This Must Be the Place Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Anna Winger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or

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  not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Lines from “Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” by Kevin Cronin are copyright © 1984 Fate

  Music (ASCAP) (Administered by HoriPro Entertainment Group). All rights reserved.

  Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Winger, Anna.

  This must be the place / Anna Winger.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3874-9

  1. Actors—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction. 3. Americans—

  Germany—Berlin—Fiction. 4. Berlin (Germany)—Fiction.

  5. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I6624T

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  FOR JÖRG

  Ich habe dich gewählt

  Unter allen Sternen.

  I have chosen you

  Among all these stars.

  —ELSE LASKER-SCHüLER

  PROLOGUE

  The mothers pushed their babies past the building in the dark. Although the sun would not be up for at least another hour, the shops were open, as were the day-care centers, the kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers. Students were riding bikes up the avenues to class. True daylight would last only for a few hours. By the time the schools let out, mid-afternoon, it would be dusk already. It was the peculiar lot of Berlin, given its Cold War island history, to hang on at the eastern edge of Western Europe’s time zone. But in November 2001, twelve years after the fall of the Wall, its clocks were still set at GMT+1. It was a political, if arbitrary, position. Just up the Baltic coast in Vilnius or Tallinn, where the clocks read one hour later, working people would be coming home for dinner, while in Berlin they were still chained to their desks, as if they lived in Madrid, a thousand miles to the west, where it was light out.

  When the building was constructed in 1911, it wrapped all the way around the corner from Schillerstrasse to Bismarckstrasse,then an elegant residential avenue lined with front gardens and horse-drawn carriages, not cheap supermarkets and traffic. Its architect had designed the apartments to be Villenetagen, villas on every floor, prime real estate, because Berlin’s future had been promising in those days. Although most of the building had since been blown up or burned down, ninety years later its balconies and trellises, mullioned windows and inner courtyards designed to provide views from almost every room still hinted at the optimism of its origins. The back side of the original complex remained on Schillerstrasse, facing south. Its yellow-ocher façade needed a paint job, and the grand floor-through apartments had been divided up and nobody cared for the garden, but in the right light (and this was the right light: the blue beginnings of daybreak deep on the horizon) it was beautiful. Ninety years is not such a long time in the scheme of things: the life of a person, if they are lucky; a room just wide enough to touch both walls with outstretched hands. In other places, such a building might have seen only the soft swell of progress, but here? Ninety years of drama, followed only by this.

  1

  When Walter woke up in the dark he was alone in his bed, buried beneath a winter-weight duvet, afflicted simultaneously by a hangover and the residue of a nightmare (water at his ankles, the sudden suck of a tsunami, a tunnel, Christmas lights, an electric guitar). Four flights down, the traffic piled up every few minutes at the lights around Ernst-Reuter-Platz. Across the street, children waiting for the bell to ring in the schoolyard screamed. He reached around for Heike, but the space beside him was empty and the sound of water running in the bathroom sink confirmed that she was already up. He rolled over onto her side of the bed and burrowed into the pillows. He had accepted a guest turn on the popular soap opera she starred in only as a favor to her: recently the ratings had slipped. Her role, she claimed, was in danger and his name still carried with it a certain retro-chic cachet. But Walter had not acted in front of the cameras for almost twenty years. The idea that he might do so today seemed to him remote at best, and at worst, absurd. Eyes closed, he tried unsuccessfully to remember the last time he had seen Heike’s face light up at the sight of him, or the last time they had made love in the morning even if it meant being late to work. Then he rubbed his eyes and worked on his cough. When she came out of the bathroom, he would say that he felt terrible. She would take pity on him. He could call in sick. It was a good plan until he made the mistake of answering the phone.

  “Baum hier.”

  “Herr Walter Baum,” the young producer replied. “Or should I say, Mr. Cruise. I would recognize your voice anywhere. I’m just calling to let you know that the car will pick you two up at nine. It’s nice that you could join us today. And it will be fun for Heike too, of course.”

  “She’s a good enough actress in her own right.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She doesn’t need me th
ere today.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You shouldn’t make her trade on her relationship with me to keep her job.”

  The long silence that followed was punctuated only by the uncomfortable sound of both men breathing into the phone.

  “There has definitely been a misunderstanding,” said the producer. “We think Heike is fantastic.”

  His incredulous tone clarified everything. Heike didn’t need to trade on their relationship to get work anymore, more like the other way around.

  Walter dropped the telephone on the bed and jumped up, pulling on the same clothes he had been wearing the day before.

  “I’m going out to get bread,” he told the bathroom door.

  “Don’t take too long,” Heike replied.

  But he was already in the elevator. When he rushed out into the lobby, raised voices were arguing in American English, blocking the doorway to the street. He stopped short behind a small woman in a trench coat. The man she faced just outside on the stoop was holding up a paper street map. Walter caught the angry flavor of their words immediately but not what they were talking about. He cleared his throat loudly.

  The woman’s face was delicate and pretty, her blue eyes red.

  “Guten Tag,” said the man.

  Walter pushed past them onto the street, where the winter air burned his cheeks but the view was immediately comforting: the same old linden trees lined the sidewalk, the same old cobblestones along the curb. The argument resumed behind him, but faded out as he walked toward the bakery. He had moved into his apartment in 1986 and had walked around the corner to buy bread for breakfast almost every morning since. The same old woman had been selling loaves of Vollkornbrot, sandwich rolls and poppy seed pastry, without any change in inventory for the past fifteen years. Once she’d made muffins to compete with a coffee bar that opened up a block away, chocolate and apple-cinnamon, with American flags on toothpicks tucked into them. But they languished on their doilies in the Plexiglas shelves. Walter had bought one just for the flag, which he kept, occasionally taking it out of his pocket to twirl between two fingers. After a while the red, white and blue paper had simply disintegrated.

  In the twenty-four hours since he’d last been to the bakery, Christmas decorations had taken over like a fungus. Walter touched a gold pretzel hanging on a wreath by the door. They started earlier and earlier each year, he thought. It wasn’t even December.

  “What do you want?”

  The woman who worked there was a typical Berliner Schnauze, unfriendly, but at least she was consistent: she never smiled. She asked questions in a voice hoarse from forty years of smoking, peering over the counter at her customers as if they were disturbing her afternoon nap. Walter pointed out a loaf of bread in the case.

  “It sure is cold out,” he offered while she wrapped it.

  “Of course it’s cold. It’s almost Christmas.”

  He wanted to call her ridiculous. If it was almost Christmas, then it had just been Reunification Day, and would soon be Fasching; for that matter, it would soon be spring, and they both knew that wasn’t true. She eyed him suspiciously.

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “My wife?”

  “You’re usually here with a lady. The actress from the soap opera.”

  Ever since Heike had taken the role on the soap, which was set in a women’s prison, her fans had been coming out of the woodwork. Married women of a certain age who, Heike insisted, felt like prisoners themselves. She had never been and would never be his wife, since she didn’t believe in marriage. She couldn’t even enjoy a Hollywood romantic comedy if it involved a wedding; whenever he’d dragged her out to one, she’d groaned disdainfully over her popcorn for ninety minutes and picked apart the happy ending before they’d even left the theater.

  “She’s not my wife,” he said, accepting the paper package across the counters.

  “That’s too bad.” The woman in the bakery shrugged, looking past him at the next person in line. “I love that show.”

  Outside, Walter watched the sidewalk disappear beneath his feet, holding the bread close to his heart.

  “We think Heike’s fantastic,” he imitated the producer’s tone exactly under his breath. “And who the hell are you?”

  As he came around the corner, he saw the American couple still arguing on the stoop. Since he was hardly in a hurry to go back upstairs, he retreated gratefully to the other side of the street. Did they live in his building? Walter rarely crossed paths with his neighbors, mostly housebound geriatrics and traveling businessmen, not attractive young people from the United States. He sat down on the low wall around the schoolyard and looked around as if he were waiting for someone. He looked over at the couple as if simply checking the time on an invisible clock above the front door. The man was fully dressed in a suit, as if for work in an office, and shaking the paper map, now open to reveal an expansive tangle of pink and yellow streets. Although he was accompanied by a small blue suitcase, the woman wasn’t even carrying a handbag. Closer inspection revealed that she wasn’t wearing any shoes and her hair was wet, as if she had just emerged from the shower and wrapped the trench coat around her body like a bathrobe. The angry tone of their American accents was audible, but the words were just beyond Walter’s grasp. How long had they been at it? Where did it start? Probably this began as a normal discussion: which way to go, which way was faster, when to leave. Maybe she was taking too long to get ready. Maybe the man was rushing her. But now it had come to this: he was yelling, she was crying. The woman grabbed the map away and threw it to the sidewalk.

  Upstairs, thought Walter, Heike would be in the shower by now, washing her long brown hair. She would be wondering how the hell he was going to get ready in time if he didn’t come home immediately. He pulled his jacket tightly around his body. The answer was that he would not be ready. The answer was that he would not be going at all. Why did she care so much if he ever acted again? She was too young to remember watching Schönes Wochenende in its original broadcast, of course, but she certainly appreciated the looks on people’s faces when they went out in public together, that slow glimmer of recognition. She loved it when shy adult women came up to them in cafés to admit a teenage crush that had never died. Although the truth was that recently it had been shy men coming up to the table for autographs— hers, not his. We think Heike’s fantastic. She pitied him, he thought.

  The concrete wall was cold against his jeans, but Walter stayed where he was, still unwilling to break up the scene on his doorstep. The American man had picked up the map off the ground and was tearing it into pieces; the woman was doubled over, weeping. Walter watched them with the tense exhilaration of a sports fan in the bleachers at the very end of a game. The last few moments of a fight were always the most dangerous. On the one hand, he wanted to yell something across the street, stop them before they went too far. On the other hand—he couldn’t help it—he wanted to see them throw themselves off the precipice into a miserable abyss. His mobile rang and although he recognized Heike’s number, he didn’t pick it up. Fantastic, he thought, relishing the thought of frustration brewing in the shower four flights up. On the stoop, the woman cried and the man ripped up the map until his hands were empty. Then they looked at each other in silence for at least a minute. Then the man walked away. Walter inhaled sharply. Would she run after him? Should she? The pretty American did not move. She did not look down at the shredded pink and yellow paper at her feet. She smoothed her wet hair back and wiped her eyes, and although she continued looking down the street in his direction long after he was gone, she didn’t call out to him once.

  After a few moments had passed, Walter figured that he could walk right by and greet her normally, but it was cold out and suddenly he worried about her wet hair. If he came close enough, he felt, he would not be able to resist the urge to lift her feet from the cold ground and carry her across the threshold into the lobby. So he waited until she went inside. When enough ti
me had passed that he was certain she had taken the elevator, he crossed the street, looked quickly over both shoulders, and collected the pieces of the paper map as carefully as he could, folding them into his jacket.

  Heike was still in the shower when he returned to his apartment and entered the bathroom. Her mobile phone sat, wet, in the soap dish at the sink.

  “I’m back.”

  “You’re late.”

  He wiped away the steam from the mirror to examine the progress of his bald spot, a permanent yarmulke nestled into the close-cropped remains of what had once been thick, curly hair.

  “Can you name a single famous actor in Hollywood who’s bald?” he asked through the shower curtain.

  “Are you getting ready?”

  “One,” he insisted. “Name one.”

  “Kevin Costner.”

  “He isn’t famous anymore. I mean a great one.”

  “Jack Nicholson.”

  “He has power rails. Those are different. They imply virility and wisdom. I mean really bald.”

  “Well—”

  “You can’t. Because none of them are. Think about it: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Tom Cruise, of course—”

  “Aren’t some of those guys dead?”

  “But they were never bald.”

  When he had been famous in Germany in the early 1980s, his Dionysian mop had been Walter’s trademark. But despite the daily application of expensive potion, by the end of 2001, a shiny pink monster was emerging from the hole in his head. He dropped his chin to his chest and strained for a glimpse of the back side. By the time his father died, in his forties, he no longer had hair on his legs or his toes. Walter was thirty-nine.

  In middle age I will emerge anew, he said silently to himself. Smooth and hairless, like a baby.

  Heike turned off the water and pushed open the curtain. She had the kind of figure that appeared shapely in clothes, but stripped of padding it was sharp, as if he might be injured on contact were his own body not so soft and forgiving.