How else, Yao continued, could I, a black man, want to ban a book written by another black man. He moved closer and was breathing hard, struggling, I feared, with his own question of identity, whether he was a healer or a basher. I didn’t know how to stand. Yao placed his hands on his back and talked to me with his chin.
I did understand, did I not, that I was saying such things in Berlin, where in living memory books had been burned. Maybe an American, even an unwanted black-skinned American, held on to being an American, because for the American that rainy day always came. But for him, and for many of his brothers, their presence in West Berlin was a political solution in which the tragic personal destinies that had brought them to this city could be overcome.
I withdrew my motion. Yao got handshakes as he took his seat, his tribal stool. My face was hot. What year of grammar school or high school had I not metaphorically pissed myself in front of the entire class. To be back in school, with those feelings, as though I’d been beamed, made me consider that maybe the AA Big Book, which I looked down on because it was not great literature, knew more than I did about alcoholism and drug addiction.
Lucky said that the arrogance of Europe belittled the beliefs of millions. I hadn’t assigned religious feelings to anyone I lived with. I thought I saw homesickness in Lucky’s insistence on bringing up a subject that people were allergic to, that and maybe weariness with his invisibility in West Berlin.
After the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great, big in queer history, thought of building a mosque to encourage Turks to move to his capital, Lotte once told me. She was surprised I’d never been to Sanssouci.
Yao got to his feet again. First, Cleaver. Second, Rushdie, which he had not yet had the privilege to read. He couldn’t get anyone he knew in England to mail The Satanic Verses to him. In Brussels they shot the one imam who respected where we lived, on a continent that should know better. The National People’s Army killed its own people who tried to get over to where we were.
Members applauded and adjourned themselves. The cups were mine. Sugar and honey had been spilled everywhere. I tidied up Uwe’s copies of Afro Look, a magazine for black Germans. No one had signed up to go with his group to a conference in Frankfurt on minorities and immigrants in the Federal Republic. This was a collective that preferred to concentrate on its war with the German Democratic Republic and much of “the international Spartacist tendency” over Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s legacy. I should have aced that part of my interview, thanks to Manfred’s tirades, but the sound of his voice in my head had made me struggle.
Lucky walked out. He scooted his chair up before he left, but he definitely walked out without a word to any of us.
“Right on,” I said like a fool to Yao and extended my fist for a dap, for him to tap the top of my fist with the bottom of his.
He contemplated my hand for a few seconds and then knuckled me harder on my shoulder than he needed to. Smiling.
* * *
Security procedures had been stepped up at the airport on the way out of Berlin and probably would be even more so at the airport when I left Chicago. Solomon and Francesca had to get back. That was understood. They had high-powered jobs, a real life together, and there was the problem that neither of them liked Greenwich Village. They’d made a mistake.
They assumed that I had nothing urgent to get back to. No one asked. I didn’t say. Almost two months had gone by before Duallo at the café and I on the phone in the front hallway managed to have a conversation.
Moscow was the most exciting city he had ever been to and he wanted to go to Beijing next. He loved the statue of Pushkin and was glad he had no packs of cigarettes to give people. He had the correct pink vouchers and a view of the Kremlin, but lunch and coffee were impossible to find. Not to speak Russian tired him quickly. Two black students spoke French to him when it was clear he was not American.
Mom gave no sign after I hung up that she heard me tell Duallo I would wire funds. I was a problem solver. Dad hadn’t liked the setup on the second floor and to install him in the basement had been a strain. He was the only thing we had to move and he simply walked down two flights and got into bed. I was the strain, the intruder in their basement. They had everything down there—stereo, double hot plate, refrigerator-freezer. I could see his workbench of model planes in the back room. Mom’s poster-making Magic Markers would have been to the left of the door.
It was clear I was in the way, but Mom said I could be of use. I walked to the pharmacy. Mom knew that Dad wouldn’t have let me touch the car. Perhaps she wanted to have a different conversation from the one we had when I came back with Dad’s medicine. His prognosis was good. She told me to sit with her a minute. It was the end of his pancakes, her grill pan, their Belgian waffles.
“She’s left it too long to get back with it now…” Mom started. She could only have been talking about Cello. Mom said that in getting the basement ready for Dad, she’d found her dissertation on Florence Beatrice Price. Mom met Mrs. Price once, when she was a music/music education student. Mom said she’d nearly fainted, to meet a black woman who wrote symphonies.
Cello had a gift for composition. Her teachers said so. It was not too late for her; she loved music so much. Mrs. Price made Mom realize how important it was to make a contribution to what you loved.
Mom had kept me from getting back to my life in Berlin in order to have a conversation about what the future held for Cello, the thirty-six-year-old mother of four who had only written music for school and had not tried to play in public for more than a decade, not since her Bicentennial Disaster, which was the reason they had fallen out with each other for so long.
Mom had said, “Your father has never been fifty-eight years old before either. It’s new for him, too.”
Mom said maybe I could talk to her about composition. I may not have thought so, but Cello respected my opinion.
I made no comment about the hot tub, gas heater, and pumping system they had in an alcove off the laundry room. It was like being surprised, after we left home, that they’d tried to have a fondue party, years after fondue had gone out of fashion.
Mom said that the Spirituals were not Gospel music. When Dad sat upstairs to listen to Mom play arrangements of Spirituals, I knew it was safe to leave them.
* * *
“With Father Paul?”
“Paul. Cela ne l’amuse pas.”
* * *
Hayden Birge was at work on an opera, Wittgenstein in Love. But his love story wasn’t about Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Pinsent, Wittgenstein’s Cambridge friend who died in World War I. They’d ended up on opposite sides. No, Hayden’s gay opera was about the philosopher’s brother, Rudi Wittgenstein. Three of the five Wittgenstein brothers were to commit suicide. In 1904, Rudi Wittgenstein, in his early twenties, drank milk he’d poisoned himself, in the middle of a gay bar in Berlin, in despair over a hustler, according to Hayden’s plot.
* * *
Dram was in Dortmund. Konrad, Hildegard, and Maximilian were asleep, but Otto, a very serious boy, was still up. He said he remembered me. He’d reached the age at which he understood that he could not repeat everything he heard his parents say. He looked at me an uncomfortably long time and then went away with purposeful strides.
“Carnaval,” Hayden called from the study with Cello’s Bösendorfer.
“Schumann,” Cello said and lit a scented candle, a thing I’d never seen her do, just as she never wore pants.
“Schumann. Difficult.” He came back, Canova-shaped, an African American artist abroad, the kind of black man white people threw themselves on.
“No, but it’s big. It’s not big like the Brahms Paganini variations. It feels good to play it. It’s like listening to a set of virtuosic waltzes.” And men of all races would kill for her.
I had sworn not to mention Hayden’s opera in front of Cello, but I did. She gave me a look that said I was one of the glorious underbidders in life and went to check on Otto. They
had a new nanny, a Russian, a fat friend of their cleaning lady’s, Hayden had said, but she didn’t live with them.
Hayden turned his nose up at the menthol I suavely held out to him. He crossed his legs and said I might have noticed that he was on his own, too. He said he knew where Duallo was and I didn’t. Father Paul took Duallo to techno bars, but mostly he let Duallo find nirvana between his Tom of Finland cheeks.
“They found some voodoo butter and your boy started banging my boy. I even joined in once. I thought you should know.”
I’d not touched Duallo in public, because I thought that would have violated his African sense of propriety. I was in no condition to handle cleverness and scorn.
I slapped that So-and-so so hard. Dad and Mom both said So-and-so when they didn’t want to say either Nigger or Motherfucker.
I could see Hayden’s tongue touch blood in the corner of a beautiful lip. “Bullshit.” He stood and didn’t let me see him cock his arm.
There were those spots telling me I was about to black out, one of which quickly became Duallo.
But it was not Duallo. I’d stayed away too long and lost him.
* * *
It was time. Duallo was returning to his friends at his branch of Paris Tech, where evidently he was some sort of young black hope. His mother cried when they talked, he said. He was not going for another few days, but he carefully collected his things from around my room, our room, and placed them in his duffel bag.
I’d not confronted him about Father Paul, but how could he not know I knew. I felt that I deserved extra points for my Berlin cool about the whole matter, having done the royal thing of slapping the messenger. But he did not want me to see him off at Bahnhof Zoo. He wanted us to make our farewells then and there. I pressed on him the gifts he was not putting into his duffel bag. He unpacked his book bag and took the CD player from the socket where he had been recharging it. I told him to come back for the racing bicycle. If he didn’t want me to ship it, then he could take it on the train.
I was impressed by the grace and unhurriedness of his movements. He declined the two small speakers attached to the portable CD player I’d got for myself, careful not to make it better than what I had given him. He omitted to give me the time of his departure. He was perfectly composed. He would not let the kiss linger. He’d thrown out some time ago his gray shirt of little white fish leaping in the same direction. Downstairs, he let me call a taxi from the café. I’d been naked with this beautiful, gleaming boy and he with me.
One morning not long afterward, Duallo’s racing bicycle was no longer in the entrance hall. He’d grown up and left town.
* * *
A model airplane friend of Dad’s had taken him to the park to fly their model airplanes. Mom said she understood why Florence Beatrice Price, Mary Lou Williams, and Margaret Whatchamacallit Bonds ended up writing religious music. There was far too much out there for it to be just us. She said she was not aware of a particular reason she should not sometimes use only black women as examples, but I did not have to worry about her ever walking on pews.
She’d found the score of Cello’s first piece of music, a clean presentation copy she’d been given. Cello was sixteen when she wrote it. The piece, for piano, was very ambitious. She’d had theory, including species counterpoint. Mom had never heard Cello play it. She said she hated to think how devout Bach probably was.
* * *
I meandered around on the other side of Zoo Station, but I couldn’t get any of the loitering Turkish boys to respond. I gave up and went toward the ChiChi, singing the theme song of Cheers to myself.
I was singing as I stepped into the bar and raised my voice, and none of the cocktail hour crowd joined in. Zippi was setting up a white wine on the bar.
I stood where I was and said that there had been a misunderstanding. The miniature lights blazed as I pried Satan off my back. Zippi said it was just that the last time she heard me sing, I was stinking.
“West Germany pays West Africa to take its garbage,” Afer said. “You will go to sea.”
I was not used to Afer’s style of camaraderie. He and Bags never asked me for a drink. I asked them to accept drinks from me.
“You are inviting me?” Bags crooned prissily, satirically. He’d said it in German. It had been some time since I’d cared whether someone was speaking German to me, counted up my mistakes. I’d given up, knowing what I knew in junior high school, that I was only going to be so good at German and that Tadzio was not my type.
Odell’s vintage car was falling apart and he let the three of us out along the Landwehrkanal. I liked Bags taking command, lining up Afer and me behind him, moving us quietly under the trees. The real trouble was far ahead, and not wanting to get trapped, Bags led us off to the side the first chance he got. We hurried along the Wall, dropping down at Marienenplatz, and at Oranienstrasse enrolled ourselves in the mayhem, the singing, whistling, and bright camera lights.
The anticapitalist, antipolice anarchist marches had long been over, and the streets were jammed. We ambled along behind huge groups also seeking that flash point. Scores of police in visors mingled among us. I could see boys waving flares from rooftops. We walked so much Afer bought beers. Darkness fell. Bags had a joint—not hash, but marijuana. I was in Berlin, living May Day, inhaling the carbon dioxide from hundreds of cigarettes and hundreds of white boys.
The battle, when it came, was between the German police in black gear and Turkish youth in jeans, their faces wrapped in notorious scarves. The air went acrid from burning cars, from fires in the direction of Lausitzerplatz. In the tense quiet, I could hear stones raining down on pavement. A sudden warning “Hupp!” from someone, and Bags almost knocked me over, turning me to run from Turkish boys stretching at full speed in our direction. They swarmed past us, running from the bulls.
The thing was to keep moving, to get around the next corner, to fly past doorways, and not to get trapped between the police and the vans they maybe intended to drive stone throwers toward. And not to get involved in the barricade and bonfire making either. I let Bags turn me twice more. The police had no batons. They were not to be provoked. But word was going around that some crowds had attacked police. I started wondering how to get away.
We got into a taxi. I had to turn myself inside out to get a look at the full orange moon. Hope of my youth, where were you all this time?
Back at the Co-op, Alma was at the top of the stairs. “Dueling comes next.”
* * *
When I was copping weak, stepped-on coke in the block down the street from the Eagle, Cello’s daughter, Hildegard, was an infant Cello had brought back to show Mom and her dying grandmother. Cello wanted to brandish her happiness in front of women who used to feel sorry for her and the grandmother who had barely acknowledged her existence.
Cello insisted that the hospice room be disinfected before she brought her children for their black grandmother to bless. Mrs. Williams went over and supervised the extra cleaning by a furious nurse’s aide. Cello reported how much it meant to her to have the chance to tell her grandmother how she’d made her feel all those years, she who had a disconcerting way of looking through her own mother, leaving her to her sister. Cello’s deposition lasted for more than two hours. Aunt Loretta couldn’t talk anymore. She had to lie there and take it. She was a beetle on her back and if Mrs. Williams was an ant pulling off her legs, then Cello was the meadowlark that cracked her in its beak.
* * *
It was Whitsuntide and Rosen-Montag had received the Schopenhauer Medal of Freedom, awarded by the institute endowed by Dram’s father. In the newspaper photograph, Rosen-Montag stands between the director and the director’s astonished wife, a lamb in the instant the fatal jolt is administered. Rosen-Montag is bare-chested under his fitted dinner jacket. It was a cinch he wasn’t wearing underwear or socks either.
And then the next night the two of them showed up at the café, Cello and Dram. Lucky had resigned from the Co-op. He claimed a
post office box was the only thing he needed. Allah is with those who restrain themselves. He had so little to storm out with. I nearly offered him the Schwinn I’d lost interest in, though winter had got on the train out of Dodge.
Yao looked at my impeccably groomed guests and excused himself. They’d been to a private evening at the Philharmonic. Dram spoke. I owed Hayden an apology. I’d been thinking only of myself. Duallo had come to mean something to them, too.
I thought I deserved admiration I wasn’t getting for my indifference to whatever treaty of promiscuity Hayden and Father Paul had signed during the international emergency of a sexually transmitted disease.
Cello was smoking; her dangerous hair wandered in a fog and on the other side of it we might happen upon the remains of a recent battlefield. West Berlin was a city where the necessities had to be imported: food, clothes, coal, but not beer. I got up when I felt like it and filled an order or two. Some Co-op members went behind the bar to help themselves. One of those spring evenings in Berlin had happened and the sounds we could hear in our isolated corner of cloud were those of transportation, cars and a bus somewhere.
Dram said that to lure a horse, I mustn’t chase it.
I cursed like Odell when I came back from plunging the toilet. It was my party. Hayden, Father Paul, and I were not feeling the same and everyone knew it. Cello and Dram weren’t there to commiserate with me. They had come to smile at me. They’d come to expel me from the thirty-thousand-feet club. They’d known it from the get-go: I could not fuck in their league. I got them drunk and offered to call a taxi. Dram could come back for the Mercedes.
I’d never known Cello to drink in order to blot herself out. Back in the bad times, I would have dwelled on her pride, her capacity for duplicity. I would have felt sophisticated analyzing her actions. But I was through fixating on the slave mistress and slave master instead of on myself. If Dram said he was cool to drive, who was I to argue that there was no traffic at that time of night.
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