Black Deutschland (22 page)

I cried when King was killed, because Mom, Cello, Rhonda, and that priest cried so much. The seamstress staying with us also bawled, turning her thirty-day AA coin over in her hands. I was scared out of my head, but it was also an intense experience to let go, to insinuate myself into their grief, to release into the air my sadness as a musty kid teased at school. I sensed that day that my misery was closer to the alcoholic seamstress’s than it was to Mom’s.

A few years later two commuter trains on the Illinois Central collided outside a station downtown and I understood for the first time the flinty shock of death. A family friend who made what he called antique furniture was among those killed. I didn’t cry, I was so amazed by the discovery. Dad thought I had grown up. I wasn’t paying attention at the funeral. The open casket didn’t faze me. I was fixed on the realization that life was serious; it offered no do-overs. You don’t get up from play and head home wondering what happened to the fireflies of childhood.

*   *   *

The
Eagle
hadn’t had any fifty-year anniversary celebrations and its closure three years later was a story only in the black press, down at the bottom of the fifth or sixth page in other black newspapers around the country.
EAGLE GROUNDED
, one generous former competitor announced.

Uncle Ralston was being kept overnight for observation. Shay Holdings took a limping Mrs. Williams away in disgrace. Dad was driving Ralston Jr. and Aunt Gloria back to the house on South Parkway. One of the caretakers lived with them, but something else would have to be done with the inmates after the house, the rented-out condo in North Carolina, and the closed-up lake cabin in Wisconsin were sold.

Solomon was with Dad, who was taking him back to his hotel. That he and Francesca were staying in a hotel prompted Mom to pull the plug on her day and go down to the basement. She understood that they weren’t staying with Francesca’s parents on North Lake Shore Drive either, but she preferred to talk about it in the morning. She looked forward to meeting her daughter-in-law in the morning. If she met Francesca’s parents in the morning, then that would be fine, too. For her to leave before the last of her guests said something. Solomon looked troubled as Mom gathered up a volume of her Bach Preludes and Fugues that had fallen under a chair.

After a while, I had on one of Dad’s precious Dinah Washington albums. I was probably going to have an interview for a job as a consultant on a local public television program about Scott Joplin at the Chicago Fair. The producer had worked part-time as a starving teenager at the
Eagle
. Dad got him off the streets. He gave me his card.

“Want to dance?” I asked the attorney. He was sexy enough for me to risk Dad’s sniffing the air when he got back. Now that Mom was downstairs, we were smoking the attorney’s herb in the living room. He didn’t take away the flame he held for me. I blew smoke and thanked him. This was just the kind of situation I would have got myself into in my drinking days.

“No, my man, but knock yourself out. Do your thing, you know.” He loose-walked with the joint to the kitchen, where the women were maybe not young, but they were real.

I tried to flirt with the middle-aged priest. He turned off the record player. This was exactly the sort of thing I would have woken up ashamed over in my drinking days.

*   *   *

“You look like a panda, Alfred,” I once heard Uncle Ralston say to Dad when Mom was coming back from canvassing outside the steelyards. “Like a lovesick panda booted out of China.”

*   *   *

A reason for me to take drugs was not to dream, or not to remember my dreams. Stoned, I slept, the livid theater of the unconscious blacked out. Sober, I dreamed of getting stoned. In the dream, I say “Happy trails” to Zippi early in the morning and board the plane to Amsterdam with paper sacks for hand luggage, stoned and seeing spots. De Quincey said that a man who dreams of oxen will dream of oxen even when on opium.

*   *   *

If Dad noticed anything funny smelling when he got back, it wasn’t as important as getting to their basement hideaway to check on Mom. He left it to me to take care of the people sitting around the dining room and kitchen tables, debating in which direction our black political future lay.

I stared at Manfred’s old telephone number written in that portfolio of photographs from the Chicago Fair. One night in his Schöneberg pub he’d also given me the number of his sister in Bremen. I managed to keep control of myself at what would have been five in the morning for her, though the attorney was the last to leave. The woman he helped into her coat had plush honkers pressed against her sweater and her skirt rode a hippo-huge behind. He stomped around the walls of Jericho, letting the city of her black tights know just what was what.

Hotel Berlin
was on late, a Hollywood melodrama made at the close of World War II about the end of the war on the Nazi side of things. Generals, refugees, resistance fighters, whores, and spies run around the hotel corridors and suites, scheming and lying. “Haven’t you told him he must commit suicide?”

SEVEN

Some days only the admiration of the whole world will do, but the world just isn’t giving it. She said that they didn’t make propaganda; they made entertainment. She said some of us may not have heard of Conrad Veidt, but he was the most famous Nazi actor and he’d been a leftist Jewish sympathizer before that. She said that even though the Party knew that most of her circle had been arrested, she kept her job at Ufa until she was called up. They were sending everybody to the Eastern Front. That was in 1943. She was twenty-eight years old and handsome. She said she never lied about her age and she said what she did about having been a handsome young man, because none of the films she had bit parts in survived.

She said it was important for her to talk to the young. When she was born, her father already had been lost on his Western Front. She was a wraith, but still young and handsome when her war ended. She put on her first pair of nylons for a Soviet officer. He brought her a phonograph. They danced to big-band swing. Then one night she waited, into the morning. She never saw him again or found out what had happened to him. She didn’t have a photograph of him. But she had tucked away in a
Schrank
one scratched record that he had loved.

The young thought that she was old when they got their war, which was technically somebody else’s war, though America tried to make Vietnam everybody’s war, she said. She did not feel old. Perhaps it was her pearls. She was proud of them, the young. They stood up and asked their parents about her war. She said that once you learned something about it, you wanted to know more. She said she would never get to the end of it herself. It just continued. There was no relief from what you could learn once you started. She didn’t like the feeling of people trying to put the war behind them. She said some people hadn’t forgiven Marlene or Elisabeth for leaving Germany.

She said she was not born an aristocrat, like Marianne Hoppe, the darling of Aryan cinema who used her standing with Hitler to protect Jews and gays and Communists in the theater. But she was happy to live in a land where literature was taken seriously. She said she baptized herself when the new Germany was born. When the old Germany was being thrown out, she picked up a name from the debris, vintage Louis XIV stuff. She tried it on and liked it. And she loved the letters of Charlotte von der Pfalz, the unhappy wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s auntie brother.

She said that film had lost its importance. Forty years after the war, film was escape and there were no big problems that were completely unheard-of before. Her old gang was dead, dead to the world, in bed, any bed, lost in barbiturate confusion, but when she floated through Wertheim’s, giving off a strong scent of violets, she found it an agreeable sensation to be on her own and not needing to shoplift. In West Berlin, she could live by day, in the open, unafraid, in love with the five-mark pieces in her pouch. She said it was a struggle for her to give any one of them up.

*   *   *

Cello sped again through the part of Bach’s A-Minor English Suite that she remembered Mom loved. Hayden’s Tyrolean farm boy said “Oh wow” as her fingers flew back down the keys. Suddenly her demonstration was over. Father Paul, as Hayden called his twenty-year-old gymnast, knew he’d blown the mood for her, made her self-conscious. “No, go on, please.” He got up to block her path. “I am sorry,” he said in English.

Dark hair tapped his face when she darted past his incredible shoulder. He bent backward and his eyes went wide. “Oh wow,” he said. She was so fast, her hair was a force become visible in pursuit of her. She was amazing to look at; something about her held your attention. I had to admit I was proud of her. I was also feeling a little sorry for her, as I’m sure Hayden was, too. She couldn’t bear her own talent.

She called out in German that she was just looking in on the children and she’d send the nanny back with the tray. We were having tea with our gay friends, she’d said that morning, also in German. It would be during naptime and before Dram came home to kiss his children.

He wouldn’t hear of taking money from me for letting me crash in my old maid’s room. I’d joked to Solomon and Francesca about the mice in my painter’s storage closet in Kreuzberg, wanting to seem the cool black expatriate to my brother, black corporate lawyer turned trader of futures now wed to the contemporary art curator who looked like a Raphael. But he got up immediately and made a big deal to Mom and Dad that I’d been living in a storage bin. It made me tear up, my butchness fled, until I saw that Dad had looked away.

Mom in turn informed Cello and then put me on the line.

“You should have told us you were a German poet,” Cello said in German. Fortunately, the difference in time zones and the needs of her children made the conversation entirely practical.

It was still cold, but I had made it back to the Mercedes-Benz star and the sound of my footsteps in new patent leather boots.

Nobody at the ChiChi had seen Bags for a while, but I didn’t ask Zippi where she got the yellow, rocklike hash we were smoking in the kitchen. I asked her for a job as suddenly as I’d accepted the joint from her. “Which one of these guys do you want me to chop to make space for you?” she said, indicating with the spliff the day bartender finishing his shift and the busboy/microwave operator. I realized that it was the first time she’d spoken to me in German. She was a completely different person, a harder, older woman than the gamine with the adorable bangs who sympathized in English.

I wasn’t worried. Berlin rewarded my faith. I turned up at Manfred’s pub and found Afer there. Through him I found my new address. It was going to be spring someday, and after the children had been put to bed, Dram and I smoked cigarettes together on the front terrace on the other side of the largest piano. I liked the chill in the air. Cello sat with us, draped in shawls, a cup of hot water and lemon on a little table.

They were impressed that I was doing something they considered utterly Berlin. We were reconciled all around, and we didn’t refer to the Russian doctor cleaning lady, who had decided that I wasn’t there. She didn’t clean the maid’s room or its bathroom because they were not in use as far as she was concerned. I got my own towels.

Cello thought it a good omen that I would be moved out by the third anniversary of my having got sober. The tea I waited for with Hayden and Father Paul, frisky as a ram, was my celebration. Hayden was saying that Michelangelo worked for the Borgias, even though they were criminals. The nanny was still in the kitchen. We couldn’t hear anything from the back of the vast apartment. Father Paul gave Hayden a quick kiss, then another. I got up, as discreet as Michael York as Brian in
Cabaret
, and went out onto the front terrace to smoke again. Gas came out of the Zippo lighter I’d stolen from Manfred and I told myself that I felt high.

The day was colorless, the street depressed under uninterrupted cloud. I could hear plates being stacked in the schnitzel restaurant across the street. A heavy front door closed somewhere to my right. In the other direction, the Kurfürstendamm was rehearsing, “You are on your own. Burt Lancaster doesn’t live here anymore.”

*   *   *

The legend in the downtown dive where I spent most of my drinking time in Chicago was that it occupied the site of what had been one of the last whorehouses in town where a black man could buy a white woman.

I didn’t believe it, or that there had been such an area as Little Cheyenne. The madam had a parallel business in venereal disease treatment, giving mercury oil applications and sarsaparilla baths, I was told. A lot of deaths in the neighborhood went unrecorded the summer Scott Joplin played at the Chicago World’s Fair. This information came to me from a short-order cook I met at the new library. Fat, eloquent, and dark, an Irish American drunk, he and I went on costly binges together in his flophouse. I still don’t know how I got away from him.

*   *   *

Potsdamerplatz was a sandy nowhere, blond and chalky in the sunrise of the north. We were riding the side of the earth that was getting higher, hanging out over bowls of coffee at a long wooden table, like farmers. The commune I’d been accepted into on Afer’s recommendation was several hundred meters from the Wall, but you could see it and one of the guard towers when you looked east from the old wagon doors. Near to it, a sort of phantom Wall, an unfinished elevated electric train track, ran for some time and then stopped abruptly, as if it had suddenly realized its pointlessness. We sat down when birds I couldn’t name and forgot every day to ask about flew over the Wall in the morning and again in the evening as they went back to the East.

The building, a former factory, stood on Theodor Lohmann Ecke. Empty lots bordered it on three sides, but a blank wall, made up of the sides of prewar working-class apartment houses, abutted the empty lots. Ahead of us, by itself, out there in front, like the bull of the herd, getting ready to face the Wall, was a blackened building with a short tower. It had been a brewery before the war. It was the last building on Potsdamerplatz. Everything else around it had been bombed, the ranges of brick and dust carted away by the famous rubble women, the women of Berlin who after the war cleaned up the wreckage of their own infatuation with uniforms.