This Must Be the Place (31 page)

After he showered, he took a nice blue shirt out of his closet and buttoned it carefully. To avoid traffic he would have to leave in a few minutes. The dark blue suit he’d had made at Heike’s insistence during her attempted makeover two years earlier was still hanging in its original bag. When he pulled it on, it fit like a glove. He turned to observe himself in the mirror, ran one hand across the monster, smoothed down what was left of his hair. He looked good; thicker, older, but good. He found the laminated VIP pass on the kitchen table and slipped it safely into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and rushed back into his bedroom to look for a tie. He dug through his underwear drawer, the back of his closet, the night table, and found one hanging over the bedpost, still tied in a knot from some game he’d played with Heike at least a year ago. He removed it and undid the knot and sat down on the bed. He was holding the tie open with both hands when his eyes fell on the script lying by him on the bed.
The Wild West,
by Ludwig Schmitz. Walter smirked at the title and peeked inside. After reading page one, he glanced quickly at the clock. He had to get out of here. He was three pages in when he realized that it was Orson’s script. When he was ten pages in, he removed his jacket, moved to the armchair by the television, and put his feet up on the bed.

Halfway through the script he checked the clock and turned on the local news: the screaming fans were twenty deep to the velvet rope around the theater. Tom Cruise got out of his limousine with arms outstretched. He made his way slowly down the red carpet, plunged into the crowd, high-fived the guys in the front, signed the teeny-boppers’ autograph books; he hugged a woman so excited to see him that she cried. The crowd was still cheering in the background when Walter got up from his chair and went to the window. The night sky over Berlin was unusually clear and he could see over the rooftops toward Potsdamer Platz, where the disk-shaped Sony theater, a glowing spaceship, was just barely visible. The lights seemed a little brighter than usual tonight, he thought, as if, like the Christmas lights of his childhood, Tom Cruise had brought America with him, as if his presence alone had created a surge in electricity that was flamboyant, wasteful, optimistic.

When Walter first moved into this apartment, Potsdamer Platz was nothing but a bombed-out wasteland between East and West. When he looked out this same window on a winter night, at the same view to the East, there had been only an impenetrable darkness past the Brandenburg Gate, punctuated by the eerie silhouette of the TV tower at Alexanderplatz and the yellow 40-watt haze of the streetlights on Unter den Linden. Now, judging on the view alone, he had moved to a completely different city without leaving this room. He looked around inside. The blue walls were depressing, but they could be changed. He could clean things up, rearrange the furniture, throw stuff out. Perhaps if he turned his bed, when he was lying down he could still look out the window at the sky. The rent was cheap, after all. He could live here for years on his savings. He could do other things. Walter watched the live coverage until Tom Cruise reached the front doors to the theater and turned to wave goodbye to the crowd, then he went back to Orson’s script. When he finished it the first time, he read it again. He had just put it down on his lap for the second time when the phone rang.

“You just didn’t show up?”

He could hear the sounds of the premiere party going on in the background.

“Tom Cruise thanked you,” said Klara. “He said,
Walter Baum makes me sound even better in German than I do in English.
”

Walter laughed. “Not anymore.”

“What?” she screamed over the music.

“I’m giving him up.”

“Is this about last night?”

“Yes,” he said. “But not what you think.”

“Did you get the script? The director said to tell you that Til Schweiger pulled out last minute and that you have to save his ass.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He imagined Klara in the club under strobe lights, the hot crowd throbbing around her, like film in slow motion.

“Let’s talk tomorrow,” he said.

In the kitchen he found a garbage bag and spent the next half an hour gathering the receipts from his tax audit into it in the living room. Little by little the furniture emerged from the mess, the floorboards and the shape of the walls. He removed the map of Berlin from under books that had flattened it, and hung it up on the wall above the couch. It was no longer possible to see where the historical divisions had been because of all the new cracks and crevices. The green mass of Tiergarten anchored a sprawl of streets, spreading out in all directions from the center. Where only a month earlier the streets had seemed to run off the ragged edges of the paper into nowhere, now they made sense. Thick twists of the
Stadtautobahn
circled the city. The Avus ran out into the blue wilds of Wannsee. The two zoos, the two TV towers, two big airports and three operas were back where they belonged. Walter traced the single road that came in from the East on Unter den Linden, crossed under the Brandenburg Gate and through the park and into Charlottenburg on Bismarckstrasse, just behind his house. He made an X in blue ballpoint at his own address, and he went to retrieve his jacket and tie.

In the bathroom, he examined his face in the mirror above the sink. The circles under his eyes were probably permanent, the furrow in his brow and the lines leading up from his forehead into the thinning crown of hair; but he could work with it. He smoothed his suit and retrieved five small glasses from the kitchen. When she opened the door, Hope was visibly surprised to see him standing there in a suit.

“You look great,” she said. “Are you leaving for the premiere now?”

“The premiere is over. It’s something else. You’re coming with me.”

“Where?”

“This is my surprise. Would you mind getting a little bit dressed up?”

She looked down at her sweatpants.

“Okay.”

He waited in the foyer while she changed, imagining that he was preparing himself for the camera, as he would be come Christmas, when they were shooting Orson’s movie in her apartment. When she returned she was wearing a black dress and a yellow sweater. Her face was flushed and she had put on lipstick.

“Now we need a few more things for our journey,” he said.

“A coat?”

“No, we won’t be needing coats where we’re going.”

“Walter.”

She said it cautiously, as if he were still planning to take her to California. He took a deep breath.

“We need five candles and a box of matches,” he said. “Do you have that?”

In the elevator he held the five glasses together with two hands and she had the candles from the Christmas tree— bigger than birthday candles but smaller than dinner ones— and the matches from the restaurant. Walter pressed the button for the basement. They didn’t speak as they descended past the lobby into the ground and came out into pitch darkness. He turned on the overhead light so that they could see where they were, a cavelike space with stone walls and an ancient floor, curved ceilings overhead. The air was dank and smelled musty. A narrow corridor was lined with little rooms, each one marked with a number and each door closed by a padlock.

“This is really creepy,” said Hope. “Where are we going?”

“Each apartment has a storage room down here,” he told her. “You must have one too.”

“I don’t have anything to store.”

He laughed. “Lucky you.”

He led her to the door marked “14” and opened the padlock. Inside, there were ten boxes stacked three high in the middle. There was no electricity inside, so he left the door wide open to let in the light from the hallway. He looked over the boxes until he found one marked CALIFORNIA, which had been folded together sixteen years ago, but never taped. When he pulled it open, dust rose from the surface, crumbs of plaster, a cobweb. The photo album he had taken from his grandparents’ house that day was the only thing inside. Walter wondered briefly what had happened to everything he’d left behind: his clothes and shoes, his bank account, Sharon; maybe he would never know. He set up two closed boxes for chairs and another in the middle for a table.

“Please come in.”

Hope stepped into the dark chamber and sat down.

“What is this?”

“Open it.”

The spine of the photo album cracked, giving way after so many years. He had spent the whole flight home looking at these pictures. By the time he arrived in Berlin again, he’d memorized each one.

“She looked a lot like you.”

“Thank you.”

He arranged the five glasses in a circle on the makeshift table.

“Can you hand me the candles?”

While she looked through the photo album, he rubbed the bottom of the candles until each one was standing, unlit, in a glass.

“Are you ready?” Walter asked her.

“For what?”

“I am going to do it now. I am going to say Kaddish.”

“Here?”

“This is the place.”

When he lit a match and leaned over the five candles, the warm light illuminated the ninety-year-old stone walls of the room, once plastered and white, now a dingy beige. On the back wall Hebrew letters had been drawn from right to left in tidy lines, in ink and now faded. They covered almost the entire surface. Hope got up from her box and went up to the wall.

“It was a Hebrew school,” said Walter.

“A secret one.”

“Yes. For the children hiding down here during the war.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could ask someone. We could look it up.”

“We will do that.”

“How did you find this?”

“I wasn’t looking for it. When I moved in my things sixteen years ago, it was all just here.”

She ran her fingers over the letters.

“There is so much here.”

She laid the photo album open on the table to the picture of Walter’s young mother, smiling, in a snowsuit, sat down again and smoothed her skirt over her knees.

“Five candles?”

“My parents, my grandparents, your son.”

She nodded.

“Do you know the prayer?”

“No. Do you?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Then I’m going to sing, all right? Whatever songs I can think of. You can sing with me if you want to.”

“I’m a terrible singer.”

“My voice is actually pretty good,” said Walter. “But I haven’t performed in front of anyone in a long time.”

He started with the lullabies he remembered.
The river Jordan is deep and wide, milk and honey on the other side.
He held the flame carefully to each wick. The first one for his mother, the next for his father, then his grandfather and his grandmother and, finally, for the baby. His voice cracked at the beginning but after a verse or so it evened out. It got stronger as he moved on to fragments of pop music from his youth, whatever he could remember of Journey ballads and Madonna and REO Speedwagon, sung quietly in place of formal prayer. Sometimes Hope joined in, or reminded him of the lyrics, or made requests. He could feel himself sitting up taller on his box, reaching for the high notes.
It’s time to bring this ship into the shore and throw away the oars forever.
Walter sang until the candles had burned down, filling the glasses with orange light, and the room glowed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to my agent, Sarah Burnes, for her wisdom and enthusiasm, and to my inspired editor at Riverhead, Megan Lynch. I know how lucky I am.

Patrick Winczewski, the “real” German voice of Tom Cruise, was kind enough to let me into his studio. Let the record show that he could not be more different from Walter Baum.

Many thanks to my first readers: Jordanna Fraiberg, Harvey Friedman, Julie von Kessel, Nicole Krauss, Ralph Martin, and Lithe Sebesta. And to Christine Muhlke. And to my ladies in Charlottenburg for the everyday: Patti Ferer, Wilma Harzenetter, Penelope Lewis, Charlotte Sötje and especially Gabriela Pardo,
mi comadre,
who picked me up on the playground my very first day there. And finally to my parents, Bob and Sarah Le Vine, for embracing Berlin.

This book is dedicated to my husband, Jörg Winger, who has shown me a whole new world.