Nico

by James Young

  He propped himself up on the sofa, pulled the door open slightly and shouted down the hall. ‘Purra brew on, pet!’

  Funeral No. 2 was a couple of weeks later in Berlin. Demetrius was still perturbed by the idea that Nico’s ashes would not be interred up at Preacher Mike’s place, so I suggested we should take a raw stone from up on the hills as her memorial. We got the rock and lugged it back to Manchester to find that it didn’t conform to the German Verordnung, so Demetrius had to commission an expensive, correctly proportioned and racially pure one from a funerary mason in Berlin.

  We set off for Berlin in a Mercedes tour bus with videos and reclining seats. On board were me, Demetrius, Eric Random, Dids, Le Kid, Preacher Mike and a blues singer from Oldham called Victor Brox. Victor had brought with him bags of 5p pieces, which he was going to use on German cigarette machines. He had a long mandarin beard with beads threaded in it. He liked a decent pint, a nice piece of ass and a good fart. Amazingly, it was Victor Brox who, hanging out in Ibiza in the early sixties, had first encouraged Nico to sing.

  ‘I can’t work out whether the world owes him a debt, or he owes us one,’ said Demetrius, irritated by the delays at every German truck-stop while Victor pumped the ciggie machines with 5ps. Herr Bluesmeister Brox quickly got the nickname from Demetrius of ‘Hans Off’ (as in ‘Hands off cocks – it’s Victor Brox!’)

  Though it was a funeral party it still had the feeling and approach of a rock and roll tour: there remained a steady smog of hash smoke around Eric Random, and Preacher Mike happily shared the whisky bottle, letting Demetrius wear his dog-collar. Demetrius picked up his customary bumper set of porno-mags along the autobahn; even Le Kid seemed content, still trying to stick together that eternal jointlette.

  However many times we’d made that trip down the corridor to Berlin the sensation was always that of entering a walled city-state. (How often had we driven past the same sentry posts, the same flyblown cafeteria, serving the same flyblown East German food; the same Russian tank atop its memorial column supposedly the first to liberate the city in’45?) It stopped the city from becoming just another Euro-metropolis for steel-eyed techno-Teutons. All the kids who were dodging military service found a refuge there in Kreuzberg and formed the core of Nico’s audience.

  ‘With how many eyes does a man enter a city …’ said Demetrius as we bought our visas. ‘In search of the unseen, the perfect memory, the moment set apart from all other moments when a place, a gesture, a woman’s smile, will assume a permanent significance in his heart?’

  Travel narrows the mind – rock and roll tours especially, vacuum-packed to keep out ordinary reality. Demetrius had a love affair with the road itself, with change as the sole constant in his life, protected from the unwarranted incursion of the unknown upon his nervous sensibility by the company of his conscripted pals. They provided the steady temperature and environment for him to make the occasional probe into alien soil.

  ‘… And the businessman flying into Berlin or New York – what does he seek or expect? Is he, when he phones for a callgirl, or just chats up a colleague’s secretary, is he also trying to let the memory take root?’

  Victor Brox answered him: ‘We-e-ll a city is like a worman/ you godda find a way to her heart/ah sayed – a city is la-a-ke a worman …’

  16/8/88 Berlin

  It was a lovely day for a funeral. Bright blue sky, temperature in the eighties. The Grünewald-Forst cemetery was at the edge of the woods, out by the Wannsee, the lake which provides Berlin with a seaside, where folks go sailing and skinny-dipping in the summer. (And where, at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Reynard Heydrich first presented the detailed plans for the Final Solution.)

  It was an intimate setting, the smell of evergreens and aromatic shrubs hanging in the still morning air. A quiet oasis away from crazy, overheated Berlin.

  The memorial stone Demetrius had ordered wasn’t ready, so there was just a small marker, a spike with a disc on top which said, ‘Paffgen 16.10.38 – 18.7.88’. The hole was about half a metre square and a metre deep. Demetrius limped over, still using his walking-stick, one leg now shorter than the other. Random and Dids were behind a hedge, pulling things out of their pockets. Preacher Mike called everyone together.

  ‘Not where she wanted to be,’ muttered Demetrius.

  ‘She wasn’t all there anyway,’ said Random.

  ‘She’s not all there now,’ I said. ‘The best average is only twenty-five per cent of the loved one’s ashes actually getting into the urn … they don’t rake out the grate every time.’

  ‘James, old boy,’ said Demetrius, ‘I would remind you that this is a funeral.’

  Le Kid appeared with the urn in one hand and a ghetto-blaster in the other. Preacher Mike said a few words from the Bhagavad Gita – he’d met Nico and knew what she was about, so there was no pretence of piety. Then Le Kid placed the urn in the ground, rested the cassette-player at the mouth of the grave, and switched on. It was a recording of Nico singing ‘Mütterlein’:

  Liebes kleines Mütterlein

  Nun darf ich endlich bei Dir sein

  Die Sehnsucht und die Einsamkeit

  Erlösen sich in Seeligkeit.

  (Dear little mother

  At last I can be with you

  Longing and loneliness

  Are redeemed by inner peace.)

  As soon as the harmonium started up, that was enough for Demetrius, and he staggered off, pale and trembling, into the bushes, inhaler at the ready.

  A few people had come on their own, like Philippe Garrel, the film director, the only man Nico said she’d ever loved. A shy, rumpled little guy in a borrowed suit and tie, he’d made the effort to get there from Paris.

  After the ceremony we all joined up for a few drinks in a lakeside café. Nico’s auntie Helma bought the drinks and told us how pretty ‘little Christa’ was as a child, how she was always with her mother and that it was good she was buried beside her. Dids said he’d seen a little shrew jump out of the grave during the service. Demetrius remarked upon the absence in any form of the New York contingent.

  ‘That Garrel’s a decent sort – came all the way on his own from Paris. But that New York lot … not even a bunch of flowers or a message.’

  ‘Too Cool,’ I said.

  ‘I hate Cool,’ he answered. ‘Cool is when you’re dead.’

  That evening there was a memorial concert back at the Planetarium. Lutz had organised it as a means of paying the funeral expenses. Everyone did a turn – Victor Brox warmed things up with a Death-Rattle Boogie. Then they played a recording of Nico’s last concert which had taken place in the same building, and switched on the stars and whirling planets. Again, at the sound of Nico’s disembodied voice, Demetrius fled. I also left the weird necrophiliac rite and went to the dressing-room where I found Lutz and a bottle of Jameson’s. He told me what had happened in Ibiza:

  ‘After the Planetarium concert Nico went to Ibiza. I’d planned to join her, but I was worried about all the hash-smoking. Eventually I decided to go but the night I packed my bags Ari (Le Kid) phoned to tell me Nico was dead. So then I don’t know what I should do. I still decide to go, as Ari needed help to fix the funeral.’

  I asked Lutz how she died.

  ‘She’d been renting a farmhouse in the woods. She and Ari had been arguing … she wanted to go off and buy some hash. It was the middle of the day, and she put on a turban because she had a headache. A witness said he’d seen her on her bike in good shape then, five minutes later, further on down the road, she was lying in the middle of the sidewalk. She couldn’t speak or move down one side. The guy didn’t know what to do. He flagged a cab to take her to hospital. As soon as she heard the word ‘hospital’ she waved her arm to say ‘no’. The cab didn’t want to take her anyway, but the guy persuaded him. Then she was taken to a hospital, but they didn’t have any doctors. So they went to another – the same story. Then they got her to the big hospital. On the stretcher she was still waving
her arm. She had an operation and they found blood on the brain. Nobody knew who she was. She was just some old junkie. The next day Ari wondered where she was and called the police. They had Nico’s description and told him to go to the Cannes Nisto hospital. When he got there he found she’d died in the night. The terrible look on her face of …’

  Lutz paused to find the right word, ‘ … aloneness.’

  Next morning I went for a meeting with the promoters of the Planetarium concert to discuss what should be done with the live recording of Nico’s last show, which now belonged to the Berlin City Council. Just before the meeting began Le Kid announced that he had something important to say. More eulogies perhaps? He poked around inside his carrier-bag and produced two large medicine bottles that had belonged to his mother.

  ‘Ees zere anyone eere ’oo would lak to buy some mezzadone?’

  You can’t help admiring someone who cuts the crap and gets straight down to business. And Le Kid had been doing good business the past couple of days – what with the memorial concert (the proceeds of which Demetrius had assumed would go towards the funeral expenses, but which instead went straight into Le Kid’s wallet), and now Nico’s unused cache of methadone, Le Kid was mopping up.

  ‘Muz be werf two gees, easy,’ he said, smiling. ‘I can do eet for a good price.’

  We declined Le Kid’s offer, and discussed what should be done with the live recording. Le Kid was insistent that Nico’s estate (i.e. Le Kid) should get all the publishing, so there was an initial impasse. Since it had been more of a collective effort than a solo one, I felt the musicians should get a percentage of any royalties which might accrue from a future record release. A 60/40 split was agreed, in his favour.

  (Later, Le Kid gave a cassette copy of the Planetarium concert to a character in L.A. called Joe Julian. He’d done a bit of studio work with Nico earlier in the decade and had a copy of Nico’s out-takes in his possession. Together with the material from the live concert – with judicious fades where applause begins – he managed to persuade Enigma Records

  that he had some original Nico music ‘produced’ by himself. They gave him a pleasant purse and put out a tacky piece of merchandise called Hanging Gardens, which was described on the sleeve as ‘Nico’s last studio recordings’. Neither Le Kid nor anyone else, except Joe Julian, ever saw a penny from this unfortunate, yet predictable, postscript to Nico’s career.)

  After the meeting we left Le Kid behind to blow the dough, packed Nico’s few belongings – the harmonium and her bag of clothes – into the bus, and headed home.

  ‘I say, chaps,’ said Demetrius suddenly during a lull in the journey, ‘don’t let’s have any tasteless confessionals appearing in print, in the form of “My Life with Nico” or “The Last of the Bohemians”, or any other such opportunistic banalities.’

  Absolutely. We all agreed.

  ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘for a man of acute literary sensibility, like myself, such a subject would lie beneath my concern.’

  As we came into France, north of Lille, our favourite customs post gave us the traditional shakedown. Demetrius immediately broke into his nervous whistle.

  Waiting for us in the shed was the same rodent-eyed little ‘flic’ who’d finger-fucked Eric Random the last time we dropped in for a tête-à-tête.

  Everyone had to wait by their personal luggage while Rat-eyes’s pals combed the van. A sad little shoulder bag, with two empty motorbike boots standing to attention on top, remained unclaimed in the corner. Rateyes asked us who it belonged to. Demetrius spoke up:

  ‘You may recall the last time we visited your establishment. We had with us a singer, a good German lady by the name of Fraulein Paffgen. I was her personal physician. It is with great regret that I must inform you that she succumbed to an accident while on holiday … fell off her bicycle … Sadly she is no longer with us.’

  ‘So where ees she now?’

  ‘Above or below – who can say? Beyond the comprehension of mere mortals …’

  Rateyes’s whiskers twitched.

  ‘Dead,’ said Eric Random, getting to the point.

  Rateyes still wanted to sniff inside her bag. He motioned Eric to bring it to him.

  ‘An what ees ze style of musique zat you play?’ He spread Nico’s belongings over the counter.

  ‘Pop,’/‘Jazz,’ said Demetrius and Eric simultaneously.

  ‘Jazz,’ repeated Eric, throwing Demetrius a black look, ‘definitely jazz.’

  Rateyes fingered a pair of Nico’s grey knickers. ‘Aaah … J’adore le jazz … Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli … You like ze ’Ot Club de Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘Never bin,’ said Eric.

  NICO DISCOGRAPHY

  Chelsea Girl (Verve) 1967

  The Marble Index (Elektra) 1969

  Desertshore (Warner Brothers) 1970

  The End (Island) 1974

  Drama of Exile (Aura) 1981

  Live in Denmark (VU) 1983

  Camera Obscura (Beggars’ Banquet) 1985

  Behind The Iron Curtain (Dojo) 1986