Afer wanted my vote to change the name of the bookstore from Librairie Rosa to Bookshop Dulcie September, in honor of the South African freedom fighter assassinated in Paris two months earlier. I voted with the Old Guard, convinced by the argument that the name, Librairie Rosa, was already established.
Afer told me off in the café. “You are a brother of the undescended testicle type.”
Alma heard this and decided that we were dear friends. She said she hadn’t wanted to change the bookstore or café name because Rosa Luxemburg was her girl. Alma was an anarchist from Romansch country high up in Switzerland. She was scheduled to sing its folk songs at ZFB and we were to pass the hat. She wouldn’t allow a fixed admission price for this music. She would leave again in the fall to tour. You thought of clear mountain streams when you looked into her light brown eyes and when she smiled. She wore boxy jackets and Chinese pants and brightly patterned headbands, because she couldn’t manage her shortish brown hair. Her skin glowed.
Alma told me that she found my reference to Cabaret silly, but not a serious offense. To her, Sally Bowles was amoral. Plus, she did not like show biz and if anyone sounded like show biz it was Liza with a Z. “You have heartbreak for Judy Garland, too? Ach so. A friend of Dorothy. I know this expression. To frighten the bones of each song.” She said she’d rather smoke than gain weight.
I told her about AA and Cello. Alma had heard of Schuzburg Tools, but not of Cello. She told me about the time a black woman had knocked on her door in the mountains and said in French that her car had broken down. Alma had a phone and she knew the one boy in that area who ran a garage. It would take him a day to get up there. They walked to the black woman’s car and walked back with her groceries and cooked together. The black woman stayed overnight and left in the morning. Alma never said to her that she had recognized her. The black woman never said that she was Nina Simone.
“But this is Berlin. You and Lotte came here for the same reason. To be gay.”
Alma said she’d seen me checking out the men at the house meeting. She said we were going to have a problem because we had the same taste: anybody.
Lotte was at her round wooden table late, slurring as she coached Uwe for a part he’d got in a Kreuzberg play about the Night of the Long Knives, the June dawn in 1934 when Hitler started shooting gay men high in the party hierarchy, the brownshirts who’d helped him to power. I left them and cycled down to the AA meeting in Dahlem. I liked most how light the sky was on my way back as I rang my smug, high-pitched bell at unsuspecting pedestrians and took on the cars curving through the Bundesplatz, cars unhampered by any speed limit, because this was West Berlin.
One Sunday I cycled to Wannsee. I said nothing to Cello and Dram about not smoking, because smoking was out of the question at Dram’s parents’ house anyway. Frau Schuzburg passed behind her son and said he was wearing too much scent. Her grandchildren were intelligent and well-mannered and good-looking. I remembered that when Konrad was three, he could count forever in three languages. “Timbuc-one, Timbuc-two, Timbuc-three,” his performance in English began. He knew he was funny, even at that age.
Because of Dram, the Schuzburgs, of all people, had some regard for the squatters’ movement. It was better to bring a house back to life than to let it crumble, innocent victim of the past. For them, the project of rebuilding Berlin was far from complete. They said squats should be brought into the system, too. The only time I heard Herr Schuzburg oppose Dram was over Dram’s belief that West Berlin should be declared an international city, either to govern itself or to be governed by several nations.
Exhausted and stuffed, I rode the S-Bahn sitting with my Schwinn back up to town. I got out in the heart of Charlottenburg and walked my bike. A his-and-her leather-clad couple not feeling the heat watched their small dog keep up beside me and stop at the same bookstore table that I did under the arches of the train tracks. They smiled; I smiled. I had no problems in West Berlin, the retirement community of the ’68 generation, as Dram described the city.
I walked to a gay bar on the other side of the Ku’damm, next door to the Department Store of the West, KaDeWe. “KaDaVey,” I’d learned to say. Nice Berlin closed up early on Sundays, the department store, the ice-cream chains along the Ku’damm, the apparel shops that smelled of middle-aged women’s perfumes, but not the bars. The gay bar was chatty and tipsy. I was pretty sure it was in this bar that I’d ordered Prosecco with a scoop of lemon sorbet, because I’d heard that that was what Cecil Taylor liked to drink.
There were other places around Berlin where I’d done worse, places I didn’t remember until I happened into a bathroom stall. I sipped my water. My bicycle was looking back at me from the street. I smiled to myself. A thin bearded bald guy at the other end of the crowded bar smiled gold-toothed in my direction. “Leaving so soon?” the twin who was probably his boyfriend asked in English as I went toward the exit. I unlocked my bicycle and wished blessings on their backs.
Back at the Café Rosa, marveling at how remade I felt, I nearly collided with one of the architects who’d come in to buy a bottle of red wine. We were closed, but they’d let him in. He was supposed to have been home an hour ago, but he got lost in the discussion Afer, Yao, Alma, and some others were having. The Berlin Effect. The architect departed. I got into what was left over and was tough on Afer, which he said he appreciated because being interrogated helped him to hone his thinking. We were strenuously self-conscious, everybody sitting around, ready to get down with history in case it came that way again.
* * *
And then comes that thing, out of the blue, a someone into you, and he really did come out of one of those long drawn-out late-summer afternoons, long after lunch and hours before sunset. I was sitting with Alma on the steps of the Reichstag, between the black and brown columns that showed bullet holes from the battle for the capital in the spring of 1945. The last tour bus had departed. In those days, the Reichstag had no dome. It had a tourist travel shop, as one of the memorials, the ruins of history that could be visited, posed against, silently questioned. It had no convincing day-to-day function, like most old government buildings of that kind in West Berlin. And if not a symbol, then yet more disused, underused scenery for the endless hanging out that life in West Berlin was. We sat and talked about our plan to put Lotte von der Pfalz onstage, laughing about funding fantasies, shaking our heads to the music of the football game taking place in the Platz der Republik, the dusty, worn-down, unkempt, big grassy square in front of the burned Reichstag.
The players ran from left to right and from right to left ceaselessly in the late-summer heat, the sky cheering them on, the white soccer ball bounding surprising distances all of a sudden before being pursued once again in the white dust of the open square. They charged, the two teams of African players, so many black men in one place in public in Berlin, and half of them half undressed, charging from our right to our left, the sunlight rolling over their dark muscles, their flowing, changing, elongating bodies. They ran without fear, they ran with their voices, they ran without worries about eczema or ichthyosis, they charged from my left to my right without Vaseline on their knees or heels, of that I was sure. They had no skin disorders to confuse their blackness with, they had only their glistening selves, as brown as the banks of those rivers in the Cameroons Duallo would prove so tender about.