by Anna Winger
“It looks fine to me. I just had never given any thought to this question before. Apparently the English tuck in their sheets and blankets. The Swedes use separate comforters for each person, overlapping in the middle. The Austrians fold back their duvets into little poufs at the bottom of the bed that look like meringue. It’s a good metaphor for the chaos of the European Union, isn’t it?”
“You don’t think the European Union is a good idea?”
“It’s a good idea, but the reality is that people do not give up their national identities so easily. The Germans are the most enthusiastic members of the EU only because they want to be linked to something other than the Holocaust.”
“What about the euro?”
“It goes into effect on January first.”
“Are you sad to lose the deutschmark?”
“I don’t care what money we use. I am already living in the afterlife. The money I knew as a child disappeared when East Germany was absorbed into the West in 1990. The country I come from no longer exists. I never expected any of that to happen, could never have imagined it, but it did. So whatever happens next is a surprise, you know? I try to embrace it.”
“Do you miss the way things used to be?”
“Even if I did, it would be impossible to go back for a visit. I still live in the neighborhood where I grew up, but everything is different there now. The people, the products, the politics, the value system. It’s a whole new world.”
Hope pictured the scenes from New York that she watched on the news every day: people rendered speechless with pain, sick from the contaminated air, terrified to open their mail. She wondered if she would ever be able to go back to the place she had known as home there.
“Have you ever seen that movie from the eighties, Buckaroo Banzai?” Orson asked her.
“The time-traveling superhero.”
“Remember his motto?”
She shook her head.
“Wherever you go, there you are.” He smiled. “I consider myself a citizen of the world.”
Hope led him down the hallway and held open the door to the bathroom. Its glorious expanse of white tiles looked especially bright.
“You can definitely fit your crew in here,” she said.
“Amazing. I’ll have to write in a bathtub scene. How did you find this place, through a broker?”
“My husband found it. I think there was a broker.”
“He must have wet his pants.”
“My husband or the broker?”
“The broker. The real estate market here is totally depressed. I mean, this is a city built for five million people that currently has a population of only three and a half because so many people left for the West after the Wall came down. They can’t give places away. Germans know that, so they haggle and bitch, but when someone from New York shows up, it’s their big chance to cash in. Any price he quoted would have seemed cheap to your husband, compared to what a place like this would cost there, right?”
“That’s true.”
“The funny thing is that every Berlin real estate agent carries a Louis Vuitton briefcase and drives a nice car,” he said. “It’s absurd. They probably make two sales a year, but they act so superior. It’s as if they all read the same self-help book.”
He had on something of a uniform himself, thought Hope. Textbook renegade filmmaker. His leather pants were molded to his legs as if he hadn’t taken them off in six months. The look was universal, in no way distinctly German or even European, and she was struck by how he might easily be an American if she didn’t hear his accent. Walter was fifteen years older, and yet for all his interest in the United States he was utterly German in style and effect. His cleanliness, the hovering length and tighter cut of his pants, the confidence with which he ordered wine in a restaurant. The summer she traveled around Europe with her parents she had found the local teenagers completely exotic hothouse flowers cultivated on a strange and careful planet. On and off hot trains all over the continent, Hope and her parents came apart at the seams while their European counterparts suffered the heat gracefully, not a hair out of place. With Orson’s generation you could hardly tell the difference, she thought. Everyone was American, more or less. It was too bad.
“Maybe it helps,” she said sympathetically. “Maybe carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase helps them believe in themselves despite the odds.”
He turned around in the hallway and looked at her.
“You’re too nice.”
She shrugged. “I used to teach third grade.”
“But you don’t get it. They’re shooting themselves in the foot. They carry the briefcase as if to say, I don’t need your business. In other words, I don’t care about your needs. It’s a defensive measure designed to preempt the customer’s rejection. Typically German. Germans can’t sell anything. It has to do with our history, of course.”
He brought both hands to his face and framed the hallway through a rectangle of thumbs and forefingers.
“One of my friends recently went to see a house with his wife,” he said. “It was old-fashioned, built before the war and restored after the Wall came down; a nice place with a garden. But when they tried to negotiate the rent, the broker said that the previous inhabitants had been a mother and her adult son, and that the son had shot the mother with a hunting rifle while he was cleaning it. The charges were dropped, the broker said, but the fact remained that a murder had taken place there and he just wanted to make sure they knew that in advance, before they rented it.”
They entered the empty nursery at the back of the apartment.It was cold in there. Hope wrapped both hands around her body and held her elbows to warm herself up. She looked up at the sweet animals in the ceiling.
“Did they take the house?”
“Nope.”
“I can understand that. I wouldn’t want to live in a house where somebody died.”
Orson laughed. “This is Berlin, Hope. If you start worrying about the ghosts around here, you’ll never sleep again. I mean, who do you think lived in this apartment before the war? A beautiful apartment like this, in Charlottenburg? Where do you think they are now? All the real estate is haunted.”
The sheep on the ceiling grazed near the light socket. The horse stared back at her. Hope was no more able to conjure an image of children playing in this blank white room than the unbearable possibility of what had happened to them.
“It’s hard to imagine anything bad ever happening here.”
“Because bad things don’t happen to rich people?”
“Maybe. Maybe because I can’t imagine that anyone even lived here before me. I know this is an old apartment, but the walls are so white and perfect. It seems completely new.”
“Americans are the greatest customers in the world. You’re so easily sold.”
He had been facing her, standing in the middle of the room, and now he walked to the nearest wall by the window and ran his hand over it as if feeling for the latch of a secret door.
“What are you doing?”
She took a step toward him. His finger moved vertically and then across the wall from side to side, as if drawing boxes on the plaster.
“I’m just trying to prove a point. Come here.”
His finger was pink and slim, the nail bitten ragged. At the point in the wall where it rested was a nearly invisible seam, where one sheet of paper appeared to have been glued against another. The seam ran from the ceiling to the floor.
“White Rauhfasertapete,” said Orson. “It means rough, textured wallpaper. It’s a special German invention. Looks like plaster at a distance. It’s a faster and much cheaper way to cover things up.”
“Is it all over my apartment?”
“Of course. It’s all over the walls of every apartment in Berlin. When one tenant leaves, the owner just wallpapers over his mistakes and starts again with the next one. Check this out.”
With what was left of the nail on his finger, he picked at the seam until he was able t
o lift the edge, then quickly pulled away a chunk of it about the size of a quarter to reveal a glimpse of bright orange wallpaper underneath it.
“What is that?”
“The good taste of the people who lived here before you did, obviously.”
“They left up the old wallpaper?”
“God knows how many layers there are underneath. That’s my point.”
“That’s disgusting,”
Up close, it smelled of old smoke, she thought. She could practically hear it exhaling through the hole in the white top layer. Long, sour breaths held in for years. Then she realized it was Orson she smelled. His arm was almost touching hers, as if they were trapped together in a telephone booth at a bar. Did they still have telephone booths in bars, or anywhere else anymore? She stepped back trying to remember the last time she had actually been in a proper bar in any city.
“Don’t worry, the crew can fix the hole when we’re finished,” said Orson. “Along with everything else we move around. We’ll leave the place looking exactly as we found it.”
When he turned to make a phone call, Hope stared at the orange spot. From a few feet away it was hard to tell if it lay on top of the white wallpaper, like a stain, or was actually a hole, sucking the brightness of the room in toward it. But when she touched it, she could feel its depth against her fingers, and was struck by the sense of reaching through a portal, as if, when her finger pushed into the orange wallpaper, it might pull her hand with it, her arm, the rest of her. She looked up at the white wall, stretching to the ceiling, that only moments earlier had seemed flat and lifeless, but now rippled with the possibility of layers beneath it. When she was a child, her family had moved into a house that had previously belonged to visiting professors from France. The house had a big backyard, in which she found a bathtub, buried under a beech tree. Actually, she found only the lip of a bathtub, a round of white porcelain rough with age, peeking through the undergrowth. She had begged to dig up the rest of it. Her parents had made a lot of jokes about the dead body that might be buried in it (Those crazy French people, ha ha ha), but had insisted that she leave it where it was. In the end they planted a flower bed, and as the years passed, the bathtub was no longer visible at all. With her fingernail Hope picked at one side of the hole in the wallpaper, then another, lifting the edge. Suddenly she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her day: if she could no longer ride the subway, she would stay right here in this room and see where it went.
18
Saturday morning Walter awoke early to surprise Hope with a real American breakfast. The cold spreads of sliced ham, cheese and bread served in Germany couldn’t compete with the pancakes and scrambled eggs his mother had made when he was a child. He was the only person in the dark morning on Goethestrasse, but when he reached the market at Karl-August-Platz, it was crowded. Bare lightbulbs illuminated piles of vegetables and fruit, whole wheat bread and pastries, meat, eggs and seasonal arrangements of holly, mistletoe and myrrh. The Christmas people had colonized the western edge of the square selling trees, wreaths, handmade wooden ornaments and boiling vats of Glühwein, the telltale stench of cinnamon in the air. Customers were already drinking it for breakfast. Walter stayed on the opposite side of the market, making his way slowly between the stalls. He bought eggs from a Brandenburg farm and juicing oranges from Central America. Holding his shopping bag above his head to protect the eggs, he searched for real maple syrup. He thought he heard someone calling his name, but it had been a long time since a fan chased him down. When he heard it again, he looked back over his shoulder.
“Walter! How’re you doing?”
Stuffed into a dark blue parka, Dave was panting like a dog. “Can you believe this many people get up early on Saturday morning? I came over to pick up a Christmas tree for Hope. I want to decorate it and everything before she wakes up.”
Walter stared at him. “I thought you were in Poland.”
“I came home to surprise her for the weekend. I got in late last night. Thanks for taking such good care of her this week. Sounds like you’ve been showing her a good time. She said Orson, you know, your friend, is really nice too.”
Dave winked as he had the last time they’d met. Like Bodo, he had a small yellow ribbon attached to the left breast of his jacket.
“Are you done with your shopping?”
Walter looked down at the precious ingredients packed into his bag. His Saturday with Hope had just walked away from him.
“I guess so.”
“Could you help me carry the Christmas tree home?”
On the other side of the church, a forest of pine trees had been cut down, tied up and stacked ten deep against the wall.
“What is the ribbon for?”
“Oh, that, yeah. It’s a symbol to support the American troops. The Poles love the United States. They’re big supporters of the war so the ribbon’s good for business. I just wear it when I’m over there. I forgot to take it off.”
Dave’s hands struggled with the tiny safety pin.
“Smells great here, doesn’t it?” He inhaled deeply. “I love the smell of pine. Christmas really feels like Christmas in Germany.”
Surprised, Walter started to ask him a question then re-phrased it as a statement.
“Hope said you were Jewish.”
“I am. This is all folklore to me. But Hope seems really interested in it, so tonight I’m going to take her over to the Weihnachtsmarkt on Alexanderplatz. Help her get into the culture.”
“That’s not culture, it’s business.”
Dave chuckled. “Where we come from culture is business. Anyway I’m hoping it’ll cheer her up. She’s been through a lot this year. I don’t know how much she told you.”
Walter hated the thought of Hope being subjected to the hell of the Alexanderplatz Christmas market: drunk teenagers, fried food, the stench of old beer; but the suggestion that he didn’t know what she was going through made him furious. Dave was the one who was out of the loop.
“I know about what happened in New York.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“She told you about the baby?”
Walter set down the bag of groceries he’d been carrying at his feet.
“The baby?”
“We lost a baby last summer, right before I started this job. The plan was for Hope take a few years off from work while it was little. We thought Berlin was a good place to do that. But there were complications.”
Walter nodded his head automatically. He could see shapes and colors, the idea of a baby.
“Complications. She didn’t tell me.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. After it happened, she just went to bed and didn’t get up. She refused to come with me in July when I started this job. In fact, if it weren’t for what happened in September, I don’t think she would have come here at all.”
He rubbed his hands together. Asleep, thought Walter. Hope had been asleep when the buildings were hit, asleep when they fell, asleep all summer, afraid to wake up. He looked up at the red brick church steeple. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“It’s a relief to be back in Berlin,” said Dave. “Things can get pretty bleak over on the other side of the border.”
“Especially for—” Walter paused. “For you. I mean, living in West Berlin in the eighties we felt like anti-Semitism had been banished more or less completely. Then the Wall came down, and a whole new world of it opened up a hundred fifty kilometers away from here.”
“But I have the opportunity to make a different impression. I’m working in the middle of nowhere and there is certainly a lot of ignorance there, but we have to start somewhere. Has Hope told you about my work? Probably not, huh? She doesn’t know a lot about it.”
Asleep. Walter thought he might cry. Dave pulled a tree out from the thicket and paid for it. They moved slowly, Dave with the trunk in hand, Walter bringing up the rear.
“I’m doing a sustainable development proj
ect in an agricultural area about an hour east of Frankfurt Oder. I was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador in the early nineties; we set up weaving cooperatives among women in communities where farming was no longer profitable. We’re applying the same model here.”
Walter vaguely remembered Ecuadorians selling colorful sweaters in the subway. He had had one; it smelled like sheep. He pictured a group of doe-eyed Polish women, cigarettes balanced between the slim fingers that held their knitting needles, bare legs crossed under skeins of thick, itchy wool.
“Christmas is awesome in Ecuador,” said Dave. “By the way.”
“Weaving cooperatives.”
“Not here. Not exactly. But something like that. I’m trying out a pretty radical new idea of mine, actually.”
“Great.”
“The truth is that I’m dying to talk about it, but it’s top secret.”
“That’s fine.”
“Not top secret, really, it’s just that I don’t want Hope to know yet. It might upset her.”
They came to a standstill in the middle of the sidewalk. The tree was heavy.
“You don’t have to tell me anything. Really.”
“No, no. It’s okay. Here’s the scoop. Instead of knitting sweaters, they make videos.”
“Who watches Polish videos? No one even watches German movies.”
“They’re porn videos.”
Dave put down his end of the tree and held up one hand.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s all totally kosher, believe me. The videos have no sex in them, just naked women wrestling. You watched one of our ads the other night.”
“Time for Action?”
“Yes! You have to remember that the women were prostitutes before. They were regularly exposed to AIDS and other venereal diseases, violence. They had abusive pimps, German johns who harassed them. Now they’re off the street. They act in and direct the videos themselves. It’s an all-female operation. We provide the seed money and equipment. We launched the original ad campaign. But the rest is up to them and the initial response has been great. I think the project will be self-sustaining by next summer. We’re planning franchises all over the Eastern bloc.” Dave raised his eyebrows, his chest inflated with self-importance, and sighed. “We’re saving people’s lives here, Walter. It’s important stuff.”
