“Fahrkarte,”
said the female cop when she reached Hope.
Her eyes were a grayish-blue and small, her thin lips pursed. When Hope failed either to produce a ticket or to explain herself, she took her arm as if to pull her toward the other prisoners, but just then the doors opened and the crowd pushed past them in both directions. Hope pulled her arm free and backed onto the platform at Friedrichstrasse station, turned at the top of the stairs and ran down them.
It was drizzling outside the station. She ran up the sidewalk without looking back, intoxicated by the flight forward. She ran past the traffic that marked the northern end of Friedrichstrasse, past the construction sites and empty spaces, through puddles cast the murky yellow of streetlights at dusk, feeling the distance left behind by each footstep. But at the first corner past the station a hand, then two, landed on her back; then an arm around her waist. The cop, who had been chasing her, now hugged her from behind and Hope, no longer able to move forward, collapsed against her, panting.
“Where is your ticket?” She spoke basic, if heavily accented, English. “No good to run.”
She released Hope from the hug but held on to one wrist.
“I didn’t know I needed a ticket.”
“There machines in every station.”
“But no turnstiles.” Her cheeks were wet. “Nobody checks.”
“I check.”
“Now? I’ve been riding the subway every day for ten days.”
“Lucky for you, then. You should have paid. We have honor system here. Please show me your passport.”
“An honor system for the subway,” said Hope. “That’s just a trap.”
She was crying now. The rain came down harder.
“I don’t have my passport with me.”
“It is illegal to go out without identification.”
“Ilegal?”
Hope stared at the policewoman through a thick lens of tears, thinking that if they took her to jail and she were allowed one phone call, she would call Walter to bail her out, not Dave. It wasn’t that Dave couldn’t successfully negotiate with the German police; actually, he would relish the opportunity. It was that afterward he would ask her too many questions that she couldn’t answer, while Walter would ask her none at all. He would bring a towel to dry her hair. He would take her home and make her tea.
“Then you pay sixty marks now.” The policewoman pulled an official-looking pad of paper out of her pocket, rounding her body over it to protect from the rain. “Fare is four. Penalty is sixty. Since you have not identification I cannot send you a bill. You must pay now.”
“That’s fifteen times the fare.”
“You ride for long time already free. Penalty sixty.”
“That’s too much.”
“This is a free country now. Be lucky. We have honor system now. Next time you buy ticket or worse.”
She reached deftly for Hope’s handbag and pulled out a pack of gum, a pen, Dave’s copy of
Weimar Culture.
It was a small, attractive, yellow book; raindrops stained the cover immediately.
“You can’t just go through my bag like that.”
The policewoman removed a brown leather wallet from the bag, opened it, took out sixty marks and handed it back to Hope, along with the bag itself. Then she leaned over her pad and wrote out a receipt.
“I am the police,” she said. “I do whatever I want.”
15
The last day of work on
Vanilla Sky,
the trees gave up their last few leaves. Construction sites all over the city came to a standstill, kilometers of scaffolding forsaken until spring. On the way to work, Walter watched December descend over Berlin through the windshield of his car with affection he could feel only for a lover he had already decided to abandon: her cracked lips never to be kissed again, the uneven sighs in her sleep. He could appreciate the winter now knowing he didn’t have to live through it. He would miss the fresh air most of all, he thought. When he lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the city had been in an almost permanent state of smog alert. He remembered constant warnings to keep your windows closed in the heat against the heavy, orange-pink haze. There was no industry in Berlin, he reflected, and thus no money, but as a result it did have good air. Out the window a group of people waited at the crosswalk behind a scrim of frozen breath. At the Christmas Market by the Gedächtniskirche, vendors were already heating up their grills. The greasy smell of bratwurst came into the car. Tourists were eating kale and bacon for breakfast. The working stiffs at the Europa Center hurried into work in beige overcoats. The mothers soldiered up the sidewalk in groups of two or three, while tucked deep into their strollers, the next generation watched the storm clouds gathering overhead, breathing in Berlin’s fresh winter air like a drug.
Wrapping up the latest Tom Cruise usually left Walter with postpartum melancholy, but not today. He would treat his last days as a farewell tour, do all the best things one last time, this time with Hope: ice-skating on Wannsee, a winter stroll through the gardens at Schloss Charlottenburg. He had not told her yet about his plans for the two of them in California, but there would be time for that now too. Dave had returned to Poland, leaving them alone again in peace.
“You free for dinner?” He called up the stairs when he arrived at the studio.
“Me?”
Orson’s voice came over the loudspeaker. He stuck his head out of the cabin door above and said it again in a normal voice. They hadn’t spoken much all week.
“You inviting me to dinner?”
If there were two of them it would be natural to invite Hope along. Just a casual outing among friends. The perfect first date.
“It’s our last day. We should celebrate.”
“Sounds good.”
Orson closed the door to the cabin and Walter turned to the screen overhead where a clip from the end of the film played in slow motion. Tom Cruise took a flying leap off the top of a tall building in downtown Manhattan, his arms outstretched like a diver. It looked as though the wind might catch his body and bring him up, giving him wings, but instead he just fell to the ground. It wasn’t until the clip was over that Walter realized he’d been holding his breath.
Outside Deutsche Synchron, a cold rain hovered at one or two degrees above freezing, resisting snow. Orson unlocked his bike and pulled it up alongside Walter’s car.
“Don’t you want a ride?”
He tapped the hardtop of the Mercedes convertible.
“How many days a year can you actually take that thing off?”
“In the summer I keep it off all the time.”
“In the summer it rains every other day.”
“So I put it back up between trips.”
Orson laughed, loudly, pulled a waterproof poncho over his parka. “You should get one of these,” he said.
“You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“No, thanks. I need my bike to get home later.”
They agreed to meet at The Wild West in half an hour, leaving Walter alone in his car with the radio. Marvin Gaye came through like California on the pitch-perfect sound system.
Let’s get it on.
He leaned back against the headrest above the driver’s seat, moving his head in time to the music. In almost every Tom Cruise movie he could think of,
Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, Days of Thunder, The Firm,
you name it, somewhere in the second act his character danced and sang along to a pop song on the radio to illustrate a sudden flash of optimism. He closed his eyes, imagining himself dancing with Hope on that terrace overlooking the Pacific. Champagne and the sunset, Tom Cruise smiling somewhere in the background, Marvin Gaye on the radio. He moved his shoulders and tapped his feet against the floor of the car. It was more than a month already since Heike walked out on him and although he still checked his messages regularly to see if she’d called, he only did so out of habit. Things were looking up. He loved this song. He felt so good tonight. But he had seen enough Tom Cruise movies to know that a sudden flash of optimism was usually just a harbinger of further disaster. He grooved in place against the smooth leather interior of his car, but for fear of further plot twists he controlled the urge to sing.
He found Hope standing in the lobby in her raincoat.
“Are you going out?”
“No. I just got in.”
She squeezed the water from her hair onto the floor.
“Why don’t you come to dinner with Orson and me? We finished the job today and we’re celebrating.”
“Like this?” She looked down at herself. “I don’t know.”
“You look great. Come on, my treat.”
He hurried her into his car and drove around the corner. He had no time to appreciate the novelty of having her out in the world. He didn’t get to clock her reaction to his beautiful car because he knew that if Orson arrived first at The Wild West, Bodo wouldn’t give him a table. Walter found a parking place and steered Hope into the restaurant just as Orson was locking up his bike at the curb. It was not until the three of them were sitting at a nice corner table at the restaurant basking in the warm light of its yellow walls that he saw what a terrible idea it had been to bring together these two people to this restaurant for dinner. He and Orson had never spoken English to each other; Hope had never heard Walter speak German at all. Trapped between two selves at the table, he said nothing for fear of alienating one or both of them. Orson’s long hair was wet from the ride over; his leather pants gave off a meaty smell as they dried. Among the moneyed, elegant patrons of The Wild West, his personal style screamed for the wrong kind of attention. People at surrounding tables looked at them, sniffed, looked away. Walter searched the restaurant for Bodo while Orson smoked and Hope drank her wine. She had removed her raincoat to reveal an equally wet sweater, and every few seconds, both men glanced at her nipples poking through the tight green wool. She was already well into her second glass when she started talking.
“I was caught today riding the U-Bahn without a ticket.”
Orson took off his pink sunglasses.
“Inside the train or on the platform?”
His English was good.
“On the train, but then I made it about a block up Friedrichstrasse before she caught me.”
He leaned forward as if to get a better look at her face.
“Who?”
“The policewoman.”
“The people who check you on the subway aren’t really the police. They’re just security guards.”
“Whatever. She chased me down. She went through my things.”
“She ran after you?”
“Yes. It was terrifying. I mean, being grabbed by a German policefrau in Berlin obviously conjures up pretty terrible images.”
“Technically she wasn’t a policefrau.”
“She said she was.”
“In English? I am sure she didn’t know the difference.”
“Regardless. You can’t help but consider the historical context.”
Orson laughed. “Please. Why didn’t you pay the fare?’
“Because I thought the subway was free.”
“Free?”
“Walter said that Berlin was a socialist paradise.”
“What?”
“I was talking about West Berlin in the eighties,” said Walter, clearing his throat. “But even then we paid for the subway.”
“Even in the East we paid,” said Orson. “Anyway, how could all the transportation in Berlin be free? The city is totally broke.”
Hope looked tired. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s why the city’s broke.”
“It’s broke because when the Western world no longer needed Berlin to be their island behind the Iron Curtain, they pulled out all the subsidies and there was nothing left here. No industry, no business, no money—”
“Orson,” said Walter, cutting him off, “the East was already broke when the Wall came down. The West went broke rebuilding it.”
He turned to Hope.
“East Germany was one-third the size of West Germany, both in population and size, and everything there was in terrible condition in 1989. But we just absorbed it.”
“You could have let us continue to be our own country,” said Orson.
“Since the early nineties, every German citizen has been paying solidarity tax every month to rebuild the East.”
“Even if they live in Munich?”
“Everyone. Imagine if the United States annexed all of Mexico and said that in ten years they were going to have the same quality infrastructure as we do and that we were going to pay for it. The
Autobahn
in Brandenburg is gorgeous now but it leads nowhere.”
Orson exhaled impatiently through his nostrils.
“You didn’t pay on the subway today because you thought you could get out of it by playing the dumb American,” he said to Hope. “You thought the rules didn’t apply to you. I spent a year in America on a high school exchange—”
“Where?”
“In Montgomery, Alabama.”
Hope ran her left hand through her hair. Her gold wedding ring caught the candlelight on the table. Walter hoped Orson hadn’t seen it.
“You Americans are always complaining that someone is infringing on your rights. I mean, what really happened to you today? You skipped the fare, you had to pay a sixty marks penalty and so you cried?”
“I felt trapped.”
“Orson, stop,” said Walter. “She’s been through a lot.”
“It felt good to make a break for it, actually. I mean, in New York—”
Orson cut her off.
“Where?”
“Just leave it alone,” Walter said to Orson in German, so that Hope would not understand. “She’s been through a lot. She was in New York in September, understand?”
Orson replied in German too. “Do you realize the social capital it has to suggest that she was in New York on 9⁄11?”
“She isn’t just suggesting. It’s true.”
“But to refer to it like that, in public like that, in the middle of an argument, is a trump card. It is the present-day equivalent to rolling up your sleeve to show us her number.”