This Must Be the Place (14 page)

She ducked under the S-Bahn tracks to the other side, where a couple of the mothers she had seen before sat side by side on a bench in the large playground. Beyond them, an older sister pushed a younger one on a swing, three boys jumped off a castle in the middle, and other mothers huddled together in little groups, clutching coffee. The playground was covered in graffiti and the weather was cold, but she stood close to the gate, watching a mother beckon to a little girl whose nose was running. The girl jumped off the jungle gym, presented her nose to be wiped and returned to play, her mother put the dirty tissue back in the pocket of her coat, and Hope gripped the metal gate with both hands. All summer she had jealously avoided her friends who had children. In New York, she had looked away when passing even anonymous families on the street. Since June, she had hardly seen a child at all. Now she forced herself to look out across the playground. She would have liked to go in and sit beside the mothers, but stopped herself for fear of imposing. Without child or stroller, she might seem ridiculous. For the first time in many years she did not even have a stash of emergency tissues in her own coat pocket. In the early years of her job, when none of her friends had kids yet, they used to tease her about the tissue supply and the Band-Aids, the raisins that sometimes came up with her wallet, the way she washed her hands religiously when she came indoors, or ate, or read the newspaper.

“Ms. Hope,” they called her, emphasizing the
Mizz,
saying it with a midwestern accent.

Even Dave, who had often visited her at the private school where she worked, managed to imagine that she spent her days inside one of his glorified camp memories, playing kickball against the faded yellow-green landscape of a 1970s snapshot. That she hadn’t been back to school since June was strange, but she didn’t miss teaching. She watched a boy just about the age of her students climb up on a swing, pump his feet till he was flying, then jump off. Third-graders were eight years old, turned nine during the year, and it was a fragile age: old enough to understand what was going on but young enough to be confused by it. They asked a lot of questions. In the beginning, she had written important words and discoveries in round, clear script on the blackboard; the words listed there at the end of the day provided a kind of road map, clues to what they were thinking and where they were going.

“Why did the Beatles break up?”

“How do you know about the Beatles?”

“They’re my grandma’s favorite band.”

“Okay. Because they were very talented people and they needed more free time.”

“Why?”

“To do other things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“I don’t know. What would you do if you were John Lennon?”

“Sing songs.”

“Like what?”

“ ‘Ob-La-Di.’ ”

“What else?”

“ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ ”

After school she often studied the words on the blackboard for a long time before erasing them:
talent, free time,
songs, sky, diamonds.
It was hard now to remember when these conversations had started to make her uncomfortable. It wasn’t clear, she thought now, if the questions themselves had changed as the years went by, or if she had just become more sensitive. Either way, she had learned that nine was not simply an age of discovery, but a loss of innocence: the age when the world came crashing through the window. At some point she started trying harder to forget her conversations with her students than to remember them.

“Why did Judy Garland kill herself?”

“How do you know about Judy Garland?”

“
The Wizard of Oz
was on last night.”

“Okay. She thought her fans didn’t love her anymore.”

“I love her.”

“Yes, but she was a drug addict. She wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Is that why Kurt Cobain killed himself?”

“How do you know about that?”

“My brother told me.”

“Okay, then. Yes.”

“What’s a drug addict?”

“It’s something that happens to famous people.”

“All of them?”

“A lot of them.”

“The Beatles?”

“Maybe. I can’t remember.”

“Is that why John Lennon killed himself?”

“He didn’t. Another man killed him.”

“Why?”

“He was angry.”

“Because the Beatles broke up?”

“No. That happened before.”

“Why did the Beatles break up?”

“Because they got sick of each other.”

Wizard, love, drug addict, kill, angry, famous, sick.
In the years that followed, Hope stuck more diligently to the lesson plans prescribed by the school. Now she pulled herself away from the playground and toward Ku’damm, walking against the wind. Walter might have been one of her students the year his mother died, she thought, seeing him at nine: blue eyes and chubby, the sadness now written in lines across his face still fresh, cheeks trembling with the effort to contain it. She knew that look. It took far less than a mother’s death to crush the face of a third-grader.

On Ku’damm, white Christmas lights decorated the trees in the middle of the avenue and the sidewalks, brightening the grand buildings on either side. In the right light, this street reminded her of the Champs-Élysées. Remembering what Walter had suggested, she narrowed her eyes and peered through the murky fringe of her lashes, to conjure an image of the avenue’s illustrious past, the
Gründerzeit
boom a hundred years ago and the Roaring Twenties. She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as instructed, to make the sound of horseshoes against the cobblestones. It was easy to imagine Josephine Baker sashaying down this avenue in a flapper dress. It was easy to imagine her throwing open the French doors to one of the ornate balconies above and singing,
Evita
style, over all these sparkling lights. In fact, Hope did not find it difficult to conjure the glamorous origins of Ku’damm’s architecture at all, but rather its destruction. Because Walter had explained that these buildings were completely flattened in the Allied bombings in World War II and had been rebuilt afterward.

“The entire Hitler period, including the war, lasted only twelve years,” he’d said. “Isn’t that amazing? In the grand scheme of history it seems like nothing, a fucked-up fairy tale. But in Berlin it is everything, even now, almost sixty years later.”

Staring up through the scrim of her eyelashes, Hope tried to imagine the fancy façades ripped off to reveal furniture and wallpapered rooms, fires burning, people screaming. How did they explain any of what had happened here to children, she wondered. How did they explain even Ku’damm’s history to the third grade? Walter had told her that it took years to clear the rubble. Since most of the men had been killed or imprisoned, or had to walk home from war fronts in Russia or France, the women had cleared Ku’damm themselves.
Trümmerfrauen
, they were called. They passed the chunks of stone and concrete, wood and tiles, one to the next, all the way down the avenue and another mile or so through Grünewald, where they made a massive pile. The pile was apparently a proper mountain now, grown over with grass. People liked to hike and picnic there.

“It’s called Teufelsberg,” Walter had said. “The Devil’s Mountain. In West Berlin, it was one of the only places to go sledding in the winter.”

Berlin was so flat in every direction that such a rise in the landscape would have towered over everything else. She looked around at the buildings above her head now. Children born today would match them up with historical photographs and think they had always been there, just like this. When they flew down Teufelsberg on their flying saucers they would never imagine all that rubble beneath the snow. She wondered, when they reconstructed the towers in downtown Manhattan, as they now proposed to do, would anyone believe that they had once disappeared?

She waited for the light to change in a crowd of pedestrians packed together at the corner of an otherwise unoccupied stretch of sidewalk thirty feet wide. No cars were coming up the side street, but not a single person stepped off the curb. In New York they would have flooded the street already, pushing ahead, but here they waited to move forward all at once when the light turned green. Hope controlled her own impatient impulse to cross against the signal because she was in no hurry to get to class. She kept pace with the crowd, like an animal in a pack, until they neared her German school. Then her feet dragged and she fell behind. The thought of three hours conjugating verbs in the warm classroom made her feel as if she had already fallen asleep, but skipping was out of the question, since she had never missed a class of any kind in her life. Even when her college friends had slept through morning classes after a late night out, she’d been the one to haul herself into her seat with a coffee. She was reminding herself of this when one of the other students in her German class, a middle-aged guy from Morocco, walked past her without saying hello. She raised one hand in greeting as the Vietnamese brothers came by next, but they didn’t wave back. Hope watched them go up the stairs until they entered the building and the door slammed shut behind them. Then she turned and walked away from the school altogether, pace quickening, till she was running, doubling back toward Bahnhof Zoo.

The neighborhood was grittier at that end of the avenue, where no one had bothered to reconstruct the original architecture. Instead, a clutch of midcentury buildings—large, cheap, glass-and-concrete offices that might have been at home in any urban landscape—collected around a church whose steeple had been destroyed by a bomb and never repaired. Hope stopped to catch her breath in front of it. The broken steeple made it look like a soldier with his head blown off, she thought, the body still standing before it fell. She remembered that Walter had mentioned it.

“It’s called the Gedächtniskirche,” he said. “The Memorial Church. I think they left the steeple that way to memorialize how much the local community suffered during the war.”

She craned her neck but couldn’t see very well from below and so she went up the stairs to the S-Bahn, whose elevated tracks cut through the neighborhood, providing a view from above. Following the signs to find the right platform, she was surprised that no turnstiles or ticket booths blocked her entrance to the train. Every subway system she had ever used (New York, of course, London, Paris) didn’t even allow the passengers to reach the platform without paying first. Here there were no conductors selling passes. There were hardly any other people. That it was free seemed impossible, but there it was. When the train going east arrived, she just got on without paying anything at all. Through the window she could see the silhouette of the crushed steeple at eye level against the darkening sky. Finally she understood what Walter had meant when he’d said that the true socialist paradise had been West Berlin, not East.

“This city is different from others because for so long it was a symbolic island,” he’d said. “The last frontier of democracy, surrounded by enemies beyond the Wall. They had to make sure enough people lived here, although there was no industry and very few jobs, so everything was subsidized by the Marshall Plan. There were social benefits. Believe me, lots of people wish the Wall were still up.”

The interior of the S-Bahn car was remarkably clean and comfortable, but it was the fact that it was free that made it seem like fun to her, a gift. She buzzed with the thrill of a tourist managing public transportation for the first time in a foreign city. The higher perspective revealed holes and crevices between the buildings that she had been unable to see from the ground: wide courtyards, the ragged edges of houses left standing when the ones next to them fell, ugly modern construction built right up against the shard of one original, ornate façade. Because it was getting dark out, she could peek into the lit interiors of third-floor apartments right next to the tracks (stuffed bookshelves and tables laid for supper, amber against the blue light of evening) and imagined herself sitting with Walter at her dining room table. He usually appeared around nine p.m. and always left before midnight, whether out of decorum or because he had other late-night plans, she wasn’t sure. Maybe he needed his beauty sleep? Maybe he had a girlfriend or even a wife tucked away somewhere and whoever she was she came home after midnight? He never mentioned anyone, but she found it hard to imagine that he was truly single. He was too good a listener to be single, she thought. It had been a long time since someone had paid her as much attention as Walter did. She had what Dave always said was a typically midwestern way of dealing with people that confused some men in New York (she always said thank you, she always smiled, even when she was feeling like shit) and as a result, over the years there had occasionally been awkward advances from acquaintances who mistook her good manners for something more. This was different: Walter kept a respectful distance. He never made a suggestive comment of any kind. When he pulled out a chair for her to sit down, he did it carefully. But when she spoke he watched her lips move, she thought, as if imagining how to kiss her. So she moved them slowly, letting him enjoy it, because it had been a long time since someone had done that.

The train passed quickly through a park of tall naked trees, Tiergarten, the big green blob dividing the West from the East on Dave’s map. On the other side was a sea of construction cranes. They looked like a herd of massive, prehistoric animals swarming, she thought, pouring forth from the park in all directions. To the south, one or two finished buildings shone brightly with fluorescent light around the Sony complex at Potsdamer Platz.

“Potsdamer Platz was destroyed so thoroughly that there was almost nothing left to rebuild,” Walter said. “During the Cold War it was a no-man’s-land between East and West.”

“What for?”

“It was supposed to be a buffer zone but basically functioned like a moat filled with alligators around a castle. People who tried to escape over the Wall from the East side were shot. It’s only now they are building something there, a whole new city center, sixty years after it was flattened.”