Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

Otherwise, Cello was the color of a Snickers bar and had a large nose and lips copied from Man Ray. She was tall, one of those girls who would have been comforted by the publication of Jackie Onassis’s shoe size in the Detroit Free Press . Her ample hips gave her her music-camp nickname, which she was instantly proud of. Men noticed her breasts. Her posture was incredible. But her eyes were too small for her face. She did not get her mother’s big eyes; she got the raisins of her father’s side of the family, my side. Her glasses had to make up for a lot with their style. It was because of her eyes that other women, including her mother, felt that there were other women out there prettier than Cello. That made them generous about her brilliance as a pianist. Their approval lapped at the stairs Cello ascended when in their presence, her hair in her hands, just like the illustration in an old book we had about a princess in trouble.

Cello kicked at the tricycle that, apparently, had been involved in the collision of mother and child. “Bad tricycle,” she said in German. The older boys started kicking at the various toys that had turned the spacious foyer into a mess. The entrance hall framed three sets of double doors, one set of which opened onto a large salon, also chaotic from child’s play. An American fire truck that the children could ride was parked under a long black piano, which seemed to have rolled to rest where it was, not wholly in the corner, blocking the way to another room. Everything in the room felt as if it had been flung there, tables and telephone books and little wooden musical pipes and tiny drums and tiny T-shirts and Beethoven scores and plastic juice cartons with built-in straws.

“Who are you?” the oldest repeated in English.

“I’m Jed.” I was nervous about saying even the simplest things in German to a child, but I again asked him his name.

Once more he didn’t reply, and hopped away.

“Otto!” Cello said, putting her hollering youngest on the parquet. A hefty young white girl looked out from behind a door.

“Why aren’t you in the kitchen? Where’s Hildegard?”

The rosy-faced brunette scooted back down the corridor, agile in stretch pants she ought not to have had on. Cello lifted her boy again.

I just so happened to have been tested while in the rehab. The reason I’d not looked up Cello the last two summers I came to Berlin was that she’d told my mom that she could not have me around her children unless I had the AIDS test. I was secretly relieved not to have her reporting Stateside about me, as if people couldn’t have seen for themselves had they wanted to.

My cousin didn’t have to reply to the thank-you note I sent when I got back to Chicago after my first trip to Berlin, but Cello also didn’t answer when I wrote her the next year to say I was coming. She finally agreed to meet me for breakfast the day before I was scheduled to leave. I slept through our appointment. She forgave me in Chicago when she brought her three children to see her fading grandmother. Maximilian hadn’t been born yet. But when I came back to Berlin that summer, I promptly disgraced myself.

Now Cello was ready to help me in my starting over. She was showing me around the apartment, though I’d been there when they moved in three years before. By the end of that visit, I was sweaty in the mirror of the bathroom I kept adjourning to. I was not good enough at anything or good-looking enough to get away with being dirty, she said then. She’d kept me at arm’s length since. But Cello was good at wiping the slate clean.

“You remember where the kitchen is,” she said, in German. Back in Chicago, I was her cousin, but sometimes in Berlin she’d made it clear to me that I was her second cousin, a distant family obligation from the United States, a country relation she had to do something for. The boy in her arms and his six-year-old and five-year-old brothers trailing us down the hall that let in light from two sides were hardly kin to me. Cello handed Maximilian to the nanny and walked me, her mitzvah, past a pantry, a laundry room, and a bathroom. The corridor turned right. We walked through an open door and sat side by side on the bed.

How she accumulated shawls on her way down the hall I couldn’t say. She folded three or four layers of delicate stuff over her bare shoulders. Underneath us, the intricate pattern of a lovely white bed throw. Cello sprang up and ushered the children from the room, telling Otto and Konrad to join their sister and brother at the coloring table in the kitchen.

The furniture in the bedroom was on a smaller scale than what I was used to, real Biedermeier with white marble tops, the lamps dark Prussian iron. The last time I’d been in that room, there’d been only a camp bed and cartons piled on cartons. I wondered how I was going to ask Cello if I could make some room in the glass case for my own books, which would be arriving soon. I somehow had the feeling that the books had been in that case unexamined for a long time. Every space was taken up. Books were crammed on their sides. Cello didn’t read books, not really. She studied scores. Her eyes flashed across bars, like a burglar looking at windows for a way in. Yet somehow she had absorbed the vibe of the most important literary works of Western culture. She would have balked to be reminded that her father had this talent.

Cello’s father was my mom’s first cousin. He went nuts in the civil rights movement. Her mother thought she had a singing career, which meant that Cello and her little brother and sister pretty much stayed with us. Our extended family wasn’t large. There weren’t many of us, because of the family members who had no siblings or children or had just lost touch, not to mention those who weren’t speaking to us. Cello never could decide what to do with me. After all, I was the only person in West Berlin who’d known her when she was called Ruthanne. And I’d seen her face during one of her mother’s cabaret performances in Old Town in the 1970s.

Cello was infinitely more musical than her mother. The gap between them in regard to absolutely everything about music, from degree of talent to the type of music that engaged them, was deeply painful to Cello. It was my mom who called the blind piano tuner, got Cello to lessons, and discussed her next steps with her teachers, and no one more than Cello wanted her mother to be too wrapped up in her own singing lessons and choir practice to pay much attention to Cello’s day-to-day development. Cello had a life of her own elsewhere, behind the temple of the Art Institute, at the American Conservatory of Music, then on to the Chicago Musical College.

She was set apart by her destiny. She was not expected to look after her brother and sister; she was never asked to go to the store. Cello never had a child’s free time or an adolescent’s schedule of lassitude behind closed doors. She ate separately, later or earlier, like the poet-slave Phillis Wheatley in the home of her doting Methodist owners. Then she’d disappear upstairs. Once we’d finished, she liked to help my mom to wash up. We often had my mother’s social causes in the form of women bums and female cons staying with us, but Mom didn’t like for anyone else to help her do the dishes except Cello, no matter how many had been at the dinner table.

My mom was the person she talked to. Mom was the one in the family who knew the Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu when she heard it and just what it would take for Cello to learn it as well as she wanted to. Cello practiced two hours a day downtown and then was driven home, where she played some more. But sometimes she sat on Mom’s piano bench, not playing. She had to take out some of the music stuffed in the seat in order to get it flat. She liked to costume herself in an ankle-length pale blue taffeta gown and sit there, head bowed, hands folded in her lap, lights low.