Black Deutschland (25 page)

In my intense and bewildering nakedness in the head, I phoned my mother from the café. Nothing was wrong, I said. But I’d wanted to say I was sorry. I would never forget that I’d made my rehab experience as shameful for Mom and Dad as I could. Inmates have more power than their visiting families. I could range freely over that prairie of memory where childhood incidents lay unburied, and in their guilt as creators of an addict they were obliged to render unto me hides of truth. I’d always known that her politics put Mom on the defensive as a mother. That I had denounced in the rehab her social activism as a species of child neglect explained why she had stayed in the public rooms of her feelings with me ever since. I could say I was sorry and she could say that I mustn’t dwell on such things, but she dodged me, and my covert pleas. I felt it all the more now that Cello was back in with her.

She was excited about Dad’s surprise: he himself had got them tickets for practically every performance of the Ravinia Festival. She was going to have Mozart and Frederica von Stade and Brahms and the Chicago Symphony all summer long. She said that our conversation reminded her that there was something she wanted to tell Cello and she hung up. It was no consolation that Solomon was now perhaps also wondering how long it would be before Mom was her real self with him again.

*   *   *

“You can start a riot by having a black ass on the wrong beach,” Ralston Jr. said when the paramedics took Uncle Ralston away. “By having your black ass on the wrong one. Ask Carl. Ask Loraine. Your brown black ass.”

*   *   *

In Berlin, when one door closed, another opened. I’d heard of her, but hadn’t met her. Everyone at the house meeting was excited to have Alma back, except for the house leader’s partner. The house leader and his woman were the only Co-op members with children. He used to be with Alma. They met when she got hurt at the first squatters’ riots in Berlin eight years before. He still liked her. His woman fumed and baked in the main Co-op kitchen. I let myself imagine Zippi wet for Odell all day long.

Afer wanted my vote to change the name of the bookstore from Librairie Rosa to Bookshop Dulcie September, in honor of the South African freedom fighter assassinated in Paris two months earlier. I voted with the Old Guard, convinced by the argument that the name, Librairie Rosa, was already established.

Afer told me off in the café. “You are a brother of the undescended testicle type.”

Alma heard this and decided that we were dear friends. She said she hadn’t wanted to change the bookstore or café name because Rosa Luxemburg was her girl. Alma was an anarchist from Romansch country high up in Switzerland. She was scheduled to sing its folk songs at ZFB and we were to pass the hat. She wouldn’t allow a fixed admission price for this music. She would leave again in the fall to tour. You thought of clear mountain streams when you looked into her light brown eyes and when she smiled. She wore boxy jackets and Chinese pants and brightly patterned headbands, because she couldn’t manage her shortish brown hair. Her skin glowed.

Alma told me that she found my reference to
Cabaret
silly, but not a serious offense. To her, Sally Bowles was amoral. Plus, she did not like show biz and if anyone sounded like show biz it was Liza with a Z. “You have heartbreak for Judy Garland, too?
Ach so
. A friend of Dorothy. I know this expression. To frighten the bones of each song.” She said she’d rather smoke than gain weight.

I told her about AA and Cello. Alma had heard of Schuzburg Tools, but not of Cello. She told me about the time a black woman had knocked on her door in the mountains and said in French that her car had broken down. Alma had a phone and she knew the one boy in that area who ran a garage. It would take him a day to get up there. They walked to the black woman’s car and walked back with her groceries and cooked together. The black woman stayed overnight and left in the morning. Alma never said to her that she had recognized her. The black woman never said that she was Nina Simone.

“But this is Berlin. You and Lotte came here for the same reason. To be gay.”

Alma said she’d seen me checking out the men at the house meeting. She said we were going to have a problem because we had the same taste: anybody.

Lotte was at her round wooden table late, slurring as she coached Uwe for a part he’d got in a Kreuzberg play about the Night of the Long Knives, the June dawn in 1934 when Hitler started shooting gay men high in the party hierarchy, the brownshirts who’d helped him to power. I left them and cycled down to the AA meeting in Dahlem. I liked most how light the sky was on my way back as I rang my smug, high-pitched bell at unsuspecting pedestrians and took on the cars curving through the Bundesplatz, cars unhampered by any speed limit, because this was West Berlin.

One Sunday I cycled to Wannsee. I said nothing to Cello and Dram about not smoking, because smoking was out of the question at Dram’s parents’ house anyway. Frau Schuzburg passed behind her son and said he was wearing too much scent. Her grandchildren were intelligent and well-mannered and good-looking. I remembered that when Konrad was three, he could count forever in three languages. “Timbuc-one, Timbuc-two, Timbuc-three,” his performance in English began. He knew he was funny, even at that age.

Because of Dram, the Schuzburgs, of all people, had some regard for the squatters’ movement. It was better to bring a house back to life than to let it crumble, innocent victim of the past. For them, the project of rebuilding Berlin was far from complete. They said squats should be brought into the system, too. The only time I heard Herr Schuzburg oppose Dram was over Dram’s belief that West Berlin should be declared an international city, either to govern itself or to be governed by several nations.

Exhausted and stuffed, I rode the S-Bahn sitting with my Schwinn back up to town. I got out in the heart of Charlottenburg and walked my bike. A his-and-her leather-clad couple not feeling the heat watched their small dog keep up beside me and stop at the same bookstore table that I did under the arches of the train tracks. They smiled; I smiled. I had no problems in West Berlin, the retirement community of the ’68 generation, as Dram described the city.

I walked to a gay bar on the other side of the Ku’damm, next door to the Department Store of the West, KaDeWe. “KaDaVey,” I’d learned to say. Nice Berlin closed up early on Sundays, the department store, the ice-cream chains along the Ku’damm, the apparel shops that smelled of middle-aged women’s perfumes, but not the bars. The gay bar was chatty and tipsy. I was pretty sure it was in this bar that I’d ordered Prosecco with a scoop of lemon sorbet, because I’d heard that that was what Cecil Taylor liked to drink.

There were other places around Berlin where I’d done worse, places I didn’t remember until I happened into a bathroom stall. I sipped my water. My bicycle was looking back at me from the street. I smiled to myself. A thin bearded bald guy at the other end of the crowded bar smiled gold-toothed in my direction. “Leaving so soon?” the twin who was probably his boyfriend asked in English as I went toward the exit. I unlocked my bicycle and wished blessings on their backs.

Back at the Café Rosa, marveling at how remade I felt, I nearly collided with one of the architects who’d come in to buy a bottle of red wine. We were closed, but they’d let him in. He was supposed to have been home an hour ago, but he got lost in the discussion Afer, Yao, Alma, and some others were having. The Berlin Effect. The architect departed. I got into what was left over and was tough on Afer, which he said he appreciated because being interrogated helped him to hone his thinking. We were strenuously self-conscious, everybody sitting around, ready to get down with history in case it came that way again.

*   *   *

And then comes that thing, out of the blue, a someone into you, and he really did come out of one of those long drawn-out late-summer afternoons, long after lunch and hours before sunset. I was sitting with Alma on the steps of the Reichstag, between the black and brown columns that showed bullet holes from the battle for the capital in the spring of 1945. The last tour bus had departed. In those days, the Reichstag had no dome. It had a tourist travel shop, as one of the memorials, the ruins of history that could be visited, posed against, silently questioned. It had no convincing day-to-day function, like most old government buildings of that kind in West Berlin. And if not a symbol, then yet more disused, underused scenery for the endless hanging out that life in West Berlin was. We sat and talked about our plan to put Lotte von der Pfalz onstage, laughing about funding fantasies, shaking our heads to the music of the football game taking place in the Platz der Republik, the dusty, worn-down, unkempt, big grassy square in front of the burned Reichstag.

The players ran from left to right and from right to left ceaselessly in the late-summer heat, the sky cheering them on, the white soccer ball bounding surprising distances all of a sudden before being pursued once again in the white dust of the open square. They charged, the two teams of African players, so many black men in one place in public in Berlin, and half of them half undressed, charging from our right to our left, the sunlight rolling over their dark muscles, their flowing, changing, elongating bodies. They ran without fear, they ran with their voices, they ran without worries about eczema or ichthyosis, they charged from my left to my right without Vaseline on their knees or heels, of that I was sure. They had no skin disorders to confuse their blackness with, they had only their glistening selves, as brown as the banks of those rivers in the Cameroons Duallo would prove so tender about.

He and three others ended up on the steps near us. They wanted water. Alma had cigarettes and could answer in French. I slitted my eyes toward the west and then up in the direction of Lessingsdorf. Now and then she would update me on the subject under discussion and I would say I know, I know, like I had been following, like I understood more French than I could speak. He was pretty quiet, and he was the prettiest of them, slender, with a full mouth, the high cheekbones of all my dreams, and eyes I’d never thought about, large, dark, and not clear.

One of them got up and dusted himself off. Duallo stepped over into my line of vision. His two remaining comrades filled his space, stepping closer to Alma; the duel between them for her that would last only a couple of hours had begun. Some friends from the pitch called to them and they sang back, and they clearly weren’t rejoining the game, which had just stopped, for some reason I didn’t know. One man with legs reminiscent of a caliper stood over the stilled football. The teams talked on, in French, in Wolof, Duallo told me later, slapping themselves, kicking in the dust, hands on hips, several sitting, hands behind them.

Duallo moved us from my inhibited German to his freer English and sat beside me. I could have fainted a million times. He smelled like Aunt Loretta’s cold cream in her dish in front of the mirror on her tiny vanity table as it was in 1966. Here I was, in Berlin, and he smelled like a boy’s crime I had forgotten. There was a spot on Aunt Loretta’s silk scarf. It could only have got there from some unauthorized someone having violated the house and been at her vanity table. It’s true, I’d crept upstairs and I’d run her scarf around me, and it’s true, I’d rubbed her cold cream from the open jar on my hands, and then smelled orange blossom, but I had lied about it when first questioned, until Mom, the Grim Extractor, arrived and the truth fled to her side.

And if I didn’t pick up my end soon or come up with something to say, I was going to lose him. He’d put his shirt back on, flipping it together. Buttoning it up. Like the shutting of an altarpiece. The molded, packed, ribbony upward thrust of his torso was veiled by a much-washed faded gray shirt decorated with little white fish all leaping in the same direction. The orange blossom thrill of being so close to his chest turned into fear and depression that he wasn’t gay, certain knowledge that I was way out of my sexual league, when he stood up and I took in how beautifully formed he was. He hadn’t seemed that tall in the distance or when stretched out on the steps. Maybe it was his long neck. His head tilted down toward me. His mysterious eyes looked across my shoulder in the direction of Alma and his two friends when she suggested we drive to Potsdamerplatz in the rusted VW van one of them had.

Crammed together, talk was general, and I didn’t have to say anything. I just had to be there. Duallo had got in front with the driver. Alma and Contestant Number 1 and I were in the windowless back, comfortable on the carpet amid a mishmash of boxes and buckets and mops. Somehow we ended up not at the Co-op, but on Oranienstrasse, at a table on the street, crowded with alternative types and Turks, headscarves and safety pins and U.S. Army camouflage fatigues marching by. Alma put her chin in her hand and looked at the passing scene as the two contestants rolled into the colloquial French phase of their duel over her. It was an argument about music maybe, she whispered. Musicians, she shrugged, and had some German conversation with the girl behind us about the state of the women’s bathroom in this café.

Duallo turned from the argument and explained that musical loyalties were intense in West Africa. I said I’d never been there. He was three when he first went out there, he said. No, he was born in France. He was French, he said. His mother was from Mali, but she was French, he said. His father was from Paris. His father’s mother had come from the German Cameroons to Paris in the late 1920s. There she met his grandfather, an African nobleman whose title the French government recognized. He died before the war. His grandfather never married his grandmother. His father had had a rough time during the war. Duallo’s father had gone to his father’s country in the 1960s, but he did not feel welcomed there by his father’s family. He went back to a life on the fringes of the capital, in the art and film scenes, an unhappy black Frenchman in Paris. Having several children had not cheered him up. Duallo said he came to Berlin to get away from his father’s bitterness.