My back hurt, not from carrying trays of dirty cups and sloppy beer glasses, but from trying to read lips. Any chance I got, I stupidly cruised by wherever Duallo was, just to connect with him, I told myself, when in fact it was to say to whomsoever to him cometh that the nectar in question was mine.
Father Paul was complaining to Duallo that he was tired of commuting back and forth. He had family and his studies in Austria, but Hayden would not look for work in Vienna. I convinced myself that Duallo wasn’t following his German.
Hayden jumped on him, snarling that nobody in Austria was ever going to give a black man the position someone of his caliber and experience deserved. Father Paul put his hands in his lap. His love was hurt.
I made coffee. The café was noisy. Wooden chairs scraped the unpolished floorboards. The house leader bawled for two beers and two coffees; the area where I worked was slippery. Co-op members had a good time ripping further the remnants of leaflets and old posters glued to the bumpy walls.
Hayden asked me to phone for a taxi. He wouldn’t dream of taking Dram away from his political philosophy and shook hands with Yao, Afer, Lucky, the house leader, Uwe, Dram, and Duallo. He threaded through the configuration of tables to kiss Cello and me, too. Father Paul was like a feather on his palm.
Hayden had seen in the paper that Lessingsdorf was being disassembled, the trompe l’oeil pulled down. There was some controversy over the workers’ houses and warehouse offices and until the disputes were resolved they were likely to remain unoccupied, an addition to the unused in West Berlin, but not exactly real estate that had no value either. I couldn’t see Cello’s face.
Stagnation had changed the occupied city, the house leader proposed to Dram. Stagnation on both sides of the border, the house leader’s partner, the incredible baker, added. Reforms wouldn’t save either side. Their two tired children stood around her, gnawing on the only sweet buns she let them have per weekend. I never translated for Duallo. Fortunately, he’d not asked me to. He said his classes were very, very hard.
Another Co-op member said he wanted to go back to the question of which was the occupied city, East or West Berlin. He propped open the front door as he spoke. The air became colder, but not less smoky. The lights in the café flickered now and then.
For me, it had been an emotionally unsatisfying evening ever since Duallo and Father Paul hugged goodbye. And it wasn’t over. I regretted that I’d not paid attention to the film. At least I would have had that self-respecting experience. I got more orders for coffee and beer and red wine. Duallo came behind the bar to help me, his eyes that I could not read full on me.
* * *
Triumphs are much harder to get over than disasters. Uwe had his golden brown hand in his blue pouch of golden brown tobacco and rolled one for Duallo. I failed not to mind that he could have one cigarette per month. He could smoke at a party and not get hooked. He was that way about alcohol, too. I just couldn’t understand how he could leave half his glass of wine, and his first one at that.
I couldn’t tell if I was really in love or if I was just relieved to have someone, to have joined the living. Maybe the rain wasn’t really more poignant since he’d come into my life and I was just acting but not admitting it. We had gone swimming one Sunday in the summer. He said his father had a friend from his film days and through him he’d had some holidays on Cap Nègre until his father’s depression caused him to lose interest in his son, who was by no means his first. But at least he learned to swim. He liked tennis. He almost met Yannick Noah. McEnroe said he was more scared of Noah’s hair than his tennis.
When we were out cycling, it was Duallo’s juju beckoning me, I told myself. I let him have the Schwinn. We came to the point where I had a hard time keeping up on Yao’s old brown contraption, something Anne Frank’s father would have had. To head back in, because of me, was more embarrassing than how badly I played tennis, after all the training on the bike I’d subjected myself to. The next time I rattled by a display window of bicycles, I stopped.
I did not think about how I looked to him when I watched him play football again in the Platz der Republik. It was Duallo who told me that the reason the Reichstag had no function was that everyone had promised the Russians it would remain unused. He ran and time stood still and if I did not forget everything, hugging my knees on the porch of the Reichstag, I at least forgot myself. The Berlin Effect. I never met his teammates, and Contestant Number 1 left us alone where the Nazis set fire to the Weimar Republic. That was the last time I’d see him play. I think I knew that afternoon that I would one day say to myself about him that I saw him play twice, the first time and the last.
Yet I had to cover up from myself my hurt when he mentioned that he played other football matches, over in Neukölln and in Kreuzberg on the Saturdays when I was digging in the ground in the Schrebergärten. I’d been with him in that very square in Kreuzberg one evening. The Wall ran along the far end of Mariannenplatz. You could see a church spire and roof on the other side, over in East Berlin. Someone had painted the church front, what the Wall blocked, on the side facing south, or the Western sector.
The park was in use in every corner, families took their time packing up plastic baskets, and everything around us was purple in the twilight. Children of a mystical hue came laughing through the dusty grass, chased by papa. The scarf on his daughter’s head seemed so unfair, and Duallo said so. He looked back and said her scarf did not appear to be slowing her down.
We wandered for some time. He was demonstrating with his hands different nautical knots. I made it a point of honor not to interrogate him about where he’d been and whom he’d seen, but maybe my not wanting to know was not honorable, because what he did tell me made me think of how much of his life I was shut out from. Even after he’d begun spending every night with me, I was not at ease about us.
* * *
Cello was telling Uwe that it would be one thing to work with Lotte von der Pfalz on a piece about the Nazi times, but she knew the black American poet he’d referred to who was living in West Berlin, a second-generation Beat figure, and her advice to Uwe would be to stay clear of him. She’d let Duallo and Uwe smoke near her. Uwe wanted to write a performance piece about race, being mixed race.
No, it was not that that black American poet was a bad man, she said, getting up to take Dram’s cigarette from him to smoke herself—he kissed her—it was that he was second-rate, which was worse. Those were precisely the people to avoid in Berlin, Cello said. They were in hip Berlin because in what was actually a village they could have the careers they could not have in New York or Los Angeles or London. She switched to English. They were never-was performance artists, never-to-finish-dissertation affirmative-action parasites.
She lived by the social philosophy that if you heard what she’d said about you, then you were meant to or you wanted to, and at least she wasn’t ignoring you. I’d no worries about keeping my cool with her, but not for the first time what I really felt was sorry for her. The family love only money could buy turned out to be a rental. The meter flipped fast on Cello’s moods anyway.
But what was it to her that I was bedding a beautiful young man. That was proving more than enough to freak me out. I missed Zippi; I missed Alma; I missed having a friend, being one of the guys, having a gang to tell me to stay strong. I’d never understood why Cello had never really wanted that with me. I thought of unnerving Solomon with a sober phone call. AA teaches us to go back and say we’re sorry to people we did messed-up things to when we were out of our minds. We were to write them letters. Apart from Mom, and only kind of, I’d made amends to no one back in Chicago. That hadn’t worked. Perhaps just talking with wise old Lotte in the morning would suffice.
I was not smoking and it bothered me that the times Duallo wasn’t with me felt like breaks between rounds, chances to take out the mouth guard, to pant, squirt water over my face, plan my next moves. I could not relax into my love, though he spent hours in the dark with me, and I
was proud fighting the mildew in the bath in housing I wouldn’t have thought nearly as cool back in Chicago.
* * *
Duallo had replaced the bicycle I’d given him with a racing machine he liked and taken it to school. I was back on my Schwinn, in front of the Nissen hut enclave. Multiple chains held the gates fast; plants had got into the gravel. Rosen-Montag’s glass carriage lights had been removed from above the doors. Instead, bare bulbs hung from wires that looped from hut to hut. In a few years it would look like something left over from the war.
I went on, past the Academy of Arts and one of the easiest structures to make fun of in West Berlin, the House of the Cultures of the World. I pumped toward the Spree and up to Lessingsdorf, feeling cold and sorry I hadn’t worn gloves or made more of my opportunity with Rosen-Montag. The public entrance had been obliterated. I rode beside the S-Bahn tracks and turned off on a road once bumpy with trucks. Now my tires rolled on the hash-smooth black asphalt, specified by Rosen-Montag.
I could hear different rhythms, a smacking onto the pavement somewhere, a crunching of wood sound, something hydraulic. I should have known what those machines were. I realized I was riding toward what had been a great wall of trompe l’oeil depicting the backs of narrow houses and arched passages. The magic city had become a high tin fence. There was no one to call out to at the wire gate. This was a parking lot. I nearly fell over the handlebars to get a better angle, but I’d never seen another like Manfred’s Deux Chevaux in Berlin. The right fender was dark blue, but I couldn’t see the left one, which, to be Manfred’s car, had to be green with a big white splotch.
No one was there and beyond the next fence was noise, so why call out. I couldn’t say if I’d missed him. Maybe I just wanted to show off the bohemian life I’d made for myself in his absence. Maybe it had been a relief to have him gone, yanked out. I’d never yelled in my life. Dad didn’t yell when he watched a game. He pulled his hands apart and bit his lip. Solomon beat his fist into his palm. I’d never yelled when I’d come. “I didn’t came for a week,” a blond soldier once said in the AA meeting down in Dahlem.
It was too cold to wait and see if that was his car, too pet Negro to wait for him. Straight guys aren’t trying to hurt your feelings, they’re just not thinking about you in that way. I’d pedaled to the Landwehrkanal by the time I concluded that Manfred was not searching for himself; but I was, or, rather, the American abroad, I was supposed to be.
One of my favorite buildings in Berlin stood along the north side of the Landwehrkanal, Emil Fahrenkamp’s beautiful Shell House, with its waved exterior. From west to east it stepped down in waves of glass and treated stone, from ten storys to five storys. It had been white in 1932, the books said, but had turned the color of the gray stuff in my soap dish, my soap dish before I met Duallo.
The trees could have offered shade, had it been that kind of day, but we were fast revolving away from the sun. These would not have been the trees that had witnessed anything. Everything back then got used for fuel. What waterway wasn’t also a grave. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Weimar Republic, proclaimed at the Reichstag on November 9, 1918, after the signing of the Armistice.
Two hours later, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Kaiser’s Stadtschloss, which in those days was down the street from the Reichstag. The East Germans demolished the palace in 1950, except for the sandstone balcony, which was preserved and then enclosed by a dull government building of East Bloc bureaucratic vastness.
The Wall cut off the Reichstag from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, built as the western end of Unter den Linden, the boulevard of palaces, embassies, and a little Greek temple by Schinkel that fascinated everyone. From the Reichstag you could see over the Wall to passages of Doric columns and the four-horse chariot that topped the gate. The Wall cut through what had been Pariserplatz, right in front of the gate, and stopped you from getting near it.
You couldn’t approach the Brandenburg Gate from the east either. The tourist hit a barrier where Unter den Linden terminated as paved expanse, Soviet-style. Hitler fans were given no chance to get near where the Chancellory and the bunker had been. In the West, you could press up against the Wall and hump it. But in East Berlin, a wall guarded the Wall. Between the two walls lay heavily patrolled grassy strips where apartment buildings had been, and the windows people are jumping from in the black-and-white films of August 1961.
I remembered Cello’s sister, Rhonda, impressed that she was so close to the big, bad Berlin Wall, and I understood. But Berlin was not a Cold War story for me, terrified at the border though I was. It was Liebknecht supporting the workers’ general strike, as I learned in the Co-op bookstore. They lost and Weimar culture was born.
The Freikorps came for Liebknecht and brave Rosa Luxemburg. One account in German of what was done to her at the Eden Hotel I was glad I was not able to finish. On January 15, 1919, they were taken to the Landwehrkanal, where they were shot and their bodies thrown into the water. Hers wasn’t found for months. And here I was, cruising by the very spot on the bridge, maybe.
Manfred had argued that the Weimar Republic was the reason people lost faith in the Weimar Republic. “Jed, Mann, who ordered the murders of Liebknecht and Red Lady Luxemburg?”
My books had come. Consequently, I’d not read a newspaper, not so much as the Herald Tribune. It was days after the story was published that I saw Rosen-Montag’s photograph in Die Tageszeitung—“Die Taz, bitte,” as I, an insider, liked to hear myself say before my footsteps took off. His head was big and the story was small, because several key players I’d never heard of hadn’t much to say about his foundation chairman’s threat to sue the city.
* * *
And they were ordered to make bricks, and each one to write his name upon his brick. Twelve wouldn’t get with the program and one of them wouldn’t go along with their escape plan, saying that wild animals might as well be in the mountains for all the good running from the city would do. And when Nimrod’s people came to throw him into the limekiln, an earthquake happened. Fire consumed everyone around him but left him unmolested.
* * *
The summer after I graduated from high school, I was in the 57th Street Bookstore. I couldn’t have been accepted into the University of Chicago, but I was pretending to myself, and maybe to others, that I was an incoming freshman. I recognized the title, The Torture Doctor. Someone at the Eagle lost her copy of the bestseller about an evil pharmacist who picked up women at the Columbian Exposition and killed them. Cello’s father hadn’t had an episode in a while, but I guessed that he had purloined it. When I realized what the book that Ralston Jr. had was about, I told Dad.
He didn’t answer when I said, so grown up, that this was not what that man should be studying. Was it true the FBI asked Cello’s father to wear a wire, taking advantage of someone known to be off his rocker? I couldn’t blame Aunt Gloria, I said, for trying to get away from that nut job, even though that Jewish steelyard owner over there in Indiana was married.
Instead, Dad laid hold of me. My father seized me and twisted my wrist as he squeezed me in the direction of his office door. He was so hot and filled with blood he couldn’t risk speech. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it. After he pushed me into the corridor. That was his head that he leaned for some time against the opaque glass.
The evil pharmacist took his unsuspecting women to his combination office/hotel in Englewood. He’d used different builders in order to hide his overall design. He locked his victims in soundproof rooms that had no windows and gassed them. He sent the bodies down a chute to the basement and reduced them to skeletons, which he then sold to medical schools. They don’t know how many he killed, maybe two hundred, but not all in Chicago.
Numbers of people who came to the World’s Fair never went home. They disappeared, started over somewhere else.
* * *
Dram came to see me at the café. I had a friend. He bowed slightly toward Lotte and th
en sat at the bar. I didn’t mind if he smoked and it went without saying that I would not tell Cello of our conversation. No one else was around. He said he wanted to explain the sudden cancellation of their American Thanksgiving. She found a reason every Thanksgiving to cancel her plan to gather up strays like me. Cello had made him get rid of the nanny. I put more paraffin into the café stove to get the coals roaring.
“She accused me of having a thing with her.” In English, we were family. “Now she accuses me of having had a thing for her.” He swirled the dregs of his cup and swallowed quickly. “That I wanted to.” He went to the door with his cigarette and peered out at the yellow street. It was cold. He came back. His coat collar was trimmed in black velvet. His ties that he was so indifferent to were silk, gifts from his wife or his mother, her friends, his sisters, the women in his office.
Lotte adjusted her ears under her thin pageboy. Otherwise, she knew how to sit absolutely still for the camera.
Dram said he didn’t have to tell me his position or the company’s on taking advantage of women in his employ. But the young lady’s family rode with the West Kent Hunt and she wanted to be a chef. “Stupidly, I fucked her. I am the cliché.” Dragon amounts of smoke rushed from his nostrils.
“Lie.”
“You have seen her. I am fucking her at present. We meet at my sister’s apartment now that she is at Berkeley.”
“Continue to lie to her,” I said in German.
So be it, I said to myself, and that night explained to Duallo that I had a Chicago-related work appointment I’d nearly forgot. I changed my clothes to make it look good and went to stake out Manfred’s pub in Schöneberg. He didn’t come, but Bags did.
* * *
“Don’t turn it loose, because it’s a motherfucker,” James Brown instructed the band.
* * *
A lot of people were in the city to get lost. “I’ve been away, cocksucker,” Bags said. He was hooded up, as for a polar expedition.
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