This Must Be the Place

by Anna Winger

  The bright light in the lobby of Walter’s apartment building caught him by surprise, then he saw the American woman from the stoop waiting by the elevator. She was wearing the same trench coat, but clothes underneath it now, and shoes. He was considering an immediate retreat when he heard the humming. It was a familiar tune, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The lobby, a once luxuriously appointed place, had seen better days. The marble steps were worn down in the middle from almost a century of footsteps in exactly the same place, ceiling details were obscured by dust; but the acoustics were perfect. The cavernous space gave the woman’s high-pitched humming the clarity of a violin solo performed in a concert hall. Walter swayed back and forth at the threshold, soothed by the music, wondering if he was imagining things. In his hometown, people in crisis were often comforted by visions of the Virgin Mary in breakfast cereal or dishwater bubbles. If he prayed, he thought, he would have prayed for this. He straightened his jacket, took a few careful steps closer toward her and unpacked his best attempt at a dazzling smile.

  “Guten Abend,” he said. “Good evening.”

  She was lovely. Her nose was long, slightly too large for her fine-boned face. Delicate laughter lines spread out from her deep-set eyes. At work he’d made a private study of how different languages and even accents formed their speakers’ mouths over time: the mouths of the British bent down at the sides, the Italians’ stretched back from the middle, and those of the French curled forward like they were blowing irritated kisses; Germans pulled their mouths together like they were nibbling little seeds between their front teeth. Even if he hadn’t already heard her speak English, he would have known this woman wasn’t German, because her full lips turned up at the corners as if she were smiling inside about a private joke, as only American lips did. She nodded at him and continued to hum, and the desperation he had been feeling moments earlier gave way to high-pitched enthusiasm. This woman came from California, he told himself. She had a tawny-skinned, wholesome look about her that immediately conjured the feeling of someplace warm. A whole life flashed through his mind in Super 8: there she was waddling across the fresh-cut lawn in Pampers and ringlets, giggling in a classroom, dancing at a bonfire beach party, making out with a boyfriend in a VW Cabriolet.

  The elevator opened and he followed her into it, recalling the calm look on her face a few days earlier as she watched the man walk away. Her boyfriend? Her husband? Her brother. The elevator was small and old-fashioned. Once inside, Walter was close enough to smell her hair, or whisper in her ear if he leaned forward, or bury his face in her neck. She rested her eyes on the middle distance between herself and the door, and in his head he followed the tune she was humming like the ball in a karaoke video. He was able to anticipate the upcoming notes and even the lyrics, but still unable to name the song, a pop hit from years ago, the kind that lived on forever at the supermarket. Her version was nice, he thought, the acoustic original pared down to the kind of simple melody hippies used to play on guitars. When the old elevator lurched into its ascent she stopped humming. Then she continued out loud.

  “Forgotten what I started fighting for,” she sang under her breath.

  It was clear she hadn’t noticed that the song slipped out her mouth. When she took a long pause to inhale, he held his breath. They were so close to each other they might have kissed. The elevator creaked slowly past the first floor, then past the second.

  “It’s time to bring this ship into the shore,” she sang, “and throw away the oars. Forever.”

  The next line lingered on Walter’s lips. If this were a musical, he thought, they would break into a duet at the chorus. They would start off a cappella in the elevator, like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. The orchestra would join in as they danced onto the landing, singing together. I can’t fight this feeling anymore! As they twirled down the hallway, the neighbors would stick out their heads, then slam their doors in unison. Walter and the beautiful woman would just laugh, snapping their fingers, swinging their hips. The number would wind down at her front door. Arched back, dramatic kiss. In fact, they were still standing side by side in the elevator, but he grinned at her anyway, and when she saw his smile she stopped singing abruptly, covered her mouth with one hand. She was embarrassed! He wanted to tell her not to be. He wanted to say it was beautiful, but the English words escaped him. Tom Cruise has never made a musical, is what he was thinking. They could talk about that in California. They could develop the project together next year. Walter was still considering whether or not the singing parts should be dubbed into German when the elevator reached the third floor and the woman stepped out.

  6

  Hope woke up late and went down to the end of her street to a Starbucks look-alike called Balzac, where she ordered a cup of coffee. That Balzac had its menu board in English (the unique nomenclature of Starbucks English) and a take-out system that required little contact with its employees meant that she often bought all her meals there, listening to the same collection of hits from the eighties that played on shuffle over the loudspeakers. Today, she had walked in to “Careless Whisper,” followed closely by “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Normally she took her coffee to go and drank it back at the apartment, but after what had happened the night before she determined to stay. She was clearly spending way too much time alone. How long had she been singing out loud? Maybe she’d been doing it on and off for days, on the street and in her German class, in her sleep. She found herself an armchair by the window with her coffee. The night before she had rushed into her apartment from the elevator and done something she rarely did anymore: she called her mother.

  “At least he smiled,” said Hope. “If he hadn’t smiled I wouldn’t have noticed. I might have just gone on singing for days.”

  The song had been stuck in her head for a week: “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” an REO Speedwagon hit from high school that she’d never liked, even when it was popular, but like most of the Top 40 hits from her youth she remembered all the words. She hadn’t heard this particular song for fifteen years, but in Berlin it was on all the time.

  “What about Dave?”

  Dave had come home after she was already asleep and left the house before she got up.

  “He’s busy, Mom. I don’t see him much these days, and since I rarely speak to anyone else, the sound of my own voice is becoming unfamiliar.”

  “After what you’ve been through anyone would be distracted.”

  “Or maybe I’m going crazy.”

  Her mother’s preternaturally positive personality did not allow for a lot of soul-searching. She preferred solution-oriented conversations, which is why Hope had been avoiding her until now.

  “Nonsense. You just need to make some friends there. Actually, you really only need one friend, in my experience. This is what you do: Tomorrow go to the busiest place you can think of—I mean a nice, busy place, not the train station—take a seat and look around. When you see an attractive woman who looks friendly, introduce yourself.”

  “What if she doesn’t speak English?”

  “Everyone speaks English. A nice girlfriend in the neighborhood will do you a world of good.”

  So it was that Hope found herself holding a cup of coffee with both hands and looking around at Balzac for a friend. The median age of the patrons was about twenty-two, presumably due to the university across the street, and she tried to count how many of them were smoking. Too many, so she counted how many were not smoking instead: four, including herself. Germans smoked like they thought it was good for them, she thought. “Uptown Girl” played over the loudspeakers and she watched the students at a table to her left. They were unbelievably young and yet old-fashioned: inexpensive clothes and obvious makeup, big hair, acne. In New York, it had seemed to her that college students were much more sophisticated nowadays. They owned companies already, wore designer clothes, had perfect skin. The students at Balzac reminded her instead of her own college friends years ago, hanging around in lazy groups of fo
ur or five, fixing each other’s makeup. Occasionally, one or the other would burst out into laughter so hysterical that she had to double over completely to recover. Hope drank her coffee and turned to face the tall, curved window stretching around the entire front of the café, like a movie screen, capturing the street corner in action. People blew by in both directions clutching newspapers, briefcases, handbags and groceries, illuminated as if deliberately by pale northern light. A man carrying his small daughter on his shoulders caught her attention. The girl was bundled up in a pink jacket and a hat and asked to be taken down. When she hit the ground running and tripped on the sidewalk, Hope’s entire body jerked forward as if to pick her up, spilling hot coffee on her thighs.

  She winced in pain, but it was the girl’s father who reached for her outside, who dusted off her knees and used the inside of his coat cuff to wipe her tears. Hope forced herself to close her eyes until they were gone.

  She wiped up the spilled coffee with a napkin and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. She didn’t see a friendly-looking woman to pick up anywhere and befriend. But if not here, then where? There were fifteen other students in her German class, but on the first day, when they went around in a circle to give their names and their countries of origin, it had not been lost on her that both past and current enemies of the United States were well represented: Vietnam, Russland, der Irak. To her right had been two men from Saudi Arabien, to her left another from Marokko. She was the only woman in the class with the exception of a very young one from Kuba, married to a German pensioner three times her age. When the introduction circle had arrived at Hope’s place, she had cleared her throat.

  “Ich komme aus New York.”

  The announcement had been followed by a pause in conversation. The teacher nodded sympathetically and the other students looked away, as if she had admitted to a terrible handicap that made them feel disgusted, helpless and guilty all at once. In the days since, they had all settled into regular seats and stayed as far away from her as possible. Since the majority were men from the Middle East and northern Africa, they took the front and shared a single Arabic- German dictionary, the Russians formed a group in the middle row and the two men from Vietnam—brothers, apparently— sat together. She had taken a place at the back with the Cuban teenage bride who dropped out after the first two weeks. These days, she sat alone.

  She pulled her textbook out of her bag and opened it up to the Christmas calendar that was her homework. Much to her parents’ dismay she had not actually celebrated Christmas since she met Dave, but even as a child it had never been her favorite holiday (uncomfortable dress, turkey and stuffing the second time in a month, boring television). She had always preferred Halloween and Easter (trick-or-treating, egg hunts, active holidays with things to do) but the textbook made German Christmas seem interesting. Pictures were laid out along the month of December. There were many more days to celebrate here than she remembered in the United States. One picture showed a pine wreath laid flat and decorated with four large candles. The book said that Christmas trees were only decorated on the evening of the 24th and then with real candles, not electric lights; it said that Sankt Nikolaus came on the 6th to bring children candy, and the Weihnachtsmann came with presents the 24th, although the difference between these two characters was unclear. Both were old men with beards, red hats, big bellies. Her favorite picture was of a girl kneeling down before a shoe filled with candy. The American version of the same picture would have shown one of her own third-grade students, she thought, his or her brightly colored sneaker stuffed with candy bars, the Velcro closures hanging open. Somehow the simple laces of the brown leather German shoe suggested that an idyllic childhood was still possible here, if no longer in New York. She hoped so, because like the rounded edges of phone booths in Paris, or the pink of the Italian newspaper, the German Christmas rituals outlined in her textbook satisfied her expectations of Europe. She was comforted to have found something charming here.

  On her way to class she carefully followed the street signs leading south, marking off the corners she recognized in an effort not to get lost. She had been in Berlin for a month and it had been overcast every day so far, dry and cold. The sky was gray and the buildings were gray. There were so few people on the street, and so few stores, that the streets were similar one to the next and she often got turned around, mistaking north for south or east for west. She was used to Manhattan’s grid. Here, when she got lost, she could not just flag down a yellow cab, because there were no yellow cabs in Berlin, only the occasional curbside group of cream-colored Mercedes waiting for phone calls. So she walked slowly and paid attention. Dave had mentioned that most of the streets in their neighborhood were named after famous educators (he was appealing to her vanity, she thought, but as she had never heard of Mommsen, or Leibniz, or Pestalozzi, the names didn’t stick). She clung to the few she remembered, like Kant, searching out memorable landmarks. At the corner of Kant and Leibniz was a sex shop, its exterior covered with life-size photographs of women in black leather bikinis, carrying whips. The photographs were lit from behind like ads in an airport, so that even in the dark, Hope could see this corner glowing from a few blocks away. Now, as she came around it, a man in a black coat approached her. His hair was cropped short and he wore a small black leather cap.

  “Excuse me,” he started in English, enunciating his words, “do you know where I could find—?”

  “You’re American,” she said, grasping at his familiar accent.

  “No. Well, yes, but I’m giving it up.”

  As he turned his head fully toward her, she noticed that he had only one ear. On the other side of his head were only a hole and a scar. He was tall and she had to look up at him.

  “I’m from L.A. but I’m applying for German citizenship now. I’m finished with the States.”

  “Why?”

  He turned his head again, so that the good ear was aimed her way.

  “Why? Because I don’t want to be liable for their foreign policy.”

  Hope held her handbag close.

  “Whose?”

  “The American government’s.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “As an American citizen you are automatically an ambassador when you go abroad. You’re a target. You’re putting yourself in harm’s way, don’t you know that? Global politics are personal now. It’s all personal.”

  She examined his face, pink in the reflected light of the photographs. That she could recall, the only two people to famously lose an ear were the painter van Gogh and the teenage son of the Getty family who had been kidnapped in Rome in the 1970s. It had been a big story one summer. The kidnappers had sent his ear back to his rich parents when they refused to pay the ransom.

  “I have never lived abroad before,” she said. “I guess I’ve never thought much about how America looks from the outside.”

  “Just be thankful you got out when you did.”

  “Of the United States?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  It was one thing to travel, she thought. It was another to give up being American altogether, which seemed illicit and impossible, like some kind of dirty joke. Even if you lived abroad for the rest of your life, you still had to file a U.S. tax return every year. Dave would have dismissed this guy as a nutcase.

  “How do you know that I got out in time?”

  “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  When Hope tried to picture herself as a member of some other national tribe, only stereotypes came to mind: the French Hope with a beret and cigarette, the Argentinean Hope dancing tango. The idea had nonetheless been introduced. Had she not raged at the American government? How much time had she spent pondering the bewildering fact that it was illegal in the United States to issue a birth certificate and a death certificate on the same day? She had been over the details at the hospital and at city hall. It had all been explained to her, but it still didn’t make any sense. She had received the death certifica
te, the ashes, nothing else. And yet, how could someone die without ever being alive? If a death certificate marked the end of a life, then didn’t that life, however short, deserve validation?

  “Think of this as an opportunity to start again,” said the one-eared man.

  She nodded, because Dave had been saying the same thing to her for weeks but she liked it better coming from a stranger. She wondered if Americans on the streets of foreign cities routinely spoke to one another this way, cutting right to the chase like estranged members of the same screwed-up family. She was late for class but considered his point. The global might be personal now, but how about the other way around? In September, when she came out of her downtown building to see people covered in white powder running for their lives, she had not been entirely surprised to find the outside world finally reflecting her inner chaos. Maybe Berlin was an opportunity to start again. In the photograph shining beside her, a woman in blond cornrows and leather touched her tongue seductively to her upper lip. The man put his hands in his pockets.

  “Anyway,” he said, “do you know where I can find an ATM machine?”

  Hope laughed, because she actually knew the answer to his question, and pointed out the bank at the northwest corner of Savignyplatz.

  As she walked the last few blocks to class, the REO Speedwagon song came back into her head and she sang along quietly under her breath. Even as I wander, I’m keeping you in sight. Maybe it had been so long, that this kind of music was actually cool again, come back in a sudden wave of misguided nostalgia. You’re a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter’s night. Then again, it hadn’t really been cool the first time. It had been popular, inescapable for a while, and then it had disappeared. Maybe it had just moved to Berlin to start over? The young tan couple in the Virgin Islands would have had a good laugh over this possibility, thought Hope, but now she could hardly imagine such a conversation with Dave. She wished she had asked the one-eared man for his phone number. The only other person she could think of was her neighbor from the elevator. He wasn’t the woman in a busy place that her mother told her to look for, but he did smile when she sang. She could track him down and ask him. Maybe the cheesy music of her youth, long given up for dead, had been playing in a loop over the loudspeakers at Balzac every day since the last time she heard it on American radio fifteen years ago. Maybe all those musicians survived and were living on here in Berlin. The image of them all on the plane made her feel almost optimistic: Bonnie Tyler and Bryan Adams and Billy Joel, Cher and Steve Perry all piled into economy class like a summer school glee club trip. Bryan Adams had an acoustic guitar in his lap. Billy Joel was playing air piano against the backs of the seats. The others snapped their fingers and hummed, eyes closed, keeping the beat, rocking and rolling across the Atlantic. The party plane to Berlin, thought Hope. She was there too, of course, in layered hair and braces, her favorite red jacket from high school with the diagonal zipper, lip gloss, while behind them in the distance, smoke was still rising from the ground in New York.