by Anna Winger
“All the important actors were already famous in their early twenties,” he told her. “Just like I was. At that point there was no way to predict if any of us would lose our hair. But look at me and look at them. All of them have kept it. All the big ones.”
“You stopped acting before you started losing your hair.”
“You’re missing my point. In retrospect, it’s as if these guys knew innately that they would keep their hair, and the knowledge of that gave them a comparative advantage. It’s as if there were some hormonal connection between hair follicle activity and the development of enduring charisma.”
Heike twisted a towel around her head.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“Everything will be fine.”
“I mean, this show is beneath me. The opening weekend of my last movie alone grossed more than fifteen million marks.”
She stepped out of the tub. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave.
“Think of your fans, baby. Everyone in Germany will watch the show when it airs.”
“Just to see what I look like after all these years.”
She shook her head.
“You have to let yourself evolve as an actor.”
Allow himself to occupy a different space in people’s minds is what she meant, thought Walter, a space off in the hinterlands, off the sexual radar. The middle-aged guy, innocuous neighbor, buddy, postman, high school teacher, killer; the character actor, not the heartthrob. He preferred to leave his celluloid persona uncompromised by the ravages of laziness and time. Was that so terrible? He thought of the American woman standing still in the cold on his doorstep a few minutes earlier and suddenly wished that he had swept her off her bare feet, right there, like the groom in one of the romantic movies that Heike couldn’t stand. By “evolve,” she meant she expected him to sacrifice the last golden vestige of his self-image in the interest of personal growth. Fantastic.
“I know you lied to me,” he said.
“What?”
“You said you needed me on the show to boost the ratings. You begged me, as I remember it.”
“I knew you wouldn’t agree to do it otherwise.”
It was true, but he would punish her anyway. For lying, for encouraging him, for giving a shit in the first place; for moving on with her young life while he wallowed in chronic indecision at the gateway to middle age.
“You lied to me,” he said. “The fact remains.”
Heike’s wide-set eyes filled up halfway with tears and although they didn’t touch, Walter felt as if one of his hands were wrapped delicately around her esophagus, one shoulder pressing hers to the wall.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.
Walter had been anticipating this moment since the day they met, but he did not respond. She squeezed past him in the doorway. The light blue of her eyes was the first thing he’d noticed about her, he thought; it was the thing he would always remember. When he turned around, she was dressed and throwing her things into a bag, smoking a cigarette held between her front teeth and wearing a tight white I LOVE NY T-shirt with a big red heart. Neither of them spoke until the downstairs buzzer rang.
“That’s it then?” she asked. “You have nothing more to say to me?”
Don’t go, he thought. But her figure was already receding down the hallway, through the front door, out into the world.
“The T-shirt is ridiculous. You’ve never even been to New York.”
“It’s a symbol, Walter.”
“Of what?”
“Solidarity. Compassion. Something you know nothing about. What should I tell them when I get downstairs? They’re expecting both of us.”
“Just say I couldn’t make it.”
For the next thirty seconds he listened to the sound of her bag dragging along the wooden floorboards of the apartment, followed by the opening of locks.
“Bruce Willis,” she called out, before slamming the front door decisively behind her. “Bruce Willis is bald.”
2
Hope leaned back against the inside of her front door, quickly calculating what to pack. Facing down the long white hallway inside her apartment, she blinked as if driving into the light, trying to remember where she had last seen her passport. She had brought so little with her from New York that she could just throw it all back into the same suitcase and be out of there in five minutes flat. But she needed the passport. In the kitchen she found her handbag and dumped out its contents into the sink: the ticket stubs from her flight to Berlin, her wallet, a notebook, a pen, the wrapper she had saved from a German granola bar with the brand name Corny, the cover of a local magazine called Zitty, a dead U.S. mobile phone and some loose American change. No passport. She hit the counter with one hand and threw the bag on the floor. In the bedroom her suitcase was still standing in the same place it had been since she arrived a month earlier, like a child at a boring dinner party begging to be taken home. She stuffed it with her clothes, and by the time she sat down to close it, she was out of breath. Then she noticed her passport wedged beneath a standing lamp and the floor, and started crying again. It was one thing to leave, but she had nowhere to go. She sobbed into the arm of her raincoat not with regret for the place she might abandon, but from the realization that she had no clear alternative. When she imagined herself out in the world with her passport, she was unable to come up with a single viable destination. New York was no longer the home that she knew, and she could hardly return to her parents. In the past five months she had distanced herself even from her closest friends. Dave had turned out to be a pretty flimsy rug, she thought, but leaving him now felt like pulling out all she had left from beneath her feet.
The phone rang and she wiped her nose with the back of one hand. Only two people had the number: Dave and her mother, who called once a week to deliver cheerful midwestern edicts laced with palpable anxiety about Hope’s life. But since it was two A.M. in Kansas City, it was not her mother. She let Dave wait long enough to worry that she was still outside, freezing her ass off on the doorstep where he’d left her, then rose from her seat on the packed suitcase and reached for the phone.
“You’re home,” he said.
She could hear the highway around his voice in the car.
“On Thursday night,” he said, “when I get back, I’m going to take you to this great schnitzel place I heard about from a colleague.”
Hope had to swallow the fury she felt rising in her throat. This is what he’d been doing since June, behaving as if nothing had happened. What was one more fight to him?
“Schnitzel.”
“Breaded veal, Hope. It’s a local delicacy.”
“Great,” she said.
“Good. My cell phone’s fading out now.”
When he was gone, she leaned against the wall and tried to calm herself down. Thursday night Dave would take her on a date. They would eat schnitzel. They would be polite to each other, as if they had just met, and make small talk about the Polish economy, the reconstruction of Berlin, the progress of the war in Afghanistan. Dave was perhaps the only person on earth who was able to spin even the war on terror in positive terms, she told herself. Everything would be fine. He would talk and she would not and after dinner they would have sex (habitual, results-oriented, precise). He would not mention the fight they had just had on the doorstep. He would not comment on the fact that although she spent most of her time in the bathtub, she had once again forgotten to wash her hair. He would not press for details about what she had been doing all week, alone, in this vast and empty apartment and she would try to make this work. They had been married for six years already. She thought: This is my life.
She left the suitcase packed on the floor and went into the bathroom, where the bath she had left to follow him down the stairs was already cold. She turned on the taps again, removed her clothes and stared at the pieces of herself reflected in the shiny white wall tiles. The bathroom was very large. There was a round bathtub i
n the middle of the room, a separate shower, a toilet and a marble counter containing two sinks, side by side. As she leaned back in the water, she wondered if other couples actually brushed their teeth together, smiling at each other in the mirror through the foam. She had never liked to be in the bathroom with Dave. Even in the best of times, now difficult to recall, she had always preferred to be alone. Hope reflected that their New York bathroom was so small that one of them would have had to stand in the shower anyway, leaning over the other’s shoulder with a toothbrush to reach the mirror. Strange that she had come all the way to Berlin to have a bathroom big enough for two, a bathroom whose exaggerated luxury struck her as distinctly American: the pièce de résistance in a fancy house somewhere in New Jersey, not here. The only other time she had been to Europe, on a summer trip with her schoolteacher parents in 1986, the plumbing, in particular, had seemed backward. In England, there were no showers at all, only handheld faucets at the side of the tub. In France, the toilets were often separated into little rooms, so that you had to run down the hall to wash your hands. In some restaurants there had been only a hole in the ground. In Italy, she had been fascinated by the mysterious bidets until her mother showed her how to use one to wash sand off her feet. There had been washing machines but no dryers anywhere, as she remembered it. When she complained about having to wear damp jeans, her father told her she was being culturally insensitive.
“Europe is still somewhere between the First and Third Worlds,” he explained. “They’re lagging behind us in terms of technology and services.”
But he was careful to point out that this did not mean Europe was the Second World.
“The Second World refers to the one behind the Iron Curtain. No one knows what kind of plumbing they have there.”
Hope pulled her head under the water for as long as she could stand it, then came up, listening to the water running off her hair into the tub. Her eyes fell on the binding of a thick book she’d been using as a doorstop to the bathroom: Hitler’s Willing Executioners. In place of a guidebook, Dave had given her a stack of books to read about the Holocaust and the roots of anti-Semitism. Books, he had suggested, that would help her understand Berlin. It was typical of him to decide that a good grasp of history would help her acclimate to everyday life, she thought. He was an economist, after all, interested in formulas and systems, the facts, not the emotional details. His tendency to break things down in rational terms had once had a calming effect, but now it enraged her.
“A fluke,” he said about the baby. “Look at the statistics.” He had said this often during the past five months, as if his point just needed to sink into her brain for a lightbulb to go on. As if he truly believed that what happened would be easier to accept if she could just see it as the function of a mathematical equation. But Hope did not want to look at the statistics. She did not want to be a statistic; the one in a million who made all other pregnant women feel relieved. She wanted to grieve.
“What happened, happened,” he’d said today. “It’s been long enough.”
“How can it possibly have been long enough,” she’d replied, “when I never had the chance to say goodbye?”
It had become their usual routine: screaming at each other because there was no one else to blame.
“We have an opportunity to start over here,” he’d said, again, before storming off.
For orientation about the culture, she preferred her textbook from German class to his history books, its lengthy descriptions of Christmas traditions and accompanying pictures of happy children. Sometimes she just flipped through the dictionary. Certain words were similar to their English counterparts: Nervenzusammenbruch, for example, was the word for nervous breakdown. Others, like Schwangerschaft, which meant pregnancy, or Schmerz, which meant pain, had no relationship at all. Still others, simple words like Kind, the word for child, meant one thing in English and something different altogether in German. Then there was a host of terms that had been imported wholesale from English: brainstorm, for example, or midlife crisis. Hope imagined people saying these words with a heavy German accent in the flow of an otherwise unintelligible conversation. Even if she spoke the language, she probably would not recognize them.
She let her hands rest on the stretch marks just above her pubic hair, purple stains against the pale skin that was still loose there, despite her flat stomach. She wondered if they would ever disappear and if then she would feel that it had been long enough to move on. But maybe there was no such thing as long enough, she thought. She reached for a bottle of conditioner sitting on the edge of the bathtub and ran one finger across the label. In New York she had isolated herself deliberately, unable to speak to friends and family whose concern for her felt like expectation, whose desire for her to bounce back had become an unbearable burden. It had seemed grotesque to be polite in light of what happened, so she just stopped talking to people at all. But here she had no other choice. She knew no one and couldn’t speak the language. She was taking a German class but it was slow going. If only she had come to Berlin on that trip in 1986, she thought, she might have been prepared for how far away this city felt from the United States, and even from the rest of Europe, or from what she remembered of Europe (a charming parallel universe of familiar things made special: good milk chocolate, telephone booths with rounded corners, tobacco shops, double-decker buses, pink newspapers, women in high heels on narrow cobblestone streets). But the distance had a built-in benefit: nobody pitied her, or worried about her, or expected anything at all. She turned the bottle of conditioner over in her hands, thinking that here she might even welcome the benign company of strangers, if only for the chance to escape her own head. But where? The day before, she had gone into a drugstore and spent half an hour selecting the conditioner, unable to distinguish the name for it, Spülung, from that for shampoo, say, or shower gel or body lotion. She had asked the salesclerk at the front of the store for help.
“Conditioner?” She sounded the word out slowly, her best effort at a German accent. “Crème rinse?”
To illustrate the promises of the product, she had run both hands over her hair, which was anything but smooth and silky at the time, and the salesclerk had simply shrugged, uncomprehending. Later, she had returned to the hair aisle with her dictionary, but the word for conditioner was not in it. To identify this bottle, she had opened the tops of many bottles, smelled their contents, rubbed the liquids on the back of her hand, wondering finally if conditioner was even used in Germany. She had noticed a lot of fine, straight hair around, although apart from this it was much harder to generalize about the Germans than she had expected. She had yet to see a crowd of strapping, blond men, or a ruddy-cheeked Frau with pigtails, or anyone even remotely resembling Marlene Dietrich. If anything, she thought, the local population seemed harmless and exhausted, cautiously stooped over as they walked into the wind.
There were glimpses of beautiful architecture. The building she was living in was quite grand and old, but it connected to a cheap replica built much more recently. She had yet to wander far, but from what she had seen, the mix was typical and all the more dismal with so few people on the street. If her bathroom here was like somewhere in suburban New Jersey, she thought, then what she had seen of the rest of Berlin was more like Newark on a winter day than Rome or Paris, like the depopulated fringes of urban American. In a month she had not had a conversation with anyone except Dave, but people often asked her for directions. In fact, the very first day an older couple came up to her on the street and although she couldn’t understand a thing they said, it was clear that they were lost. A few days later it happened again, this time a young woman with a backpack and a folded newspaper in one hand. After that, it was a family of tourists. First, they tried German, then a few rough words of English, but even in English she couldn’t help them. She had no idea where anything was. This morning she had mentioned it to Dave.
“Why me?”
He looked up briefly from the small blue suit
case he was both unpacking and repacking on the bed.
“Why not?”
“I am so clearly a foreigner. I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. Why do they choose me?”
“Probably because you walk so slowly. You look like you have all the time in the world to talk. They don’t want to stop someone who looks like they’re in a hurry.”
“Someone in a hurry is in a hurry because they have somewhere to go. If they have somewhere to go in such a hurry, it means they know their way around. That’s the person to ask.”
Dave closed his suitcase.
“The next time someone asks you for directions you should point that out,” he said. “But I’m telling you: just walk a little faster and they’ll leave you alone.”
It was when he came in to say goodbye to her in the bathroom that he handed her the enormous map of Berlin, opening it up all the way as if to demonstrate its utility. It was different from American street maps. It was pink and yellow, folded in sixteen sections and covered with a bewildering scrawl of streets she didn’t know, neighborhoods she’d never seen. The city was so huge it wrapped around from one side of the paper to the other.
“This is the map I use to get in and out of Berlin,” he told her, folding it back up carefully. “But you can have it. The next time someone asks for directions you can actually help them.”
“With that?”
She imagined herself whipping it out at the street corner, bending down to unfold it flat on the sidewalk, and trying to locate the nearest subway station, which is what they usually asked about, or where to get a coffee.
“Why not? Maybe you’ll make some friends.”
His total disregard for her experience made her so furious that she pulled herself up from the water and followed him down the stairs.
Now she leaned her head back and slowly washed her hair. Six months earlier, when Dave was originally offered the job in Berlin, she had willingly agreed to come with him. She knew as much about the city as anyone else, but it wasn’t much: Cabaret; the War, the Wall; Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), heartbreaking news clips of freed people clambering over it. But the timing had seemed perfect. They had been living in the same place in New York, doing the same thing, for seven years. They were going to have a baby and she planned to stop working for a while. Anyway, she had liked the image of herself pushing a stroller on long, meandering walks through a romantic Euro-cityscape composed of fifteen-year-old memories of Rome, London and Paris. But in her fantasy of living here, she was able to read a menu. In the fantasy, it was always summer, not November. She was wearing a light trench for the occasional shower, not a winter coat. On weekends, they ate picnics of cheese and sausage on a blanket in dappled sunshine under a tree. In the fantasy, chic people on candy-colored Vespas cooed at the baby at stoplights because, of course, in the fantasy there was a baby. Dave had jumped at the chance to work on this project, the Polish Poverty Project, he called it, because he said it was a chance to wipe the slate clean. Privately, she thought he liked the idea that the very people who had once driven out his grandparents now needed his help. In any case, he had not explained that he would be gone all week, leaving her alone in Berlin. Hope looked around her at the bathroom thinking that six months ago she would never have imagined this; not the place nor the circumstances, not the reverberating sense of disorientation that afflicted her, like chronic nausea, whenever she got out of the tub. The fantasy of her European life had not materialized, but her American life no longer existed. She had to remind herself of this because it was easy to forget.
