Lili said: “So we have to take special precautions, that’s all. Alice and Helmut will be extra cautious.”

“I want to go, whatever the danger,” Alice said emphatically. “I understand the risk, and I’m prepared to take it.” She looked accusingly at her grandfather. “You’ve raised two generations under Communism. It’s mean, it’s brutal, it’s stupid, and it’s broke—yet it’s still here. I want to live in the West. So does Helmut. We want our children to grow up in freedom and prosperity.” She turned to her fiancé. “Don’t we?”

“Yes,” he said, though Lili sensed he was more wary than Alice.

“It’s mad,” said Werner.

Carla spoke for the first time. “It’s not mad, my darling,” she said forcefully to Werner. “It’s dangerous, yes. But remember the things we did, the risks we took for freedom.”

“Some of our number died.”

Carla would not let up. “But we thought it was worth the risk.”

“There was a war on. We had to defeat the Nazis.”

“This is Alice and Helmut’s war—the Cold War.”

Werner hesitated, then sighed. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said reluctantly.

“Okay,” said Carla. “In that case, let’s make a plan.”

Lili looked at the TV again. In Hungary, they were still dismantling the fence.

• • •

On election day in Poland, Tanya went to church with Danuta, who was a candidate.

It was a sunny Sunday, June 4, with a few puffy clouds in a blue sky. Danuta dressed her two children in their best clothes and brushed their hair. Marek put on a tie in the red and white colors of Solidarity, which were also the colors of the Polish flag. Danuta wore a hat, a white straw bowler with a red feather.

Tanya was in an agony of doubt. Was all this really happening? An election, in Poland? The fence coming down in Hungary? Disarmament in Europe? Did Gorbachev really mean it about openness and restructuring?

Tanya dreamed of freedom with Vasili. The two of them would tour the world: Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Delhi. Vasili would be interviewed on television and talk about his work and the long years of secrecy. Tanya would write travel articles, maybe a book of her own.

But when she woke up from her daydream she waited, hour by hour, for the bad news: the roadblocks, the tanks, the arrests, the curfew, and the bald men in bad suits coming on television to announce that they had foiled a counterrevolutionary plot financed by the capitalist-imperialists.

The priest told his congregation to vote for the most godly candidates. As all Communists were in principle atheists, that was a clear steer. The authoritarian Polish clergy did not much like the liberal Solidarity movement, but they knew who their real enemies were.

The election had come sooner than Solidarity expected. The union had rushed to raise money, rent offices, hire staff, and mount a national election campaign, all in a few weeks. Jaruzelski had done this deliberately, to wrong-foot Solidarity, knowing that the government had an organization firmly in place and ready to go.