by Anna Winger
“At least where you came from, everyone understood the lyrics,” he said. “I grew up in a village in the Alps where everyone listened to American music but no one understood the songs. They just sang along phonetically. I was always explaining to my friends that, for example, chew the hot dog was actually do the hustle.”
She nodded.
“I got in a huge fight with a friend once over the words to a Go-Go’s song. I said it was telling lies in the back of the bus. She said it was but that’s no surprise.”
“She was right.”
“She was right.”
Long before he was the only guy from his village to be on television, Walter recalled, he was the only guy who understood all the words to the songs on the radio.
“Where are you from?”
“Kansas City, Missouri.”
“I don’t know anything about Kansas City.”
“There isn’t much to tell. Great barbecue, of course. Actually its real claim to fame is that there are more fountains there than in any other city in the world except Rome.”
“That’s funny. When I lived in California I spent a lot of time at a mall in Orange County that claimed to have more fountains than any other mall in the United States. Who counts these things? Tell me more about Kansas City.”
“There’s a Spanish plaza downtown because its sister city is Seville.” She fingered the tube of sunscreen Walter had brought with him to the kitchen table. “It’s in the middle of the country but it feels more like the South. It’s been ages since I lived there. I went to college in New York City and I’ve lived there ever since.”
“That must have been a change. I was nineteen when I moved from a small village in the south of Germany to Berlin. It blew my mind.”
“Kansas City is spread out low to the ground. My first year in New York, the tall buildings really freaked me out. I used to lie in bed in my room on the seventh floor of the dormitory and imagine that the building was gone and I was just floating there. Then I would imagine that all the buildings were gone and all the people, all over the city, were floating in place, like I was. It seemed so strange to me that if you removed the buildings, people were lying in bed only a few feet away from their neighbors, up and down, without any contact. I would imagine the sky filled with bodies and each person alone, floating above the street in their own spot of air. After a while I forgot about it, of course. New York was home.”
She put down her cup.
“To be honest,” she said, “it’s nice to be in a city that’s low to the ground again.”
“You like it here?”
“I don’t know yet. But I needed to leave New York. I was relieved to have somewhere else to go.”
Walter was watching her mouth as she spoke, imagining the bodies floating in the air for a long moment before he understood what she was talking about: she had been in New York in September. The way she said it, he assumed that she had only narrowly escaped, that by a monumental stroke of luck she had made it safely out of New York City and across the ocean, to sit here now at his kitchen table. The thought was exciting, as if by proxy he too had been there in the eye of the storm. (In fact, he’d been at Deutsche Synchron watching the news projected onto the playback screen overhead, replays of colorful explosions, people running, screaming, again and again up the street.) He was eager to hear a first-hand account and waited for Hope to elaborate, but she just looked down at the sunscreen, studiously reading the Spanish directions on the back of the tube: Evite contacto con los ojos, it said: Avoid contact with the eyes.
“Was there a Spanish section?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Of Berlin. After the war.”
“Oh. No. The city was divided into four zones: Russian, American, British and French. The Russian zone became East Berlin. The other three merged together to form West Berlin.”
“What was this neighborhood?”
“Charlottenburg was in the British zone. But the only thing that really mattered was East or West.”
“The Wall was around East Berlin.”
“Actually, the Wall was around West Berlin. But the East Germans built it. The government told the people that the Wall was to keep the capitalist fascists out, but obviously it was to keep the East Germans in.”
“Then why was it around West Berlin?”
“Because West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany on all sides. Before they built the Wall, anyone wanting to defect could just walk into the West and stay there. You see what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Berlin didn’t straddle the border of East Germany and West Germany, with one side in either country. It was an island in the middle of the East. West Berlin, where we are now, is, was, two hours from the closest border to what was West Germany.”
Hope smiled.
“I didn’t know that.”
“When I was in America in the eighties, and this was during the Cold War, I noticed that a lot of people didn’t know that.”
“It’s the same with Kansas City and no one knows that either.”
“What?”
“Kansas City does actually straddle a state line, between Missouri and Kansas. But there are two separate cities named Kansas City, one in either state. Most people, most Americans, but certainly everyone else too, think there’s only one.”
They both laughed.
“What was it like here with the Wall up?”
“Not the way people imagine it. Actually, there was a lot contained inside West Berlin. Forests, lakes, campsites.”
“Campsites?”
“It was hard to go anywhere. Three hours’ drive, plus long lines at the border on either end, meant that sometimes it took eight hours to get from here to West Germany. So there were all kinds of things for people to do here, even camping. Only a little piece of real Autobahn, though, an old racing track that runs from Charlottenburg to Wannsee called the Avus.”
“Was that important?”
“It was the only place to drive without a speed limit.”
“Germans love cars.”
“Of course. Without the Avus, if you had a Porsche or something, you couldn’t even drive it properly. Now you can just drive right into Brandenburg if you want to.”
It wasn’t even hot anymore, but Hope blew at her coffee anyway. Her breath made a path through the middle of the liquid, as if she were blowing a Porsche, full speed, down the Avus.
“It’s amazing how you live with history here,” she said. “In New York, people only think about what’s going to happen next.”
Political history was everywhere in Berlin, thought Walter,but personal history was just as easily swept under the rug.
“As a kid, the worst of German history is beaten into you from every angle. When I was in high school, every year we went on a class trip to a different depressing place. One year we went to Buchenwald and spent the night.”
Her eyes widened.
“Inside the concentration camp?”
No German woman would have been impressed by these stories. In Germany they were standard fare, common experience. Walter relished his own eloquence in English.
“The rooms where the Jewish prisoners slept are a museum. We slept in the former SS barracks.”
“No way. That must have been really disturbing.”
“It was!”
He was on a roll. He almost went on to tell her that Heike’s soap was shot in a prison, in Spandau, where the British kept Rudolf Hess after the war, and where he died in 1987. The British moved out after the Wall came down, and it became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, so the city converted it to a TV studio. It was a good story, but Walter stopped himself because it would have required an explanation of both Heike and the stupid soap opera. Hope’s fingers picked up the tube of suntan lotion, turned it over and put it again on the table. He tried to think of something else to tell her.
“When I first moved here, someone pointed out to me that you can gauge the point of co
ntact of each bomb dropped during World War II by tracing the radius of reconstruction around it,” he said. “Have you noticed the circular patterns of buildings from the 1950s? Take our building, for example. Where we are is still the original part, the prewar houses have long wooden windows and high ceilings, but everything extending to the corner is new, all the ugly buildings with plain façades. If you draw a circle around the corner at Schiller and Schlüter, to encompass the new buildings on either side of the street, you can be pretty sure that the bomb fell right in the middle of it.”
“Why here? Was there some sort of industry nearby?”
“Berlin was the capital. Everything here was a target, even residential neighborhoods. The fanciest ones were the ones worst hit. The Hansaviertel, around Tiergarten, was completely destroyed, Grünewald, Wilmersdorf. But even here, if you walk to the corner you see that Grolmanstrasse, which used to run all the way past the Schillertheater, had to be cut off to accommodate the destruction. That’s why there’s a big hole in the middle.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. But you know, if you just look closely at pretty much any corner of this city you’ll see the same thing.”
“Imagine how awful it was for the people living here at the time, I mean right here in this apartment.”
Walter remembered the first day he saw Hope on the stoop, barefoot in the cold. Why was he telling her disaster stories?
“My hometown was built after the war,” he backtracked. “All the houses were new and cheaply constructed. Before I came to Berlin I had never seen so many elegant prewar buildings in one place. I liked trying to imagine what the city looked like before everything was bombed, at the turn of the last century during the Gründerzeit. It was a good time in German history, the last really good time, actually. A big economic boom. At night when I walked down the street, I tried to recapture it.”
He narrowed his eyes and looked at her through the fuzzy fringe of his eyelashes. Her blond hair was a halo, her face an Impressionist painting. She did the same, looking back at him.
“Like this?”
“That’s right. But you have to do the horses too if you really want to get into the mood.”
He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to reproduce the sound of hooves against the cobblestones. To his relief, she laughed.
“I’m going to try that,” she said.
“You’ll see. This city can be very nice from the right perspective.”
“I’ve been reading up on Christmas here.”
“Christmas?”
“Do you remember celebrating the day of Sankt Nikolaus from when you were a child? Getting candy in your shoes?”
“Where I come from, Nikolaus had an evil assistant, Knecht Ruprecht. Nikolaus was ruddy-cheeked and white-bearded and cheerful, like Father Christmas, but Ruprecht was dark, the bad guy in black clothes, with a long, black beard. If you were good, you got candy from Nikolaus, but if you were bad, you got coal from Ruprecht. In our village, people used to dress up and run through the streets at night on the fifth of December making a huge racket with bells, threatening children. It was like Carnival, only scarier. In the morning, everyone was afraid to put their shoes on.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It was awful. I hid under my bed. I hated it.”
“Seriously?”
“There was nothing nice about it.”
“Not even the candy?”
“There wasn’t any candy,” said Walter, trying to make a joke of it for her benefit. “Not at our house.”
Hope’s hands drifted up to her ponytail again, this time pulling it out of the elastic so that her hair fell down around her face and a few strands of her hair got caught across her cheeks. Walter just barely controlled the impulse to reach up and brush them away, to touch her skin with his fingers.
“Thank you for inviting me in,” she said, standing up.
“You’re not leaving?”
“I have some things to do before the shops close. If I don’t go now I’ll stay all day,” she said. “I’m so starved for company you’ll never get rid of me.”
After she was gone Walter admired his kitchen, which still radiated her presence. She had been there only half an hour but it had been long enough to remind him that he could reinvent himself completely just by speaking another language, which was a relief. Because while blowing out the candles on a cake at his thirty-ninth birthday six months earlier, he’d had a strangely disheartening realization: the traditional midlife crisis was not an option for him. Although he was experiencing all the attendant frustration, dissatisfaction and ennui typical of a middle-class white man facing forty, he had no wife and children to leave behind, he already owned an expensive German car and he was already dating a much younger woman. None of this was making him happy, he realized, and yet there was forty lurking just up ahead like an unfriendly cat on the prowl. In the intervening months he had considered the range of remaining options. Weight loss, hair plugs, a sail round the world; a spiritual quest into the Eastern religions, even a doctor-sanctioned nervous breakdown at a traditional Alpine cure, with sexy nurses in starched white uniforms, a view of the Alps and chamomile tea. For a week or so at a time, he had attached himself to each one until it proved impossible: he lacked the motivation for a serious diet, and hair plugs would just make his head look like a plastic doll’s. He got seasick on sailboats and couldn’t get into the lotus position to save his life. The worst discovery had been that the sanatoriums described in nineteenth-century German romantic novels were a thing of the past. The nurses at Alpine cures no longer wore starched white uniforms with visible cleavage and pointy caps; in the twenty-first century, they just wore aprons over their sweatpants, and rubber clogs.
Until the evening he encountered Hope in the elevator, his most recent midlife crisis fantasy had been in danger of getting stuck in turnaround like all the others: although he had been able to see the outline of his life in Southern California, the convertible and the asphalt driveway, the suntan, the salty waves licking at his ankles, he’d stopped short when he tried to picture a domestic life across the Atlantic. Instead of seeing, for example, the sun pouring in the windows of a Richard Neutra house filled with Playboy bunnies, Walter had only been able to see himself coming home to the warm-weatherequivalent of his Charlottenburg apartment and padding around, alone, in his socks. When Hope walked into Walter’s kitchen, Walter walked through a newly opened door in his imagination. Suddenly he was no longer alone in the California of his mind. He envisioned their life together there in a series of future snapshots. Hope in a sundress, pulling apart a lettuce for salad behind the counter of their open kitchen. Hope asleep on the pillow next to his, holding his hand across the stick shift in the car, dancing against the backdrop of a smog-induced Technicolor sunset, her head resting on his shoulder. He deliberately kept things PG-RATED. No seduction scenes or gratuitous nudity. But he did allow himself a glimpse of the two of them toasting long-stemmed glasses of champagne with Tom Cruise himself on a terrace in Malibu overlooking the beach. Why not? Even Christmas wouldn’t be so bad. He could fill her shoes with candy, if that’s what she wanted. They could string up electric lights around a palm tree in the yard. They would give each other handmade gift certificates, he thought dreamily: 1 Foot Massage, 1 Breakfast-in-Bed. It would be the first time he’d ever enjoyed the holiday season.
Throughout their conversation in his kitchen, Walter had listened carefully for any mention of the man he had seen with Hope on the doorstep, even a simple reference to we, but none had come. He decided that the man, like Heike, was yesterday’s news. A few days later, when he was coming in from the studio, he found Hope in the lobby carrying two large bags of dirty clothes.
“Where are you off to?”
“The laundromat at the corner,” she said. “I don’t have a machine yet.”
Given the steps they had already taken toward domesticity in his mind, he automatically offered her the use of his. I
t was a bold move, which she accepted quite naturally, and he found himself with her again in the elevator, which had already become the place where we met in his mind. For years, its small dimensions had seemed to him suffocating and impractical; now they were intimate. The fluorescent light in the ceiling had been garish; now it was bright. He would have liked to take her everywhere with him. She looked him in the eye as if he made sense to her, and seemed to turn his comments over in her mind not skeptically, as Heike had done (always looking for an argument) but as if to fully absorb them. In his apartment he made a grand gesture with one arm toward the washing machine. Hope emptied the two bags on the kitchen floor.
“I’m terrible at this,” she said. “I always dye everything pink.”
“Let me help you.”
They sorted the whites, darks and colors. When he noticed a few pairs of men’s boxer shorts, colorful ones printed with polka dots and a paisley pattern, he assumed that she wore them to bed. It was when he picked up a long-legged pair of men’s jeans that all the air trapped in the kitchen rushed into his lungs. He dropped them on the pile of darks and reached for a bottle of water.
“My husband will be happy,” said Hope, surveying the three piles. “He doesn’t like to wear pink underwear, although I’m not sure why not. No one sees it except me.”
My husband. Walter’s cheeks filled with air.
“He couldn’t possibly wash his own underwear, of course. When I got to Berlin there was a mountain of laundry in the bathroom.”
She seemed angry about it. Angry was good.
“But look at you,” she said. “You’re an expert.”
The truth was that Walter rarely did laundry. He let it pile up in a basket until it spilled over onto the floor. But he could rise to this challenge. One of his most lucrative advertising contracts was an ongoing campaign for a line of detergents, and he had absorbed some useful information over the years. My husband. Will be. Happy. He put the water bottle down on the counter.
“There is a science to this,” he said.