Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

Hotel Berlin was on late, a Hollywood melodrama made at the close of World War II about the end of the war on the Nazi side of things. Generals, refugees, resistance fighters, whores, and spies run around the hotel corridors and suites, scheming and lying. “Haven’t you told him he must commit suicide?”

Some days only the admiration of the whole world will do, but the world just isn’t giving it. She said that they didn’t make propaganda; they made entertainment. She said some of us may not have heard of Conrad Veidt, but he was the most famous Nazi actor and he’d been a leftist Jewish sympathizer before that. She said that even though the Party knew that most of her circle had been arrested, she kept her job at Ufa until she was called up. They were sending everybody to the Eastern Front. That was in 1943. She was twenty-eight years old and handsome. She said she never lied about her age and she said what she did about having been a handsome young man, because none of the films she had bit parts in survived.

She said it was important for her to talk to the young. When she was born, her father already had been lost on his Western Front. She was a wraith, but still young and handsome when her war ended. She put on her first pair of nylons for a Soviet officer. He brought her a phonograph. They danced to big-band swing. Then one night she waited, into the morning. She never saw him again or found out what had happened to him. She didn’t have a photograph of him. But she had tucked away in a Schrank one scratched record that he had loved.

The young thought that she was old when they got their war, which was technically somebody else’s war, though America tried to make Vietnam everybody’s war, she said. She did not feel old. Perhaps it was her pearls. She was proud of them, the young. They stood up and asked their parents about her war. She said that once you learned something about it, you wanted to know more. She said she would never get to the end of it herself. It just continued. There was no relief from what you could learn once you started. She didn’t like the feeling of people trying to put the war behind them. She said some people hadn’t forgiven Marlene or Elisabeth for leaving Germany.

She said she was not born an aristocrat, like Marianne Hoppe, the darling of Aryan cinema who used her standing with Hitler to protect Jews and gays and Communists in the theater. But she was happy to live in a land where literature was taken seriously. She said she baptized herself when the new Germany was born. When the old Germany was being thrown out, she picked up a name from the debris, vintage Louis XIV stuff. She tried it on and liked it. And she loved the letters of Charlotte von der Pfalz, the unhappy wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s auntie brother.

She said that film had lost its importance. Forty years after the war, film was escape and there were no big problems that were completely unheard-of before. Her old gang was dead, dead to the world, in bed, any bed, lost in barbiturate confusion, but when she floated through Wertheim’s, giving off a strong scent of violets, she found it an agreeable sensation to be on her own and not needing to shoplift. In West Berlin, she could live by day, in the open, unafraid, in love with the five-mark pieces in her pouch. She said it was a struggle for her to give any one of them up.

* * *

Cello sped again through the part of Bach’s A-Minor English Suite that she remembered Mom loved. Hayden’s Tyrolean farm boy said “Oh wow” as her fingers flew back down the keys. Suddenly her demonstration was over. Father Paul, as Hayden called his twenty-year-old gymnast, knew he’d blown the mood for her, made her self-conscious. “No, go on, please.” He got up to block her path. “I am sorry,” he said in English.

Dark hair tapped his face when she darted past his incredible shoulder. He bent backward and his eyes went wide. “Oh wow,” he said. She was so fast, her hair was a force become visible in pursuit of her. She was amazing to look at; something about her held your attention. I had to admit I was proud of her. I was also feeling a little sorry for her, as I’m sure Hayden was, too. She couldn’t bear her own talent.

She called out in German that she was just looking in on the children and she’d send the nanny back with the tray. We were having tea with our gay friends, she’d said that morning, also in German. It would be during naptime and before Dram came home to kiss his children.

He wouldn’t hear of taking money from me for letting me crash in my old maid’s room. I’d joked to Solomon and Francesca about the mice in my painter’s storage closet in Kreuzberg, wanting to seem the cool black expatriate to my brother, black corporate lawyer turned trader of futures now wed to the contemporary art curator who looked like a Raphael. But he got up immediately and made a big deal to Mom and Dad that I’d been living in a storage bin. It made me tear up, my butchness fled, until I saw that Dad had looked away.

Mom in turn informed Cello and then put me on the line.

“You should have told us you were a German poet,” Cello said in German. Fortunately, the difference in time zones and the needs of her children made the conversation entirely practical.

It was still cold, but I had made it back to the Mercedes-Benz star and the sound of my footsteps in new patent leather boots.

Nobody at the ChiChi had seen Bags for a while, but I didn’t ask Zippi where she got the yellow, rocklike hash we were smoking in the kitchen. I asked her for a job as suddenly as I’d accepted the joint from her. “Which one of these guys do you want me to chop to make space for you?” she said, indicating with the spliff the day bartender finishing his shift and the busboy/microwave operator. I realized that it was the first time she’d spoken to me in German. She was a completely different person, a harder, older woman than the gamine with the adorable bangs who sympathized in English.

I wasn’t worried. Berlin rewarded my faith. I turned up at Manfred’s pub and found Afer there. Through him I found my new address. It was going to be spring someday, and after the children had been put to bed, Dram and I smoked cigarettes together on the front terrace on the other side of the largest piano. I liked the chill in the air. Cello sat with us, draped in shawls, a cup of hot water and lemon on a little table.

They were impressed that I was doing something they considered utterly Berlin. We were reconciled all around, and we didn’t refer to the Russian doctor cleaning lady, who had decided that I wasn’t there. She didn’t clean the maid’s room or its bathroom because they were not in use as far as she was concerned. I got my own towels.

Cello thought it a good omen that I would be moved out by the third anniversary of my having got sober. The tea I waited for with Hayden and Father Paul, frisky as a ram, was my celebration. Hayden was saying that Michelangelo worked for the Borgias, even though they were criminals. The nanny was still in the kitchen. We couldn’t hear anything from the back of the vast apartment. Father Paul gave Hayden a quick kiss, then another. I got up, as discreet as Michael York as Brian in Cabaret , and went out onto the front terrace to smoke again. Gas came out of the Zippo lighter I’d stolen from Manfred and I told myself that I felt high.

The day was colorless, the street depressed under uninterrupted cloud. I could hear plates being stacked in the schnitzel restaurant across the street. A heavy front door closed somewhere to my right. In the other direction, the Kurfürstendamm was rehearsing, “You are on your own. Burt Lancaster doesn’t live here anymore.”

* * *

The legend in the downtown dive where I spent most of my drinking time in Chicago was that it occupied the site of what had been one of the last whorehouses in town where a black man could buy a white woman.