Half-Blood Blues (6 page)

Hell, was I tired. Too tired to sleep. Tired as laundry, my ma used to say. I been talking German again like it was my first tongue and I thought how strangely the mind traps language, won’t let it go. I stretched back on the bed, let out a long breath. Room all done up in creams and beiges so pale was like you ain’t actually supposed to see any of it, like you’d stepped into a great void.

The quiet just swallowed me up. It was like being cottoned by moss. Oh Berlin, our beautiful Berolina, our charcoal life. What a city this was, after that first war. And all of us poor, antsy, fetching to know what more life held. I been a latecomer, didn’t hit these streets till ’27, but man was she beautiful. Hundreds of gates flocked here, dragging their instruments. Hundreds of stage hens.

Every joint felt famous then. The Barberina. Moka Efti. The Scala. In the Romanisches Café, the great brains of the age gathered like grapes to trade ideas over beer. I saw Kästner there, and Tucholsky, even Otto Dix. Dix maybe dreaming up nightmares for his paintings, pausing over his glass as something new struck him. That famous one he did of Anita Berber, the dancer, her hair and dress red as torn flesh.

That Berber girl, hell. We used to flock to watch her dance at the White Mouse. She’d slither half-nude through the packed tables, bring her dance to a climax by breaking champagne bottles over fellows’ heads. Broke one over Big Fritz’s head, he ain’t hardly noticed. I remember her working the Eldorado, too, that pansy club so dark you couldn’t hardly see the stage. And her all flexing and shivering to the dry old tunes of Camille Saint-Saëns –
man
, did she ever bring it down.

In the craziest days, there was more than twenty cabarets. For real. Damn near every casting agent become a Columbus – new talent was everywhere to discover. Marlene Dietrich at The Two Cravats; Ursula Fuller at the Red Feather. Who’d have reckoned Fuller – so dainty, an angel on earth – would cut her chops in that lowdown joint? Cause The Feather, man, it left
nothing
to the imagination. We only ever been there once but I ain’t never forget it. Dancers come out near-naked. Sitting on gents’ plates, their legs splayed, they slowly got dressed. Was like spying on your neighbour’s wife. That was the idea, anyhow. Though I remember Ernst leaned over to me and smiled: ‘Whose neighbour’s wife looks like
that
?’

A knock come at the door and I got achingly to my feet. I figured it got to be my damn suitcase. Poland, hell, I thought.

It wasn’t the suitcase. Some gent stood there holding a blue suit on a coat hanger under a plastic sleeve. ‘Mr Jones asked me to bring this down to you, sir,’ he said in dignified German. ‘And allow me to introduce myself.’ With his lightning-fast speech and his humble stutter I ain’t caught his name. But he seemed to be me and Chip’s minder for the night, sent from the festival. If it’s not too much trouble, he stammered, could you be ready to leave in an hour? Sure thing, brother. Closing the door, I was half afraid he might choose to stand in the damn hall the whole hour. I put my eye to the peephole. Well, he had more sense than you figured.

Ain’t no way Chip’s suit was going to fit. Chip known it too. But I laid it out carefully on the bed and then went to the window and drawn back the curtains, staring out at the city. The light was already greying, the late afternoon beginning to sink away. Streetlights was coming on. I studied the line of rooftops, the glint of glass off the Reichstag and the low sprawl of trees on the boulevards far below.

A city can change without being no different. I known that. Hell, I ain’t hardly recognized the Baltimore I come back to after Paris. But Berlin ain’t just any city. I remembered how Chip and me was in hot demand when we first got here. German jazz bands needed us for the sex of it. I mean, toss a few honest-to-god Yankees into your line-up and wham, you was the real thing. This festival, I known, wasn’t so different.

Back then, it even got so
Germans
began pretending they was American.
Herr Mike Sottneck aus New York
billed his band as ‘amerikanische Jazz-Tanzkapelle’. Wasn’t the only fake. Least the Krauts picked up some of what we was doing. See, we hailed from the cradle of jazz, and that gave us a feel for the music. I ain’t saying it was racial. It had to do with rubbing up against jazz in your tadpole years. With the fact that back home folks of a certain class wasn’t afraid to play it in their houses. Lot of the Krauts had classical training, and ain’t quite broken out of the schmaltzy continental salon dance style. Was like a sickness, that style. Like a damn infection in you instrument.

I ain’t saying everyone. But when you heard cats like Gluskin and Bela, with their choppy harmonic shifts and slippery percussion, well, you thought you’d died and gone to hell. Couldn’t swing their way out of a playground. No feel for improv. Ernst once told me he caught Wilhelm Bosch
transcribing a Red Nichols solo from a record
. Beat that. Red Nichols is bad enough. But then Bosch let it out on stage note by stale note, reading from his sheet music. Ernst was laughing so hard he like to be sick.

Chip and me, we didn’t give that sort the time of day. We was snobs, purists. And so we swung with Franz Grothe and Georg Haentzschel, Walter Dobschinski and Ernst Hoellerhagen and Stefan Weintraub. We swung with Eric Borchard, till that night when, high on horse, he strangled his girlfriend. Then we swung with someone else. It been a ride.

It was a cool night, the coppery reek of raw exhaust on the breeze. I looked across the grass of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, studying the glowing ochre Babylon theatre. From a distance it put me in mind of a slab of cheddar, that lustrous colour and all them angles. How strange to be standing here again, in this very square I used to tread when I was young. The building caught the last of the sunlight, bright against the grey square.

Chip stood between me and our eerily silent minder, what’s-his-name. Chip was fixing his hair, spitting on his fingers then dabbing at the pale part in his Afro. Already sick with nerves, I looked past him, at the Babylon, the crowd of folks spilling out onto the plaza. Seeing just how many there was, I begun swallowing hard. My damn throat felt like it stuffed with cotton.

‘Sid? You got the nerves, brother?’ said Chip.

I waved him off. ‘I’m alright.’

The square was filled with a carpet of folk rolling all the way to the theatre across, the Volksbühne, with its fearsome grey pillars. The Babylon looked packed so tight a gent couldn’t sneeze without greasing his neighbour. As if every Tom, Fritz and Eva in the city had turned out. Hell. I’d banked on this being a smaller affair.

‘How we even going to get in?’ I said. ‘There ain’t even room to get in the damn door.’

‘Aw, we’ll get in. You’ll see.’ Chip was looking at me with his thin oyster lips pressed tight. ‘You sure you alright? You looking a little green, Sid.’

‘I ain’t green.’

Chip grunted, patted my shoulder. Felt good having his hand there, reassuring. I was damned uncomfortable. Chip’s suit hung too short on my arms, hiked high up off my wrists like I about to wash my damn face. And his shirt sagged real loose on the collar, tailored for his fat bull’s neck I guess.

I thought of telling him so. Instead, I said, ‘I should’ve punched you in the goddamned mouth second you asked me to come back here.’

That seemed more fitting.

But Chip, he was laughing, already leading me and our minder toward the front door. ‘Hitting me wouldn’t of made no difference. Ain’t one single tooth nor shred of sense left in this old head.’

‘I expect that’s the truth.’

He turned back to me then with a funny smile on his face. ‘You ready to get back into the world, Sid?’

And before I could answer, he thrown open the damn door and shoved me on in.

Just like that, everything erupted. Hordes of folks was all up in our faces, their cries clattering about the theatre like trapped birds.
Chip Jones! Mr Jones! Sidney Griffiths! Charles! Sid!
Cameras flashed like pinpricks of light on the surface of water. Our minder, the sorry runt, he just too damn scared and too damn small to make anything of his job. As he squeaked for folks to step on back, I got jostled right and left, nearly falling down the carpeted steps, the silk of my suit roughing against Chip’s. A sudden urge to grip Chip’s coat come over me, but knowing I’d look a fool I just held my breath. The air felt heavy and sultry as a July night in Baltimore. And everything around us glowed red and yellow: the walls, the glare of sun dying in the windows, the gleam of blouses and handbags, of shoes. I felt suffocated by the marigold brightness of it all. And some damn fool named Sidney Griffiths had his name shouted over and over, like he was lost.

‘Just a little nervous, eh?’ said a milky voice suddenly at my ear. Caspars’ arm come up under mine.

The crowd began unbraiding around us, and I turned to look Kurt Caspars in the face. His plump cheeks all stubbly, his Scandinavian paleness a shock against his dyed black hair. He was smiling that half-mast smile of his, that awful ironic smile makes you feel something bad just happened somewhere else and what kind of damn creep you must be not to know about it yet. Nodding, he left us.

Our minder led me and Chip through the nightmare of a foyer into the theatre. I ain’t said nothing to him. Cause damn if that theatre wasn’t
packed
. Stuffed row on row with every damned brand of folk. All that noise in the foyer – they was the
overflow
. God in holy heaven, I thought, sinking into my seat. Why did I come.

The minder sat Chip in the front row, among the VIPs. Set him down like an old sack of potatoes between two gents we ain’t known from Adam. Then he led me to the other end of the same row, taking the seat beside mine. That surprised me. Guess I reckoned he’d file old Jones and me side by side, seeing as how we was a package deal.

I sat feeling out of sorts, a weird sulphur smell coming off the upholstery, like it was newly shampooed. Seats creaking around me like Virginia crickets. The other VIPs was all older than me, wax-faced and stern. I didn’t know none of them. No Marsalis, no Grappelli. I wondered where everyone was.

Kurt Caspars took the stage, smiling his cold weasel smile. ‘Thank you all for coming tonight,’ he said. His weird, angular accent somehow put me in mind of Big Fritz. Hell. Fritz. That poor bastard. There was a time I couldn’t think of him without getting angry. Coming back here was a damn fool idea.

It pleased me some to see Caspars’ hands trembling. ‘What we’ve managed to create here tonight,’ he said, ‘it’s been the work of so many voices, of so many years. A festival for Hieronymus Falk here, in what used to be Horst-Wessel Square? It’s a testament to the power of the new Germany, of a people filled with the future.’

The crowd, man, they ate this cheddar
up
. Cheering, clapping, banging the damn armrests on their creaking blue seats. Me, I sat frowning to myself. The thing about Caspars, see, he’s a master of talking big and saying nothing. But conviction in a voice ain’t like meat in a stew. It ain’t got no sustenance. I knew that even back as a kid. I glanced down the row to see what old Jones was making of this. His face look empty, sharp, staring straight at the stage. I tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t look at me.

All of a sudden Caspars quit the stage and a tremendous hush descended. The lights dropped, and the whole theatre sat in silence, waiting. I must’ve been fidgeting, cause our minder leaned over and whispered, ‘They’re going to show the documentary first, then afterwards your row will go onstage to answer questions.’

‘So they’re delaying the guillotine,’ I said.

The chap paused, silence opening between us. Then he leaned over once more and said, ‘They’re going to show the documentary first, then afterwards your row will go onstage to answer questions.’

A chill run through me. I got that odd feeling again, like something bad was going to happen. My stomach was burning.

But then the screen began to glow, the soundtrack crackled in, the audience began applauding. I drawn in a slow breath. Two hours, I told myself. Two hours. Ain’t hardly long at all.

Caspars’ documentary wasn’t told in no straight line. Seemed like one person was still talking when another one shown up onscreen, and then they was both talking over some photograph of someone else. I don’t know. But every time the kid flash up onscreen, his face eight feet tall, that chill cut through me. It got so I felt like I was watching myself watching the picture, my eyes pried wide, my hands damp on my trouser legs. Christ, here it all was, every last piece of our Berlin life: the women we’d messed with, the clubs we’d gigged at. And ain’t none of it seemed
right
.

Then this old gent come on and I known him at once. He’d been our band’s first manager. Hell, he’d lost his hair, his blue eyes was hazy with age and almost colourless, but I known him alright. He looked tidy and simple and entirely unscarred by life.

‘You have these four men in Paris,’ he was saying, ‘these men who’ve just watched the Nazis march in. And what do they do, instead of packing up to leave like everyone else? They write this song of resistance, they give their collective finger to the authorities. In this tiny little studio, where they could be arrested anytime. This studio where the equipment hasn’t been used for at least half a decade, the lathe and lacquers just sitting there gathering dust. Most of the blanks had been damaged, the coating scratched. I mean, in some cases you could see straight through to the aluminum. Now, you have to understand – to achieve perfect sound on lacquer-on-aluminum, the disc’s surface must be absolutely smooth. So the band had maybe nine or ten functional discs to work with. Nine or ten tries to get it right. And at the centre of it all, you’ve got this kid directing everything, this twenty-year-old Falk. And he’s screaming in the middle of takes, wrecking them, he’s grabbing the discs and gouging their surfaces with his pocket knife. Anything to stop a bad take from existing.

‘And amazingly, it’s on the very morning before Falk’s arrest that Griffiths decides he’s had enough of the kid’s perfectionism. So he takes the last disc they’ve cut and he tucks it into the case of his upright. You know, on the off chance it’s any good. And what’s remarkable about this fact is that those parts of the recording that couldn’t be remastered, those parts where there are actual pieces of the performance missing – those were pressed off by Griffiths’ bass strings boring into the lacquer. So those gaps are missing because the thing is that fresh, that literally hot off the press.