Black Deutschland

by Darryl Pinckney

  I was safe in the divided city and Uwe insisted to Hayden that he was treated as a German in the United States, though I was pretty sure that even after he opened his mouth he was still a light-skinned black to most Americans. If he was an African in Germany, which he was nowhere else on earth, then he was at least a foreigner in both countries, maybe everywhere he went, except West Berlin, haven of mongrels.

  He sucked on his joint and said that he was at home nowhere, for which he blamed his parents. He blamed his parents for being strangers to each other after making him, and for being strangers to him. He blamed his father for abandoning his mother when his tour of duty was up at the end of the 1960s, causing her many years of starting each morning with shots of whiskey. He blamed his mother for letting her family ignore them all his life, for letting him leave school in order to discover the land where his father lived, and for his father turning out to be a stupid fuck in the middle of the Los Angeles ghetto.

  Everyone was quiet. Cello wouldn’t look at Rhonda, but she let Dram reach down the back of her chair for her hair. I put my hand sympathetically on Uwe’s back as I inched by with cups. He leaned far forward in response. Hayden gave me an Oops look, his arms soon to be around superbly formed Father Paul.

  * * *

  Dad whistled while he worked over schedules of deductibles. Mom did not like to make too much of a fuss about the holidays. Her crazies were usually depressed at that time of year and we ourselves didn’t much want to get together with family. Uncle Ralston’s dynastic fantasies of a clan celebrating in style were thwarted by Aunt Loretta’s inability to countenance guests, not to mention his own obnoxiousness.

  “You don’t want to die for something,” I heard Ralston Jr. say to Dad one Christmas Eve. “I have a bus schedule to El Salvador. I want to die. In Eliot, it’s Greek. I want to die. What’s the difference between doing and being? The difference is infinite.”

  * * *

  Hayden had kept Father Paul waiting to go until the last minute, not wanting to miss what he knew would happen between Uwe and Doctor Rhonda. I could hear her down the hall getting pounded. Elsewhere, Afer’s girlfriend shouted Afer’s praises. Loud, thumping reggae was going in the young Germans’ rooms, to which I had not been invited. Yao and Lucky hadn’t come back from their first-Saturday-of-the-month ritual, a visit to a one-story slot machine/porn cabinets/whorehouse establishment on Potsdamerstrasse, next to a used-car dealership. Dram had taken a melancholy Cello home, his love for her burning in his eyes. Everyone in Berlin was getting laid, except me.

  I didn’t have any hash. I could make out a couple going at it in a lit bedroom in the brewery across the dark. Nobody ever had any trouble asking me to cover for them on Sunday mornings doing whatever, because to them, I was very acceptable as the nonpracticing kind of ’mo. They only needed for me to be black. I could see them when I came downstairs on Sunday mornings to open up for someone, a couple asleep on the floor under a duvet by the sofa, the door ajar, or a couple half naked and drowsily postcoital at a kitchen table.

  “The cat’s here.”

  “I know. It’s very moving.”

  Berlin was full of people who hated you for what they’d told you, Lotte said. We were alone all morning in the café, she and I.

  Lotte said that 1934 had been a very bad year for queers, maybe the worst since Oscar Wilde’s conviction.

  I couldn’t forget Rock Hudson’s face. Saintly and shriveled, he talked cheerfully, but the lost-eyelashes look would not suit him. A big man had climbed from this sick man’s side and loped off to an all-night diner, never to return. He’d been dead three years, but the ravaged face flashed behind that of every cute boy I cut a desperate look at, even in faraway Berlin.

  * * *

  “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,” Big Dash said. “But I’m waiting for that lost-looking dude down there to hit the can and I’ll join him.”

  Zippi opened the big rectangle of aluminum foil and swept her bangs at the sight of the soft, moist black hash. It was coming into Europe again, I explained in German. Afghani chieftains and Russian officers had worked things out, I said, though I’d no idea where I got that news.

  A football game was on TV. Odell let out a cowboy yelp. I didn’t have to lie either. I’d not seen Bags, I said in English. Regulars along the bar made what they thought were coyote sounds. Zippi said in German that I could tell Afer this didn’t make up for things. I let her look away first. The hash was a gift from me, but I didn’t volunteer that I purchased it from Afer’s girlfriend and I didn’t follow Zippi into the kitchen either.

  I was a big boy now. I got a white wine from Odell and took it to a thin older woman I used to put them away with. She’d had a few glasses already. We laughed at how my German had advanced. Was I reading in German the German literature I liked so much, she wanted to know. I was flattered that she remembered that I liked Heinrich Mann. Two hours later my joker was wrapped and I was balling her. To stay interested I had to pretend I was commanding her with that fat one of Manfred’s I’d never seen.

  * * *

  My thing for this German dude was still very much alive. I slowed and looked up when I cycled past the building where his betrayed oncologist worked. I took to parking across from the Nissen huts. Even at a distance I could tell that the enclave looked and felt nothing like the militantly organized and clean encampment Rosen-Montag had insisted that it be every day. It wasn’t clear what the site was being used for now. On the other side of the Tiergarten, I wasn’t yet ready to go as far as Lessingsdorf. I turned back at the Academy of Arts.

  I had a theory. The feelings for Manfred that I carried around Berlin changed in emphasis depending on my mode of transportation. On foot, my thoughts about him were sorrowful; by subway and train the images of our times together were fractured and comic; in a taxi or on a bus I was passive, the weak one, someone not in charge; but by bicycle I experienced gratitude in having enjoyed his company, acceptance that as an ideal he belonged to German history and as a man to himself, not to me, and maybe not even to his countess, taking the Rilke view of patrons in castles.

  I cycled as far as the Schlachtensee. Every family on the banks of the lake was a nudist colony. Buck-naked fathers climbed trees and dived and grandmothers wiped the mouths of cherubs, the loose flesh of their grandmotherly arms sagging beside breasts content to have done their job, retired, and gone to sleep above their cascades of flesh.

  The sun was going to be out for a good while yet. I was in a rowboat. Experimentally, I removed my sneakers and socks. My shirt came off next. I rowed farther into the lake. My skin was slippery from the effort and the sun. My trousers and underwear I got rid of in a single motion. I lay down in the rowboat, knees above me. It was too much on my eyes, even with clip-on shades. I sat up. I did that German thing. I looked at my navel. I noted mostly the absence of definition around it. I did the boy thing next, deliciously.

  “Jed, Mann,” Manfred might have said, pulling on my arms. He got excited when I took to something characteristic of Berlin: bouletten, George Grosz, controlling the line I was standing in at the cinema, his reckless parking, too much cake on Sunday, hatred of authority, exhibitionism. “How cool is that then,” he’d say.

  I was willing to masquerade as him on the sheets again, but my former partner in white wine didn’t want me. Everything she said to me under her breath in the ChiChi was humiliating. I was, like every black man in the free city, a hustler when it came to white women. She nodded in Odell’s direction. If I couldn’t get what I wanted from her I’d discard her. True, I admitted. If she wanted that, she would hire from the bar one of the talented, skillful musicians, she said. She pushed away the glass of wine I’d brought her and called for one she’d pay for herself. I should have given her my black man’s Who-are-you-kidding look, but I doubted at that moment that I had one.

  After that, the time I would have given to the ChiChi went instead to piles of dishes and miles of bike lanes. I didn’t want to
lie to Zippi even if I wasn’t coming around. I didn’t like my gentleman’s debt to Afer’s girlfriend. When I asked Afer if he’d seen Bags, he said he’d gone to see his family in America. But he was coming back. He rushed over it, like a salesman covering up something defective about the product. Afer wasn’t good at intrigue. He had a way of letting on that he was involved in something, keeping big secrets. But he tricked me. I hadn’t expected him to understand when I quit smoking dope.

  Lotte was at her table in the window one morning and we saw five guys from the architects’ collective rush around from the front of the building to their cars. They had blueprints rolled up under their arms and waved big notebooks. They ran like the Keystone Kops, like they were having a good time. Lotte said it was a circulated fact that since the Cold War, German architects on both sides of the Iron Curtain were expected to spy for their governments.

  I put off having a coffee that day and fell asleep without having had any. I didn’t take a break while on café duty the next day and fell into bed without having had a cigarette. It was going to be easier to ride the bicycle, I told myself. I couldn’t stop sweating. I ignored the content and Technicolor of my recurring dreams.

  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 direct
ion. “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.