And before I could explode, he embraced me and said to the wall behind my shoulder that they were relieved my father had recovered. Duallo had kept them informed. The house leader shook my hand and said yes, and that was the delicate matter. He did not believe Duallo had made an accurate account of his use of the café telephone. The last bill was historic.
I was on Duallo’s side. The young Germans from the fifth floor who were covering my shift had friends in Iceland, I pointed out. He said that the calls in question were mostly to Paris, Austria, and the USA, not Reykjavik. I’d never seen an itemized phone bill in West Berlin. I said I would make good any sum immediately, indignant as I was for Duallo’s honor and his right to benefit as my boyfriend from my Co-op membership. I was also thinking of the generous supply of prepaid phone cards I’d left him.
The first thing I had to do once I’d taken my bags upstairs was to return and pick up the café phone. I’d promised Mom I would call as soon as I got back. The stairs were cold and lined with extra junk, and my room was like that of a boy who’s used to having either his mother or the help to clean up, someone who simply hasn’t noticed the zoo, someone confident from experience that someone else will come along who won’t accept it and the zoo will be flushed out. German clean was something I could achieve. The stove in my room had not been emptied in some time.
To look down at your father in his hospital bed sets off a wavering inside you. Your footing becomes insecure and you have to make an effort to keep your balance. Everyone has been dreading your arrival because of your history of inappropriate, inopportune displays, but that inclination leaves you once his face has confirmed for you your place in the great chain of being — soon enough after his. The grimace lets you know that you have been a weight. The momentary imbalance by the hospital bedside was you learning in an instant how to stand on your own, and it was uncomfortable at first, like any correction of posture.
He was the wrong color and texture and temperature. Solomon and Francesca were standing on one side of him, I was at the foot of the bed, and Mom was seated on the other side, stroking his hand as machines chirruped. He was asleep a lot of the time. Then he would come to and float for too long, ending on, “You went into labor with Jed when we were out at Peyton Place.”
“No, it was Beginning of the End. They were going to nuke Chicago.”
“What a downer for everyone. We used to call you Bugs.”
And we’d crack up, mostly because there was nothing else to do, perched around my father’s sad allotment of hospital bed, plastic tray, and synthetic curtain.
Solomon had come to O’Hare to get me, leaving Francesca with Mom at the Med Center. He said Mom was very shaken up, just from having heard Dad fall in the kitchen. Imagine if he’d had his heart attack in the basement. But then she is never someplace else, somewhere he isn’t, not anymore. Maybe when we were kids, back when women didn’t express themselves and she did. I could tell that Solomon was getting a lot from Francesca’s memories of her American Studies electives. He’d said nothing about praying for Dad. Mom would have been relieved. Our names didn’t come from the Bible; they came from Black Reconstruction.
On my way out of the terminal, I saw a white guy in shirt and tie waiting in line at a newsstand. The young cashier was so busy she didn’t see him look around and then just wander off with the magazine and nuts, called after by no one. From the escalator a few yards back, I’d seen as I descended a black kid in a baseball cap snatch the plastic cup of tips from the counter of a doughnut concession. Solomon would not have believed me, so I didn’t bother.
* * *
It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I’d just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked. If they weren’t going to wait down in the café, then I was certainly going to take my time getting dressed before I let Duallo unlock the door. He said it would be unfriendly to send them away. He’d run out of his mother’s blossomy lotion. It was my first night back.
Hayden and Father Paul had looked after Duallo while I was away, and now there was a gay café in Kreuzberg, on Oranienstrasse, where he was comfortable. He liked that there weren’t just bar stools, there were sofas, too. Hayden had been too modest in front of me about his French and Duallo and Father Paul had built up more German between them. I couldn’t help myself and I kept my voice to a low register because Hayden was in the vicinity. But West Berlin was mine to give.
I took the four of us to an elegant Italian restaurant in Schöneberg, on a side street of leather bars and back rooms smelling of poppers. The three of them had tall white beers and I a small coffee in a crowded gay bar not far away. It was loud with hits from ten years before. I bopped through the noise and didn’t join in the conversation. It was enough that while Duallo listened he now and then let my hand seek his.
I’d not been by the Mercedes-Benz star as yet. Hayden found it ridiculous that I paid obeisance to a corporate emblem, to a company that had a far from blameless war record. I asked him what German company didn’t and knowing what we knew, why then had we come to Berlin. That was a ritual I should have confessed to Duallo when we were alone.
I led the way to the ChiChi. There’d been a Budapesterstrasse, a Budapest Street, over in what was now East Berlin that they’d changed the name of, to Friedrich Ebert Street, in honor of the first president of the Weimar Republic. But nobody wanted to offend Hungary, so a stretch of the Ku’damm was renamed Budapest Street.
Hayden told me to get them out of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood and in front of several drinks. It was cold.
Ebert ordered the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. Rosa Luxemburg stepped onto the podium on November 9, 1918, the day after she walked out of prison, and never saw another spring.
It was late, but I could hear the alcoholics screaming on the other side of the door, the sign that the bar was peaking, riding that night wave. Zippi and Odell were making out, making up for whatever quarrel they’d had earlier. They acknowledged Big Dash’s applause. Afer gave his girlfriend a peck and Bags lit his old lady’s cigarette for her, she who seldom left her Schöneberg. You are leaving the American sector. Dishes of little heart-shaped chocolates in different-colored tinfoil had been placed around the smoky, twinkling bar.
Zippi shrugged like she didn’t know what he was talking about when show-off Hayden said that the Jewish Valentine’s Day was in the summer, was it not.
And that was my fifty-mark note on the bar, luxurious though Hayden looked in his sweater. But we were all wearing beautiful sweaters. I saw Duallo look at himself in his present in the mirror behind the bottles. It had turned back into a great day.
Zippi went on tiptoe to give me kisses on both cheeks and a smile that said she was glad I’d figured out that these things didn’t have to be complicated. She had a special smile for Duallo, and one for Father Paul, too, and the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, emerging from pitch-dark eyeliner, affected me somehow.
I didn’t go into the kitchen with Bags, his old lady, and Zippi, because Hayden wouldn’t, he who never touched the stuff and made Father Paul say that he, too, was happy with his tall white beer that Manfred had also liked.