Black Deutschland

by Darryl Pinckney

  On my way out of the terminal, I saw a white guy in shirt and tie waiting in line at a newsstand. The young cashier was so busy she didn’t see him look around and then just wander off with the magazine and nuts, called after by no one. From the escalator a few yards back, I’d seen as I descended a black kid in a baseball cap snatch the plastic cup of tips from the counter of a doughnut concession. Solomon would not have believed me, so I didn’t bother.

  * * *

  It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I’d just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked. If they weren’t going to wait down in the café, then I was certainly going to take my time getting dressed before I let Duallo unlock the door. He said it would be unfriendly to send them away. He’d run out of his mother’s blossomy lotion. It was my first night back.

  Hayden and Father Paul had looked after Duallo while I was away, and now there was a gay café in Kreuzberg, on Oranienstrasse, where he was comfortable. He liked that there weren’t just bar stools, there were sofas, too. Hayden had been too modest in front of me about his French and Duallo and Father Paul had built up more German between them. I couldn’t help myself and I kept my voice to a low register because Hayden was in the vicinity. But West Berlin was mine to give.

  I took the four of us to an elegant Italian restaurant in Schöneberg, on a side street of leather bars and back rooms smelling of poppers. The three of them had tall white beers and I a small coffee in a crowded gay bar not far away. It was loud with hits from ten years before. I bopped through the noise and didn’t join in the conversation. It was enough that while Duallo listened he now and then let my hand seek his.

  I’d not been by the Mercedes-Benz star as yet. Hayden found it ridiculous that I paid obeisance to a corporate emblem, to a company that had a far from blameless war record. I asked him what German company didn’t and knowing what we knew, why then had we come to Berlin. That was a ritual I should have confessed to Duallo when we were alone.

  I led the way to the ChiChi. There’d been a Budapesterstrasse, a Budapest Street, over in what was now East Berlin that they’d changed the name of, to Friedrich Ebert Street, in honor of the first president of the Weimar Republic. But nobody wanted to offend Hungary, so a stretch of the Ku’damm was renamed Budapest Street.

  Hayden told me to get them out of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood and in front of several drinks. It was cold.

  Ebert ordered the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. Rosa Luxemburg stepped onto the podium on November 9, 1918, the day after she walked out of prison, and never saw another spring.

  It was late, but I could hear the alcoholics screaming on the other side of the door, the sign that the bar was peaking, riding that night wave. Zippi and Odell were making out, making up for whatever quarrel they’d had earlier. They acknowledged Big Dash’s applause. Afer gave his girlfriend a peck and Bags lit his old lady’s cigarette for her, she who seldom left her Schöneberg. You are leaving the American sector. Dishes of little heart-shaped chocolates in different-colored tinfoil had been placed around the smoky, twinkling bar.

  Zippi shrugged like she didn’t know what he was talking about when show-off Hayden said that the Jewish Valentine’s Day was in the summer, was it not.

  And that was my fifty-mark note on the bar, luxurious though Hayden looked in his sweater. But we were all wearing beautiful sweaters. I saw Duallo look at himself in his present in the mirror behind the bottles. It had turned back into a great day.

  Zippi went on tiptoe to give me kisses on both cheeks and a smile that said she was glad I’d figured out that these things didn’t have to be complicated. She had a special smile for Duallo, and one for Father Paul, too, and the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, emerging from pitch-dark eyeliner, affected me somehow.

  I didn’t go into the kitchen with Bags, his old lady, and Zippi, because Hayden wouldn’t, he who never touched the stuff and made Father Paul say that he, too, was happy with his tall white beer that Manfred had also liked.

  And when they came back to the bar, giggling and terribly pleased with themselves, I realized that that evening was the first time I’d touched Duallo in public since the day we met. I rubbed his back and he swayed. He conversed with Bags’s old lady, who was pretty funny in her angry German confrontational way, while I stood over him, big-chested and prepared to retire the legends I’d twisted myself over about the romance of pain and the agony that was true love. It didn’t have to be that way to be real.

  Hayden could have got a light from the person he bummed the cigarette from, but he had to come back over and lean between Duallo and Bags’s old lady and borrow her lighter, letting his left hand rest on the very patch of beautiful black boy back where I’d just had my right hand.

  * * *

  For Mom, the catastrophic-enough event was followed by several aftershocks of the heart, among them her apparent humiliation at having to make her peace with us—Solomon, Francesca, and me—because we’d be all she had should anything ever happen to Dad for good. She said some people are alone even though they’re married, but she hadn’t been one of them. Dad was her soul mate and if Francesca was that for Solomon, then she as a mother could not ask for more of her daughter-in-law. Or of anyone I chose to care about, she added.

  * * *

  “This is your home,” Mom would say to Rhonda and Ronald when they came through the door again with empty Flintstones lunch boxes and their crayons in one of their mother’s discarded traveling cases. Cello sometimes broke down when she finished her practice for the evening. Mom would sit next to her in the kitchen.

  Aunt Loretta’s family considered itself much too good for Uncle Ralston and she agreed. She never took in her grandchildren, though she had all those bedrooms. Her husband was too deep into himself as well to offer them anything. He didn’t want them underfoot, for all his dreams of a great black dynasty bursting forth from his deadness. It was bad enough that often he had to throw out his own son. Old Man Shay complained about the cost of his grandchildren’s education.

  When Dad knew whom Aunt Gloria was really trying to get away from and why he didn’t help her, I didn’t ask.

  * * *

  Dad’s favorite thing was to remember Uncle Ralston’s inanities. The EKG machine blinked and he was entertained by our versions of family meetings on South Parkway. It was a hoot how much Uncle Ralston disliked Mexicans, Vietnamese, Indians, any new group. To him, race in America was a story between white and black, and anything else was yet more change for the worse.

  “What a bummer for everyone,” Dad said, fiddling his paper hospital bracelet.

  Mom said that during the World’s Fair of 1893, one black woman hated Aunt Jemima so much she went on a two-month rampage, brutally assaulting white men at night.

  * * *

  Bags’s old lady smoked Rothmans Menthols, and I bummed one. Just like that.

  “When did you again?” Duallo breathed. He broke away from my kiss. That was going too far, though we were at the ChiChi, where a cellulite-smacking contest was taking place among some crones at Odell’s end of the bar. I didn’t look to see what Hayden might have seen.

  They’d been dancing for two days, Zippi sighed.

  * * *

  In the hospital corridor, Solomon said if I was going to be related to him, then I had to lose the beard. The kid brother, I let him drop me at a barber’s. I hadn’t realized how shaggy I’d got. A black barbershop in Chicago was the place to go if you wanted to continue to taste ashes from the presidential election.

  A haircut was not easy for a black man to find in Berlin. It was roulette. From shop to shop, the same short guy in a white jacket with the same scissors would hunch his shoulders, as if to say he had no idea what to do with you. Then you’d find someone who was willing to give it a shot, so long as you understood that he—one time it was she—had never cut black hair before.

  The barbers who frowned you out the door without speaking were kinsmen of the old woman who s
aid on the street to a friend of Bags’s old lady, a white girl with her brown baby in her arms, “At least if it were a dog it could be put down.” They still lived in Berlin, those types, sitting behind you upstairs on the bus.

  Of course I had done the simple thing of asking another black man where he had his hair cut. Duallo ignored my hint that I hang out with him the next time he was seeing his friend who had the girlfriend who had clippers and hooked everybody up, even cut designs into their hair. That was his black Frenchman’s Africa life. Hayden sent me to his Kreuzberg barber. You had to holler up at his window or phone from a pub. A creamy German guy with Angel on the Rock curls sat you at his cluttered mirror, his bed unmade no matter the hour, his box of clippers and attachments lost, his room filthy with the sticky sweet aroma of just-fucked ass.

  Whatever had happened in the meeting with Dad’s cardiologist, by the time I got back to the hospital cafeteria with my beard merely trimmed, Mom said she had decided that she would be fine whenever that was going to be required of her, so we never had to fear that she would become a problem for us ever. She’d watched her mother live alone her whole life and she knew how to do it, what it looked like, and maybe her mother hadn’t been wrong with her all-or-nothing, love-me-or-leave-me attitude.

  Upstairs, Solomon batted away the hand I was protecting my face with. “Who are you trying to be?”

  “Let your reading advance your facial hair,” Dad, awake, rasped from his side of the room.

  * * *

  I thought the noise in the ChiChi was the reason we couldn’t hear what was being said on the television news report. But Odell said it was CNN, not just a new station, but a new concept, uninterrupted news footage from around the world, day and night. There was no audio commentary. A ticker tape of captions concerning “The Rushdie Affair” ran along the bottom of the large screen.

  Bags returned and said, yes, that book that made fun of that piece of ayatollah who took our people hostage. They had just put a price on the writer’s head. From where I stood, I could see images of fires and mobs, but I wasn’t sure if they were pictures from Islamabad or Bradford, England.

  The bar was wild with St. Valentine’s Day. Odell stood like Neptune in his stormy sea, entranced by his Schaub television. We’d never seen a picture that clear, he informed everyone. It was because of that satellite dish, which he could have installed himself. A few people would get up, stand next to Odell, watch for a while, and then resume their places. Zippi liked him preoccupied. I was not going to leave Duallo, who was happy listening to Bags’s old lady explain that although she was glad the Soviet Union hadn’t won last year, she was truly sick of the Dutch thinking they had the greatest captain in the world.

  Father Paul snatched Duallo’s beaver skin hat from where he’d tucked it at his feet, not trusting the rack by the door. He was outside with it, Duallo behind him, and something happened in my stomach when Hayden, grinning, chased after them.

  I was stuck: either the cool father staying inside or running in the cold. When I at last decided to go out and put a stop to the game, they were coming back in. The cold on their clothes was an affront, an experience I did not share. Duallo petted his hat. It was a cat and made purring noises. Father Paul did it, too.

  Hayden said that Duallo was proud of that hat because he won it arm wrestling in Moscow.

  That story Duallo should have told me when we were alone.

  * * *

  Mom refused to take in Ralston Jr. and Aunt Gloria. Cello and her brother and sister knew the drill and were on their way upstairs. Dad told Solomon to go back to bed, too, but since he’d turned twelve Solomon was allowed to give Dad an incredulous you’re-joking face, and Dad would let his little man get away with everything.

  Aunt Gloria looked so pathetic, her wig in curlers, heading back into the night with her suitcase. Dad took her and Ralston Jr. both to South Parkway and left Uncle Ralston no choice. While Uncle Ralston was putting the chain on the front door, Dad used his keys to unlock the back door. Aunt Loretta hardly left her room once her mad son and unhappy daughter-in-law turned up. Dad got a succession of janitors to move in. Mrs. Williams cooked and the asylum was complete. Ralston Jr. and Aunt Gloria lived mostly with his parents for the next twenty years.

  Mom was strict about not discussing in front of Cello, Rhonda, or Ronald what we knew would upset them. But the morning after they’d come, smelling of smoke and hysteria, clutching pillowcases of beloved, petty possessions, nobody had to say anything to me. I could read minds that breakfast.

  “So you’re sure Ralston set fire to the apartment on purpose,” Francesca said, standing by Dad’s bed.

  Mom and Dad exchanged a look and began to play thumbs.

  I explained to her that the riot in Newark that summer excited Ralston Jr. Solomon asked me what made me think I could say that, given that I was ten years old in the Summer of Love. He and his bride were healthy and camera-ready. I wanted to lie, to bring in the perverse, to say that Ralston Jr. used to beat off to the CBS Evening News, that Solomon hadn’t been at the Eagle those miserable summers. But I was officially as well fucked as my older brother and dropped my voice to say, “Think about it.”

  * * *

  The last syllable was scarcely out of his mouth when his dearest little friend got up and chose Ascyltus as his lover. Thunderstruck by this verdict, he fell on the bed. He would have laid violent hands on himself, like an executioner, if he hadn’t begrudged his rival that victory.

  * * *

  They were disappointed in my books, Duallo and Uwe. To which era did I belong? I looked over my shoulder in the Co-op bookstore when I was reading Fanon’s case study from 1932 about the woman from Madagascar who only wanted a relationship with a white man. I had not wanted to be in West Berlin with those sorts of books and questions.

  Maybe that was why I really lost it in a house meeting about the bookstore selling Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which to them was a classic from the black American revolution of the 1960s but to me had nasty things to say about gay black men wanting to have babies by white men and the rape of white women as Cleaver’s personal retribution for the Vietnam War.

  One woman framed the argument that Cleaver was not, as an oppressed man, an evolved man. I shot Afer a look that he didn’t want to acknowledge but couldn’t help but agree with. And this was the woman who, I heard, had decreed that she would not allow the Co-op to stock the memoirs of working-class-traitor terrorists or waifs who hung around Bahnhof Zoo, overdosed, survived, and then starred in films about their self-destruction.

  I didn’t hear Lucky rise to introduce his motion. He wanted to address the subject of blasphemy and that book.

  The house leader said we had no copies to sell and no plans to order copies from the London publishers. The Co-op would wait for the German translation.

  The mother of his children went back to her oven. A few others made to leave the crowded café. I had to laugh at Co-op members like Afer, who enjoyed telling the stray customers we got in that part of town at that hour that we were closed.

  Lucky had tried some of us already, deploring news of bookstore bombings in California while saying that it was very human that faith, when insulted, moved the faithful to act in defense of faith. I hadn’t thought of Lucky as Muslim or in the least observant. He hadn’t kept Ramadan last year, as far as I could tell.

  I told Lucky that maybe I hadn’t made a motion, but I still had the floor. The house leader backed me up.

  A girl with red pigtails who could repair any bicycle brought to her said that we were not the Bundestag. She wore black boots, even in summer, had them on the back of the chair in front of her, but most emphatically was not a lesbian. I stayed clear of her. Alma told me that a while back she gave Alma a black eye when Alma said that the redhead’s boyfriend was petit bourgeois, not proletarian, because his family had a butcher’s shop. The redhead was saying that every time they called for a free discussion, the house leader appointed himself p
olice of that discussion.

  I made a motion that the one copy in the original English by Eldridge Cleaver that was on sale be withdrawn and the house leader by way of restatement yelled it out for me. Duallo wasn’t present, but I thought I should be doing my own yelling. I opened my arms wide, like Frederick Douglass, and intoned that Cleaver once had a beautiful wife but he had become a Mormon and a Republican, signs that he had been a fraud in waiting, and Koh-op Hah-ee had to leave him behind, in the wet dust, as had his wife.

  I felt some amazed eyes on me. Sometimes the house leader translated what he thought the English-shy among them had not understood fully. I waited.

  Yao stood and raised his arm, stepping forward. The house leader acknowledged him. The redhead barked that he should just talk and forget recognition.

  Yao asked me to have the patience to let him point out to me that Soul on Ice was first published twenty years ago. He could verify for me that twenty years was a long time, because he had not seen his mother, had not been back to Ghana, in twenty years. He was reluctant to say such things to me, but we were brothers in intellectual progressiveness, which he had understood the Co-op to consider among its foundation principles. Therefore, he had to ask if Europe did not do funny things to the black man.

  I’d been depressed on the fourth anniversary of my having gone into rehab. I was sober except for the return of menthol cigarettes and lukewarm coffee. In the café, I had poured the occasional late morning glass of white wine for Lotte and still not asked for its new phone number.

  But I knew that after the house meeting I would be back in the kitchen with Afer and some others, then upstairs with Afer and his girlfriend, then in my room, with me, my menthol, and little mouse droppings of hash, waiting for Duallo, whom I’d not seen in three days. I’d not been to the AA meeting in Dahlem since we met.