by Anna Winger
“I am the police,” she said. “I do whatever I want.”
15
The last day of work on Vanilla Sky, the trees gave up their last few leaves. Construction sites all over the city came to a standstill, kilometers of scaffolding forsaken until spring. On the way to work, Walter watched December descend over Berlin through the windshield of his car with affection he could feel only for a lover he had already decided to abandon: her cracked lips never to be kissed again, the uneven sighs in her sleep. He could appreciate the winter now knowing he didn’t have to live through it. He would miss the fresh air most of all, he thought. When he lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the city had been in an almost permanent state of smog alert. He remembered constant warnings to keep your windows closed in the heat against the heavy, orange-pink haze. There was no industry in Berlin, he reflected, and thus no money, but as a result it did have good air. Out the window a group of people waited at the crosswalk behind a scrim of frozen breath. At the Christmas Market by the Gedächtniskirche, vendors were already heating up their grills. The greasy smell of bratwurst came into the car. Tourists were eating kale and bacon for breakfast. The working stiffs at the Europa Center hurried into work in beige overcoats. The mothers soldiered up the sidewalk in groups of two or three, while tucked deep into their strollers, the next generation watched the storm clouds gathering overhead, breathing in Berlin’s fresh winter air like a drug.
Wrapping up the latest Tom Cruise usually left Walter with postpartum melancholy, but not today. He would treat his last days as a farewell tour, do all the best things one last time, this time with Hope: ice-skating on Wannsee, a winter stroll through the gardens at Schloss Charlottenburg. He had not told her yet about his plans for the two of them in California, but there would be time for that now too. Dave had returned to Poland, leaving them alone again in peace.
“You free for dinner?” He called up the stairs when he arrived at the studio.
“Me?”
Orson’s voice came over the loudspeaker. He stuck his head out of the cabin door above and said it again in a normal voice. They hadn’t spoken much all week.
“You inviting me to dinner?”
If there were two of them it would be natural to invite Hope along. Just a casual outing among friends. The perfect first date.
“It’s our last day. We should celebrate.”
“Sounds good.”
Orson closed the door to the cabin and Walter turned to the screen overhead where a clip from the end of the film played in slow motion. Tom Cruise took a flying leap off the top of a tall building in downtown Manhattan, his arms outstretched like a diver. It looked as though the wind might catch his body and bring him up, giving him wings, but instead he just fell to the ground. It wasn’t until the clip was over that Walter realized he’d been holding his breath.
Outside Deutsche Synchron, a cold rain hovered at one or two degrees above freezing, resisting snow. Orson unlocked his bike and pulled it up alongside Walter’s car.
“Don’t you want a ride?”
He tapped the hardtop of the Mercedes convertible.
“How many days a year can you actually take that thing off?”
“In the summer I keep it off all the time.”
“In the summer it rains every other day.”
“So I put it back up between trips.”
Orson laughed, loudly, pulled a waterproof poncho over his parka. “You should get one of these,” he said.
“You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“No, thanks. I need my bike to get home later.”
They agreed to meet at The Wild West in half an hour, leaving Walter alone in his car with the radio. Marvin Gaye came through like California on the pitch-perfect sound system. Let’s get it on. He leaned back against the headrest above the driver’s seat, moving his head in time to the music. In almost every Tom Cruise movie he could think of, Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, Days of Thunder, The Firm, you name it, somewhere in the second act his character danced and sang along to a pop song on the radio to illustrate a sudden flash of optimism. He closed his eyes, imagining himself dancing with Hope on that terrace overlooking the Pacific. Champagne and the sunset, Tom Cruise smiling somewhere in the background, Marvin Gaye on the radio. He moved his shoulders and tapped his feet against the floor of the car. It was more than a month already since Heike walked out on him and although he still checked his messages regularly to see if she’d called, he only did so out of habit. Things were looking up. He loved this song. He felt so good tonight. But he had seen enough Tom Cruise movies to know that a sudden flash of optimism was usually just a harbinger of further disaster. He grooved in place against the smooth leather interior of his car, but for fear of further plot twists he controlled the urge to sing.
He found Hope standing in the lobby in her raincoat.
“Are you going out?”
“No. I just got in.”
She squeezed the water from her hair onto the floor.
“Why don’t you come to dinner with Orson and me? We finished the job today and we’re celebrating.”
“Like this?” She looked down at herself. “I don’t know.”
“You look great. Come on, my treat.”
He hurried her into his car and drove around the corner. He had no time to appreciate the novelty of having her out in the world. He didn’t get to clock her reaction to his beautiful car because he knew that if Orson arrived first at The Wild West, Bodo wouldn’t give him a table. Walter found a parking place and steered Hope into the restaurant just as Orson was locking up his bike at the curb. It was not until the three of them were sitting at a nice corner table at the restaurant basking in the warm light of its yellow walls that he saw what a terrible idea it had been to bring together these two people to this restaurant for dinner. He and Orson had never spoken English to each other; Hope had never heard Walter speak German at all. Trapped between two selves at the table, he said nothing for fear of alienating one or both of them. Orson’s long hair was wet from the ride over; his leather pants gave off a meaty smell as they dried. Among the moneyed, elegant patrons of The Wild West, his personal style screamed for the wrong kind of attention. People at surrounding tables looked at them, sniffed, looked away. Walter searched the restaurant for Bodo while Orson smoked and Hope drank her wine. She had removed her raincoat to reveal an equally wet sweater, and every few seconds, both men glanced at her nipples poking through the tight green wool. She was already well into her second glass when she started talking.
“I was caught today riding the U-Bahn without a ticket.”
Orson took off his pink sunglasses.
“Inside the train or on the platform?”
His English was good.
“On the train, but then I made it about a block up Friedrichstrasse before she caught me.”
He leaned forward as if to get a better look at her face.
“Who?”
“The policewoman.”
“The people who check you on the subway aren’t really the police. They’re just security guards.”
“Whatever. She chased me down. She went through my things.”
“She ran after you?”
“Yes. It was terrifying. I mean, being grabbed by a German policefrau in Berlin obviously conjures up pretty terrible images.”
“Technically she wasn’t a policefrau.”
“She said she was.”
“In English? I am sure she didn’t know the difference.”
“Regardless. You can’t help but consider the historical context.”
Orson laughed. “Please. Why didn’t you pay the fare?’
“Because I thought the subway was free.”
“Free?”
“Walter said that Berlin was a socialist paradise.”
“What?”
“I was talking about West Berlin in the eighties,” said Walter, clearing his throat. “But even then we paid for the subway.”
“Even in the Ea
st we paid,” said Orson. “Anyway, how could all the transportation in Berlin be free? The city is totally broke.”
Hope looked tired. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s why the city’s broke.”
“It’s broke because when the Western world no longer needed Berlin to be their island behind the Iron Curtain, they pulled out all the subsidies and there was nothing left here. No industry, no business, no money—”
“Orson,” said Walter, cutting him off, “the East was already broke when the Wall came down. The West went broke rebuilding it.”
He turned to Hope.
“East Germany was one-third the size of West Germany, both in population and size, and everything there was in terrible condition in 1989. But we just absorbed it.”
“You could have let us continue to be our own country,” said Orson.
“Since the early nineties, every German citizen has been paying solidarity tax every month to rebuild the East.”
“Even if they live in Munich?”
“Everyone. Imagine if the United States annexed all of Mexico and said that in ten years they were going to have the same quality infrastructure as we do and that we were going to pay for it. The Autobahn in Brandenburg is gorgeous now but it leads nowhere.”
Orson exhaled impatiently through his nostrils.
“You didn’t pay on the subway today because you thought you could get out of it by playing the dumb American,” he said to Hope. “You thought the rules didn’t apply to you. I spent a year in America on a high school exchange—”
“Where?”
“In Montgomery, Alabama.”
Hope ran her left hand through her hair. Her gold wedding ring caught the candlelight on the table. Walter hoped Orson hadn’t seen it.
“You Americans are always complaining that someone is infringing on your rights. I mean, what really happened to you today? You skipped the fare, you had to pay a sixty marks penalty and so you cried?”
“I felt trapped.”
“Orson, stop,” said Walter. “She’s been through a lot.”
“It felt good to make a break for it, actually. I mean, in New York—”
Orson cut her off.
“Where?”
“Just leave it alone,” Walter said to Orson in German, so that Hope would not understand. “She’s been through a lot. She was in New York in September, understand?”
Orson replied in German too. “Do you realize the social capital it has to suggest that she was in New York on 9⁄11?”
“She isn’t just suggesting. It’s true.”
“But to refer to it like that, in public like that, in the middle of an argument, is a trump card. It is the present-day equivalent to rolling up your sleeve to show us her number.”
“What?”
Orson slapped the inside of his forearm.
“Her identity number? You mean a tattoo from a concentration camp?” Walter shook his head. “Where are you going with this?”
Orson turned to Hope and switched into English.
“I might disagree with you, but I’m not going to argue with you now. You personally suffered through the seminal tragedy of our generation.”
“A lot of other people suffered more than I did.”
“Well, you aren’t going to run into any of them here. You were there and we just watched it on TV. You win.”
“Win what?”
“For the rest of your life you’ll be sitting around with groups of people and everyone else will describe where they were when the planes hit. At work, on the toilet, on the phone. People will cherish the telling of their insignificant stories and then you’ll shut them down. I was there, you’ll say. And people will look at you differently.”
“Is it so different from being in Berlin when the Wall came down? That used to be the seminal moment of our generation.”
Walter reflected that he had been in exactly the same place—Deutsche Synchron—when both events occurred. In 1989, he had eventually left the studio in Wedding to walk into Mitte, against the flow of people rushing into West Berlin.
“It was an amazing moment,” said Orson. “But it was not a tragedy. Tell us what you were doing when the planes hit.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re going to tell this story many times and this is your chance to practice it with an excellent director.”
Hope held her wineglass with both hands and looked into it. Walter imagined her covered in white soot, running up the street like the people on TV. Maybe she was trapped in one of the towers herself, on a class trip with all of her students. He had read stories in the paper about heroines like her, teachers escorting their children down a hundred flights of stairs in the dark.
“I was asleep,” she said quietly.
“Asleep?”
Walter almost yelled the word, so that the people at the next table turned to look at him. At least she might have saved a cat abandoned in an apartment building. Asleep is where Heike would have been had she been there that day, not Hope. Walter stared at her profile in the candlelight, and corrected himself. Heike would have been right in the thick of it, her face smeared with soot and camera-ready, working the publicity for all it was worth. It was he who would have been asleep. That’s right. Other people jumping out of windows to save their own lives while he slept; the most significant public tragedy of his generation and Walter in bed while it all passed him by. Asleep. Maybe it was something he and Hope had in common. He tried now but was unable to remember the last time he felt truly, completely awake.
“By the time I went outside, both towers had already come down.”
“But you felt trapped,” said Orson.
“We were all trapped. You can’t imagine.”
“I grew up in East Berlin.”
“That’s different. In Berlin it was a permanent situation. It must have seemed normal.”
Walter was picturing himself asleep with Hope, their arms wrapped around each other in a bed floating over a war-torn city.
“Americans,” said Orson. “Your own experience is always so much more important than other people’s. Your own defense is always worth a struggle, regardless of consequence. Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung.”
“What does that mean?”
“Attack is the best defense,” Walter translated.
Orson leaned toward Hope over the table and spoke quietly.
“It means that the security chick on the subway was just doing her job, but rather than take responsibility for your own actions you fought with her, got her wet and upset, ruined her afternoon.”
“Better to go down fighting.”
Orson shook his head and whistled a few bars of “Dixie”; it happened to be a popular ring on German cell phones that year and everybody knew the tune. Hope fiddled nervously with her wedding ring. suddenly the shiniest object in the restaurant, flashing like the emergency lights on a double-parked car. He looked back and forth between Orson’s eyes and the ring. Where the hell was Bodo? Orson definitely assumed that Walter was already sleeping with Hope. When he saw the ring he would tease her about it, Walter was sure of it; Orson couldn’t keep his mouth shut about anything. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She pulled the gold band up to the knuckle, swiveled it, and pushed it down the bottom of her finger.
“You know what?” said Orson. “The thing I admire most about Americans is the same thing that most disgusts me. Your obstinate self-determination.”
Hope twisted her ring.
“But it’s the same with Germans. That is, our best quality is also our worst. Apologetic cautiousness. Fewer mistakes, but a lot less progress. Case in point: when an American director wants the actors to begin, do you know what he says to them?”
“Action.”
“Exactly. Do you know what German directors say?”
“Achtung?”
“We say Bitte,” Orson told her. “It means ‘please.’ ”
Hope watched Orson’s face carefully over t
he edge of her glass.
“You are amazing, Orson Welles,” she said. “You just sit back and tell me that Americans are so awful, but you name yourself after one of our most famous filmmakers and make money dubbing our movies into your language so that more of your people will watch them. You can’t have it both ways.”
Orson shrugged. “Last I checked there was still a fine line between appreciating American fiction films and agreeing with the government’s foreign policy.”
“Look, we have a right to defend ourselves. They started it, remember?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“We also happen to be defending the rights of very weak people. You know how women are treated over there, don’t you? If nothing else, you must agree that we have a responsibility to liberate them.”
“I just don’t think that’s what this war is about. Even so, I don’t think liberating anyone else is the responsibility of the United States.”
Hope smoothed two fingers across each of her eyebrows toward her temples and sighed. “You grew up in a totalitarian regime.”
“And I don’t remember the United States coming to our rescue. As I remember it, we liberated ourselves.”
Walter motioned to the waiter for another bottle of wine. So much for the celebration dinner, he thought, so much for his first date with Hope.
“I thought you weren’t going to argue with me anymore. I thought I was beyond reproach.”
“Touché.”
Orson watched the waiter uncork the new bottle and, as she held up her glass to be filled, finally caught sight of the gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand.
“Are you married?”
Hope looked down at the ring as if she’d just discovered it. Walter inhaled slowly through his teeth.
“Yes.”
“For a long time?”
“Six years.”
“Is your husband American?”
“Why?”
Orson glanced at Walter, licked one finger and touched it to the burning end of his cigarillo so that its flame slowly sizzled to a stop. Walter held his breath, pleading silently, the weight of his immediate future hanging on the delicacy of Orson’s response.