Edge of Eternity (151 page)
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 protestors, which was forbidden. One protestor 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 protestor 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 theatre, 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 towards all these years.’ said Cam.
Tedder shook his head sceptically. ‘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 for the fact 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.’
Epilogue
4 November 2008
63
They 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 240,000 ecstatically happy people had gathered.
On stage 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-grey 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 on to 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 Grandad.’
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 Grandad 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.’
Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right,
To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours
And smear with dust their glittering golden towers.
Shakespeare,
The Rape of Lucrece
Acknowledgements
My principal history advisor for the Century trilogy has been Richard Overy. Other academic historians who helped with this volume were Clayborne Carson, Mary Fulbrook, Claire McCallum and Matthias Reiss.
Numerous people who lived through the events of the era also helped me, either by checking my first draft or giving me interviews, especially: Mimi Alford on the Kennedy White House; Peter Asher on being a pop star; Jay Coburn and Howard Stringer on Vietnam; Frank Gannon on the Nixon White House, along with his colleagues Jim Cavanaugh, Tod Hullin and Geoff Shephard; Congressman John Lewis on civil rights; and Angela Spizig and Annemarie Behnke on life in Germany. As always, Dan Starer of Research for Writers in New York City helped me find my advisors.
On my research trip to the American South my guides were: Barry McNealy in Birmingham, Alabama; Ron Flood in Atlanta, Georgia; and Ismail Naskai in Washington, DC. Ray Young at Fredericksburg Greyhound station kindly dug out photographs from the sixties.
My friends Johnny Clare and Chris Manners read the first draft and made many useful criticisms. Charlotte Quelch corrected numerous errors.
My family helped me in immeasurable ways. Dr Kim Turner advised me on many matters, especially medical. Jann Turner and Barbara Follett read the first draft and made perceptive and helpful comments.
Editors and agents who read the draft included Amy Berkower, Cherise Fisher, Leslie Gelbman, Phyllis Grann, Neil Nyren, Susan Opie, Jeremy Trevathan, and, as ever, Al Zuckerman.
About the Author
Ken Follett was twenty-seven when he wrote
Eye of the Needle
, an award-winning thriller that became an international bestseller. He then surprised everyone with
The Pillars of the Earth
, about the building of a cathedral in the Middle Ages, which continues to captivate millions of readers all over the world and its long-awaited sequel,
World Without End
, was a number one bestseller in the US, UK and Europe.
Fall of Giants
, the first bestselling book in the Century trilogy is followed by
Winter of the World
and this,
Edge of Eternity
.
Also by Ken Follett
The Modigliani Scandal
Paper Money
Eye of the Needle
Triple
The Key to Rebecca
The Man from St Petersburg
On Wings of Eagles
Lie Down with Lions
The Pillars of the Earth
Night Over Water
A Dangerous Fortune
A Place Called Freedom
The Third Twin