by Anna Winger
“We wear wedding rings on the right hand here in Germany. Not on the left. I always forget that Americans do it the other way around.”
Bodo arrived at the table and Walter let the air out of his stomach.
“Just in time,” he said under his breath.
“Did I hear correctly? We have a convict in the restaurant?”
Hope held out her hand to be shaken.
“I was myself once arrested at Friedrichstrasse,” said Bodo.
He rolled his r’s in English as if speaking with an Irish brogue. He formed his sentences as if still speaking German. A yellow ribbon was still fastened to the collar of his shirt.
“I was coming back to West Berlin from a day in the East with another actor friend. We were separated and questioned for hours in little rooms. Good cop, bad cop. Finally, we tell them everything.”
“What did you do?”
“We bought the complete works of William Shakespeare. One set for each.”
“It was illegal to buy books?”
“No. But the books cost more money than was legal to exchange in one day. We had exchanged ours with a street guy, black market, instead of at the official place. We got a much higher rate.”
“How did you get out of it?”
“We told the police we were poor actors, which was true, that we could not pay to buy such important literature in our own terrible, capitalist country, which, by the way, was also true. Eventually they let us go.”
Orson laughed. Walter, relieved, laughed too.
“Nice ribbon,” said Orson.
Bodo looked down at his shirt collar.
“Born and raised in West Berlin, my man. We always remember the airlift.”
Their eyes met and in the slow moment that followed, Orson seemed to be swallowing his words. Bodo smiled.
“Have you already heard the specials?”
When the food came, they were well into their third bottle of wine. Hope listened intently to the plot of Orson’s movie.
“I want to say things about my country that people never say out loud,” he said. “But the film is going to be funny. I want to draw people in by making them laugh and then make them think.”
“It’s a cool idea to have this guy reinvent himself by putting his skills to good use. When I was teaching, I always tried to use humor to communicate the difficult concepts.”
“Well, I tried to sell this script to all the public funding agencies and no one would touch it. They said it would offend people in the East. The GDR wasn’t just ironic furniture, young man, they told me. But I think if it’s done right, humor will heal people, not offend them. So I am funding it myself. At least this way I can stay true to my vision.”
“You know what, if you need an apartment to film in for free, you’re welcome to use mine. It’s completely empty. My stuff still hasn’t arrived from New York.”
The only thing worse than losing the role was the idea of passing Til Schweiger every day in the lobby during the shoot, thought Walter. Thankfully he wouldn’t even be here. He would be drinking piña coladas by the pool at the Beverly Hilton.
“I might take you up on that,” said Orson, taking down her phone number in a notebook. “We’re still scouting for locations.”
She lifted her glass.
“To your first Academy Award,” she said.
They clinked their glasses together and turned to Walter, who lifted his own reluctantly.
“I wanted him to be the star but he turned me down,” said Orson.
“Really? I didn’t know you were an actor,” she said, turningto look at Walter. “I mean, I thought the dubbing thing was something different.”
“He’s an icon!”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
All evening he had been unsuccessful in trying to influence the conversation’s direction.
“You have to see Schönes Wochenende,” said Orson. “It’s a TV show from the early eighties about people in the Alps. It’s a classic and Walter was the star. His character was named Hans. Everybody loved Hans. When I was a child, we could pick up West German TV signals over the Wall. We never missed Schönes Wochenende. My sister even had a black-market poster of Hans up behind her bedroom door.”
Hope clapped her hands together, looking at Walter in delighted disbelief.
“You have to show it to me!”
He cleared his throat, scanning the soft surface of her face.
“Remember the guy washing the horse? The German show with the beautiful landscape?”
Her lips opened up in a circle that exposed all her teeth.
“That was me.”
“You look so different now.”
He could feel the blood pumping through his heart.
“It was years ago.”
“Have you been in other things since then?”
“No.”
“That’s a pity.”
Orson nodded enthusiastically.
“He looks even better now, don’t you think?”
“Please—”
“He does. Hans had a baby face.”
“That’s right. Now it’s weathered into something more interesting.”
Walter rubbed one hand over the face they described. His thumb and forefinger pressed into the sharp, day-old stubble on either side of his mouth as Orson went on.
“He walked out on his contract at the height of the show’s popularity. Hans went off to the army. The whole thing was something of a local industry mystery.”
A mystery! Walter laughed. Better than a cautionary tale. In the years since then, he had nervously gauged how much of his history to reveal to each new person that came into his life.
“Where did you go?”
“Los Angeles. I told you that.”
“Why?”
“My father died—” He stopped himself: He would tell Hope everything but not now, not here. “It was complicated.”
“Must have been tough to get work again when you came back,” said Orson.
“I never planned to come back.”
“Will you stay for good this time?”
“You’re going back to L.A.?”
“I told you—”
“That’s why he turned down my film.”
“I told you. I’m going to L.A. for Christmas. After the premiere.”
“To stay?”
“Maybe.”
“No,” she said.
Walter gazed at Hope in the candlelight, unclear what she meant. Come with me, he asked her silently. He couldn’t bring himself to say it here.
“He was great as Hans but he would have been even better as Fritz,” said Orson.
Hope put one hand on Walter’s arm and squeezed it.
“You would have been perfect.”
16
Sharon shared a small house in Irvine with roommates from Disney. It was a pinkish bungalow in a development of pinkish bungalows laid out like checkers across a board. In the mornings Walter liked to sit on her front step with his cereal and look down the street, which was perfectly straight. He would close one eye and then the other, checking for a slight curve in the pavement, waiting for someone to appear on the concrete horizon. People in Irvine never walked anywhere, not to dinner with the neighbors, not for exercise. They drove their cars somewhere, went for a jog, got back in their cars and drove home. But he waited there anyway, because he could imagine it so clearly: an old couple, just taking a morning stroll through the neighborhood, would come up the sidewalk and there he would be, eating cereal on the front step of a pink bungalow in Irvine as if random coincidence had brought them together. In his mind the scene that followed played out different ways. Sometimes they recognized each other immediately and fell tearfully into an embrace.Sometimes they stopped to stare at him, since he looked just like his mother, and he played it cool.
“I didn’t know I had grandparents,” he’d say. “What a surprise.”
After she died, he had waited for them to come for him. Ever
y day he had expected to find them after school, waiting for him on the low wall that lined the front yard of his house, calling out to him with the familiar English words that had all but disappeared overnight: honey, breakfast, night-night, love-you, baby. They never came and he had never seen a picture of them, and so he examined the face of every American tourist who appeared in his Alpine village, just in case. As a teenager, when he traveled by train and found himself sitting next to an American couple of a certain age, he always wondered. They might have been anyone then, he thought, but now they were only a few miles away. He had located Springtime Estates on the map soon after he got the Disney job and had been driving past it for months now, had even idled once in the car at the front gate, next to the sign advertising “Independent Living with Friendly Assistance.” After twenty minutes, he’d chickened out and driven away.
At first he did not register the beige Star of David that decorated the sign. That his grandparents chose to live in a Jewish community struck Walter as no more or less of a surprise than that they lived in Irvine at all, or in California. He didn’t know if they were short or tall, elderly or just getting on, if they were friendly, busy, sick; he knew nothing about them. The day he finally went inside the gates of Springtime Estates was a January Monday blessed with the kind of weather that makes people who moved west from colder climates want to kiss the ground with gratitude. He drove slowly through the front gates and up the flat, flower-named avenues until he found 53 Bougainvillea. The house was a bungalow not unlike Sharon’s. It was light blue with small front windows and one car parked in the driveway, a powder blue Buick sedan that almost matched the color of the house. Walter pulled over to the other side of the street. Only crickets punctuated the silence, chirping in time with the rapid staccato of his heartbeat. The house shimmered in the sunshine, ripe with promise and half unreal. Walter turned on the radio and Lionel Richie crooned. He watched the dark blue front door for signs of life, thinking that by being here now he had veered off the linear trajectory of his life. Worse, that he was breaking an unspoken rule that bound him to his father. In the ten years between their deaths, his father had only mentioned his mother’s parents once, drunk on schnapps their first Christmas Eve alone.
“They killed her,” he’d said, raising his voice, tears in his eyes. “They made her choose between us. No one should have to make that choice, especially not a seventeen-year-old girl. Do you understand me? They killed her with neglect.”
Walter nodded, although he had not understood. He’d been shocked to see his usually taciturn father fall apart.
Not a leaf stirred that warm day in Irvine, but the fear that he was betraying his father made Walter shiver in his car. If it was nine A.M. in California, it was nine hours later in Germany: six P.M. If his father were still alive (and Walter had to remind himself that he wasn’t), he would have just arrived home from work. He’d had the same job for twenty years, the same routine. Walter was picturing him with a glass of beer, alone at his kitchen table, when an old man came out of the blue house wearing tennis whites and got into the Buick. He was nearly bald and at least eighty years old, if not older, but for his age appeared to be quite fit. Even from where Walter was parked ten meters away the resemblance was immediately obvious. The square jaw, the round eyes, the quick-paced, short-legged gait. Walter pulled his car around at the end of the street and followed his grandfather from half-a-block’s distance away. The streets of Irvine were wide and free of cars. When his grandfather pulled into the parking lot at Fashion Island, Walter followed him, parked his own car and, maintaining his distance, walked into a small restaurant by the entrance to the mall.
Inside, an icy blast of air-conditioning. The wet film of sweat that covered Walter’s body froze instantly. He rubbed his bare arms and looked around. Simple booths and Formica tabletops lined the walls of the all-purpose diner. Senior citizens and housewives chattered together in small groups over coffee and eggs. Walter’s grandfather sat down alone in a booth near the back and pulled out the newspaper. Walter sat down just past him, where like a gangster he had the whole restaurant in view. He ordered a cup of coffee while his grandfather read the sports section and ordered eggs with toast, no bacon. A waitress made the rounds, stopping at his table. They seemed to know each other.
“Playing tennis again today?”
Walter’s grandfather looked up from his paper.
“Every Tuesday and Thursday. Aren’t you from Chicago?”
“I am.”
“Bears fan?”
“Of course!”
She smiled and held up her pot of coffee with the other hand on her hip.
“Think they can beat Boston?”
She laughed. “I sure do. You wanna bet?”
Walter’s grandfather turned to Walter, who was so surprised he spilled the contents of his coffee cup into its saucer.
“You want to take her up on this?”
The waitress leaned down to wipe up the mess.
“I don’t—”
“You’re not from back East too, are you? I’m surrounded!”
Walter’s grandfather leaned back in his seat and faced Walter squarely. He grinned.
“No,” said Walter carefully. “But I don’t know anything about the Super Bowl. I’m from Germany.”
He waited for the grin to either expand with recognition or fade in shock, for a cloud to cross his grandfather’s lined, brown face. Nothing happened. The waitress refilled Walter’s cup and moved on to other tables. His grandfather kept his chair tilted toward him.
“You know you’ve got some good tennis players coming out of Germany,” he said. “These young kids from that town near Heidelberg, what’s it called again?”
The training ground of both Boris Becker and Steffi Graf was one of the only places in Germany ever mentioned in the L.A. Times.
“Leimen.”
“That’s right! You know, I was in the service over there years ago. The winters were damn cold.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Walter,” said his grandfather. “By the way.”
He extended his hand. Walter looked down at the swollen veins that lined five thick fingers just like his own. What to say? He had never imagined it this way. He had never allowed for the possibility that they wouldn’t know him: he had his mother’s eyes, his grandfather’s hands. He was German. He was twenty-three years old. Do the goddamn math, is what he wanted to say, but it choked in his throat.
“I’m Hans,” he said.
The name came out easily, so he said it again as he shook his grandfather’s hand. It was the only time they ever touched.
“I’m Hans,” he said again. “It’s nice to meet you.”
17
Hope waited in the living room, standing up by the window. They had agreed on eleven and it was five minutes past and she was irritated that Orson was late. This morning she had woken up exhausted and now paced the empty living room, unsure what to do with her day. Since the incident two days earlier she had not returned to the subway. The magic was lost. From where she was standing in her apartment, she could see a clean sweep of Berlin’s flat, unremarkable skyline to the south. But from afar, it did not have the immediacy she experienced from the train. She couldn’t see any of the details, into apartments or the courtyards of buildings or people’s faces. She was unable to grasp the sense of mystery about the city that had kept her coming back to the subway day after day. She had treated her daily investigations like a job, and the loss of its imperative left her aimless and restless. Hope turned from the view to watch the pattern a rare ray of sunshine was making on the parquet floor. She was startled when the doorbell rang.
“I’m late,” said Orson. “I’m sorry. Normally I ride my bike, but today it’s just too damn cold.”
She stepped aside to let him in.
“At least it’s sunny.”
“Sun is overrated. I hate high-contrast lighting. The shadows just get in the way of the shot. Let’s pray for gray
skies over Christmas. I’m shooting video, remember.”
She followed him down the hallway into the living room.
“Nice,” he said, taking in the white space, the intricate floorboards, the view.
“I told you it was empty. Our container is stuck in customs in Hamburg. Even if they deliver it before Christmas, which is unlikely at this rate, we can just put everything in one of the bedrooms until you’re finished shooting.”
Orson walked the length of the room, counting off his steps in German, under his breath. When he was finished making a calculation, he looked at Hope.
“This might work really well. Of course it’s much fancier than the place my character is living in, but we can dress it down.”
“It’s all yours. The space is kind of wasted on us.”
“Can I look around?”
She held out her hand. Orson removed a small camera from his pocket, took a few pictures of the living room and they walked into the dining room and then the kitchen.
“Walter lives in this building too?”
“Upstairs.”
“In an apartment like this?”
“It’s the same layout, but it’s not renovated. You know, he’s lived there for a long time. I think he pays a lot less rent.”
Orson opened the dishwasher, examined the three dirty glasses inside, closed it and left the kitchen. They headed into the back down a long corridor, where she opened the door to the master bedroom. The TV stood at the foot of the mattress, the dust on its screen now illuminated by sunshine. At least she’d made the bed. The comforter was thrown flat over the mattress and the pillows against the wall.
“I recently directed the voice-over for a TV commercial about fabric softener,” said Orson. “In the film, a family was making a bed, you know, beautiful shots of clean sheets and all that. It sounds simple enough, but they had to shoot the bed made nine different ways, one for each of the other European countries where the commercial was going to air, because no one could agree on how to make a bed.”
“I don’t even have a real bed yet. Excuse the mess.”