He wanted me to know that this was his decision alone, as head of his family and the protector of his children. He had not consulted Cello. She had been an ally of my good health, he said in English. I’d been living with them a long time, he continued in German. Perhaps a change was in order for us all.
The hashish from Bags never lasted long enough for me to bring any back to their place and though I knew he also had cocaine, I stayed away from it. Cello couldn’t face me, in a tired rather than sheepish or censorious way. As disappointed in me as she was, I had a suspicion that she knew something about where the drugs might have come from that she wasn’t telling. I did not question her. I was too amazed by this slice of real life. The moral upper hand was mine to study, homeless though I was. I wrote a long note of thanks addressed to them both.
Cello phoned me at my Nissen hut and said that I had a concubine’s mentality, but she didn’t understand why. She said my mother had lied to me all my life about my being good-looking and I should spend just enough time in front of a mirror to see myself as the world saw me. I was not my brother and never would be. It was hard to strike back at Cello because she went on for so long, and by the time she spat out one sequence of hurtful remarks I’d changed my mind about saying what I thought I had to say, because the rule was that Cello and I only went so far with each other. It’s just that the demarcation of what was considered “far” had shifted considerably into my territory.
I didn’t tell her about N. I. Rosen-Montag’s great plans for me. Cello had merely shrugged when I’d suggested they have the Rosen-Montags to dinner again. I guessed at the time that that meant she’d already tried and it hadn’t worked out. I was pleased that I had enjoyed the times when Cello had had to show an I’m-glad-for-you face when we met by her study door and I gave her the briefest of rundowns on how busy the builder of a city was keeping me.
I decided not to tell her about a conversation I’d had that afternoon with none other than Susan Sontag. I’d come across Sontag in Cello’s favorite record store in Europa Center, a large two-floor operation filled with classical music that Cello seldom bought. She agonized over new recordings, as though they were a kind of betrayal. I looked across the aisle and told Sontag that I’d heard her speak back in my hometown. She’d been a freshman at the University of Chicago when she was sixteen. I’d not expected a grin. She said she was glad she never became a teacher.
I told her I had moved to West Berlin for good and was never going home again. She told me home was where my books were. I told her that I had some books in Berlin, some were in my parents’ house, but most were in storage. There I was, in the fraternity of Americans Abroad, talking to this famous woman with the white streak in her hair. She said Twain called Berlin the German Chicago because it, too, was always in a state of becoming. She inclined her head and walked off when she sensed that other shoppers had realized she was approachable.
* * *
I didn’t just move away from Charlottenburg, from downtown West Berlin. I stopped watching TV, West German soap operas, American thrillers on the Armed Forces Network, and perplexing costume dramas on East German stations. I’d been kicked out, a laugh riot at the ChiChi, a rite of passage in becoming a true citizen of West Berlin. The mail didn’t come and Berlin was happy. A man with icy raindrops on his thick mustache was repairing the façade of the Hotel Kempinski. I smiled; he didn’t. That did not have to mean bad news.
I didn’t see Cello the night I left. Much earlier, across the courtyard, I could hear her calling her children into bed with her. Dram waited before he went back to the office, doing dictation on a portable machine. He shook hands with Manfred and grabbed a suitcase. Manfred manfully took two more of them. He didn’t humiliate me when Dram wished us good luck as though he thought we were together. Manfred said we might as well deal with the boxes of books. They left no room for me in the car. I followed in a taxi.
There I was in Schöneberg, on a futon on Manfred’s floor. It worked out because mostly he stayed over at his oncologist’s. He wasn’t drinking. I fingered his shirts in his absence but did nothing too creepy. The hot-water heater worked in the shower, but I wore a sweater and two pairs of socks under the duvet. I looked up over my boxes at the weak courtyard lamps trapped in the black of his wet, streaked window. A Liberty Bell, a gift from the people of the United States, slept in the tower of the city hall.
When he was around, he would yank my arms down toward the floor and stress how cool it was to have me staying with him. I was not in the way, Mann. To be pulled down like that meant that my head would bang against his shoulder, uncoordinated as I was. I listened to him close his book and turn off the light and cough. Though I was the goat in the stable that lets the stallion sleep, I couldn’t help it. I thought maybe I could rig my dreams. I tried to drift into sleep holding on to the image of us united and running the ChiChi.
FOUR
The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.
Cain was a fugitive, but as the son of Adam and Eve he was simply acting out the family tradition of exile. His wife, that roadside convenience, probably endured many a night of listening to Cain’s guilty tears and then many a morning of his loathing because she had witnessed his tears. Somehow he pulled himself together, and east of Eden, in the land of Nod, he founded a city, which he named for his son, Enoch.
Perhaps by the time Enoch grew up he was completely bored with his father’s neurotic, repetitive story of how harshly the Lord had used him. There, over the sputtering lamp and the darkening wine, was Cain, becoming morbidly self-pitying as he trotted out his old grievances and regrets. Perhaps Enoch and his mother exchanged a look, and one of them would say, My look at the time. We must to bed. And then they would abscond from the company of the anguished man.
I like to think that in this new city Cain found friends who welcomed his talk. Maybe some among them were true friends, but how could the founder of a city ever be sure people received him because they liked him. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Cain. An audience was an audience. Theoretically, the inhabitants of this city had to be his relations. If not, then they were phantoms, figments of Cain’s imagination. Hallucination was another family tradition. His parents believed in their conversations with a serpent.
* * *
The Chicago I grew up in was full of people who could not get away. They couldn’t cash checks; they couldn’t buy tickets out of town. State Street was Stuck Street. People without gas money went to work on State Street. They ate government cheese for lunch. The Dan Ryan Expressway slammed through property that had slipped from family hands before the Great Depression.
Liquor stores, beauty shops, check-cashing joints, gas stations, and tambourine Pentecostal churches in former drugstores made it impossible for me to understand what had been so fabled about Bronzeville. There were a couple of corners, but most everything was boarded up. My dad couldn’t get over the loss of the Regal, his favorite theater, the place with the balcony where he became a man, and Mom said she was tired of debating whether the Taylor projects could ever be cleaned up.