“Where is your husband?”
“In Poland.”
Walter had been over the border an hour away only once and remembered very little about it except the sad young girls for sale by the side of country roads, dancing in their underpants in groups of two or three, waving to the German cars driving through the grim post-Soviet landscape.
“Why?”
“He’s an economist. He’s consulting on a project for a new business initiative here in Berlin, but spends most of his time on-site, just over the border from Frankfurt Oder.”
“Have you been there?”
“Oh, no.”
He decided to take this as a good sign. Let the husband stay in Poland. Hope’s eyes rested on the same tube of sunscreen that had been there before.
“Are you going on a trip?” she asked.
“I might go to Los Angeles for Christmas.”
“Nice.”
Nice,
thought Walter.
Come with me.
“I used to live there,” he said.
“That’s why your English is so good.”
“It was sixteen years ago.”
“You must go back often.”
“Never.”
He gauged the temperature in the room. Where he began this story would dictate which version he told. There were many versions, developed over the years for different audiences. There was the short answer, the simple one, the sob story, the superficial explanation. There was the truth, of course, but this he almost never told anyone.
“My mother came from the United States,” he said, beginning at the beginning. “From California originally, but her father was in the Army and they moved around a lot. They came to Germany in 1961, when she was seventeen. That’s where she met my father, who was working in a village near the base.”
“Like Priscilla Presley.”
“My father was nothing like Elvis, believe me.”
He looked at the clock, at the washing machine, at the smooth, square linoleum tiles that made up his kitchen floor. He pictured his hometown in winter. On a moonless night it seemed like the last village left on earth after the apocalypse, he remembered, as if the outside world had been cut off, the search teams had been called back and there was no more chance of ever being saved. He wanted to explain that to Hope. He felt that she would instinctively understand that experience of isolation, but if he pulled the loose thread here, what was to stop his life from coming completely unraveled at her feet? Quickly, he pushed his chair back and unloaded the wet laundry into a plastic basket and headed to the bedroom, but then he remembered the map.
“Hold this,” he said, handing her the laundry basket.
He went into the bedroom and came out again with a drying rack. Then he steered her farther down the hallway to the spare bedroom.
“In our apartment this room was designed as a nursery,” said Hope. “There are animals carved into the moldings on the ceiling. I wonder why you don’t have them in here.”
“Every apartment in this building has a different story. There have been so many tenants over the years. So many different renovations.”
She looked down, as if trying to see through the floor into the nursery in her apartment below. He set up the drying rack by the window.
“Did children live in our apartment before we moved in?”
“I’ve been here for sixteen years and I can’t remember ever seeing a child in this building.”
“That’s too bad.”
She lifted a shirt out of the basket and hung it over the rungs of the rack.
“Tell me the rest of the story.”
“Which one?”
“About your parents.”
“After they met they started spending time together on Sundays. The premise was that my father needed to practice his English, but one thing led to another and my mother got pregnant. Her parents were pretty scandalized, I mean, it was 1961. They didn’t want her to have a baby. They wanted her to go back to the States with them, go to college. But instead she left school and married my father and had me. Her parents transferred away from Germany and she never reconciled with them.”
“You never met them?”
Walter glanced down at the bra he was laying over the drying rack.
“My mother used to try to reach them on the telephone, but they wouldn’t speak with her.”
“Wow.”
“They had—” He paused. “They had what I think you would call irreconcilable differences.”
They returned to the kitchen and loaded the next pile of laundry into the washing machine.
“At home we only spoke English. We listened to American music. We lived in the German part of town, but at Christmas she used to take me up to the American neighborhood, near the Army base, to see the lights. The Americans covered their houses with crazy, blinking, colored lights, with glowing displays of Santa and his reindeer on their front lawns, Jesus in the manger, the Three Kings, snowmen. All of them lit up from within. Germans considered it all a vulgar public display, of course, but we loved it.”
“Did she decorate your house?”
“No, no. We didn’t even have a tree. She didn’t believe in that. It wasn’t Christmas that she liked about the decorated houses, but the brazen waste of electricity.” He laughed. “You know, people in our village were very conservative, very Catholic. My mother was always different. She just created this little bubble around the two of us.”
Walter could still see his mother’s pink skirt swinging in time to Otis Redding while she danced with the GI in the living room. It was a circle skirt, long outdated in places more fashion-forward in 1971. Her party skirt, she’d called it. He had loved how it swished around her legs like a fountain, defying gravity, smiling at him. Her slim legs moved in time to the music as the soldier spun her around the room. His friend cheered them on, laughing and shaking the ice cubes in his glass like maracas. Walter had laughed too, loving the music and the sudden good cheer, happy to see his mother having such a good time. He had never told this story to Heike. In the thirty years since it happened, he had told it only rarely at all, perhaps because it was not atypical. Many German-American marriages went bust in the postwar years. Had he openly complained, he would have been told to buck up. The fallout from the war was long and complicated. Everyone had paid a price.
“She died in a car accident when I was nine.”
Hope inhaled and covered her mouth with one hand.
“She used to hang out with GIs from the U.S. base in the afternoons while my father was at work. She was lonely and homesick and young. My father was meticulous and methodical about his work but he was the kind of guy who misses a lot of things happening right under his nose. The afternoon of the accident, two guys had driven over in an Army jeep. It had no hardtop, just a roll bar, and she wanted to go for a ride. All three of them were pretty drunk already. They were laughing really hard. My mother couldn’t leave me alone, so one of them went with her and the other one stayed with me.”
The face of the young GI left behind to babysit was fixed forever in his mind; his broad, flat cheeks and pale skin, his droopy eyes like a hound dog across the yard as they played catch. Every detail of those last few moments remained acute: the slap of the hard baseball in his right hand when he caught it, the flip of his small elbow when he threw, the chill in the air, the purple shape of his house in the afternoon twilight.
“You know what I remember most clearly? For those few, slow-motion moments I was alone with that guy, before the police came to the house and my father came home and everything fell apart, I felt like one of those normal American kids I’d seen on television. Just playing catch in the front yard, like the Beaver or Bud Anderson. Just passing the time before dinner.”
“Was there a funeral?”
“I don’t think so. My father was really upset. He was heartbroken and ashamed.”
“Did you still look at the Christmas lights afterward? In her honor?”
“Never. My father didn’t want to do anything that reminded him of her. He never really got over her, to be honest. He died ten years later of a heart attack.”
“You must have felt so lost.”
Walter sat very still in his chair. He was torn between the desire to kiss her and the fear that he might cry. Instead, he got up from his chair to carry another load of finished laundry down the hallway to the spare bedroom, where he laid out her husband’s damp T-shirts, paisley-patterned boxer shorts and jeans against the plastic rungs of the drying rack, as carefully as if they were his own.
10
Although they never officially made plans, since they’d met, Hope had come to expect Walter’s evening visit and was already looking forward to it as she made her way to class through the dark afternoon. Along her usual route, the indistinct buildings, kebab stands, neon signs and even trees had become the landmarks she had been missing at the beginning and she no longer got lost. She had to admit to herself that her mother was right: one friend made all the difference. It was not that Walter actually showed her around the neighborhood, but the fact that Charlottenburg was his home, which made it seem less foreign by association. It grounded the unfamiliar landscape in something concrete: his memories, their conversations, the knowledge that they would see each other again at the end of the day. The night in the schnitzel restaurant only a couple of weeks earlier, when she had felt that she was clinging to Dave on a sinking raft adrift in a sea of strangers, had taken place in a different city.
Because she had the time to walk to class, she never took the subway but often stopped to watch the S-Bahn go by on the elevated tracks at Savignyplatz. On the east side of the square, beyond the barren bushes, was an old hardware store and a Russian restaurant and next to that, two women standing in front of a wide, wooden door covered in Christmas decorations. It had taken Hope a few days to understand that the women were prostitutes, but now she saw them there every day, smoking cigarettes and looking up and down the street. One was black and one was white and both were blond; the black one was wearing a Santa hat. In the windows above them, a pink neon sign said CHERRY. Hope glanced their way before a very different group of women came up the street pushing strollers; she stepped aside deferentially, letting them take over the sidewalk. Because she walked to class at the same time each day, she often saw the same people and had come to recognize in particular the many mothers, some with babies and others with older children going to and from school, meeting at the playground, hustling home for dinner. Some women had two. One had six, if Hope had counted correctly. All girls. There were so many children in the neighborhood that she would have assumed Berlin was experiencing a baby boom if Dave hadn’t already complained about the declining local fertility rate. It had apparently reached an all-time low of 1.3 percent, which meant, he claimed, that the Germans were dying out.
“Who the hell do these people think is going to pay their Social Security when they’re old?”
He had asked her this rhetorically, as if baby-making were simply another industry in need of critical reform, as if by resisting parenthood the Germans were putting up a dam to hold back water that might have irrigated an entire desert. He made it sound as if having a baby were the easiest thing in the world, which they both knew it was not. They had been married for five years before they ever even tried to conceive. Dave had wanted to start right away but she’d put it off because she wasn’t ready. If someone had told her then that it would be so hard, she would have replied disdainfully that personal fulfillment was hard. Work was hard. Babies were a piece of cake. She had become a teacher because she couldn’t decide whether or not to get a Ph.D., delayed having a baby because she wanted to keep the graduate school option open. Who could think about having a child when she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life? When she was younger, it would have never occurred to her that what she wanted to do with her life, if nothing else, was be a mother.
“The American population is still growing, Hope. Anyway, we don’t have a social welfare state. Here, all they talk about is unemployment, but the real crisis is that the labor force is dwindling since they no longer have any children.”
He was so angry. Why did Dave care if the Germans were dying out? If she had learned anything so far from her conversations with Walter, it was that it wasn’t easy to be German in the world. Maybe they wanted to die out. Maybe they thought it was for the best.
She watched the mothers walk away under the tracks of the S-Bahn to the playground on the other side. She had resisted further argument with Dave because his anger about it was the only suggestion that somewhere inside his rational exteriorhe was suffering too and she wanted to believe that. In the past, she had often thought that if she were only to make one determining decision in her life, marrying Dave had been a good one. He was the eldest of three, an athlete, a National Merit scholar, his mother’s favorite. He had always been the kind of person who accepted the word
no
as an invitation.
“Nein,”
Hope said to herself out loud, thinking that in German it sounded like even more of a challenge.
His parents’ objection to his choice of a non-Jewish girlfriend had only made Dave want to marry her. After he and Hope had been married at Niagara Falls and were living in the Village, about eighty blocks south of his parents, whom they rarely saw, the situation had only seemed to make him love her more. Hope waited as yet another woman walked past her toward the playground with a stroller. Six years into a barren marriage, she worried that his parents had been partially right. They had been too young. They were too different. She had to remind herself that they had once been happy together. It was only after what happened in June that she had come to resent his unrelenting personality. When he insisted on coming to Berlin in July, according to plan, she had been unable to fathom his determination in the face of grief, had turned over in bed to face the wall until he was finished packing and had wished him away. If it weren’t for what happened in New York in September, she might never have joined him here at all. A gray sky was hanging over Savignyplatz like a heavy woolen blanket. She had allowed Dave to be her compass, she thought, and he had led her here.