* * *
“It’s not eating. It’s called quality control,” Dad said.
* * *
The days were getting longer. In the Tiergarten, the chestnut trees were black while the sky behind them resumed that glazed blue of Nabokov’s evenings. In the bushes someone played a plaintive sax. I could hear an artificial waterfall and smell the wet cement. I wanted the middle-aged black man with the middle-aged white woman whom I passed to know that I approved. I smiled at the cute black girl holding hands with the white boy whom I came across next. I was in favor of things working out for others.
The first thing I did when I got back to my room was to light a cigarette. Then I took off my shoes. Often I threw away my socks. I noticed the coffee things on the table where I’d left them the day before, intending to clean up when I got back that night. The milk was sour, my half-finished cup had gone filmy. My room made me a detective on a case, surveying how the missing person had left things.
Brown and sweaty in Central Europe, I dug in the Schrebergärten as though to find clues. I sat with a book in the café; I went upstairs and opened a book across my stomach. I came back to the café, usually rinsing and then taking Lotte’s place when she left for the day. The nearest shops were some distance and she liked to get to them when people were going home from work, just to be among them, to remember that she was alive because she knew how to steal, pick pockets.
“Ah, the sweet Berlin air,” she said. “You should have been here in 1937.”
From Lotte’s table, I could see the green fender with the white splotch. I crossed the street to make sure it was Manfred’s Deux Chevaux parked behind the brewery. In no time, I was losing it on the other side of the building, bursting into the architecture firm on the ground floor, answering their German in English and they my German in English. Manfred, yes. A guy in a blue shirt said he bought that rickshaw from him the last time Manfred was in Berlin with his guru, N. I. Rosen-Montag.
* * *
I took the giant train that was passing like a chapter of history through Berlin, stopping at Bahnhof Zoo long enough to pick me up. The train was thick with black youth sleeping since Moscow and every compartment was full. I sat up in a seat the whole way to Paris. I was still young enough for the point of travel to be what I was willing to put myself through.
But I was also older. I tried to check into a fancy hotel that didn’t want me. One of the reasons I lived in bohemia was that I was allowed to. The second fancy hotel let me have a small room. The trip had been so uncomfortable I deserved a nice hotel. I also wanted to make the right impression on Duallo when he came over.
He didn’t come over. “Il n’est pas ici,” female voices at two numbers informed.
His école was somewhere in the north of Paris. Then I wandered through Saint-Denis. I returned to his suburb in the morning. I went up and down a market of stalls and tables, but noticed only the huge number of leather belts for sale.
I’d read about the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the oldest Gothic structure in Europe. Berlin could never have had anything like this. The Gothic cathedral was a twelfth-century rebuilding of one of Charlemagne’s churches. Inside, centuries of kings and queens. I imagined their slabs of maiden marble white leapfrogging around the ambulatory. The white basilica had two towers until lightning zapped one of them, but it seemed to be crouching on both elbows nevertheless.
The doors opened and without warning three columns of black people started into the forecourt. The basilica was big, the numbers of black parishioners who kept emerging said so. Some had on the immigrant’s version of Sunday best; some women wore bright pagnes under sweaters draped across their shoulders. The handful of priests stood out, white and white-haired. Children stalked their own shadows between the stripes cast by the railings. The congregation was still leaving the basilica as those ahead spread into the street and farther market stalls, young men, too, leading a Catholic army. They were all black, not a European war veteran among them. Out of feudal portals, on the site of martyrdom, late twentieth-century France was going off to lunch at mamamuso’s or headed to cabines to make transcontinental calls.
I couldn’t face the train and made for Charles de Gaulle. I was a scruffy black man with little luggage asking for a one-way ticket.
I was not paying attention. There was a mop-haired boy in the street as the tanks rolled by.
I was so into myself that it was a day or two before I caught up with what was happening in China. I’d not understood what Alma and the others were talking about, but I’d not asked either.
What had been the problem? We both liked Menzel and Fab 5 Freddy.
* * *
We were downtown, looking at Christmas lights, and Dad said Jehovah knew not to promise that parking would be any better in the Heavenly City.
It made us nervous to go anywhere together as a family.
* * *
I’d been stoned constantly since my birthday. I hung on long enough to talk to Dad and Mom. Solomon had even called—more of Francesca’s influence. Then I hung up and blew my brains out on that rare commodity in Europe, marijuana. Bags was loosening me up for an Irish air cargo deal. It was working. East Germans were taking chances, escaping across the Hungarian border into Austria, and suddenly Bags indicated a willingness to have sex with my mouth again, just like that.
I turned him down. His calculation moved me. I said I’d stake him. I regretted both decisions immediately. But that was why I was in West Berlin, to make stupid decisions. I was starring in a romance or a thriller, but at the same time I could get up and turn it off at any moment. I was in control. Lament was just a social key. Some things were expected, such as being blue on the anniversary of meeting him.
If I put down my mask I could admit that I’d got what I wanted—footsteps full of meaning: b) I’d stayed away too long and lost him and a) I threw him onto my futon and spent the rest of the night trying to lose my fears.
The music of blue went well with being stoned. Odell was keeping it Curtis Mayfield/Marvin Gaye. Huey Newton’s murder settled heavily over the ChiChi. The black men weren’t going to give him up just because his shit had gone wrong. For them, he had been the Man when they needed him to be. Violence is not the issue, policies are, one session man said, as though quoting a line from a song.
“He was fine,” Big Dash fanned. “That man was so fine.”
Bags hovered close to me. Instead of letting me drop him off, he convinced me to come upstairs and hang with him and his amused old lady a hot minute. They were getting the marijuana in all the way from Washington State. I was too aroused to stay any longer.
* * *
There was the city of Jopp, but it was called Jaffa, after one of Noah’s sons, Japhet, who founded it. And some men said that it was the oldest city in the world, for it was founded before Noah’s flood.
I couldn’t see how anyone ever believed what Mandeville said. It was clear to me he had never gone anywhere he claimed. Yao accepted my suggestion that the bookstore have a discount shelf, and Mandeville was my first donation. Then I got ruthless and really purged my shelves.
* * *
Poles and French-speaking Africans with suitcases were still turning up at the city’s borders. Bags spread his arms at the Polish flea market behind the State Library, around the corner from Potsdamerplatz. He said whatever we were doing, we weren’t selling Gucci shit, like the Senegalese brothers in Italy, or grandma’s drawers, as these Polish families were forced to. The area looked like a refugee camp; the items for sale on blankets or on top of suitcases or just in the dirt were hopeless.
Clothes of every description, assorted bric-a-brac, radios, classical records, and not every participant would make eye contact. One man sat resolutely over his book, a large selection of toys at his plastic shoes. They’d been coming for months, the Poles, every weekend, released by Solidarity to scrabble around West Berlin because the few marks they could come up with were many zlotys back in Poland.
The sort of Germans I didn’t know—people who, say, got up in the morning to go work at the facility where the Federal Republic printed its money—complained about the noise and the stench of the Poles in the neighborhood. Some Co-op members were confused by their failure to find representatives of the heroic people whom they could sponsor in Berlin.
One astute girl figured out that the Polish guys haggling with Turkish guys over stuff unseen were Catholic, not lefties, and the Café Rosa had someone new in it at any hour of the day. The flea market commerce had become more organized and I sometimes saw at Bahnhof Zoo crews of men with duffel bags of goods for resale.
Bags said he knew an African guy with a dry-cleaning shop on Hermannplatz who had a basement full of ivory. He said he didn’t like him and you could be sure he was paying off the authorities. Only fools would talk about the machine guns for sale at the Anhalter Bahnhof.
He and his old lady didn’t share the same taste in films. He did his business while she went to the black-and-white French classics. One acquaintance he pointed out in the ChiChi he said did a brisk business knocking off Mercedes cars, driving them to the West, and then shipping them to the Arab world. He’d go into a Mercedes showroom somewhere, pretend he needed a new alarm system, learn how it worked, and then use that information on the street.
Bags said everybody in Berlin talked too much and all junk shops were fronts. He took me to a dirty shop off Kantstrasse. The black American proprietor was commie and crazy. He cackled at the end of every sentence. His toupee made him look like a Motown nostalgia act. He said he survived on the S and M paraphernalia he made in the back. He also sold hash, so openly that Bags said when we went back to the ChiChi that he’d wanted me to meet that a-hole because he was sure he was an informer.
Bags asked me if he should get a tattoo for his other arm and I said no, which was what his old lady had said. He didn’t know why she liked performance art. He locked an arm around my neck and said I needed to get my ’fro shaped. He knew where to send me. He said African students who came over from East Berlin to shop were routinely thrown in jail and deported, not back to East Germany, but to Africa.
Odell was going through a phase, too. He played “Fight the Power” incessantly. His jazzmen protested.
Bags said just because I had refused to notice it, that didn’t mean that clerks weren’t watching me, too, to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything. If I wasn’t thinking I was special, then maybe I had made the mistake of thinking Berlin was.
* * *
Lotte said that even had she known who Marian Anderson was, she would not have gone to her concert in Berlin in 1934, young and starving as she, he, was then in her life of living by the church bells.
Josephine Baker was another story. Lotte knew who she was, but had been too young. Then, after the war, well, she just didn’t. There was no point in her saying she’d try to come back for Alma’s evening of improvised music down in ZFB. She said she’d reached the age where the arrival of midnight sent her into a tailspin if she wasn’t sitting in her own chair.
Liebknecht was not Rosa’s lover, Alma said, shocked. Rosa had her own lover; she would not have taken the man of a friend. She was not that kind of woman. Alma had sung at a special memorial in Zurich back in January. She wanted to write to Margarethe von Trotta and she never wrote letters. I’d not seen much of her, because Uwe followed her barefoot everywhere and was shirtless when in her rooms.
In the candlelight of the closed café, Co-op members were drinking up the stock. It had been Yao’s shift, which was the only reason he had an audience. I’d heard that at first they were glad to have the wisdom of an exile from the 1960s generation. But every encounter with him was the same and after a while they didn’t encourage him when he got on to his late-night subject: Africans had it worse than black Americans in West Berlin, in spite of government benefits.
He managed to be morally superior about the fatwa, too. The Co-op didn’t contest the justice of his position in relation to their history, but once they’d acknowledged that being German disqualified them from human feeling they clammed up. He was at the same time telling some Co-op members that as rebels they had a father complex about the state.
Alma said Austria had much to answer for, so it might as well succor East Germans.
* * *
Outside, different kinds of lights divided in the distance. Someone in the café was remembering the Democracy Wall and it took no time for someone else to bring up “the German Autumn.” That was the year to have been in Berlin, 1977. Berlin was really the free city Berlin in those days. “You should have been here in 1977.”
* * *
Alma was gone again, on her autumn music tour, taking Uwe with her. Lotte grieved alone in her window. My marijuana thing had calmed down. I couldn’t believe how much money I’d been spending, including an idiotic investment in Bags. I’d slashed at the amount of time I had to do jack with my footsteps in Europe.
Cello forgot that Solomon no longer lived in San Francisco. He hadn’t been in the earthquake on CNN. She said she might as well have a coffee while I was making it. Shawls and sweaters settled around her. It meant something when she, a lady, took a seat at a bar. Cello and I would always make up, I thought. She didn’t want a cigarette. She struck her breast and coughed, as if to show how horrible.
Her hair was extraordinarily restless, milling from her forehead, tumbling over her formidable huntress cups. She asked for the phone. The light caught a glistening behind her narrow glasses. She pushed the phone away and covered herself with her hair. Cello didn’t have any friends either, not really. Where was Hayden?
“Was gibt’s?”
“Wir sind verliebt. Nevin und Ich.”
I hadn’t thought to inspect her pupils.
Cello said she wanted to tell Mom, but couldn’t yet. She was leaving Dram for Rosen-Montag. She called him Nevin.
TEN
It is by this means that we remember Carthage and all the other places we have been.
* * *
I went around to what I knew was the right building and encountered trash on the run from the trash right behind it. A fiery bearded guy bundled up in orange dragged ahead of him long bags of what he’d been able to trap. Neither he nor the terrible smell stopped me. I was prepared to meet her remains in plastic. Nobody in the café had seen her in two weeks. One of the unlucky fisherman’s nets broke and his catch of rotted matter dropped under his hurrying feet.
Another guy in orange spoke through a blue mask. The police had had to break in. A neighbor unlocked her door and shrieked in Turkish. The odor was not just two weeks old. This is what survival had led to—an avalanche of garbage. It was the most trashed place I’d ever been in. Handprints on the doorframes said where someone had made her way to bed. But the bed had disappeared, along with any table. One grubby, stained easy chair was semi-clear. She must have lived and slept in that chair.
We were standing in an accumulation of years. This was Lotte, she who doused herself every day with violet water. Whoever it was, the person ate takeaway and never threw out the containers. Plastic bags, paper bags, cardboard food containers, tin food containers, wax wrapping paper, hair-spray cans fenced in by trench works of newspaper. To finish the inventory of squalor were empty wine bottles. They were in plastic laundry baskets, lined up along the floor, nesting atop ratty, plump plastic garbage bags, on wall shelves, on their sides along the newspaper hedges.
The orange guy said that it was unbelievable how people lived, unbelievable. He pushed with a wide broom at stuck-together notepads. In the café, we didn’t know Lotte’s legal name.
* * *
In any early twentieth-century U.S. census, the mother of Christian philosophy would have been described as colored. For me, Saint Monica comes off in Saint Augustine’s Confessions as unpleasant in her obsession to rescue her son from his lust, Roman writers, the Manichee, Milan, whatever it was he was into that kept him from being what she considered a good
Catholic. Party killers come into their own in a disaster, and it was Saint Monica who, when her ship was in danger, put heart into the crew, promising them that they would safely land because she had had a vision of her son saved from error.
She held out, did not get out of her son’s ear until every article of her vision had been satisfied. Little else could be expected of a parent who, as a child, was watched over by an old woman who wouldn’t let her drink water between meals. Her son’s chains were broken and he asked what kind of evil he had not done. Saint Monica defied the emperor’s mother, then died as she was about to embark with her prize for home. Her grandson Adeodatus wailed. Saint Monica had had a drinking problem. Prayer was her AA. Still, other women couldn’t understand why Saint Augustine’s father hadn’t beaten her, his mother, dead and hidden away from his sight.
* * *
It was in the vulgar press, as Cello referred to tabloid newspapers like Freitag Inserenten. Rosen-Montag’s estranged wife tracked them to the hushed restaurant of a chic hotel by the Landwehrkanal and nearly connected with Cello’s eye when she lunged to sock her. Rosen-Montag was quicker, sweeping Cello to safety in the manager’s office. The hotel physician and the head of security were summoned. First Cello wanted the woman ejected from the premises so that they could dine in peace. Then she wanted her detained so that they could leave by a side door.
I recognized the picture of Cello, taken at the memorial for the victims of the La Belle disco bombing three years before. She looked amazing, her wide black hat and majestic hair framing her downcast bearing.
I did not say that she seemed proud to have been covered in the junkyard press, only because I hadn’t had the time. The afternoon when I was brought in on her side, an innocent photograph had appeared in a respectable morning newspaper of Dram at a hunt in Grünewald, of all places, attired in red.
He expected her to accept his affairs, his custom of sleeping with school friends’ sisters and wives. She did not want to tell me any of that. I never felt more sorry for her. She was in a black-and-white knit suit, like someone dressed for a grand jury appearance, and she sat on her hair. “As we know, the mad are completely dishonest,” she said.
Black Deutschland Page 26