This Must Be the Place (21 page)

“You would have been perfect.”

16

Sharon shared a small house in Irvine with roommates from Disney. It was a pinkish bungalow in a development of pinkish bungalows laid out like checkers across a board. In the mornings Walter liked to sit on her front step with his cereal and look down the street, which was perfectly straight. He would close one eye and then the other, checking for a slight curve in the pavement, waiting for someone to appear on the concrete horizon. People in Irvine never walked anywhere, not to dinner with the neighbors, not for exercise. They drove their cars somewhere, went for a jog, got back in their cars and drove home. But he waited there anyway, because he could imagine it so clearly: an old couple, just taking a morning stroll through the neighborhood, would come up the sidewalk and there he would be, eating cereal on the front step of a pink bungalow in Irvine as if random coincidence had brought them together. In his mind the scene that followed played out different ways. Sometimes they recognized each other immediately and fell tearfully into an embrace.Sometimes they stopped to stare at him, since he looked just like his mother, and he played it cool.

“I didn’t know I had grandparents,” he’d say. “What a surprise.”

After she died, he had waited for them to come for him. Every day he had expected to find them after school, waiting for him on the low wall that lined the front yard of his house, calling out to him with the familiar English words that had all but disappeared overnight:
honey, breakfast, night-night, love-you, baby.
They never came and he had never seen a picture of them, and so he examined the face of every American tourist who appeared in his Alpine village, just in case. As a teenager, when he traveled by train and found himself sitting next to an American couple of a certain age, he always wondered. They might have been anyone then, he thought, but now they were only a few miles away. He had located Springtime Estates on the map soon after he got the Disney job and had been driving past it for months now, had even idled once in the car at the front gate, next to the sign advertising “Independent Living with Friendly Assistance.” After twenty minutes, he’d chickened out and driven away.

At first he did not register the beige Star of David that decorated the sign. That his grandparents chose to live in a Jewish community struck Walter as no more or less of a surprise than that they lived in Irvine at all, or in California. He didn’t know if they were short or tall, elderly or just getting on, if they were friendly, busy, sick; he knew nothing about them. The day he finally went inside the gates of Springtime Estates was a January Monday blessed with the kind of weather that makes people who moved west from colder climates want to kiss the ground with gratitude. He drove slowly through the front gates and up the flat, flower-named avenues until he found 53 Bougainvillea. The house was a bungalow not unlike Sharon’s. It was light blue with small front windows and one car parked in the driveway, a powder blue Buick sedan that almost matched the color of the house. Walter pulled over to the other side of the street. Only crickets punctuated the silence, chirping in time with the rapid staccato of his heartbeat. The house shimmered in the sunshine, ripe with promise and half unreal. Walter turned on the radio and Lionel Richie crooned. He watched the dark blue front door for signs of life, thinking that by being here now he had veered off the linear trajectory of his life. Worse, that he was breaking an unspoken rule that bound him to his father. In the ten years between their deaths, his father had only mentioned his mother’s parents once, drunk on schnapps their first Christmas Eve alone.

“They killed her,” he’d said, raising his voice, tears in his eyes. “They made her choose between us. No one should have to make that choice, especially not a seventeen-year-old girl. Do you understand me? They killed her with neglect.”

Walter nodded, although he had not understood. He’d been shocked to see his usually taciturn father fall apart.

Not a leaf stirred that warm day in Irvine, but the fear that he was betraying his father made Walter shiver in his car. If it was nine A.M. in California, it was nine hours later in Germany: six P.M. If his father were still alive (and Walter had to remind himself that he wasn’t), he would have just arrived home from work. He’d had the same job for twenty years, the same routine. Walter was picturing him with a glass of beer, alone at his kitchen table, when an old man came out of the blue house wearing tennis whites and got into the Buick. He was nearly bald and at least eighty years old, if not older, but for his age appeared to be quite fit. Even from where Walter was parked ten meters away the resemblance was immediately obvious. The square jaw, the round eyes, the quick-paced, short-legged gait. Walter pulled his car around at the end of the street and followed his grandfather from half-a-block’s distance away. The streets of Irvine were wide and free of cars. When his grandfather pulled into the parking lot at Fashion Island, Walter followed him, parked his own car and, maintaining his distance, walked into a small restaurant by the entrance to the mall.

Inside, an icy blast of air-conditioning. The wet film of sweat that covered Walter’s body froze instantly. He rubbed his bare arms and looked around. Simple booths and Formica tabletops lined the walls of the all-purpose diner. Senior citizens and housewives chattered together in small groups over coffee and eggs. Walter’s grandfather sat down alone in a booth near the back and pulled out the newspaper. Walter sat down just past him, where like a gangster he had the whole restaurant in view. He ordered a cup of coffee while his grandfather read the sports section and ordered eggs with toast, no bacon. A waitress made the rounds, stopping at his table. They seemed to know each other.

“Playing tennis again today?”

Walter’s grandfather looked up from his paper.

“Every Tuesday and Thursday. Aren’t you from Chicago?”

“I am.”

“Bears fan?”

“Of course!”

She smiled and held up her pot of coffee with the other hand on her hip.

“Think they can beat Boston?”

She laughed. “I sure do. You wanna bet?”

Walter’s grandfather turned to Walter, who was so surprised he spilled the contents of his coffee cup into its saucer.

“You want to take her up on this?”

The waitress leaned down to wipe up the mess.

“I don’t—”

“You’re not from back East too, are you? I’m surrounded!”

Walter’s grandfather leaned back in his seat and faced Walter squarely. He grinned.

“No,” said Walter carefully. “But I don’t know anything about the Super Bowl. I’m from Germany.”

He waited for the grin to either expand with recognition or fade in shock, for a cloud to cross his grandfather’s lined, brown face. Nothing happened. The waitress refilled Walter’s cup and moved on to other tables. His grandfather kept his chair tilted toward him.

“You know you’ve got some good tennis players coming out of Germany,” he said. “These young kids from that town near Heidelberg, what’s it called again?”

The training ground of both Boris Becker and Steffi Graf was one of the only places in Germany ever mentioned in the
L.A. Times.

“Leimen.”

“That’s right! You know, I was in the service over there years ago. The winters were damn cold.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Walter,” said his grandfather. “By the way.”

He extended his hand. Walter looked down at the swollen veins that lined five thick fingers just like his own. What to say? He had never imagined it this way. He had never allowed for the possibility that they wouldn’t know him: he had his mother’s eyes, his grandfather’s hands. He was German. He was twenty-three years old.
Do the goddamn math,
is what he wanted to say, but it choked in his throat.

“I’m Hans,” he said.

The name came out easily, so he said it again as he shook his grandfather’s hand. It was the only time they ever touched.

“I’m Hans,” he said again. “It’s nice to meet you.”

17

Hope waited in the living room, standing up by the window. They had agreed on eleven and it was five minutes past and she was irritated that Orson was late. This morning she had woken up exhausted and now paced the empty living room, unsure what to do with her day. Since the incident two days earlier she had not returned to the subway. The magic was lost. From where she was standing in her apartment, she could see a clean sweep of Berlin’s flat, unremarkable skyline to the south. But from afar, it did not have the immediacy she experienced from the train. She couldn’t see any of the details, into apartments or the courtyards of buildings or people’s faces. She was unable to grasp the sense of mystery about the city that had kept her coming back to the subway day after day. She had treated her daily investigations like a job, and the loss of its imperative left her aimless and restless. Hope turned from the view to watch the pattern a rare ray of sunshine was making on the parquet floor. She was startled when the doorbell rang.

“I’m late,” said Orson. “I’m sorry. Normally I ride my bike, but today it’s just too damn cold.”

She stepped aside to let him in.

“At least it’s sunny.”

“Sun is overrated. I hate high-contrast lighting. The shadows just get in the way of the shot. Let’s pray for gray skies over Christmas. I’m shooting video, remember.”

She followed him down the hallway into the living room.

“Nice,” he said, taking in the white space, the intricate floorboards, the view.

“I told you it was empty. Our container is stuck in customs in Hamburg. Even if they deliver it before Christmas, which is unlikely at this rate, we can just put everything in one of the bedrooms until you’re finished shooting.”

Orson walked the length of the room, counting off his steps in German, under his breath. When he was finished making a calculation, he looked at Hope.

“This might work really well. Of course it’s much fancier than the place my character is living in, but we can dress it down.”

“It’s all yours. The space is kind of wasted on us.”

“Can I look around?”

She held out her hand. Orson removed a small camera from his pocket, took a few pictures of the living room and they walked into the dining room and then the kitchen.

“Walter lives in this building too?”

“Upstairs.”

“In an apartment like this?”

“It’s the same layout, but it’s not renovated. You know, he’s lived there for a long time. I think he pays a lot less rent.”

Orson opened the dishwasher, examined the three dirty glasses inside, closed it and left the kitchen. They headed into the back down a long corridor, where she opened the door to the master bedroom. The TV stood at the foot of the mattress, the dust on its screen now illuminated by sunshine. At least she’d made the bed. The comforter was thrown flat over the mattress and the pillows against the wall.

“I recently directed the voice-over for a TV commercial about fabric softener,” said Orson. “In the film, a family was making a bed, you know, beautiful shots of clean sheets and all that. It sounds simple enough, but they had to shoot the bed made nine different ways, one for each of the other European countries where the commercial was going to air, because no one could agree on how to make a bed.”

“I don’t even have a real bed yet. Excuse the mess.”

“It looks fine to me. I just had never given any thought to this question before. Apparently the English tuck in their sheets and blankets. The Swedes use separate comforters for each person, overlapping in the middle. The Austrians fold back their duvets into little poufs at the bottom of the bed that look like meringue. It’s a good metaphor for the chaos of the European Union, isn’t it?”

“You don’t think the European Union is a good idea?”

“It’s a good idea, but the reality is that people do not give up their national identities so easily. The Germans are the most enthusiastic members of the EU only because they want to be linked to something other than the Holocaust.”

“What about the euro?”

“It goes into effect on January first.”

“Are you sad to lose the deutschmark?”

“I don’t care what money we use. I am already living in the afterlife. The money I knew as a child disappeared when East Germany was absorbed into the West in 1990. The country I come from no longer exists. I never expected any of that to happen, could never have imagined it, but it did. So whatever happens next is a surprise, you know? I try to embrace it.”

“Do you miss the way things used to be?”

“Even if I did, it would be impossible to go back for a visit. I still live in the neighborhood where I grew up, but everything is different there now. The people, the products, the politics, the value system. It’s a whole new world.”

Hope pictured the scenes from New York that she watched on the news every day: people rendered speechless with pain, sick from the contaminated air, terrified to open their mail. She wondered if she would ever be able to go back to the place she had known as home there.

“Have you ever seen that movie from the eighties,
Buckaroo Banzai
?” Orson asked her.

“The time-traveling superhero.”

“Remember his motto?”

She shook her head.

“Wherever you go, there you are.”
He smiled. “I consider myself a citizen of the world.”

Hope led him down the hallway and held open the door to the bathroom. Its glorious expanse of white tiles looked especially bright.

“You can definitely fit your crew in here,” she said.

“Amazing. I’ll have to write in a bathtub scene. How did you find this place, through a broker?”

“My husband found it. I think there was a broker.”

“He must have wet his pants.”

“My husband or the broker?”

“The broker. The real estate market here is totally depressed. I mean, this is a city built for five million people that currently has a population of only three and a half because so many people left for the West after the Wall came down. They can’t give places away. Germans know that, so they haggle and bitch, but when someone from New York shows up, it’s their big chance to cash in. Any price he quoted would have seemed cheap to your husband, compared to what a place like this would cost there, right?”