Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Duallo and I never made a fuss of goodbye.
Plus tard
, he’d say, and reach for his book bag.
Plus tard
, I’d answer, cool as all get-out.
Afer had a gig in Amsterdam. Lotte, over by the window, wasn’t talking yet. Bags downed his coffee. It was not about the child. As far as I could tell, Afer’s girlfriend left the child with its grandmother and clothes she’d lost interest in. I didn’t ask how much he’d seen of his baby daughter. I understood what it was to be a black man doing the best he could, even though it was my fondness for dubbed thrillers that filled in the information I could not hear through the walls on the fifth floor.
Because it was cold and silent, the kind of Berlin morning when you realized just how far from where you came from and on your own you were deep down, I got Bags to tell me most of the story. They’d not picked him up with the keys on him. He’d flushed the luggage claim slip. Nothing had felt right that day and he didn’t go for the car at the Frankfurt airport. But they must have been waiting for him, because they picked him up anyway when he left the terminal. They detained him and lost him for some time on purpose before they questioned him about drug smuggling and former or current U.S. Army personnel.
Things had not been cool with Afer, because his people had lost money. Neither of us named Odell and Zippi. When they cut Bags loose, he had to get out of the country for a while. He headed upstairs to have his argument with Afer’s girlfriend.
I hadn’t seen a thriller since I met Duallo. I took him to the art cinema and to hear jazz and the opera, because I wanted him to have a certain impression of the culture I was into. He was into David Bowie.
“I used to be.”
“Essaie une autre fois.”
* * *
We’d been in Schöneberg at a hip agency, finishing up on getting our visas for Moscow. Everything had been nail-biting and I remembered why I never went anywhere. But Duallo paid close attention to what was said. Then we ran into Bags and Afer at Europa Center buying traveler’s checks as well. Bags said that everybody was tightening up on how to get the fuck out of Dodge.
I wouldn’t let Duallo walk to the Techno Institut. The three of us escorted him to a taxi rank and I went with Bags and Afer to the ChiChi. It was a tradition. I was getting out of Dodge. I had our tickets in my breast pocket.
I also had a letter. It had come two days before. I was carrying it around. I never got letters. I never wrote letters. Alma warned me that she never wrote letters. This letter had been forwarded to me. Mom had my address, but she’d sent this letter in care of Cello. That was Dram’s handwriting on the outer envelope. I’d not noticed it on the mail table. I never looked at the mail table. Mom had stopped forwarding my alumni newsletter and subscription renewal notices because I’d moved around so much.
The letter in my breast pocket came from Manfred, written from his
Schloss
. He said he wasn’t sure where I was. He said he had been back. Had I not also returned to Lessingsdorf before the legions of destruction reached the village? We could be proud of the conversions, and why not accept what had become of Rosen-Montag’s fantasy on a mud pile? So that
had
been his Deux Chevaux. His letter began, “My Darling Doughnut…”—our old joke, the literal translation of Kennedy’s famous line about his being a Berliner.
Zippi hugged us. Odell gave us the black man’s nod and pointed the remote. The ChiChi was a smoky murmur. It was going to be hard to find somewhere in Berlin where people were not talking about the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. The attack brought people in the ChiChi closer together and while they bonded I did not smoke or toke or drink. I’d not seen footage of the crash debris before. I was nervous that some real feeling might get up and menace me in my cage, my isolation.
Around midnight, Odell wanted to show off his new automobile, a 1933 Mercedes sedan with places for tires on either side of the engine. This one had no spare tires. It was in hilariously battered shape. A hole in the rear floor let winter swoosh along with us. Odell gave us a foul-smelling-gasoline ride to Potsdamerplatz. Zippi’s dark eye makeup ran with anger when he left her. Big Dash stood at her side, fanning.
I didn’t lose it too much when the three of them talked openly about a good deal coming that they wanted to get in on with these Yugoslavs. They knew me as a fool who threw money around. Bags rested a sexy hand on my shoulder. AA cautions us not to people-please, not to say yes to people just to get them to like us. He said they weren’t talking about any crazy Russians. They themselves were not crazy. I decided that they bought traveler’s checks for lots of reasons. I liked being taken for a ride, but I had not in the hours I’d been with them said much and that felt like power.
Duallo wasn’t back yet, because the message was still taped to my door, a message from Cello for me to call Solomon. Urgent.
Solomon and Francesca were already in Chicago with Mom. Dad had had a heart attack.
The prisoner, a revolutionary who loved pensive weather, said in a letter written in December 1917, her third Christmas under lock and key, that she lay awake at night, pondering why it was that she was in a state of joyful intoxication. She had no cause to be, entombed in the silence of her cell, her mattress hard as stone. The gravel beneath the guard’s boots made a hopeless sound, she said.
Yet her heart beat with joy, as though she were moving in sunshine across a meadow. Enveloped in the manifold wrappings of unfreedom, she said she still smiled at life. The darkness of night was beautiful, if she looked at it in the right way. Even the heavy tread of the guard was a song to life, if she let herself have the ears to hear it.
Wagons of bloodstained tunics arrived in the prison courtyard for the women to mend and send back to the army. One day a wagon appeared, drawn by buffaloes instead of horses. They were trophies from Rumania, to be worked to death. A soldier beat them with the butt end of his whip. While the wagon was unloaded, the beasts stood still. She looked into the eyes of the buffalo that was bleeding, the expression in its eyes like that of a child who has been thrashed but does not know why or how to escape the ill-treatment.
She was freezing and she said that spring was the only thing she never got tired of. A Jewess who spoke Polish, not Yiddish, when growing up, denied magna cum laude in Zurich because that was considered too much for a girl, she shared in her letter to her friend the inexhaustible bliss of remembering the wind through the rocks on Corsica or the gloaming at Whitsuntide in her garden in Berlin. She asked about the berry picking in Steglitz, her South End of town.
She’d called them on the telephone at ten in the morning once to come to the Botanical Garden to hear the nightingale. She understood, as her mother believed King Solomon did also, the language of birds, the shades of meanings conveyed by their different tones. She hoped to die in the service of her principles, but her true self belonged more to her tomtits than it did to her comrades. As much as she loved birdsong, she did not look to nature as a refuge. She suffered at its cruelties. Meanwhile, the disappearance of songbirds in Germany because of the destruction of their habitats made her think of the vanquished Red Indians in North America.
The worse the news, the more tranquil she became, hearing the throaty rooks in the evening, observing them full of grave importance on their homeward path. Surrounded by brick, she liked to recall her love for the songs of Hugo Wolf and how they had laughed in the Café Fürstenhof the morning Karl was arrested. The sky was so interesting. She said people ought not to fret about morality. If they paid attention to the sublime indifference of the sky they could not fail to do good.
* * *
There was no drama. The morning I landed at Tegel, Duallo had been back in classes for a while, in the beaver skin hat that—he said he couldn’t wait to tell me how—became his in Moscow, in what was called Little Harlem, the few blocks where black youth were tolerated near Patrice Lumumba University.
The house leader, who had survived a coup, was firm with me about my emergency, Co-op rules, Duallo’s access to my room, his having guests. Incredibly, the leader handed me written criticism from other Co-op members. The Germans, I couldn’t wait to say to Bags. I segregated myself, he summarized for me, and did not help in any political action or hunger strike in support of South Africa. I especially minded criticism of my handling of the café. They wanted to say that I was too friendly, that I did not respect the Berlin style of not giving a shit who had just entered the establishment. Instead, they said that I put my personal life ahead of cleaning the place or keeping track of what needed to be ordered.
And before I could explode, he embraced me and said to the wall behind my shoulder that they were relieved my father had recovered. Duallo had kept them informed. The house leader shook my hand and said yes, and that was the delicate matter. He did not believe Duallo had made an accurate account of his use of the café telephone. The last bill was historic.
I was on Duallo’s side. The young Germans from the fifth floor who were covering my shift had friends in Iceland, I pointed out. He said that the calls in question were mostly to Paris, Austria, and the USA, not Reykjavik. I’d never seen an itemized phone bill in West Berlin. I said I would make good any sum immediately, indignant as I was for Duallo’s honor and his right to benefit as my boyfriend from my Co-op membership. I was also thinking of the generous supply of prepaid phone cards I’d left him.
The first thing I had to do once I’d taken my bags upstairs was to return and pick up the café phone. I’d promised Mom I would call as soon as I got back. The stairs were cold and lined with extra junk, and my room was like that of a boy who’s used to having either his mother or the help to clean up, someone who simply hasn’t noticed the zoo, someone confident from experience that someone else will come along who won’t accept it and the zoo will be flushed out. German clean was something I could achieve. The stove in my room had not been emptied in some time.
To look down at your father in his hospital bed sets off a wavering inside you. Your footing becomes insecure and you have to make an effort to keep your balance. Everyone has been dreading your arrival because of your history of inappropriate, inopportune displays, but that inclination leaves you once his face has confirmed for you your place in the great chain of being—soon enough after his. The grimace lets you know that you have been a weight. The momentary imbalance by the hospital bedside was you learning in an instant how to stand on your own, and it was uncomfortable at first, like any correction of posture.
He was the wrong color and texture and temperature. Solomon and Francesca were standing on one side of him, I was at the foot of the bed, and Mom was seated on the other side, stroking his hand as machines chirruped. He was asleep a lot of the time. Then he would come to and float for too long, ending on, “You went into labor with Jed when we were out at
Peyton Place
.”
“No, it was
Beginning of the End
. They were going to nuke Chicago.”
“What a downer for everyone. We used to call you Bugs.”
And we’d crack up, mostly because there was nothing else to do, perched around my father’s sad allotment of hospital bed, plastic tray, and synthetic curtain.
Solomon had come to O’Hare to get me, leaving Francesca with Mom at the Med Center. He said Mom was very shaken up, just from having heard Dad fall in the kitchen. Imagine if he’d had his heart attack in the basement. But then she is never someplace else, somewhere he isn’t, not anymore. Maybe when we were kids, back when women didn’t express themselves and she did. I could tell that Solomon was getting a lot from Francesca’s memories of her American Studies electives. He’d said nothing about praying for Dad. Mom would have been relieved. Our names didn’t come from the Bible; they came from Black Reconstruction.
On my way out of the terminal, I saw a white guy in shirt and tie waiting in line at a newsstand. The young cashier was so busy she didn’t see him look around and then just wander off with the magazine and nuts, called after by no one. From the escalator a few yards back, I’d seen as I descended a black kid in a baseball cap snatch the plastic cup of tips from the counter of a doughnut concession. Solomon would not have believed me, so I didn’t bother.
* * *
It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I’d just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked. If they weren’t going to wait down in the café, then I was certainly going to take my time getting dressed before I let Duallo unlock the door. He said it would be unfriendly to send them away. He’d run out of his mother’s blossomy lotion. It was my first night back.
Hayden and Father Paul had looked after Duallo while I was away, and now there was a gay café in Kreuzberg, on Oranienstrasse, where he was comfortable. He liked that there weren’t just bar stools, there were sofas, too. Hayden had been too modest in front of me about his French and Duallo and Father Paul had built up more German between them. I couldn’t help myself and I kept my voice to a low register because Hayden was in the vicinity. But West Berlin was mine to give.
I took the four of us to an elegant Italian restaurant in Schöneberg, on a side street of leather bars and back rooms smelling of poppers. The three of them had tall white beers and I a small coffee in a crowded gay bar not far away. It was loud with hits from ten years before. I bopped through the noise and didn’t join in the conversation. It was enough that while Duallo listened he now and then let my hand seek his.
I’d not been by the Mercedes-Benz star as yet. Hayden found it ridiculous that I paid obeisance to a corporate emblem, to a company that had a far from blameless war record. I asked him what German company didn’t and knowing what we knew, why then had we come to Berlin. That was a ritual I should have confessed to Duallo when we were alone.