This Must Be the Place (11 page)

When the doorbell rang, he almost didn’t recognize the sound. It had been years since someone rang the interior bell to his apartment rather than the buzzer on the street. He left the half-packed suitcase on the bed and closed the bedroom door to conceal the mess he’d made. Still holding a dusty tube of sunscreen leftover from a trip he’d taken once to Lanzarote, he padded to the front door and stopped short behind it. There was no peephole to look through, but he knew it was Heike. One of the neighbors would have let her in. He breathed quietly, one hand on the doorknob, contemplating his housecleaning outfit. The holes in his socks, the baggy sweatpants. He looked like he’d been sulking in bed since she left. This was hardly the heroic scenario he’d hoped for. What would Tom do? Walter recalled the blowout with his wife in
The Firm.
They were outside by the swing set, the only place where bugs couldn’t trace the things they said. Tom had cheated on her, he had dragged her into this terrible mess, but he didn’t run away. No, he apologized. He came clean and came up with a plan to save the day and his marriage in the process. Walter rubbed his thumb against the brass doorknob without turning it. Tom Cruise never shied away from confrontation. Almost every film climaxed with a moment in which he faced his anger, his guilt, vulnerability, even shame, head-on. Walter rested his forehead against the front door.

He was preparing his reconciliation speech when a hand knocked softly on the wood a few centimeters away.

“Hel-lo-o?”

American English. A twang gave the second syllable a long extra beat. Walter pulled his head back abruptly and opened the door to find the woman from the night before holding two paper cups of coffee-to-go in front of her hands like exercise weights.

“It’s you,” he said.

She had her hair pulled up and back in a ponytail.

“I wanted to introduce myself,” she said. “I would have baked a pie or something but I don’t have any pans. My things are still on their way over here from New York City on a boat. Or maybe they’re sitting in a warehouse somewhere in Hamburg already, I’m not sure. I’ve been told that they’re not letting anything through customs these days. So this is the best I could do.”

Walter understood everything she said but watched her, dumbstruck. She handed him one of the cups.

“It’s good coffee,” she assured him. “Maybe we can imagine a pie to go with it.”

He had been fiddling nervously with the tube of sunscreen and now he dropped it to accept the cup. When they both bent down to pick it up, coffee spilled over the plastic lid.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

The words came, finally.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Please come in. Let’s imagine a pie.”

It was hard for Walter to remember the last time he had had a visitor in the middle of the day. His recent experiences as a host were limited to occasionally giving colleagues a ride home in his car, so he looked around his apartment as if it belonged to someone else. What to do with her? The living room furniture was still obscured by a blanket of receipts from the tax audit six months ago.

“Do you take milk?”

He led her into the kitchen.

“I should have introduced myself the other night,” she said when they were sitting down at the kitchen table. “I’m Hope.”

“Hope.” Walter smiled. “You have a very lovely singing voice.”

“I was singing.”

“Humming, too.”

“How embarrassing. You know, since I got here I’ve been alone all the time. Sometimes I go the whole day without speaking to anyone at all.”

“It was nice. Really.”

“Well, I need to make some friends. I thought I could start with you.”

“I’m honored. I’m Walter, by the way.”

“I know,” she said. “Walter Baum. I described you to the super.”

“The super speaks English?”

“I showed him.” She used both hands to mime a smooth head, a stocky physique, a big smile. “He pointed out your door.”

The shape she traced in the air was the most flattering description of himself that Walter had encountered in a long time. He wanted to step into it, conform to its outlines and live up to her good impression. He hadn’t had a proper conversation in English with another person since he last lived in California. There had been short, occasional exchanges with foreign taxi drivers or the waitstaff at beach hotels, but real conversation in his mother tongue was something he experienced only in his imagination, in the elaborate dialogue with ghosts from his past that he had reworked obsessively over the years, as if he might improve the course of history if he could get the syntax right.

Hope reached back to tighten her ponytail, seemed to catch herself fidgeting and returned her hands to her lap.

“I’m taking a German class,” she said. “But since the lyrics to songs playing in stores and cafés are always in English, I hear them more clearly than anything else and they get stuck in my head. Songs I haven’t heard since high school.”

“REO Speedwagon,” said Walter, finally remembering the name. “‘I Can’t Fight This Feeling.’ Was that 1984?”

“Exactly. You know, most days I can’t remember where I put my keys but I can remember every word to every dumb song on the American Top 40 between about 1977 and 1985. I think I could come up with all the words to ‘Wham! Rap’ if someone held a gun to my head.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Walter, savoring the play on her name. “Hope.”

When she smiled, the muscles in her face contracted and relaxed like an intricate origami. He did the music math. The songs she listened to in high school fell into a brief window of music sandwiched between the great, groovy rock ’n’ roll of his own adolescence in the late 1970s and the mainstream revival of the Grateful Dead that preceded grunge. That brief window was exactly the period of time when Walter was living in Los Angeles. In fact, George Michael’s voice still aroused in him the vaguely carsick sensation of beingstuck in a morning traffic jam on the 405 South. That made her only a few years younger than he was. Thirty-five, maybe. He felt pleased with himself; he had never dated a woman old enough to remember REO Speedwagon, let alone dislike them.

He was warming up to the sound of his own English. His accent was still good and the words came more easily already. He spoke faster and louder than he normally did in German, felt looser and more dramatic. He reached over and touched her arm for emphasis, hoping that he would have the chance to go out with her in public. People overhearing their conversation would assume that they were just another American couple visiting town, he thought. He wondered if her sweet, southern-sounding twang was contagious. If he spent enough time with her, he might learn to speak English like Elvis.

“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.”