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stop a sudden, urgent flow of tears. Sobbing into the orange insides of his eyelids then, he had a vision of the holiday season in Los Angeles: free candy canes by the cash registers, plastic decorations on summer-green lawns, poinsettia bushes grown tall as trees, people in flip-flops. Instead of endless Bach, there would be happy holiday songs for everyone on the radio: Frank Sinatra and Patti LaBelle, the Muppets! The democracy of Christmastimein California! The sky was blue there every day, as he remembered it. The sun shone even through the smog, even when it rained. Maybe things would have been different for him, maybe they still could be. He was not a superstitious man. He didn’t believe in God or feng shui. He didn’t throw spilled salt over his left shoulder or read his horoscope or knock wood. But he was desperate now. Like a drowning man grasping at driftwood, he reached out for the one shiny object he saw bobbing on the waves: Tom Cruise was coming to the premiere. Walter decided that it was a sign.
    In the grand tradition of English-language names around West Berlin left over from the Army occupation (The John F. Kennedy School, Institute and Friendship Center; the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Travel Agency, Riding Club and Nursery School; the Cruise-In Diner, the British-American Lifestyle Shop), Bodo’s restaurant was called The Wild West. Its terrace spread around the corner of Knesebeckstrasse and Grolmanstrasse like a fan, facing the garden on Savignyplatz. In the summer its patrons sat outside and admired the view, in the winter they retreated to the yellow walls of the interior dining room. Walter had come up with the name the first time he met Bodo, when they were working together on Top Gun and the wall was still up in 1986. Bodo had at that time an incipient career as the voices of both Anthony Edwards and River Phoenix.
    “I’m going to open my own restaurant,” he told Walter between takes. “Only open for dinner so I can sleep late. Make all my money on wine.”
    “Here?”
    “Why not? You don’t think the front line of the Cold War is a good place to open a restaurant?”
    “I like to think of this as the last frontier of democracy.”
    Bodo smiled. “Even cowboys have to eat.”
    As the sound technicians cued the next scene, he threw his empty paper coffee cup toward a garbage can in the corner and made the basket easily. Manifest destiny, thought Walter.
    “The Wild West,” he said. “You should call it that.”
    By the summer of 1989, Bodo had enough money to open his doors. Although it was only four months before the Wall came down, no one in West Berlin could have foreseen the radical changes on the immediate horizon. In July, the restaurant’s name and American comfort food menu and the rustic touches, like the ranch-style wooden fence around the outer edge of the front terrace, still made sense. The Wild West opened in July and was immediately popular with the actors, directors and film technicians in Bodo’s professional circle. By 2001, when most of the other restaurants, galleries and clothing shops had closed up and moved east, abandoning Savignyplatz for the inexpensive real estate now available on the other side of the Wall, The Wild West remained, a cozy relic of stability in an ever-morphing city.
    Emboldened by his conversation with Klara, Walter got out of bed and went down to the restaurant for dinner. Bodo quickly came to greet him across the room. He still looked exactly the same as he had in 1986, like a welterweight boxer, blond and fit, light on his feet.
    “Look who’s here,” he called out.
    Walter allowed himself to be embraced and climbed onto a stool at the bar that extended across the left-hand side of the restaurant. Elton John crowed over the ceiling speakers. Bodo had a small yellow ribbon attached to his shirt collar with a safety pin. He leaned his back against the wooden counter.
    “Let me buy you a drink.”
    Walter requested a Weissbier. “What’s