Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

The way down looked long. I expected a hard fall, but guys lowered me like a sack. I saw a woman stop in front of the white crosses behind the Reichstag. She put her hands on her cheeks. On one side, the black Spree. On the other, thin trees failing to contain a three-quarter moon. There were cyclist shapes in the dirt path and the red tips of cigarettes everywhere. The S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse glowed orange in the night, like a UFO. Across No Man’s Land, I heard chants of mass impudence.

The bullet holes in the Invalidenstrasse bridge had been filled in ages ago, but I had the time to count them. It took so long to get across and through the gates into East Berlin. People leaving West Berlin pressed against people leaving East Berlin, and on either side they passed through a gauntlet of applause. Grown men pounded on the hoods of Trabis or passed bottles up to long-coated border guards, the hated Vopos. One looked away, as if ashamed his side had lost. My dear Marcellinus, false gods cannot save a city.

I mounted a ledge next to a group of guards who waved back to people colliding with joy. I saw two women hug each other and pass on. Clap and whistle, and the occupiers would be gone. I couldn’t imagine what this meant to those going in one direction, those coming out the other. I felt alone and in the way. I’d not tried to hug anyone.

In East Berlin, state-owned hotels were ominously quiet. I’d chosen to walk south from the checkpoint and approach the Brandenburg Gate from the eastern side. It took far longer than I had thought. But that was the way it usually was: me trying to get to the noise, to where the party was going on.

The Russian embassy on Unter den Linden was dark, but the one guard waved to me. It was three o’clock in the morning and the Brandenburg Gate was alive. East German police stood around, expressionless. I offered my arm to a woman and we passed through the gate. We backed up and promenaded under the quadriga one more time, stepping lively. She blew me a kiss, but I was still alone. The moon had moved higher, changing from Alpine white to Prussian yellow.

The outlines of hundreds of people showed against the lights at the Wall. For a moment I thought the water had been turned back on, but that was champagne flowing. I made a step with my hands and hoisted people up. Then I was pulled up. It was crowded, crazy with faces wandering back and forth. A festival was going on in the awakened square: people in a state of elation and disbelief. I sat, turned around, and was helped down into the sudden friendliness, the sudden youth of the West Berlin police.

* * *

It was odd to see East German cars parked everywhere and sometimes people in full sail in their nightclothes. Maybe not every white person I saw was German, but it felt like it. Afer and his girlfriend were kissing at a little table and the ChiChi was hosting a riot.

Big Dash was screaming: “Do you like black beer!”

The bar screamed in the awful smoke: “Yes!”

“Do you like Fassbinder!”

“Yes!” That could have been another black beer for some who were present, still smoking their terrible brand of tobacco.

“We are one planet!”

“We are one people!” the Germans screamed in correction, many in stonewashed jeans.

“Let’s hear it for the monks of Neuzeller!” Big Dash also asked everyone to give it up for the Holy Roman Empire.

No one had any idea what he was trying to connect with anymore, but a huge black American comedian of some kind was what an East German might have expected to find in a little bar in the forbidden half of his capital, not far from the notorious Zoo Station and the blue windows of the twenty-four-hour porn theaters and the winking casinos. Maybe some of them had never seen a television picture with the crisp definition of Odell’s, but it did not seem a surprise to East Germans in the way that it was to West Germans that they could speak their mother tongue to non-Germans.

Bags told me I had it wrong, as usual. They all thought we were GIs. He liked to cross his leg behind his other leg and kick me in the hollow of my knee. They also thought every black man in the ChiChi was a hustler, he added. How could they have, with Odell in charge. People over from the deserted German Democratic Republic drank for free, but Odell wasn’t asking for identification. Therefore, his regulars kept in circulation a brandy snifter for donations to Odell’s spontaneity.

Odell assumed that everyone at his party had in common victories in Europe over totalitarianism and authoritarianism, if not Berlin. In 1937 or 1938, when Der Grosser Stern was moved from the Platz der Republik to the Tiergarten, it was made even taller, so that little Goebbels, that horny toad, could not, as they said then, reach Victory’s skirts. For us, that pantomime never got old, but they said no, they’d never heard that, and some faces maybe said they were thinking it was typically American to bring all that up again, especially at an unprecedented time like this. Odell poured.

He was more popular in the privacy of the kitchen, where session musicians were coming out to one another as patriots.

“I feel U.S.-grade American. Job well done.”

They hadn’t tensed up at my presence and they’d even scooted over for me against a counter. Bags wouldn’t let me get in on the fat joint that two musicians passed between themselves. He just reached out and put my arm down. From the way he shook his head I understood that there was something in that joint I didn’t want to mess with. He said West Berlin was finished because the first thing that would happen was that the city would get regulated and what were they going to do with us, the irregulars.

“Moses, you can split. We’re good now. Here, take this atom bomb with you.”

Zippi was losing it. Her makeup had run completely. She looked like she had a spider tattoo on her face. She and a large woman were head-to-head over the bar. Zippi gripped the woman by her henna-soaked hair and the woman had her fingers in Zipporah’s dyed black scalp. They were sobbing and understanding each other, sobbing and understanding. She had fallen out with her family not over her black lover, but because she came back to Berlin, where her family had moved to from Polish Prussia in 1910. Why was she telling strangers things she’d never told me?

My bitch of a white wine date from back-when recoiled from Big Dash’s dancing a jig with her. “Am I Aunt Wanda from Uganda? She I am not.”

“You say kosmonaut, I say astronaut,” Big Dash belted out to two East German youths trying to help each other get to the men’s room in time.

I couldn’t take any more. The emissions from sputtering Trabi and Wartburg engines seemed to have become visible and were floating waist-high in the streets.

* * *

West Berlin had been up all night, crying, honking. Café Rosa hadn’t closed. Smoke was awake, a thick band extending from ceiling to shoulder level. A radio station was interviewing thrilled brother after thrilled brother. At the same time, Stevie Wonder was singing, “They say that heaven is ten zillion light years away,” and there he was, with guys from the architects’ collective, that white boy in all his masculine glamor. “Jed.” The god of Weimar culture pulled me down by my arms. “Jed, Mensch .” My forehead scraped his buttons.

He drank all day long and we smoked all day long. We saw an East German family in a supermarket count the varieties of marmalade. We eavesdropped on East Germans giving one another directions and telling one another where they’d been. We smoked in front of a school on the Bundesallee with three Turkish boys. They blew into their hands or kept them tucked in their armpits. They said East German teens had beaten up a friend of theirs behind Bahnhof Zoo, warning him that from now on it was their station.