Page 451 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"No. It's my house and my grandson, and I won't stay out of anything."

"I can't overlook this, Mom! She did wrong."

"If I'd never done anything wrong, I wouldn't have you."

"That's nothing to do with it."

"I'm just saying we all make mistakes, and sometimes things turn out all right anyway. So stop beating Verena up. It won't do any good."

Reluctantly, George saw that she was right. "But what are we going to do?"

Verena said: "I'm sorry, George, but I just can't cope." She started to cry.

Jacky said: "Well, now that we've stopped yelling, maybe we can start thinking. This nanny of yours is no good."

Verena said: "You don't know how difficult it is to get a nanny! And it's worse for us than for most people. Everyone else hires illegal immigrants and pays them cash, but politicians have to have someone with a green card who pays taxes, so no one wants the job!"

"All right, calm down, I'm not blaming you," Jacky said to Verena. "Maybe I can help."

George and Verena stared at Jacky.

Jacky said: "I'm sixty-four, I'm about to retire, and I need something to do. I'll be your backup. If your nanny lets you down, just bring Jack here. Leave him here overnight when you need to."

"Boy," said George, "that sounds like a solution to me."

Verena said: "Jacky, that would be wonderful!"

"Don't thank me, honey, I'm being selfish. I'll get to see my grandson more."

George said: "Are you sure it won't be too much work, Mom?"

Jacky made a contemptuous noise. "When was the last time something was too much work for me?"

George smiled. "Never, I guess."

And that settled it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Rebecca's tears were cold on her cheeks.

It was October, and a biting wind from the North Sea was blowing across Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg. This graveyard was one of the largest in the world, a thousand acres of sadness and mourning. It had a monument to victims of Nazi persecution, a walled grove for resistance fighters, and a mass grave for the thirty-eight thousand Hamburg men, women, and children killed in ten days by Operation Gomorrah, the Allied bombing campaign of summer 1943.

There was no special area for victims of the Wall.

Rebecca knelt down and picked up the dead leaves scattered over her husband's grave. Then she placed a single red rose on the earth.

She stood still, looking at the tombstone, remembering him.

Bernd had been dead a year. He had lived to sixty-two, which was good for a man with a spinal cord injury. In the end his kidneys had failed, a common cause of death in such cases.

Rebecca thought about his life. It had been blighted by the Wall, and by the injury he had received escaping from East Germany, but despite that he had lived well. He had been a good schoolteacher, perhaps a great one. He had defied the tyranny of East German Communism and escaped to freedom. His first marriage had ended in divorce, but he and Rebecca had loved each other passionately for twenty years.

She did not need to come here to remember him. She thought about him every day. His death was an amputation: she was constantly surprised to find he was not there. Alone in the flat they had shared for so long, she often talked to him, telling him about her day, commenting on the news, saying how she felt, hungry or tired or restless. She had not altered the place, and it still had the ropes and handles that had enabled him to move himself around. His wheelchair stood at the side of the bed as if ready for him to sit upright and haul himself into it. When she masturbated, she imagined him lying beside her, one arm around her, the warmth of his body, his lips on hers.

Fortunately her work was constantly absorbing and challenging. She was now a junior minister in the foreign affairs department of the West German government. Because she spoke Russian and had lived in East Germany she specialized in Eastern Europe. She had little free time.

Tragically, the reunification of Germany seemed ever farther away. Die-hard East German leader Erich Honecker appeared unassailable. People were still being killed trying to escape across the Wall. And in the Soviet Union the death of Andropov had only brought in yet another ailing septuagenarian leader, Konstantin Chernenko. From Berlin to Vladivostok, the Soviet empire was a bog in which its citizens struggled and often sank but never made progress.

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