Supposedly they’d met before, but she ignored my quick Uwe, Afer, Yao, Duallo, Lucky thing, and marched off to the bar to demand a glass of red wine, Lucky’s name hanging from the biblical shawl that crossed her hair like a bridge over a dark river. Dram sauntered in her direction. He called loudly for a coffee. Though he conquered her every time, I wondered if each time he wasn’t sure he would, and if that was the secret.
I did a Lotte von der Pfalz, Cello Schuzburg, Dram Schuzburg thing, standing nowhere near any of them. Lotte’s arm shot out and Dram walked over and lightly took her hand. She blushed. Cello didn’t budge from the bar. Dram called. Cello wheeled around, a starting-over smile along with her. Introductions were not really a Berlin thing. Our bar wine was supposedly foul, but nobody turned it down.
“She made him drive,” Hayden whispered. “The ride over was tense, child. Ravel wore makeup,” he continued, studying Lotte, who’d made sure she’d had a nap. “Blue eyeliner.” He and Father Paul were respectful when I offered Lotte their names, but they sat at a table ahead of her.
I’d said my black housemates’ names fast, so fast I’d messed up the German for Cello, Hayden, Paul, Dram, you remember my friends Uwe, Afer, Yao, Duallo, and this is Lucky. I said all these names fast, trying to hide his in there, but Hayden, like one of Hemingway’s hunters, spotted him in the brush, nibbling at Mother Earth.
I got us chairs chest-first, but my face was too shiny. I moved around too fast and when I slowed myself down, I no doubt looked like someone who wasn’t at home in his body telling himself to slow down. I was saying the names of other Co-op members and Cello graciously acknowledged them as she and Dram took seats at the front center table.
“Jed, my friend,” Lotte said. I’d forgot her white wine. Her table had filled up with people whose orders I’d not taken.
I knew that I was in danger of sitting on it and squashing it to death. He was next to me during the film, equatorial and fruity, squirming in his seat. His body was alive and strong. It was special, like holding a child and sensing in your being as another human that the child is moving, a person is newly alive, warmth up against warmth.
Dram laughed his head off at RoboCop, but I couldn’t have passed an exam on what the film was about. I kept quiet during the discussion afterward. Dram scooted his chair closer to Cello, got up, and pushed Lotte’s chair into our rearranged circle. He wasn’t smoking.
“You’re not smoking,” he said to me in German.
That was why everything was happening too fast. A cigarette was a magic wand. It had the power to make time stand still. The problem was that cigarettes betrayed you to your end. They got bored and put their arms down. You were used up and time began again, even faster. Cigarettes took cynical payment. They put you on the rack and killed you, ended that life that hadn’t moved past the first chapter of Confessions of Zeno.
And the problem with love was that it made you feel bad most of the time. I’d spent the whole film not paying attention to it, sitting in the smokeless shadows — a close house vote restricted smoking until after the film — wondering just what was the vibe or the meaning of the first awkward thing that had happened between Duallo and me.
I got hung up over the question of laundry. In Berlin, it was not simple. I did it on alternate Saturdays, when I was not on duty at the Schrebergärten. About half the Co-op members had washing machines, usually tiny un-American appliances that had ridiculous vacuum-hose-like attachments for the sink. The rest of the house had made arrangements to use these machines. Except for the fifth floor. No one had a machine and as far as I could tell no one had an arrangement in the house with anyone who did. I’d not inherited Alma’s arrangements either. Intimacy was a funny thing in a German commune. They did not want someone else’s dirty laundry. But they hung their clean laundry from windows and across landings and around the courtyard, like we were some neorealist Italian film set.
Afer’s girlfriend collected his laundry and returned it, brought it upstairs to the fifth floor. The more Duallo stayed with me, the more of his things he left for the convenience of having them there.
I washed his things along with mine and they were in the drawer that was becoming his. I didn’t mention it; neither did he. This was the first week he’d spent every night with me. And so he was with me in the late afternoon when I carried the bag to the rare laundrymat far down Potsdamerstrasse, past the used-car lot and the Spiel Kino/casino whorehouse. I dumped everything in, his things, too. I hardly think he realized where we were.
He was talking about Afrika Bambaataa again. He had the latest album on his portable CD player. It had earphones. Two prostitutes smoked, old enough to be made to do their own laundry again, I thought. Had I not had a shift at the Café Rosa already and were I not facing an extra shift because of the film, maybe I would have acted my age and not been suddenly unwilling to accept him acting his.
When at long last I had a pile of hot clothes on the table, I tapped him on the shoulder. He took out an earbud. I walked back to the table and patted a pile of clothes, indicating that he was to help me fold. He eventually came over and stood there, earbud and CD player in his hands.
“Mann, komm schon.”
It took him a while to put the CD player down safely and store the earphones. Then he picked up a T-shirt, one of mine, and looked at it. He set it down again and folded it in half, like a napkin. We were alone. He picked up another T-shirt. I was nearly finished. I was tired, but I knew we had to climb out of this. I would have to carry him up on my back and throw him over the side of the crater of misunderstanding. I’d offended the aristocrat in him.
“Merci.”
He said nothing and picked up his CD player. I’d offended the boyfriend in him as well. He was not my girlfriend. He did not perform tricks.
* * *
The Oracle of Delphi was obviously a black woman, Solomon said, because she couldn’t keep her opinions to herself. But then the Sphinx was a black woman, too. “We can’t win.”
And even if the Field Museum hadn’t said so, Mom said, he ought not to forget that Tutankhamun’s grandmother, Queen Tiyi, came from the Sudan.
“Teach, sister,” the resident crazy of the moment said and left to get a good seat. The petition to Mom had succeeded that Cello’s practicing be curtailed on the night that The Carol Burnett Show was on.
Ronald and Rhonda were upstairs putting on pajamas, but Dad had to make apologies to Mom for not checking to see who was around before he spoke. How could Cello, suddenly in the hall, not have heard Dad remind Mom that the Queen of the Matamba had been known to speak to Ralston Jr. from the seventeenth century, so she had better watch it or else she, too, might wake up in a church with a hammer in her hand and fragments of a Jesus at her feet.
Dad stole out the door for the Eagle.
* * *
Cello was telling me what she’d discussed with Mom about the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, how Bach’s original opening two bars have a single line, and Busoni adds alternating octaves. He starts with an octave in the left hand and a single note in the right hand and then an octave in the right hand and a single note in the left hand and they alternate and it’s not as easy to play as it sounds, this being Bach.
“Nothing like a sweat after a good Bach,” Dram said in English.
I treasured the look that Duallo and I exchanged, like a couple. Wasn’t that a weird thing for him to say?