by Anna Winger
“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.
“Wein?”
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 a
utographs. 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.
Although he rarely used it outside of the house, Walter had learned to speak English first. Later on, as a teenager, he picked up vocabulary from song lyrics. Neon lights in the fog, the words rose up to him through the dense rock ballads of the late 1970s and early ’80s. In 1983, he arrived in Hollywoodwith nearly perfect English, but casting directors had trouble looking past his origins. In two years he got only a one-liner bit part as an SS guard in a World War II film. Still, it was a bona fide Hollywood production: quasi-famous principals, elaborate Warsaw ghetto sets, M&M’s at the craft service table separated by color into individual bowls.
“You do not even exist,” he said to a skinny Jewish prisoner, who was played by an Italian-American.
Then he spit. His scene took fourteen takes because his accent was too good.
“Make it sound more German,” the director said. “Think Arnold, c’mon.”
Maybe what Klara said was true and he had never had a chance there, but at the time it felt like a step in the right direction. Maybe things would have been different for him. He would never know. In the end, his time in California was cut short before the film came out in the theaters. He left town too soon to find out what might have happened next.
Walter pulled some paper towels out of a dispenser next to the sink and mopped at his damp face without taking his eyes off the picture. He was still trying to conjure the feeling of the young man sitting before him on a horse. The picture had been taken for an article on up-and-coming stars in a German celebrity magazine. He remembered the shoot, the feeling of the warm horse beneath him and the smell of manure at the farm, as if he were touching it all to his fingertips through very thick gloves; the distance traveled since then felt much longer than twenty years. It had been freezing that day. The cigarette had been added to explain the cloud of breath around his mouth. Drying his hands, Walter counted off the dates in his head. The picture was taken in February 1981, which meant that he had been on Schönes Wochenende for only five months at the time. Acting was still an adventure to him then, not a career. He threw the wad of used paper towels into a bin under the sink, finally seeing himself clearly at nineteen.
“Ich war so glücklich,” he said under his breath. “I was so happy.”
He touched the picture lightly as if he might recapture the sensation through the glass, but it struck him that glücklich, the German translation of the English adjective happy, was also the word for lucky. This conflation of what are considered to be two distinct emotions by Americans had caused him many dubbing problems over the years. Now he pulled apart the German word and reimagined the same statement in English. Not happy. Lucky. That was it: sitting on that warm horse twenty years ago in freezing cold weather, playing it up for the camera, he had felt lucky. It was something he had rarely experienced since.
He left The Wild West without finishing his dinner. He waited until Bodo was distracted by something in the kitchen and paid his bill without saying goodbye. The streets of his neighborhood were quiet: an old woman was walking a little terrier on the block up ahead, shuffling her feet and speaking to it under her breath. In the playground at the corner teenagers lounged over a rusty jungle gym, smoking. Ornate art nouveau façades, built before World War II, switched off every few buildings with the practical concrete apartment blocks built in the 1950s to fill in the bombed-out blanks. Orange light glowed in the windows of other people’s apartments as if to underscore the dark emptiness awaiting him at home. When he’d first moved to Charlottenburg sixteen years earlier, the streets he walked now had been busy with nightlife. But since the inclusion of its eastern half, the city had completely shifted its topography, pushing Charlottenburg to the western fringe, so that he might as well have moved to the suburbs. In 2001, the only reason anyone who was anyone ever came back to the old neighborhood was to eat at The Wild West, and when they ran into Walter there they feigned disbelief that he still lived around the corner. He was sure they laughed about it once he was out of earshot.
“What better place for that relic of the 1980s,” they probably said, “than Charlottenburg?”
Gone were the bars and crowds of his youth, and in their place only hair salons and jewelry stores, women of a certain age who wore tent dresses and dyed their hair bright red, and yuppie families with children. On his way home from Bodo’s, Walter occasionally still saw ghosts of the artists and musicians he’d partied with in the 1980s, but not tonight. At Zwiebelfisch, the pub where he’d spent many a drunk early morning after dancing all night at Dschungel, two old guys sat alone with their beer by the window. At the jazz bar A-Trane, the only local nightclub to survive the change, musicians warmed up before an audience of four. He looked in automatically but continued toward home, pulling his jacket collar up against his neck.
He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and checked for messages but there weren’t any. The display told him only that it was 9:17 P.M. When he’d lived with Heike, the weeks had gone by quickly: Monday to Friday, Friday to Sunday. The past few days now seemed longer to him than the entire two years they were together. Her house keys jingled in his pocket as he walked. Finally liberated from the shackles of his bad attitude, she was probably out at a club in the East with some skinny guy her own age. He pictured a room of young people in I LOVE NY T-shirts, rocking out to show their solidarity with heartbroken widows and children five thousand kilometers away, then stopped at the corner of Schlüterstrasse, dizzy and out of breath. He bent over and inhaled deeply. In a third-floor apartment above his head he could see the silhouettes of a couple getting ready to go to sleep and felt a sudden, urgent longing to join them. He could just curl up and sleep at the foot of their bed, he thought. They could sing to him. He wondered if they knew any American lullabies. His mother’s singing voice had been higher than her speaking voice but clear and pretty. “The river Jordan is deep and wide.” That’s how it went. “Milk and honey on the other side.” By the time the light upstairs switched off and the window went black, tears were burning at the back of Walter’s eyes.
His gaze fixed at street level, he forced himself forward to the next block, where a policeman paced in front of what appeared to be a residential building, hands clasped behind his back. He was the same cop pacing most Friday evenings in this spot, half asleep in his silly green uniform and cap. Only in Germany did the government play down the authority of the police by making them look ridiculous. In that outfit it was hard to imagine this man tackling terrorists or dismantling a bomb. That his very presence was more likely to attract attention to the synagogue hidden behind the front door than protect it was something the city never seemed to consider: it was a matter of pride and principle that Jewish organizations deserved state protection. Walter leaned against a wall and wiped his eyes. The door of the synagogue looked like any other, but it was just a false front, like a city backdrop on a film set. Only once had he ventured close enough to see the freestanding building inside, its stained-glass windows and a small front garden. To be allowed in you had to show identification and register with security, which he had never done. He had only hovered here at the edge of the block, listening closely for the cantor’s melody. He liked to imagine
an old woman standing alone in a cool dark room, singing with her arms out and her eyes closed, but he was unable to picture the congregation. The only local Jews he was aware of were the glamorous Russians who double-parked their cars on Fasanenstrasse while they ran into Gucci, people who surely had something more exciting to do on a Friday night. The very thought of joining the mysterious men and women inside the temple made him feel ashamed. How many of his acquaintances claimed to have had a transformative experience in Israel? How often had he heard someone refer to himself or herself as twelve percent or even five percent Jewish? What did that mean? It was a contemporary German cliché, he thought, to wish for salvation if not merely comfort, or acceptance, from Jews. The cop came back Walter’s way and thrust out his chin, to remind him that he had no business here.
As he headed home reluctantly down Schlüterstrasse, Walter had the eerie feeling he was leaving his last contact with civilization behind. It was cold and dark and few cars came up the street. Glued up on the wall to his left were a slew of posters advertising dance parties in Soviet-cool spaces in the East, abandoned offices of the GDR government or rooms that once housed the airline of the former Czechoslovakia. Heike was probably at one of these parties tonight. The wide shot: her lithe body snapping like a rubber band to a throbbing electronic beat. The close-up: beads of sweat dripping down into the silky hollow between her breasts. The hamburger he’d eaten earlier backed halfway up his throat. The poster at the end of the wall caught his eye because it stood out from the rest in its graphic simplicity. Against a plain black background, a pale woman was holding two fists up high like a champion. The frame cut off just above the nipples and below her cleavage. She was looking out at him from under low-tilted brows, and he walked toward her as the tears came, pressing his face into the smooth, cool paper. Only after he had been crying for a few moments did he notice that the old woman he’d seen up the street was staring at him, muttering to her dog and shaking her head with disapproval. He looked up at the poster he was hugging and realized it was an ad for porn. Above the woman’s head it said, in English, in red capital letters: TIME FOR ACTION! He ran the last few steps home.
