This Must Be the Place (6 page)

“What about it?”

Bodo held the filter of his cigarette like a joint. He took a last toke before putting it out.

“They won, didn’t they?” He exhaled. “Not to be harsh, buddy, but in this situation, you’re the guy in the Goofy suit. Nobody wants to know where that voice is really coming from.”

4

Hope looked down at the schnitzel laid out before her by a middle-aged waiter who didn’t even crack a smile. On the plate with it were a soggy cucumber salad and roasted potatoes.

“Besides the English,” Dave was saying, “Germans were the biggest immigrant group to the United States. It’s funny, because people so rarely refer to themselves as German-American. I think they gave that up during the First World War. But if you look around us here, we’d blend right in.”

She looked around the dimly lit restaurant. Twenty empty white-draped tables spread out from where they sat in the center. The only other people in the room were an old couple who had not said a word to each other in twenty minutes, which meant that they could not possibly be Americans, she thought. Americans talked throughout the meal, non-stop, as if the whole point of going out to eat was not nourishment but conversation, as if silence were dangerous, or at least an admission of failure.

“If you want to see the German roots of American culture,” she said, “just look at this food.”

“What about it?”

“Chicken patties and french fries.”

“This is veal.”

“I’m telling you, we ate more or less exactly this once a week when I was growing up in Missouri.”

Dave groaned in protest.

“Everything else we ate too,” she insisted. “Now that I think about it. Frankfurters, hamburgers. Even their names are German.”

“The greatest legacy of the massive German immigration is the hot dog?”

“It is our national dish.”

He leaned forward, so that his nose was very close to her face.

“This is a nice restaurant, Hope. I just wanted to take you somewhere nice.”

The winter after their wedding, they had spent one week in the British Virgin Islands on a belated honeymoon, a gift from his parents who, once they got over the initial shock of the marriage, tried to make amends. The native islanders and other tourists there had been completely exotic to both Hope and Dave, so that the usual black and white differences in their own backgrounds, often the subject of tension and dismay, were reduced to inconsequential shades of gray. They had entered into a kind of cozy bubble, as she remembered it now, in which their only point of reference, their only reality, was each other. It had been an awfully nice way to experience a foreign country. The young, tanned couple in the Virgin Islands would have snuggled up against the strangeness of it all in Berlin: the unfriendly waiter, the cultural history of the hot dog, the soggy cucumber salad. As it was, what might have been grounds for reconciliation was having the opposite effect. She wondered if the problem with Germany was the very fact that they could blend right in here. She wondered if it was the inevitable fate of a childless couple to grow apart.

The waiter returned to refill their wine. Hope watched the neighborhood out the window for signs of life. Earlier, she thought she’d recognized a man walking by as the neighbor who had walked through their argument at the beginning of the week, but his short, thick frame was hunched over his pockets and she didn’t see his face. He had disappeared into another restaurant across the street. Not another person had walked by since.

“This is a ghost town,” she said, when the waiter had gone. “Where are all the people? They aren’t out on the street, they aren’t home watching TV. It’s not even eight P.M.”

“Maybe they’re working.”

“So late?”

“Most people do work past three in the afternoon.”

She might have retorted that most people did not have to get up at six, as she had done every morning in her seven years as a third-grade teacher, but she didn’t take Dave’s bait.

“It must have been busy here once. That’s all I mean. They would never have built all these big buildings if there hadn’t been people to live in them. Now the neighborhood seems abandoned.”

“Most places seem abandoned compared to New York.”

“Maybe. But it must have been different here a hundred years ago. I would have liked to see that. Wouldn’t you?”

In the past, they had liked to discuss the New York of various bygone eras: Fifth Avenue by horse-drawn carriage in the 1870s, Central Park during the Summer of Love.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

Dave wiped his mouth with his napkin.

“Because I like my Germans guilty,” he said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“They’re nice to me now.”

Hope let her head fall to the side and stared at his neck. In the past she had often slept with her face buried into the soft base of his hairline.

“Fifteen minutes ago you said we could blend right in if we wanted to.”

“I guess I meant you. If you never opened your mouth no one would know you were a foreigner here. In my case, they wouldn’t necessarily see that I’m Jewish, but a hundred years ago I would have felt a lot different from everyone else.”

“Now you don’t?”

“I do, but now it works to my advantage.” He laughed. “Let’s just say that for me, at least, this is the best time yet to be living in Berlin.”

He likes it here, she thought. Her surprise was not so much an indictment of the city but a realization that his experience here was completely separate from her own. In New York they had had different jobs but a single shared domestic life. They had cooked together, seen friends together. Now, he had been in Berlin for three months, since July, and she for one, since October. But the two months apart in the middle, August and September, had created a space between them. He liked it here, but she didn’t know why. He went to work, but she had no idea what he did there. He spent days away, and she didn’t even have a mental image of how he spent his time. When he practiced his German, long-winded soliloquies on waiters or the super, on anyone who would listen, she could not understand a word he said. It was as if they had been apart for a year or more, or worse: as if the only thing that had been keeping them together for the six years previous had been the rhythm of daily life which, now upset, could no longer provide the necessary glue.

Dave’s phone rang, startling both of them. It vibrated loudly against the table, where it had been sitting throughout the meal, and danced up to the edge of his plate.

“Work,” he whispered, visibly relieved to have an excuse to step outside. “I have to take this. It’ll just take a minute.”

She watched him through the window. Pacing the sidewalk, he moved one hand in a circle for emphasis, smiling, and for a moment she felt jealous of the colleague on the other end of the line. Because the look on his face reminded her of an evening, late into her pregnancy, when they already knew that the baby was going to be a boy. At the Chinese restaurant around the corner from their New York apartment, they had each made up a list of names, then traded the lists facedown across the table, lifting the edges of the paper with trepidation both exaggerated and real. Out there on the telephone now, pacing the cold Berlin sidewalk, the look on his face was exactly as it had been that night in New York, when they finally turned over their lists to reveal the very same first choice.

She let the waiter finish off the bottle into her glass. Still on the phone, Dave stood flush up to the window, only a few feet away, and she found herself mesmerized by his features, at once totally familiar and yet strange, like a pair of shoes whose shape has changed with use. She stared at his features and wondered, yet again, what their son’s face might have looked like. When there was no more wine in her glass she tapped lightly on the window.

“I’m going home,” she mouthed, pointing at the door.

She expected Dave to protest, to hang up and come back inside, order another bottle of wine, dessert, a coffee, but he just smiled back and made an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“See you there.” He enunciated each syllable with exaggerated relish, like a mime on the street.

Hope could sense the waiter’s worried eyes on her back so she turned to him and pointed to Dave’s jacket, which was still hanging over the back of his chair.

“He’ll pay,” she said in English.

The word for money was the only relevant one that came to mind. It came out like an afterthought.

“Geld,”
she said as she put on her coat.
“Mein Mann.”

The waiter must have understood, because he didn’t try to stop her.

5

The men’s bathroom at The Wild West had film stills from Westerns hanging in frames all over the walls like family pictures. Walter splashed cold water on his face and put his hands on either side of the basin, leaning forward to catch his breath. As the water dripped off into the sink, he looked up into the mirror above it and examined his own reflection. The monster stared back at him aggressively over the edge of his hair, a few days’ gray-flecked stubble coated his jaw and a second chin peeked out beneath it like a drop shadow. His skin was pale. His round eyes and thick eyebrows sagged together over dark circles: smile-shaped scars etched into the tops of his cheeks. He ran two fingers along them, pulling the skin smooth from his nose out to the edge of his eyes. On the wall to his right were framed photographs of famous cowboys: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, the Marlboro Man. Included in the collection was a picture of himself aged nineteen in character, sitting on a horse. A cigarette was hanging off his bottom lip.

In 1980, Walter was discovered at the proverbial soda fountain, plucked from oblivion in his small village in the Alps to join the cast of the popular television drama
Schönes Wochenende.
The title meant
Have a Nice Weekend.
The soda fountain, in his case, was a large outdoor public swimming pool filled with screaming children, one of thousands dotting the West German landscape like shiny blue plastic bobbles against the green. He had just finished high school and was working for the summer as a lifeguard until his fifteen months of compulsory military service began in September. Outside of work, he spent most of his free time lifting weights in his father’s basement and listening to Journey’s first album,
Departure
(specifically the song “Any Way You Want It”), rewound again and again and played at top volume. His ambitions, insofar as he had any, were to be a student for as long as possible and thus avoid working altogether. He had no prior acting experience. When Klara came up to him in his lifeguard chair and invited him to an audition the following week, her frosted hair teased up like a feather boa, she stood out gloriously from the crowd. Everyone at the pool noticed when she handed Walter her business card.

“All that weight training’s finally paying off, Pretty Boy,” the other guys said afterward.

They were impressed, of course. Walter himself was impressed, but he wasn’t surprised. Instead he had felt something rising in him like the slow swell of a warm tropical tide. It wasn’t arrogance or greed or even vanity so much as satisfaction. He had been waiting for someone to come along and recognize his potential. He had average grades and no unique talents to speak of; he was short in a country of very tall men; but he was going places. Turning Klara’s card over in his hand that day by the pool, he knew that somewhere deep inside himself he had always expected to be famous. Years later, in his thirties, he happened to read a magazine interview with Gwyneth Paltrow in which she said matter-of-factly that she always knew she was going to be famous too.

“Ask anyone else who’s famous now,” she said in the article. “They’ll tell you the same thing.”

Reading this he felt an uncomfortable combination of self-recognition and shame. That feeling wasn’t prescient at all; most people expected to become famous. The few who actually did could claim to have predicted it, while everyone else was still waiting for their moment to arrive. The problem was that if it came, there was no way of knowing how long it would last.

Schönes Wochenende
had made Walter famous right away. At the end of that summer, he moved his legal residence to West Berlin, an island of democracy in a sea of communism that garnered a special privilege: its male citizens were relieved of the military service required of all other German nineteen-year-olds. Although the show was shot in the countryside near Munich, by moving officially to Berlin at eighteen, he was allowed to go directly into television. There were only two channels in Germany in those days. They showed primarily detective shows, American imports like
Dallas
and old movies.
Schönes Wochenende,
about a city family from Munich who moved full-time to their weekend house in the countryside, was one of the few dramas actually produced in Germany, and the majority of viewers tuned into it each week. Walter’s character, Hans, was the troubled son of a local farmer who seduced the city family’s daughter, Julia.

“The James Dean character,” the producers told the press, spinning a frenzy that lifted Walter up like a tornado.

They made sure that when Hans fixed his blue eyes on Julia, teenage girls all over Germany swooned. In cities he could hardly walk down the street without a swarm of young fans trailing perpetually just a few steps behind. Even their mothers asked him for autographs. He perfected a dazzling smile and patiently signed his name on proffered subway tickets, the insides of book covers, T-shirts and, occasionally, the pocket diaries of particularly lovesick thirteen-year-old girls. The seasoned television people around him commented among themselves that for a nineteen-year-old kid from
am Arsch der Welt,
the ass of the world, he took his newfound fame impressively in stride. But the truth was that he was used to being treated differently in his hometown. First, because his mother was American, then because of the tragic circumstances surrounding her death. He could speak in local dialect, he could draw a map of the forests around his village in his sleep; he was born there, but from the beginning he was set apart. And now, he had not been back in almost twenty years, since his father’s funeral in 1983, when he quit the show at its peak and left for California.