Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

Dram said he didn’t have to tell me his position or the company’s on taking advantage of women in his employ. But the young lady’s family rode with the West Kent Hunt and she wanted to be a chef. “Stupidly, I fucked her. I am the cliché.” Dragon amounts of smoke rushed from his nostrils.

“Lie.”

“You have seen her. I am fucking her at present. We meet at my sister’s apartment now that she is at Berkeley.”

“Continue to lie to her,” I said in German.

So be it, I said to myself, and that night explained to Duallo that I had a Chicago-related work appointment I’d nearly forgot. I changed my clothes to make it look good and went to stake out Manfred’s pub in Schöneberg. He didn’t come, but Bags did.

* * *

“Don’t turn it loose, because it’s a motherfucker,” James Brown instructed the band.

* * *

A lot of people were in the city to get lost. “I’ve been away, cocksucker,” Bags said. He was hooded up, as for a polar expedition.

I knew what that meant. I just wanted to know where and for what reason. I didn’t want him to share a taxi with me back to the Co-op. It was not because he didn’t know where Afer was. It was because I was going to have to lose him before I dipped into my room, where trusting Duallo waited. I told Bags I’d had a work-related appointment before I ran into him. Bags did not have me on his mind.

He knocked past the bicycles and grunted the whole way up to the fifth floor. He could yell. Afer and his girlfriend both came, undressed, into the hall. Clearly, that wasn’t news to Bags, but I was turned on. The young Germans on our floor had plastered homemade nonsense posters everywhere and scribbled with Magic Marker when off their heads.

“Why would you do me like this?” He was yelling at Afer.

“Go home.”

“Where’s that at?”

The house leader was beside us in no time. We’d have to respect the rules. Afer’s girlfriend did not want Bags inside and the café was closed. Bags refused to leave and he would not be quiet either. The hall was icy. I just stood there, wondering what had happened between them. The house leader frowned at the posters. Everything was messed up, Bags repeated while we waited for Afer to get dressed. They went out after the house leader had blocked their exit and been firm with them again. Duallo was in my room, unaware, on his earphones. The stove he’d kept lit was wonderful.

I thought it was because love on Dad’s scale was hard, but it was probably because mine was the higher make-believe. I could not project a future for us, what we would do or go on doing. Duallo let me rest his head on my chest for a second, that blossomy smell coming up from his skin, his thick cap of hair. I let him down every day, because I thought of him as African, not European. I felt in him the touch of his grandmother’s Ngala, the creator of the world. But it was easier to spot what was going wrong than it was to admit how hard I was trying to stay with the feeling, to make it real.

If it doesn’t go away, it multiplies in some fashion, spreads in some biological manner, becomes overarching context, the lid you no longer see it’s so prevalent in the sky of your head. But my desires were contradicted by my circumstances. Besides, the parent gets hurt; the lover finds himself doing hard time. It is not possible that an unconditional love does not show the scars as it ages, become less quick in the joints, a more costly show to run. The parent or the lover has no choice but to pass on some of his or her costs to the loved one, unspecified amounts deducted without warning from the loved one’s freedom account, which is therefore perpetually in danger of falling into arrears.

Where I lived, how I sat around were not conducive to adult life. Duallo smoked about once a month. I couldn’t. I liked his books and I liked the untouched blue pouch of cigarette tobacco spilling out onto the tray on the floor next to that futon beginning to split that I hadn’t thrown out. I knew not to tell him too much.

I’d heard that there was a price, and I couldn’t wait for the exquisite piercings. I would have talked to anyone about my fear of the pain, except everyone would say that I must have known that it was the pain I’d been after all along. My inability to relax into being with Duallo was just excitement, anticipation of the blow. I’m about to get hurt. I’m about to come. I wanted to say that that wasn’t me.

* * *

Frederick Douglass said that slaveholders were most anxious for free black men to leave the country, but he wanted these slaveholders to know that he was not disposed to leave, that he had been with them, was still with them, and would be with them to the end.

* * *

They settled in to see Out of Rosenheim . Father Paul had seen it before and loved it. I didn’t like the way Hayden detached me from Father Paul and Duallo, who seemed happy enough to hear that hilltop Austrian accent. I wasn’t really paying attention to what Hayden was saying about a crate of antique army gear, a present for Cello. He said something about that little black boy in the film putting the accent on the second note of every bar in the Bach piece that he was shown practicing throughout the film and then repeated the Cello story.

They were supposed to play four hands, but of course she changed her mind, so Hayden was there when a shipper from Oxfordshire announced himself. Two men brought up in the elevator and unpacked for her two teak folding chairs, a teak games table, ivory-handle cutlery for two, two brass traveling candlesticks, two round leather cases lined with cork, two hinged sandwich cases, a leather cigarette case, and a decanter set.

Hayden was saying how at first Cello was unimpressed by Dram’s way of telling her that he and she would be leaving the children and getting away to Sri Lanka for New Year’s. But then the British military campaign furniture turned out to be a birthday present from Rosen-Montag, only just now reaching her.

“Child, I thought she was going to scream. ‘Help me hide this, Ethel. Ricky will be home any minute.’”

I was not going to laugh with him at her expense. After all, she wasn’t the one encouraging her hot boyfriend to befriend my hot boyfriend and he wasn’t the friend I could tell what a mess I was. Nevertheless, she couldn’t have a drama going on, not in the middle of mine. Hayden said she left the invoice and Rosen-Montag’s innuendo-free message — he peeked — on top of the games table. I’d been right in my suspicion that he’d been fishing, that he wasn’t sure.

Mom practically told me to mind my own business when I asked if Cello had said anything to her about how things were with Dram. He hadn’t come back to the café and that was for the best, lonely though I still was, and eager as I was to be a gender Uncle Tom, the kind of gay man to sell out a straight woman to her straight man in the name of male solidarity.

“You’ll miss the beautiful sunsets, but you’ll always have turnips,” Dad said when I couldn’t get a date to my junior prom.

* * *

I was not going to Chicago for Christmas and Duallo wasn’t going to Paris. Though he wanted to go away with me, I was struggling to trust the Isherwood promises that Berlin was keeping with me. I sure as hell was not going to accept the mountains with Hayden and Father Paul and his parents and grandmother and sister and brother-in-law and little nephew. I made Duallo coffee and brought up Greece or Tunisia. Moscow was not the answer I was expecting. I’d never gone anywhere from Berlin, except back to Chicago.

Bags came in not long after Lotte. I wasn’t used to seeing him in the morning, dark, wide, and tense. He was staying in his painter friend’s storage closet on Moritzplatz. His old lady had put him out. There was no stove, but he needed to be alone. Anywhere else he could have crashed would have been a story. Eventually she would get over his having been in detention. He had got over it.