by Anna Winger
“What?”
“It’s a Jewish prayer.”
Across the room, his grandfather shrugged.
“Not a lot of Jews where you come from.”
He said it kindly, as if to explain Walter’s ignorance to the room, but Walter was still staring in awe at the photographof his mother. How many times had his grandmother told this story? How many people had she told that her daughter died in 1961? How long had she been telling herself that, because her daughter died in 1961, she had never had a grandson born in 1962? Her version of events was much simpler than the truth, and if it had not eradicated the very fact of his existence, Walter might have liked to accept it himself. Because the truth was so much harder to handle. Because the truth was that his mother was Jewish and had married a German, which meant that she was as good as dead to her parents in 1961, ten years before her time.
“I’m Walter Baum,” he said, clutching the sides of the photo album with both hands.
His grandfather cleared his throat.
“I’m her son,” said Walter.
“That’s impossible.”
“Hans,” said his grandfather. “Please don’t.”
Walter turned to him.
“Not Hans. My name is Walter. Your name. She named me after you.”
“Walter,” said his grandfather, whispering the name but no longer contesting the fact of it, as if to admit that he had known all along.
“Yes,” said Walter.
“It’s impossible,” said his grandmother. “No.”
The veins in her temples stood out, pale blue rivers running into her eyes. When Walter’s grandfather moved to comfort his wife, he did not try to convince her. He looked plaintively at Walter, who was gripping the photo album against him like a breastplate of armor, and the look on his face said everything. That it had been easier to feel each other out through a smooth curtain of artifice. That Hans and his happy stories, his flower-topped hillsides and big-breasted Bavarian milkmaids and a horse in the neighbors’ living room were preferable to the truth, because the truth was too painful to imagine: his own grandchild, grown up motherless in a godforsaken land.
Walter ran from the dark house into the sunshine as if into the blast of paparazzi flashbulbs and held up one hand to block the light from his eyes. When he’d first moved to Los Angeles two years earlier, he had mapped out a tour to pay homage to German émigrés who preceded him. He went by the small room on Vine that Peter Lorre shared with Billy Wilder when they first fled Germany in 1933; had a drink at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset where Hedy Lamarr lived in 1937; and sniffed perfume at the Beverly Hills department store where she was arrested for shoplifting in 1965. He visited the studio lots where Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in twelve films and Jungle Jim (“Tarzan with clothes on”) in an additional sixteen. He peeked through the front gates at the villa on Roxbury Drive that had once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. But his last afternoon in California, he just drove. Out the windshield: sun-scorched crabgrass and an occasional sliver of the Pacific; the pastel-colored housing developments of Orange County, layered back into infinity like paper dolls. He pulled off the freeway and parked his car at the airport. He removed both passports from the glove compartment and left the mix-tapes and glossy headshots behind. His plane was halfway across the Atlantic already when he remembered that the one time Dietrichhad performed in Berlin after the war, people had booed her off the stage. Fleeing the Nazis had lent the vain ambitions of his predecessors a dignity Walter could not claim. Still. They had laid out a one-way path for him and he had failed them. Although what happened that afternoon in the living room in Irvine had nothing to do with Hollywood, he knew no one was going to believe it. The plane had already begun its descent into Berlin when he realized that he was the first of his people to flee in reverse.
23
The first time Hope was pregnant, she was sick from the beginning, throwing up every day well into her fourth month. She was exhausted and plagued by apprehension, privately calculating risk at every turn, staying home so as not to cross the street at the wrong moment or overexert herself. She avoided going anywhere she might have exposed her unborn child to secondhand cigarette smoke or loud noises or germs. What a rotten deal, she thought afterward. Nausea, stretch marks, fifteen pounds and back pain, all that anxiety for nothing. In retrospect now, it seemed sadly ironic that she had been so cautious, as if, by avoiding all manner of external risk, she had forced her body to generate its own calamity. Dave would have said that she was just emotionalizing the facts. But he didn’t even know that she was pregnant again. He didn’t know that this time she felt totally different. This time, she felt good. Blood for two coursing through her veins! She kept thinking about an article once distributed at the private school where she worked, a study of wealthy children in New York City who drank only expensive bottled water. The children had developed an alarming number of cavities, while their less privileged counterparts in the public schools drank city tap water, which was enhanced by fluoride, and thus had much better teeth. It was a useful metaphor. In the past few days she had worked day and night in the nursery. When she slept, she slept well and when she was awake, the pregnancy made her feel invincible and compassionate. When she walked down the street, she smiled at her neighbors, even when they didn’t smile back. When Dave called from Poland, she was neutral, even polite, but did not encourage him to hurry home. When she saw the look on Walter’s face at Bodo’s restaurant, although she didn’t understand a word of what was going on, she took him back to her apartment, where she listened to his story and held his hand.
Across the table in her dining room now she watched his face change color in the dim light of the one lamp that was on in the corner. If his face had been almost white when they came in, it was brighter now, a warmer shade, she thought. The blue of his eyes was by contrast very blue.
“I never told this to anyone before,” he said when he was finished. “Not the whole story.”
“Why now?”
“Because I don’t want us to have any secrets.”
She nodded.
“Because I want to start over,” said Walter. “When we go back.”
She bit her bottom lip. How could she explain to him that she had to stay here?
“This is as good a place as any other to start over,” she said.
“Here?”
“If we stand right here on this spot, the whole world will keep spinning past us. We can travel ten thousand miles to California—”
“Six thousand.”
“We can travel all that way there but we’ll be taking all our problems with us. You came back here, didn’t you? How many years ago was that?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen years,” she said, remembering the beautiful young man on that television show. “Do you think you escaped?”
In a parallel universe, she would have liked to go with him. She could see the two of them in folding chairs on a beach somewhere, zinc on their noses, continuing the same conversation they had here night after night. It was rare to feel so comfortable with another person. In a parallel universe, they might have made it to California together, but in this one she wished he would stay. What could she tell him? The summer is beautiful in Berlin. But he knew that. He knew what it was like to watch the sun set long after all the children had gone to bed. He knew how Schillerstrasse looked with green leaves on the trees. She wanted to touch his face, press her cheek against his cheek.
“I have a secret too,” she said. “It’s time I told you.”
He leaned toward her across the table.
“I lost a baby in June. I was seven and a half months pregnant and one day his heart just stopped beating inside me.”
“Hope.”
It had been hot that day. She had been sitting in an armchairat home, by a fan propped inside one of the living room windows. She had been playing music for the baby, as she often did, not Mozart but pop music, rock and roll, hip-hop; she ha
d her CDs in piles on a table and the armchair pulled up to the stereo, so she could reach everything without getting up. She had been listening to the Talking Heads, rubbing her stomach.
“Feet on the ground, head in the sky,” sang David Byrne. “It’s okay, I know nothing’s wrong.”
Those lines had been her quote on her yearbook page in high school. She had wanted her baby to hear it and sang along, but when she realized the baby hadn’t moved in a while, she stopped singing and stood up. She made one circle through the rooms of her small apartment. It didn’t wake him. She turned off the fan and the music and stood as still as she could in the middle of her living room and willed him to move. The sweat on the back of her neck was cold and the apartment was quiet. A siren bleated in the distance, a garbage truck, someone down on the street yelled something to someone else.
“I had to try to deliver him normally even though he was already dead,” she told Walter. “I was in labor for forty hours.”
“Hope.”
“But at the end they had to give me a C-section anyway. They put me under general anesthesia, and when I came to, they had already taken him away. Dave didn’t stop them. He said he thought it would be better that way for me, not to see the body, can you imagine? Dave didn’t want to see him himself so he deprived me of that possibility too. I never saw my own baby. The hospital just returned the ashes to me with a death certificate.”
“He was cremated.”
“Yes. Dave signed off on that too. The worst thing, though, was that there was no birth certificate at all. Apparently, it is illegal to issue a birth certificate to a stillborn baby. We were given a record of his death but none of his life, and it was as if the pregnancy hadn’t happened at all. He was alive inside me for seven and a half months and then he was gone. Just like that.”
She could feel the tears in her eyes, but she did not cry. She did not want to cry about this anymore.
“Do you know the words to that song?”
“Home—”
“Yes.”
He sang the first word, now said the rest.
“Love me till my heart stops.”
“Love me till I’m dead,” she finished. “The climax. It’s the best part of the song.”
She stood up from the table.
“I have to show you something.”
Down the hall, the door to the nursery was closed and she paused in front of it.
“Close your eyes, please.”
She had stripped seven layers of wallpaper from the four walls, using the steam machine, an X-acto knife and various blunt, flat instruments. Although the work was still rough, she had uncovered all four original walls, had planned to finishthe job with Walter’s bread knife, scrape the last bits of paper off the plaster. As it was, the walls were pockmarked and uneven, they would need to be sanded and sealed, but they were glorious. The air was still moist and warm. She had collected the old paper into garbage bags and had set up the Christmas tree there, in the middle of the room. With the little golden clips from the hardware store, she’d clipped real candles to its branches, but had been unable to find any matches. Now she went in first, leaving Walter, eyes closed, in the doorway, and pulled a box she’d taken from The Wild West out of her pocket.
“You can open your eyes now.”
The walls were illuminated by the candlelight on the tree. She watched his face as he took it all in: Puss in Boots, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in her grandmother’s cape. A whole wall was devoted to Hansel and Gretel, the elaborate gingerbread house, a winding path through a thicket of trees. He circled the Christmas tree slowly, staring at the luminescent walls, like frescoes in a church.
“What are these paintings?”
“They were here.”
“Who painted them? When?”
“I like to think it was the mother of a child who lived in this nursery. It was sometime in the thirties. The last layer I took off was plain newspaper. It stuck to the back of thick wallpaper from the fifties. The date was from January 1939.”
Walter touched the trees in Hansel and Gretel’s forest, ran one finger along the path to the candy-covered house.
“It’s like looking back in time.”
She moved closer to him. “Look. I didn’t refuse to talk about my baby because it didn’t matter, but because it mattered too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I understand your grandparents better than you do.”
They were standing only a few inches apart.
“Take it from me,” she said. “Just because they walked away doesn’t mean they didn’t care. They cared too much.”
“I don’t think so.”
“They told themselves your mother died because by mourning her, they could keep on loving her. Instead of fighting with her, they said Kaddish in her honor. They celebrated her memory instead of dwelling on their differences. The rituals relieved their pain. They were lucky to have that. Maybe you should try it.”
Walter looked up at the fairy-tale characters as if suddenly remembering that he had an audience.
“Most Germans of my generation would love to be Jewish,” he said slowly. “Even just a little bit. People are always coming up with a Jewish great-grandmother out of the blue. One of my colleagues at the studio claims she was a rich Jewish woman in Grünewald in her past life. Everyone wants to identify with the oppressed, not the oppressors, to relieve their own inherited guilt. If you ask, almost everyone here will claim that their own family had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that they were hiding Jews in the basement, or in the attic, or under the bed. But if there were as many Jews hidden all over Germany as people claim, believe me, many fewer would have died.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“It’s a cliché to discover your Jewish roots.”
“She was your mother.”
“She was miserable in Germany.”
“That was then.”
For a moment, Walter didn’t say anything. He glanced at the Christmas tree.
“I have lived here most of my life, Hope. I don’t think it’s possible to be both German and Jewish. Not really.”
“They were.”
She gestured in a circle, waving to the walls.
“The Jewish mother who lived here in the thirties didn’t paint scenes from the Old Testament for her child,” she said. “She painted Hansel and Gretel. Little Red Riding Hood. The Wolf. This was her culture too.”
Walter stared at the Wolf in the orange light of the Christmas tree.
“What is Kaddish?”
“The mourner’s prayer. You light a candle on the anniversary of someone’s death to commemorate their life and you say Kaddish.”
“I wonder what date they chose for her death.”
“It doesn’t matter. They lit candles, they said a prayer for her. It made them feel better.”
“Right.”
“You should try it.”
“Light candles for them?”
“Unless you think they are still alive.”
He shook his head. His breath was rising quickly in his chest.
“I was in their house, Hope. I was right there in front of them and they told me that I didn’t exist.”
“But you knew that wasn’t true.”
He shook his head. “No. I could have been honest from the beginning but instead I hid behind Hans for six months. My character on television. Imagine that.”
“You were young.”
“By the time I came clean, they were right.” He looked at her. “I had already killed myself off.”
The candles had burned down into the gold clips that held them to the branches, so that they were shining through the needles, casting patterns on the walls. In this particular light, thought Hope, Walter looked more alive to her than ever.
“You didn’t do a very good job,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re still
here,” she said. “I can see you.”
24
Walter hadn’t walked a red carpet since 1983. The day of the premiere, he lay against the pillows in his dark bedroom and considered the various options. You can glide elegantly forward up the middle, he thought, keeping a wide margin from the screaming fans on either side. Or you can hug the edges, signing autographs while your handlers check their watches impatiently at the end. You can push away the microphones. You can roll your eyes like you would rather be just about anywhere but here. Or you can work it for the cameras and the audience at home, big smiles and air kisses, making the most of thirty seconds in the spotlight. As he recalled, the whole thing was only glamorous on television afterward. Live, the carpet itself was stained and bound with duct tape, the interviewers’ makeup as thick as your thumb, and the path was crowded. Producers’ wives and children, women carrying clipboards, video technicians and dangerous lengths of wire. The minor players were basically invisible. Nobody at home even noticed those vaguely familiar faces creeping up the carpet behind the big stars. Fans behind the rope screamed right through them, cameras shot around them, occasionally they got caught in the paparazzi crossfire, picking their teeth while the starlet in front struck a pose, but what’s the worst that could happen to him, at this point? He would wear a dark suit and a clean shave. He would walk that red carpet like a runway, gaining speed with every step, and take off into the doors of the theater at Potsdamer Platz, to the screening, the party, the airport, to California; he would be clear into another galaxy before the pictures ever made it into the papers.
Hope was not coming with him to California. Where had he gone wrong? It was already early afternoon and although the premiere would begin at six P.M. and he was expected to arrive early, he made no move to get out of bed. Instead, he lay in the dark and reviewed the denouements of the more serious Tom Cruise films for clarity. The drama tended to follow a similar arc. The main character was almost always a cocky young guy, too smart for his own good but unable to focus.
“He has to learn to be himself, but on purpose,” said Paul Newman in The Color of Money.
