Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Q: Why do East German policemen travel in threes?

A: One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.

The haughtiness they showed toward their Ossie brethren somehow led them to be less shy about expressing their frustrations with the burden of being German.

Once, on a drizzly May morning, Doris, Lars, and I were at an outdoor café sharing an English-language newspaper, when Doris made an outburst that almost caused me to choke on my bratwurst.

“I hate this old Jew!” she shouted, backhanding the World section.

The “old Jew” was David Levin, the paper’s Berlin correspondent. I rather liked and identified with his conflicted personal accounts of the new Germany. Doris felt them too biased and bitter, and apparently too Jewish and too old.

Hearing the word Jew uttered in public used to be a rare occurrence. If a German used it around you it was a sign of affection. It meant that they were comfortable with you — and you too comfortable with them. Sometimes Klaudia would say it when she felt embittered about the second-class treatment Afro-Germans received. If she was feeling particularly aggrieved she’d take a good look around, ensuring that no Jews or Jewish ghosts were within earshot, and hiss, “maybe if I was Jewish . .,” never finishing the thought.

Both Doris and Klaudia felt a certain entitlement to the word. Klaudia’s sense of dispensation came from a “Hey, doesn’t anybody care, they sterilized us and sent us to the camps too?” outlook. Doris’s prerogative stemmed simply from the word being in the dictionary. If it was in the dictionary she was allowed to say it, wasn’t she?

“Old Jew?” I said, peering over my sports section while Lars wisely played deaf.

“The fucking guy never says anything positive about our country.”

Sometimes I’ll be on the train, standing in an out-of-the-way corner looking at the commuters, skin-pierced punks, and college kids all sitting ramrod straight in their seats, eyes front, hands folded in their laps, elbows tucked into their sides, and my prejudice and genocidal fears get the best of me. I think that one day a buzzer will ring and these people will all stand in unison, snap to attention with a heel click and a bellicose “Jawohl!” and order me to take the next train. I know that this buzzer can sound in any country, at any time. And that some will stand in good faith and others will stand in fear, and that a select few will stand taller than the rest by fighting back, harboring, leafleting, dying, and trying. But still.

“It’s the sins of the fathers, not the sins of the grandfathers — why should we Germans suffer forever?” Doris said, though as a devout pantheist she should know better than to think there’s a statute of limitations on genocidal guilt, much less suffering.

What’s funny is that if that buzzer ever does go off, I know I’d run to her. I’d skulk my way to Kruezberg, sprinting from shadow to shadow, until I ended up in her arms. And she’d sell her barely used possessions and find a way to spirit me out of the country. Any other persecutees would be shit out of luck because I wouldn’t share a single can of soured herring with their asses.

Ladling spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, she summarized the article aloud, thinking that once I heard the unnecessarily mean-spirited screed, I’d see her anger as justified.

“Mr. Levin says that in the short time he’s lived in Germany he’s noticed that Germans rarely speak in the first-person singular. He claims it’s a symptom of groupthink. That talking to one German is like talking to eighty million German Siamese twins all conjoined at the mind. Ask someone what his opinion is, and the first word out of our mouths is we .”

“You do that all the time.”

“No we don’t!”

The way she bandied about Jew made me miss the Wall. Before reunification no one called me Neger to my face or said Jew as a pejorative. Now young boys jump out of parked cars and, in a pitiful imitation of the syndicated American cop shows they watch on television, point finger guns at my head and demand that I “freeze.” On the train a doughy white boy in the car ahead will catch my eye through the window and slide his finger across his throat. I’ll visit a sick friend in the hospital and the man in the bed next to her will call me “Smokey.”

I’m not the only one who misses the Wall; some Germans miss it too. The Wessies miss how special living on an island in the middle of a landmass made them feel. With no mandatory military service, West Berlin was a state-supported counterculture, a Jamestown without the Indians, Woodstock without the rain. East Berlin, on the other hand, was Wounded Knee without the news coverage, Wattstax without the soul music, and yet there are Ossies who miss the Wall. They miss the slow pace, the leisurely work hours, the obsession with free expression and not money, the lack of choice and the commensurate beauty of being able to go into a restaurant for dinner and not have to make nine imperialist decisions about your first course.

“Soup or salad?”

“Salad.”

“Green, spinach, Caesar, or arugula?”

“Spinach.”

“Italian, thousand island, French, blue cheese, or vinaigrette?”

“Blue cheese.”

“Regular or low-fat?”

Needless to say, the black expat population longed for the Wall’s return. Yes, the reunification had, as the black security guard and others like him had hoped, doubled the number of, pardon the misogynist redundancy, “fuckable white women”; however, it also had the unforeseen impact of quadrupling the number of white male assholes. Not that the asshole-per-capita ratio was any greater among East Germans. Reunification and the rise of neo-Nazi activity had given the West German asshole the freedom to show his true colors.

The personification of black American frustration in post-Wall Berlin was an eccentric black man who’d periodically come into the Slumberland pushing a wheelbarrow filled with assorted pieces of brick, stone, coins, and paper money. He never spoke, preferring to let the cardboard sign dangling from his neck do his talking for him. A placard said, HOW CAN WE READ THE WRITING ON THE WALL, IF THERE IS NO WALL. If you didn’t pitch some money or a good-sized rock into the wheelbarrow he’d stick a grimy finger in your drink.

Unlike the brickless brick mason, I had the Schwa to keep me sane in race-unconscious Berlin. Klaudia von Robinson’s brick-house blackness helped too. She and Fatima would show up unannounced at my door. I guess that’s how they did it in the former GDR. No phones. If I wasn’t home, they’d leave a message scrawled on a flier for Korean BBQ and jam it into the keyhole. If I had female company, they’d sit outside in the hallway, wait for the woman to leave, and then in a fit of pretend jealousy bust in demanding to know if I had licked her toes.

“If you kissed her smelly white feet I’m leaving,” Klaudia would declaim, examining my lips and tongue for who knows what. Nail-polish chips and toe-jam residue, I guess.

Despite delusions of a potential ménage a noir, the chicken-fucking song didn’t work on Klaudia and Fatima. The first time I played the tape, the only articles of clothing that came off were their shoes.

“Hey, that’s the man who suggested I go to the Torpedo Käfer that night we met,” Klaudia said, flinging her espadrilles at the man on the TV screen.

“Stasi,” growled Fatima, pointing at him.

“So offensichtlich!” Klaudia said, which is German for “Duh!”

While not devotees to the Schwa in the historical sense that Lars was, the von Robinson sisters, at first familiar with his music, soon became deeply fervent fans.