Clarence Major - My Amputations

Now, Berlin is another story. He was met at the airport by professors Wolfgang Proeschel and Heiner Graf, both Americanists. Had lunch at a student hangout where World War One saddles and spurs hung on hooks from the ceiling over the bar. Eye drift. Amesville was carved right into the wood of the table top where he calmly rested his arms. He wasn't alarmed. Already he felt more at ease in Germany than in France: but for the shabby reason everybody spoke his language. Hmmm. Proeschel was round and kindly through thick glasses; Graf was younger and lean with a twisted face holding tiny untrusting eyes. At two he was introduced by Graf to about a hundred students in a classroom on the second floor of the John F. Kennedy-Institut fuer Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universitat. He cleared his throat and said how happy he was. Then: “I once went to a Private Eye for help. I needed him for a novel. He gave me a full report on my problem. It cost a lot. I didn't get my money's worth. I'm talking about writing. So in the end I had to invent the character I paid him to find… ” and when he finished the questions were intelligent (political, historical, social, reluctantly literary). Mason did his best. That night there was a dinner party at Proeschel's. Mason had only an itsybitsy German: he'd mostly skipped fruehstueck — since the fries were bullets and the steak disguised, rawhide. After the party around the dinner he and Heiner went out on the town. Little sneaky-eyed guy turned out to be quite a number. He took Mason in search of the myth of Berlin: the 1930s? A thirst for sekt? for weisswein? A bar called Sloe Gin and Sin (already America, huh!) in the Mitte area. Chilly and damp night. But the little guy knew his way: he led Mason into the indirectly-lit decor of Early Longhair: slender paste-white women in long black dresses wearing Garbo-wide hats with mysterious veils holding ivory cigarette holders in delicate fingers away from the flutter of their own eyelids. Music was Duke's and Whiteman's — not at the same time. Latter-day filmstars millionaires mistresses of bankers or bankers themselves? Mason felt slightly ruffled here: a little too tweedy: mock formality. After the sweetness of the hard liquor and his own cigarettes rubbed him the wrong way he suggested they leave. They were both quite drunk by now. Graf even pissed in the mouth of the alley outside. They fell into a Spanish restaurant and demanded gazpacho and cocido escabeche de pesado — hoping to sober. Night lights showed them the way to filmed cunts: and they gazed at them: Mason was seeing double already — and seeing crazy: a naked man was hanging upside down in a closet: he had a hypo stuck in the base of his spine: for the umpteenth time he fought off Jesus trying to whip him over the head with a blackthorn cane. In Son of Sloe Gin and Sin, Heiner told him to get ahold of himself. He was staggering in respectable places. He saw Melba there: said she was moving to Yoknapatawpha County to avoid the fact that figleaves are shaped like male genitals. But he said they have figs down there! Giggling and staggering together holding each other up in the rain he and Heiner broke their way into a dingy joint where he saw one of his sons — Keith? Arthur? another one whose name…? — a soldier leaving with a German woman. Oh, my oh my, thought Mason! Party time! But the young American soldier and his — date? girlfriend? — “companion” walked right by him as though he were a stain on the carpet: despite the fact that Mason cried out: “ Keith ! I love you! I'm your father!” But no dice. And Mason and Heiner held each other up as they stumbled past the reception desk from which Mason snatched a big antique vase (with hand-painted ladies in a garden along its central swell). Roses stuffed in it. Hmmm. Under street lights he cackled till he fell in the gutter — but he didn't lose the flowers. Heiner helped him up and Mason saw this woman in mink coming walking with her poodle. As he approached her with the vase she lost faith in humanity and ran. Immediately he turned and bumped into a girl perhaps eighteen: he rammed the vase into her chest, she automatically wrapped her arms around it and laughed. She got the joke. And he and Heiner continued to follow the flute sounds of some Pied Piper. After Heiner vomited in the gutter and on the fender of a VW he started blabbering about Spanish food again. A place called Castell de Ferro. They stopped a taxi. Mason told the driver: “Take me to my mother's place. It's on Drexel.” Heiner punched him lightly. “No, no. Pal, we not — listen we're in Barcelona. Didn't you know …?” “No,” said Mason. “I don't want to go to Drexel. Take us to my place in the Village. Edith'll cook something for us. Even if she's asleep she'll get up. You'll like her, Cowie.” “My name's not Cowie.” “Okay. Okay.” The driver said, “Which hotel?” Heiner's pronunciation was good even through the haze. The driver delivered them and they managed to pay him — twice. But it wasn't the right hotel. Across the street a bunch of people stood huddled together in a plastic tube waiting for the bus. Then it happened. Blam! Mason's eardrums refused to take the sound. It was the end of the earth. The people in the tube flew to pieces — arms, heads, legs. A flash. It wasn't anything but a movie: couldn't be real. Must be watching TV. Yet… there was something different about this movie. He could smell it. They stumbled across the street through jammed traffic!… didn't notice people running crazily from the scene. Mason touched a bloody arm on the hood of a parked car just outside the bus-stop area. Is that a real arm? The fingers were cold. But, Jez, uh, the damned thing felt real. Where was Heiner? There: squatting over — what was that? — a dead horse? No, an old man, probably: too much blood to tell. Sharp smell of burning plastic. Gelignite? Screaming from a gathering mob of stick-like figures dangling against darkness and the profusion of glittering pin-points. And approaching sirens. Gotta wake up. Just force yourself up out of it. Now there was pushing. Who'd he been with? German guy. What's his name? Mason fell. Feet lifted over him. It took ten years to get on his knees — the ground was ice cold — and to crawl from pavement to snow-covered dog-shit smeared grass. There he climbed to his wobbly feet at the edge of the mob. It seemed to him that something was really happening. Was he on a train being searched by Feds? If not then why was that rumbling going on beneath his feet? Perhaps some hanky-panky on the part of MRF? He heard ’em up there in the dark even now: geese flying overhead. Bright red and white lights flashing. Cops. Medics. He stumbled back into bluer shadows. Wasn't that Edith there at the edge of the crowd — dressed as Kitty in Gunsmoke ? Without a coat… Mason touched the wetness on his beard. Held his hand out under a beam of light coming through fractured tree limbs: blood. It was warm blood and his… He felt his teeth. Big one right in front on the left was loose. Ah, Holy Kabbala! Cable Cab Calloway! He was losing his grip. With his tongue's tip he held the big chopper in place. Heiner Graf wiped the blood from Mason's face. An irreducible self looked out of Mason up at the Taurus one above him. If this were the world in microcosm Mason wanted nothing to do with it. “Come! Off to the Potsdamer! We have a train to catch!” Mason lifted himself to an elbow. Bettle lava had his tongue glued to his mouth roof. Despite the slat stone and sting of the winter night, Mason was sweating rutabagas. And where were they going? He felt a blazing need for Wongo's galaxy of advice. This insane journey was driving him bananas. Who was this grief-stricken maniac pulling at his arm? Hadn't they just swam the Spree all the way to a fruit barge anchored near the Reichstag and the Friedrichstrasse. And hadn't he fallen into a soot-covered barrel of coal covered with kerosene-smelling snow. And who was it that saved this Taurus clown from his own skullduggery when a bunch of workers at the Anhalter Bahnhof wanted to nail him to a fence beneath a billboard that said, “Shop at The Karstadt!” Then wasn't it just hours ago that they'd gone to the bloody railroad anyway and hadn't they travelled some distance. And got mixed up with a bunch of strikers and beaten by the police in front of a factory gate in north Berlin. And it couldn't have been too long ago that this same man led him along the aisle of a devil-out-of-hell S-Bahn car filled with people as stunned and stiff as figures in an Ernst Fritsch or a Cesar Klein. They were all armed with cubist costumes. So why go anywhere else? What was the point. Mason didn't want to get up. Something, perhaps his left knee, was frozen. An asteroid churned in his lower stomach. He felt the lunar blues. Yet Graf pulled him up and leaned him against a car that looked like a middle-aged nude by Grosz. This had to be a frame-up. Else why had he seen Florence Soukhanov, a fictional character of his own making, in a coffee shop on Potsdamer Strasse spying on him from behind a crisp copy of Der Sturm. And why had he been unable to convince Graf that she was a spy for Painted Turtle. Graf claimed he'd never heard of Painted Turtle. He also denied knowing Little Sally Walker too. But Mason knew something was fishy about this whole situation. It wasn't just his well-justified paranoia. As Mason attempted to sink like a wet noodle, Graf held him up. “Care to dance?” “Not funny,” Graf said. “Well miss the train. If we're going to do this thing right we should go all the way. You haven't seen the winter bathers at the Wannsee Standbad. I must take you to the grave sites too. Look! There's a cop coming. Let's move! Can you walk?” They were on a one-way street.