“Not after tomorrow,” he said.
“What’s tomorrow? Oh, the radio. What do you say?”
“Things they won’t like. I can never come back.”
“So it’s like before. In America. The great gesture. And where do you go this time?”
“I don’t know. Wherever I can see Peter.”
“But not me. It doesn’t mean anything to you, how we are?” She reached for him, drawing him closer. “You can’t just walk away. You can’t. I’m not like her. The one in America.”
“No.”
“This nonsense I tell them. It’s so important?”
He stroked her hair. “No. I just wanted to know. It makes things easier, that’s all.”
“What things? I can stop all that. We could—” She pulled back. “You’re not even listening. It doesn’t matter what I say—” Her voice quivering, then suddenly calm. “How can you leave? You always wanted this.”
“Yes, I always did.”
She stood taller, gathering up her pride like a skirt. “Well, then. And later, how will you feel?”
He looked at her, the same defiant eyes, Kurt’s head in her lap, feeling time dissolve. He slipped out of her arms and walked to the door, then turned.
“What?”
“I just wanted to look.” A snapshot moment, what he’d felt on the bridge.
“Alex, for God’s sake—”
“You used to think everybody was in love with you.”
She shrugged. “So maybe they were,” she said, her face soft. “In those days.”
“Maybe. I was. I wonder—”
“What?”
“How different everything might have been. If you’d been in love with me.”
* * *
He walked down Luisenstrasse and over the bridge. In the dusk, moving headlights were lighting up the Brandenburg Gate, the world divided by a few steps. Nobody was stopping traffic. A crude wooden sign. You are leaving the Soviet sector. He passed under the arches expecting to hear a police whistle, pounding feet. But in another minute, East Berlin was just a patch of dark behind him. Out of it. Through the Gate. Where everything would be different. Where he would be himself again. Dieter was leaning against the trunk of the car, smoking, waiting, indifferent to what was inside. What he would become. Maybe what he already was. You’re in this now. You do what you have to do. Then you carry it with you. But he was here, on the other side. He stopped for a second, taking a deep breath, somehow expecting the air itself to be different. But the air was the same.