*
That morning, at the last ExComm of the crisis, George heard Mac Bundy invent a new way of describing the opposite sides among the President’s advisors. ‘Everyone knows who were the hawks and who were the doves,’ he said. Bundy himself was a hawk. ‘Today was the day of the doves.’
But there were few hawks this morning: everyone was full of praise for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis, even some who had recently argued that he was being dangerously weak, and had pressed him to commit the United States to a war.
George summoned up the nerve to banter with the President. ‘Maybe you should solve the India-China border war next, Mr President.’
‘I don’t think either of them, or anyone else, wants me to.’
‘But today you’re ten feet tall.’
President Kennedy laughed. ‘That’ll last about a week.’
Bobby Kennedy was pleased at the prospect of seeing more of his family. ‘I’ve almost forgotten my way home,’ he said.
The only unhappy people were the generals. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting at the Pentagon to finalize plans for the air attack on Cuba, were furious. They sent the President an urgent message saying that Khrushchev’s acceptance was a trick to gain time. Curtis LeMay said this was the greatest defeat in American history. No one took any notice.
George had learned something, and he felt it was going to take him a while to digest it. Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic programme, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected. This realization had implications for George’s career that he needed to mull over.
When ExComm broke up, George kept his suit on and went to his mother’s house. It was a sunny autumn day, and the leaves had turned red and gold. She cooked him supper, as she loved to do. She made steak and mashed potatoes. The steak was overdone: he could not persuade her to serve it in the French style, medium rare. He enjoyed the food anyway, because of the love with which it was made.
Afterwards, she washed the dishes and he dried, then they got ready to go to the evening service at Bethel Evangelical Church. ‘We must thank the Lord for saving us all,’ she said as she stood in front of the mirror by the door, putting on her hat.
‘You thank the Lord, Mom,’ George said amiably. ‘I’ll thank President Kennedy.’
‘Why don’t we just agree to be grateful to both?’
‘I’ll buy that,’ said George, and they went out.
Part Four
GUN
1963
21
Joe Henry’s Dance Band had a regular Saturday night gig in the restaurant of the Europe Hotel in East Berlin, playing jazz standards and show tunes for the East German elite and their wives. Joe, whose real name was Josef Heinried, was not much of a drummer, in Walli’s opinion; but he could keep the beat, even when drunk, and besides, he was an official of the musicians’ union, so he could not be fired.
Joe arrived at the staff entrance of the hotel at 6 p.m. in an old black Framo V901 van with his precious drums in the back packed tight with cushions. While Joe sat at the bar drinking beer, it was Walli’s job to carry the drums from the van to the stage, unpack them from their leather cases, and set up the kit the way Joe liked it. There was a bass drum with a kick pedal, two tom-toms, a snare drum, a high-hat, a crash cymbal and a cowbell. Walli handled them gently, as if they were eggs: they were American Slingerland drums that Joe had won from a GI in a card game back in the 1940s, and he would never get another set like it.
The pay was lousy, but as part of the deal Walli and Karolin performed for twenty minutes in the interval, as the Bobbsey Twins, and, most importantly, they got musicians’ union cards, even though Walli at seventeen was too young.
Walli’s English grandmother, Maud, had chortled when he told her the name of the duo. ‘Are you Flossie and Freddie, or Bert and Nan?’ she had said. ‘Oh, Walli, you do make me laugh.’ It turned out that the Bobbsey Twins were not a bit like the Everly Brothers. There was a series of old-fashioned books for children about the impossibly perfect Bobbsey family with two sets of beautiful rosy-cheeked twins. Walli and Karolin had decided to stick with the name anyway.
Joe was an idiot but Walli was learning from him just the same. Joe made sure the band was too loud to be ignored, though not so loud that people complained they could not converse. He gave each band member the spotlight in one number, keeping the musicians happy. He always opened with a well-known number, and he liked to finish while the dance floor was packed, leaving people wanting more.
Walli did not know what the future held, but he knew what he wanted. He was going to be a musician, the leader of a band, popular and famous; and he was going to play rock music. Perhaps the Communists would soften their attitude to American culture, and permit pop groups. Maybe Communism would fall. Best of all, Walli might find a way to go to America.
All that was a long way off. Right now his ambition was that the Bobbsey Twins would become popular enough for him and Karolin to become full-time professionals.
Joe’s musicians drifted in while Walli was setting up, and they began to play at seven sharp.
Communists were ambivalent about jazz. They were suspicious of everything American, but the Nazis had banned jazz, which made jazz anti-Fascist. In the end they permitted it because so many people liked it. Joe’s band had no vocalist, so there was no problem about lyrics that celebrated bourgeois values, such as ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’ or ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’.
Karolin arrived a minute later, and her presence lit up the shabby backstage area with a glow like candlelight, bathing the grey walls in a rosy wash and making the grimy corners vanish into shadow.
For the first time, there was something in Walli’s life that mattered as much as music. He had had girlfriends before, in fact they came without much effort by him. And they had usually been willing to have sex with him, so intercourse for Walli was not the unattainable dream it was for most of his schoolmates. But he had experienced nothing like the overwhelming love and passion he felt for Karolin. ‘We think the same way – we even say the same thing sometimes,’ he had told Grandmother Maud, and she had said: ‘Ah – soulmates.’ Walli and Karolin could talk about sex as easily as they talked about music, confiding what they liked and did not like – though there was not much that Karolin did not like.
The band would play for another hour. Walli and Karolin got into the back of Joe’s van and lay down. It became a boudoir, dimly lit by the yellow glow from the car park lights; Joe’s cushions were a velvet divan, and Karolin a languorous odalisque, opening her robes to offer her body to Walli’s kisses.
They had tried sex using a condom, but neither of them liked it. Sometimes they had intercourse without a condom, and Walli withdrew at the last moment, but Karolin said that was not really safe. Tonight they used their hands. After Walli had come into Karolin’s handkerchief, she showed him how to please her, guiding his fingers, and she came with a little ‘Oh!’ that sounded more like surprise than anything else.
‘Sex with the one you love is the second best thing in the world,’ Maud had said to Walli. Somehow a grandmother could say things that a mother could not.
‘If that’s second best, what’s first?’ he had asked.
‘Seeing your children happy.’
‘I thought you were going to say: “Playing ragtime”,’ Walli had said, and she had laughed.
As always, Walli and Karolin went from sex to music with no break, as if it were all one. Walli taught Karolin a new song. He had a radio in his bedroom and he listened to American stations broadcasting from West Berlin, so he knew all the popular numbers. This one was called ‘If I Had a Hammer’, and it was a hit for an American trio called Peter, Paul and Mary. It had a compelling beat, and he felt sure the audience would love it.
Karolin was doubtful about the lyric, which mentioned justice and freedom.
Walli said: ‘In America, Pete Seeger is called a Communist for writing it! I think it annoys bullies everywhere.’
‘How does that help us?’ Karolin said with remorseless practicality.
‘No one here will understand the English words.’
‘All right,’ she said, giving in reluctantly. Then she said: ‘I have to stop doing this, anyway.’
Walli was shocked. ‘What do you mean?’
She looked sombre. She had saved some piece of bad news so that it would not spoil the sex, Walli realized. Karolin had impressive self-control. She said: ‘My father has been questioned by the Stasi.’
Karolin’s father was a supervisor at a bus station. He seemed uninterested in politics, and was an unlikely suspect for the secret police. ‘Why?’ said Walli. ‘What did they question him about?’
‘You,’ she said.
‘Oh, shit.’
‘They told him you were ideologically unreliable.’
‘What was the name of the man who interrogated him? Was it Hans Hoffmann?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I bet it was.’ If Hans was not the actual interviewer, he was surely responsible, Walli thought.
‘They said Dad would lose his job if I continued to be seen in public singing with you.’
‘Do you have to do what your parents say? You’re nineteen.’
‘I’m still living with them, though.’ Karolin had left school but was at a technical college studying to be a bookkeeper. ‘Anyway, I can’t be responsible for my father getting the sack.’
Walli was devastated. This blighted his dream. ‘But . . . we’re so good! People love us!’
‘I know. I’m so sorry.’
‘How do the Stasi even know about your singing?’
‘Do you remember the man in the cap who followed us the night we met? I see him occasionally.’
‘Do you think he follows me all the time?’
‘Not all the time,’ she said in a lowered voice. People always spoke quietly when mentioning the Stasi, even if there was no one to overhear. ‘Maybe just now and again. But I suppose that, sooner or later, he noticed me with you, and started tailing me, and found out my name and address, and that’s how they got to my father.’
Walli refused to accept what was happening. ‘We’ll go to the West,’ he said.