‘Because the alternative is worse. If you don’t do it, you’ll always feel, in your heart, that you missed out on something because of me, that you made a sacrifice for my sake. I’d rather you went ahead and tried it. You don’t have to reveal the details: just come home and tell me you love me.’
‘I don’t know,’ Rebecca said, and she slept uneasily that night.
On the evening of the next day she was sitting next to the man who wanted to become her lover, Claus Krohn, in a meeting room in Hamburg’s enormous green-roofed neo-Renaissance town hall. Rebecca was a member of the parliament that ran the Hamburg city-state. The committee was discussing a proposal to demolish a slum and build a new shopping centre. But all she could think about was Claus.
She was sure that after tonight’s meeting Claus would invite her to a bar for a drink. This would be the third time. After the first he had kissed her goodnight. The second had ended with a passionate clinch in a car park, when they had kissed with mouths open and he had touched her breasts. Tonight, she felt sure, he would ask her to go to his apartment.
She did not know what to do. She could not concentrate on the debate. She doodled on her agenda. She was both bored and anxious: the meeting was tedious, but she did not want it to end because she was scared of what would happen next.
Claus was an attractive man: intelligent, kind, charming, and exactly her age, thirty-seven. His wife had died in a car crash two years ago, and he had no children. He was not good-looking in the movie-star sense, but he had a warm smile. Tonight he was wearing a politician’s blue suit, but he was the only man in the room with a shirt open at the neck. Rebecca wanted to make love to him, wanted it badly. And at the same time she dreaded it.
The meeting came to an end and, as she expected, Claus asked her if she would like to meet him at the Yacht Bar, a quiet place well away from City Hall. They drove there in their separate cars.
The bar was small and dark, busiest in the daytime when it was used by people who had sailboats, quiet and almost deserted now. Claus ordered a beer, Rebecca asked for a glass of Sekt. As soon as they were settled she said: ‘I told my husband about us.’
Claus was startled. ‘Why?’ he said. Then he added: ‘Not that there’s much to tell.’ All the same he looked guilty.
‘I can’t lie to Bernd,’ she said. ‘I love him.’
‘And you obviously can’t lie to me, either,’ Claus said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It isn’t something to apologize for – just the opposite. Thank you for being honest. I appreciate it.’ Claus looked crestfallen, and amid all her other emotions Rebecca felt pleased that he liked her enough to be so disappointed. He said ruefully: ‘If you’ve confessed to your husband, why are you here with me now?’
‘Bernd told me to go ahead,’ she said.
‘Your husband wants you to kiss me?’
‘He wants me to become your lover.’
‘That’s creepy. Is it to do with his paralysis?’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘Bernd’s condition makes no difference to our sex life.’ This was the story she had told her mother and a few other women to whom she was really close. She deceived them for Bernd’s sake: she felt it would be humiliating for him if people knew the truth.
‘Well,’ said Claus, ‘if this is my lucky day, shall we go straight to my apartment?’
‘Let’s not rush, if you don’t mind.’
He put his hand over hers. ‘It’s okay to be nervous.’
‘I haven’t done this often.’
He smiled. ‘That’s not a bad thing, you know, even if we are living in the age of free love.’
‘I slept with two boys at university. Then I married Hans, who turned out to be a police spy. Then I fell in love with Bernd and we escaped together. There, that’s my entire love life.’
‘Let’s talk about something else for a while,’ he said. ‘Are your parents still in the East?’
‘Yes, they’ll never get permission to leave. Once you make an enemy of someone like Hans Hoffmann – my first husband – he never forgets.’
‘You must miss them.’
She could not express how much she missed her family. The Communists had blocked calls to the West the day they built the Wall, so she could not even speak to her parents on the phone. All she had were letters – opened and read by the Stasi, usually delayed, often censored, any enclosure of value stolen by the police. A few photos had got through, and Rebecca had them next to her bed: her father turning grey, her mother getting heavier, Lili growing into a beautiful woman.
Instead of trying to explain her grief she said: ‘Tell me about yourself. What happened to you in the war?’
‘Nothing much, except that I starved, like most kids,’ he said. ‘The house next door was destroyed and everyone in it killed, but we were all right. My father is a surveyor: he spent much of the war assessing bomb damage and making buildings safe.’
‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’
‘One of each. You?’
‘My sister, Lili, is still in East Berlin. My brother, Walli, escaped soon after I did. He’s a guitar player in a group called Plum Nellie.’
‘That Walli? He’s your brother?’
‘Yes. I was there when he was born, on the floor of our kitchen, which was the only warm room in the house. Quite an experience for a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘So he escaped.’
‘And came to live with me, here in Hamburg. He joined the group when they were playing some grimy club on the Reeperbahn.’
‘And now he’s a pop star. Do you see him?’
‘Of course. Every time Plum Nellie play in West Germany.’
‘What a thrill!’ Claus looked at her glass and saw that it was empty. ‘Would you like another Sekt?’
Rebecca felt a tightness in her chest. ‘No, thanks, I don’t think so.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Something I want you to understand. I’m desperate to make love to you, but I know you’re torn. Just remember that you can change your mind at any moment. There’s no such thing as the point of no return. If you feel uncomfortable, just say so. I won’t be angry or insistent, I promise. I would hate to feel I’d pushed you into something you weren’t ready for.’
It was exactly the right thing for him to say. The tightness eased. Rebecca had been afraid of getting in too deep, realizing she had made the wrong decision, and feeling unable to back out. Claus’s promise set her mind at rest. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.
They got into their cars and Rebecca followed Claus. Driving along she felt a wild exhilaration. She was about to give herself to Claus. She pictured his face as she took off her blouse: she was wearing a new bra, black with lace trimming. She thought of how they would kiss – frantically before, lovingly after. She imagined his sigh as she took his penis in her mouth. She felt she had never wanted anything so badly, and she had to clamp her teeth together to prevent herself crying out.
Claus had a small apartment in a modern building. Going up in the elevator, Rebecca was assailed by doubts again. What if he didn’t like what he saw when she took off her clothes? She was thirty-seven: she no longer had the firm breasts and perfect skin of her teenage years. What if he had a hidden dark side? He might produce handcuffs and a whip, then lock the door—
She told herself not to be silly. She had the usual woman’s ability to know when she was with a weirdo, and Claus was delightfully normal. All the same, she felt apprehensive as he opened the apartment door and ushered her in.
It was a typical man’s home, a bit bare of ornament, with utilitarian furniture except for a large television and an expensive record player. Rebecca said: ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘A year.’
As she had guessed, it was not the home he had shared with his late wife.
He had undoubtedly planned what to do next. Moving quickly, he ignited the gas fire, put a Mozart string quartet on the record deck, and assembled a tray with a bottle of schnapps, two glasses and a bowl of salted nuts.
They sat side by side on the couch.
She wanted to ask him how many other girls he had seduced on this couch. It would have struck a wrong note, but all the same she wondered. Was he enjoying being single, or did he long to marry again? Another question she was not going to ask.
He poured drinks and she took a sip just for something to do.
He said: ‘If we kiss now, we’ll taste the liquor on each other’s tongues.’
She grinned. ‘All right.’
He leaned towards her. ‘I don’t like to waste money,’ he murmured.
She said: ‘I’m so glad you’re frugal.’
For a moment they could not kiss because they were giggling too much.
Then they did.
*
People thought Cameron Dewar was mad when he invited Richard Nixon to speak at Berkeley. It was the most famously radical campus in the country. Nixon would be crucified, they said. There would be a riot. Cam did not care.
Cam thought Nixon was the only hope for America. Nixon was strong and determined. People said he was unscrupulous and sly: so what? America needed such a leader. God forbid that the President should be a man such as Bobby Kennedy who could not stop asking himself what was right and what was wrong. The next President had to destroy the rioters in the ghettoes and the Vietcong in the jungle, not search his own conscience.
In his letter to Nixon, Cam said that the liberals and the crypto-Communists on campus got all the attention in the left-leaning media, but in truth most students were conservative and law-abiding, and there would be a huge turnout for Nixon.
Cam’s family were furious. His grandfather and his great-grandfather had both been Democratic senators. His parents had always voted Democrat. His sister was so outraged she could barely speak. ‘How can you campaign for injustice and dishonesty and war?’ Beep said.
‘There’s no justice without order on the streets, and there’s no peace while we’re threatened by international Communism.’
‘Where have you been the last few years? When the blacks were non-violent they just got attacked with nightsticks and dogs! Governor Reagan praises the police for beating up student demonstrators!’
‘You’re so against the police.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m against criminals. Cops who beat up demonstrators are criminals, and they should go to jail.’
‘There, that’s why I support such men as Nixon and Reagan: because their opponents want to put cops in jail instead of troublemakers.’