“Time for Action,”
said Hope. “It took me a second to get it. It’s not obvious like the other posters all over town. The naked woman wearing stars on her nipples?”
“Sexyland.”
“That’s it. What’s Sexyland?”
“A sex shop,” said Walter.
“On the corner of Leibniz and Kant?”
“This one’s on Martin-Luther Strasse. They’ve been using the same poster forever. There was an article about the model once in the People of Yesterday section of the paper. It’s a sort of chronicle of famous has-beens.”
“Germany loves the famous has-beens,” said Dave. “I heard that Bryan Adams is starting up a fashion magazine here. And how about David Hasselhoff singing on the Berlin Wall, New Year’s Eve 1989, wearing that electric leather jacket?”
He laughed and Hope shot him a dirty look. David Hasselhoff was at the peak of his fame in 1989, thought Walter. To be fair, he had only more recently qualified as a has-been.
“What happened to the girl on the poster?”
“She was paid twenty marks to pose in the early 1980s as a one-time thing. But everyone loved the picture, so Sexyland kept it up. In the end she had to move to Majorca because everybody recognized her here. She couldn’t get away from it. They say she calls her family once in a while to check if she can come back to Berlin yet, but the posters never go away.”
“That’s an awful story.”
It was kind of awful, he thought. The winner of the wrestling match raised her fists in the air like she did on the poster.
Time for Action
came up in red with the phone number beneath it.
“I still can’t believe they show porn on TV here,” said Hope.
“These are just commercials,” said Dave. “To watch the whole thing, you have to pay. You have to call that number and order the video. But I think the wrestling series is better than the others. The women are more natural without makeup. They’re naked, sure, but the sex is implied, not explicit. I think it strikes a good balance by being less exploitative to the women involved. But it’s still a turn-on for the potential customer. Don’t you agree, Walter?”
Walter, who was thinking that Dave had been spending way too many nights alone in hotel rooms in Poland, blushed. He couldn’t remember beating off to the porn ads for years although he and Heike had occasionally left them on in the background during sex. Still, he was determined to set himself apart here.
“I’m not into this kind of thing,” he said.
Dave winked at him.
“I see.”
Walter shrugged. Dave now assumed that he was gay, which, he figured, wasn’t such a bad thing. It meant that he would leave them alone. Walter reached for his shoes. Hope’s husband had turned out to be the kind of guy who almost certainly kept his watch on during sex; who winked and chuckled and called his own wife
kiddo.
But his confidence was enviable. Whether it derived from arrogance or ignorance was not yet clear. Perhaps it was just something American, something they put in the water over there, like fluoride, to give the men an unfair advantage from the start.
Time for Action,
Walter decided, standing up. This guy deserves whatever he gets.
13
On the fourth stage of the Disneyland theater, Walter looked around the side of the curtain. The theater was packed: adults holding children on their laps; preteen girls clustered together in groups, standing in the aisles. The audience seemed to have increased exponentially every weekend since Thanksgiving.
“It’s official,” he said to Sharon when he came back behind the curtain. “Every school in the world is out for Christmas vacation. And every single family decided that this was the year to take that trip to Disneyland.”
She was applying lip gloss with one finger from a little plastic pot and he admired the shiny bow of her mouth. He liked the way her body felt in his hands. He wasn’t in love with her, but he liked her a lot.
“Work that accent, Charming,” she said. “Give the girls a little European fantasy to take home with them to Boise.”
She blew him a kiss. He had been sleeping with her since the beginning, but it was a couple of months before he’d realized that he’d stopped sleeping with anyone else. Possibly because his previous sexual experiences in America had been quick, and rarely twice with the same person, or simply because she was a dental student and noticed physical details, Sharon had been the first woman to comment directly on his foreskin. She had inspected it like a scientific specimen, tested its elasticity and asked questions as if it were, like E.T., a strange, cute animal descended on Southern California from another planet.
“It’s like the difference between a normal sweatshirt and a hooded one,” she said finally. “No more, no less.”
Walter had never seen a circumcised penis. Everyone in Germany had foreskins. That all American men were circumcised made him uncomfortable (setting him, in his nascent Americanness, even further apart) but Sharon seemed to like it. Unlike the majority of Americans he’d encountered, she seemed to think the fact that he came from Germany was interesting. A plus, not a minus. She even asked him to talk dirty to her in German sometimes, although she didn’t understand a word of it.
“I could be saying anything,” he protested. “
Looks like rain on Tuesday.
It just sounds dirty to you because you don’t understand it.”
“No, no. I can tell. The words have meaning. I can feel it without understanding the language.”
They were eating breakfast. He spent most nights at the house she shared with friends near work now and went back to Los Angeles only a couple times a week. She held up a piece of pineapple from her fruit salad.
“You’re saying that pineapple isn’t pineapple anymore when you call it by a different name.”
Walter laughed.
“Seriously. What do you call this in German?”
“Ananas.”
“Ananas,”
Sharon repeated, eating the fruit. “It’s still pineapple, baby. I know what you like in any language.”
Walter ran his fingers through his hair and took a deep breath before the curtain went up. Normally he didn’t look directly into the audience during a performance. The lights were so bright that it was impossible to see anything beyond the first few rows. When he was taking a bow with the others and he heard the voice call out from the middle of the theater, he thought he was imagining things.
“Hans! Guck mal hier!”
Walter looked out off the edge of the stage, but all he could see were hands clapping, until he walked down the stairs from the stage and found himself engulfed in a sea of young girls. They were all screaming in German now, they were all calling him Hans. Judging from their accents, they came from the south of Germany, as he did, where
Schönes Wochenende
had been especially popular. They pulled at his arms and kissed his cheeks. Some of them cried. The Disneyland guards watched Walter suspiciously from the edges. Nothing like this had ever happened. The girls usually went for Cinderella with their kisses and their snapshot cameras. The Prince was second choice! Walter tried to stay in character, a smile plastered to his face as he peeled back their fingers and pressed through the crowd.
“My sweet ladies,” he shouted, “Prince Charming only speaks English.”
The girl standing closest to him seemed tall for her age; she was able to look him directly in the eye.
“We know it’s you, Hans,” she said in German. “Just because you’re wearing a different costume doesn’t mean you’re someone else.”
They were standing near the back wall of the theater and over her shoulder he could see the entrance to the dressing rooms behind the stage. Walter met her gaze. He wondered, Is
Ananas
still
Ananas
when you call it a pineapple? He broke free of his fans and made for the door.
14
Most days, Hope waited until rush hour was over to set out on her trips around the city. Compared to what she had been used to in Manhattan, rush hour in Berlin wasn’t even that bad. On the occasions that she set out too early or came home too late, she still almost always got a seat on the subway. During the past ten days, as she’d been switching tracks in stations scattered all over the city, from U-Bahn to S-Bahn, she had quickly established certain preferences: the right side of the car not the left, the back, four seats to herself if possible. On long stretches above ground, she put up her feet. Every morning she planned out a different route before she left the house. She did not choose her destinations for the areas around the subway stations but rather for the stations’ names. Weissensee to Spandau, Frohnau to Lichterfelde to Wannsee. Sometimes she picked a series of stops that rhymed, or began with the same letter, or sounded funny, like Blankenberg, or nice, like Paradestrasse. Sometimes she got off at the end and looked around, but mostly she just rode. She liked to think of the city out the window as a person,clocking its schedule by the ebb and flow of students getting out of school, the older women with their midmorning groceries, strollers at the elevator stations in the afternoon, the general flow of citizens from east to west, north to south. Although she never set out without a plan, she knew that another person (Dave, for example) might have said that her traveling lacked an organizing principle, might have suggested that instead she make a list of important attractions or at least pick a theme: graveyards, museums, modern architecture, flea markets, parks designed by someone famous, World War II battle sites, Cold War battle sites, soccer stadiums. But he would be missing the point. The point was to figure out where she was. The point, she thought, was to let the city unfold on its own.
The train drove through Stadtmitte station, walking distance from Checkpoint Charlie and Libeskind’s empty Jewish Museum, but Hope did not get out. Walter had already pointed out that all big-name tourist attractions were pretty depressing.
“Here in Germany we only celebrate guilt,” he’d said. “Our greatest national monuments honor the suffering of our victims. It’s the opposite of the United States, where you come away from battle sites in California feeling proud to be American, regardless of what happened to the Mexicans. You know what I mean?”
Hope figured the museums could wait until she had formed her own opinion. The only other person in the subway car at that moment was an old woman with a red wool hat and a dog in her lap. That the dog was allowed on the train at all was a novelty, but the woman just rubbed behind his ears as if it were the most normal thing in the world. When Dave told his parents they were moving to Berlin, Hope’s mother-in-law had retorted that the Germans loved dogs more than people.
“The SS guards always had their little dogs with them,” she said. “Feeding them steak while the Jews starved.”
Dave’s mother had spent the war years happily ensconced in Forest Hills, Queens, so it was unclear how she knew this; it was the kind of thing people in New York often said about Germans, thought Hope. Random, but incriminating. She was wondering if the woman was old enough to have been one of the
Trümmerfrauen
who cleaned up Ku’damm, when she got up at the next stop and dropped her dog to the ground. The dog wasn’t on a leash, but he didn’t leave her side. They sauntered through the open doors of the train together as if heading out for a night on the town.
As the U-Bahn pulled up above ground, Hope blinked into the daylight thinking that it was possible to see every layer of the city’s history at once in any direction. A drive through Berlin was like visiting a grand archaeological site, but unlike that of a civilization from thousands of years ago—already dug up and dusted off, set aside at a clinical distance—this one was fully in use; it was up to visitors to excavate the remains, to make sense of it for themselves. In New York, as soon as one building came down, another went up so quickly as to completely obliterate the memory of what had been there before. In the other European cities, the past was glorified, the architecture spruced up for tourists to the point of caricature. But here, nobody seemed to be in any hurry one way or the other. Buildings had been bombed and the city had been ripped apart, but years later holes remained all over the place without explanation or apparent concern. The city moved forward with a lack of vanity that she found relaxing. As the days got shorter, speeding toward the winter solstice, she was beginning to feel at home. Hope leaned back in her seat and looked out the window, thinking about her first year in college, when with a boyfriend she had ridden each New York train to the end of the line just to see where they went. One afternoon they had ended up in Far Rock-away, a windswept neighborhood of dilapidated Victorian houses and a long, white beach where they’d come upon a tree, barren of leaves, but decorated all over with dirty old stuffed animals. Dingy rabbits and teddies of all shapes and sizes and the occasional filthy zebra and a very large, blue, one-eyed bear. The tree was outside a bar and the bartender there told them that around the corner was the parking lot for all the garbage trucks in New York and that the bar was where the men hung out after their shifts. He said that the tree was a time-honored tradition (regularly maintained and updated with new decorations), a reminder to everyone at the end of the day to keep their sense of humor when handling other people’s trash.
It was during one of the few crowded moments in the afternoon when the police came onto the train. Hope was standing up at the time, holding on, when she noticed a plainclothes man and woman, with official-looking badges hanging around their necks, making their way through from the other end of the car. The man was middle-aged and the woman was younger. As they addressed the passengers, each one nervously but obediently produced a little piece of paper for their inspection. One by one they looked closely at the papers, then passed them back. They appeared to be tickets of some kind, although unlike any other subway ticket or pass Hope had seen before. Most apparently passed muster, but those passengers in possession of the wrong kind of paper were rounded up by the door. After a while the man stayed back to guard the prisoners and only the woman continued up the aisle. The train, which had been loud with conversation at the previous stop, had fallen silent. People waited with their hands in their laps, little papers in their hands. Hope fished around in her pockets automatically, though she knew she didn’t have a ticket because she didn’t even know she needed a ticket. The understanding that the subway was free wasn’t the only reason she had been riding it every day, but the sheer generosity of it had been very appealing. It had made her feel welcome, and the sudden realization that she had been wrong about this made her feel queasy. She backed herself into the closed doors at the other end of the car.