by Anna Winger
In the grand tradition of English-language names around West Berlin left over from the Army occupation (The John F. Kennedy School, Institute and Friendship Center; the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Travel Agency, Riding Club and Nursery School; the Cruise-In Diner, the British-American Lifestyle Shop), Bodo’s restaurant was called The Wild West. Its terrace spread around the corner of Knesebeckstrasse and Grolmanstrasse like a fan, facing the garden on Savignyplatz. In the summer its patrons sat outside and admired the view, in the winter they retreated to the yellow walls of the interior dining room. Walter had come up with the name the first time he met Bodo, when they were working together on Top Gun and the wall was still up in 1986. Bodo had at that time an incipient career as the voices of both Anthony Edwards and River Phoenix.
“I’m going to open my own restaurant,” he told Walter between takes. “Only open for dinner so I can sleep late. Make all my money on wine.”
“Here?”
“Why not? You don’t think the front line of the Cold War is a good place to open a restaurant?”
“I like to think of this as the last frontier of democracy.”
Bodo smiled. “Even cowboys have to eat.”
As the sound technicians cued the next scene, he threw his empty paper coffee cup toward a garbage can in the corner and made the basket easily. Manifest destiny, thought Walter.
“The Wild West,” he said. “You should call it that.”
By the summer of 1989, Bodo had enough money to open his doors. Although it was only four months before the Wall came down, no one in West Berlin could have foreseen the radical changes on the immediate horizon. In July, the restaurant’s name and American comfort food menu and the rustic touches, like the ranch-style wooden fence around the outer edge of the front terrace, still made sense. The Wild West opened in July and was immediately popular with the actors, directors and film technicians in Bodo’s professional circle. By 2001, when most of the other restaurants, galleries and clothing shops had closed up and moved east, abandoning Savignyplatz for the inexpensive real estate now available on the other side of the Wall, The Wild West remained, a cozy relic of stability in an ever-morphing city.
Emboldened by his conversation with Klara, Walter got out of bed and went down to the restaurant for dinner. Bodo quickly came to greet him across the room. He still looked exactly the same as he had in 1986, like a welterweight boxer, blond and fit, light on his feet.
“Look who’s here,” he called out.
Walter allowed himself to be embraced and climbed onto a stool at the bar that extended across the left-hand side of the restaurant. Elton John crowed over the ceiling speakers. Bodo had a small yellow ribbon attached to his shirt collar with a safety pin. He leaned his back against the wooden counter.
“Let me buy you a drink.”
Walter requested a Weissbier. “What’s with the ribbon?”
“Showing my support for the troops.”
“The American troops?”
“Saved our asses once upon a time, didn’t they? My mother never stopped talking about the airlift.”
When the Soviets cut off road access for nine months in 1948, the American Army delivered packages of food to the starving citizens of West Berlin in planes. Although in fact the planes had landed at Tempelhof airport, Walter had always imagined the food literally falling from the sky: candy into the mouths of children, people standing all over the city with their arms outstretched. He pictured himself waiting in the rubble along Ku’damm, looking up at the heavens. When his beer came, he drank half of it down in one gulp.
“Heike left me.”
Bodo nodded.
“She came in last night and gave me these to give to you.” He reached over the bar and pulled out a ring of house keys. “Are you okay?”
The keys were cold against the palm of Walter’s hand. Many questions presented themselves simultaneously. What did she say? Who was she with? How did she look? Where is she now? He asked none of them. Instead he pushed his empty beer glass toward the bartender, who refilled it and handed it to Bodo, who carried it over to a table out of earshot by the window. They both sat down.
“I’m going to California,” he said with finality, as if he had already bought the tickets and packed his bags.
“Going to California?”
In heavily accented English, Bodo sang the title of the Led Zeppelin song, badly. Walter moved around the silver-ware set at his place. They were exactly the same age, old enough to remember playing air guitar to that song when it first came out.
“When?”
“Soon.”
Walter sipped his second beer. A waiter came and he ordered a hamburger.
“Because of Heike?”
“Because a good opportunity just came up and anyway it’s time for a change.”
He was hesitant to get into details because the rhythm of his friendship with Bodo had long been established: Bodo was the one with the big ideas and Walter was the listener. Bodo took action while Walter plodded predictably forward like a pilgrim toward what felt like an increasingly ephemeral destination. In the fifteen years they’d known each other, Bodo had achieved impressive notoriety as the voice of River Phoenix, gotten married, retired from dubbing on the heels of Phoenix’s dramatic death from a drug overdose, had two children and refused to come out of retirement when Anthony Edwards’s career took off in Germany with the TV show ER, graciously offering the part to a younger, less experienced actor who had since made a great deal of money doing voice-overs for a derivative, safety-oriented pharmaceutical campaign (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”). Throughout, he had maintained a successful restaurant in West Berlin despite the fact that everyone else had moved to Mitte. Walter, meanwhile, had been living in the same rental apartment he took over from a friend in the summer of 1985 when he returned from his first, failed stint in California. He had been doing Tom Cruise since early 1986, had had a series of unsuccessful relationships, gained fifteen kilos, lost his hair, kept his considerable earnings in a simple savings account that accrued a paltry floating interest rate of 1.5 to 3 percent a year and had eaten almost the same meal, at the same restaurant, almost every night since it opened. Over the years, Bodo had suggested endless possibilities to Walter: summerhouses on the Baltic Sea, new-economy investments, Pan-Asian restaurants and other explorations into the world of ethnic cuisine. Walter had never, on his own, offered up a plan like moving to another country, in particular the very country where they both knew he’d lost his way once.
The confidence he had felt when he was alone with Tom Cruise at home on Replay was fading now like a daydream.
“What kind of opportunity would take you, of all places, back to California?”
Walter looked into his beer for support.
“In December, Tom Cruise is coming to Berlin for the premiere of the film I start next week, so I’m going to talk to him about getting started in Hollywood.” The plan solidified in his mind as he spoke of it aloud. “He’s a producer now. Maybe he can use me for something. Otherwise he can introduce me around. He has connections to the right people.”
“I’m sure he’s only coming here now to lend his celebrity to the cause.”
“What cause?”
“Scientology isn’t recognized as a religion here. They’ve been lobbying to receive church tax status.”
“I’m not interested in religion. You know that. That’s his private business.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why should he help you?”
“Sixteen percent of his box office comes from the German-language screenings. Do you know how much that is, total, since 1986?”
“No.”
“Three hundred and twenty-eight million dollars, give or take.”
“You’ve already been paid for your work.”
“It’s not about the money. I want to work again as a real actor. Somewhere else, somewhere I don’t have to deal with everyone remembering me
from before. Look, I’m still talented. I just need the right project.” He realized that this last statement sounded particularly pathetic, but strained to keep his confidence afloat. “I’m not some crazy, delusional fan. Tom and I have a professional relationship. I feel like I know him. I’m sure he’ll help me out.”
Bodo motioned to the bartender for a cigarette.
“Everybody feels like they know Tom Cruise. It’s his job to make us feel that way, isn’t it? It isn’t real. He isn’t real.”
Only recently Walter had been thinking the same thing.
“Of course he’s real,” he said now. “Look beyond the celebrity thing. He’s just a guy like you or me.”
“People that famous are not regular guys.”
“I know a thing or two about celebrity, Bodo. I’ve been there, you know. I never stopped being myself.”
“What, during Schönes Wochenende?” Bodo smoked, considering Walter’s head as if it were a piece of fruit whose edibility was in question.
“I realize that you’re going through a tough time,” he said after a while.
“That’s really not the point.”
“Okay, then: I respect that you have a professional relationship with him. But owing to that relationship, he cannot take you to California, because he needs you to stay here and do his German voice, right?”
Walter’s hamburger arrived.
“But even if that weren’t the case,” said Bodo, “what makes you think you’re going to meet him when he comes to the premiere? What makes you think he’s even aware of you at all?”
Walter silently fished bits of bun from his teeth with his tongue. In sixteen years this thought had never crossed his mind. Of course Tom Cruise was aware of him, of course he knew his films were regularly dubbed into German, right? Bodo dropped his voice now to a much lower register.
“Dubbing is behind-the-scenes work, man,” he said. “In Germany it’s a big deal to be doing the voice for a box office star. Around those moles at Deutsche Synchron you get credit for that sixteen percent. I won’t argue with that, it’s an impressive statistic. But when Tom Cruise comes to town, it’s his show. No one is going to say, ‘Hey Tom, here’s the man responsible for all those hits in Germany.’ They’re going to keep you as far away from him as possible. Remember that story you told me about Disneyland? About that guy you worked with there, the one that played the suited character. Goofy?”
Walter put down the burger. He wished he had never told Bodo that he’d worked at Disneyland when he lived in California. His year as Prince Charming, a face character in the Cinderella Panorama, was something he tried to forget. Given the chance, he’d happily erase everything that happened that year from memory, but because he’d told Bodo about Disneyland during a drunken late night long ago he was stuck with it, like a stubborn stain on a favorite shirt.
“What story?”
“About the family who were led out the back by mistake and saw the actor playing Goofy with his head off, smoking a cigarette. You told me they sued Disneyland for emotional distress because their kids were so upset to learn that Goofy wasn’t real.”
“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.”
