This Must Be the Place

by Anna Winger

  Craving more than two breakfasts a week with his grandfather, after a few months Walter starting following him when he went to play tennis. He became good at keeping a stealth distance behind, a few cars between them on the road, parking in the shade (his car was a common brand, the color an undistinguished brown). Sometimes he waited outside the tennis club, listening to the radio and years later, when he remembered those mornings sitting in the car, it would seem to him that the Madonna song “Holiday” had been playing in a loop the whole time. Its early electronic beat and her high-pitched voice reverberated in the midday heat, waves of energetic enthusiasm dancing across the hot pavement like a mirage. Sometimes he stayed long enough to pick up the chase again two hours later and follow his grandfather around on his errands (the drugstore, the bank). He was tempted to arrange a spontaneous encounter, to roll up with his own basket at the supermarket and say hello, as if by coincidence, but he wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He was tempted to follow him into Springtime Estates but he bided his time. When he noticed that the beige Star of David on the sign at Springtime Estates was replicated on the sign outside the tennis club, he absorbed it as any other logo. The club was clearly an extension of the housing development. But in the hours he spent looking at it he began eventually to wonder if the whole organization was a Jewish one and if his grandfather too, then, was Jewish. The idea was unexpected and thrilling. Walter had had no contact with Jews growing up (there were only a few in Berlin when he lived there, and perhaps none at all in rural Bavaria) but the cultural void left behind by the Holocaust had loomed large. If only because the majority of German émigrés who had come to Hollywood before him were Jewish, he had already felt a private kinship. That his mother’s parents and thus his mother, and thus he, too, might be Jewish offered not only a connection to famous luminaries in his profession, but an explanation for his lifelong sense of dislocation and therefore, finally, the possibility of a home. If his people were out there, then he could find them; if he had been adrift all his life, he had now been thrown a rope. It wasn’t a question of God, but kinship. He never asked his grandfather directly, but the clues added up, and after a while Walter accepted the possibility as fact. A new identity began, proudly, to crystallize.

  On a high school trip Walter had once visited Regensburg, a medieval city in Bavaria not bombed during the war. All the architecture was intact. In the Rathaus there, the huge town hall, there was an original prison in the basement, including a whole room devoted to violent and primitive torture devices that left a particularly strong impression on the teenage boys in the group, who took turns trying to stick each other into them. There were many levels, for each kind of prisoner, descending into an isolation chamber at the bottom for the worst of the worst. It could be reached only through a small opening in the ceiling. There was no light and nowhere to sleep but the floor. There was only a makeshift toilet in the corner, a hole in the ground covered by a stone that served as a seat. The tour guide had been very thorough and perhaps because his audience was so attentive, went into great detail. He told them how each of the torture devices worked and what the prisoners were fed (in descending order) and pointed out, finally, that the stone surface of the toilet in the dungeon at the bottom was actually a tombstone stolen from a Jewish cemetery during the pogrom of 1509. The entire class had leaned in to peer down at the Hebrew letters inscribed in the stone.

  “The scum of the earth sat on a stolen Jewish tombstone to take a shit?”

  Someone else had asked the question, but the heartbreaking thought had crossed Walter’s mind too. Now sitting in his car outside the tennis club, bare legs plastered to the hot plastic seats, the thought of that tombstone made him sick. He was twenty-three that year in California. High school was a recent memory, even his childhood was relatively fresh. He stared at the Star of David and found himself sifting through the details of class trips and history lessons, his own father’s family stories from World War II. And when Walter imagined his very young mother; when he imagined his mother, his Jewish mother, alone in that small town and surrounded by its incomprehensible history, the image took his breath away.

  20

  The store reminded Hope of the hardware store she had grown up with in Kansas City, in business since the beginning of time. As she opened the door, a bell hanging over it chimed. Every step she took now already felt like a step for two. She took in the thick patina of daily use on the store’s walls, the display of plastic buckets, arranged by size, gathering dust in the window. She examined a pile of real candles for Christmas trees. The tree Dave brought home had just been sitting in a corner, so she picked up three boxes of candles and two of the little gold clips and gathered her thoughts before approaching the counter. If her project in the nursery had initially been driven by curiosity, it was personal now. It was taking too long. Her German wasn’t good enough to describe what she needed in detail, but she had collected a few key words from the dictionary and had written them down on a piece of paper.

  “Was kann ich für Sie tun?” asked the shop clerk.

  He had on thick glasses that made his eyes expand behind their black plastic frames. Hope laid the small piece of paper down on the counter and he removed his glasses to get a better look at it. The eyes underneath were human-sized, brown and kind. He read her list and looked up at her, replacing the glasses on his nose.

  “Rauhfasertapete,” he said, at least this was the one word she could identify from what came out of his mouth.

  She nodded. He left the counter and went into the back. While she waited, she examined the hundreds of drawers lining the walls, from the floor to the ceiling, each one with a sample of its contents on the front: screws, nails, hooks, handles, knobs. She hadn’t had a shower in two days and had her hair pulled back in a knot held in place by a pencil, which felt loose as she bent her neck. Behind her, a line of other customers gathered, agitating silently as the wait went on. She reknotted her hair and stuck the pencil in as deep as she could, so that it felt like even sides of her face were pulled back into the bun. When the man emerged from the back, he was carrying a square-shaped, old-fashioned machine and a collection of other objects: a paper mask, a flat, sharp metal tool, garbage bags and an X-acto knife. He placed the machine on the front counter.

  “Wasser,” he said slowly, pointing into the hole in the top. “Fünf Minuten.” He held up one hand with five fingers spread.

  Hope nodded quickly. She made a deposit for the rental, paid for the other supplies and the Christmas candles, which she threw in her shoulder bag, and left the store carrying the machine carefully with both hands.

  The drunks on the bench at Savignyplatz were already well into their morning despite the cold, and they hackled when she approached them, so she walked the other way around the square. As she came up on the southeast corner, she had to force herself to continue past the clothing store and the Russian restaurant separating her from the brothel’s entrance. Only one woman was standing there today, the black one with blond hair, no Santa hat. She had on moon boots that went up past her knees and thick stockings and a very short white down jacket over a bright red leotard, hips and breasts swelling impossibly from the tight belt at her waist. The outfit made her look like some punk Wonder Woman, thought Hope, putting down the machine. She pulled her trench coat protectively around her stomach thinking that this woman would not be standing outside in the cold at ten A.M. if it were not worth her while. Apparently, Dave had been right about the local market for a quick morning fuck.

  “Three businesses boom during a recession,” he’d told her not that long ago. “Liquor, movies and prostitution.”

  “How cynical,” she’d replied.

  She already knew how his affair would play out. She was certain that he had placed limits on how far he’d go with someone else (oral sex, no penetration; fingers, hands; no kissing), that he had managed to circumscribe the experience in his mind, keep it separate from their marriage. Meat and milk. Eventually he would co
me back, if she wanted him (of this she was certain, but she was no longer certain that she did). She shook out her arms and as she did so, the prostitute looked over. Her makeup was garish, bright and metallic against her dark skin, and when their eyes met she licked her lips. The lick was lazy, provocative, a pink tongue run slowly over red lipstick; Hope realized only halfway through that it was meant as an invitation. She shook her head. The woman shrugged. I’m sorry, Hope wanted to say. It isn’t you. She quickly picked up the machine and hurried under the S-Bahn tracks to avoid the posters, which she knew were wrapped around a wall by the entrance to the train. They would be rain-soaked and peeling off the walls by now, she thought, but the image was still there: the hooded smile, the arms still lifted victoriously, the stupid headline in red. At the playground on the other side of the tracks, the mothers sat together on a bench while their children played, bundled up in handmade-looking woolens and snow boots. Hope couldn’t hear them, or see their lips move, but she knew they were talking from the breath that rose up from their heads in the cold.

  She pushed open the gate. As it slammed shut behind her, the view of the playground seemed to both retract and expand, as if filtered through a fish-eye lens. The jungle gym bloated in the middle, the line of women pulled off to one side and the strollers to the other, and the whole picture warped around her, sucking her inextricably inward. She considered the possibility that she might be jinxing everything by entering hallowed ground so early in her pregnancy, but last time, she had not eaten sushi, had not had a single sip of alcohol or flown in a transatlantic plane. Last time, she had told no one that she was pregnant until twelve weeks had passed, which was no comfort when the baby died at thirty weeks. By then, she already had told everyone and quit her job. Hope put down the machine and approached the bench. The mothers looked up and moved to one side to make space for her without asking why she was there without a child. If they had noticed that she had entered the playground with a humidifier instead of a stroller, they did not say so. They made space for her and spoke to her in English.

  “I’ve seen you at Balzac,” said one with short gray hair and an American accent. “You must be new in town, because there are way better places to get a cup of coffee.”

  “If you saw her there, then you were there too,” pointed out the woman to her left. “And you’ve been here for years.”

  “I go there all the time because the menu is in English,” said Hope.

  They nodded. There were three of them, each very different in style. The one with short hair and the American accent was the eldest. She had a serious, slightly defeated expression and wore clogs. The one to her left was wearing a proper winter coat with a wide collar and buttons made of tortoiseshell; she had long, polished black hair and an accent. The third one had not spoken yet. She had her blond hair fixed in a bob and clasped her hands in her lap over a pale blue parka that matched the color of her eyes. Hope sat down next to the dark-haired woman closest to her side of the bench.

  “When I first came, there wasn’t even coffee-to-go in this city,” continued the American. “You couldn’t get anything to go in Berlin.”

  “When was that?”

  “Late eighties, right before the Wall came down.”

  The blond woman yelled something to one of her children in German. The child, a girl about six years old, pulled her hat down over her ears.

  “What was it like here then?”

  “Very left-wing, very laid-back. None of these business types you see around here now, running the world.”

  “She always complains that the Ties have ruined Charlottenburg,” said the blonde. “But my husband is a Tie.”

  “A Suit,” the American woman corrected her. “Your husband is a Suit. In English we don’t call them Ties.”

  Hope laughed.

  “The Wall came down and the Suits came charging over from the East?”

  “No, the Suits came from Munich to make money in the New Berlin. The people who came over from the East just wanted to eat bananas. That was the thing they had craved most. For weeks you had to kill someone in the supermarket to get a banana. Anyway, it wasn’t until the official reunification that the change really sank in.”

  “In 1990.”

  “I remember going down to Unter den Linden to see the celebration, and I’m telling you, it was like the Germans won the war after all. They won the World Cup that summer with a reunited team. They even got all their land back in the end. They were dancing in the streets. It was scary.”

  “We didn’t get everything back,” said the blonde. “It isn’t fair to say that. My family had been living for five hundred years near Königsberg. They had a castle there.”

  “You always bring this up. The aristocrats supported Hitler, so in the end they lost their castles to the Russians. Please.”

  “They survived only by foraging for mushrooms.”

  “At least they survived,” said the American woman.

  No one said anything for a moment.

  “It’s insensitive.”

  “Because you’re Jewish?”

  All three women looked at Hope, surprised.

  “Because she is,” the American woman indicated the dark-haired woman sitting next to Hope. “Because she lost more than a castle, if you know what I mean.”

  The dark-haired woman shrugged.

  “My family is Jewish and German, but I was born in Colombia. I decided to come back. I have been living here for three years now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is a good place for a family and those”—she pointed to two children on the jungle gym, a boy and a girl—“those are my children.”

  “Is this a good place for children?”

  “Of course. Berlin is a city of the future.”

  “But what about the past?”

  “You have to make peace with the past to get on with the future.” She smiled. “I live with my ghosts here. I keep them company. They like that.”

  Hope watched the children playing on the jungle gym. For the first time she noticed that this playground had been built in a bombed-out lot. On either side were the ragged edges of other buildings, leaning up against the air.

  “What about you?”

  “Me? No, but—” She paused. “My child.”

  The Colombian woman placed one warm hand on Hope’s cold one.

  “Felicidades,” she said. “A summer baby. The summer is beautiful in Berlin.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Hope squinted into the dim daylight and tried to imagine the city in summer. The winter here was like being locked in a room with nothing but a low-burning lightbulb overhead, she thought. In college, she had once taken a film history class and remembered the German Expressionist period. Rain pouring against windows while, inside, the actress despaired.

  “I think the problem with Berlin is that the winter weather so perfectly reflects the mood of its international reputation that it’s almost vulgar to imagine it otherwise. I mean, people taken from their homes on a green summer afternoon? Bombs falling from a bright blue sky? The sun shining over a population in captivity?”

  “I wasn’t there,” said the American woman. “But everyone says that September eleventh was a perfect autumn day.”

  Hope looked down the bench at the other mothers but said nothing more.

  “You know, in Bogotá,” said the Colombian woman, “the weather is always the same. The sun rises at seven and sets at seven the whole year. Nobody ever talks about it. We take the sunshine totally for granted. But here it’s like a gift every time the spring comes back. Just when you think you can’t take it anymore, everything blooms at once. The trees are green and the cafés are full and the children are running around in their underpants.”

  Hope laughed. “I have totally lost touch with the spin of the earth,” she said. “I just don’t believe that it will ever be warm here.”

  “Not just warm,” said the
Colombian woman. “Light!

  This week it will be the shortest day of the year. Already it is so dark that you walk around feeling half asleep. But the payoff comes around on the other side in Berlin. You’ll see, in June it is sunny until eleven in the evening.”

  Hope had never considered this: the payoff on the other side, the yin-yang of the seasons. She could not picture Berlin in summer any more than she could actually imagine going to California for Christmas, but suddenly found herself trying. A sunset at midnight, a green view from her apartment, the children unwrapped from their layers, and people, everywhere, spilling out onto the sidewalk. She found herself wondering what it would be like to stay and find out.

  At her apartment one hour later, she dropped her coat by the door and headed straight for the nursery in the back with the machine. Paper hung off the walls onto the floorboards, stinking of glue. Where she had already pulled the white paper free it revealed wide stripes of the orange wallpaper beneath it. She had begun with the small hole Orson had made and worked outward, picking at the glue with a kitchen knife. She had managed to pull off almost all the white layer of paper on that wall, revealing the orange paper beneath it. There were three walls left, and then the orange layer and whatever she found below that. She filled the machine with water and plugged it in, pulling it into the middle of the room and paced around it for the five minutes it took the water to boil, as the man at the hardware store had instructed. When steam billowed from the machine in gusts, rising to the ceiling and filling out to the sides, she sat down on the floor and watched until perspiration poured down the walls.

  When the wallpaper swelled up in ripples and bumps, she put on the paper mask and pulled with both hands. The top layer came off easily now that it was wet. After an hour, her hair and clothes were soaked with steam and her fingertips bloody with paper cuts. When she pushed back the orange layer underneath the white, she found another paper there: a textured disco pattern, sparkles blended into a background yellow and sticky with age. She reached for the X-acto knife and cut a square, one foot wide, into the orange paper and pulled up the edge. The disco paper was deep beneath it, followed by a layer of pink flowers, and beyond that a big pattern from the 1950s, in white and avocado green. When Hope scraped at that layer with the knife, she found a thinner paper beneath it, simple newspaper. She took a step back now and examined the open edges of the square through the steam, layers of wallpaper snuggled up against each other like generations of sediment in an archaeological dig.