Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  Gains? All I could see was the misery.

  In those weeks after the Wall came down, a fog seemed to slide away from over East Germany, revealing a nightmare landscape: women forced to handle chemical wastes without gloves; a countryside poisoned by sulphur dioxide; secret police who destroyed thousands of people.

  There were also frightening outbreaks of feverish violence on all sides: a mob in Leipzig, screaming "Communist swine," threatened to lynch the Stasi; delirious with freedom, a pack of hoodlums accosted a Jewish girl and cut the Star of David into her flesh with a knife.

  What gains? And how many other Victors were there, how many true believers left behind in the East, stranded by their politics. What gains, I wanted to shout over lunch, but I knew there was no point. With the whole rotten enterprise revealed as a sham, Victor and others like him, having made a lifetime enterprise of their beliefs, were impaled on the necessity of believing. We ate and Renate listened quietly.

  After lunch that day at the Moscow Restaurant, Renate dropped Victor off at his building. She took me back to Checkpoint Charlie but she seemed reluctant to let me go. I was sorry to leave her.

  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 R
ussians, 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.

  It was hyperbole; people still listened to rock. But as a political act, as the music that let you declare your otherness, when the state withdrew its opposition, rock and roll lost its heart. Fed up, even Boris Grebenshikov left Leningrad and went to London, where he wore baggy brown corduroys and spent most of his time painting pictures and drinking malt whisky.

  "I'm tired of being the ambassador of rock in a country that's got no rhythm," he said.

  All the myths were banging around in some crazy, unpredictable fashion and Art was gloomy. He could hear the sound of breaking Glasnost, he said over and over. "Breaking Glasnost." Good line, I said, and he nodded agreement, and we said it one more time in unison: BREAKING GLASNOST.

  Art felt that civil war was coming to the Soviet Union - Lithuania, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, all ready to rebel. Art could not quite explain how it was coming, but it was inevitable.

  "Why don't you leave?" I asked. "If what's coming is what you say and you stay, it's a prescription for your own death."

  He said, "But if I'm wrong, I want to be part of it. Wouldn't you.

  So we toasted Glasnost and Gorbachev.

  So much stuff was going on in Moscow that it was hard to get Dean Reed into focus again. Intellectuals found him loathsome or ridiculous, if they remembered him at all; the "peasant young people," as Art had called them, had other things on their minds like finding jobs and food.

  They were cynical about everything, these Soviet kids. Someone took a poll of young Soviets; in the eyes of the young, the most desirable job was that of "racketeer." This was followed by hard-currency hooker and croupier at a gambling club.

  When the Australian Embassy offered to process emigration forms, half a million Muscovites came to the gates. They had been promised better times for seventy years and better times had never come and they were fed up to the teeth. They wanted to have some fun before they died.

  "The best thing for this country is to sell it off a piece at a time to the highest bidders," Art said as we strolled into Pushkin Square.

  Oh, McDonald's!

  It shimmered there, all the neon, the yellow and red arches, the backlit signs, the shiny floors and surfaces, the stainless steel palm trees, and the pop music playing. It was the biggest McDonald's I had ever seen. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There was a line outside every day. People waited three or four hours because they knew when you got inside, unlike a lot of places in Moscow, you actually got something to eat.

  Beeg Mek. Yum. I ate my first Big Mac in Moscow. I went very early one morning to avoid the lines. Tolya Schevshenko, the rock fan who had once bought a Chubby Checker record inscribed on an X-ray plate, came with me. We ate cheeseburgers and fries, the hot apple pie, and vanilla ice cream. Tolya asked why I had never eaten this food before and I tried to explain that, in a place like New York, fast food was mostly for kids and poor, people. Tolya was not convinced. I ordered more fries.

  McDonald's was the new People's Palace. My own skepticism about my country disappeared for a while. In Moscow, all things American were, more than ever, hugely desirable.

  The more often I went to Moscow (I went again and again through the early 1990s), the more often I met Americans who, like me, could not get enough.

  A lot of us were the grandchildren of Russian immigrants, the children of the old American Left. We were urban coastal Jews who had grown up during the 1960s. We had been cynical about mainstream America most of our lives. Now we had seen the other, we had seen the Soviet Union, and we were cynical about it, too, but also seduced by it. We were ineluctably drawn towards this mess of a country.

  I talked about it with Joe Klein, the journalist, over a lunch at Doc's in New York. Like me, Joe was busy calculating how soon he could get back to the Soviet Union. Like me, he had his own friends, his Svetlana and Art, his Tolya. He had his favorite stories, his favorite restaurants, his own account of the first time he had seen Red Square. Joe made me see why it was so irresistible; for one thing, they wanted us. They loved us, and in a way always had, for our jeans, our dollars, our hamburgers and music, our movies and literature, our Coca Cola and our Constitution, and our friendliness. I remembered that Vera Reich had loved the West above all for its friendliness.

  They loved us, as Americans, and we loved them back for it. It was also a kind of relief, at least for someone like me who had put in time in the 1960s and 1970s obsessed with the evils of America. We were off the hook. Going to the Soviet Union gave us back America. In Moscow I took a picture of McDonald's.

  "Not allowed!" shouted a uniformed boy.

  Pictures were not permitted except by special arrangement, he said, casting a sharp eye on the squads of young Soviets scrubbing the floors religiously.

  These were the rules and in this, I thought, McDonald's, the result of perfect regimentation, was ideally suited to the Soviet Union. This was the company built on the inviolable principles of the University of Hamburgerology. Outside Moscow, in specially equipped factories, any bun that did not meet its standards was killed.

  On the way out I looked at the long line. McDonald's now fulfilled the longing for America. It was my conceit that in some ways McDonald's had replaced Dean Reed as the American icon.

  The next day I saw Oleg Smirnoff, who now represented Pizza Hut, which was coming to Moscow.

  No longer did Oleg have a row of ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket; no longer did he speak the Party line. He wore a navy blue blazer from Next. He talked about "Communist assholes" and about his advertising agency. For the Moscow opening of Pizza Hut, his biggest client, he planned to commission a song about pizza. I suggested "That's Amore".

  "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore!" I sang. Oleg seemed nonplussed.

  We moved on to Dean's death. Oleg was no longer reluctant to talk to me.

  "His death was played down and made little of in the USSR, which made everyone suspicious," he said. "Dean talked about America a lot. Maybe somebody in East Berlin got pissed off."

  In the spring of 1986 Dean told Oleg, "I can go home again, Oleg. I met people in Colorado who told me they remembered me. I can have a career there. I can go home." It was the last time the two met.

  "Dean, at the end, was a man who could not acknowledge that he had wasted his life. It was too late for him," Oleg said. "He was an idealist."

  Oleg and I drank coffee in the Savoy, Moscow's newest hotel, where the chairs were covered in turquoise nylon brocade; the dissident poet Andrei Voznesensky ate steak in the restaurant there, I heard. All around us, men sat on the little chairs and signed deals that would never come to much. Upstairs in a casino, pimply boys, in tuxedos, worked as croupiers.

  At long last, more than two years since I'd first met him in the club in Gorky Park, Oleg offered me his videotape. When I looked at it, it was mostly a memorial concert in honor of Dean Reed.

  I wandered around Moscow by myself a lot. Svetlana was away in London. Art was considering his career. Tolya dreamed of Malibu. I thought of the eight hundred thousand children dying from leukemia from the spill at Chernobyl and of the mutant babies with six toes who were born there and the trees that grew upside down. And I thought of Vera, who was leaving for America because her husband was afraid of the anti-Semitism. It was one of the ironies of Glasnost and of the break-up of the whole Soviet Empire: with freedom
of expression, people felt free to hate each other.

  I asked Vera to show me her passport. In plain Russian it was marked: Jew. On days when the Pamyat scheduled pogroms - it was physically shocking to write the word pogrom in 1990 - Yelena Zagrevskaya's mother put a scarf over her head and stayed indoors. I read that, in the main square in Vilnius, a sign had appeared: Lithuania for the Lithuanians, Poles to Poland, Yids to the Crematoria.

  Asleep in my room at the Savoy, I dreamed that I heard a loudspeaker blast through the hotel. The hotel management was shouting, howling, and screaming for all of the Jews to assemble in the courtyard. Then I dreamed of a horse that had fallen into a swimming pool. When it was hoisted up, it had no legs.

  Chaotic times, strange, terrifying, wonderful. There were people who had no bread and people who talked to you fearlessly about politics and smiled at you in the subways just for the hell of it. I didn't get anywhere with Dean Reed's death, though, just the same rumors and whispers recycled, retailed, cranked up. It was driving me crazy. Back to Berlin.

  In Berlin, most of the Wall was already gone, except for a few slabs, one that was a kind of backdrop for a snack bar in the Potsdamerplatz. On the road to the suburbs to see a homicide cop who had some information, or said he did, there were dozens of trashed Trabants, the Cold War cars nobody wanted anymore.

  Thomas Sindennann, who had been East Berlin's chief homicide policeman, had sharp eyes and a pointy nose, and he occasionally sniffed when he talked, as if he had an allergy or smelled something bad. Private enterprise had allowed Sindermann to recycle himself as a private eye, a German Sam Spade with a fancy computer in the office in his house. .

  I wasn't expecting much. I'd half given up expecting answers about Dean's death, and then, in a matter-of-fact way, Sindermann calmly laid it all out.

  In Sindennann's view the confusion surrounding Dean's death was that the Central Committee of the Communist Party got involved instead of the homicide police; but, then, he was a cop. And it was easy for Sindermann in hindsight to see what the problems were, to treat it as a straightforward case. Renate had, of course, been most of all worried about her husband during the events leading up to his death and never suspected a crime. As far as Renate and Gerrit List were concerned there was no reason to suspect anything other than that Dean had disappeared temporarily as he so often had. They had acted the way anyone would have done in their situation.