Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

We found Trabants parked on sidewalks and locked his new BMW next to a big Russian Lada. We bought beer and bouletten for some men in Manfred’s pub so that they wouldn’t drink up their one hundred West German marks of Welcome Money. We took the U-Bahn to Kochstrasse and walked into an East Berlin of plastic bags and new down coats. At the Friedrichstrasse station, the line of people trying to leave stretched down the stairs and into the street. We went through the unguarded diplomatic exit and up to the platform. As we went over the river, a little boy with a Bon Jovi haircut said to East Berlin, “Adios.”

It took a long time to get off the Freedom Train, to get down the stairs at the station, to get into the street. Stores were giving away food; some people carried big boxes of appliances. There were people everywhere, but no taxis. We talked our way in the cold back to the Co-op. The East German brand of stonewashed jeans was heartbreaking. A unified Germany was only acceptable in the context of a unified Europe. We passed out on the old futon.

Fate left us fully clothed, though Manfred got up in the night, and when he came back, he turned out the light and pulled off his boots. He groped for my right Doc Marten. He fell to a disgraceful pillow on his back, hands above his flattened hair. I waited for his toe to brush my instep, for him to cradle me to him. I waited until he sat up in the weak light, hair standing. I made coffee down the hall. I had no milk. He lit the stove, his back in his seaman’s sweater carved with power and beauty.

They drilled a hole in the Wall at Potsdamerplatz. The Polish flea market had gone on as usual. The Poles had nothing, but at least they were Poles, whereas the East Germans had always been made to feel like second-class Germans, Manfred said, he who still had not really been to East Berlin.

The fortress island was overrun and my footsteps had taken me along the top of the Berlin Wall. History had freed Manfred and I’d never seen Yao so quiet. Alma and Uwe phoned from Basel. Dad called and when I called him back Mom told me not to do anything dangerous. I called Solomon myself, and it was not like him to say that I must not forget that the Germans did not like blacks and Jews.

It was a miracle, people said, as if the cobblestones had, indeed, yielded oysters, just as in Heine’s poem. Something like Rhine wine washed through the gutters as emerald bottles rolled in the cold under the dancing, the chassez-dechassez of the very drunk. White boys in sad shoes tried to be cool at the Mercedes showroom.

“I think we shall have to send them all back, no?” the house leader said low to Yao.

After a visit to the Polish flea market’s chess players, a film in Café Rosa on The Doors, another on Jimi Hendrix, and hours of tall white beers, Manfred bear-galloped on all fours onto the futon, stretching a pair of my sweatpants and winter socks. He filled and reshaped a sweatshirt and shook his clean hair from his eyes. I fished in a drawer, pretending to have just remembered something, and handed him his Zippo lighter. It was out of fluid, but he was glad to have it back.

We talked about my meeting him and Rosen-Montag in Japan. We’d shared nights in German history that he’d scorched the autobahn not to miss. I could tell how much it meant to Manfred, because he turned the joint around in his teeth so that the fire was in his mouth, leaned over, closed his eyes, and sent a gust of marijuana-and-non-menthol-tobacco smoke toward my parted lips.

* * *

They cut the Wall at Potsdamerplatz like a loaf and artfully set the three sliced sections to one side, an open door, the pieces leaning, historic relics. Souvenir hunters, mostly Americans, worked along the Wall with hammers and chisels, some perhaps manufactured by Schuzburg Tools. East German soldiers and West Berlin police managed crowd control together. New people filed between red rails into my world. The East Bloc way of life had arrived: long lines for everything.

A great summer of the head, the postwar era, swept to its end. Playgrounds were preparing to rust behind empty barracks. It was too late for me to try for what I was never going to be, and I never bothered to work out what I would do with myself if found. Tourists poured from distant birches, coming from the future of skyscrapers and magnetic trains, and girls disappeared into the future, with plastic bags of pineapples and cosmetics, days and days of them, and then it snowed.

I missed the unification of Germany ceremonies at the Brandenburg Gate the following year, because I was in a graveyard blinking rapidly as two large coffins were lowered into the cookie-cutter earth. A prince of a man had spun out of control, killing himself and the woman he loved, who was buckled in beside him, setting off in those horrified to survive them a seeping away of life, a deterioration of soul.

* * *

“Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.”

* * *

On his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1893, Du Bois went to Potsdam for coffee and saw a pretty girl. He had candlelight in his room on the Schöneberger Ufer. The Landwehrkanal crept below him and he wrote to himself that he was a strong man, glad to be alive, rejoicing as a strong man. He’d trimmed his beard and mustache in the fashion of the crippled kaiser’s and learned about Wagner. He said that the Chicago Exposition had a lot of art and not the loan of a single masterpiece from Europe.

But he knew all about the Sorrow Songs, he thought of them what Frederick Douglass knew of them, and they took him home to Negro-hating America, where the great man, Douglass, died as Du Bois was putting down his cane and taking off his German gloves. Nobody knew then that Douglass had had a German mistress for twenty-five years. Who knew that Douglass wrote poetry, he who never saw his mother’s face by daylight.

When Douglass married a younger woman, this mistress, a journalist, Jewish, a refined woman, swallowed cyanide in Paris. I have sometimes wondered what Mom would have said about that.

* * *

So far from his Jamaica, Claude McKay had been warned in 1923 by friends in Moscow not to go back to Berlin because France was using black troops to occupy the Ruhr. Some German Americans were hysterical about the jungle threat to the white women of the precious Ruhr.

Berlin was inflation-sick and hostile, but not toward him. The Wandervögel, German youths who were supposed to sling knapsacks over their shoulders and make harmonies in the forests, roamed the streets. McKay met a friend from his Greenwich Village days, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, the poet who dressed like a parakeet and talked Dada with the leaves. She was selling newspapers, reduced to German homespun, a pitiful Frau. He asked his rich American boy to give her some dollars. The white boy liked McKay’s poetry and kept him drunk. Gentlemen liked McKay; McKay liked sailors and the guts of banjos. He wrote sonnet after sonnet in Berlin and didn’t know he had syphilis.

* * *

Berlin was the place where European powers got together in 1884 to divide Africa among themselves and that’s why Du Bois opens his operatic novel, Dark Princess , in the German capital. It is 1923 and because his medical school in New York won’t permit the protagonist to take obstetrics where he might touch white women, he, an accomplished black student, storms off to Berlin. He’s seen white women smoke, but never a colored one, and he pours out his heart to an Indian princess over tea in the Tiergarten, having saved her from the advances of a white American boy in a café on Unter den Linden. He knocked the guy down.

A few years and some misadventures later, the black student is a popular state legislator from Chicago about to win the nomination for Congress, his idealism wiped away by big-interest politics. But reunited with the princess, he renounces political office and abandons his scheming wife. Don’t let black Chicago think you’re down and out because of one man, a cigar-chomping ward boss tells the cast-off wife.