This Must Be the Place (20 page)

“What?”

Orson slapped the inside of his forearm.

“Her identity number? You mean a tattoo from a concentration camp?” Walter shook his head. “Where are you going with this?”

Orson turned to Hope and switched into English.

“I might disagree with you, but I’m not going to argue with you now. You personally suffered through the seminal tragedy of our generation.”

“A lot of other people suffered more than I did.”

“Well, you aren’t going to run into any of them here. You were there and we just watched it on TV. You win.”

“Win what?”

“For the rest of your life you’ll be sitting around with groups of people and everyone else will describe where they were when the planes hit. At work, on the toilet, on the phone. People will cherish the telling of their insignificant stories and then you’ll shut them down.
I was there,
you’ll say. And people will look at you differently.”

“Is it so different from being in Berlin when the Wall came down? That used to be the seminal moment of our generation.”

Walter reflected that he had been in exactly the same place—Deutsche Synchron—when both events occurred. In 1989, he had eventually left the studio in Wedding to walk into Mitte, against the flow of people rushing into West Berlin.

“It was an amazing moment,” said Orson. “But it was not a tragedy. Tell us what you were doing when the planes hit.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re going to tell this story many times and this is your chance to practice it with an excellent director.”

Hope held her wineglass with both hands and looked into it. Walter imagined her covered in white soot, running up the street like the people on TV. Maybe she was trapped in one of the towers herself, on a class trip with all of her students. He had read stories in the paper about heroines like her, teachers escorting their children down a hundred flights of stairs in the dark.

“I was asleep,” she said quietly.

“Asleep?”

Walter almost yelled the word, so that the people at the next table turned to look at him. At least she might have saved a cat abandoned in an apartment building. Asleep is where Heike would have been had she been there that day, not Hope. Walter stared at her profile in the candlelight, and corrected himself. Heike would have been right in the thick of it, her face smeared with soot and camera-ready, working the publicity for all it was worth. It was he who would have been asleep. That’s right. Other people jumping out of windows to save their own lives while he slept; the most significant public tragedy of his generation and Walter in bed while it all passed him by.
Asleep.
Maybe it was something he and Hope had in common. He tried now but was unable to remember the last time he felt truly, completely awake.

“By the time I went outside, both towers had already come down.”

“But you felt trapped,” said Orson.

“We were all trapped. You can’t imagine.”

“I grew up in East Berlin.”

“That’s different. In Berlin it was a permanent situation. It must have seemed normal.”

Walter was picturing himself asleep with Hope, their arms wrapped around each other in a bed floating over a war-torn city.

“Americans,” said Orson. “Your own experience is always so much more important than other people’s. Your own defense is always worth a struggle, regardless of consequence.
Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung.
”

“What does that mean?”

“Attack is the best defense,” Walter translated.

Orson leaned toward Hope over the table and spoke quietly.

“It means that the security chick on the subway was just doing her job, but rather than take responsibility for your own actions you fought with her, got her wet and upset, ruined her afternoon.”

“Better to go down fighting.”

Orson shook his head and whistled a few bars of “Dixie”; it happened to be a popular ring on German cell phones that year and everybody knew the tune. Hope fiddled nervously with her wedding ring. suddenly the shiniest object in the restaurant, flashing like the emergency lights on a double-parked car. He looked back and forth between Orson’s eyes and the ring. Where the hell was Bodo? Orson definitely assumed that Walter was already sleeping with Hope. When he saw the ring he would tease her about it, Walter was sure of it; Orson couldn’t keep his mouth shut about anything. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She pulled the gold band up to the knuckle, swiveled it, and pushed it down the bottom of her finger.

“You know what?” said Orson. “The thing I admire most about Americans is the same thing that most disgusts me. Your obstinate self-determination.”

Hope twisted her ring.

“But it’s the same with Germans. That is, our best quality is also our worst. Apologetic cautiousness. Fewer mistakes, but a lot less progress. Case in point: when an American director wants the actors to begin, do you know what he says to them?”

“Action.”

“Exactly. Do you know what German directors say?”

“We say
Bitte,
” Orson told her. “It means ‘please.’ ”

Hope watched Orson’s face carefully over the edge of her glass.

“You are amazing, Orson Welles,” she said. “You just sit back and tell me that Americans are so awful, but you name yourself after one of our most famous filmmakers and make money dubbing our movies into your language so that more of your people will watch them. You can’t have it both ways.”

Orson shrugged. “Last I checked there was still a fine line between appreciating American fiction films and agreeing with the government’s foreign policy.”

“Look, we have a right to defend ourselves. They started it, remember?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“We also happen to be defending the rights of very weak people. You know how women are treated over there, don’t you? If nothing else, you must agree that we have a responsibility to liberate them.”

“I just don’t think that’s what this war is about. Even so, I don’t think liberating anyone else is the responsibility of the United States.”

Hope smoothed two fingers across each of her eyebrows toward her temples and sighed. “You grew up in a totalitarian regime.”

“And I don’t remember the United States coming to our rescue. As I remember it, we liberated ourselves.”

Walter motioned to the waiter for another bottle of wine. So much for the celebration dinner, he thought, so much for his first date with Hope.

“I thought you weren’t going to argue with me anymore. I thought I was beyond reproach.”

Orson watched the waiter uncork the new bottle and, as she held up her glass to be filled, finally caught sight of the gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand.

“Are you married?”

Hope looked down at the ring as if she’d just discovered it. Walter inhaled slowly through his teeth.

“Yes.”

“For a long time?”

“Six years.”

“Is your husband American?”

“Why?”

Orson glanced at Walter, licked one finger and touched it to the burning end of his cigarillo so that its flame slowly sizzled to a stop. Walter held his breath, pleading silently, the weight of his immediate future hanging on the delicacy of Orson’s response.

“We wear wedding rings on the right hand here in Germany. Not on the left. I always forget that Americans do it the other way around.”

Bodo arrived at the table and Walter let the air out of his stomach.

“Just in time,” he said under his breath.

“Did I hear correctly? We have a convict in the restaurant?”

Hope held out her hand to be shaken.

“I was myself once arrested at Friedrichstrasse,” said Bodo.

He rolled his
r
’s in English as if speaking with an Irish brogue. He formed his sentences as if still speaking German. A yellow ribbon was still fastened to the collar of his shirt.

“I was coming back to West Berlin from a day in the East with another actor friend. We were separated and questioned for hours in little rooms. Good cop, bad cop. Finally, we tell them everything.”

“What did you do?”

“We bought the complete works of William Shakespeare. One set for each.”

“It was illegal to buy books?”

“No. But the books cost more money than was legal to exchange in one day. We had exchanged ours with a street guy, black market, instead of at the official place. We got a much higher rate.”

“How did you get out of it?”

“We told the police we were poor actors, which was true, that we could not pay to buy such important literature in our own terrible, capitalist country, which, by the way, was also true. Eventually they let us go.”

Orson laughed. Walter, relieved, laughed too.

“Nice ribbon,” said Orson.

Bodo looked down at his shirt collar.

“Born and raised in West Berlin, my man. We always remember the airlift.”

Their eyes met and in the slow moment that followed, Orson seemed to be swallowing his words. Bodo smiled.

“Have you already heard the specials?”

When the food came, they were well into their third bottle of wine. Hope listened intently to the plot of Orson’s movie.

“I want to say things about my country that people never say out loud,” he said. “But the film is going to be funny. I want to draw people in by making them laugh and then make them think.”

“It’s a cool idea to have this guy reinvent himself by putting his skills to good use. When I was teaching, I always tried to use humor to communicate the difficult concepts.”

“Well, I tried to sell this script to all the public funding agencies and no one would touch it. They said it would offend people in the East.
The GDR wasn’t just ironic furniture, young man,
they told me. But I think if it’s done right, humor will heal people, not offend them. So I am funding it myself. At least this way I can stay true to my vision.”

“You know what, if you need an apartment to film in for free, you’re welcome to use mine. It’s completely empty. My stuff still hasn’t arrived from New York.”

The only thing worse than losing the role was the idea of passing Til Schweiger every day in the lobby during the shoot, thought Walter. Thankfully he wouldn’t even be here. He would be drinking piña coladas by the pool at the Beverly Hilton.

“I might take you up on that,” said Orson, taking down her phone number in a notebook. “We’re still scouting for locations.”

She lifted her glass.

“To your first Academy Award,” she said.

They clinked their glasses together and turned to Walter, who lifted his own reluctantly.

“I wanted him to be the star but he turned me down,” said Orson.

“Really? I didn’t know you were an actor,” she said, turningto look at Walter. “I mean, I thought the dubbing thing was something different.”

“He’s an icon!”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

All evening he had been unsuccessful in trying to influence the conversation’s direction.

“You have to see
Schönes Wochenende
,” said Orson. “It’s a TV show from the early eighties about people in the Alps. It’s a classic and Walter was the star. His character was named Hans. Everybody loved Hans. When I was a child, we could pick up West German TV signals over the Wall. We never missed
Schönes Wochenende.
My sister even had a black-market poster of Hans up behind her bedroom door.”

Hope clapped her hands together, looking at Walter in delighted disbelief.

“You have to show it to me!”

He cleared his throat, scanning the soft surface of her face.

“Remember the guy washing the horse? The German show with the beautiful landscape?”

Her lips opened up in a circle that exposed all her teeth.

“That was me.”

“You look so different now.”

He could feel the blood pumping through his heart.

“It was years ago.”

“Have you been in other things since then?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity.”

Orson nodded enthusiastically.

“He looks even better now, don’t you think?”

“Please—”

“He does. Hans had a baby face.”

“That’s right. Now it’s weathered into something more interesting.”

Walter rubbed one hand over the face they described. His thumb and forefinger pressed into the sharp, day-old stubble on either side of his mouth as Orson went on.

“He walked out on his contract at the height of the show’s popularity. Hans went off to the army. The whole thing was something of a local industry mystery.”

A mystery! Walter laughed. Better than a cautionary tale. In the years since then, he had nervously gauged how much of his history to reveal to each new person that came into his life.

“Where did you go?”

“Los Angeles. I told you that.”

“Why?”

“My father died—” He stopped himself: He would tell Hope everything but not now, not here. “It was complicated.”

“Must have been tough to get work again when you came back,” said Orson.

“I never planned to come back.”

“Will you stay for good this time?”

“You’re going back to L.A.?”

“I told you—”

“That’s why he turned down my film.”

“I told you. I’m going to L.A. for Christmas. After the premiere.”

“To stay?”

“Maybe.”

“No,” she said.

Walter gazed at Hope in the candlelight, unclear what she meant.
Come with me,
he asked her silently. He couldn’t bring himself to say it here.

“He was great as Hans but he would have been even better as Fritz,” said Orson.

Hope put one hand on Walter’s arm and squeezed it.