Free This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger Page B

find—?”
    “You’re American,” she said, grasping at his familiar accent.
    “No. Well, yes, but I’m giving it up.”
    As he turned his head fully toward her, she noticed that he had only one ear. On the other side of his head were only a hole and a scar. He was tall and she had to look up at him.
    “I’m from L.A. but I’m applying for German citizenship now. I’m finished with the States.”
    “Why?”
    He turned his head again, so that the good ear was aimed her way.
    “Why? Because I don’t want to be liable for their foreign policy.”
    Hope held her handbag close.
    “Whose?”
    “The American government’s.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “As an American citizen you are automatically an ambassador when you go abroad. You’re a target. You’re putting yourself in harm’s way, don’t you know that? Global politics are personal now. It’s all personal.”
    She examined his face, pink in the reflected light of the photographs. That she could recall, the only two people to famously lose an ear were the painter van Gogh and the teenage son of the Getty family who had been kidnapped in Rome in the 1970s. It had been a big story one summer. The kidnappers had sent his ear back to his rich parents when they refused to pay the ransom.
    “I have never lived abroad before,” she said. “I guess I’ve never thought much about how America looks from the outside.”
    “Just be thankful you got out when you did.”
    “Of the United States?”
    “Well, yeah.”
    It was one thing to travel, she thought. It was another to give up being American altogether, which seemed illicit and impossible, like some kind of dirty joke. Even if you lived abroad for the rest of your life, you still had to file a U.S. tax return every year. Dave would have dismissed this guy as a nutcase.
    “How do you know that I got out in time?”
    “You’re here now, aren’t you?”
    When Hope tried to picture herself as a member of some other national tribe, only stereotypes came to mind: the French Hope with a beret and cigarette, the Argentinean Hope dancing tango. The idea had nonetheless been introduced. Had she not raged at the American government? How much time had she spent pondering the bewildering fact that it was illegal in the United States to issue a birth certificate and a death certificate on the same day? She had been over the details at the hospital and at city hall. It had all been explained to her, but it still didn’t make any sense. She had received the death certificate, the ashes, nothing else. And yet, how could someone die without ever being alive? If a death certificate marked the end of a life, then didn’t that life, however short, deserve validation?
    “Think of this as an opportunity to start again,” said the one-eared man.
    She nodded, because Dave had been saying the same thing to her for weeks but she liked it better coming from a stranger. She wondered if Americans on the streets of foreign cities routinely spoke to one another this way, cutting right to the chase like estranged members of the same screwed-up family. She was late for class but considered his point. The global might be personal now, but how about the other way around? In September, when she came out of her downtown building to see people covered in white powder running for their lives, she had not been entirely surprised to find the outside world finally reflecting her inner chaos. Maybe Berlin was an opportunity to start again. In the photograph shining beside her, a woman in blond cornrows and leather touched her tongue seductively to her upper lip. The man put his hands in his pockets.
    “Anyway,” he said, “do you know where I can find an ATM machine?”
    Hope laughed, because she actually knew the answer to his question, and pointed out the bank at the northwest corner of Savignyplatz.
    As she walked the last few blocks to class, the REO Speedwagon song came back into her head and she sang along quietly under her