Edge of Eternity (93 page)

Anna looked aghast at this peep into the life of Ivan Kuznetsov. “I'll go to Vienna tomorrow and get him the best quality.”

Anna nodded, pleased. “Shall we meet again here on Friday?”

“Yes.”

Tanya stood up. “We should leave separately.”

A look of panic crossed Anna's face. “What about the typescript?”

“Wear my jacket,” said Tanya. It might be a bit small for Anna, who was heavier than Tanya; but she could get it on. “When you reach Vienna, unpick the lining.” She shook Anna's hand. “Don't lose it,” she said. “I don't have a copy.”

•   •   •

In the middle of the night Tanya was awakened by her bed shaking. She sat up, terrified, thinking the secret police had come to arrest her.
When she turned on the light she saw that she was alone, but the shaking had not been a dream. The framed photograph of Grisha on her bedside table seemed to be dancing, and she could hear the tinkling sound of small jars of makeup vibrating on the glass top of her dressing table.

She jumped out of bed and went to the open window. It was first light. There was a loud rumbling noise coming from the nearby main street, but she could not see what was causing it. She was filled with a vague dread.

She looked for her leather jacket, and remembered that she had given it to Anna. She quickly pulled on blue jeans and a sweater, stepped into her shoes, and hurried out. Despite the early hour there were people on the street. She walked swiftly in the direction of the noise.

As soon as she reached the main street she knew what had happened.

The noise was caused by tanks. They were rolling along the street, slowly but unstoppably, their caterpillar tracks making a hideous din. Riding on the tanks were soldiers in Soviet uniforms, most young, just boys. Looking along the street in the gentle light of dawn, Tanya saw that there were dozens of tanks, perhaps hundreds, the incoming line stretching all the way to the Charles Bridge and beyond. Along the sidewalks small groups of Czech men and women stood, many in their nightwear, watching with dismay and stupefaction as their city was overrun.

The conservatives in the Kremlin had won, Tanya realized. Czechoslovakia had been invaded by the Soviet Union. The brief season of reform and hope was over.

Tanya caught the eye of a middle-aged woman standing next to her. The woman wore an old-fashioned hairnet like the one Tanya's mother put on every night. Her face was streaming with tears.

That was when Tanya felt the wetness on her own cheeks and realized that she, too, was weeping.

•   •   •

A week after the tanks rolled into Prague, George Jakes was sitting on his couch in Washington, in his underwear, watching television coverage of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

For lunch he had heated a can of tomato soup and eaten it straight
from the pan, which now stood on the coffee table, with the red remains of the glutinous liquid congealing inside.

He knew what he ought to do. He should put on a suit and go out and get himself a new job and a new girlfriend and a new life.

Somehow he just could not see the point.

He had heard of depression and he knew this was it.

He was only mildly diverted by the spectacle of the Chicago police running amok. A few hundred demonstrators were peacefully sitting down in the road outside the convention center. The police were wading into them with nightsticks, savagely beating everyone, as if they did not realize they were committing criminal assault live on television—or, more likely, they knew but did not care.

Someone, presumably Mayor Richard Daley, had let the dogs off the leash.

George idly speculated on the political consequences. It was the end of nonviolence as a political strategy, he guessed. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had both been wrong, and now they were dead. The Black Panthers were right. Mayor Daley, Governor Ronald Reagan, presidential candidate George Wallace, and all their racist police chiefs would use violence against anyone whose ideas they found distasteful. Black people needed guns to protect themselves. So did anyone else who wanted to challenge the bull elephants of American society. Right now in Chicago the police were treating middle-class white kids the way they had always treated blacks. That had to change attitudes.

There was a ring at his doorbell. He frowned, puzzled. He was not expecting a visitor and did not want to talk to anyone. He ignored the sound, hoping the caller would go away. The bell rang again. I might be out, he thought; how do they know I'm here? It rang a third time, long and insistently, and he realized the person was not going to give up.

He went to the door. It was his mother. She was carrying a covered casserole dish.

Jacky looked him up and down. “I thought so,” she said, and she walked in uninvited.

She put her casserole in his oven and turned on the heat. “Take a shower,” she ordered him. “Shave your sorry face and put on some decent clothing.”

He thought of arguing but did not have the energy. It seemed easier just to do as she said.

She began clearing up the room, putting his soup pan in the kitchen sink, folding newspapers, opening windows.

George retired to his room. He took off his underwear, showered, and shaved. It would make no difference. He would slob out again tomorrow.

He put on chinos and a blue button-down shirt, then returned to the living room. The casserole smelled good, he could not deny that. Jacky had laid the dining table. “Sit down,” she said. “Supper's ready.”

She had made King Ranch chicken in a tomato-cream sauce with green chilies and a cheese crust. George could not resist it, and he had two platefuls. Afterward his mother washed up and he dried the dishes.

She sat with him to watch the convention coverage. Senator Abraham Ribicoff was speaking, nominating George McGovern, a last-minute alternative peace candidate. He caused a stir by saying: “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we would not have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

Jacky said: “My, that's telling them.”

The convention hall went quiet. The television director cut to a shot of Mayor Daley. He looked like a giant frog, with bulging eyes, a jowly face, and a neck that was all rolls of fat. For a moment he forgot he was on television—just like his cops—and yelled vituperatively at Ribicoff.

The microphones did not pick up his words. “I wonder what he said,” George mused.

“I can tell you,” said Jacky. “I can lip-read.”

“I never knew that.”

“When I was nine years old I went deaf. Took them a long time to figure out what was wrong. Eventually I had an operation that restored my hearing. But I never forgot how to lip-read.”

“Okay, Mom, prove it. What did Mayor Daley say to Abe Ribicoff?”

“He said: ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch,' that's what he said.”

•   •   •

Walli and Beep were staying in the Chicago Hilton, on the fifteenth floor, where the McCarthy campaign had its headquarters. They were
tired and dispirited when they went to their room at midnight on the last day of the convention, Thursday. They had lost: Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, had been chosen as the Democratic candidate. The presidential election would be fought between two men who supported the Vietnam War.

They did not even have any dope to smoke. They had given that up, temporarily, for fear of giving the press a chance to smear McCarthy. They watched TV for a while, then went to bed, too miserable to make love.

Beep said: “Shit, I'll be back in class in a couple of weeks. I don't know if I can face it.”

“I guess I'll make a record,” Walli said. “I've got some new songs.”

Beep was dubious. “You think you can patch things up with Dave?”

“No. I'd like to, but he won't. When he called me to tell me he had seen my folks in East Berlin, he was real cold, even though he was doing a nice thing.”

“Oh, God, we really hurt him,” Beep said sadly.

“Besides, he's doing fine on his own, with his TV show and everything.”

“So how will you make an album?”

“I'll go to London. I know Lew will drum for me, and Buzz will play bass: they're both pissed at Dave for breaking up the group. I'll lay down the basic tracks with them, then record the vocals on my own, and spend some time adding overdubs, guitar licks, and vocal harmonies and maybe even strings and horns.”

“Wow, you've really thought about this.”

“I've had time. I haven't been inside a studio for half a year.”

There was a bang and a crash and the room was flooded with light from the hall. Walli realized with incredulity and terror that someone had beaten the door in. He threw back the sheets and jumped out of bed, yelling: “What the fuck?”

The room lights came on and he saw two uniformed Chicago policemen entering through the wreckage of the door. He said: “What the hell is going on?”

By way of reply one of them hit him with a nightstick.

Walli managed to dodge, and instead of hitting his head the
truncheon landed painfully on his shoulder. He yelled in agony and Beep screamed.

Grasping his injured shoulder, Walli backed toward the bed. The cop swung his stick again. Walli jumped back, falling on the bed, and the club hit his leg. He roared in pain.

Both cops lifted their clubs. Walli rolled over, covering Beep. One nightstick smashed into his back and the other his hip. Beep screamed: “Stop it, please, stop, we haven't done anything wrong, stop hitting him!”

Walli felt two more excruciating blows and thought he would pass out. Then suddenly it stopped, and two pairs of heavily booted footsteps sounded across the room and out.

Walli rolled off Beep. “Ah, fuck, it hurts,” he said.

Beep knelt up, trying to see his injuries. “Why did they do it?” she said.

Walli heard, from outside the room, sounds of more doors being broken down and more screaming people being dragged from their beds and beaten. “The Chicago police can do anything they like,” he said. “It's worse than East Berlin.”

•   •   •

In October, on a plane to Nashville, Dave Williams sat next to a Nixon supporter.

Dave was going to Nashville to make a record. His own studio in Napa, Daisy Farm, was still under construction. Besides, some of the best musicians in the business were in Nashville. Dave felt that rock music was becoming too cerebral, with psychedelic sounds and twenty-minute guitar solos, so he planned an album of classic two-minute pop songs, “The Girl of My Best Friend” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Woolly Bully.” Besides, he knew that Walli was making a solo album in London and he did not want to be left behind.

And he had another reason. Little Lulu Small, who had flirted with him on the All-Star Touring Beat Revue, now lived in Nashville and worked as a backing singer. He needed someone to help him forget Beep.

On the front page of his newspaper was a photograph from the
Olympic Games in Mexico City. It was of the medal ceremony for the two hundred meters race. The gold medal winner was Tommie Smith, a black American, who had broken the world record. A white Australian took silver, and another black American bronze. All three men wore human rights badges on their Olympic jackets. While “The Star-Spangled Banner” was being played, the two American athletes had bowed their heads and raised their fists in the Black Power salute, and that was the photo in all the papers.

“Disgraceful,” said the man sitting next to Dave in first class.

He looked about forty, and was dressed in a business suit with a white shirt and a tie. He had taken from his briefcase a thick typed document and was annotating it with a ballpoint pen.

Dave normally avoided talking to people on planes. The conversation usually turned into an interview about what it was really like to be a pop star, and that was boring. But this guy did not appear to know who Dave was. And Dave was curious to know what went on in the head of such a man.

His neighbor went on: “I see that the president of the International Olympic Committee has thrown them out of the games. Damn right.”

“The president's name is Avery Brundage,” Dave said. “It says in my paper that back in 1936, when the games were held in Berlin, he defended the right of the Germans to give the Nazi salute.”

“I don't agree with that either,” said the businessman. “The games are nonpolitical. Our athletes compete as Americans.”

“They're Americans when they win races, and when they get conscripted into the army,” Dave said. “But they're Negroes when they want to buy the house next door to yours.”

“Well, I'm for equality, but slow change is usually better than fast.”

“Maybe we should have an all-white army in Vietnam, just until we're sure American society is ready for complete equality.”

“I'm against the war, too,” the man said. “If the Vietnamese are dumb enough to want to be Communists, let them. It's Communists in America we should be worried about.”

He was from a distant planet, Dave felt. “What line of business are you in?”

“I sell advertising for radio stations.” He offered his hand to shake. “Ron Jones.”

“Dave Williams. I'm in the music business. If you don't mind my asking, who will you vote for in November?”

“Nixon,” said Jones without hesitation.

“But you're against the war, and you favor civil rights for Negroes, albeit not too soon; so you agree with Humphrey on the issues.”

“To hell with the issues. I have a wife and three kids, a mortgage and a car loan; they're my issues. I've fought my way up to regional sales manager and I have a shot at national sales director in a few years' time. I've worked my socks off for this and no one's going to take it away from me: not rioting Negroes, not drug-taking hippies, not Communists working for Moscow, and certainly not a softhearted liberal like Hubert Humphrey. I don't care what you say about Nixon, he stands for people like me.”