Page 52 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"Hard to imagine, isn't it?"

"Not in the least. Even a spy couldn't fail to fall for you."

"Don't be absurd."

"Is that why you came?" Bernd said. "To warn me?"

"And to say . . ." She had to be discreet, even with Bernd. "To say that I probably won't see you for some time."

"Ah." He nodded understanding.

People rarely said they were going to the West. You could be arrested just for planning it. And someone who found out that you were intending to go was committing a crime if he failed to inform the police. So no one but your immediate family wanted the guilty knowledge.

Rebecca stood up. "So, thank you for your friendship."

He came around the desk and took both her hands. "No, thank you. And good luck."

"To you, too."

She realized that in her unconscious mind she had already made the decision to go west; and she was thinking of that, with surprise and anxiety, when unexpectedly Bernd bent his head and kissed her.

She was not expecting this. It was a gentle kiss. He let his lips linger on hers, but did not open his mouth. She closed her eyes. After a year of fake marriage it was good to know that someone genuinely found her desirable, even lovable. She felt an urge to throw her arms around him, but suppressed it. It would be madness now to start a doomed relationship. After a few moments she broke away.

She felt herself near to tears. She did not want Bernd to see her cry. She managed to say: "Good-bye." Then she turned away and quickly left the room.

*

She decided she would leave two days later, early on Sunday morning.

Everyone got up to see her off.

She could not eat any breakfast. She was too upset. "I'll probably go to Hamburg," she said, faking good spirits. "Anselm Weber is head of a school there now, and I'm sure he'll hire me."

Her grandmother Maud, in a purple silk robe, said: "You could get a job anywhere in West Germany."

"But it will be nice to know at least one person in the city," Rebecca said forlornly.

Walli chipped in: "There's supposed to be a great music scene in Hamburg. I'm going to join you as soon as I can leave school."

"If you leave school, you'll have to work," their father said to Walli in a sarcastic tone. "That will be a new experience for you."

"No quarreling this morning," said Rebecca.

Father gave her an envelope of money. "As soon as you're on the other side, get a taxi," he said. "Go straight to Marienfelde." There was a refugee center at Marienfelde, in the south of the city near Tempelhof airport. "Start the process of emigration. I'm sure you'll have to wait in line for hours, maybe days. As soon as you have everything in order, come to the factory. I'll set you up with a West German bank account, and so on."

Her mother was in tears. "We will see you," she said. "You can fly to West Berlin any time you want, and we can just walk across the border and meet you. We'll have picnics on the beach at the Wannsee."

Rebecca was trying not to cry. She put the money in a small shoulder bag that was all she was taking. Anything more in the way of luggage might get her arrested by the Vopos at the border. She wanted to linger, but she was afraid she might lose her nerve altogether. She kissed and hugged each of them: Grandmother Maud; her adoptive father, Werner; her adoptive brother and sister, Lili and Walli; and last of all Carla, the woman who had saved her life, the mother who was not her mother, and was for that reason even the more precious.

Then, her eyes full of tears, she left the house.

It was a bright summer morning, the sky blue and cloudless. She tried to feel optimistic: she was beginning a new life, away from the grim repression of a Communist regime. And she would see her family again, one way or another.

She walked briskly, threading through the streets of the old city center. She passed the sprawling campus of the Charite hospital and turned on to Invaliden Strasse. To her left was the Sandkrug Bridge, which carried traffic over the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal to West Berlin.

Except that today it did not.

At first Rebecca was not sure what she was looking at. There was a line of cars that stopped short of the bridge. Beyond the cars, a crowd of people stood looking at something. Perhaps there had been a crash on the bridge. But to her right, in the Platz vor dem Neuen Tor, twenty or thirty East German soldiers stood around doing nothing. Behind them were two Soviet tanks.

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