Authors: Darryl Pinckney
The trees could have offered shade, had it been that kind of day, but we were fast revolving away from the sun. These would not have been the trees that had witnessed anything. Everything back then got used for fuel. What waterway wasn’t also a grave. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Weimar Republic, proclaimed at the Reichstag on November 9, 1918, after the signing of the Armistice.
Two hours later, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Kaiser’s Stadtschloss, which in those days was down the street from the Reichstag. The East Germans demolished the palace in 1950, except for the sandstone balcony, which was preserved and then enclosed by a dull government building of East Bloc bureaucratic vastness.
The Wall cut off the Reichstag from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, built as the western end of Unter den Linden, the boulevard of palaces, embassies, and a little Greek temple by Schinkel that fascinated everyone. From the Reichstag you could see over the Wall to passages of Doric columns and the four-horse chariot that topped the gate. The Wall cut through what had been Pariserplatz, right in front of the gate, and stopped you from getting near it.
You couldn’t approach the Brandenburg Gate from the east either. The tourist hit a barrier where Unter den Linden terminated as paved expanse, Soviet-style. Hitler fans were given no chance to get near where the Chancellory and the bunker had been. In the West, you could press up against the Wall and hump it. But in East Berlin, a wall guarded the Wall. Between the two walls lay heavily patrolled grassy strips where apartment buildings had been, and the windows people are jumping from in the black-and-white films of August 1961.
I remembered Cello’s sister, Rhonda, impressed that she was so close to the big, bad Berlin Wall, and I understood. But Berlin was not a Cold War story for me, terrified at the border though I was. It was Liebknecht supporting the workers’ general strike, as I learned in the Co-op bookstore. They lost and Weimar culture was born.
The Freikorps came for Liebknecht and brave Rosa Luxemburg. One account in German of what was done to her at the Eden Hotel I was glad I was not able to finish. On January 15, 1919, they were taken to the Landwehrkanal, where they were shot and their bodies thrown into the water. Hers wasn’t found for months. And here I was, cruising by the very spot on the bridge, maybe.
Manfred had argued that the Weimar Republic was the reason people lost faith in the Weimar Republic. “Jed,
Mann
, who ordered the murders of Liebknecht and Red Lady Luxemburg?”
My books had come. Consequently, I’d not read a newspaper, not so much as the
Herald Tribune
. It was days after the story was published that I saw Rosen-Montag’s photograph in
Die Tageszeitung
—“Die Taz, bitte,” as I, an insider, liked to hear myself say before my footsteps took off. His head was big and the story was small, because several key players I’d never heard of hadn’t much to say about his foundation chairman’s threat to sue the city.
* * *
And they were ordered to make bricks, and each one to write his name upon his brick. Twelve wouldn’t get with the program and one of them wouldn’t go along with their escape plan, saying that wild animals might as well be in the mountains for all the good running from the city would do. And when Nimrod’s people came to throw him into the limekiln, an earthquake happened. Fire consumed everyone around him but left him unmolested.
* * *
The summer after I graduated from high school, I was in the 57th Street Bookstore. I couldn’t have been accepted into the University of Chicago, but I was pretending to myself, and maybe to others, that I was an incoming freshman. I recognized the title,
The Torture Doctor
. Someone at the
Eagle
lost her copy of the bestseller about an evil pharmacist who picked up women at the Columbian Exposition and killed them. Cello’s father hadn’t had an episode in a while, but I guessed that he had purloined it. When I realized what the book that Ralston Jr. had was about, I told Dad.
He didn’t answer when I said, so grown up, that this was not what that man should be studying. Was it true the FBI asked Cello’s father to wear a wire, taking advantage of someone known to be off his rocker? I couldn’t blame Aunt Gloria, I said, for trying to get away from that nut job, even though that Jewish steelyard owner over there in Indiana was married.
Instead, Dad laid hold of me. My father seized me and twisted my wrist as he squeezed me in the direction of his office door. He was so hot and filled with blood he couldn’t risk speech. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it. After he pushed me into the corridor. That was his head that he leaned for some time against the opaque glass.
The evil pharmacist took his unsuspecting women to his combination office/hotel in Englewood. He’d used different builders in order to hide his overall design. He locked his victims in soundproof rooms that had no windows and gassed them. He sent the bodies down a chute to the basement and reduced them to skeletons, which he then sold to medical schools. They don’t know how many he killed, maybe two hundred, but not all in Chicago.
Numbers of people who came to the World’s Fair never went home. They disappeared, started over somewhere else.
* * *
Dram came to see me at the café. I had a friend. He bowed slightly toward Lotte and then sat at the bar. I didn’t mind if he smoked and it went without saying that I would not tell Cello of our conversation. No one else was around. He said he wanted to explain the sudden cancellation of their American Thanksgiving. She found a reason every Thanksgiving to cancel her plan to gather up strays like me. Cello had made him get rid of the nanny. I put more paraffin into the café stove to get the coals roaring.
“She accused me of having a thing with her.” In English, we were family. “Now she accuses me of having had a thing
for
her.” He swirled the dregs of his cup and swallowed quickly. “That I wanted to.” He went to the door with his cigarette and peered out at the yellow street. It was cold. He came back. His coat collar was trimmed in black velvet. His ties that he was so indifferent to were silk, gifts from his wife or his mother, her friends, his sisters, the women in his office.
Lotte adjusted her ears under her thin pageboy. Otherwise, she knew how to sit absolutely still for the camera.
Dram said he didn’t have to tell me his position or the company’s on taking advantage of women in his employ. But the young lady’s family rode with the West Kent Hunt and she wanted to be a chef. “Stupidly, I fucked her. I am the cliché.” Dragon amounts of smoke rushed from his nostrils.
“Lie.”
“You have seen her. I am fucking her at present. We meet at my sister’s apartment now that she is at Berkeley.”
“Continue to lie to her,” I said in German.
So be it, I said to myself, and that night explained to Duallo that I had a Chicago-related work appointment I’d nearly forgot. I changed my clothes to make it look good and went to stake out Manfred’s pub in Schöneberg. He didn’t come, but Bags did.
* * *
“Don’t turn it loose, because it’s a motherfucker,” James Brown instructed the band.
* * *
A lot of people were in the city to get lost. “I’ve been away, cocksucker,” Bags said. He was hooded up, as for a polar expedition.
I knew what that meant. I just wanted to know where and for what reason. I didn’t want him to share a taxi with me back to the Co-op. It was not because he didn’t know where Afer was. It was because I was going to have to lose him before I dipped into my room, where trusting Duallo waited. I told Bags I’d had a work-related appointment before I ran into him. Bags did not have me on his mind.
He knocked past the bicycles and grunted the whole way up to the fifth floor. He could yell. Afer and his girlfriend both came, undressed, into the hall. Clearly, that wasn’t news to Bags, but I was turned on. The young Germans on our floor had plastered homemade nonsense posters everywhere and scribbled with Magic Marker when off their heads.
“Why would you do me like this?” He was yelling at Afer.
“Go home.”
“Where’s that at?”
The house leader was beside us in no time. We’d have to respect the rules. Afer’s girlfriend did not want Bags inside and the café was closed. Bags refused to leave and he would not be quiet either. The hall was icy. I just stood there, wondering what had happened between them. The house leader frowned at the posters. Everything was messed up, Bags repeated while we waited for Afer to get dressed. They went out after the house leader had blocked their exit and been firm with them again. Duallo was in my room, unaware, on his earphones. The stove he’d kept lit was wonderful.
I thought it was because love on Dad’s scale was hard, but it was probably because mine was the higher make-believe. I could not project a future for us, what we would do or go on doing. Duallo let me rest his head on my chest for a second, that blossomy smell coming up from his skin, his thick cap of hair. I let him down every day, because I thought of him as African, not European. I felt in him the touch of his grandmother’s Ngala, the creator of the world. But it was easier to spot what was going wrong than it was to admit how hard I was trying to stay with the feeling, to make it real.
If it doesn’t go away, it multiplies in some fashion, spreads in some biological manner, becomes overarching context, the lid you no longer see it’s so prevalent in the sky of your head. But my desires were contradicted by my circumstances. Besides, the parent gets hurt; the lover finds himself doing hard time. It is not possible that an unconditional love does not show the scars as it ages, become less quick in the joints, a more costly show to run. The parent or the lover has no choice but to pass on some of his or her costs to the loved one, unspecified amounts deducted without warning from the loved one’s freedom account, which is therefore perpetually in danger of falling into arrears.
Where I lived, how I sat around were not conducive to adult life. Duallo smoked about once a month. I couldn’t. I liked his books and I liked the untouched blue pouch of cigarette tobacco spilling out onto the tray on the floor next to that futon beginning to split that I hadn’t thrown out. I knew not to tell him too much.
I’d heard that there was a price, and I couldn’t wait for the exquisite piercings. I would have talked to anyone about my fear of the pain, except everyone would say that I must have known that it was the pain I’d been after all along. My inability to relax into being with Duallo was just excitement, anticipation of the blow. I’m about to get hurt. I’m about to come. I wanted to say that that wasn’t me.
* * *
Frederick Douglass said that slaveholders were most anxious for free black men to leave the country, but he wanted these slaveholders to know that he was not disposed to leave, that he had been with them, was still with them, and would be with them to the end.
* * *
They settled in to see
Out of Rosenheim
. Father Paul had seen it before and loved it. I didn’t like the way Hayden detached me from Father Paul and Duallo, who seemed happy enough to hear that hilltop Austrian accent. I wasn’t really paying attention to what Hayden was saying about a crate of antique army gear, a present for Cello. He said something about that little black boy in the film putting the accent on the second note of every bar in the Bach piece that he was shown practicing throughout the film and then repeated the Cello story.
They were supposed to play four hands, but of course she changed her mind, so Hayden was there when a shipper from Oxfordshire announced himself. Two men brought up in the elevator and unpacked for her two teak folding chairs, a teak games table, ivory-handle cutlery for two, two brass traveling candlesticks, two round leather cases lined with cork, two hinged sandwich cases, a leather cigarette case, and a decanter set.
Hayden was saying how at first Cello was unimpressed by Dram’s way of telling her that he and she would be leaving the children and getting away to Sri Lanka for New Year’s. But then the British military campaign furniture turned out to be a birthday present from Rosen-Montag, only just now reaching her.
“Child, I thought she was going to scream. ‘Help me hide this, Ethel. Ricky will be home any minute.’”
I was not going to laugh with him at her expense. After all, she wasn’t the one encouraging her hot boyfriend to befriend my hot boyfriend and he wasn’t the friend I could tell what a mess I was. Nevertheless, she couldn’t have a drama going on, not in the middle of mine. Hayden said she left the invoice and Rosen-Montag’s innuendo-free message—he peeked—on top of the games table. I’d been right in my suspicion that he’d been fishing, that he wasn’t sure.
Mom practically told me to mind my own business when I asked if Cello had said anything to her about how things were with Dram. He hadn’t come back to the café and that was for the best, lonely though I still was, and eager as I was to be a gender Uncle Tom, the kind of gay man to sell out a straight woman to her straight man in the name of male solidarity.
“You’ll miss the beautiful sunsets, but you’ll always have turnips,” Dad said when I couldn’t get a date to my junior prom.
* * *
I was not going to Chicago for Christmas and Duallo wasn’t going to Paris. Though he wanted to go away with me, I was struggling to trust the Isherwood promises that Berlin was keeping with me. I sure as hell was not going to accept the mountains with Hayden and Father Paul and his parents and grandmother and sister and brother-in-law and little nephew. I made Duallo coffee and brought up Greece or Tunisia. Moscow was not the answer I was expecting. I’d never gone anywhere from Berlin, except back to Chicago.
Bags came in not long after Lotte. I wasn’t used to seeing him in the morning, dark, wide, and tense. He was staying in his painter friend’s storage closet on Moritzplatz. His old lady had put him out. There was no stove, but he needed to be alone. Anywhere else he could have crashed would have been a story. Eventually she would get over his having been in detention. He had got over it.