Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

And that was my fifty-mark note on the bar, luxurious though Hayden looked in his sweater. But we were all wearing beautiful sweaters. I saw Duallo look at himself in his present in the mirror behind the bottles. It had turned back into a great day.

Zippi went on tiptoe to give me kisses on both cheeks and a smile that said she was glad I’d figured out that these things didn’t have to be complicated. She had a special smile for Duallo, and one for Father Paul, too, and the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, emerging from pitch-dark eyeliner, affected me somehow.

I didn’t go into the kitchen with Bags, his old lady, and Zippi, because Hayden wouldn’t, he who never touched the stuff and made Father Paul say that he, too, was happy with his tall white beer that Manfred had also liked.

And when they came back to the bar, giggling and terribly pleased with themselves, I realized that that evening was the first time I’d touched Duallo in public since the day we met. I rubbed his back and he swayed. He conversed with Bags’s old lady, who was pretty funny in her angry German confrontational way, while I stood over him, big-chested and prepared to retire the legends I’d twisted myself over about the romance of pain and the agony that was true love. It didn’t have to be that way to be real.

Hayden could have got a light from the person he bummed the cigarette from, but he had to come back over and lean between Duallo and Bags’s old lady and borrow her lighter, letting his left hand rest on the very patch of beautiful black boy back where I’d just had my right hand.

* * *

For Mom, the catastrophic-enough event was followed by several aftershocks of the heart, among them her apparent humiliation at having to make her peace with us — Solomon, Francesca, and me — because we’d be all she had should anything ever happen to Dad for good. She said some people are alone even though they’re married, but she hadn’t been one of them. Dad was her soul mate and if Francesca was that for Solomon, then she as a mother could not ask for more of her daughter-in-law. Or of anyone I chose to care about, she added.

* * *

“This is your home,” Mom would say to Rhonda and Ronald when they came through the door again with empty Flintstones lunch boxes and their crayons in one of their mother’s discarded traveling cases. Cello sometimes broke down when she finished her practice for the evening. Mom would sit next to her in the kitchen.

Aunt Loretta’s family considered itself much too good for Uncle Ralston and she agreed. She never took in her grandchildren, though she had all those bedrooms. Her husband was too deep into himself as well to offer them anything. He didn’t want them underfoot, for all his dreams of a great black dynasty bursting forth from his deadness. It was bad enough that often he had to throw out his own son. Old Man Shay complained about the cost of his grandchildren’s education.

When Dad knew whom Aunt Gloria was really trying to get away from and why he didn’t help her, I didn’t ask.

* * *

Dad’s favorite thing was to remember Uncle Ralston’s inanities. The EKG machine blinked and he was entertained by our versions of family meetings on South Parkway. It was a hoot how much Uncle Ralston disliked Mexicans, Vietnamese, Indians, any new group. To him, race in America was a story between white and black, and anything else was yet more change for the worse.

“What a bummer for everyone,” Dad said, fiddling his paper hospital bracelet.

Mom said that during the World’s Fair of 1893, one black woman hated Aunt Jemima so much she went on a two-month rampage, brutally assaulting white men at night.

* * *

Bags’s old lady smoked Rothmans Menthols, and I bummed one. Just like that.

“When did you again?” Duallo breathed. He broke away from my kiss. That was going too far, though we were at the ChiChi, where a cellulite-smacking contest was taking place among some crones at Odell’s end of the bar. I didn’t look to see what Hayden might have seen.

They’d been dancing for two days, Zippi sighed.

* * *

In the hospital corridor, Solomon said if I was going to be related to him, then I had to lose the beard. The kid brother, I let him drop me at a barber’s. I hadn’t realized how shaggy I’d got. A black barbershop in Chicago was the place to go if you wanted to continue to taste ashes from the presidential election.

A haircut was not easy for a black man to find in Berlin. It was roulette. From shop to shop, the same short guy in a white jacket with the same scissors would hunch his shoulders, as if to say he had no idea what to do with you. Then you’d find someone who was willing to give it a shot, so long as you understood that he — one time it was she — had never cut black hair before.

The barbers who frowned you out the door without speaking were kinsmen of the old woman who said on the street to a friend of Bags’s old lady, a white girl with her brown baby in her arms, “At least if it were a dog it could be put down.” They still lived in Berlin, those types, sitting behind you upstairs on the bus.

Of course I had done the simple thing of asking another black man where he had his hair cut. Duallo ignored my hint that I hang out with him the next time he was seeing his friend who had the girlfriend who had clippers and hooked everybody up, even cut designs into their hair. That was his black Frenchman’s Africa life. Hayden sent me to his Kreuzberg barber. You had to holler up at his window or phone from a pub. A creamy German guy with Angel on the Rock curls sat you at his cluttered mirror, his bed unmade no matter the hour, his box of clippers and attachments lost, his room filthy with the sticky sweet aroma of just-fucked ass.

Whatever had happened in the meeting with Dad’s cardiologist, by the time I got back to the hospital cafeteria with my beard merely trimmed, Mom said she had decided that she would be fine whenever that was going to be required of her, so we never had to fear that she would become a problem for us ever. She’d watched her mother live alone her whole life and she knew how to do it, what it looked like, and maybe her mother hadn’t been wrong with her all-or-nothing, love-me-or-leave-me attitude.

Upstairs, Solomon batted away the hand I was protecting my face with. “Who are you trying to be?”

“Let your reading advance your facial hair,” Dad, awake, rasped from his side of the room.

* * *

I thought the noise in the ChiChi was the reason we couldn’t hear what was being said on the television news report. But Odell said it was CNN, not just a new station, but a new concept, uninterrupted news footage from around the world, day and night. There was no audio commentary. A ticker tape of captions concerning “The Rushdie Affair” ran along the bottom of the large screen.

Bags returned and said, yes, that book that made fun of that piece of ayatollah who took our people hostage. They had just put a price on the writer’s head. From where I stood, I could see images of fires and mobs, but I wasn’t sure if they were pictures from Islamabad or Bradford, England.

The bar was wild with St. Valentine’s Day. Odell stood like Neptune in his stormy sea, entranced by his Schaub television. We’d never seen a picture that clear, he informed everyone. It was because of that satellite dish, which he could have installed himself. A few people would get up, stand next to Odell, watch for a while, and then resume their places. Zippi liked him preoccupied. I was not going to leave Duallo, who was happy listening to Bags’s old lady explain that although she was glad the Soviet Union hadn’t won last year, she was truly sick of the Dutch thinking they had the greatest captain in the world.