to a German pulmonary specialist he knew from previous conferences. Peter Ramburg was polite, nonjudgmental, and colorless. Herb had yet to see him express any emotion, positive or negative. Peter was also very thin, which raised the possibility he might have AIDS, though he appeared energetic and must be capable of hard work if he was telling Herb the truth about how many bronchoscopies he did a week.
They talked shop during the salad and main courses. Herb excused himself at dessert to take in the view through the ballroom’s glass-curtain walls. The fog had descended, so there was little to see—the vague outline of a television tower in East Berlin, the runway lights at Tegel. He was drifting around the perimeter, identifying other blurry landmarks, when someone shouted excitedly. The only word Herb could understand, and only because it was repeated over and over, was “Funkankündigung.”
All the Germans began shouting. More remarkable to Herb, they were using their hands for emphasis, which he had never seen a German do. He asked several people what was happening, but their replies were unintelligible.
Herb saw Peter sitting alone, flushed and trembling. He didn’t respond until Herb yelled, “Funkankündigung?”
Peter stirred from his catatonic state.
“Radio announcement. There has been a radio announcement. The East Germans have opened the wall. Tonight they let everyone cross to the West.”
Pounding the table, Peter sobbed, “You cannot imagine what this means to us.”