Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Her only solace from this all-encompassing pallidity was Charles Stone, and she found it not so much in his music but in the man. Klaudia and I never spoke about how much her sister and the Schwa looked alike. And as far as I know, neither did they. All we knew was that the two became inseparable. Whenever he was in the streets rebuilding his wall, she was right there next to him, blasting his music on a boom box. And conversely, whenever she was hospitalized he was at her bedside singing lullabies and helping her tear down her mental walls. He encouraged her to confront her fears, and for a while she listened. Taking up nursing even though the uniform caused her to break out in hives. For a while she even dated a Kenyan albino she met at the Slumberland. But the grind of being black in Berlin wore on her.

I’d last seen her a few weeks before on Russian disco night at a popular nightspot in Prenzlauer Berg called An Einem Sonntag im August. Fatima, Stone, Klaudia, and I queued up for over an hour waiting to get in. If you’ve ever heard Russian disco you’d stand in line too. An amalgam of Gypsy hip-hop, Siberian soul, and Moldavian ska, it’s an underground music so unabashedly commercial and cheesy that it takes awfulness to heights unexplored since Lawrence Welk covered the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” The effect is truly lobotomizing, and Fatima looked forward to her and the Schwa dancing their troubles away to classics like “Vodka Revolution,” “Generation @,” and “Vassily’s Groove.”* When we finally reached the entrance, the doorman said he could let the women in, but not me and the Schwa.

“There’s a new club policy,” he said. “No black men.” I followed his finger to an exclusionary sign that, if you’d struck out the No , would’ve been the entrance policy at the Slumberland. The sign read:

No Admittance To Black Men

Who Meet Any Of The Following Criteria

• Under 25 years of age

• Wearing expensive and grotesque American sportswear, gold chains, and pricey watches

• Bloodshot eyes

• Bad teeth in conjunction with unusual body hygiene for an African (i.e., strong-smelling deodorant and aftershave)

• Not in the company of white females or locals

• Frequent the drug scene

• Exceptions will be made for tourists and black men with intelligent eyes

While we protested, the doorman shoved us into the street, explaining that the club was having problems with black men selling drugs and sexually harassing the female help.

“We aren’t racist,” he shouted, addressing the crowd more than us. “We respect our multikulti brethren in the neighborhood far too much for us to suspect all black people. Our policy is only directed toward drug dealers.”

Peeking over his shoulder I could see Doris and Lars inside, boogying on down totalitarian style to a polka-punk ditty called “Dancing on the Airplane.” I felt less insulted by the place’s discriminatory illogic than by the fact that he failed to notice the glint of intelligence in my eyes.

While Fatima had a breakdown sitting on the hood of an Opel station wagon, I walked up on the scruffy gatekeeper and batted my brilliant peepers smartly in his face.

“Come on, man. You mean to tell me you don’t see at least a hint of intelligence in these eyes?”

Fatima never recovered from the insult. Among the daily affronts — the squirt gun assaults, dirt-clod bombardments, subway gropes, and “compliments” about her excellent German and her good fortune in having grown up in Germany and not Africa — the incident at An einem Sonntag was the snub that stopped the cultural chameleon from changing colors. There is no camouflage for being black.

When the cops asked the crowd about the smoldering corpse, they were really addressing Thorsten, as he was the only white person present. Since my gig the cold-hearted neo-Nazi couldn’t get the Schwa’s sound out of his head no matter how many Turks he beat, Chinese he stoned, Jewish ghosts he exorcised, and niggers he flicked lit cigarette butts at. On days off from his piano-moving job, he’d call me.

“Where is he?”

I’d call Fatima to find out, relay the info to him. He’d bus in from Marzahn just to sit curbside and listen to the music, hoping to catch the Schwa before he was shooed away by the authorities. The verdammte Neger across the street, who since the Bundestreffen also followed the Schwa, sometimes gave him dirty looks, but Stone and Fatima never paid him any mind.

As Thorsten explained himself to a sympathetic cop, the paramedics floated a plastic sheet over Fatima’s body. It wasn’t hard from the evidence (a singed metal gas canister and a melted boom box) to figure out what had happened.

Thorsten told the cop that when he showed up and took his place on the bus stop bench, it was as if she had been waiting for him. She stared him down with those large, distant, camel-brown eyes, then silently toted her gas can to the nearby station. Splurged on two liters of high octane. Returned to the scene. Sat down. Drenched herself in gasoline. Jabbed her earphones into the radio. Turned up the volume. Adjusted the treble. Held up her lighter rock ’n’ roll — concert style and lit it. Hell of an encore.

The Schwa and Fatima had gotten a lot of work done that day, and I admired their handiwork. At nearly five feet high and fifteen feet long, the wall was higher, longer, smoother, and sturdier than I’d ever seen it. Stone remarked that Fatima had studied some architecture books and had taught him that before building he should sort the stones into piles and that the base of a freestanding wall should be about half its height with the bigger stones at the bottom.

By this time the police had barricaded the good-sized group of increasingly agitated blacks behind wooden horses. Seeing the Schwarzen had been contained, the coroner whipped the sheet off Fatima’s burnt corpse and began pounding the remains into ash with a shovel while two cops prepared to sweep her up into a body bag. The callous treatment of the deceased set the black Germans off, and from behind a phalanx of riot police they hurled rocks and curses. Thorsten, with his ball-peen skull and Nazi chic attire, drew his fair share of both the stony fusillade and abuse. The rocks were your standard fare: hard, meta-morphic, and amorphous. But the invective was uniquely German: wonderfully smart, deeply emasculating, and with a dash of U-boat sailor’s brio thrown in for good measure. Whether you call it snapping, capping, or bagging, the insult the beach-ball-afroed Nordica unleashed on Thorsten was one for the ages: “It’s your fault she died, you cowardly, warm-shower-taking, satin-testicled, spotty-dicked onanist who stinks like a lion’s cage, saves every fucking e-mail, answers every fucking e-mail, compares gas prices, drives an automatic car, uses his brakes when driving uphill, and is a fish-faced, poor excuse for an evolutionary mishap who waves back at the Teletubbies and only swims near the edges of the pool.”

A lesser man would have joined Fatima in suicide then and there, but Thorsten just stood there, hands on hips, ignoring the barrage of rocks and insults like some cocksure army officer oblivious to the war going on around him.

He took a small, neatly folded piece of paper and tossed it to Klaudia, who tucked it safely behind the wall.

“Your sister gave me this before she killed herself.”

“Is it a suicide note?”

“I don’t know; I can’t read. I didn’t give it to the bulls because I thought maybe it blames me for her death. Read it to me, but cover your ears so that you don’t hear it, okay?”

The cute, twisted logic of thinking that if she couldn’t hear herself reading the note she wouldn’t know what it said caused a tight, almost morbid smile to break out on her tearstained face. The Schwa and I scooted in next to her and peeked over her shoulder. Though the note was in German, Thorsten made us cover our ears too. Klaudia started to read: It was a stanza from a poem, “They’re People Like Us,” by May Ayim.