by Anna Winger
She liked the idea that each layer had been chosen by a different mother to decorate the nursery of a different child, and pictured the women she had met in Berlin so far laid out along a timeline, populating the history of the room. The black prostitute on Savignyplatz would have looked good next to orange paisley. The American from the playground might have picked the sparkle in her disco days. Had she lived here in the sixties, the policewoman at Friedrichstrasse might have chosen bright pink flowers to distract her children from the bewildering fact that this room was just a tiny island floating above another island, surrounded by a hostile nation full of people who looked just like them. And the big avocado-green print? The blonde in the light blue coat had a certain 1950s vibe. Beneath the newspaper was the original wall, plaster wet and warm at the surface but solid. Hope hooked her fingers underneath the free edge of the square and with one strong pull tore the whole thing from the wall at once, leaving a hole one foot wide and one foot high and sixty years deep. The years came apart in her hands: white, orange, pink and disco, avocado green. The original walls were beige and blue, a pattern painted by hand. Hope pushed the top edge of the square. Another wet handful came off and she stood back again: a blue cat in black boots was staring at her. His face was crooked, but delighted, with long whiskers and a black nose, jodhpurs and a buttoned jacket. In her mind’s eye she saw the Colombian mother from the playground holding a paintbrush and palette, painting a whole world for her children right here in this room. Hope wrapped both arms around her stomach, touched her forehead to Puss in Boots and closed her eyes.
21
All week, when Walter called downstairs, Hope begged off further excursions. She was sick to her stomach, she told him, she had a cold. But she sounded just fine.
“I’m not even getting out of bed today,” she said.
He offered to bring her chicken soup, bananas, yogurt, aspirin, a VCR and videotapes, but she declined. He called downstairs throughout the day to discuss their California plans, each time struggling to come up with new details that required her input: the hotel, the rental car, dinner reservations, day trips. If she agreed to the details she couldn’t possibly back out. They were planning this trip together, he told himself. It was only fair to run things by her.
“Hello?”
“It’s me again.”
“Walter. Hi.”
“I’m just wondering. Can you drive a stick shift?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a valid U.S. driver’s license?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something special you’d like to eat for dinner Christmas Day?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
“Goose?”
“That would be nice.”
“Or roast beef, perhaps?”
“That would be nice too.”
On the phone she was friendly but distracted. Sometimes she was out of breath. He always hung up feeling worse than he had before he called, but then the empty hours would pass and he’d find himself back in his bedroom, imagining her lying there, silently and separately, only meters below, asking himself what was wrong with this picture. Since they’d met, they’d seen each other almost every day, and now she was slipping through his fingers. He’d pace his bedroom with the phone in one hand until he couldn’t control himself and call again.
After a few days had passed, the sound of champagne toasts made on that imaginary California terrace had faded out; the sun had set, the children had gone home; the whole plan was threatening to ship out to sea. Walter tried to focus on the premiere (Tom Cruise patting him on the back like a buddy, telling him jokes) but it didn’t stick. He spent the day drinking coffee, wandering around his apartment, unpacking and repacking his suitcase. He flipped through the first trimester in a guide to pregnancy that Heike bought when her soap character got knocked up by a security guard (she had really gotten into it, method acting her way through a bottle of folic acid pills). In the living room, he taped the last few pieces of the map together. Where it had been damp it was now wrinkled, so he laid it out under the biggest books he could find. He retrieved the newspaper from his doormat but couldn’t sit still long enough to read it. He returned to the living room and looked out over the dusty carpet of invoices and paper receipts that covered the furniture. What a mess. It reminded him of a story Bodo had told him years ago, about a trip he’d once made to a remote part of China. There had been no special accommodations for foreigners, so he’d slept in a large monastery where instead of toilets there were just rooms with holes in the floor. When he squatted over one of the holes, his shit had just dropped down into the room below.
“When the room downstairs filled up with shit,” he’d told Walter, “they just locked the door and moved on to the next one. It stank worse than anything I ever smelled. But I was impressed. I mean, that’s true detachment for you. They just left their shit in a room and forgot about it.”
Walter walked around the apartment he’d lived in for the past sixteen years and made a decision. When he left Berlin he would take nothing with him; not the old bathing suit he had tried on the other day or the sunscreen on the kitchen table or any of the other clothes he’d packed and repacked into his suitcase. He would not clean up the piles of paper from his tax audit or empty his closets or give things away; he would leave the interior of his apartment exactly as it was. Let his landlord have his stereo and his security deposit. Hope was coming with him to California. He would start over there from scratch.
In the kitchen he ate four Toasts Hawaii in a row without sitting down. He prepared each one carefully, taking as long as possible, biding his time. Thirty seconds to open the can of pineapple and three to slice the bread, ten to cut a piece of cheese, seven for the butter, five for the ham, six minutes in the toaster. He was slicing off bread for a fifth when the phone rang.
“Hallo?”
“Walter?”
Hope’s voice materialized like a miracle on the other end of the line. He removed his hand from the bread.
“Do you have a very sharp knife up there?”
She was polite, as if she were asking an enormous favor of him, as if they hadn’t spoken three times the day before. He ran his thumb along the serrated edge of the knife he’d been using.
“I’m working on a little project,” she said. “A sharp scissors will do if that’s all you’ve got.”
“Are you cooking something?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“Can I help you?”
“Oh no, I can do it alone. Just the knife if you’ve got one. The sharpest one you have. I’ll come up and get it.”
“I’ll bring it down.”
He wrapped the knife in a dishtowel and fifteen seconds later he was ringing her bell. When she opened the door, the first thought that crossed his mind was that he hardly knew her. A few days apart was a long time and he’d already forgotten many things: the color of her eyes, the sound of her voice, even the shape of her face was different from how he’d remembered it. She was wearing a large I LOVE NY T-shirt and shorts and, although it was the middle of December, appeared to be sweating. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought that she had been working out, but there was something off-kilter about all of it. The hair down her back was tangled. The clothes looked as though she’d been wearing them for days.
“Did you get that T-shirt from Orson?”
“Orson? No, I bought it years ago in New York.”
He nodded. Even her legs glistened, but she was barefoot. There were flecks of colored paper across her forehead. Stranger still, she seemed happy. She held out one hand for the knife and grinned. There was no way he was leaving her alone like this.
“When was the last time you ate something?”
“Oh, I’m not very hungry.”
“What about the baby?”
She tapped one foot impatiently against the floor.
“In the first trimester it’s really important to eat a lot of iron,�
� he said. “You have to keep your energy up. You should eat a steak or something.”
She wiped her hands directly on the breast of her shirt like a worker at a construction site and sniffed, eyeing the knife.
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Let me take you to dinner at Bodo’s. The fresh air will do you good. Think of the baby.”
Hope pulled her hair up out of her face.
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind?”
“You don’t have anything else you want to do tonight? It’s one of your last free nights in Berlin. Tomorrow night is your premiere, isn’t it?”
He leaned stiffly into the doorjamb.
“I don’t mind.”
They walked toward the restaurant in silence. At the Schillertheater, a rehearsal for the musical Hair was going on inside, men and women’s voices poured out through the window, singing together in German-accented English: Let the sun shine in! A short, thin man coming down the steps of the theater called out to them but they kept going until he called out again. Only then did Walter recognize him as Jens Kossendrup, the actor who had played his brother on Schönes Wochenende. He ran up to meet them on the sidewalk. His face was ruddy and his eyes exhausted, but he had kept both his figure and his hair.
“How you doing, man?”
Jens slapped one palm against Walter’s and patted the other against his back in a half-hug.
“Good, good.”
“Tom Cruise?”
“Yeah.”
“What a cash cow. Lucky you.”
Walter was relieved that Hope couldn’t follow the conversation in German.
“What are you up to?”
“It’s been tough, man. But now I got a gig, here, in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Weekday evenings and Sunday matinee.”
Walter never went to musicals; the overacting and heavy makeup reminded him of Disneyland. The most popular show at this particular theater was a Korean extravaganza called Cookin’, in which actors danced enthusiastically with knives. But he was relieved that Jens had a job.
“You playing Joseph?”
Jens laughed, slowly at first and then big, as if he’d suddenly realized that Walter was joking.
“Yeah, right.”
“No?”
“Joseph? C’mon, man. They always have a name for the main roles.”
“You’re a name.”
“I was a name, my friend. That was years ago. Now I’m just one of the brothers.”
Walter glanced at Hope to make absolutely sure she couldn’t follow the conversation, but she was just staring at the theater, lost in her own thoughts.
“One of the brothers?”
“Joseph has eleven brothers.”
“Right.”
“You should come see the show sometime. We can get a beer after.”
When he finally got to California, thought Walter, he was never, ever coming back.
They said goodbye to Jens and headed north toward Savignyplatz. As they followed the familiar route, he tried to picture their exact location on the globe, the curvature of the earth beneath their feet treading steadily across the neighborhood; Pestalozzi to Bleibtreu to Kant, toward Savignyplatz. He saw Charlottenburg laid out against the shapes of countries and oceans, the small, square grid of his daily ritual like one of those warped maps drawn from a particular provincial perspective. Walter Baum’s View of the World: their beautiful yellow building on Schillerstrasse in the foreground, the various nearby shops, Deutsche Synchron outlined in red, The Wild West swollen to the size of an important country, and off in the distance a sliver of Atlantic Ocean, a tiny New York City skyline and a single cartoon palm tree bobbing hopefully at the far western edge. When they passed the cop patrolling the synagogue on Pestalozzistrasse, Hope spoke for the first time.
“Why is the synagogue a secret?”
“It isn’t. There are other synagogues in the city that you can see from the street.”
“There are policemen in front of all of them?”
“Only during services. Since September, there’s been a tank all the time in front of the big one in Mitte.”
“This one seems so mysterious, though, since they built it behind closed doors. Maybe they knew they would have to protect themselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know that this neighborhood was very Jewish? Do you know anything about our building?”
“Yes,” said Walter. “There is evidence that most the residents before the war were Jewish.”
“Evidence?”
He looked up the street.
“The super was born in the building in 1944. In fact, the day before a bomb dropped and destroyed the rest of it.”
“How did they survive?”
“By hiding in the basement. Have you ever been to our basement?”
“No.”
“Well, the super’s mother told him that they were the only non-Jewish family before the war. She said that the people who couldn’t get out of Germany hid in the basement, but that eventually they were discovered, rounded up in the courtyard and taken away.”
“No.”
“They left their furniture and everything inside their apartments. They were fancy apartments, you know, so eventually other people just moved into them, dusted them off and used all their things.”
Hope stopped walking.
“Non-Jews.”
“Of course. By the time the super’s mother went down into the basement to hide from the bombing, she had a whole new group of German—I mean non-Jewish—neighbors. None of the original people were left.”
He put one hand behind Hope’s back to push her gently forward, steering her past the Time for Action poster without comment. It was frayed and wrinkled from the rain.
“The sad truth is that if you ask almost anyone in Charlottenburg about their building, they’ll tell you something similar.”
“You think that a Jewish family lived in my apartment?”
“Kristallnacht was in November 1938. It is likely that a Jewish family lived in your apartment before that, but not much later.”
“So they were killed.”
“This is Berlin, Hope.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s old news.”
“It is old news.”
“But it’s horrible.”
“You’re right.” He paused. “Honestly, if I thought about this all the time I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”
“What about the children?”
“Which children?”
“In my apartment. Do you think they killed the children, too?”
They reached the restaurant, saving Walter from a response, and he pulled open the front doors.
Velvet curtains hung in a half-circle around the front door that made it impossible to see into the restaurant until you had passed through into the sea of guests. Hope went first and Walter followed her into the dining room, like walking out onto a stage. I’d like to thank . . . He scanned the crowd automatically. It was early but it was already dark outside and packed inside, and loud; it took him a moment to focus and another to realize that Heike was sitting at a table in the middle of the restaurant with a group of people. Some he recognized, some he didn’t, one of them was Klara. Heike was wearing her hair pulled up and red lipstick. She was holding a glass of red wine and laughing dramatically, head back, eyes closed, one shoulder thrown forward like a pinup. He watched until she stopped laughing, dabbed the tears at the corner of her eyes with a napkin and noticed him. The other people at her table looked up too and fell silent. It seemed to Walter then that the noise level in the whole restaurant dropped. Conversations paused midsentence. People whispered. The soft background music rose up to the surface: Sade. Klara got up from her seat and walked toward him.
“Sometimes things just have to get worse before they get better,” she said, taking him by the shoulders
.
He hadn’t seen her in ages. She was wearing a dark blue suit and funky red glasses. Her hair was frosted and blown straight to her shoulders.
“I should have called this morning as soon as I saw it.”
“What?”
“The phone works both ways, Walter. You could have called me, too.”
“Walter!”
Bodo pushed Klara aside to get to him.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” he whispered in Walter’s ear. “I’ll take care of this.”
He turned to Hope.
“Maybe you can settle a debate raging in the kitchen. There are only a few really tall skyscrapers left in New York now, right? Which one is tallest? The Empire State or the Daimler-Chrysler?”
“The Daimler-Chrysler?”
“Of course not. I knew it was the Empire State.”
“No,” said Hope. “I mean, yes, the Empire State building is taller. But the Chrysler Building is still called the Chrysler Building.”
Bodo steered them toward a table near the window. He pulled out a chair for Hope, who sat down. Klara had followed them and sat down next to her. Walter stayed on his feet.
“I saw her,” he told Bodo. “I can handle it.”
“You saw the paper?”
“She’s sitting in the middle of the restaurant.”
“She’s celebrating, of course. I couldn’t just turn her away.”
Klara leaned into Hope, who was reading the menu.
“Ich empfehle den Zander.”
“I don’t speak German very well,” said Hope.
Klara observed her face more closely. “I recommend the fish,” she said in English.
Bodo glanced at Heike’s table and back at Walter, who still had not sat down.
