Black Deutschland (34 page)

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.

She was without her instruments and she was without her children and who was sufficiently intimate with her to ask if she was aware of this. She was mistress of a pink and black satin-covered sofa in a fussy suite at the Hotel Kempinski. I knew what Rosen-Montag thought of the Ku’damm version of the venerable hotel, but he made it not my place to think that she was near her children. Cello of the incredible posture sat back tall against the sofa, fighting her disliked body’s need to be hunched over and hugging her elbows. She had learned to ride, for Dram, but horses bored her, as did bicycles, all buses, most trains, and anything slow, she once said.

I stood when I heard his voice in the carpeted corridor. Looking only at Cello, his intensity lighting the space around her, a fully suited Rosen-Montag, flanked by three stony-faced members of his entourage, followed by competent board-member-looking guys or attorneys. If there was going to be a drawn-out battle with his second wife over his copyrights and intellectual property, they knew who would prevail. If they were ever going to have to tell him that his second wife had committed suicide, they knew what their faces should show.

He had something he had to tell a flushed and trembling Cello and bent over the coffee table for her hands. His abdominal muscles pulled her to her feet.

I nearly burst into tears at the little-girl steps that her resistance to him made her take. The extra faces around him went somber for this genuine Helen in his life.

I could see her mouth of subdued lipstick form the question, What? and in her stretched face the hottest fright at what he was about to tell her. Her knees folded, her shining hair no comfort. Rosen-Montag did not need help. He walked her down the corridor. I heard her sad little cry of surprise.

It didn’t sound as though Dram had killed the children. I stood around with the staff. We weren’t speaking. Rosen-Montag took a long time coming back. He’d got her to lie down. His people disappeared into the deluxe corridor and I was alone with him for the second time in my life. We didn’t sit. He didn’t seem manic. In order not to call him Nevin, I called him nothing.

I could tell from my own reaction that I had not expected him to have them on his mind. Dram, he said, was making it as hard for them as he could. For the moment, they took turns being with the children, she by day, he by night, but Dram would not let her see them alone or take them out of the apartment or let the man who would be their new
abba
accompany her. Rosen-Montag wanted her to rest before it was again her turn to put the children to bed. The youngest wasn’t sleeping.

I was going to have to wait to ask after Manfred. Rosen-Montag walked me to the door. He appreciated my not telling her and he was just as glad that I hadn’t known. He’d been keeping it from Cello. Finally, he’d had to tell her. Vladimir Horowitz, entirely beloved, was dead.

I told Francesca what was going on, who told Mom. What exploded between Mom and Cello that could not be taken back I did not find out. She and Cello never spoke again.

*   *   *

I didn’t know when I got on the S-Bahn that November night that I had had my last conversation with my European cousin. I also didn’t know what had been happening down the street, although a while back Co-op members had returned one night dejected because trains to Leipzig had been stopped.

Bags said he heard that East Germany’s top dog complained to the Soviet leader that his car had no brakes and the Soviet leader told him that didn’t matter because the only direction possible for him was downhill. I knew things were weird enough in East Germany and Prague for me to wonder more than I had why Bags was sending me across the border at Friedrichstrasse. I’d done unexplained currency-smuggling favors for him as casually as I’d done drugs.