Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

* * *

I had been going to the AA meetings in Dahlem again. I nodded to the steadfast black noncoms; one of them even dapped my fist with his fist once. I wasn’t drinking. I felt nothing going past glasses of white wine on restaurant terrace tables. But every Saturday when I got back to the Co-op, I joined Afer’s faction in the Café Rosa’s kitchen for long discussions — the Co-op’s relation to the Autonomen movement, why capitalism needs racism, how to be more Green — over soft, pliable, very black hash.

There seemed to be some agreement among the members who had survived the bloodletting of a couple of years before that they would not talk about the purge that led to the arrival of several newcomers. I picked up from Afer that the younger Bio-Anarcho element finally outnumbered the Red Army Faction sympathizers and their tired, bony dogs. On certain days the floorboards on certain scrubbed floors still gave off a faint odor of pet urine.

The bookstore concentrated on ecology and antinuclear literature, with a small Africa, South America, and Caribbean section that reflected an early victory in committee of the women who opposed female circumcision in Africa over those who said Westerners ought to leave native beliefs and practices alone. They just expanded their shelves from there, along the lines of problems in what was then called the developing world. Long-term Co-op members said openly, to our faces, that they’d asked Yao and Afer to recruit among their circles in Berlin those most likely to be bio-sympathetic, though they were far too with-it to call us black men. To bring in soul brothers was a way of beefing up the male presence without antagonizing the considerable feminist faction in the house.

Cats led mammal life in the dark courtyard and weedy lots beyond the kitchen doors. The Co-op had been negotiating with the absent owners of one lot. They wanted a vegetable garden. They had worked out a deal with a pensioner for his Schrebergärten way on the other side of town, on the way to Tegel. Named for the man who preached the therapeutic value of every man working his allotment of land, Schrebergärtens flourished around the city.

Every Co-op member not on permanent garden duty had to work in the garden on alternate weekends. The Co-op’s arrangement with the pensioner had been guaranteed by recent federal legislation. When the garden came up in house meetings, I realized that a fissure existed between those members who were relieved to be legal about some things and those who rejected permission from the state for anything the Co-op did.

I hated working in the potato patch and I hated that the hundred square meters the Co-op leased were so near Lessingsdorf — now into its second summer as a must-see for hip visitors to the unreal city about which the hardest thing was getting there. I found it vaguely humiliating to farm in the city. I was told that the Lustgarten over in East Berlin in front of the Old Museum had first been a potato field for a vegetable then brand new to the city. And so what, I said to myself in the June sun. That was three hundred sad years ago. I stopped bitching in my head when a couple of guys took off their T-shirts, but I thought for sure I would leave this commune by winter. I couldn’t face duty in the café coal bin.

The Co-op was not a dorm, nor was it Fräulein Schroeder’s rooming house. I learned that right away. It was not cool to drop in on anybody. You didn’t walk up to a door and knock. You were invited up to someone’s room or rooms. Until then, you met the other members in the kitchen meetings or in the corridors, on the stairs or in the bookshop at more meetings, and, most sociably, in the Café Rosa. I became the dishwasher for the afternoon shift and, apronless, drenched, I was usually so tired by dinnertime that I fell asleep after cleaning up the kitchen on my floor.

I lived at the top of the house, the fifth floor, with the lowest ceilings, as did a light-skinned Afro-German guy and a dark-skinned Bangladeshi guy. Two very young white couples who had been members for little more than a year each had a room. A room with a small stove and sink had been rigged up at the other end. Afer and his girlfriend had their own kitchen and the biggest apartment on the floor.

I had a shower, but my toilet was in the hall. I cleaned it before I used it and then again right after I used it. My windows faced the rear, the solid plaster back and sides of the apartment houses around us. I couldn’t name the trees or the wildflowers growing in the lots. I got my own cube of refrigerator from a store off Potsdamerstrasse and carried it to my room on my back. But the thing the American in me could not get over was that I had a coal stove for heat. No radiators. Winter was a long ways off; who knew where I’d be.

Of course the women I thought were lesbian were not. I understood soon enough that I was the only queer in the Co-op.

* * *

The week before Cello’s graduation from the conservatory, her father bought an old safe for all the cash he had on him, and a lot he didn’t, from white mobsters in the Shore Drive Motel, because he had become convinced that Scott Joplin’s lost ragtime opera was inside it and he was loudly desperate to present the score to his daughter. I never talked to Cello about her parents. Somehow you just couldn’t do that to her, no matter what. “She may be a monster, Jeddie, but remember she’s our monster,” Mom explained to me early on.

* * *

It was my party. Cello’s sister, Rhonda, was in town, doing a quick tour of northern European cities as part of her present to herself for having got her doctorate, plus a postdoc position. Cello held herself away from the peeling walls as she made her way upstairs to inspect my room. She wouldn’t touch the walls on the way down either. Her hair appeared to coax her, to push her along. Around her sister, Rhonda wore her hair tightly braided or rolled up completely.

They’d heard of the architect’s collective in the brewery, so elegant in front of us in the darkening dust. For some reason, Cello had assumed that that was the community I was joining. “I see, you’re a hippie now, in your continuing late adolescence.” She asked if this situation was the healthiest for me. “I can smell patchouli and something else.”

I laid out a big table on the sidewalk in front of the café. It was important to keep the cousins away from the people I did hash with, but rather than not have my brothers on the fifth floor join us I begged them not to let on to my family that I smoked stuff. They did not need to be told. There were lots of things we were all getting away from, no matter where we started out, Lucky said, glad to talk English with Germans for a change.

He’d walked to Europe, almost. His family dug up the gold they had buried and sent him off. He, the eldest, was their big chance. He’d come thousands of miles, by trains to Pakistan and a flight to Turkey. It took him two years to get into Greece. An Egyptian arranged to smuggle him across the Hungarian border. Lucky had no papers. He washed dishes in a restaurant in Charlottenburg, for questionable Russians. He sent home as much money as he could to the saline-drenched farm back in Bangladesh.

Dram was not some liberal who couldn’t face things. He put his hand on Lucky’s shoulder and in the silence went back to his bouletten , or meatballs, a Berlin thing. Cello sat back in her chair when he ordered them. The café also offered a flavorless tofu dish. The rest of us were having meatballs, and the men and Rhonda were drinking tall white beers. I saw Manfred’s fingers around a shaft. But in his absence, the passion could not be fed; it was dying of inanition. Hayden and Father Paul fell in with the party and they ordered tall white beers when they finally showed up, both in tight jeans.