Authors: Darryl Pinckney
It took a long time to get off the Freedom Train, to get down the stairs at the station, to get into the street. Stores were giving away food; some people carried big boxes of appliances. There were people everywhere, but no taxis. We talked our way in the cold back to the Co-op. The East German brand of stonewashed jeans was heartbreaking. A unified Germany was only acceptable in the context of a unified Europe. We passed out on the old futon.
Fate left us fully clothed, though Manfred got up in the night, and when he came back, he turned out the light and pulled off his boots. He groped for my right Doc Marten. He fell to a disgraceful pillow on his back, hands above his flattened hair. I waited for his toe to brush my instep, for him to cradle me to him. I waited until he sat up in the weak light, hair standing. I made coffee down the hall. I had no milk. He lit the stove, his back in his seaman’s sweater carved with power and beauty.
They drilled a hole in the Wall at Potsdamerplatz. The Polish flea market had gone on as usual. The Poles had nothing, but at least they were Poles, whereas the East Germans had always been made to feel like second-class Germans, Manfred said, he who still had not really been to East Berlin.
The fortress island was overrun and my footsteps had taken me along the top of the Berlin Wall. History had freed Manfred and I’d never seen Yao so quiet. Alma and Uwe phoned from Basel. Dad called and when I called him back Mom told me not to do anything dangerous. I called Solomon myself, and it was not like him to say that I must not forget that the Germans did not like blacks and Jews.
It was a miracle, people said, as if the cobblestones had, indeed, yielded oysters, just as in Heine’s poem. Something like Rhine wine washed through the gutters as emerald bottles rolled in the cold under the dancing, the
chassez-dechassez
of the very drunk. White boys in sad shoes tried to be cool at the Mercedes showroom.
“I think we shall have to send them all back, no?” the house leader said low to Yao.
After a visit to the Polish flea market’s chess players, a film in Café Rosa on The Doors, another on Jimi Hendrix, and hours of tall white beers, Manfred bear-galloped on all fours onto the futon, stretching a pair of my sweatpants and winter socks. He filled and reshaped a sweatshirt and shook his clean hair from his eyes. I fished in a drawer, pretending to have just remembered something, and handed him his Zippo lighter. It was out of fluid, but he was glad to have it back.
We talked about my meeting him and Rosen-Montag in Japan. We’d shared nights in German history that he’d scorched the autobahn not to miss. I could tell how much it meant to Manfred, because he turned the joint around in his teeth so that the fire was in his mouth, leaned over, closed his eyes, and sent a gust of marijuana-and-non-menthol-tobacco smoke toward my parted lips.
* * *
They cut the Wall at Potsdamerplatz like a loaf and artfully set the three sliced sections to one side, an open door, the pieces leaning, historic relics. Souvenir hunters, mostly Americans, worked along the Wall with hammers and chisels, some perhaps manufactured by Schuzburg Tools. East German soldiers and West Berlin police managed crowd control together. New people filed between red rails into my world. The East Bloc way of life had arrived: long lines for everything.
A great summer of the head, the postwar era, swept to its end. Playgrounds were preparing to rust behind empty barracks. It was too late for me to try for what I was never going to be, and I never bothered to work out what I would do with myself if found. Tourists poured from distant birches, coming from the future of skyscrapers and magnetic trains, and girls disappeared into the future, with plastic bags of pineapples and cosmetics, days and days of them, and then it snowed.
I missed the unification of Germany ceremonies at the Brandenburg Gate the following year, because I was in a graveyard blinking rapidly as two large coffins were lowered into the cookie-cutter earth. A prince of a man had spun out of control, killing himself and the woman he loved, who was buckled in beside him, setting off in those horrified to survive them a seeping away of life, a deterioration of soul.
* * *
“Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.”
* * *
On his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1893, Du Bois went to Potsdam for coffee and saw a pretty girl. He had candlelight in his room on the Schöneberger Ufer. The Landwehrkanal crept below him and he wrote to himself that he was a strong man, glad to be alive, rejoicing as a strong man. He’d trimmed his beard and mustache in the fashion of the crippled kaiser’s and learned about Wagner. He said that the Chicago Exposition had a lot of art and not the loan of a single masterpiece from Europe.
But he knew all about the Sorrow Songs, he thought of them what Frederick Douglass knew of them, and they took him home to Negro-hating America, where the great man, Douglass, died as Du Bois was putting down his cane and taking off his German gloves. Nobody knew then that Douglass had had a German mistress for twenty-five years. Who knew that Douglass wrote poetry, he who never saw his mother’s face by daylight.
When Douglass married a younger woman, this mistress, a journalist, Jewish, a refined woman, swallowed cyanide in Paris. I have sometimes wondered what Mom would have said about that.
* * *
So far from his Jamaica, Claude McKay had been warned in 1923 by friends in Moscow not to go back to Berlin because France was using black troops to occupy the Ruhr. Some German Americans were hysterical about the jungle threat to the white women of the precious Ruhr.
Berlin was inflation-sick and hostile, but not toward him. The Wandervögel, German youths who were supposed to sling knapsacks over their shoulders and make harmonies in the forests, roamed the streets. McKay met a friend from his Greenwich Village days, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, the poet who dressed like a parakeet and talked Dada with the leaves. She was selling newspapers, reduced to German homespun, a pitiful Frau. He asked his rich American boy to give her some dollars. The white boy liked McKay’s poetry and kept him drunk. Gentlemen liked McKay; McKay liked sailors and the guts of banjos. He wrote sonnet after sonnet in Berlin and didn’t know he had syphilis.
* * *
Berlin was the place where European powers got together in 1884 to divide Africa among themselves and that’s why Du Bois opens his operatic novel,
Dark Princess
, in the German capital. It is 1923 and because his medical school in New York won’t permit the protagonist to take obstetrics where he might touch white women, he, an accomplished black student, storms off to Berlin. He’s seen white women smoke, but never a colored one, and he pours out his heart to an Indian princess over tea in the Tiergarten, having saved her from the advances of a white American boy in a café on Unter den Linden. He knocked the guy down.
A few years and some misadventures later, the black student is a popular state legislator from Chicago about to win the nomination for Congress, his idealism wiped away by big-interest politics. But reunited with the princess, he renounces political office and abandons his scheming wife. Don’t let black Chicago think you’re down and out because of one man, a cigar-chomping ward boss tells the cast-off wife.
The liberated black politician and his princess put on knickerbockers and pick up knapsacks and hold hands in Jackson Park. By the waters of Lake Michigan, she recites from the Rig Veda. She reveals that she rejected an English suitor whom London approved of and went on a grand tour of the Darker World, the world that was and is to be again, from China to Egypt. A Japanese baron turns out to be the prime minister of the Darker World. In Berlin, at a conference of Turks and Arabs, the black American was considered a slave, a half-man, not fit to be part of the new world order of Dark People raised up, and she came over to see for herself.
They part. He works as a laborer, digging the Chicago subway. She is with his mother in Virginia, where he writes to her of the innocent sandy dust and gas pipes of the city. She quotes the Buddha. He goes home to find that she has borne him a son, the Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds.
* * *
Claude McKay died in Chicago, twenty-five years after he left his American in Berlin. He was young, or not much younger than Dad was, and a Catholic, like Marcus Garvey.
* * *
My presence hurt them. They had a silent denouement. They were too decent not to be ashamed of the hurt my presence made them ever more conscious of. The longer the intervals between my visits, the more café time abroad I found on deposit. Ronald said openly that he wished it had been me, but Mom and Dad just became more recessive, because of what had happened to them through the actions of their elder son one early morning on the Long Island Expressway, and the hurt of no children for Solomon and Francesca to leave behind.
* * *
I don’t know anyone I knew twenty-five years ago. I went to a couple of goodbye parties way back there. One bald brother didn’t want to say what a commie he’d been over there in East Berlin with his big apartment, but he’d written for newspapers and he’d had a radio show. He made a big deal about needing to get back Stateside. Still paranoid after all those years, he was ditching his formerly state-controlled girlfriend in the process.
I am one of the black American leftovers who sit by themselves. We nod to one another, my fellow old heads and I, a veteran session musician, a widowed engineer, that second-rate Beat poet, now a celebrity because of his age, and low-frequency me. I have their general outlines and they pieces of mine. We exchanged them a few years ago, but since the engineer’s German wife died, we have not added to the kitty of information. They don’t come in as regularly as I do, a fat guy again. To gain weight is to become neutered. Yet the crew of dealers I manage in Hasenheide Park is scared of me.
I never tried to belong. I stayed in the great head with the unratified deeds, a phrase I always took to mean the things we do in the dark. I just wanted to be left alone. I was. I have been, my slowed footsteps a perfunctory but familiar chorus. During the worst of the antiforeigner attacks, the neo-Nazis never messed with American-looking blacks, not even at four in the morning. I was still bleary-eyed in Powell’s Bookstore basement with the deutsche taschenbuch verlag editions I couldn’t really read.
I kept moving. Armies withdrew, but I didn’t go anywhere. I became the kind of unexplained American in Berlin who only met people in public. I gave up a long time ago looking either for the brewery or for the polished steel line marking the Wall’s old course through the profound disappointment of what Potsdamerplatz became. Who knew that the East Bloc was broke or that on her mother’s side Cello had three cousins in two state penitentiaries. She’d never been threatened by my presence, but there I was, hanging on, like the flu.
I know I’m supposed to sound sorry. But am I? I eat alone at Christmas. I close the door and don’t have to swing it for anyone, not even for myself. Big Dash used to sing a Blues, “Empty Pants.” It is not that I am too old for a young man’s idea of freedom, which would somehow justify the sitting, the uninterrupted days of false expectations. It’s that my rendezvous with machines is drawing nearer and I am not brave.
Schöneberg has cafés full of one beautiful mixed-race girl after another. I sometimes wonder which one is Bags’s daughter by Afer’s girlfriend. A certain place is one of the oldest and dreariest of local pubs and therefore fashionable among the young who smoke.
Everyone loves that recording of Ella Fitzgerald forgetting in concert in Berlin the English words to “Mack the Knife.” Tell me tell me tell me could that boy do something right …
* * *
In all these seasons, I have seen her only once, and that already a while back, in what people still called the new Café Einstein, though by then it had been on the Linden for more than ten years. I’d been sitting there for at least twenty minutes, not noticing the music, when a waiter carried past me the sort of frothy-looking coffee with milk that I wasn’t having at the time. The imposing brown woman upright on a banquette was none other than Cello, able to fit into her vintage Agnes B. Berlin was in its bleak winter period, cold, deserted, damp, with pig dishes in many kitchen pots.
She was right out there, in the open, not hidden behind the newspaper racks. She would have had it shaved before she’d ever cut it. I could tell from her hairstyle just how crazy she was: it was pinned up into several thick, tight, glossy Spartan braids. A family of black lizards was riding on her head. The bartender smiled over the bar and down the long wall. The iPod behind him was suddenly playing something other than mellow pop, something that made me want to pay attention to the way people were looking at one another. It was Joe Williams singing “It’s the Talk of the Town.” The black wall of her sunglasses in the winter light gave her an advantage over everything she looked like she was ignoring. Her three divorces, campaigns of mutually assured destruction, told village Berlin of damage I’d known nothing about. But time had gone by. I wasn’t sure how many people cared about her overdose. No one was smoking.
She and Mom didn’t laugh at the old white lady back in Hyde Park who used to welcome audiences to the Harper Theater wearing an evening gown. The old dear was not from the artists’ colonies that Dad managed to scare Mom into having little to do with. Cello, Ruthanne, curtsied to the woman, mesmerized by French and Italian films Mom didn’t care that she was much too young for. The woman was someone Cello responded to, her movie theater one place where Cello would go. Curtsying made her happy; the foreign languages made her happy. Mom did what she didn’t like to do, dress up, and helped Cello step into yet more taffeta in order to continue the rebuilding of the destroyed fat girl, her brilliant black Rapunzel who’d vomited over herself backstage and couldn’t go on.
She sat alone, expecting no one. I stayed where I was. I had to. Our stories allowed for nothing else. I was sure she spotted me, from the way she started and reached for her jeweled throat. The waiter took away the coffee and brought her tea. He poured. She didn’t touch it. Her hands were shaking. Cello, the fat girl who butterflied into that ravishing woman, the young black artist who adored playing like a demon Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto but couldn’t with a spotlight on her, though Mom had put together an Olympic training team of therapist, yoga instructor, trusted former teacher, and dietician.