Authors: Darryl Pinckney
* * *
Cello said she was thinking of going to Budapest for Bartók’s state funeral. She confessed to me that she’d hired two German women to wash her hair, like the women in myth around that loom. She had the nicely pliable English nanny take Maximilian out for the afternoon. They went to a boutique with plenty of Agnès B. “She doesn’t take him to Karstadt.” While they were out, the German women would come, the boss one spilling over with “Gnaediges Frau, gnaediges Frau.” They massaged and patted her burden. It took hours to treat and comb, dry and brush.
I called Cello from the café on her birthday. Mom had got up early to phone her. They’d ended up laughing about Mom’s one-man protest against street artist Zeno’s mural in the Fifty-Fifth Street underpass, the same week Cello had a major competition. To Mom, people’s art was a social misdemeanor. Cello remembered when Mom had tried to stop Regents Park, that high-rise complex, and Dad ran home to get his chain cutters. Mom lectured Dad so hard the cops didn’t arrest her. They said they could see he had his hands full. Cello said she asked Mom why her meetings in Zurich with the Hungarian countess could not be as important to her as Dram’s design meetings in Dortmund were to him.
To my credit, I did not tell Cello that it was not too late for her to become an institution builder. She knew that I knew about her and her siblings, but she did not inquire about us, because, knowing Cello as I did, her not letting herself know anything about us kept her from feeling that Dad had perhaps cheated her, that I was hanging out on what was perhaps something that had been gouged out of hers.
It hit me then that Cello had taken me up this time because it excited her to be around someone who knew what she could not as a well-bred girl refer to. She’d worn her tenth wedding anniversary necklace, gold inlaid with tin, only once, and the occasion had been safely in West Germany, in Stuttgart. But Cello did go so far as to say to me that she’d often experienced the tedium of white people who thought all black people were poor until the day before yesterday. I wondered if she dared to say such things to Dram. Somehow I thought not. Bewitched as he was, he nevertheless knew an heiress when he danced with one. As Dram and Afer reviewed the situation in South Africa, with contributions from Yao, Cello couldn’t hide an expression that I hoped the father of her children was unaware of.
“Never worry about how tough the run is going to be if you can work every problem in the book,” Dad used to say.
Lotte told us that in 1937 the SS estimated that there were two million cute boys in the Third Reich.
* * *
The coolest thing I had ever done had been not to tell Cello about Duallo. She was irked that I thought myself so fly. Maybe I could pull this off, after all. Yet I did not enjoy the derisive looks Hayden cut at Cello, who had been a long time getting the message, she was so used to me being alone.
“But wasn’t he with Rhonda?” she whispered as Uwe followed Lotte to the door and gave him a warm get-home-safely. Uwe’s play was awful, but he’d made his stage debut. Dram patted me on the shoulder when I whisked away the chair Lotte had vacated.
My back hurt, not from carrying trays of dirty cups and sloppy beer glasses, but from trying to read lips. Any chance I got, I stupidly cruised by wherever Duallo was, just to connect with him, I told myself, when in fact it was to say to whomsoever to him cometh that the nectar in question was mine.
Father Paul was complaining to Duallo that he was tired of commuting back and forth. He had family and his studies in Austria, but Hayden would not look for work in Vienna. I convinced myself that Duallo wasn’t following his German.
Hayden jumped on him, snarling that nobody in Austria was ever going to give a black man the position someone of his caliber and experience deserved. Father Paul put his hands in his lap. His love was hurt.
I made coffee. The café was noisy. Wooden chairs scraped the unpolished floorboards. The house leader bawled for two beers and two coffees; the area where I worked was slippery. Co-op members had a good time ripping further the remnants of leaflets and old posters glued to the bumpy walls.
Hayden asked me to phone for a taxi. He wouldn’t dream of taking Dram away from his political philosophy and shook hands with Yao, Afer, Lucky, the house leader, Uwe, Dram, and Duallo. He threaded through the configuration of tables to kiss Cello and me, too. Father Paul was like a feather on his palm.
Hayden had seen in the paper that Lessingsdorf was being disassembled, the trompe l’oeil pulled down. There was some controversy over the workers’ houses and warehouse offices and until the disputes were resolved they were likely to remain unoccupied, an addition to the unused in West Berlin, but not exactly real estate that had no value either. I couldn’t see Cello’s face.
Stagnation had changed the occupied city, the house leader proposed to Dram. Stagnation on both sides of the border, the house leader’s partner, the incredible baker, added. Reforms wouldn’t save either side. Their two tired children stood around her, gnawing on the only sweet buns she let them have per weekend. I never translated for Duallo. Fortunately, he’d not asked me to. He said his classes were very, very hard.
Another Co-op member said he wanted to go back to the question of which was the occupied city, East or West Berlin. He propped open the front door as he spoke. The air became colder, but not less smoky. The lights in the café flickered now and then.
For me, it had been an emotionally unsatisfying evening ever since Duallo and Father Paul hugged goodbye. And it wasn’t over. I regretted that I’d not paid attention to the film. At least I would have had that self-respecting experience. I got more orders for coffee and beer and red wine. Duallo came behind the bar to help me, his eyes that I could not read full on me.
* * *
Triumphs are much harder to get over than disasters. Uwe had his golden brown hand in his blue pouch of golden brown tobacco and rolled one for Duallo. I failed not to mind that he could have one cigarette per month. He could smoke at a party and not get hooked. He was that way about alcohol, too. I just couldn’t understand how he could leave half his glass of wine, and his first one at that.
I couldn’t tell if I was really in love or if I was just relieved to have someone, to have joined the living. Maybe the rain wasn’t really more poignant since he’d come into my life and I was just acting but not admitting it. We had gone swimming one Sunday in the summer. He said his father had a friend from his film days and through him he’d had some holidays on Cap Nègre until his father’s depression caused him to lose interest in his son, who was by no means his first. But at least he learned to swim. He liked tennis. He almost met Yannick Noah. McEnroe said he was more scared of Noah’s hair than his tennis.
When we were out cycling, it was Duallo’s juju beckoning me, I told myself. I let him have the Schwinn. We came to the point where I had a hard time keeping up on Yao’s old brown contraption, something Anne Frank’s father would have had. To head back in, because of me, was more embarrassing than how badly I played tennis, after all the training on the bike I’d subjected myself to. The next time I rattled by a display window of bicycles, I stopped.
I did not think about how I looked to him when I watched him play football again in the Platz der Republik. It was Duallo who told me that the reason the Reichstag had no function was that everyone had promised the Russians it would remain unused. He ran and time stood still and if I did not forget everything, hugging my knees on the porch of the Reichstag, I at least forgot myself. The Berlin Effect. I never met his teammates, and Contestant Number 1 left us alone where the Nazis set fire to the Weimar Republic. That was the last time I’d see him play. I think I knew that afternoon that I would one day say to myself about him that I saw him play twice, the first time and the last.
Yet I had to cover up from myself my hurt when he mentioned that he played other football matches, over in Neukölln and in Kreuzberg on the Saturdays when I was digging in the ground in the
Schrebergärten
. I’d been with him in that very square in Kreuzberg one evening. The Wall ran along the far end of Mariannenplatz. You could see a church spire and roof on the other side, over in East Berlin. Someone had painted the church front, what the Wall blocked, on the side facing south, or the Western sector.
The park was in use in every corner, families took their time packing up plastic baskets, and everything around us was purple in the twilight. Children of a mystical hue came laughing through the dusty grass, chased by papa. The scarf on his daughter’s head seemed so unfair, and Duallo said so. He looked back and said her scarf did not appear to be slowing her down.
We wandered for some time. He was demonstrating with his hands different nautical knots. I made it a point of honor not to interrogate him about where he’d been and whom he’d seen, but maybe my not wanting to know was not honorable, because what he did tell me made me think of how much of his life I was shut out from. Even after he’d begun spending every night with me, I was not at ease about us.
* * *
Cello was telling Uwe that it would be one thing to work with Lotte von der Pfalz on a piece about the Nazi times, but she knew the black American poet he’d referred to who was living in West Berlin, a second-generation Beat figure, and her advice to Uwe would be to stay clear of him. She’d let Duallo and Uwe smoke near her. Uwe wanted to write a performance piece about race, being mixed race.
No, it was not that that black American poet was a bad man, she said, getting up to take Dram’s cigarette from him to smoke herself—he kissed her—it was that he was second-rate, which was worse. Those were precisely the people to avoid in Berlin, Cello said. They were in hip Berlin because in what was actually a village they could have the careers they could not have in New York or Los Angeles or London. She switched to English. They were never-was performance artists, never-to-finish-dissertation affirmative-action parasites.
She lived by the social philosophy that if you heard what she’d said about you, then you were meant to or you wanted to, and at least she wasn’t ignoring you. I’d no worries about keeping my cool with her, but not for the first time what I really felt was sorry for her. The family love only money could buy turned out to be a rental. The meter flipped fast on Cello’s moods anyway.
But what was it to her that I was bedding a beautiful young man. That was proving more than enough to freak me out. I missed Zippi; I missed Alma; I missed having a friend, being one of the guys, having a gang to tell me to stay strong. I’d never understood why Cello had never really wanted that with me. I thought of unnerving Solomon with a sober phone call. AA teaches us to go back and say we’re sorry to people we did messed-up things to when we were out of our minds. We were to write them letters. Apart from Mom, and only kind of, I’d made amends to no one back in Chicago. That hadn’t worked. Perhaps just talking with wise old Lotte in the morning would suffice.
I was not smoking and it bothered me that the times Duallo wasn’t with me felt like breaks between rounds, chances to take out the mouth guard, to pant, squirt water over my face, plan my next moves. I could not relax into my love, though he spent hours in the dark with me, and I was proud fighting the mildew in the bath in housing I wouldn’t have thought nearly as cool back in Chicago.
* * *
Duallo had replaced the bicycle I’d given him with a racing machine he liked and taken it to school. I was back on my Schwinn, in front of the Nissen hut enclave. Multiple chains held the gates fast; plants had got into the gravel. Rosen-Montag’s glass carriage lights had been removed from above the doors. Instead, bare bulbs hung from wires that looped from hut to hut. In a few years it would look like something left over from the war.
I went on, past the Academy of Arts and one of the easiest structures to make fun of in West Berlin, the House of the Cultures of the World. I pumped toward the Spree and up to Lessingsdorf, feeling cold and sorry I hadn’t worn gloves or made more of my opportunity with Rosen-Montag. The public entrance had been obliterated. I rode beside the S-Bahn tracks and turned off on a road once bumpy with trucks. Now my tires rolled on the hash-smooth black asphalt, specified by Rosen-Montag.
I could hear different rhythms, a smacking onto the pavement somewhere, a crunching of wood sound, something hydraulic. I should have known what those machines were. I realized I was riding toward what had been a great wall of trompe l’oeil depicting the backs of narrow houses and arched passages. The magic city had become a high tin fence. There was no one to call out to at the wire gate. This was a parking lot. I nearly fell over the handlebars to get a better angle, but I’d never seen another like Manfred’s Deux Chevaux in Berlin. The right fender was dark blue, but I couldn’t see the left one, which, to be Manfred’s car, had to be green with a big white splotch.
No one was there and beyond the next fence was noise, so why call out. I couldn’t say if I’d missed him. Maybe I just wanted to show off the bohemian life I’d made for myself in his absence. Maybe it had been a relief to have him gone, yanked out. I’d never yelled in my life. Dad didn’t yell when he watched a game. He pulled his hands apart and bit his lip. Solomon beat his fist into his palm. I’d never yelled when I’d come. “I didn’t came for a week,” a blond soldier once said in the AA meeting down in Dahlem.
It was too cold to wait and see if that was his car, too pet Negro to wait for him. Straight guys aren’t trying to hurt your feelings, they’re just not thinking about you in that way. I’d pedaled to the Landwehrkanal by the time I concluded that Manfred was not searching for himself; but I was, or, rather, the American abroad, I was supposed to be.
One of my favorite buildings in Berlin stood along the north side of the Landwehrkanal, Emil Fahrenkamp’s beautiful Shell House, with its waved exterior. From west to east it stepped down in waves of glass and treated stone, from ten storys to five storys. It had been white in 1932, the books said, but had turned the color of the gray stuff in my soap dish, my soap dish before I met Duallo.