Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

No one was there and beyond the next fence was noise, so why call out. I couldn’t say if I’d missed him. Maybe I just wanted to show off the bohemian life I’d made for myself in his absence. Maybe it had been a relief to have him gone, yanked out. I’d never yelled in my life. Dad didn’t yell when he watched a game. He pulled his hands apart and bit his lip. Solomon beat his fist into his palm. I’d never yelled when I’d come. “I didn’t came for a week,” a blond soldier once said in the AA meeting down in Dahlem.

It was too cold to wait and see if that was his car, too pet Negro to wait for him. Straight guys aren’t trying to hurt your feelings, they’re just not thinking about you in that way. I’d pedaled to the Landwehrkanal by the time I concluded that Manfred was not searching for himself; but I was, or, rather, the American abroad, I was supposed to be.

One of my favorite buildings in Berlin stood along the north side of the Landwehrkanal, Emil Fahrenkamp’s beautiful Shell House, with its waved exterior. From west to east it stepped down in waves of glass and treated stone, from ten storys to five storys. It had been white in 1932, the books said, but had turned the color of the gray stuff in my soap dish, my soap dish before I met Duallo.

The trees could have offered shade, had it been that kind of day, but we were fast revolving away from the sun. These would not have been the trees that had witnessed anything. Everything back then got used for fuel. What waterway wasn’t also a grave. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Weimar Republic, proclaimed at the Reichstag on November 9, 1918, after the signing of the Armistice.

Two hours later, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Kaiser’s Stadtschloss, which in those days was down the street from the Reichstag. The East Germans demolished the palace in 1950, except for the sandstone balcony, which was preserved and then enclosed by a dull government building of East Bloc bureaucratic vastness.

The Wall cut off the Reichstag from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, built as the western end of Unter den Linden, the boulevard of palaces, embassies, and a little Greek temple by Schinkel that fascinated everyone. From the Reichstag you could see over the Wall to passages of Doric columns and the four-horse chariot that topped the gate. The Wall cut through what had been Pariserplatz, right in front of the gate, and stopped you from getting near it.

You couldn’t approach the Brandenburg Gate from the east either. The tourist hit a barrier where Unter den Linden terminated as paved expanse, Soviet-style. Hitler fans were given no chance to get near where the Chancellory and the bunker had been. In the West, you could press up against the Wall and hump it. But in East Berlin, a wall guarded the Wall. Between the two walls lay heavily patrolled grassy strips where apartment buildings had been, and the windows people are jumping from in the black-and-white films of August 1961.

I remembered Cello’s sister, Rhonda, impressed that she was so close to the big, bad Berlin Wall, and I understood. But Berlin was not a Cold War story for me, terrified at the border though I was. It was Liebknecht supporting the workers’ general strike, as I learned in the Co-op bookstore. They lost and Weimar culture was born.

The Freikorps came for Liebknecht and brave Rosa Luxemburg. One account in German of what was done to her at the Eden Hotel I was glad I was not able to finish. On January 15, 1919, they were taken to the Landwehrkanal, where they were shot and their bodies thrown into the water. Hers wasn’t found for months. And here I was, cruising by the very spot on the bridge, maybe.

Manfred had argued that the Weimar Republic was the reason people lost faith in the Weimar Republic. “Jed, Mann , who ordered the murders of Liebknecht and Red Lady Luxemburg?”

My books had come. Consequently, I’d not read a newspaper, not so much as the Herald Tribune . It was days after the story was published that I saw Rosen-Montag’s photograph in Die Tageszeitung —“Die Taz, bitte,” as I, an insider, liked to hear myself say before my footsteps took off. His head was big and the story was small, because several key players I’d never heard of hadn’t much to say about his foundation chairman’s threat to sue the city.

* * *

And they were ordered to make bricks, and each one to write his name upon his brick. Twelve wouldn’t get with the program and one of them wouldn’t go along with their escape plan, saying that wild animals might as well be in the mountains for all the good running from the city would do. And when Nimrod’s people came to throw him into the limekiln, an earthquake happened. Fire consumed everyone around him but left him unmolested.

* * *

The summer after I graduated from high school, I was in the 57th Street Bookstore. I couldn’t have been accepted into the University of Chicago, but I was pretending to myself, and maybe to others, that I was an incoming freshman. I recognized the title, The Torture Doctor . Someone at the Eagle lost her copy of the bestseller about an evil pharmacist who picked up women at the Columbian Exposition and killed them. Cello’s father hadn’t had an episode in a while, but I guessed that he had purloined it. When I realized what the book that Ralston Jr. had was about, I told Dad.

He didn’t answer when I said, so grown up, that this was not what that man should be studying. Was it true the FBI asked Cello’s father to wear a wire, taking advantage of someone known to be off his rocker? I couldn’t blame Aunt Gloria, I said, for trying to get away from that nut job, even though that Jewish steelyard owner over there in Indiana was married.

Instead, Dad laid hold of me. My father seized me and twisted my wrist as he squeezed me in the direction of his office door. He was so hot and filled with blood he couldn’t risk speech. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it. After he pushed me into the corridor. That was his head that he leaned for some time against the opaque glass.

The evil pharmacist took his unsuspecting women to his combination office/hotel in Englewood. He’d used different builders in order to hide his overall design. He locked his victims in soundproof rooms that had no windows and gassed them. He sent the bodies down a chute to the basement and reduced them to skeletons, which he then sold to medical schools. They don’t know how many he killed, maybe two hundred, but not all in Chicago.

Numbers of people who came to the World’s Fair never went home. They disappeared, started over somewhere else.

* * *

Dram came to see me at the café. I had a friend. He bowed slightly toward Lotte and then sat at the bar. I didn’t mind if he smoked and it went without saying that I would not tell Cello of our conversation. No one else was around. He said he wanted to explain the sudden cancellation of their American Thanksgiving. She found a reason every Thanksgiving to cancel her plan to gather up strays like me. Cello had made him get rid of the nanny. I put more paraffin into the café stove to get the coals roaring.

“She accused me of having a thing with her.” In English, we were family. “Now she accuses me of having had a thing for her.” He swirled the dregs of his cup and swallowed quickly. “That I wanted to.” He went to the door with his cigarette and peered out at the yellow street. It was cold. He came back. His coat collar was trimmed in black velvet. His ties that he was so indifferent to were silk, gifts from his wife or his mother, her friends, his sisters, the women in his office.

Lotte adjusted her ears under her thin pageboy. Otherwise, she knew how to sit absolutely still for the camera.