I was happiest when Duallo and I were alone, in some bad café after a museum visit, at the movies in seats I’d insist he choose, in the back of the crowd at street concerts, in my room on the fifth floor. Alma had gone on her tour — she wondered if I permitted myself to be free enough inside to understand what folklore was — but she left Duallo her James Brown record with “Funky Drummer” on it that he could really groove to.
* * *
Dad was the secret of my persuasiveness as a man in love. Because he had taken care of me, I could in turn protect Duallo in the American style. I was one of the few members of the Co-op who did not have an outside job. The young Germans also didn’t have a slave — the slang for “job” that Odell and Bags had liked to use because it came to them from Malcolm X. But I didn’t play guitar with my case open in Europa Center either.
Some members of the Co-op had been to Lessingsdorf. I didn’t talk about having worked for Rosen-Montag, because that was my defeat at the gates of international cool. I’d been near glory and the she-goddess had flung me into the pits. I climbed out and stepped off into an act that was more my stride. In Cello’s small village, there were many mansions.
I said I was working on a script for a documentary back in Chicago. Nobody would have cared had I told the truth: I didn’t get that TV job. But I already had a job. Alma said that for thousands like us in West Berlin, that was the point — to figure out why we were in West Berlin.
Two days after Harold Washington’s funeral, Dad said he would explain things to Ronald, who would explain them to his sisters, but now he was talking to Solomon and me. He and Mom had made plans for our graduate education and for our getting married and for our having kids of our own, and if we did have kids someday, and he hoped that Solomon and Francesca would, then we would learn that it’s a waste of effort to try to attach a timetable to your kids’ lives once they’d got seats on that rocket ship out of the nest.
All he knew was that yeast rose. He was going to go ahead and give Solomon his wedding gift and although marriage was not going to be my hangman’s card he was going to go ahead and let me have the equivalent, because it could not have been easy for me to go back to school a third time and ride it out. He told Solomon that he and Francesca didn’t need her father, not only because he had brought up his son to take care of his family, but also because he hadn’t been treasurer of Shay Holdings, Inc., for thirty years just for Uncle Ralston’s sake. He said that he’d promised Mom that what her father had allowed to happen to her and her mother he never would. He told me not to sell myself out over there, not to let myself get taken. I still had to be a man, the head coach of a team.
My black expatriate’s footsteps along the verges of Autonomen culture in West Berlin had been made possible by the vengeance of my father and his power of attorney. Cello in particular was thrilled. She referred to her parents as buried alive. Dad loaded Uncle Ralston and Ralston Jr. with drugs and parked them in two different locked-down facilities. He and Mom drove a resigned Aunt Gloria to a convent in Wisconsin. Dad cut Mrs. Williams loose without another cent, prying her out of a house Shay Holdings owned. He said she was what public assistance was for. Mom made no objections. Dad was cutting us loose, too, and Mom coped by pretending that he wasn’t.
I gave Duallo a portable CD player, the latest fashion. It fit snugly into his book bag. Another thing that had changed since Rock Hudson’s death was the exchange rate between the dollar and the deutschmark. Americans didn’t win the lottery anymore. But where Duallo and I lay was the ancient world. I grew a beard and rolled him over once more.
* * *
Louis Armstrong’s new tailor asked him if he dressed left or right. Armstrong told him to leave room on both sides. “I like for it to swang.”
* * *
Because of Duallo, I walked through doors chest-first. I was no longer a eunuch to my fellow Co-op members. They made mistakes with him right off, I could tell. One girl tried to get over on him, as a pretty girl who got annoyed when the wrong sort of boy was gay. Gay was okay, so long as it wasn’t someone whom she wanted to like girls, her. She would sit with him at the café bar and make her thirteenth apology in English and German if she had said something the other day when they were speaking that offended him. It’s just that the flies on the eyes of the children she saw in that refugee camp would stay in her mind forever. I counted the number of times she stroked his bare arm. I thought of Zippi slamming saucers around. This girl turned up the volume. The girl was booming. She boomed at Duallo, but it waved over him.
The Co-op offered freedom because West Berlin was the back of beyond, where we’d come to live unmonitored, in a place suitable to people either not in a position to judge or those who had made it their cause to judge our judgers. But they, the white people, I almost observed to Alma when she was still around, assumed that Duallo needed their help just because he wasn’t white, wasn’t German. His engineering student visa was always a surprise to them, a bit like Uwe’s German.
But unlike Uwe, Duallo wasn’t touchy about being patronized. He figured it was their problem, not his, their assumptions of what his story would be, their slowness to comprehend a black Frenchman. I was so ginger around him; he never felt that from me. To be black in most places was to be on the touchy side. I didn’t challenge him. He considered me a patient listener. I didn’t understand everything, but I never tired of looking at him, of having him shower and shower, he pleased to be clean, perched in the window ledge, worrying in that young way about his future.
These should have been pancake days. But once I wasn’t unnerved anymore that he would take up with some girl in the house and move on, I was sure that a secret sweetheart waited for him back in Saint-Denis or a handsome German engineer fluent in both Wolof and French would show him a bone bigger than mine. I couldn’t relax. His future was in France whenever he talked about it. He was my first real thing, too.
* * *
In my dream, I am in a sanatorium, attended by Mrs. Williams. I have come to stop smoking, but she is pouring white wine from a glossy white pitcher into a delicate glass. My hands are tied. She has my shoes. She motions with her head toward the open door. Someone is behind the door, but I am forbidden to say his name. Cigarette burns appear on the sheet and I wake up.
* * *
It was mid-October and Berlin life was hurrying back inside when the sun went down. On Saturday nights, we turned the Café Rosa into a cinema. The house vote to do so had been unanimous, mostly because our equipment and screen were hot, black market. Some of us still “liberated” things from stores. Plus, ZFB was in a leaky, damp phase.
Pabst’s Westfront 1918 had been followed by Sembène’s Black Girl, which we’d obtained thanks to a name in Paris that Duallo provided. Now we were packing them in with RoboCop, and Afer made a big display of being uneasy about where our copy came from. Guys in the back had to sit on tables.
The joy of Cello’s trust account had made us almost like family, but I’d not expected her to call me at the Café Rosa from time to time, or for her to say yes when I explained that I couldn’t come to dinner because of our Saturday Night at the Movies program and would she like to come to Co-op J.I., “Koh-op Hah-ee,” instead. She and Dram had been so busy, they’d not seen RoboCop, and he really liked Soldier of Orange, she reported back.
It wasn’t the ten extra marks I would have to put in for Hayden and Father Paul that I resented. These would be my guests, I’d made sure with the house leader’s partner, because Cello tended to sail past ticket takers and sign-in tables. But I didn’t like it when I compared myself to Hayden after his season in the mountains, his butt yet more rounded and smooth, as if made by Canova.