I bought condoms at a gas station. I lifted the heavy sack of all my pointless, fruitless pining and bore down on her, the sweet, lonely Polish loading dock. Nothing is mysterious to a seaman, they say, unless it be the sea itself. I didn’t keep our next appointment and she had no phone.
* * *
One Saturday, I left the AA meeting in Dahlem early and went to one of those free Bach concerts in the ugly modern church at Europa Center. The musicians were visiting students, but it was another place where I could escape my landlord professor and myself.
Cello and Dram were both there. I was sure they’d wandered in on impulse. We got up and went outside at the same time. Cello shook off the bad experience, swinging her hair back and forth and making animal sounds. Dram lit up. They were young again. I was nostalgic for that sad, drifting feeling of a few weeks earlier. Money, the expatriate’s enemy, was ending my days with the frightened professor, he who was so unprepared for bachelor life. But I could see where his wife and his daughter might think his conversation a poor return for waiting on him hand and foot.
They’d maybe had something to drink, Cello and Dram. They’d maybe had one of those where-are-we-now conversations, without either being irrevocably honest. Dram stepped on his cigarette. “Okay, he decided he is straight,” he said in English, as if Manfred had come to his senses. Cello lightly cupped my chin. Dram got behind me and said over my shoulder that I was not to give up hope. Cello took my hands, backed up, and let go.
Dram doubled back to thank me for being there for Cello during her recent cancer scare, but he’d been so unable to guess what was up with his wife that he wished I had told him she was consulting a specialist in Switzerland, someone his family did not know. Cello, swinging her arms and her hair, stayed off in the distance as he told me what she evidently had had no trouble getting him to believe. Dram said her music foundation had never before had so many meetings, so he’d been concerned. He knew that something was up. He tapped my shoulder and caught up with Cello. Dram and Cello pulled on each other as they walked hand in hand across the plaza toward the Ku’damm, their children, and home.
Their atmosphere of hearts still beating gave me permission to be friends again with the ChiChi. I was not feeling at all vulnerable to the promises, the lies of white wine. But in one of those addict’s crazy minutes, as soon as I saw Bags, I asked if he had any coke. He handled the heavy side of his business himself. Hash put me to sleep and Berlin asked for a brother to be somewhat awake, I explained. He called me Cuz.
The streets had been busy ever since I got back. Small parades and street fairs and demonstrations and ceremonies and bands and protests. There were official and unofficial festivities marking the city’s birthday. Lessingsdorf had been one of those parties for the intelligentsia, for the arty, for what Manfred called the schicki-micki. I paid no attention when I heard the honking outside. It just sounded very loud. The ChiChi usually muffled most of the city noise, what little found its way behind Europa Center.
A regular who was leaving came back immediately and spoke to Odell. His body language alerted Zippi, who came flying. Odell ordered her to stay put, no cops. His buddies were with him. If Bags and Big Dash were among them, then I was going to be as well. I was in no mood to stay behind with the girls.
I recognized Afer, the guy from South Africa with the ancient name, who had been granted asylum. I saw blood on his forehead as he lurched toward the curb. He went down. He’d been hit so quickly, I thought somebody had thrown something at him. I didn’t realize he’d been socked again by a burly man who jumped into a small car of other burly men holding small flags.
Odell’s buddies stormed the car and cut it off. Big Dash was rocking the vehicle by its door handle. Three or four languages accompanied the assault. The burly passenger rammed his door against Big Dash, and Bags pulled the passenger from the car. We set on him. The other burly East Europeans — Bulgarians, Odell said later — were out and swinging metal pipe.
Bags went down and I jumped on an East European’s back. It was not like the movies. To be kicked in the stomach by a goat could not be much worse than an East European elbow. Moreover, he spun, and I with him. The law of physics predicted my flight over the hood of a parked car. I banged my head going down on the other side. I saw spots.
“‘Fly me to the moon,’” Big Dash sang to an East European. The big white dude paused and Big Dash kicked his attacker hard in the nuts.
It was a black-white, African-American-African-Slav melee. Afer lay unconscious and Big Dash was on his knees, blood overflowing his mouth, his lower lip a fountain. Two men had Odell, whose free arm punched at the ribs of an assailant. Two session men grunted with an East European, and Bags had the fifth man from the tiny car. It was like the movies. He slammed his forehead down on the man’s nose. The huge man lay between parked cars. I rolled over and raised myself onto his throat. I was not dead. He kicked. I was not a eunuch. I let go. I struck before I got up. His teeth cut my knuckles.
Bags palmed me five, drew his fingers along mine, and ended with a snap of his fingers.
It was over, except for Zippi shrieking that she’d called the police. Afer was back among us, surrounded by women. Odell motioned for the session musicians to slip away as the sirens neared. The East Europeans sat with their backs against their tiny car, panting, touching their bruises. Odell flipped a couple of pipes into nearby bushes. I didn’t see Big Dash get up and leave. Hours later he came back, stitched up and drinking through a straw.
The West Berlin police were no different from police anywhere in their dislike of paperwork. They were answering drunken calls about football violence and minor-league anger all over town. That we were Americans, black Americans, made them even less willing to pursue the matter. They made it clear that if they detained the East Europeans, then they would take us in as well. In the end, Afer wouldn’t go with the ambulance. The medics asked him questions in German and English, then left, removing their rubber gloves. I saw the dread in the policemen’s faces when Afer produced his documents. They did not want to have met up with him.
Our documents were in order. Odell wanted the police to come in to see how much in German order the bar and everything about it was. They’d handed our passports or cards or registrations back to us, the Americans, without comment. Bags had expired, laminated army ID. But he’d refused to get lost. He was an American. The police were deferential to Zippi. I did not know until that night that she was an Israeli. I also think I learned that she and Odell weren’t married and that she was the sole owner of the bar.
Show us the way to the next whiskey bar. Bruised and sore, I felt wonderful, connected, thoroughly in Berlin. Bags knew a painter with a storage closet on Moritzplatz, in Kreuzberg, an oval at the bottom of a dead-end street leading up to the Wall. It was quiet and Turkish. Mice ate at canvases during the night. They didn’t bother me, spread out on Manfred’s futon. I had been the kind of guy who freaked at the way they flicked along your peripheral vision, that something extra in the room. But I’d become badass.