Coming closer, they saw people pouring out of the Stadtmitte subway station, swelling the crowd. There was also a line of cars, their drivers clearly unsure whether to approach the checkpoint or not. Lili sensed the feeling of celebration, but she was not sure they had anything to celebrate. As far as she could see, the gates were not open.

Many people held back, just out of range of the floodlights, afraid to show their faces; but the bolder ones approached nearer, committing the criminal offense of “unwarrantable intrusion into a border area,” despite the risk of arrest and a sentence of three years in a labor camp.

The street narrowed as it approached the checkpoint, and the crowd thickened. Lili and her family pushed through to the front. Before them, under lights as bright as day, they could see the red-and-white gates for pedestrians and cars, the lounging border guards with their guns, the customs buildings, and the watchtowers rising over it all. Inside a glass-walled command post, an officer was talking on the telephone, making large, frustrated arm-waving gestures as he spoke.

To the left and right of the checkpoint, stretching away along Koch Strasse in both directions, was the hated Wall. Lili felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. This was the edifice that for most of her life had split her family into two halves that almost never met. She hated the Wall even more than she hated Hans Hoffmann.

Lili said aloud: “Has anyone tried to walk through?”

A woman next to her said angrily: “They turn you away. They say you need a visa from a police station. But I went to the police station and they didn’t know anything about it.”

A month ago, the woman would have shrugged her shoulders at this typical bureaucratic foul-up and gone home, but tonight things were different. She was still here, unsatisfied, protesting. No one was going home.

The people around Lili broke into a rhythmic chant: “Open up! Open up!”

When they trailed off, Lili thought she could hear chanting from the far side. She strained her ears. What were they saying? Eventually she made it out: “Come over! Come over!” She realized that West Berliners, too, must be gathering at checkpoints.

What was going to happen? How would this end?

A line of half a dozen vans came along Zimmer Strasse to the checkpoint, and fifty or sixty armed border guards got out.

Standing beside Lili, Werner said grimly: “Reinforcements.”

• • •

Dimka and Natalya sat on the black leather chairs in Gorbachev’s office feeling excited and tense. Gorbachev’s strategy, of letting the Eastern European satellites go their own way, had led to a crisis that seemed about to boil over. This could be either dangerous or hopeful. Perhaps it was both.

For Dimka the issue was, as always, the sort of world his grandchildren would grow up in. Grigor, his son with Nina, was already married; Dimka’s and Natalya’s daughter, Katya, was at university; both would probably have children in the next few years. What did the future hold for those kids? Was old-fashioned Communism really finished? Dimka still did not know.