This Must Be the Place

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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Copyright © 2008 by Anna Winger

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or
distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do
not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation
of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

Lines from “Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” by Kevin Cronin are copyright © 1984 Fate
Music (ASCAP) (Administered by HoriPro Entertainment Group). All rights reserved.
Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winger, Anna.
This must be the place / Anna Winger.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-4406-3874-9

1. Actors—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction. 3. Americans—
Germany—Berlin—Fiction. 4. Berlin (Germany)—Fiction.
5. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I6624T
813’.6—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

FOR JÖRG

Ich habe dich gewählt
Unter allen Sternen
.

I have chosen you
Among all these stars.

—ELSE LASKER-SCHüLER

PROLOGUE

The mothers pushed their babies past the building in the dark. Although the sun would not be up for at least another hour, the shops were open, as were the day-care centers, the kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers. Students were riding bikes up the avenues to class. True daylight would last only for a few hours. By the time the schools let out, mid-afternoon, it would be dusk already. It was the peculiar lot of Berlin, given its Cold War island history, to hang on at the eastern edge of Western Europe’s time zone. But in November 2001, twelve years after the fall of the Wall, its clocks were still set at GMT+1. It was a political, if arbitrary, position. Just up the Baltic coast in Vilnius or Tallinn, where the clocks read one hour later, working people would be coming home for dinner, while in Berlin they were still chained to their desks, as if they lived in Madrid, a thousand miles to the west, where it was light out.

When the building was constructed in 1911, it wrapped all the way around the corner from Schillerstrasse to Bismarckstrasse,then an elegant residential avenue lined with front gardens and horse-drawn carriages, not cheap supermarkets and traffic. Its architect had designed the apartments to be
Villenetagen,
villas on every floor, prime real estate, because Berlin’s future had been promising in those days. Although most of the building had since been blown up or burned down, ninety years later its balconies and trellises, mullioned windows and inner courtyards designed to provide views from almost every room still hinted at the optimism of its origins. The back side of the original complex remained on Schillerstrasse, facing south. Its yellow-ocher façade needed a paint job, and the grand floor-through apartments had been divided up and nobody cared for the garden, but in the right light (and this was the right light: the blue beginnings of daybreak deep on the horizon) it was beautiful. Ninety years is not such a long time in the scheme of things: the life of a person, if they are lucky; a room just wide enough to touch both walls with outstretched hands. In other places, such a building might have seen only the soft swell of progress, but here? Ninety years of drama, followed only by this.

1

When Walter woke up in the dark he was alone in his bed, buried beneath a winter-weight duvet, afflicted simultaneously by a hangover and the residue of a nightmare (water at his ankles, the sudden suck of a tsunami, a tunnel, Christmas lights, an electric guitar). Four flights down, the traffic piled up every few minutes at the lights around Ernst-Reuter-Platz. Across the street, children waiting for the bell to ring in the schoolyard screamed. He reached around for Heike, but the space beside him was empty and the sound of water running in the bathroom sink confirmed that she was already up. He rolled over onto her side of the bed and burrowed into the pillows. He had accepted a guest turn on the popular soap opera she starred in only as a favor to her: recently the ratings had slipped. Her role, she claimed, was in danger and his name still carried with it a certain retro-chic cachet. But Walter had not acted in front of the cameras for almost twenty years. The idea that he might do so today seemed to him remote at best, and at worst, absurd. Eyes closed, he tried unsuccessfully to remember the last time he had seen Heike’s face light up at the sight of him, or the last time they had made love in the morning even if it meant being late to work. Then he rubbed his eyes and worked on his cough. When she came out of the bathroom, he would say that he felt terrible. She would take pity on him. He could call in sick. It was a good plan until he made the mistake of answering the phone.

“Herr Walter Baum,” the young producer replied. “Or should I say, Mr. Cruise. I would recognize your voice anywhere. I’m just calling to let you know that the car will pick you two up at nine. It’s nice that you could join us today. And it will be fun for Heike too, of course.”

“She’s a good enough actress in her own right.”

“Excuse me?”

“She doesn’t need me there today.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t make her trade on her relationship with me to keep her job.”

The long silence that followed was punctuated only by the uncomfortable sound of both men breathing into the phone.

“There has definitely been a misunderstanding,” said the producer. “We think Heike is fantastic.”

His incredulous tone clarified everything. Heike didn’t need to trade on their relationship to get work anymore, more like the other way around.

Walter dropped the telephone on the bed and jumped up, pulling on the same clothes he had been wearing the day before.

“I’m going out to get bread,” he told the bathroom door.

“Don’t take too long,” Heike replied.

But he was already in the elevator. When he rushed out into the lobby, raised voices were arguing in American English, blocking the doorway to the street. He stopped short behind a small woman in a trench coat. The man she faced just outside on the stoop was holding up a paper street map. Walter caught the angry flavor of their words immediately but not what they were talking about. He cleared his throat loudly.

The woman’s face was delicate and pretty, her blue eyes red.

“Guten Tag,”
said the man.

Walter pushed past them onto the street, where the winter air burned his cheeks but the view was immediately comforting: the same old linden trees lined the sidewalk, the same old cobblestones along the curb. The argument resumed behind him, but faded out as he walked toward the bakery. He had moved into his apartment in 1986 and had walked around the corner to buy bread for breakfast almost every morning since. The same old woman had been selling loaves of
Vollkornbrot,
sandwich rolls and poppy seed pastry, without any change in inventory for the past fifteen years. Once she’d made muffins to compete with a coffee bar that opened up a block away, chocolate and apple-cinnamon, with American flags on toothpicks tucked into them. But they languished on their doilies in the Plexiglas shelves. Walter had bought one just for the flag, which he kept, occasionally taking it out of his pocket to twirl between two fingers. After a while the red, white and blue paper had simply disintegrated.

In the twenty-four hours since he’d last been to the bakery, Christmas decorations had taken over like a fungus. Walter touched a gold pretzel hanging on a wreath by the door. They started earlier and earlier each year, he thought. It wasn’t even December.

“What do you want?”

The woman who worked there was a typical
Berliner Schnauze,
unfriendly, but at least she was consistent: she never smiled. She asked questions in a voice hoarse from forty years of smoking, peering over the counter at her customers as if they were disturbing her afternoon nap. Walter pointed out a loaf of bread in the case.

“It sure is cold out,” he offered while she wrapped it.

“Of course it’s cold. It’s almost Christmas.”

He wanted to call her ridiculous. If it was almost Christmas, then it had just been Reunification Day, and would soon be Fasching; for that matter, it would soon be spring, and they both knew that wasn’t true. She eyed him suspiciously.