Authors: Darryl Pinckney
At my interview, the twenty-one members of Co-operative One-Fifteen-Nineteen, or the January Initiative, as founding committee people also sometimes referred to it, weren’t concerned about my politics or lack of a coherent philosophy as I alternated between tense verbal blocks in English and borrowed German disquisitional phrases. To them—the seventeen white members of the Co-op, that is—the color of my skin was my radical politics. The four black and brown members questioned me closely in English. Afer in particular seemed angry that I was ignorant of the lies that the Voice of South Africa and the British prime minister were spreading about his country.
I may not have had much Marxist theory or an opinion about the wisdom of the Spartacist uprising of 1919, but the whole house got that, like most American queers in West Berlin, I was in love with Weimar culture. I’d given Dram’s name as a reference, but they stressed that they hadn’t asked for any references, that that was not how the decision process worked with them. It wasn’t clear to me why Afer was taking so much trouble to help me. I didn’t want to be his political project. But we had been in a street battle together and that meant something where he came from.
In my ignorance I thought at first that the existence of the
Spartacus International Gay Guide
was why the Co-op 1-15-19, Co-op J.I., avoided calling itself Spartakusbund or anything like it when the original ten people squatted in the large derelict building in 1980. But then I learned that the name Spartacus was more than taken. Every Trotskyite group used it.
I had the morning shift in the Café Rosa. To avoid a house meeting discussion about the white apron with wraparound strings that I’d bought myself in spite of its connotations of bourgeois service, I stopped wearing it. The commune also ran a bookstore, and a performance space, ZFB, initials for what translated loosely into the Time of Fossil Fuel. Jobs in these departments, so to speak, came only with seniority.
Lotte von der Pfalz, as he, she, called herself, was always standing at the door when I opened up. She liked to be the first customer, the first to get the fresh coffee. She was quiet for the first half hour, too. Then she talked all morning, patting her thin pageboy lightly when she thought she’d said something especially good. She said that
Leda and the Swan
had been Hitler’s favorite painting, so it, like Wagner, should be forbidden. After all, Mendelssohn had been banned during the war. She carried petitions, wads of pages of what she wanted suppressed in peacetime. Pretzels, the Eurovision Song Contest, henna rinses, miniature dog breeds, Gottfried Benn.
I tried to call her Madame at first, but she really didn’t like that.
“I am Lotte, simple, Jed, my old friend.”
I was suspicious of white people who boasted that they treated everyone the same, that they did not see color. Then, too, she was proud of her mezzo purr. She would not retouch her lips in public and wore androgynous black orthopedic nun pensioner shoes. Unfortunately, the violet cloud around the print dress that she came in with turned brown after a while or wore off. She told me that the University of Chicago library got its start as a collection imported from a book dealer in Berlin, thousands and thousands of books at one time. I said that that was the American way and thought of the books I was having sent from Chicago, to be reunited soon with the boxes from Cello’s cellar.
* * *
Solomon’s dark-eyed bride said she couldn’t figure out why Frederick Douglass’s first wife never learned to read or to write. She was on the plantation he’d escaped from and he got her out, so he must have cared for her, she said. But he married his second wife, his white secretary who was twenty years younger than he, only months after his first wife’s death. Didn’t he try to bring this new wife to the Chicago World’s Fair, only to be prevented by the black Haitian government that didn’t want its official black representative photographed with his white wife? Francesca remembered her American Studies classes. She wasn’t pregnant. She and Solomon got hitched on impulse.
Solomon didn’t dare go over to his wife. He moved closer to Dad by the sink and they were both just not going to notice what was happening, if anything. I was in the refrigerator door, though we were headed out soon for lunch at Francesca’s parents’ club.
Mom said that Anna Murray Douglass’s parents were slaves, but she’d been born free and that she met Douglass when they were both working around the Baltimore docks. She knew him when he was still calling himself Bailey. She followed him to Philadelphia on her own. They were married for more than forty years and had five children. True, she stayed in the kitchen when company came. Two years after she died, he married his devoted secretary. Her family, abolitionist friends of Douglass’s, stopped speaking to her. His children resented her.
Mom said most men don’t know how to live on their own, especially not busy ones, never mind a great man in public life, a great black man in the nineteenth century. Douglass was a staunch advocate of women’s suffrage, Mom said. Francesca said she knew that. Mom said that Douglass hadn’t done anything wrong. He just fell in love again after his wife died. That’s not doing anything wrong. Francesca burst into tears. Mom didn’t mammy-comfort white girls, not even her daughter-in-law. She just kept telling her from her side of the table that it was all right, she was going to be fine, it was all right.
* * *
The European football championships would be on in a week and Odell got the big television nobody knew he’d been longing for. Zippi called me a kibbutznik and asked too casually how often Bags came to see Afer. I’d not seen Bags. Zippi looked up from soapy glass water and smoothed her bangs. Her wet hand shook. I didn’t look away. But we were different with each other in German. Something else was going on. I’d not sent a postcard this time. I lied and said I was not smoking stuff.
* * *
I had been going to the AA meetings in Dahlem again. I nodded to the steadfast black noncoms; one of them even dapped my fist with his fist once. I wasn’t drinking. I felt nothing going past glasses of white wine on restaurant terrace tables. But every Saturday when I got back to the Co-op, I joined Afer’s faction in the Café Rosa’s kitchen for long discussions—the Co-op’s relation to the Autonomen movement, why capitalism needs racism, how to be more Green—over soft, pliable, very black hash.
There seemed to be some agreement among the members who had survived the bloodletting of a couple of years before that they would not talk about the purge that led to the arrival of several newcomers. I picked up from Afer that the younger Bio-Anarcho element finally outnumbered the Red Army Faction sympathizers and their tired, bony dogs. On certain days the floorboards on certain scrubbed floors still gave off a faint odor of pet urine.
The bookstore concentrated on ecology and antinuclear literature, with a small Africa, South America, and Caribbean section that reflected an early victory in committee of the women who opposed female circumcision in Africa over those who said Westerners ought to leave native beliefs and practices alone. They just expanded their shelves from there, along the lines of problems in what was then called the developing world. Long-term Co-op members said openly, to our faces, that they’d asked Yao and Afer to recruit among their circles in Berlin those most likely to be bio-sympathetic, though they were far too with-it to call us black men. To bring in soul brothers was a way of beefing up the male presence without antagonizing the considerable feminist faction in the house.
Cats led mammal life in the dark courtyard and weedy lots beyond the kitchen doors. The Co-op had been negotiating with the absent owners of one lot. They wanted a vegetable garden. They had worked out a deal with a pensioner for his
Schrebergärten
way on the other side of town, on the way to Tegel. Named for the man who preached the therapeutic value of every man working his allotment of land,
Schrebergärtens
flourished around the city.
Every Co-op member not on permanent garden duty had to work in the garden on alternate weekends. The Co-op’s arrangement with the pensioner had been guaranteed by recent federal legislation. When the garden came up in house meetings, I realized that a fissure existed between those members who were relieved to be legal about some things and those who rejected permission from the state for anything the Co-op did.
I hated working in the potato patch and I hated that the hundred square meters the Co-op leased were so near Lessingsdorf—now into its second summer as a must-see for hip visitors to the unreal city about which the hardest thing was getting there. I found it vaguely humiliating to farm in the city. I was told that the Lustgarten over in East Berlin in front of the Old Museum had first been a potato field for a vegetable then brand new to the city. And so what, I said to myself in the June sun. That was three hundred sad years ago. I stopped bitching in my head when a couple of guys took off their T-shirts, but I thought for sure I would leave this commune by winter. I couldn’t face duty in the café coal bin.
The Co-op was not a dorm, nor was it Fräulein Schroeder’s rooming house. I learned that right away. It was not cool to drop in on anybody. You didn’t walk up to a door and knock. You were invited up to someone’s room or rooms. Until then, you met the other members in the kitchen meetings or in the corridors, on the stairs or in the bookshop at more meetings, and, most sociably, in the Café Rosa. I became the dishwasher for the afternoon shift and, apronless, drenched, I was usually so tired by dinnertime that I fell asleep after cleaning up the kitchen on my floor.
I lived at the top of the house, the fifth floor, with the lowest ceilings, as did a light-skinned Afro-German guy and a dark-skinned Bangladeshi guy. Two very young white couples who had been members for little more than a year each had a room. A room with a small stove and sink had been rigged up at the other end. Afer and his girlfriend had their own kitchen and the biggest apartment on the floor.
I had a shower, but my toilet was in the hall. I cleaned it before I used it and then again right after I used it. My windows faced the rear, the solid plaster back and sides of the apartment houses around us. I couldn’t name the trees or the wildflowers growing in the lots. I got my own cube of refrigerator from a store off Potsdamerstrasse and carried it to my room on my back. But the thing the American in me could not get over was that I had a coal stove for heat. No radiators. Winter was a long ways off; who knew where I’d be.
Of course the women I thought were lesbian were not. I understood soon enough that I was the only queer in the Co-op.
* * *
The week before Cello’s graduation from the conservatory, her father bought an old safe for all the cash he had on him, and a lot he didn’t, from white mobsters in the Shore Drive Motel, because he had become convinced that Scott Joplin’s lost ragtime opera was inside it and he was loudly desperate to present the score to his daughter. I never talked to Cello about her parents. Somehow you just couldn’t do that to her, no matter what. “She may be a monster, Jeddie, but remember she’s our monster,” Mom explained to me early on.
* * *
It was my party. Cello’s sister, Rhonda, was in town, doing a quick tour of northern European cities as part of her present to herself for having got her doctorate, plus a postdoc position. Cello held herself away from the peeling walls as she made her way upstairs to inspect my room. She wouldn’t touch the walls on the way down either. Her hair appeared to coax her, to push her along. Around her sister, Rhonda wore her hair tightly braided or rolled up completely.
They’d heard of the architect’s collective in the brewery, so elegant in front of us in the darkening dust. For some reason, Cello had assumed that that was the community I was joining. “I see, you’re a hippie now, in your continuing late adolescence.” She asked if this situation was the healthiest for me. “I can smell patchouli and something else.”
I laid out a big table on the sidewalk in front of the café. It was important to keep the cousins away from the people I did hash with, but rather than not have my brothers on the fifth floor join us I begged them not to let on to my family that I smoked stuff. They did not need to be told. There were lots of things we were all getting away from, no matter where we started out, Lucky said, glad to talk English with Germans for a change.
He’d walked to Europe, almost. His family dug up the gold they had buried and sent him off. He, the eldest, was their big chance. He’d come thousands of miles, by trains to Pakistan and a flight to Turkey. It took him two years to get into Greece. An Egyptian arranged to smuggle him across the Hungarian border. Lucky had no papers. He washed dishes in a restaurant in Charlottenburg, for questionable Russians. He sent home as much money as he could to the saline-drenched farm back in Bangladesh.
Dram was not some liberal who couldn’t face things. He put his hand on Lucky’s shoulder and in the silence went back to his
bouletten
, or meatballs, a Berlin thing. Cello sat back in her chair when he ordered them. The café also offered a flavorless tofu dish. The rest of us were having meatballs, and the men and Rhonda were drinking tall white beers. I saw Manfred’s fingers around a shaft. But in his absence, the passion could not be fed; it was dying of inanition. Hayden and Father Paul fell in with the party and they ordered tall white beers when they finally showed up, both in tight jeans.
The Co-op made Dram nostalgic for his student days—the bicycles in the entrance hall, the bookstore still open, the half-assed murals on the stairs. He relished his trip back in time, talking to Afer about the ANC’s future. It was Mandela’s seventieth birthday. A bomb went off somewhere in South Africa every day; grenades and land mines killed white policemen or black guerrillas every week. Afer was in a state, the anger of not being home and not trusting the Communist Party there making him extreme in some of his predictions. I was pretty sure Afer’s girlfriend used to be Bags’s piece on the side who got pregnant—his slide, as the jazz musicians called their mistresses.