All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  To venture from West to East Berlin you had to exchange your West German marks for East German marks, one for one, despite the fact that the East German mark was worth one one-thousandth of a West German mark on the official currency exchange. The minimum exchange was twenty-five marks, the equivalent of only ten or fifteen U.S. dollars, but still a sizable amount for a struggling musician with a kid in tow. But my father loved the adventure, and the smuggled dollars would go far at the Prenzlauer Berg sheet-music shop, which was his reason for this excursion.

  The sour-faced East German soldiers glowered at us and then at our passports. Although we had done this trip many times, I could still taste the salty butter of my breakfast roll. What if the soldiers keep our passports? A Western passport was worth insane sums of money on the black market; it was a one-way ticket out. What if they search me? Find the money in my sock? Will they take me away? Separate me from Dad?

  Just when I thought I would faint from not breathing, the soldiers slid the passports back, along with wrinkled brown and green East German bills, adorned with harsh-looking hammers and compasses. Through a set of black metal doors that ­Easterners were forbidden to exit, we were let out into the drab world of East Berlin. No matter how many times we had gone through, I was always shocked by the wall of gray.

  Gray is to Berliners what white is to Eskimos and red is to the Maori. The Maori have names for one hundred different shades of red; the Eskimos define seventeen distinct shades of white. Growing up in Berlin, you tuned in to the nearly infinite gradations of gray—the hard steely gray of the February sky, the softer, swirlier orange-tinged gray of the low summer clouds, the light sooty gray of the granite buildings in the West, the darker, duller gray of the Eastern granite buildings pockmarked with twenty-five-year-old machine-gun fire, the brownish gray of the cobblestones, the iron gray of the tram tracks, and of course, the gray concrete slabs that ringed West Berlin—the Wall, which closed around the city like a noose.

  I resisted the urge to grab my father’s hand, afraid to draw any attention to myself as we walked past official buildings leached of color. Soon we were on the backstreets of Prenzlauer Berg, and although there were no uniformed men visible, none of the ordinary men, women, and even children, all dressed in dull, overwashed pants and shirts, would meet our eyes.

  “Why won’t they look at us?” I asked.

  My father leaned down closer to me. “Bitte?” he said.

  I repeated myself, and he straightened back up and we kept walking. After a half block he gave me a quick look to check on me, and I guessed that he was gauging how much I needed to know, how truthful he needed to be. After another half block he finally said, “There are secret police everywhere. If anyone talks to us they can be reported to Stasi.”

  “And what happens to them?”

  “They could wind up in jail.”

  “Are they watching us?” I asked.

  My father nodded, and after I grabbed his hand he added, “Don’t worry, kiddo. They don’t care about us. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Down several side streets, my father found the sheet music store, which impressed me, as it didn’t have a sign and looked like any other doorway on the old residential block. The windowsills, however, were covered with piles of musical scores. When we went inside, an elderly man with chunky square glasses was startled, then said, “Yah, yah, yah,” upon recognizing my father. The white-haired man patted my head as I reached into my sock for the dollars, and he and my father animatedly talked about Shostakovich and Schumann, then laughed as my father counted out the fifteen illicit U.S. dollars for the brown paper bag full of state-subsidized and politically appropriate sheet music. I, too, felt the rush of risk, terrified that Stasi would burst through the door, though I kept my face impassive, acting like any other eight-year-old shopping with his father.

  After the owner patted my father on the back, we made our way through the cobbled, narrow streets to the wide-open Alexanderplatz, a vast parade ground ringed with spectacularly ugly Soviet-style office buildings built in the sixties. Looming over the showcase for all of East Germany’s power and glory was a huge TV tower, on top of which was a glass ball that caught the sun in two bands of white light, one vertical, one horizontal, forming what appeared to be a solar Christian cross.

  “‘The Pope’s Revenge,’” my father said. “That’s what people call it.”

  I looked around to see if anyone was within earshot.

  “They’ve tried reengineering it to take away the cross, but can’t figure it out,” my father said.

  I suppressed a laugh. I’d thought of God as the infallible, terminally dull do-gooder as presented by the West Berlin Presbyterian Church. But what if God was actually a sick cosmic joker?

  In the square, kids a little older than myself were playing soccer, using their brown school bags as goalposts. It seemed impossible in the shadows of these oppressive buildings. But then it didn’t—they were kids, doing what kids do.

  “You hungry?” my father asked.

  “Not really,” I said, and stared at the bag of music.

  “We need to spend the East German money,” my father said, steering me toward the TV tower. Below, wedged between the bureaucratic buildings near what was called a “shopping center,” though there wasn’t much to shop for, my father led me into a hotel that housed visiting dignitaries and had what passed for a “fancy” restaurant. There were few public restaurants in the East, and they offered stringy meat of suspicious origin, along with withered potatoes, but in the hotel restaurant you were served marginally better meat and a blasted, unidentifiable green vegetable for what was a month’s wages for the average Easterner. A meal for me and my father would cost about eight dollars. Even after my father left a big tip, we still had a handful of useless GDR currency.

  On our way from Alexanderplatz to the eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie, even though I usually had trouble keeping up with him, I silently urged my father to walk faster, especially as we neared the World War II Soviet monument to “Victims of Fascism and Militarism,” an open black granite structure with an eternal flame and two Soviet soldiers posted out front. They were like the Westminster guards in my father’s favorite city, London. The Soviet soldiers were frozen at attention, Kalashnikovs with fixed bayonets at the ready. Yet unlike the British guards, with their implacable expressions and fixed stares, the young Russian soldiers were hard-looking teenagers who stared back at us, openly curious and hostile. I sped up as we passed, sure that they could tell that I still had a few U.S. dollars in my sock. I anticipated the cold hand on the back of my neck, positive that they were going to chase and catch me.

  Back at our apartment, I lingered in that fear, that furtive thrill. I had cheated a deathly force.

  I came to crave this danger, savored it as much as my ­seemingly inexplicable survival. I never wanted anything more than this feeling of jumping into a dark abyss and not knowing if I would be able to escape—but quietly, the desire so surrep­titious you’d never, ever know that about me.

  14

  “Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.”

  —Johnny Cash

  Soundtrack: Johnny Cash, “I Walk the Line,” 1956

  AFTER A WEEK of steady drinking, I was ready to dry out and get back to the novel in earnest.

  “You’re good at art, and you’re learning,” I told Hank over a breakfast of espressos and fish croquettes, “but are you ready for Dresden?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “Billy Pilgrim territory. I can’t wait to sketch the cathedrals, you know?”

  “As your lawyer, I advise you to let me give you a lift up to Lisbon.”

  “I’m going to pack things up, finish some of the barn sketches. I’ll be ready tomorrow.”

  “Excellent. I’m picking up Elissa’s friend at the airport in ten days, a
nd I don’t want to have to make two trips close together.”

  “Got it, Chief. I’ll get it together as fast as possible.”

  Before dinner, I relayed the news to Elissa, who said, “I’m going to miss our MacGyver. Who’s going to fix things around here? Sharpen our knives?”

  “And it’ll be back to pidgin English until Fiona gets here.”

  In light of Hank’s pending departure, we hit the absinthe hard over the next few days, which brought out a case of the maudlins. We had bonded with Hank over our shared love of history, but increasingly this love of artistic history took over his blood like minerals leaching into a dead tree, and in this ossified state he couldn’t picture himself outside of history. It was as if he already existed in sepia. And absinthe tended to bring out the worst of this trait. Toward closing, Hank waxed future historical nostalgic, asking us, “I wonder what the postcards of us will look like?”

  “Dogs playing cards,” Elissa said.

  “Hang in there, kitty,” I ventured.

  Hank’s reluctant smile was absinthe-delayed. He really did believe that he was destined for a postcard, like those famous pictures of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Paul Bowles on the beach in Tangiers, the postcards of which we each used as bookmarks.

  Apparently we had hit the absinthe harder than ever, and when Xica shuttered her bar, the three of us crawled on our hands and knees out of town, lay down on the pavement, and, level with the road, watched the moonlight dance on the blacktop’s shimmering surface.

  That crawl-on-fuzzy-blacktop-absinthe night made the sun paralyzingly bright the next day. When I dragged myself over to the farm to check on Hank, he said he couldn’t imagine driving up to Lisbon or getting on a train, so we pushed back our travel plans to the next day. I thought about going back to the novel, but I was going to lose the following day and any momentum, so instead Hank and I rode farther down the coast than previously, to a small village where a giant crow tethered to the wall of a café screeched at us until we left.

  Windburned and dehydrated, I couldn’t wait to stick my head under our kitchen tap, but Elissa was at the little Formica table, a knife with a blob of soft goat cheese hovering over a slice of rough peasant bread. She was staring down at her bare feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Why?” Elissa said, not looking up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I called Spy,” she said, still staring at her feet.

  “Why?”

  I didn’t need to ask. Two weeks before we left she’d turned in her last piece, but her editor hadn’t read it and it had been eating at her. I wasn’t going to say it, but she was too invested in that old life.

  I could just see her standing in line, biting her nails, ­waiting to use the one phone in town.

  “My last piece. I had a feeling I should check, in case there were . . . you know, fact-checking.”

  “And?”

  “I’m fucked.”

  I took the knife out of her hand, poured us both glasses of water, and sat opposite her.

  “Screw it. You made your deadline.”

  “I know. But I’m fucked,” she said.

  “Bullshit. I can just picture them sweating at their desks: It’s ninety-five and humid and the air is full of shit so it feels like they’re living inside of a diaper, and they’re taking it out on you.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “You shouldn’t be. It was a great piece. And who cares? It’s nothing compared to what you’re writing now.”

  Elissa finally looked at me, searching my face. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked with a sadness that stung.

  “I’m saying that anyone in New York publishing would hire you if . . . when we go back. But I’m also saying that we’re here now. If we aren’t living now, when will we?”

  Elissa looked up at the ceiling and exhaled long and slow. I felt for her, but was impatient. A real artist doesn’t need a safety net. This little bit of chaos injected into our routine felt like an opportunity, a possible spur to her real writing; to Elissa, however, this chaos could disrupt her creativity and call into question all the true work she had been doing in Zambi. Her damn parents—I blamed them for her stable upbringing, along with her relentlessly supportive sister. They’d grown up in one big happy house in the safety and comfort and consistency of suburban Delaware. Safety, comfort, and consistency were things you should get over if you wanted to be an artist.

  “Absinthe hour will cure what ails you,” I told her, and she gave me a sad, fake-brave smile.

  Absinthe did and didn’t cure us. We felt better for a bit, but then Hank said, “Why so quiet, Sis?” Elissa was staring off at the lavender and green striations above the waves, the sun having just been swallowed up. She told him about Spy and he said, “That totally sucks.”

  That’s what I should have said. I was annoyed with myself. I buried this annoyance with another absinthe, but it was still lingering the next morning as I walked over to the farm. Hank was next to the barn, sketching a black cat at attention by his feet. The two of them looked like they were having a staring contest.

  “I need a day or two,” Hank said, eyes on the cat.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m on a roll. The cats, the light here . . .”

  “But what about the classic cathedrals? You wanted to talk to Proust and Monet.”

  “I will, I will,” Hank said. “But the cat’s also worthy.”

  “Whatever,” I said, and walked back home, making a game of kicking rocks as far as I could.

  We saw Hank that night, and again the next night. We were developing a routine—a happy one, but it also felt like the routine was digging a rut. I thought of La Dolce Vita, where, at a party full of Rome’s artists and intelligentsia, Steiner plays back a recording of repartee from what he thinks is earlier in the party, but thunder on the tape signals that it is from a previous party, with the exact same people engaging in the exact same witty banter.

  “Let’s go to Évora tomorrow,” I said.

  “The Bone Chapel?” Elissa asked.

  “I wanted to do one last sketch of—”

  “Fuck your cats,” I said, cutting off Hank, who laughed, thinking I was joking.

  When uncomfortable or when the air needs to be cleared, I avoid conflict. Run. The two-hour drive north to Évora would not only get Hank moving toward Berlin, but would hopefully lighten up Elissa, who had been in her writing tunnel.

  As soon as we piled into Dusty, a hungover Elissa complained from the backseat, “My leg has withered.” She had been reanimated after I suggested Évora, and was even more excited when I told her that I thought the trip would jump-start Hank into heading farther north. While Hank and I slowed and slurred, his artistic dicta making less and less sense, Elissa sharpened with each drink. A new, earnest young German couple had come into the bar late and Elissa had taught them “idiomatic English,” telling them, “‘The bus’ is the new slang for ‘the coolest’ or ‘the most excellent.’” They carefully repeated each of her phrases—“the bus,” “artichoke poke,” “sansabelt spanker.”

  “Honestly, my leg!” Elissa moaned.

  Hank and I laughed, as hungover as Elissa. With no rhyme or reason, absinthe hangovers seemed to paralyze different parts of our bodies at different times. One morning it would be a leg, the next an arm, the next your brain.

  “Objects in mirror,” Hank said, drawing a giant eye in the dirty side-view mirror. A long-distance driving junkie, he was itching to get behind the wheel, even though it would have cramped his lanky frame. But he got off on that, having fixed up a series of vintage Volkswagen Beetles and even having nursed along a Yugo, the disastrous Yugoslavian car his grandparents had bought him, worried that he was driving old, unreliable cars.

  “Handles work,” I sai
d, rolling down my window, and Hank laughed. The Yugos had each fallen off on first use.

  “I really want to sketch Prague and Budapest,” Hank said as I kept my eyes forward.

  Away from the breezy coast, the temperature spiked, and by the time we arrived in the sunbaked hill town it was well over a hundred degrees. We parked near the Roman ruins, then sped across the scorching plaza to the cathedral, where it took a minute for our eyes to adjust to the dim light, the stained glass darkened from hundreds of years of burning prayer candles. Tacked along the hallway walls leading from the cathedral to the chapel were what looked like wigs, but were in fact the shorn locks of new monks who had recently entered the order.

  As my eyes adjusted, the chapel’s intricate construction came into focus. The walls were made of a lattice of large bones—femurs, tibias, pelvises, scapulas, and skulls. The columns, smaller bones—radiuses and ulnas. The windowsills, clavicles and ribs. And everywhere the smallest bones—tarsals, metatarsals, vertebrae, and phalanges—were jammed into the gaps. Over the doorway, an old wooden sign proclaimed “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos,” meaning, “Our bones are here waiting for your bones.”

  As soon as I was inside the small room, I felt as if the bones were closing in on me. There was no air and the light was ­leaking from the room. Having fainted twice before in churches, once with my mother and once with my father, I thought for a second that I might be fainting again. This was beyond spectacle, beyond religion; it went straight to a universal bond of mortality. I pictured skeletons holding hands in chains between Europe’s great churches, felt the continent’s art history. I wanted to see every church, every painting, every statue, and to be part of this continuum. But first I had to get the hell out of there.