This Must Be the Place (25 page)

“You’ll like it,” he said. “You’ll see. They play music in the afternoon and people dance. It’s a real Berlin establishment, just around the corner. It’ll cheer you up.”

Inside the club the light was dim, punctuated by the reflection of colored spots off a disco ball. Walter hadn’t been inside in years but it was exactly as he had remembered it. Velvet-cushioned seats and small tables lined a round dance floor, each one equipped with its own old-fashioned telephone.

“Why the telephone?”

“So people can ask each other to dance.”

He waved to the waiter.

“I think the average age here is about seventy-two,” said Hope.

“It’s Monday afternoon. Germany has mandatory retirement at sixty-five. That’s a lot of old people with nothing to do. In the summer they go walking, in the winter they come here.”

Nat King Cole sang his heart out over the loudspeakers, working his way through an album of greatest hits. They watched the dancers move together slowly in pairs.

“The women are dancing with other women.”

“There aren’t enough men. We die off early.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? So many women, so little time.”

She ran her hands across her stomach. He leaned forward to make sure she could hear him.

“That isn’t my problem.”

The waiter brought them Cokes and pretzel sticks. Hope stared like they were the tools of an exotic tribe and she had no idea what to do with them. Walter ate a pretzel, grabbed his Coke and stood up.

“Where are you going?”

He walked a few paces to the left and sat down three tables away, picked up the phone and dialed her number. She let it ring twice before picking it up.

“Hello?”

The phone volume had been adjusted for people of a certain age. Even with the dance music, he could hear her clearly.

“Hello.”

They looked at each other through the flashing light.

“Dave told me that when you speak German on the phone, people think you’re Tom Cruise.”

“When I speak on the phone, my voice sounds more similar to the way it sounds recorded, in movies. That is, people recognize it then as the one they know for Tom Cruise.”

“Speak to me like that.”

“In German?”

Walter tried to recall some relevant dialogue.

“Was machst du hier allein?”
he said. “What are you doing here alone?

He ran through some of the better pick-up lines from
Cocktail.
Once he got going, the German dialogue rolled off his tongue.

“It must be great to be someone else for a while,” she said. “I wish I could do that.”

“Be someone else?”

“Get away from yourself.”

Walter took a deep breath.

“Come with you?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

She didn’t understand the translation. Walter cleared his throat and said it in English.

“California.”

She was leaning forward over the telephone.

“Next week.”

“After the premiere of my new movie.”

The disco ball sprayed blobs of color across the room. Red, yellow and green across her forehead. An eternity passed.

“Christmastime is nice in Los Angeles,” he offered.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

Before she could have a chance to take it back, Walter hung up the phone.
Yes.
None of the fireworks he had expected went off. Maybe she was just kidding, but when he stared at her across the room, she looked totally serious. She was playing with a pretzel, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces, arranging the pieces into a pattern by the phone. It was an unlikely escape plan. The chances of meeting Tom Cruise were slim. The chances of Hope coming halfway across the world with him were possibly slimmer. But the image of the three of them together on the beach at the distant rim of continental America was so seductive, so palpably real in that moment, that despite all suggestions to the contrary, he believed it was going to happen. Sometimes, he thought, sometimes it was just a question of having a plan, however unlikely, for everything to fall into place. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted to feel her breasts pressed into his chest. He stood up and walked to her table.

“Should we dance?”

When they met at the edge of the dance floor, her body collapsed against his like a rag doll. They moved slowly in circles without speaking and did not stop dancing when the song changed. Walter held her in his arms but he could not feel the warmth of her body through her sweater or see her face, which was buried into his neck. When the band behind Nat King Cole kicked into high gear, he felt her crying; first the piano, then the strings, then the horn section, muffling her sobs. He just kept moving as her tears soaked into the collar of his shirt. Old women looked at them and smiled sweetly. From the outside, he thought, we look like a couple in love. It was a beginning. Hope was coming with him to California! He would take the role being offered him and run with it: a family man. Tom Cruise had children, didn’t he? Walter saw them all on a Malibu terrace overlooking the Pacific. The golden pink sunset, the sound of waves in the background, kids running around on the beach below. Let this be my midlife crisis, he thought, pulling Hope tightly into him and closing his eyes.

19

From January to June 1985, Walter ate scrambled eggs every Tuesday and Thursday morning at the diner with his grandfather. They had fallen into an easy routine. They sat at separate tables but shared the newspaper. They swapped stories like two strangers on neighboring bar stools night after night. His grandfather was friendly but his warmth had distance built into it, a chalk line drawn firmly through the playing field. He said he was a doctor, long retired, that he played a lot of tennis. He never mentioned his family, preferring to talk about sports and the weather. Walter was careful not to kick the conversation out-of-bounds.

“After World War II, I stayed in the service,” his grandfather told him early on. “We moved around a lot. Eventually we settled here and I went into private practice, but at the end, in the early sixties, I was stationed in Germany for two years.”

“Did you like it?”

“No, to be honest. Too cold in the winter.” He snorted one breath of laughter through his nose. “Didn’t much mix with locals.”

“Nobody?”

“The war was still a recent memory for us, Hans. We did our work on the base and kept a distance. Your family and friends sound very nice, but believe me, the people in the village we were in were nothing like you.”

He finished his eggs and pushed his plate away. He never ate bacon and so Walter didn’t either. He copied other things too, after a while: tucking in his shirt, pulling up his socks, rubbing one hand across his head, then still thick with hair, in exactly the way his grandfather rubbed his own bald pate.

“In fact, you don’t seem German to me at all,” said his grandfather. “I mean that as a compliment.”

After almost two years in the United States, Walter was used to this particular compliment. Casting directors, even other actors, often said it in an effort to be comforting. With the exception of Sharon, almost everyone he’d gotten to know in California had said it at some point, as if to be German, even to seem German, would be shameful, which he accepted. Everyone of his generation in Germany had been trained to enter the conversation with head bowed, to apologize for the sins of their forefathers as a matter of course and principle. They knew never to wave a flag, or promote their own agendas too aggressively. In Hollywood, when he occasionally came across other Germans, he ignored them and they ignored him, too. No one wanted to call attention to themselves or to be seen as a group on foreign soil. By the time he started having breakfast with his grandfather on a regular basis, Walter hadn’t even spoken German aloud in more than a year. Still, he knew he retained a minimal accent in English, because people always asked where he came from.

He was used to receiving this particular compliment, but when his grandfather said it, he could not help but wonder if he meant it as some kind of bait.
Actually, my mother was American,
he might have replied. But he believed that the moment of recognition would come about naturally if they could just get close enough. He was careful not to say anything that might betray his true identity prematurely. We have time, he told himself. So he stayed in character as Hans, drawing freely from the scenarios cooked up by television writers for
Schönes Wochenende
’s faithful audience. Hans had been a character on the show for three seasons. A lifetime, thought Walter as he replaced his own biography with Hans’s fictitious one. Sixty-six episodes complete with a family, location names, background details, funny anecdotes, a first love, childhood friends, even pets; he never ran out of things to talk about. Since his grandfather hadn’t been back to Germany since the early sixties, the anachronistic world of
Schönes Wochenende,
contrived to tap into the German audience’s nostalgia for simpler times, rang true: milkmaids in lace-up dresses with their cleavage spilling out, red-nosed men drunk on
Weissbier,
hilly fields dotted picturesquely with bales of hay. His grandfather listened attentively, he seemed to enjoy it, so Walter ran with it. The more Hans stories that he told, the more he took them for his own; the more he believed them, the more he wanted to tell. Walter told his grandfather everything. At the time, the fact that none of it was true seemed insignificant.

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.