Authors: Darryl Pinckney
I made a motion that the one copy in the original English by Eldridge Cleaver that was on sale be withdrawn and the house leader by way of restatement yelled it out for me. Duallo wasn’t present, but I thought I should be doing my own yelling. I opened my arms wide, like Frederick Douglass, and intoned that Cleaver once had a beautiful wife but he had become a Mormon and a Republican, signs that he had been a fraud in waiting, and Koh-op Hah-ee had to leave him behind, in the wet dust, as had his wife.
I felt some amazed eyes on me. Sometimes the house leader translated what he thought the English-shy among them had not understood fully. I waited.
Yao stood and raised his arm, stepping forward. The house leader acknowledged him. The redhead barked that he should just talk and forget recognition.
Yao asked me to have the patience to let him point out to me that
Soul on Ice
was first published twenty years ago. He could verify for me that twenty years was a long time, because he had not seen his mother, had not been back to Ghana, in twenty years. He was reluctant to say such things to me, but we were brothers in intellectual progressiveness, which he had understood the Co-op to consider among its foundation principles. Therefore, he had to ask if Europe did not do funny things to the black man.
I’d been depressed on the fourth anniversary of my having gone into rehab. I was sober except for the return of menthol cigarettes and lukewarm coffee. In the café, I had poured the occasional late morning glass of white wine for Lotte and still not asked for its new phone number.
But I knew that after the house meeting I would be back in the kitchen with Afer and some others, then upstairs with Afer and his girlfriend, then in my room, with me, my menthol, and little mouse droppings of hash, waiting for Duallo, whom I’d not seen in three days. I’d not been to the AA meeting in Dahlem since we met.
How else, Yao continued, could I, a black man, want to ban a book written by another black man. He moved closer and was breathing hard, struggling, I feared, with his own question of identity, whether he was a healer or a basher. I didn’t know how to stand. Yao placed his hands on his back and talked to me with his chin.
I did understand, did I not, that I was saying such things in Berlin, where in living memory books had been burned. Maybe an American, even an unwanted black-skinned American, held on to being an American, because for the American that rainy day always came. But for him, and for many of his brothers, their presence in West Berlin was a political solution in which the tragic personal destinies that had brought them to this city could be overcome.
I withdrew my motion. Yao got handshakes as he took his seat, his tribal stool. My face was hot. What year of grammar school or high school had I not metaphorically pissed myself in front of the entire class. To be back in school, with those feelings, as though I’d been beamed, made me consider that maybe the AA Big Book, which I looked down on because it was not great literature, knew more than I did about alcoholism and drug addiction.
Lucky said that the arrogance of Europe belittled the beliefs of millions. I hadn’t assigned religious feelings to anyone I lived with. I thought I saw homesickness in Lucky’s insistence on bringing up a subject that people were allergic to, that and maybe weariness with his invisibility in West Berlin.
After the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great, big in queer history, thought of building a mosque to encourage Turks to move to his capital, Lotte once told me. She was surprised I’d never been to Sanssouci.
Yao got to his feet again. First, Cleaver. Second, Rushdie, which he had not yet had the privilege to read. He couldn’t get anyone he knew in England to mail
The Satanic Verses
to him. In Brussels they shot the one imam who respected where we lived, on a continent that should know better. The National People’s Army killed its own people who tried to get over to where we were.
Members applauded and adjourned themselves. The cups were mine. Sugar and honey had been spilled everywhere. I tidied up Uwe’s copies of
Afro Look
, a magazine for black Germans. No one had signed up to go with his group to a conference in Frankfurt on minorities and immigrants in the Federal Republic. This was a collective that preferred to concentrate on its war with the German Democratic Republic and much of “the international Spartacist tendency” over Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s legacy. I should have aced that part of my interview, thanks to Manfred’s tirades, but the sound of his voice in my head had made me struggle.
Lucky walked out. He scooted his chair up before he left, but he definitely walked out without a word to any of us.
“Right on,” I said like a fool to Yao and extended my fist for a dap, for him to tap the top of my fist with the bottom of his.
He contemplated my hand for a few seconds and then knuckled me harder on my shoulder than he needed to. Smiling.
* * *
Security procedures had been stepped up at the airport on the way out of Berlin and probably would be even more so at the airport when I left Chicago. Solomon and Francesca had to get back. That was understood. They had high-powered jobs, a real life together, and there was the problem that neither of them liked Greenwich Village. They’d made a mistake.
They assumed that I had nothing urgent to get back to. No one asked. I didn’t say. Almost two months had gone by before Duallo at the café and I on the phone in the front hallway managed to have a conversation.
Moscow was the most exciting city he had ever been to and he wanted to go to Beijing next. He loved the statue of Pushkin and was glad he had no packs of cigarettes to give people. He had the correct pink vouchers and a view of the Kremlin, but lunch and coffee were impossible to find. Not to speak Russian tired him quickly. Two black students spoke French to him when it was clear he was not American.
Mom gave no sign after I hung up that she heard me tell Duallo I would wire funds. I was a problem solver. Dad hadn’t liked the setup on the second floor and to install him in the basement had been a strain. He was the only thing we had to move and he simply walked down two flights and got into bed. I was the strain, the intruder in their basement. They had everything down there—stereo, double hot plate, refrigerator-freezer. I could see his workbench of model planes in the back room. Mom’s poster-making Magic Markers would have been to the left of the door.
It was clear I was in the way, but Mom said I could be of use. I walked to the pharmacy. Mom knew that Dad wouldn’t have let me touch the car. Perhaps she wanted to have a different conversation from the one we had when I came back with Dad’s medicine. His prognosis was good. She told me to sit with her a minute. It was the end of his pancakes, her grill pan, their Belgian waffles.
“She’s left it too long to get back with it now…” Mom started. She could only have been talking about Cello. Mom said that in getting the basement ready for Dad, she’d found her dissertation on Florence Beatrice Price. Mom met Mrs. Price once, when she was a music/music education student. Mom said she’d nearly fainted, to meet a black woman who wrote symphonies.
Cello had a gift for composition. Her teachers said so. It was not too late for her; she loved music so much. Mrs. Price made Mom realize how important it was to make a contribution to what you loved.
Mom had kept me from getting back to my life in Berlin in order to have a conversation about what the future held for Cello, the thirty-six-year-old mother of four who had only written music for school and had not tried to play in public for more than a decade, not since her Bicentennial Disaster, which was the reason they had fallen out with each other for so long.
Mom had said, “Your father has never been fifty-eight years old before either. It’s new for him, too.”
Mom said maybe I could talk to her about composition. I may not have thought so, but Cello respected my opinion.
I made no comment about the hot tub, gas heater, and pumping system they had in an alcove off the laundry room. It was like being surprised, after we left home, that they’d tried to have a fondue party, years after fondue had gone out of fashion.
Mom said that the Spirituals were not Gospel music. When Dad sat upstairs to listen to Mom play arrangements of Spirituals, I knew it was safe to leave them.
* * *
“With Father Paul?”
“Paul.
Cela ne l’amuse pas
.”
* * *
Hayden Birge was at work on an opera,
Wittgenstein in Love
. But his love story wasn’t about Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Pinsent, Wittgenstein’s Cambridge friend who died in World War I. They’d ended up on opposite sides. No, Hayden’s gay opera was about the philosopher’s brother, Rudi Wittgenstein. Three of the five Wittgenstein brothers were to commit suicide. In 1904, Rudi Wittgenstein, in his early twenties, drank milk he’d poisoned himself, in the middle of a gay bar in Berlin, in despair over a hustler, according to Hayden’s plot.
* * *
Dram was in Dortmund. Konrad, Hildegard, and Maximilian were asleep, but Otto, a very serious boy, was still up. He said he remembered me. He’d reached the age at which he understood that he could not repeat everything he heard his parents say. He looked at me an uncomfortably long time and then went away with purposeful strides.
“
Carnaval
,” Hayden called from the study with Cello’s Bösendorfer.
“Schumann,” Cello said and lit a scented candle, a thing I’d never seen her do, just as she never wore pants.
“Schumann. Difficult.” He came back, Canova-shaped, an African American artist abroad, the kind of black man white people threw themselves on.
“No, but it’s big. It’s not big like the Brahms Paganini variations. It feels good to play it. It’s like listening to a set of virtuosic waltzes.” And men of all races would kill for her.
I had sworn not to mention Hayden’s opera in front of Cello, but I did. She gave me a look that said I was one of the glorious underbidders in life and went to check on Otto. They had a new nanny, a Russian, a fat friend of their cleaning lady’s, Hayden had said, but she didn’t live with them.
Hayden turned his nose up at the menthol I suavely held out to him. He crossed his legs and said I might have noticed that he was on his own, too. He said he knew where Duallo was and I didn’t. Father Paul took Duallo to techno bars, but mostly he let Duallo find nirvana between his Tom of Finland cheeks.
“They found some voodoo butter and your boy started banging my boy. I even joined in once. I thought you should know.”
I’d not touched Duallo in public, because I thought that would have violated his African sense of propriety. I was in no condition to handle cleverness and scorn.
I slapped that So-and-so so hard. Dad and Mom both said So-and-so when they didn’t want to say either Nigger or Motherfucker.
I could see Hayden’s tongue touch blood in the corner of a beautiful lip. “Bullshit.” He stood and didn’t let me see him cock his arm.
There were those spots telling me I was about to black out, one of which quickly became Duallo.
But it was not Duallo. I’d stayed away too long and lost him.
* * *
It was time. Duallo was returning to his friends at his branch of Paris Tech, where evidently he was some sort of young black hope. His mother cried when they talked, he said. He was not going for another few days, but he carefully collected his things from around my room, our room, and placed them in his duffel bag.
I’d not confronted him about Father Paul, but how could he not know I knew. I felt that I deserved extra points for my Berlin cool about the whole matter, having done the royal thing of slapping the messenger. But he did not want me to see him off at Bahnhof Zoo. He wanted us to make our farewells then and there. I pressed on him the gifts he was not putting into his duffel bag. He unpacked his book bag and took the CD player from the socket where he had been recharging it. I told him to come back for the racing bicycle. If he didn’t want me to ship it, then he could take it on the train.
I was impressed by the grace and unhurriedness of his movements. He declined the two small speakers attached to the portable CD player I’d got for myself, careful not to make it better than what I had given him. He omitted to give me the time of his departure. He was perfectly composed. He would not let the kiss linger. He’d thrown out some time ago his gray shirt of little white fish leaping in the same direction. Downstairs, he let me call a taxi from the café. I’d been naked with this beautiful, gleaming boy and he with me.
One morning not long afterward, Duallo’s racing bicycle was no longer in the entrance hall. He’d grown up and left town.
* * *
A model airplane friend of Dad’s had taken him to the park to fly their model airplanes. Mom said she understood why Florence Beatrice Price, Mary Lou Williams, and Margaret Whatchamacallit Bonds ended up writing religious music. There was far too much out there for it to be just us. She said she was not aware of a particular reason she should not sometimes use only black women as examples, but I did not have to worry about her ever walking on pews.
She’d found the score of Cello’s first piece of music, a clean presentation copy she’d been given. Cello was sixteen when she wrote it. The piece, for piano, was very ambitious. She’d had theory, including species counterpoint. Mom had never heard Cello play it. She said she hated to think how devout Bach probably was.
* * *
I meandered around on the other side of Zoo Station, but I couldn’t get any of the loitering Turkish boys to respond. I gave up and went toward the ChiChi, singing the theme song of
Cheers
to myself.
I was singing as I stepped into the bar and raised my voice, and none of the cocktail hour crowd joined in. Zippi was setting up a white wine on the bar.
I stood where I was and said that there had been a misunderstanding. The miniature lights blazed as I pried Satan off my back. Zippi said it was just that the last time she heard me sing, I was stinking.