Although he rarely used it outside of the house, Walter had learned to speak English first. Later on, as a teenager, he picked up vocabulary from song lyrics. Neon lights in the fog, the words rose up to him through the dense rock ballads of the late 1970s and early ’80s. In 1983, he arrived in Hollywoodwith nearly perfect English, but casting directors had trouble looking past his origins. In two years he got only a one-liner bit part as an SS guard in a World War II film. Still, it was a bona fide Hollywood production: quasi-famous principals, elaborate Warsaw ghetto sets, M&M’s at the craft service table separated by color into individual bowls.
“You do not even exist,” he said to a skinny Jewish prisoner, who was played by an Italian-American.
Then he spit. His scene took fourteen takes because his accent was too good.
“Make it sound more German,” the director said. “Think Arnold, c’mon.”
Maybe what Klara said was true and he had never had a chance there, but at the time it felt like a step in the right direction. Maybe things would have been different for him. He would never know. In the end, his time in California was cut short before the film came out in the theaters. He left town too soon to find out what might have happened next.
Walter pulled some paper towels out of a dispenser next to the sink and mopped at his damp face without taking his eyes off the picture. He was still trying to conjure the feeling of the young man sitting before him on a horse. The picture had been taken for an article on up-and-coming stars in a German celebrity magazine. He remembered the shoot, the feeling of the warm horse beneath him and the smell of manure at the farm, as if he were touching it all to his fingertips through very thick gloves; the distance traveled since then felt much longer than twenty years. It had been freezing that day. The cigarette had been added to explain the cloud of breath around his mouth. Drying his hands, Walter counted off the dates in his head. The picture was taken in February 1981, which meant that he had been on
Schönes Wochenende
for only five months at the time. Acting was still an adventure to him then, not a career. He threw the wad of used paper towels into a bin under the sink, finally seeing himself clearly at nineteen.
“Ich war so glücklich,”
he said under his breath. “I was so happy.”
He touched the picture lightly as if he might recapture the sensation through the glass, but it struck him that
glücklich,
the German translation of the English adjective
happy,
was also the word for
lucky.
This conflation of what are considered to be two distinct emotions by Americans had caused him many dubbing problems over the years. Now he pulled apart the German word and reimagined the same statement in English. Not happy.
Lucky.
That was it: sitting on that warm horse twenty years ago in freezing cold weather, playing it up for the camera, he had felt lucky. It was something he had rarely experienced since.
He left The Wild West without finishing his dinner. He waited until Bodo was distracted by something in the kitchen and paid his bill without saying goodbye. The streets of his neighborhood were quiet: an old woman was walking a little terrier on the block up ahead, shuffling her feet and speaking to it under her breath. In the playground at the corner teenagers lounged over a rusty jungle gym, smoking. Ornate art nouveau façades, built before World War II, switched off every few buildings with the practical concrete apartment blocks built in the 1950s to fill in the bombed-out blanks. Orange light glowed in the windows of other people’s apartments as if to underscore the dark emptiness awaiting him at home. When he’d first moved to Charlottenburg sixteen years earlier, the streets he walked now had been busy with nightlife. But since the inclusion of its eastern half, the city had completely shifted its topography, pushing Charlottenburg to the western fringe, so that he might as well have moved to the suburbs. In 2001, the only reason anyone who was anyone ever came back to the old neighborhood was to eat at The Wild West, and when they ran into Walter there they feigned disbelief that he still lived around the corner. He was sure they laughed about it once he was out of earshot.
“What better place for that relic of the 1980s,” they probably said, “than Charlottenburg?”
Gone were the bars and crowds of his youth, and in their place only hair salons and jewelry stores, women of a certain age who wore tent dresses and dyed their hair bright red, and yuppie families with children. On his way home from Bodo’s, Walter occasionally still saw ghosts of the artists and musicians he’d partied with in the 1980s, but not tonight. At Zwiebelfisch, the pub where he’d spent many a drunk early morning after dancing all night at Dschungel, two old guys sat alone with their beer by the window. At the jazz bar A-Trane, the only local nightclub to survive the change, musicians warmed up before an audience of four. He looked in automatically but continued toward home, pulling his jacket collar up against his neck.
He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and checked for messages but there weren’t any. The display told him only that it was 9:17 P.M. When he’d lived with Heike, the weeks had gone by quickly: Monday to Friday, Friday to Sunday. The past few days now seemed longer to him than the entire two years they were together. Her house keys jingled in his pocket as he walked. Finally liberated from the shackles of his bad attitude, she was probably out at a club in the East with some skinny guy her own age. He pictured a room of young people in I LOVE NY T-shirts, rocking out to show their solidarity with heartbroken widows and children five thousand kilometers away, then stopped at the corner of Schlüterstrasse, dizzy and out of breath. He bent over and inhaled deeply. In a third-floor apartment above his head he could see the silhouettes of a couple getting ready to go to sleep and felt a sudden, urgent longing to join them. He could just curl up and sleep at the foot of their bed, he thought. They could sing to him. He wondered if they knew any American lullabies. His mother’s singing voice had been higher than her speaking voice but clear and pretty.
“The river Jordan is deep and wide.”
That’s how it went.
“Milk and honey on the other side.”
By the time the light upstairs switched off and the window went black, tears were burning at the back of Walter’s eyes.
His gaze fixed at street level, he forced himself forward to the next block, where a policeman paced in front of what appeared to be a residential building, hands clasped behind his back. He was the same cop pacing most Friday evenings in this spot, half asleep in his silly green uniform and cap. Only in Germany did the government play down the authority of the police by making them look ridiculous. In that outfit it was hard to imagine this man tackling terrorists or dismantling a bomb. That his very presence was more likely to attract attention to the synagogue hidden behind the front door than protect it was something the city never seemed to consider: it was a matter of pride and principle that Jewish organizations deserved state protection. Walter leaned against a wall and wiped his eyes. The door of the synagogue looked like any other, but it was just a false front, like a city backdrop on a film set. Only once had he ventured close enough to see the freestanding building inside, its stained-glass windows and a small front garden. To be allowed in you had to show identification and register with security, which he had never done. He had only hovered here at the edge of the block, listening closely for the cantor’s melody. He liked to imagine an old woman standing alone in a cool dark room, singing with her arms out and her eyes closed, but he was unable to picture the congregation. The only local Jews he was aware of were the glamorous Russians who double-parked their cars on Fasanenstrasse while they ran into Gucci, people who surely had something more exciting to do on a Friday night. The very thought of joining the mysterious men and women inside the temple made him feel ashamed. How many of his acquaintances claimed to have had a transformative experience in Israel? How often had he heard someone refer to himself or herself as twelve percent or even five percent Jewish? What did that mean? It was a contemporary German cliché, he thought, to wish for salvation if not merely comfort, or acceptance, from Jews. The cop came back Walter’s way and thrust out his chin, to remind him that he had no business here.
As he headed home reluctantly down Schlüterstrasse, Walter had the eerie feeling he was leaving his last contact with civilization behind. It was cold and dark and few cars came up the street. Glued up on the wall to his left were a slew of posters advertising dance parties in Soviet-cool spaces in the East, abandoned offices of the GDR government or rooms that once housed the airline of the former Czechoslovakia. Heike was probably at one of these parties tonight. The wide shot: her lithe body snapping like a rubber band to a throbbing electronic beat. The close-up: beads of sweat dripping down into the silky hollow between her breasts. The hamburger he’d eaten earlier backed halfway up his throat. The poster at the end of the wall caught his eye because it stood out from the rest in its graphic simplicity. Against a plain black background, a pale woman was holding two fists up high like a champion. The frame cut off just above the nipples and below her cleavage. She was looking out at him from under low-tilted brows, and he walked toward her as the tears came, pressing his face into the smooth, cool paper. Only after he had been crying for a few moments did he notice that the old woman he’d seen up the street was staring at him, muttering to her dog and shaking her head with disapproval. He looked up at the poster he was hugging and realized it was an ad for porn. Above the woman’s head it said, in English, in red capital letters: TIME FOR ACTION! He ran the last few steps home.
The bright light in the lobby of Walter’s apartment building caught him by surprise, then he saw the American woman from the stoop waiting by the elevator. She was wearing the same trench coat, but clothes underneath it now, and shoes. He was considering an immediate retreat when he heard the humming. It was a familiar tune, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The lobby, a once luxuriously appointed place, had seen better days. The marble steps were worn down in the middle from almost a century of footsteps in exactly the same place, ceiling details were obscured by dust; but the acoustics were perfect. The cavernous space gave the woman’s high-pitched humming the clarity of a violin solo performed in a concert hall. Walter swayed back and forth at the threshold, soothed by the music, wondering if he was imagining things. In his hometown, people in crisis were often comforted by visions of the Virgin Mary in breakfast cereal or dishwater bubbles. If he prayed, he thought, he would have prayed for this. He straightened his jacket, took a few careful steps closer toward her and unpacked his best attempt at a dazzling smile.
“Guten Abend,”
he said. “Good evening.”
She was lovely. Her nose was long, slightly too large for her fine-boned face. Delicate laughter lines spread out from her deep-set eyes. At work he’d made a private study of how different languages and even accents formed their speakers’ mouths over time: the mouths of the British bent down at the sides, the Italians’ stretched back from the middle, and those of the French curled forward like they were blowing irritated kisses; Germans pulled their mouths together like they were nibbling little seeds between their front teeth. Even if he hadn’t already heard her speak English, he would have known this woman wasn’t German, because her full lips turned up at the corners as if she were smiling inside about a private joke, as only American lips did. She nodded at him and continued to hum, and the desperation he had been feeling moments earlier gave way to high-pitched enthusiasm. This woman came from California, he told himself. She had a tawny-skinned, wholesome look about her that immediately conjured the feeling of someplace warm. A whole life flashed through his mind in Super 8: there she was waddling across the fresh-cut lawn in Pampers and ringlets, giggling in a classroom, dancing at a bonfire beach party, making out with a boyfriend in a VW Cabriolet.
The elevator opened and he followed her into it, recalling the calm look on her face a few days earlier as she watched the man walk away. Her boyfriend? Her husband? Her brother. The elevator was small and old-fashioned. Once inside, Walter was close enough to smell her hair, or whisper in her ear if he leaned forward, or bury his face in her neck. She rested her eyes on the middle distance between herself and the door, and in his head he followed the tune she was humming like the ball in a karaoke video. He was able to anticipate the upcoming notes and even the lyrics, but still unable to name the song, a pop hit from years ago, the kind that lived on forever at the supermarket. Her version was nice, he thought, the acoustic original pared down to the kind of simple melody hippies used to play on guitars. When the old elevator lurched into its ascent she stopped humming. Then she continued out loud.
“Forgotten what I started fighting for,”
she sang under her breath.
It was clear she hadn’t noticed that the song slipped out her mouth. When she took a long pause to inhale, he held his breath. They were so close to each other they might have kissed. The elevator creaked slowly past the first floor, then past the second.
“It’s time to bring this ship into the shore,”
she sang,
“and throw away the oars. Forever.”
The next line lingered on Walter’s lips. If this were a musical, he thought, they would break into a duet at the chorus. They would start off a cappella in the elevator, like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. The orchestra would join in as they danced onto the landing, singing together.
I can’t fight this feeling anymore!
As they twirled down the hallway, the neighbors would stick out their heads, then slam their doors in unison. Walter and the beautiful woman would just laugh, snapping their fingers, swinging their hips. The number would wind down at her front door. Arched back, dramatic kiss. In fact, they were still standing side by side in the elevator, but he grinned at her anyway, and when she saw his smile she stopped singing abruptly, covered her mouth with one hand. She was embarrassed! He wanted to tell her not to be. He wanted to say it was beautiful, but the English words escaped him.
Tom Cruise has never made a musical,
is what he was thinking. They could talk about that in California. They could develop the project together next year. Walter was still considering whether or not the singing parts should be dubbed into German when the elevator reached the third floor and the woman stepped out.