I knew what that meant. I just wanted to know where and for what reason. I didn’t want him to share a taxi with me back to the Co-op. It was not because he didn’t know where Afer was. It was because I was going to have to lose him before I dipped into my room, where trusting Duallo waited. I told Bags I’d had a work-related appointment before I ran into him. Bags did not have me on his mind.
He knocked past the bicycles and grunted the whole way up to the fifth floor. He could yell. Afer and his girlfriend both came, undressed, into the hall. Clearly, that wasn’t news to Bags, but I was turned on. The young Germans on our floor had plastered homemade nonsense posters everywhere and scribbled with Magic Marker when off their heads.
“Why would you do me like this?” He was yelling at Afer.
“Go home.”
“Where’s that at?”
The house leader was beside us in no time. We’d have to respect the rules. Afer’s girlfriend did not want Bags inside and the café was closed. Bags refused to leave and he would not be quiet either. The hall was icy. I just stood there, wondering what had happened between them. The house leader frowned at the posters. Everything was messed up, Bags repeated while we waited for Afer to get dressed. They went out after the house leader had blocked their exit and been firm with them again. Duallo was in my room, unaware, on his earphones. The stove he’d kept lit was wonderful.
I thought it was because love on Dad’s scale was hard, but it was probably because mine was the higher make-believe. I could not project a future for us, what we would do or go on doing. Duallo let me rest his head on my chest for a second, that blossomy smell coming up from his skin, his thick cap of hair. I let him down every day, because I thought of him as African, not European. I felt in him the touch of his grandmother’s Ngala, the creator of the world. But it was easier to spot what was going wrong than it was to admit how hard I was trying to stay with the feeling, to make it real.
If it doesn’t go away, it multiplies in some fashion, spreads in some biological manner, becomes overarching context, the lid you no longer see it’s so prevalent in the sky of your head. But my desires were contradicted by my circumstances. Besides, the parent gets hurt; the lover finds himself doing hard time. It is not possible that an unconditional love does not show the scars as it ages, become less quick in the joints, a more costly show to run. The parent or the lover has no choice but to pass on some of his or her costs to the loved one, unspecified amounts deducted without warning from the loved one’s freedom account, which is therefore perpetually in danger of falling into arrears.
Where I lived, how I sat around were not conducive to adult life. Duallo smoked about once a month. I couldn’t. I liked his books and I liked the untouched blue pouch of cigarette tobacco spilling out onto the tray on the floor next to that futon beginning to split that I hadn’t thrown out. I knew not to tell him too much.
I’d heard that there was a price, and I couldn’t wait for the exquisite piercings. I would have talked to anyone about my fear of the pain, except everyone would say that I must have known that it was the pain I’d been after all along. My inability to relax into being with Duallo was just excitement, anticipation of the blow. I’m about to get hurt. I’m about to come. I wanted to say that that wasn’t me.
* * *
Frederick Douglass said that slaveholders were most anxious for free black men to leave the country, but he wanted these slaveholders to know that he was not disposed to leave, that he had been with them, was still with them, and would be with them to the end.
* * *
They settled in to see Out of Rosenheim. Father Paul had seen it before and loved it. I didn’t like the way Hayden detached me from Father Paul and Duallo, who seemed happy enough to hear that hilltop Austrian accent. I wasn’t really paying attention to what Hayden was saying about a crate of antique army gear, a present for Cello. He said something about that little black boy in the film putting the accent on the second note of every bar in the Bach piece that he was shown practicing throughout the film and then repeated the Cello story.
They were supposed to play four hands, but of course she changed her mind, so Hayden was there when a shipper from Oxfordshire announced himself. Two men brought up in the elevator and unpacked for her two teak folding chairs, a teak games table, ivory-handle cutlery for two, two brass traveling candlesticks, two round leather cases lined with cork, two hinged sandwich cases, a leather cigarette case, and a decanter set.
Hayden was saying how at first Cello was unimpressed by Dram’s way of telling her that he and she would be leaving the children and getting away to Sri Lanka for New Year’s. But then the British military campaign furniture turned out to be a birthday present from Rosen-Montag, only just now reaching her.
“Child, I thought she was going to scream. ‘Help me hide this, Ethel. Ricky will be home any minute.’”
I was not going to laugh with him at her expense. After all, she wasn’t the one encouraging her hot boyfriend to befriend my hot boyfriend and he wasn’t the friend I could tell what a mess I was. Nevertheless, she couldn’t have a drama going on, not in the middle of mine. Hayden said she left the invoice and Rosen-Montag’s innuendo-free message—he peeked—on top of the games table. I’d been right in my suspicion that he’d been fishing, that he wasn’t sure.
Mom practically told me to mind my own business when I asked if Cello had said anything to her about how things were with Dram. He hadn’t come back to the café and that was for the best, lonely though I still was, and eager as I was to be a gender Uncle Tom, the kind of gay man to sell out a straight woman to her straight man in the name of male solidarity.
“You’ll miss the beautiful sunsets, but you’ll always have turnips,” Dad said when I couldn’t get a date to my junior prom.
* * *
I was not going to Chicago for Christmas and Duallo wasn’t going to Paris. Though he wanted to go away with me, I was struggling to trust the Isherwood promises that Berlin was keeping with me. I sure as hell was not going to accept the mountains with Hayden and Father Paul and his parents and grandmother and sister and brother-in-law and little nephew. I made Duallo coffee and brought up Greece or Tunisia. Moscow was not the answer I was expecting. I’d never gone anywhere from Berlin, except back to Chicago.
Bags came in not long after Lotte. I wasn’t used to seeing him in the morning, dark, wide, and tense. He was staying in his painter friend’s storage closet on Moritzplatz. His old lady had put him out. There was no stove, but he needed to be alone. Anywhere else he could have crashed would have been a story. Eventually she would get over his having been in detention. He had got over it.
Duallo and I never made a fuss of goodbye. Plus tard, he’d say, and reach for his book bag. Plus tard, I’d answer, cool as all get-out.
Afer had a gig in Amsterdam. Lotte, over by the window, wasn’t talking yet. Bags downed his coffee. It was not about the child. As far as I could tell, Afer’s girlfriend left the child with its grandmother and clothes she’d lost interest in. I didn’t ask how much he’d seen of his baby daughter. I understood what it was to be a black man doing the best he could, even though it was my fondness for dubbed thrillers that filled in the information I could not hear through the walls on the fifth floor.
Because it was cold and silent, the kind of Berlin morning when you realized just how far from where you came from and on your own you were deep down, I got Bags to tell me most of the story. They’d not picked him up with the keys on him. He’d flushed the luggage claim slip. Nothing had felt right that day and he didn’t go for the car at the Frankfurt airport. But they must have been waiting for him, because they picked him up anyway when he left the terminal. They detained him and lost him for some time on purpose before they questioned him about drug smuggling and former or current U.S. Army personnel.
Things had not been cool with Afer, because his people had lost money. Neither of us named Odell and Zippi. When they cut Bags loose, he had to get out of the country for a while. H
e headed upstairs to have his argument with Afer’s girlfriend.
I hadn’t seen a thriller since I met Duallo. I took him to the art cinema and to hear jazz and the opera, because I wanted him to have a certain impression of the culture I was into. He was into David Bowie.
“I used to be.”
“Essaie une autre fois.”
* * *
We’d been in Schöneberg at a hip agency, finishing up on getting our visas for Moscow. Everything had been nail-biting and I remembered why I never went anywhere. But Duallo paid close attention to what was said. Then we ran into Bags and Afer at Europa Center buying traveler’s checks as well. Bags said that everybody was tightening up on how to get the fuck out of Dodge.
I wouldn’t let Duallo walk to the Techno Institut. The three of us escorted him to a taxi rank and I went with Bags and Afer to the ChiChi. It was a tradition. I was getting out of Dodge. I had our tickets in my breast pocket.
I also had a letter. It had come two days before. I was carrying it around. I never got letters. I never wrote letters. Alma warned me that she never wrote letters. This letter had been forwarded to me. Mom had my address, but she’d sent this letter in care of Cello. That was Dram’s handwriting on the outer envelope. I’d not noticed it on the mail table. I never looked at the mail table. Mom had stopped forwarding my alumni newsletter and subscription renewal notices because I’d moved around so much.
The letter in my breast pocket came from Manfred, written from his Schloss. He said he wasn’t sure where I was. He said he had been back. Had I not also returned to Lessingsdorf before the legions of destruction reached the village? We could be proud of the conversions, and why not accept what had become of Rosen-Montag’s fantasy on a mud pile? So that had been his Deux Chevaux. His letter began, “My Darling Doughnut…”—our old joke, the literal translation of Kennedy’s famous line about his being a Berliner.
Zippi hugged us. Odell gave us the black man’s nod and pointed the remote. The ChiChi was a smoky murmur. It was going to be hard to find somewhere in Berlin where people were not talking about the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. The attack brought people in the ChiChi closer together and while they bonded I did not smoke or toke or drink. I’d not seen footage of the crash debris before. I was nervous that some real feeling might get up and menace me in my cage, my isolation.
Around midnight, Odell wanted to show off his new automobile, a 1933 Mercedes sedan with places for tires on either side of the engine. This one had no spare tires. It was in hilariously battered shape. A hole in the rear floor let winter swoosh along with us. Odell gave us a foul-smelling-gasoline ride to Potsdamerplatz. Zippi’s dark eye makeup ran with anger when he left her. Big Dash stood at her side, fanning.
I didn’t lose it too much when the three of them talked openly about a good deal coming that they wanted to get in on with these Yugoslavs. They knew me as a fool who threw money around. Bags rested a sexy hand on my shoulder. AA cautions us not to people-please, not to say yes to people just to get them to like us. He said they weren’t talking about any crazy Russians. They themselves were not crazy. I decided that they bought traveler’s checks for lots of reasons. I liked being taken for a ride, but I had not in the hours I’d been with them said much and that felt like power.
Duallo wasn’t back yet, because the message was still taped to my door, a message from Cello for me to call Solomon. Urgent.
Solomon and Francesca were already in Chicago with Mom. Dad had had a heart attack.
NINE
The prisoner, a revolutionary who loved pensive weather, said in a letter written in December 1917, her third Christmas under lock and key, that she lay awake at night, pondering why it was that she was in a state of joyful intoxication. She had no cause to be, entombed in the silence of her cell, her mattress hard as stone. The gravel beneath the guard’s boots made a hopeless sound, she said.
Yet her heart beat with joy, as though she were moving in sunshine across a meadow. Enveloped in the manifold wrappings of unfreedom, she said she still smiled at life. The darkness of night was beautiful, if she looked at it in the right way. Even the heavy tread of the guard was a song to life, if she let herself have the ears to hear it.
Wagons of bloodstained tunics arrived in the prison courtyard for the women to mend and send back to the army. One day a wagon appeared, drawn by buffaloes instead of horses. They were trophies from Rumania, to be worked to death. A soldier beat them with the butt end of his whip. While the wagon was unloaded, the beasts stood still. She looked into the eyes of the buffalo that was bleeding, the expression in its eyes like that of a child who has been thrashed but does not know why or how to escape the ill-treatment.
She was freezing and she said that spring was the only thing she never got tired of. A Jewess who spoke Polish, not Yiddish, when growing up, denied magna cum laude in Zurich because that was considered too much for a girl, she shared in her letter to her friend the inexhaustible bliss of remembering the wind through the rocks on Corsica or the gloaming at Whitsuntide in her garden in Berlin. She asked about the berry picking in Steglitz, her South End of town.
She’d called them on the telephone at ten in the morning once to come to the Botanical Garden to hear the nightingale. She understood, as her mother believed King Solomon did also, the language of birds, the shades of meanings conveyed by their different tones. She hoped to die in the service of her principles, but her true self belonged more to her tomtits than it did to her comrades. As much as she loved birdsong, she did not look to nature as a refuge. She suffered at its cruelties. Meanwhile, the disappearance of songbirds in Germany because of the destruction of their habitats made her think of the vanquished Red Indians in North America.
The worse the news, the more tranquil she became, hearing the throaty rooks in the evening, observing them full of grave importance on their homeward path. Surrounded by brick, she liked to recall her love for the songs of Hugo Wolf and how they had laughed in the Café Fürstenhof the morning Karl was arrested. The sky was so interesting. She said people ought not to fret about morality. If they paid attention to the sublime indifference of the sky they could not fail to do good.
* * *
There was no drama. The morning I landed at Tegel, Duallo had been back in classes for a while, in the beaver skin hat that—he said he couldn’t wait to tell me how—became his in Moscow, in what was called Little Harlem, the few blocks where black youth were tolerated near Patrice Lumumba University.
The house leader, who had survived a coup, was firm with me about my emergency, Co-op rules, Duallo’s access to my room, his having guests. Incredibly, the leader handed me written criticism from other Co-op members. The Germans, I couldn’t wait to say to Bags. I segregated myself, he summarized for me, and did not help in any political action or hunger strike in support of South Africa. I especially minded criticism of my handling of the café. They wanted to say that I was too friendly, that I did not respect the Berlin style of not giving a shit who had just entered the establishment. Instead, they said that I put my personal life ahead of cleaning the place or keeping track of what needed to be ordered.
And before I could explode, he embraced me and said to the wall behind my shoulder that they were relieved my father had recovered. Duallo had kept them informed. The house leader shook my hand and said yes, and that was the delicate matter. He did not believe Duallo had made an accurate account of his use of the café telephone. The last bill was historic.
I was on Duallo’s side. The young Germans from the fifth floor who were covering my shift had friends in Iceland, I pointed out. He said that the calls in question were mostly to Paris, Austria, and the USA, not Reykjavik. I’d never seen an itemized phone bill in West Berlin. I said I would make good any sum immediately, indignant as I was for Duallo’s honor and his right to benefit as my boyfriend from my Co-op membership. I was also thinking of the generous supply of prepaid phone cards I’d left him.
The first thing I had to do onc
e I’d taken my bags upstairs was to return and pick up the café phone. I’d promised Mom I would call as soon as I got back. The stairs were cold and lined with extra junk, and my room was like that of a boy who’s used to having either his mother or the help to clean up, someone who simply hasn’t noticed the zoo, someone confident from experience that someone else will come along who won’t accept it and the zoo will be flushed out. German clean was something I could achieve. The stove in my room had not been emptied in some time.
To look down at your father in his hospital bed sets off a wavering inside you. Your footing becomes insecure and you have to make an effort to keep your balance. Everyone has been dreading your arrival because of your history of inappropriate, inopportune displays, but that inclination leaves you once his face has confirmed for you your place in the great chain of being—soon enough after his. The grimace lets you know that you have been a weight. The momentary imbalance by the hospital bedside was you learning in an instant how to stand on your own, and it was uncomfortable at first, like any correction of posture.
He was the wrong color and texture and temperature. Solomon and Francesca were standing on one side of him, I was at the foot of the bed, and Mom was seated on the other side, stroking his hand as machines chirruped. He was asleep a lot of the time. Then he would come to and float for too long, ending on, “You went into labor with Jed when we were out at Peyton Place.”
“No, it was Beginning of the End. They were going to nuke Chicago.”
“What a downer for everyone. We used to call you Bugs.”
And we’d crack up, mostly because there was nothing else to do, perched around my father’s sad allotment of hospital bed, plastic tray, and synthetic curtain.
Solomon had come to O’Hare to get me, leaving Francesca with Mom at the Med Center. He said Mom was very shaken up, just from having heard Dad fall in the kitchen. Imagine if he’d had his heart attack in the basement. But then she is never someplace else, somewhere he isn’t, not anymore. Maybe when we were kids, back when women didn’t express themselves and she did. I could tell that Solomon was getting a lot from Francesca’s memories of her American Studies electives. He’d said nothing about praying for Dad. Mom would have been relieved. Our names didn’t come from the Bible; they came from Black Reconstruction.
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