All right, that should shake off the whiners. Let's go.

I. BREZHNEV'S BED

buzzing the reichstag/ bono faces eviction without his pants/ how U2 got into this mess/ the hats vs. the haircuts/ "one"/ channel surfing through the new world order

bono wakes up in Brezhnev's bed. He can't remember where he is. When he opens his eyes the daylight shocks his dilated brain. He tries to organize his thoughts. He is in Brezhnev's bed, in East Berlin, in the communist diplomatic guest house rented to him for a good price because the communist diplomats have fled the country. In fact, the country has fled after them. He may have gone to bed in a Soviet satellite state, but he's waking in a reunited Germany. The Cold War is over! The Wall has fallen' It's safe for Bono to go back to sleep.

He thought he heard somebody downstairs, but he must have been dreaming. He is here alone. Bono pulls himself upright, his latitude out of whack from last night's celebrating. U2 arrived in Berlin yesterday, to seek inspiration and renewal at the celebration of the end of the world they grew up in. The Berlin Wall was raised as the four members of U2 were being born. Seeing it come down shook their assumptions about the way things were and would always be. Bono told the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen that this was the great moment to leap into. Now was the time to go to Berlin and begin making music for the new world! They arrived on the last flight into East Germany before East Germany ceased to exist. They had the whole sky to themselves. The British pilot was so giddy with historical moment that he announced they would buzz Berlin, fly down the Strasse des Juni where the revelers were gathering, and swing over the broken wall on which the free people of eastern Europe were dancing. "On your left you see the Brandenburg Gate," the pilot announced with pip-pip and tally-ho delight as he

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Swung his airship around. Why not? They were the only plane in the sky, the final flight to East Berlin before East Berlin was sucked into history.

As soon as they got their feet on the ground, U2 rushed to join the festivities. They leaped into the first parade they saw and waited for the contact high of liberation to intoxicate them. It was a long wait. These marchers were grim, dragging themselves along wearing dour faces and holding placards. Bono tried to muster some good Irish parading gusto, to no avail. He whispered to Adam, "These Germans really don't know how to party." Maybe, U2 thought, we've misjudged the sentiment here. Maybe the proper reaction to the end of a half-century of oppression is not celebration for what is newly won but grief for all that can never be regained. U2 looked at each other and looked at the bitter marchers and tried to fit in as they tramped along to the Wall. It was only when they got there and saw the joy everyone else was exhibiting compared with the morbidity of their company that U2 realized they were marching in an antiunification demonstration. They had hooked up with a phalanx of angry old communists, gathering one last time to show solidarity with the workers of the world and protest the fall of their Evil Empire.

"Oh, this will make a great headline," Bono said. "U2 arrives in

west berlin TO PROTEST THE PULLING DOWN OF THE wall."

In the West U2 wandered familiar streets filled with people walking as if through their dreams. The citizens of the East—not just East Germany but the newly freed Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia— were still anxious, afraid that this was only a brief opening, a momentary aberration, and that if they did not find refuge quickly they would be dragged back when the communists regained their senses. For almost thirty years West Berlin had been held up to the East as a sort of capitalist Disneyland, shining with unattainable promise just over the barbed wire and gun towers. It was not just a symbol of freedom, it was the closest thing the oppressed peoples had to Oz. Their belief in its magic was not stifled by their own leaders warning them to pay no attention to that world behind the iron curtain. But in the year since people from the East began moving West, first as a trickle through Hungary and Czechoslovakia and then in a flood right through the falling Wall, the free people of West Germany have become a little less tickled with the family reunion. As Easterners looked to share in the prosperity of the west, the Westerners began to fear being saddled with

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