Black Deutschland (27 page)

I gave Duallo a portable CD player, the latest fashion. It fit snugly into his book bag. Another thing that had changed since Rock Hudson’s death was the exchange rate between the dollar and the deutschmark. Americans didn’t win the lottery anymore. But where Duallo and I lay was the ancient world. I grew a beard and rolled him over once more.

*   *   *

Louis Armstrong’s new tailor asked him if he dressed left or right. Armstrong told him to leave room on both sides. “I like for it to swang.”

*   *   *

Because of Duallo, I walked through doors chest-first. I was no longer a eunuch to my fellow Co-op members. They made mistakes with him right off, I could tell. One girl tried to get over on him, as a pretty girl who got annoyed when the wrong sort of boy was gay. Gay was okay, so long as it wasn’t someone whom she wanted to like girls, her. She would sit with him at the café bar and make her thirteenth apology in English and German if she had said something the other day when they were speaking that offended him. It’s just that the flies on the eyes of the children she saw in that refugee camp would stay in her mind forever. I counted the number of times she stroked his bare arm. I thought of Zippi slamming saucers around. This girl turned up the volume. The girl was booming. She boomed at Duallo, but it waved over him.

The Co-op offered freedom because West Berlin was the back of beyond, where we’d come to live unmonitored, in a place suitable to people either not in a position to judge or those who had made it their cause to judge our judgers. But they, the white people, I almost observed to Alma when she was still around, assumed that Duallo needed their help just because he wasn’t white, wasn’t German. His engineering student visa was always a surprise to them, a bit like Uwe’s German.

But unlike Uwe, Duallo wasn’t touchy about being patronized. He figured it was their problem, not his, their assumptions of what his story would be, their slowness to comprehend a black Frenchman. I was so ginger around him; he never felt that from me. To be black in most places was to be on the touchy side. I didn’t challenge him. He considered me a patient listener. I didn’t understand everything, but I never tired of looking at him, of having him shower and shower, he pleased to be clean, perched in the window ledge, worrying in that young way about his future.

These should have been pancake days. But once I wasn’t unnerved anymore that he would take up with some girl in the house and move on, I was sure that a secret sweetheart waited for him back in Saint-Denis or a handsome German engineer fluent in both Wolof and French would show him a bone bigger than mine. I couldn’t relax. His future was in France whenever he talked about it. He was my first real thing, too.

*   *   *

In my dream, I am in a sanatorium, attended by Mrs. Williams. I have come to stop smoking, but she is pouring white wine from a glossy white pitcher into a delicate glass. My hands are tied. She has my shoes. She motions with her head toward the open door. Someone is behind the door, but I am forbidden to say his name. Cigarette burns appear on the sheet and I wake up.

*   *   *

It was mid-October and Berlin life was hurrying back inside when the sun went down. On Saturday nights, we turned the Café Rosa into a cinema. The house vote to do so had been unanimous, mostly because our equipment and screen were hot, black market. Some of us still “liberated” things from stores. Plus, ZFB was in a leaky, damp phase.

Pabst’s
Westfront 1918
had been followed by Sembène’s
Black Girl
, which we’d obtained thanks to a name in Paris that Duallo provided. Now we were packing them in with
RoboCop
, and Afer made a big display of being uneasy about where our copy came from. Guys in the back had to sit on tables.

The joy of Cello’s trust account had made us almost like family, but I’d not expected her to call me at the Café Rosa from time to time, or for her to say yes when I explained that I couldn’t come to dinner because of our Saturday Night at the Movies program and would she like to come to Co-op J.I., “Koh-op Hah-ee,” instead. She and Dram had been so busy, they’d not seen
RoboCop
, and he really liked
Soldier of Orange
, she reported back.

It wasn’t the ten extra marks I would have to put in for Hayden and Father Paul that I resented. These would be my guests, I’d made sure with the house leader’s partner, because Cello tended to sail past ticket takers and sign-in tables. But I didn’t like it when I compared myself to Hayden after his season in the mountains, his butt yet more rounded and smooth, as if made by Canova.

Supposedly they’d met before, but she ignored my quick Uwe, Afer, Yao, Duallo, Lucky thing, and marched off to the bar to demand a glass of red wine, Lucky’s name hanging from the biblical shawl that crossed her hair like a bridge over a dark river. Dram sauntered in her direction. He called loudly for a coffee. Though he conquered her every time, I wondered if each time he wasn’t sure he would, and if that was the secret.

I did a Lotte von der Pfalz, Cello Schuzburg, Dram Schuzburg thing, standing nowhere near any of them. Lotte’s arm shot out and Dram walked over and lightly took her hand. She blushed. Cello didn’t budge from the bar. Dram called. Cello wheeled around, a starting-over smile along with her. Introductions were not really a Berlin thing. Our bar wine was supposedly foul, but nobody turned it down.

“She made him drive,” Hayden whispered. “The ride over was tense, child. Ravel wore makeup,” he continued, studying Lotte, who’d made sure she’d had a nap. “Blue eyeliner.” He and Father Paul were respectful when I offered Lotte their names, but they sat at a table ahead of her.

I’d said my black housemates’ names fast, so fast I’d messed up the German for Cello, Hayden, Paul, Dram, you remember my friends Uwe, Afer, Yao, Duallo, and this is Lucky. I said all these names fast, trying to hide his in there, but Hayden, like one of Hemingway’s hunters, spotted him in the brush, nibbling at Mother Earth.

I got us chairs chest-first, but my face was too shiny. I moved around too fast and when I slowed myself down, I no doubt looked like someone who wasn’t at home in his body telling himself to slow down. I was saying the names of other Co-op members and Cello graciously acknowledged them as she and Dram took seats at the front center table.

“Jed, my friend,” Lotte said. I’d forgot her white wine. Her table had filled up with people whose orders I’d not taken.

I knew that I was in danger of sitting on it and squashing it to death. He was next to me during the film, equatorial and fruity, squirming in his seat. His body was alive and strong. It was special, like holding a child and sensing in your being as another human that the child is moving, a person is newly alive, warmth up against warmth.

Dram laughed his head off at
RoboCop
, but I couldn’t have passed an exam on what the film was about. I kept quiet during the discussion afterward. Dram scooted his chair closer to Cello, got up, and pushed Lotte’s chair into our rearranged circle. He wasn’t smoking.

“You’re not smoking,” he said to me in German.

That was why everything was happening too fast. A cigarette was a magic wand. It had the power to make time stand still. The problem was that cigarettes betrayed you to your end. They got bored and put their arms down. You were used up and time began again, even faster. Cigarettes took cynical payment. They put you on the rack and killed you, ended that life that hadn’t moved past the first chapter of
Confessions of Zeno
.

And the problem with love was that it made you feel bad most of the time. I’d spent the whole film not paying attention to it, sitting in the smokeless shadows—a close house vote restricted smoking until after the film—wondering just what was the vibe or the meaning of the first awkward thing that had happened between Duallo and me.

I got hung up over the question of laundry. In Berlin, it was not simple. I did it on alternate Saturdays, when I was not on duty at the
Schrebergärten
. About half the Co-op members had washing machines, usually tiny un-American appliances that had ridiculous vacuum-hose-like attachments for the sink. The rest of the house had made arrangements to use these machines. Except for the fifth floor. No one had a machine and as far as I could tell no one had an arrangement in the house with anyone who did. I’d not inherited Alma’s arrangements either. Intimacy was a funny thing in a German commune. They did not want someone else’s dirty laundry. But they hung their clean laundry from windows and across landings and around the courtyard, like we were some neorealist Italian film set.

Afer’s girlfriend collected his laundry and returned it, brought it upstairs to the fifth floor. The more Duallo stayed with me, the more of his things he left for the convenience of having them there.

I washed his things along with mine and they were in the drawer that was becoming his. I didn’t mention it; neither did he. This was the first week he’d spent every night with me. And so he was with me in the late afternoon when I carried the bag to the rare laundrymat far down Potsdamerstrasse, past the used-car lot and the Spiel Kino/casino whorehouse. I dumped everything in, his things, too. I hardly think he realized where we were.

He was talking about Afrika Bambaataa again. He had the latest album on his portable CD player. It had earphones. Two prostitutes smoked, old enough to be made to do their own laundry again, I thought. Had I not had a shift at the Café Rosa already and were I not facing an extra shift because of the film, maybe I would have acted my age and not been suddenly unwilling to accept him acting his.

When at long last I had a pile of hot clothes on the table, I tapped him on the shoulder. He took out an earbud. I walked back to the table and patted a pile of clothes, indicating that he was to help me fold. He eventually came over and stood there, earbud and CD player in his hands.

“Mann, komm schon.”

It took him a while to put the CD player down safely and store the earphones. Then he picked up a T-shirt, one of mine, and looked at it. He set it down again and folded it in half, like a napkin. We were alone. He picked up another T-shirt. I was nearly finished. I was tired, but I knew we had to climb out of this. I would have to carry him up on my back and throw him over the side of the crater of misunderstanding. I’d offended the aristocrat in him.

“Merci.”

He said nothing and picked up his CD player. I’d offended the boyfriend in him as well. He was not my girlfriend. He did not perform tricks.

*   *   *

The Oracle of Delphi was obviously a black woman, Solomon said, because she couldn’t keep her opinions to herself. But then the Sphinx was a black woman, too. “We can’t win.”

And even if the Field Museum hadn’t said so, Mom said, he ought not to forget that Tutankhamun’s grandmother, Queen Tiyi, came from the Sudan.

“Teach, sister,” the resident crazy of the moment said and left to get a good seat. The petition to Mom had succeeded that Cello’s practicing be curtailed on the night that
The Carol Burnett Show
was on.

Ronald and Rhonda were upstairs putting on pajamas, but Dad had to make apologies to Mom for not checking to see who was around before he spoke. How could Cello, suddenly in the hall, not have heard Dad remind Mom that the Queen of the Matamba had been known to speak to Ralston Jr. from the seventeenth century, so she had better watch it or else she, too, might wake up in a church with a hammer in her hand and fragments of a Jesus at her feet.

Dad stole out the door for the
Eagle
.

*   *   *

Cello was telling me what she’d discussed with Mom about the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, how Bach’s original opening two bars have a single line, and Busoni adds alternating octaves. He starts with an octave in the left hand and a single note in the right hand and then an octave in the right hand and a single note in the left hand and they alternate and it’s not as easy to play as it sounds, this being Bach.

“Nothing like a sweat after a good Bach,” Dram said in English.

I treasured the look that Duallo and I exchanged, like a couple. Wasn’t that a weird thing for him to say?

“Music that has independent voices is a challenge,” Dram went on. “That is why pianists are intense.” His hand sought his wife’s hair. “It is because of the multivoiced music that they play.”

“I thought Busoni’s Bach arrangements had gone out of fashion,” Cello said in German to Hayden.

“Composers like his own compositions,” the African American composer answered the African American pianist, in German.

“Interested in Bach arrangements from the unfashionable period,” Cello said. Hayden appeared to understand what she meant by the unfashionable period.

“Schoenberg’s
St. Anne
is intense,” Dram said in English, looking at Afer and the others in our big circle. “Over the top at all times. The orchestra sounds giant, giant.”

“E-flat Major and there’s a glockenspiel,” Hayden said in peacekeeping English.

Nobody was smoking. Nothing felt fun, though Duallo sat within smelling distance.

“In the middle of World War One, in Chicago, because he had renounced the eating of meat, Nijinsky’s wife left him,” Lotte said, in very slow English. She appealed to us one by one. “He wanted to go back to Russia and live in a commune of no women.”

People laughed and went back to talking about the film, wanting to start this part of the evening over.

“Did you see him dance?” Father Paul asked in German. He’d given up on English and understood surprisingly little of the film.

“How did you guess that I grew up in a mental asylum.” Lotte had reverted to her Berlinisch.

Lucky did not know who Nijinsky was and said so.

Father Paul stood and made a rapid turn on the front of one foot. Duallo got up, and together they pirouetted twice. The café applauded and I was proud and nervous. I do not know how I knew that Hayden was miffed that I was sitting there as big chested and proprietary as he was. He’d seen where Duallo had been all night—next to me. Maybe I could pull this off, after all, though Hayden knew I’d cheated and was screwing above my sex grade.