This Must Be the Place

by Anna Winger

  The clear water filled up with bubbles that floated on the surface, clinging to the sides of the tub. Six months earlier she would have been thrilled with this apartment. It was freshly painted white, a blank canvas, somewhere in some slick magazine just waiting to be filled with art and furniture. Because the dollar was strong, the same rent they had paid in New York now paid for this: moldings and parquet floors, a master bedroom and two bathrooms, even a beautiful nursery at the back. (The whole apartment was empty, but that room seemed emptier still.) The tiny place they’d shared in Greenwich Village for the past seven years had only two windows facing the street and three others facing the airshaft, but their friends had been jealous anyway because there was an extra little room for a baby. That the room had been more like a walk-in closet than a proper bedroom was irrelevant; it was separate space. It meant that they didn’t have to move to Brooklyn to start a family. Hope squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed both hands across her empty belly. The baby’s room would have fit three times over into the nursery here, maybe more, at least ten times into the whole apartment. Ten babies in Berlin. She examined her fingers, which were pale and almost colorless, puckered up like wet scraps of paper, and pictured the packed suitcase in her bedroom, her passport, the contents of her handbag loose in the kitchen sink. Where could she run to now? She never wanted to get out of the water. All summer in New York she had not wanted to get out of bed but there had been no bathtub. Now their furniture was still making its way across the Atlantic in a container, so here there was only the mattress on the floor, a table and four chairs. But there was this bathtub, this luxurious limbo between the horror of what had happened and the uncertainty of what might happen next. Hope let in some more hot water.

  3

  Other girlfriends had come and gone, but no girlfriend had ever left Walter at this time of year. Like a squirrel gathering nuts, or a wrestler sucking down for the season, he had always done what was necessary to make his relationships last until spring. After Heike left, he went into the bathroom and pissed for two minutes standing up. In the 1990s, there had been a nationwide movement instructing men to sit down: Women put up stickers in public restrooms, cartoon figures with little dicks hanging between their legs like tails. During the two years she had lived with him, he had not once stood up to piss. He had thus felt briefly defiant watching the wall tile behind the toilet, but two days later, the possibility of being alone through the holiday season ahead was starting to sink in. Walter lay in bed with the curtains drawn and catalogued the evidence that things were only getting worse: his growing paunch, his diminishing libido, the complete stagnation of Charlottenburg in favor of cooler, shabbier neighborhoods to the east, the advent of reality television, the continued popularity of electronic music, the bankruptcy of

  Berlin. The war on terrorism had been the most recent example, now this. Most Berliners escaped midwinter to soak up ultraviolet light on cheap package tours to one of the Canary Islands; chicer locals spent the holidays at Raleigh Beach in Phuket. But Walter knew that he could not fathom such plans on his own. He turned on the TV and watched a square-jawed American commander deliver a status report, but the simultaneous translation from English into German was badly synced, making it impossible to understand what was being said in either language. He reached for the remote and pressed Play. The video of Jerry Maguire picked up exactly where he had left it the night before, right where Jerry enters the room full of bitter divorcées and makes the famous speech to win back his wife. As it played now, in perfectly synchronized German, Walter moved his lips to the sound of his own voice and watched Tom Cruise get down on his knees.

  When he returned to Berlin from Los Angeles in 1985, Walter stopped acting, but to make money agreed to dub the voice of an up-and-coming American movie star. Tom Cruise had then just recently begun to distinguish himself in films. Other people had covered his few lines in Endless Love, Taps, and The Outsiders; the guy who usually did Rob Lowe had done Risky Business; but it wasn’t until Top Gun came out in 1986 that Tom Cruise found his German voice. In the fourteen films he’d made since then, German audiences had heard Tom Cruise speak only in Walter’s voice; they had never heard him speak English. American films were always shown dubbed in Germany, with specific native voices linked inextricably to the famous faces of all the movie stars, from Woody Allen to Julia Roberts. From the start, Tom Cruise was identified as one of the few celebrities admired equally in Germany by men and women, and as a result Walter had been making a good living doing voice-overs for commercials selling everything from luxury cars to laundry powder for fifteen years. To the advertising executives who hired him at a premium, the discrepancy between the aging German TV star before them and the all-American charisma his familiar voice conjured in the mind of their consumers was an inside joke.

  “Voice of gold you’ve got there,” they said, winking at Walter at the studio. “Men want to be Tom Cruise and women want to sleep with him.”

  Walter always chuckled along as if he were in on the joke; as if his diminished looks were a secret weapon or at least some sort of witty disguise. He told himself that even now he was better-looking than most of those guys could ever hope to be and he was laughing all the way to the bank, right? But the years had taken their toll. For a long time now his voice had been playing the hero while his body sat in the dark, eating ham sandwiches and candy bars and counting the cash.

  He got under the covers thinking that he felt like a worm cut in half, whose head keeps moving forward while the tail end dances desperately in place. On screen, the women stared at Tom Cruise as his wife stood up slowly behind the couch.

  “Ich lasse nicht zu dass Du mich weg wirfst,” he said. “I’m not letting you get rid of me.”

  “We live in a cynical world.”

  “You complete me.”

  On screen, all the women were crying and Tom Cruise kissed his wife.

  “You had me at hello,” she said.

  Walter made a mental note of key phrases that might come in handy if Heike called, although she was much tougher around the edges than the female character in the film. If he were to walk into a room full of Heike’s friends and demand to speak to her, he reminded himself, she wouldn’t dissolve into tears, or blush, or fall into his arms; she would take a suspicious step backward. She would think he’d lost his mind. When he got out of bed to switch the tape, he had to squint to make out the titles lined up in alphabetical order on his video shelf. The Mission: Impossibles were too action-oriented to provide the ego boost he needed now. He preferred the films whose drama was verbal, not physical, and thus driven by the sheer force and clarity of his dubbing. Magnolia was a favorite. Born on the Fourth of July. Finally he selected A Few Good Men and got back into bed. While it rewound to his favorite scene, he opened the paper to the two pages he read every day: Leute von Heute, People of Today, the day’s gossip listed with pictures. Sometimes there was a profile of an up-and-coming celebrity, or pictures from a royal wedding, but usually just tidbits gathered from around the globe. Today, it reported that Jim Carrey, a Canadian, had applied for U.S. citizenship.

  “I always felt growing up that America was a big brother, protecting us in the schoolyard,” he said.

  The article went on to say that he had just purchased a $42 million plane.

  “You can do that when you’re rich,” he explained.

  Walter turned the page and held his breath, as always: Leute von Gestern, People of Yesterday, the most popular section of the paper: an investigation into the current circumstances of the once famous, a daily dose of thrilling Schadenfreude at the miserable afterlife of someone who once had it all. With palpable relief, he looked down at an unflattering picture of Mickey Rourke, and pushed the paper aside. The final courtroom standoff between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson played forth. Walter pulled the covers up to his chin and listened.

  When the telephone rang he took a moment to savor the flood of relief that filled his chest, relief so certain and swe
et that it made the anxiety of the past two days almost worth it. By the second ring, he was angry. Did Heike actually think she could just come back as if nothing had happened? Actresses were all the same, he thought: histrionic and too easily indulged. He expected a pretty serious apology. There would be probation. She could not just take him for granted. By the third ring he paused the video and picked up slowly, taking his time.

  “Baum hier,” he said.

  “You just didn’t show up?”

  It was his agent. She expelled the last breath of her cigarette.

  “Klara.”

  “It was a great opportunity,” she said. “A breakthrough role.”

  Walter picked up a glass ashtray that Heike had left behind on the bedside table and turned it over in his hands.

  “Since when is playing a middle-aged high school teacher considered a breakthrough?”

  “Not just a high school teacher—a murderer, a philanderer, a statutory rapist.”

  “Still.”

  “He murders a student he had an affair with to keep her quiet! Did you even read the script? It was the kind of role most actors would kill for.”

  He had been working with Klara since he was nineteen and she was twenty-five. She had been a casting director when she discovered him. When she started her own agency soon afterward he was one of her very first clients. At the time, she had been like an older sister to him, but since then the years between them seemed to have stretched exponentially. Success had catapulted her quickly forward into real adulthood while he lagged behind with tar on his shoes. Nowadays she was always slightly distracted; even on the telephone she seemed to be looking over his shoulder at someone more important on the other side of the room. She couldn’t possibly be his sister anymore, he thought, maybe his mother. But Walter’s mother had never been anything like Klara. She had never been old.

  “Who did they get to replace you? What did Heike say?”

  On the television screen Jack Nicholson’s face, square under the military haircut, was frozen in a snarl.

  “Actually, she left me.”

  “Good for her.”

  “I’m serious. She’s not coming back here.”

  “Did she meet someone else?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Isn’t that how things usually go?”

  “How do you know I didn’t meet someone else?”

  The American woman’s map was laid out on the floor by his bed. Now dry, its pieces were wrinkled at the edges, like the half-burnt remains of newspaper kindling from a bonfire. It would take him forever to put it back together, maybe longer. Klara smoked.

  “May-December relationships aren’t easy,” she said finally.

  Walter had met Heike at the studio when she had a small voice role on Eyes Wide Shut. He had been in his element that day, the big fish in a very small pond. He was faster than anyone else. He needed only one or two tries to sync a line perfectly with the motion of the character’s mouth. He was able to utter not only the words correctly but the breathing that truly distinguishes a personality. By the time it became clear that she didn’t see him as a hero but rather as a project, she had already taken over his life.

  “Reruns of Schönes Wochenende are on all the time now,” Klara said. “Did you know that? According to the ratings it’s actually pretty popular. I’m sure I can get you another TV gig.”

  “I start the new Tom Cruise next week.”

  “You can do something after that.”

  “A film.”

  “That would be a first.”

  “Not true. In Los Angeles—”

  “I mean in Germany.”

  “But when was the last time a good film was made in German? I don’t mean a little art house film seen and loved by ten people. I’ll tell you when: before the war. Since then, the world hears the German language and thinks only of Nazis.”

  “Das Boot was in German.”

  “Exactly. And then Wolfgang Petersen moved to Hollywood to make Air Force One. You don’t see him looking back.”

  Walter listened to burning tobacco on the other end of the line and eyed the map splayed out on the floor, reflexively trying to fit it back together like the wooden puzzles he had labored over as a child, whose pieces added up to a perfect medieval landscape.

  “Ninety million people speak German. May I remind you that you make a living translating films from your beloved English into our unpopular language?”

  “I’m talking about the world market.”

  “You’re talking about the United States.”

  “They set the standard and Americans can’t accept the idea of a sympathetic character who speaks German.”

  “Oskar Schindler—”

  “Schindler had to speak English to be believable! Now that would have been a great opportunity.”

  Walter pictured Klara sitting at her desk overlooking Hackescher Markt through the plate-glass window, squashing out another cigarette butt as if it were a bug.

  “If ninety million people isn’t a big enough potential audiencefor you, I don’t know why I bother,” Klara said. “But if you insist on doing a film, I might actually have something for you.”

  He leaned back into the pillows and closed his eyes.

  “A script came in recently for you from one of the film schools. It wouldn’t pay, of course, but you don’t need the money. It’s good, and if the film turns out it’ll make the rounds of the festivals.”

  “A student film?”

  “The director’s supposed to be quite talented.”

  On screen, the growth pattern of Jack Nicholson’s hair was clearly visible, cropped short against his skull. Coming to a crest at the center of his forehead, his power rails dipped back on either side without any indication of further hair loss. Walter glanced down at Mickey Rourke’s bloated cheeks.

  “I’m not quite desperate enough to make a student film.”

  “You’re not quite desperate enough to do anything. That’s your problem.”

  He got out of bed and picked up one piece of the map off the floor. He recognized the name of one of the streets that crossed the paper, Bernauerstrasse, but could not remember if it had been in East Berlin or West. For that matter, he could not remember if it was in the northern part of the city or to the south. Even after almost twenty years in Berlin, he still got turned around. Maybe it had something to do with being surrounded by the Wall for so many years. It hadn’t mattered much which direction you went in those days, there wasn’t very far to go.

  “No German actor has had a real career in Hollywood since Marlene,” said Klara. “Why hire some unknown Germanguy and deal with all the accent trouble when there are a million American actors who look just like him?”

  “I don’t have an accent when I speak English.”

  She sighed.

  “I can’t get you work in English even if it is your mother tongue.”

  The VCR suddenly released Jack Nicholson from suspended animation and the military tribunal resumed at top volume.

  “Sie können die Wahrheit nicht ertragen,” he yelled. “You can’t handle the truth!”

  “What is that?” Klara asked.

  Walter scrambled for the remote control lost in the folds of the sheets and quickly squeezed Pause. This time, Tom Cruise’s face filled the small screen, eyebrows knit together seriously, jaw clenched.

  “Nothing.”

  “I have to get back to work,” she said, “but here’s something to look forward to: Tom Cruise is coming to Berlin, for the premiere of the movie in December.”

  “Tom Cruise.”

  “You’ve never met him, have you?”

  Walter stared at Tom Cruise’s face on the TV. He had stared at that face so many times, so intensely, that he knew its contours almost better than his own. But the idea of it attached to a warm, three-dimensional body seemed impossible. Through the crack in the curtains he could see the eggplant-colored sky outside, and the misery of the months to come unrolled in his
mind like a carpet dropped carelessly downstairs:the decline of the temperature, the diminishing daylight hours, a terrible, inevitable descent into the hell of the holiday season. The decorations were already up at the bakery. Pretty soon all of Ku’damm would be alight with white lights, and the little Christmas markets would appear all over the city like elfin villages. Then next Sunday, the first Advent, the floodgates would open. Cookie-baking parties and colleagues setting up networks of Secret Santas, gas stations handing out cardboard advent calendars filled with chocolate; waitresses in restaurants in red stocking hats, local Bavarians calling out to him cheerfully, with the greeting God Bless. And in the diminishing December light, as the season picked up momentum, the people around him would retreat inside into their warm little worlds behind closed doors, to their Secret Santas and hymn concerts and their plans to roast goose with their families, opening presents, getting fat together on stollen. He closed his eyes thinking that he would do anything at all to get out of Berlin before Christmas. He had no children, no parents, no siblings, few close friends and Heike hadn’t called all day. He was going to be alone through the holidays. He was going to grow old here alone in this room. Walter pressed his fingers against his temples in a futile effort to stop a sudden, urgent flow of tears. Sobbing into the orange insides of his eyelids then, he had a vision of the holiday season in Los Angeles: free candy canes by the cash registers, plastic decorations on summer-green lawns, poinsettia bushes grown tall as trees, people in flip-flops. Instead of endless Bach, there would be happy holiday songs for everyone on the radio: Frank Sinatra and Patti LaBelle, the Muppets! The democracy of Christmastimein California! The sky was blue there every day, as he remembered it. The sun shone even through the smog, even when it rained. Maybe things would have been different for him, maybe they still could be. He was not a superstitious man. He didn’t believe in God or feng shui. He didn’t throw spilled salt over his left shoulder or read his horoscope or knock wood. But he was desperate now. Like a drowning man grasping at driftwood, he reached out for the one shiny object he saw bobbing on the waves: Tom Cruise was coming to the premiere. Walter decided that it was a sign.