Authors: Darryl Pinckney
“West Germany pays West Africa to take its garbage,” Afer said. “You will go to sea.”
I was not used to Afer’s style of camaraderie. He and Bags never asked me for a drink. I asked them to accept drinks from me.
“You are inviting me?” Bags crooned prissily, satirically. He’d said it in German. It had been some time since I’d cared whether someone was speaking German to me, counted up my mistakes. I’d given up, knowing what I knew in junior high school, that I was only going to be so good at German and that Tadzio was not my type.
Odell’s vintage car was falling apart and he let the three of us out along the Landwehrkanal. I liked Bags taking command, lining up Afer and me behind him, moving us quietly under the trees. The real trouble was far ahead, and not wanting to get trapped, Bags led us off to the side the first chance he got. We hurried along the Wall, dropping down at Marienenplatz, and at Oranienstrasse enrolled ourselves in the mayhem, the singing, whistling, and bright camera lights.
The anticapitalist, antipolice anarchist marches had long been over, and the streets were jammed. We ambled along behind huge groups also seeking that flash point. Scores of police in visors mingled among us. I could see boys waving flares from rooftops. We walked so much Afer bought beers. Darkness fell. Bags had a joint—not hash, but marijuana. I was in Berlin, living May Day, inhaling the carbon dioxide from hundreds of cigarettes and hundreds of white boys.
The battle, when it came, was between the German police in black gear and Turkish youth in jeans, their faces wrapped in notorious scarves. The air went acrid from burning cars, from fires in the direction of Lausitzerplatz. In the tense quiet, I could hear stones raining down on pavement. A sudden warning “
Hupp
!” from someone, and Bags almost knocked me over, turning me to run from Turkish boys stretching at full speed in our direction. They swarmed past us, running from the bulls.
The thing was to keep moving, to get around the next corner, to fly past doorways, and not to get trapped between the police and the vans they maybe intended to drive stone throwers toward. And not to get involved in the barricade and bonfire making either. I let Bags turn me twice more. The police had no batons. They were not to be provoked. But word was going around that some crowds had attacked police. I started wondering how to get away.
We got into a taxi. I had to turn myself inside out to get a look at the full orange moon. Hope of my youth, where were you all this time?
Back at the Co-op, Alma was at the top of the stairs. “Dueling comes next.”
* * *
When I was copping weak, stepped-on coke in the block down the street from the
Eagle
, Cello’s daughter, Hildegard, was an infant Cello had brought back to show Mom and her dying grandmother. Cello wanted to brandish her happiness in front of women who used to feel sorry for her and the grandmother who had barely acknowledged her existence.
Cello insisted that the hospice room be disinfected before she brought her children for their black grandmother to bless. Mrs. Williams went over and supervised the extra cleaning by a furious nurse’s aide. Cello reported how much it meant to her to have the chance to tell her grandmother how she’d made her feel all those years, she who had a disconcerting way of looking through her own mother, leaving her to her sister. Cello’s deposition lasted for more than two hours. Aunt Loretta couldn’t talk anymore. She had to lie there and take it. She was a beetle on her back and if Mrs. Williams was an ant pulling off her legs, then Cello was the meadowlark that cracked her in its beak.
* * *
It was Whitsuntide and Rosen-Montag had received the Schopenhauer Medal of Freedom, awarded by the institute endowed by Dram’s father. In the newspaper photograph, Rosen-Montag stands between the director and the director’s astonished wife, a lamb in the instant the fatal jolt is administered. Rosen-Montag is bare-chested under his fitted dinner jacket. It was a cinch he wasn’t wearing underwear or socks either.
And then the next night the two of them showed up at the café, Cello and Dram. Lucky had resigned from the Co-op. He claimed a post office box was the only thing he needed. Allah is with those who restrain themselves. He had so little to storm out with. I nearly offered him the Schwinn I’d lost interest in, though winter had got on the train out of Dodge.
Yao looked at my impeccably groomed guests and excused himself. They’d been to a private evening at the Philharmonic. Dram spoke. I owed Hayden an apology. I’d been thinking only of myself. Duallo had come to mean something to them, too.
I thought I deserved admiration I wasn’t getting for my indifference to whatever treaty of promiscuity Hayden and Father Paul had signed during the international emergency of a sexually transmitted disease.
Cello was smoking; her dangerous hair wandered in a fog and on the other side of it we might happen upon the remains of a recent battlefield. West Berlin was a city where the necessities had to be imported: food, clothes, coal, but not beer. I got up when I felt like it and filled an order or two. Some Co-op members went behind the bar to help themselves. One of those spring evenings in Berlin had happened and the sounds we could hear in our isolated corner of cloud were those of transportation, cars and a bus somewhere.
Dram said that to lure a horse, I mustn’t chase it.
I cursed like Odell when I came back from plunging the toilet. It was my party. Hayden, Father Paul, and I were not feeling the same and everyone knew it. Cello and Dram weren’t there to commiserate with me. They had come to smile at me. They’d come to expel me from the thirty-thousand-feet club. They’d known it from the get-go: I could not fuck in their league. I got them drunk and offered to call a taxi. Dram could come back for the Mercedes.
I’d never known Cello to drink in order to blot herself out. Back in the bad times, I would have dwelled on her pride, her capacity for duplicity. I would have felt sophisticated analyzing her actions. But I was through fixating on the slave mistress and slave master instead of on myself. If Dram said he was cool to drive, who was I to argue that there was no traffic at that time of night.
* * *
“It’s not eating. It’s called quality control,” Dad said.
* * *
The days were getting longer. In the Tiergarten, the chestnut trees were black while the sky behind them resumed that glazed blue of Nabokov’s evenings. In the bushes someone played a plaintive sax. I could hear an artificial waterfall and smell the wet cement. I wanted the middle-aged black man with the middle-aged white woman whom I passed to know that I approved. I smiled at the cute black girl holding hands with the white boy whom I came across next. I was in favor of things working out for others.
The first thing I did when I got back to my room was to light a cigarette. Then I took off my shoes. Often I threw away my socks. I noticed the coffee things on the table where I’d left them the day before, intending to clean up when I got back that night. The milk was sour, my half-finished cup had gone filmy. My room made me a detective on a case, surveying how the missing person had left things.
Brown and sweaty in Central Europe, I dug in the
Schrebergärten
as though to find clues. I sat with a book in the café; I went upstairs and opened a book across my stomach. I came back to the café, usually rinsing and then taking Lotte’s place when she left for the day. The nearest shops were some distance and she liked to get to them when people were going home from work, just to be among them, to remember that she was alive because she knew how to steal, pick pockets.
“Ah, the sweet Berlin air,” she said. “You should have been here in 1937.”
From Lotte’s table, I could see the green fender with the white splotch. I crossed the street to make sure it was Manfred’s Deux Chevaux parked behind the brewery. In no time, I was losing it on the other side of the building, bursting into the architecture firm on the ground floor, answering their German in English and they my German in English. Manfred, yes. A guy in a blue shirt said he bought that rickshaw from him the last time Manfred was in Berlin with his guru, N. I. Rosen-Montag.
* * *
I took the giant train that was passing like a chapter of history through Berlin, stopping at Bahnhof Zoo long enough to pick me up. The train was thick with black youth sleeping since Moscow and every compartment was full. I sat up in a seat the whole way to Paris. I was still young enough for the point of travel to be what I was willing to put myself through.
But I was also older. I tried to check into a fancy hotel that didn’t want me. One of the reasons I lived in bohemia was that I was allowed to. The second fancy hotel let me have a small room. The trip had been so uncomfortable I deserved a nice hotel. I also wanted to make the right impression on Duallo when he came over.
He didn’t come over. “
Il n’est pas ici
,” female voices at two numbers informed.
His
école
was somewhere in the north of Paris. Then I wandered through Saint-Denis. I returned to his suburb in the morning. I went up and down a market of stalls and tables, but noticed only the huge number of leather belts for sale.
I’d read about the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the oldest Gothic structure in Europe. Berlin could never have had anything like this. The Gothic cathedral was a twelfth-century rebuilding of one of Charlemagne’s churches. Inside, centuries of kings and queens. I imagined their slabs of maiden marble white leapfrogging around the ambulatory. The white basilica had two towers until lightning zapped one of them, but it seemed to be crouching on both elbows nevertheless.
The doors opened and without warning three columns of black people started into the forecourt. The basilica was big, the numbers of black parishioners who kept emerging said so. Some had on the immigrant’s version of Sunday best; some women wore bright pagnes under sweaters draped across their shoulders. The handful of priests stood out, white and white-haired. Children stalked their own shadows between the stripes cast by the railings. The congregation was still leaving the basilica as those ahead spread into the street and farther market stalls, young men, too, leading a Catholic army. They were all black, not a European war veteran among them. Out of feudal portals, on the site of martyrdom, late twentieth-century France was going off to lunch at
mamamuso
’s or headed to
cabines
to make transcontinental calls.
I couldn’t face the train and made for Charles de Gaulle. I was a scruffy black man with little luggage asking for a one-way ticket.
I was not paying attention. There was a mop-haired boy in the street as the tanks rolled by.
I was so into myself that it was a day or two before I caught up with what was happening in China. I’d not understood what Alma and the others were talking about, but I’d not asked either.
What had been the problem? We both liked Menzel and Fab 5 Freddy.
* * *
We were downtown, looking at Christmas lights, and Dad said Jehovah knew not to promise that parking would be any better in the Heavenly City.
It made us nervous to go anywhere together as a family.
* * *
I’d been stoned constantly since my birthday. I hung on long enough to talk to Dad and Mom. Solomon had even called—more of Francesca’s influence. Then I hung up and blew my brains out on that rare commodity in Europe, marijuana. Bags was loosening me up for an Irish air cargo deal. It was working. East Germans were taking chances, escaping across the Hungarian border into Austria, and suddenly Bags indicated a willingness to have sex with my mouth again, just like that.
I turned him down. His calculation moved me. I said I’d stake him. I regretted both decisions immediately. But that was why I was in West Berlin, to make stupid decisions. I was starring in a romance or a thriller, but at the same time I could get up and turn it off at any moment. I was in control. Lament was just a social key. Some things were expected, such as being blue on the anniversary of meeting him.
If I put down my mask I could admit that I’d got what I wanted—footsteps full of meaning: b) I’d stayed away too long and lost him and a) I threw him onto my futon and spent the rest of the night trying to lose my fears.
The music of blue went well with being stoned. Odell was keeping it Curtis Mayfield/Marvin Gaye. Huey Newton’s murder settled heavily over the ChiChi. The black men weren’t going to give him up just because his shit had gone wrong. For them, he had been the Man when they needed him to be. Violence is not the issue, policies are, one session man said, as though quoting a line from a song.
“He was fine,” Big Dash fanned. “That man was so fine.”
Bags hovered close to me. Instead of letting me drop him off, he convinced me to come upstairs and hang with him and his amused old lady a hot minute. They were getting the marijuana in all the way from Washington State. I was too aroused to stay any longer.
* * *
There was the city of Jopp, but it was called Jaffa, after one of Noah’s sons, Japhet, who founded it. And some men said that it was the oldest city in the world, for it was founded before Noah’s flood.
I couldn’t see how anyone ever believed what Mandeville said. It was clear to me he had never gone anywhere he claimed. Yao accepted my suggestion that the bookstore have a discount shelf, and Mandeville was my first donation. Then I got ruthless and really purged my shelves.
* * *
Poles and French-speaking Africans with suitcases were still turning up at the city’s borders. Bags spread his arms at the Polish flea market behind the State Library, around the corner from Potsdamerplatz. He said whatever we were doing, we weren’t selling Gucci shit, like the Senegalese brothers in Italy, or grandma’s drawers, as these Polish families were forced to. The area looked like a refugee camp; the items for sale on blankets or on top of suitcases or just in the dirt were hopeless.
Clothes of every description, assorted bric-a-brac, radios, classical records, and not every participant would make eye contact. One man sat resolutely over his book, a large selection of toys at his plastic shoes. They’d been coming for months, the Poles, every weekend, released by Solidarity to scrabble around West Berlin because the few marks they could come up with were many zlotys back in Poland.