This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger Read Free Book Online Page B

since.
    “This is a ghost town,” she said, when the waiter had gone. “Where are all the people? They aren’t out on the street, they aren’t home watching TV. It’s not even eight P.M.”
    “Maybe they’re working.”
    “So late?”
    “Most people do work past three in the afternoon.”
    She might have retorted that most people did not have to get up at six, as she had done every morning in her seven years as a third-grade teacher, but she didn’t take Dave’s bait.
    “It must have been busy here once. That’s all I mean. They would never have built all these big buildings if there hadn’t been people to live in them. Now the neighborhood seems abandoned.”
    “Most places seem abandoned compared to New York.”
    “Maybe. But it must have been different here a hundred years ago. I would have liked to see that. Wouldn’t you?”
    In the past, they had liked to discuss the New York of various bygone eras: Fifth Avenue by horse-drawn carriage in the 1870s, Central Park during the Summer of Love.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    Dave wiped his mouth with his napkin.
    “Because I like my Germans guilty,” he said.
    “What is that supposed to mean?”
    “They’re nice to me now.”
    Hope let her head fall to the side and stared at his neck. In the past she had often slept with her face buried into the soft base of his hairline.
    “Fifteen minutes ago you said we could blend right in if we wanted to.”
    “I guess I meant you. If you never opened your mouth no one would know you were a foreigner here. In my case, they wouldn’t necessarily see that I’m Jewish, but a hundred years ago I would have felt a lot different from everyone else.”
    “Now you don’t?”
    “I do, but now it works to my advantage.” He laughed. “Let’s just say that for me, at least, this is the best time yet to be living in Berlin.”
    He likes it here, she thought. Her surprise was not so much an indictment of the city but a realization that his experience here was completely separate from her own. In New York they had had different jobs but a single shared domestic life. They had cooked together, seen friends together. Now, he had been in Berlin for three months, since July, and she for one, since October. But the two months apart in the middle, August and September, had created a space between them. He liked it here, but she didn’t know why. He went to work, but she had no idea what he did there. He spent days away, and she didn’t even have a mental image of how he spent his time. When he practiced his German, long-winded soliloquies on waiters or the super, on anyone who would listen, she could not understand a word he said. It was as if they had been apart for a year or more, or worse: as if the only thing that had been keeping them together for the six years previous had been the rhythm of daily life which, now upset, could no longer provide the necessary glue.
    Dave’s phone rang, startling both of them. It vibrated loudly against the table, where it had been sitting throughout the meal, and danced up to the edge of his plate.
    “Work,” he whispered, visibly relieved to have an excuse to step outside. “I have to take this. It’ll just take a minute.”
    She watched him through the window. Pacing the sidewalk, he moved one hand in a circle for emphasis, smiling, and for a moment she felt jealous of the colleague on the other end of the line. Because the look on his face reminded her of an evening, late into her pregnancy, when they already knew that the baby was going to be a boy. At the Chinese restaurant around the corner from their New York apartment, they had each made up a list of names, then traded the lists facedown across the table, lifting the edges of the paper with trepidation both exaggerated and real. Out there on the telephone now, pacing the cold Berlin sidewalk, the look on his face was exactly as it had been that night in New York, when they finally turned over their lists to