Because it was cold and silent, the kind of Berlin morning when you realized just how far from where you came from and on your own you were deep down, I got Bags to tell me most of the story. They’d not picked him up with the keys on him. He’d flushed the luggage claim slip. Nothing had felt right that day and he didn’t go for the car at the Frankfurt airport. But they must have been waiting for him, because they picked him up anyway when he left the terminal. They detained him and lost him for some time on purpose before they questioned him about drug smuggling and former or current U.S. Army personnel.
Things had not been cool with Afer, because his people had lost money. Neither of us named Odell and Zippi. When they cut Bags loose, he had to get out of the country for a while. He headed upstairs to have his argument with Afer’s girlfriend.
I hadn’t seen a thriller since I met Duallo. I took him to the art cinema and to hear jazz and the opera, because I wanted him to have a certain impression of the culture I was into. He was into David Bowie.
“I used to be.”
“Essaie une autre fois.”
* * *
We’d been in Schöneberg at a hip agency, finishing up on getting our visas for Moscow. Everything had been nail-biting and I remembered why I never went anywhere. But Duallo paid close attention to what was said. Then we ran into Bags and Afer at Europa Center buying traveler’s checks as well. Bags said that everybody was tightening up on how to get the fuck out of Dodge.
I wouldn’t let Duallo walk to the Techno Institut. The three of us escorted him to a taxi rank and I went with Bags and Afer to the ChiChi. It was a tradition. I was getting out of Dodge. I had our tickets in my breast pocket.
I also had a letter. It had come two days before. I was carrying it around. I never got letters. I never wrote letters. Alma warned me that she never wrote letters. This letter had been forwarded to me. Mom had my address, but she’d sent this letter in care of Cello. That was Dram’s handwriting on the outer envelope. I’d not noticed it on the mail table. I never looked at the mail table. Mom had stopped forwarding my alumni newsletter and subscription renewal notices because I’d moved around so much.
The letter in my breast pocket came from Manfred, written from his Schloss. He said he wasn’t sure where I was. He said he had been back. Had I not also returned to Lessingsdorf before the legions of destruction reached the village? We could be proud of the conversions, and why not accept what had become of Rosen-Montag’s fantasy on a mud pile? So that had been his Deux Chevaux. His letter began, “My Darling Doughnut…”—our old joke, the literal translation of Kennedy’s famous line about his being a Berliner.
Zippi hugged us. Odell gave us the black man’s nod and pointed the remote. The ChiChi was a smoky murmur. It was going to be hard to find somewhere in Berlin where people were not talking about the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. The attack brought people in the ChiChi closer together and while they bonded I did not smoke or toke or drink. I’d not seen footage of the crash debris before. I was nervous that some real feeling might get up and menace me in my cage, my isolation.
Around midnight, Odell wanted to show off his new automobile, a 1933 Mercedes sedan with places for tires on either side of the engine. This one had no spare tires. It was in hilariously battered shape. A hole in the rear floor let winter swoosh along with us. Odell gave us a foul-smelling-gasoline ride to Potsdamerplatz. Zippi’s dark eye makeup ran with anger when he left her. Big Dash stood at her side, fanning.
I didn’t lose it too much when the three of them talked openly about a good deal coming that they wanted to get in on with these Yugoslavs. They knew me as a fool who threw money around. Bags rested a sexy hand on my shoulder. AA cautions us not to people-please, not to say yes to people just to get them to like us. He said they weren’t talking about any crazy Russians. They themselves were not crazy. I decided that they bought traveler’s checks for lots of reasons. I liked being taken for a ride, but I had not in the hours I’d been with them said much and that felt like power.
Duallo wasn’t back yet, because the message was still taped to my door, a message from Cello for me to call Solomon. Urgent.
Solomon and Francesca were already in Chicago with Mom. Dad had had a heart attack.
NINE
The prisoner, a revolutionary who loved pensive weather, said in a letter written in December 1917, her third Christmas under lock and key, that she lay awake at night, pondering why it was that she was in a state of joyful intoxication. She had no cause to be, entombed in the silence of her cell, her mattress hard as stone. The gravel beneath the guard’s boots made a hopeless sound, she said.
Yet her heart beat with joy, as though she were moving in sunshine across a meadow. Enveloped in the manifold wrappings of unfreedom, she said she still smiled at life. The darkness of night was beautiful, if she looked at it in the right way. Even the heavy tread of the guard was a song to life, if she let herself have the ears to hear it.
Wagons of bloodstained tunics arrived in the prison courtyard for the women to mend and send back to the army. One day a wagon appeared, drawn by buffaloes instead of horses. They were trophies from Rumania, to be worked to death. A soldier beat them with the butt end of his whip. While the wagon was unloaded, the beasts stood still. She looked into the eyes of the buffalo that was bleeding, the expression in its eyes like that of a child who has been thrashed but does not know why or how to escape the ill-treatment.
She was freezing and she said that spring was the only thing she never got tired of. A Jewess who spoke Polish, not Yiddish, when growing up, denied magna cum laude in Zurich because that was considered too much for a girl, she shared in her letter to her friend the inexhaustible bliss of remembering the wind through the rocks on Corsica or the gloaming at Whitsuntide in her garden in Berlin. She asked about the berry picking in Steglitz, her South End of town.
She’d called them on the telephone at ten in the morning once to come to the Botanical Garden to hear the nightingale. She understood, as her mother believed King Solomon did also, the language of birds, the shades of meanings conveyed by their different tones. She hoped to die in the service of her principles, but her true self belonged more to her tomtits than it did to her comrades. As much as she loved birdsong, she did not look to nature as a refuge. She suffered at its cruelties. Meanwhile, the disappearance of songbirds in Germany because of the destruction of their habitats made her think of the vanquished Red Indians in North America.
The worse the news, the more tranquil she became, hearing the throaty rooks in the evening, observing them full of grave importance on their homeward path. Surrounded by brick, she liked to recall her love for the songs of Hugo Wolf and how they had laughed in the Café Fürstenhof the morning Karl was arrested. The sky was so interesting. She said people ought not to fret about morality. If they paid attention to the sublime indifference of the sky they could not fail to do good.
* * *
There was no drama. The morning I landed at Tegel, Duallo had been back in classes for a while, in the beaver skin hat that — he said he couldn’t wait to tell me how — became his in Moscow, in what was called Little Harlem, the few blocks where black youth were tolerated near Patrice Lumumba University.
The house leader, who had survived a coup, was firm with me about my emergency, Co-op rules, Duallo’s access to my room, his having guests. Incredibly, the leader handed me written criticism from other Co-op members. The Germans, I couldn’t wait to say to Bags. I segregated myself, he summarized for me, and did not help in any political action or hunger strike in support of South Africa. I especially minded criticism of my handling of the café. They wanted to say that I was too friendly, that I did not respect the Berlin style of not giving a shit who had just entered the establishment. Instead, they said that I put my personal life ahead of cleaning the place or keeping track of what needed to be ordered.