This Must Be the Place

by Anna Winger

  “She has her own trailer,” said the actress, holding up a picture of its interior for everyone to see. “Check this out. She has her own telephone and a bed for her dog.”

  Although there was a small room at the back for costume changes on the Schönes Wochenende set, there were no trailers. The principal actors were expected to change their clothes quickly, in front of everyone else, as if on a beach in Greece. They were expected to wash their own hair and do their own nails. It was cold inside the hangar, even in the summer. The food was lousy.

  “She is the wife of the King. Doesn’t that make her the Queen?”

  Priscilla Presley had met Elvis on an American Army base in Wiesbaden and thus occupied a special place in the collective unconscious, as if the Germans had personally set the unlikely stage for their romance.

  “They got divorced in 1973.”

  “Still, she was his only wife. The mother of his only child.”

  “So she deserves a private trailer with wall-to-wall carpeting?”

  There was much talk among the German television actors about the luxuries afforded their peers across the ocean. Some of them hired language coaches to work on their American accents in hopes of somehow making their way to Hollywood. Walter, who at twenty-one had never been anywhere (not even a Greek beach, let alone Los Angeles), listened but said very little. The truth was that he liked the set of Schönes Wochenende. Sure, it was cold and damp, dark in the winter, but he didn’t know anything else. He was having his face powdered while the guys he knew in high school ran drills in the army or wiped the asses of old people for their civil service.

  “There are more Germans over there than you think. Look at Schwarzenegger: he’s getting into the movies and he hardly speaks English.”

  “He hardly speaks German.”

  “Hell, the first guy ever to win an Academy Award for best actor, in 1929, was German.”

  “I read Emil Jannings’s autobiography. He was born in Brooklyn.”

  “He lied. He was Swiss.”

  “You’re all wrong. He was born in Switzerland, but his mother was German and his father was American. So he was German, sort of, but he was an American citizen from the start.”

  “Lucky bastard.”

  Before the production assistant touched his shoulder and leaned down to whisper in Walter’s ear, the last thing on his mind was the possibility of leaving the show. He was an American citizen from the start, like Emil Jannings, but he had never considered moving to the United States.

  He left the set immediately and went back to the village where he had been raised, a place he had not visited in almost two years. The neighbor who found the body, the same woman who had cooked for Walter and his father in the years after his mother died, had organized a funeral at the local Catholic church. Very few people came; they had no relations left and his father didn’t have many friends. He had died suddenly, of a heart attack, but in retrospect it seemed that he had been dying for ten years already. After his wife’s death he had become increasingly reclusive, and over time had retreated even from his only son. At the funeral, Walter stayed in his pew while the others took Communion. No one was surprised. The village was small and he was its only citizen who had not been baptized or confirmed, the only one who didn’t attend catechism classes in sixth grade or come to school Ash Wednesdays with a cross on his forehead. That a priest should memorialize his father at the end of his life was ironic, as he had been baptized at birth but had never returned to church after his marriage, not even after the death of his wife. But Walter had no alternative ritual to suggest. He had grown up without religion, surrounded by Catholics. This is what you do when people die, he thought, hands folded in his lap as the others crossed themselves and knelt in prayer. He would stay in town only twenty-four hours to deal with the paperwork (there was a small life insurance policy, the neighbors’ daughter was going to buy the house and everything in it). He had only to clear out some personal belongings and his father’s clothes.

  On his way back to the house it occurred to him that he had nowhere left to call home. He looked out at the rolling hills of Bavaria, thick with green in summer, and realized that his father had been his last remaining link. He was alone in the world now, too old to think of himself as an orphan, but too young to lose his anchor all the same. In the absence of family, his career, if you could call it that, was the only thing propelling his life forward, which was a harrowing thought. Thus far he had thought of acting as a lark. He had yet to take a lesson, or cultivate future projects, but he entered his father’s house now with a newfound sense of urgency, determined to get back to the Schönes Wochenende set as quickly as possible. There was coffee gone cold on the kitchen table and dishes from his father’s breakfast in the sink. Walter retrieved a suitcase from the basement, a large, hard object his father had almost never used, and went upstairs to clear out his closet: two suits, worn at the elbows, and one good pair of shoes, a little-used pair of sneakers, and five shirts, their collars frayed, underwear, handkerchiefs, socks. In the back pocket of a pair of pants draped over a chair by the bed he found his father’s wallet, which suggested that his father had not even gotten dressed the day he died, a Saturday, although the time of death was in the early afternoon. When his mother was alive his father had always dressed for work before breakfast. He had been a careful, accurate man. The picture of him keeling over in the kitchen in his pajamas in the middle of the day was so undignified that Walter had to sit down on the bed to absorb it, clutching the wallet to his chest. Then he went through it. He carefully placed his father’s driver’s license and identification card, twenty-three marks, nineteen pfennig and a dog-eared piece of paper on the bed. The eight-year-old picture on the license was evidence of his father’s once robust appearance. In recent years his blond hair had thinned and gone gray at the edges. His face had become heavily lined from smoking cigarettes. But in his youth he had been tall and fit, pale, typically German, his mother used to point out, not unkindly, in contrast to their son, whose dark hair and smaller physique resembled her own. Walter placed the license in his own wallet and left the money on the bed. Folded up tightly in the otherwise empty wallet was a paper on which were written the numbers of his father’s doctor, his health insurance, the switchboard at his office. Another name was scrawled at the bottom, with part of an address: Roth, Walter and Vera. Springtime Estates. Irvine, California. Walter stared at this information for a long time. He rubbed one finger over the name. How old was this piece of paper? His father had always worked for the same company, presumably never changed his insurance plan. Beads of sweat gathered at his temples and dripped down into the collar of his shirt. If moments earlier he had planned to return as soon as possible to the set of Schönes Wochenende, now another destination presented itself. The clue was flimsy, at best, but it was something. His mind raced. He had an American passport. Klara could send him his reel. Hans, his character on the show, could go into the army, or take an extended vacation; they could kill him off. Walter would work in Hollywood. It was close enough, he could check things out. Why not? Emil Jannings was born in Switzerland and he won an Academy Award! Walter refolded the piece of paper carefully and put it in his pocket.

  9

  The Saturday morning after Heike left, Walter threw open the curtains and turned on the radio. AC/DC blasted into the room as he studied the broken map still laid out on the floor. So far he had managed to fit together four pieces of about twenty-five, composing one small section of Wedding and Moabit, the northern edge of Tiergarten. Because each piece was printed on both sides it would have been impossible to lay out the whole city flat, and he never knew which side of each piece to try first. The fact that there were still two of everything left over from the former division made things particularly difficult: two zoos, two big airports, two TV towers, three opera houses. If he had two copies of each piece of the map, he thought, it would be much easier to put the city back together. But even then, he would have had been lim
ited by his own bad geography.

  He opened the first of the closets and pulled out a fuzzy lavender beret, a sealskin thrift-store coat with a torn collar, a pair of tights balled up behind his dress shoes, and two pairs of high-heeled sandals, the left heel worn down in exactly the same place. Comparing the two, Walter was confident he would recognize a shoe of Heike’s if he found it lazing around by itself in the middle of a vast desert. He filled up one plastic garbage bag and then another. He searched through every cupboard, drawer, dark corner and long-forgotten crevice of his apartment: underwear that had been dyed blue in the laundry, a slip with a built-in bra, a black dress made of some synthetic, elastic material, a ruffled, high-collar blouse with flowers for buttons, a cashmere cardigan with holes in both elbows, four ashtrays and six lipsticks, all of them nearly the same bright shade of red. He danced through the apartment to the music on the radio. He bit his bottom lip, pumped his fist, banged his head in the air and let it guide him through the catharsis. First the bedroom, then the back bedroom that he used as an office, then the living room, the dining room, the master bathroom and finally the guest bathroom he never went into. Discovering a half-rusted rhinestone necklace in a basket by the toilet, he remembered that Bodo had once described Heike’s carefully orchestrated look as that of a silent-film starlet after a really bad night on the town. As he said it, Bodo had even gotten up from the table to imitate her sexy, floppy walk, twisting an imaginary strand of hair with one finger and teetering on his tiptoes, as if in heels that were a bit too high. That Heike herself had laughed enthusiastically at this impersonation made Walter cringe in retrospect. Even in her private life she was always auditioning for the role of a lifetime. He released the rhinestone necklace into the third of the plastic bags and washed his hands.

  On the way back from the charity collection box at the end of his street, he lingered in the lobby, hoping for a glimpse of his neighbor. He pressed the elevator button and hummed their song to himself, almost giddy, as if something far more intimate had taken place. This American blonde, with the shy, surprised look on her face, was about as different from Heike as two young women living in the same Berlin building could be, and the possibility of others like her waiting for him in California gave him hope, but when he returned to his apartment he checked the answering machine anyway. No messages. It was just like Heike to return the keys, but leave a trail of ratty, half-forgotten things in the apartment so she’d have an excuse to come back when she felt like it, he thought. No doubt she assumed her things would still be there, just as he would be, right where she left them. He walked away from the answering machine and concentrated on the comforting image of her ringing his doorbell on Christmas Eve, looking up at his dark windows and shivering away the winter evening on the doorstep without her thrift-store coat. He would be long gone by then. In his bedroom he pulled out a suitcase from under the bed and considered the season in Southern California. At night, he’d need a light sweater and jeans, but during the day the Santa Ana winds might blow in off the desert, bringing weather warm enough for T-shirts and shorts. He’d be exercising again, so he’d need running shoes. A bathing suit and sunglasses, of course. He began to take these things out of drawers.

  When the doorbell rang, he almost didn’t recognize the sound. It had been years since someone rang the interior bell to his apartment rather than the buzzer on the street. He left the half-packed suitcase on the bed and closed the bedroom door to conceal the mess he’d made. Still holding a dusty tube of sunscreen leftover from a trip he’d taken once to Lanzarote, he padded to the front door and stopped short behind it. There was no peephole to look through, but he knew it was Heike. One of the neighbors would have let her in. He breathed quietly, one hand on the doorknob, contemplating his housecleaning outfit. The holes in his socks, the baggy sweatpants. He looked like he’d been sulking in bed since she left. This was hardly the heroic scenario he’d hoped for. What would Tom do? Walter recalled the blowout with his wife in The Firm. They were outside by the swing set, the only place where bugs couldn’t trace the things they said. Tom had cheated on her, he had dragged her into this terrible mess, but he didn’t run away. No, he apologized. He came clean and came up with a plan to save the day and his marriage in the process. Walter rubbed his thumb against the brass doorknob without turning it. Tom Cruise never shied away from confrontation. Almost every film climaxed with a moment in which he faced his anger, his guilt, vulnerability, even shame, head-on. Walter rested his forehead against the front door.

  He was preparing his reconciliation speech when a hand knocked softly on the wood a few centimeters away.

  “Hel-lo-o?”

  American English. A twang gave the second syllable a long extra beat. Walter pulled his head back abruptly and opened the door to find the woman from the night before holding two paper cups of coffee-to-go in front of her hands like exercise weights.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  She had her hair pulled up and back in a ponytail.

  “I wanted to introduce myself,” she said. “I would have baked a pie or something but I don’t have any pans. My things are still on their way over here from New York City on a boat. Or maybe they’re sitting in a warehouse somewhere in Hamburg already, I’m not sure. I’ve been told that they’re not letting anything through customs these days. So this is the best I could do.”

  Walter understood everything she said but watched her, dumbstruck. She handed him one of the cups.

  “It’s good coffee,” she assured him. “Maybe we can imagine a pie to go with it.”

  He had been fiddling nervously with the tube of sunscreen and now he dropped it to accept the cup. When they both bent down to pick it up, coffee spilled over the plastic lid.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  The words came, finally.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Please come in. Let’s imagine a pie.”

  It was hard for Walter to remember the last time he had had a visitor in the middle of the day. His recent experiences as a host were limited to occasionally giving colleagues a ride home in his car, so he looked around his apartment as if it belonged to someone else. What to do with her? The living room furniture was still obscured by a blanket of receipts from the tax audit six months ago.

  “Do you take milk?”

  He led her into the kitchen.

  “I should have introduced myself the other night,” she said when they were sitting down at the kitchen table. “I’m Hope.”

  “Hope.” Walter smiled. “You have a very lovely singing voice.”

  “I was singing.”

  “Humming, too.”

  “How embarrassing. You know, since I got here I’ve been alone all the time. Sometimes I go the whole day without speaking to anyone at all.”

  “It was nice. Really.”

  “Well, I need to make some friends. I thought I could start with you.”

  “I’m honored. I’m Walter, by the way.”

  “I know,” she said. “Walter Baum. I described you to the super.”

  “The super speaks English?”

  “I showed him.” She used both hands to mime a smooth head, a stocky physique, a big smile. “He pointed out your door.”

  The shape she traced in the air was the most flattering description of himself that Walter had encountered in a long time. He wanted to step into it, conform to its outlines and live up to her good impression. He hadn’t had a proper conversation in English with another person since he last lived in California. There had been short, occasional exchanges with foreign taxi drivers or the waitstaff at beach hotels, but real conversation in his mother tongue was something he experienced only in his imagination, in the elaborate dialogue with ghosts from his past that he had reworked obsessively over the years, as if he might improve the course of history if he could get the syntax right.

  Hope reached back to tighten her ponytail, seemed to catch herself fidgeting and returned her hands to her lap.

  “
I’m taking a German class,” she said. “But since the lyrics to songs playing in stores and cafés are always in English, I hear them more clearly than anything else and they get stuck in my head. Songs I haven’t heard since high school.”

  “REO Speedwagon,” said Walter, finally remembering the name. “‘I Can’t Fight This Feeling.’ Was that 1984?”

  “Exactly. You know, most days I can’t remember where I put my keys but I can remember every word to every dumb song on the American Top 40 between about 1977 and 1985. I think I could come up with all the words to ‘Wham! Rap’ if someone held a gun to my head.”

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Walter, savoring the play on her name. “Hope.”

  When she smiled, the muscles in her face contracted and relaxed like an intricate origami. He did the music math. The songs she listened to in high school fell into a brief window of music sandwiched between the great, groovy rock ’n’ roll of his own adolescence in the late 1970s and the mainstream revival of the Grateful Dead that preceded grunge. That brief window was exactly the period of time when Walter was living in Los Angeles. In fact, George Michael’s voice still aroused in him the vaguely carsick sensation of beingstuck in a morning traffic jam on the 405 South. That made her only a few years younger than he was. Thirty-five, maybe. He felt pleased with himself; he had never dated a woman old enough to remember REO Speedwagon, let alone dislike them.

  He was warming up to the sound of his own English. His accent was still good and the words came more easily already. He spoke faster and louder than he normally did in German, felt looser and more dramatic. He reached over and touched her arm for emphasis, hoping that he would have the chance to go out with her in public. People overhearing their conversation would assume that they were just another American couple visiting town, he thought. He wondered if her sweet, southern-sounding twang was contagious. If he spent enough time with her, he might learn to speak English like Elvis.