Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

I did understand, did I not, that I was saying such things in Berlin, where in living memory books had been burned. Maybe an American, even an unwanted black-skinned American, held on to being an American, because for the American that rainy day always came. But for him, and for many of his brothers, their presence in West Berlin was a political solution in which the tragic personal destinies that had brought them to this city could be overcome.

I withdrew my motion. Yao got handshakes as he took his seat, his tribal stool. My face was hot. What year of grammar school or high school had I not metaphorically pissed myself in front of the entire class. To be back in school, with those feelings, as though I’d been beamed, made me consider that maybe the AA Big Book, which I looked down on because it was not great literature, knew more than I did about alcoholism and drug addiction.

Lucky said that the arrogance of Europe belittled the beliefs of millions. I hadn’t assigned religious feelings to anyone I lived with. I thought I saw homesickness in Lucky’s insistence on bringing up a subject that people were allergic to, that and maybe weariness with his invisibility in West Berlin.

After the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great, big in queer history, thought of building a mosque to encourage Turks to move to his capital, Lotte once told me. She was surprised I’d never been to Sanssouci.

Yao got to his feet again. First, Cleaver. Second, Rushdie, which he had not yet had the privilege to read. He couldn’t get anyone he knew in England to mail The Satanic Verses to him. In Brussels they shot the one imam who respected where we lived, on a continent that should know better. The National People’s Army killed its own people who tried to get over to where we were.

Members applauded and adjourned themselves. The cups were mine. Sugar and honey had been spilled everywhere. I tidied up Uwe’s copies of Afro Look , a magazine for black Germans. No one had signed up to go with his group to a conference in Frankfurt on minorities and immigrants in the Federal Republic. This was a collective that preferred to concentrate on its war with the German Democratic Republic and much of “the international Spartacist tendency” over Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s legacy. I should have aced that part of my interview, thanks to Manfred’s tirades, but the sound of his voice in my head had made me struggle.

Lucky walked out. He scooted his chair up before he left, but he definitely walked out without a word to any of us.

“Right on,” I said like a fool to Yao and extended my fist for a dap, for him to tap the top of my fist with the bottom of his.

He contemplated my hand for a few seconds and then knuckled me harder on my shoulder than he needed to. Smiling.

* * *

Security procedures had been stepped up at the airport on the way out of Berlin and probably would be even more so at the airport when I left Chicago. Solomon and Francesca had to get back. That was understood. They had high-powered jobs, a real life together, and there was the problem that neither of them liked Greenwich Village. They’d made a mistake.

They assumed that I had nothing urgent to get back to. No one asked. I didn’t say. Almost two months had gone by before Duallo at the café and I on the phone in the front hallway managed to have a conversation.

Moscow was the most exciting city he had ever been to and he wanted to go to Beijing next. He loved the statue of Pushkin and was glad he had no packs of cigarettes to give people. He had the correct pink vouchers and a view of the Kremlin, but lunch and coffee were impossible to find. Not to speak Russian tired him quickly. Two black students spoke French to him when it was clear he was not American.

Mom gave no sign after I hung up that she heard me tell Duallo I would wire funds. I was a problem solver. Dad hadn’t liked the setup on the second floor and to install him in the basement had been a strain. He was the only thing we had to move and he simply walked down two flights and got into bed. I was the strain, the intruder in their basement. They had everything down there — stereo, double hot plate, refrigerator-freezer. I could see his workbench of model planes in the back room. Mom’s poster-making Magic Markers would have been to the left of the door.

It was clear I was in the way, but Mom said I could be of use. I walked to the pharmacy. Mom knew that Dad wouldn’t have let me touch the car. Perhaps she wanted to have a different conversation from the one we had when I came back with Dad’s medicine. His prognosis was good. She told me to sit with her a minute. It was the end of his pancakes, her grill pan, their Belgian waffles.

“She’s left it too long to get back with it now…” Mom started. She could only have been talking about Cello. Mom said that in getting the basement ready for Dad, she’d found her dissertation on Florence Beatrice Price. Mom met Mrs. Price once, when she was a music/music education student. Mom said she’d nearly fainted, to meet a black woman who wrote symphonies.

Cello had a gift for composition. Her teachers said so. It was not too late for her; she loved music so much. Mrs. Price made Mom realize how important it was to make a contribution to what you loved.

Mom had kept me from getting back to my life in Berlin in order to have a conversation about what the future held for Cello, the thirty-six-year-old mother of four who had only written music for school and had not tried to play in public for more than a decade, not since her Bicentennial Disaster, which was the reason they had fallen out with each other for so long.

Mom had said, “Your father has never been fifty-eight years old before either. It’s new for him, too.”

Mom said maybe I could talk to her about composition. I may not have thought so, but Cello respected my opinion.

I made no comment about the hot tub, gas heater, and pumping system they had in an alcove off the laundry room. It was like being surprised, after we left home, that they’d tried to have a fondue party, years after fondue had gone out of fashion.

Mom said that the Spirituals were not Gospel music. When Dad sat upstairs to listen to Mom play arrangements of Spirituals, I knew it was safe to leave them.

* * *

“With Father Paul?”

“Paul. Cela ne l’amuse pas .”

* * *

Hayden Birge was at work on an opera, Wittgenstein in Love . But his love story wasn’t about Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Pinsent, Wittgenstein’s Cambridge friend who died in World War I. They’d ended up on opposite sides. No, Hayden’s gay opera was about the philosopher’s brother, Rudi Wittgenstein. Three of the five Wittgenstein brothers were to commit suicide. In 1904, Rudi Wittgenstein, in his early twenties, drank milk he’d poisoned himself, in the middle of a gay bar in Berlin, in despair over a hustler, according to Hayden’s plot.

* * *

Dram was in Dortmund. Konrad, Hildegard, and Maximilian were asleep, but Otto, a very serious boy, was still up. He said he remembered me. He’d reached the age at which he understood that he could not repeat everything he heard his parents say. He looked at me an uncomfortably long time and then went away with purposeful strides.

“ Carnaval ,” Hayden called from the study with Cello’s Bösendorfer.

“Schumann,” Cello said and lit a scented candle, a thing I’d never seen her do, just as she never wore pants.

“Schumann. Difficult.” He came back, Canova-shaped, an African American artist abroad, the kind of black man white people threw themselves on.

“No, but it’s big. It’s not big like the Brahms Paganini variations. It feels good to play it. It’s like listening to a set of virtuosic waltzes.” And men of all races would kill for her.