Cello admitted to nothing, confided nothing. I asked her no questions. Maybe she hadn’t washed her face and hair since the Lessingsdorf opening the week before. Maybe she just stared at her children in their baths. Perhaps Dram was in Dortmund again. Manfully, I ordered for us both, and she spooned carrot soup and tear spit for a while. Through me she was reaching out to my mother in this, her woman’s hurt. She was squeezing Mom’s hand, not mine.
It had been the worst day. I was in awe of my discretion with Cello, but I took it as a consequence of the shock I’d had. Manfred had also got out of town, in a matter of days.
The family of a girl in Rosen-Montag’s entourage had a small Schloss, a little palace, in West Germany that needed extensive work on its wiring, plumbing, and interior decoration. He needed a break from Irma’s flowers, Manfred said. He brought up his backpack from his storage cubicle. He wanted to give me things, but I’d nowhere to put them. He threw out his furniture and Irma’s plants. He dumped as much as he could, quickly. We loaded his boxes and lamps in a moving van run by former junkies. We took my boxes up to his empty apartment. I would have to do something with them soon.
I had several coffees and he several beers at his pub in farewell. He controlled our hug in the dawn’s early light, holding my neck down on the edge of his shoulder so I couldn’t kiss his cheek, in case I was tempted. His crotch was an insulting distance.
I’d not slept and I ate more french fries and swilled more coffee as Cello lost herself to her heartbreak in the blessed desertion of the hotel restaurant. The one waiter stood far away. I wondered if we looked like a story about black deportation. Instead, we were a story of when there is no one else to turn to, when you did not want to be alone, alone in Europe though you were, when music of any kind would be only a prelude to suicide, alone and black as you were.
One of Odell’s session musician friends, Afer, once explained to me how he fled his Johannesburg township the night rumor reached his uncle that the security police were coming for him. He spent a long time in the Cameroons, trying to find a school in the West that would take him. He had a chance to go to East Berlin. From there, he crossed over. There had been nothing to stop him. He was not a Third World guest worker living in a concrete tower in one of the outlying districts of East Berlin. Once across the border, once in West Berlin, you ask for asylum. His case had been pending for a while, then got settled in his favor. His story was real, whereas my story sounded to me like an imitation of others I’d read.
I don’t know what told me that Cello was “holding,” though she would not have understood what the word meant in that context had I asked her. I made her give me the cocaine she had on her. I went to the toilet and flushed it. She’d needed someone to take from her this last remembrance. That was why she was eating and sobbing. She was crashing; I was crashing. I was a fellow addict, someone you ask to watch over you when you’re in withdrawal, when you’re facing cold turkey, when you don’t want anyone in normal life to see you. I made up my mind to abandon Manfred’s futon on my next move.
I ordered ice cream and Cello laughed at last. What got to me was that Manfred must have been planning, not merely contemplating, his exit for some time and he’d not told me. Irma didn’t want to see me, because she believed I’d known all along. I had no idea that Rosen-Montag’s entourage included a countess. Manfred had made arrangements to give up his place, to redirect his mail, and behind my back as well as Irma’s. I didn’t want to feel “left,” as he’d left her. On the other hand, I was obscurely flattered, obscurely turned on to have a share in his strange fashion of forsaking.
“He loved the flashlight more than he did the hearth,” Dad said of guys he’d heard had left their wives.
I thought of the time I flapped around inside a car as it rolled over into a ditch. It was eerie, the disconnect between knowing what was happening and not being able to do anything about it, that having to go through with what was happening, unable to do anything about it.
You couldn’t get away from your own authorship fast enough; you couldn’t run from the deed fast enough; you couldn’t wait to be the white-haired person decades later, full of regret when the intrepid young journalist tracks you down.
Cello was drained and my stomach was taut and round. I used to wait outside her door on our third floor when she cried from shame because of the madness of her father, how public his mania liked to make itself. Then there was her mother, proud of her nightclub engagement at a hotel over in Hammond, Indiana. I’d just wanted to sit with her, to keep her company, the only thing you can offer someone in misery.
* * *
Aunt Jemima was hired to cook pancakes and tell stories at the Chicago Exposition. Her booth was a giant flour barrel. They said she made more than a million instant pancakes at the fair that one summer. Buttons featured her image, the fat, shiny-cheeked, big-eyed black woman in a kerchief: “I’se in town, honey.” They called her the most famous colored woman in the world.
Aunt Jemima liked to run her mouth, but black people didn’t like her, because she told stories about how happy she’d been on the plantation. In one story, she cooked such delicious pancakes she saved her master’s life. The Yankees decided to spare her master; or the Yankees were so enjoying their pancakes he had time to sneak away. Cello’s father couldn’t remember which.
Ralston Jr. told us that Aunt Jemima never made any money from that pancake recipe. He was dressed in pajamas. It was Christmas Eve. He fell asleep. Rhonda got Cello to come downstairs then. We argued over whether Aunt Jemima had been a real person. Cello and I didn’t want to believe it, even after Dad and Mom had stepped in, dispensers of the facts.
Because I was fat, kids in the school corridor who’d never seen Mom chanted behind me, “Ain’t yo mama on the pancake box?”
* * *
I was going to random AA meetings in German. Dram had come to Schöneberg to help fetch boxes of books and take them back to their cellar. I was not following my books to Charlottenburg. Yet through Cello’s intervention I got out of Friedenau before I ran out of the money to pay for my room of blue carpet. A friend of theirs, a professor of North American Studies, had been kicked out by his wife of three decades. He had a new place near the university in Dahlem, with a cheap room he thought suitable for a graduate student type. He liked that I cleaned up in the kitchen. He sat and talked. He was a specialist in the hideous Francis Parkman and called things by Indian — Native American — names. Hashish was “shongsasha.”
I cleaned a lot, while he complained to his estranged wife’s answering machine that she had not thought about what he was to do with his laundry. He called his friends and saw them often. He talked so much about his marriage and separation it drove me to my first heterosexual incident in some time.
He accompanied me to the Waldbühne, filled with indignation that his wife had got their adult daughter on her side. I’d wanted it to be one of those magical nights of music asking for my forget-yourself attention. The glitter Jessye Norman wore soared upward, answered by the stars. The birds quieted and the dark pulsed with love for her. Deep, deep. But it was as though my landlord professor had not been listening, had been instead watching for the concert’s end so he could pick up where he left off, right along with the mosquitoes, so many bouncing above the grass they looked like the tips of reeds.
His English was idiomatic, fluent, and he had to use all of it on me. I saw her check me out in the crowd of people filtering through the tunnel away from the band shell hidden in the forest. I’d been hurrying, to get away from my landlord professor’s circular analysis of his family dynamic. She’d kept up with us, this bold girl in worn-down flat shoes. She was trying to attract me, not him. Since Manfred’s going, I had been drifting about, as useless as Telstar. I suddenly veered onto her side. She had a strong odor and dark hair. It took my landlord professor a moment to register what was going on. Then he increased his pace ahead and away. Guys understood.