But it was not Duallo. I’d stayed away too long and lost him.
* * *
It was time. Duallo was returning to his friends at his branch of Paris Tech, where evidently he was some sort of young black hope. His mother cried when they talked, he said. He was not going for another few days, but he carefully collected his things from around my room, our room, and placed them in his duffel bag.
I’d not confronted him about Father Paul, but how could he not know I knew. I felt that I deserved extra points for my Berlin cool about the whole matter, having done the royal thing of slapping the messenger. But he did not want me to see him off at Bahnhof Zoo. He wanted us to make our farewells then and there. I pressed on him the gifts he was not putting into his duffel bag. He unpacked his book bag and took the CD player from the socket where he had been recharging it. I told him to come back for the racing bicycle. If he didn’t want me to ship it, then he could take it on the train.
I was impressed by the grace and unhurriedness of his movements. He declined the two small speakers attached to the portable CD player I’d got for myself, careful not to make it better than what I had given him. He omitted to give me the time of his departure. He was perfectly composed. He would not let the kiss linger. He’d thrown out some time ago his gray shirt of little white fish leaping in the same direction. Downstairs, he let me call a taxi from the café. I’d been naked with this beautiful, gleaming boy and he with me.
One morning not long afterward, Duallo’s racing bicycle was no longer in the entrance hall. He’d grown up and left town.
* * *
A model airplane friend of Dad’s had taken him to the park to fly their model airplanes. Mom said she understood why Florence Beatrice Price, Mary Lou Williams, and Margaret Whatchamacallit Bonds ended up writing religious music. There was far too much out there for it to be just us. She said she was not aware of a particular reason she should not sometimes use only black women as examples, but I did not have to worry about her ever walking on pews.
She’d found the score of Cello’s first piece of music, a clean presentation copy she’d been given. Cello was sixteen when she wrote it. The piece, for piano, was very ambitious. She’d had theory, including species counterpoint. Mom had never heard Cello play it. She said she hated to think how devout Bach probably was.
* * *
I meandered around on the other side of Zoo Station, but I couldn’t get any of the loitering Turkish boys to respond. I gave up and went toward the ChiChi, singing the theme song of Cheers to myself.
I was singing as I stepped into the bar and raised my voice, and none of the cocktail hour crowd joined in. Zippi was setting up a white wine on the bar.
I stood where I was and said that there had been a misunderstanding. The miniature lights blazed as I pried Satan off my back. Zippi said it was just that the last time she heard me sing, I was stinking.
“West Germany pays West Africa to take its garbage,” Afer said. “You will go to sea.”
I was not used to Afer’s style of camaraderie. He and Bags never asked me for a drink. I asked them to accept drinks from me.
“You are inviting me?” Bags crooned prissily, satirically. He’d said it in German. It had been some time since I’d cared whether someone was speaking German to me, counted up my mistakes. I’d given up, knowing what I knew in junior high school, that I was only going to be so good at German and that Tadzio was not my type.
Odell’s vintage car was falling apart and he let the three of us out along the Landwehrkanal. I liked Bags taking command, lining up Afer and me behind him, moving us quietly under the trees. The real trouble was far ahead, and not wanting to get trapped, Bags led us off to the side the first chance he got. We hurried along the Wall, dropping down at Marienenplatz, and at Oranienstrasse enrolled ourselves in the mayhem, the singing, whistling, and bright camera lights.
The anticapitalist, antipolice anarchist marches had long been over, and the streets were jammed. We ambled along behind huge groups also seeking that flash point. Scores of police in visors mingled among us. I could see boys waving flares from rooftops. We walked so much Afer bought beers. Darkness fell. Bags had a joint — not hash, but marijuana. I was in Berlin, living May Day, inhaling the carbon dioxide from hundreds of cigarettes and hundreds of white boys.
The battle, when it came, was between the German police in black gear and Turkish youth in jeans, their faces wrapped in notorious scarves. The air went acrid from burning cars, from fires in the direction of Lausitzerplatz. In the tense quiet, I could hear stones raining down on pavement. A sudden warning “Hupp!” from someone, and Bags almost knocked me over, turning me to run from Turkish boys stretching at full speed in our direction. They swarmed past us, running from the bulls.
The thing was to keep moving, to get around the next corner, to fly past doorways, and not to get trapped between the police and the vans they maybe intended to drive stone throwers toward. And not to get involved in the barricade and bonfire making either. I let Bags turn me twice more. The police had no batons. They were not to be provoked. But word was going around that some crowds had attacked police. I started wondering how to get away.
We got into a taxi. I had to turn myself inside out to get a look at the full orange moon. Hope of my youth, where were you all this time?
Back at the Co-op, Alma was at the top of the stairs. “Dueling comes next.”
* * *
When I was copping weak, stepped-on coke in the block down the street from the Eagle, Cello’s daughter, Hildegard, was an infant Cello had brought back to show Mom and her dying grandmother. Cello wanted to brandish her happiness in front of women who used to feel sorry for her and the grandmother who had barely acknowledged her existence.
Cello insisted that the hospice room be disinfected before she brought her children for their black grandmother to bless. Mrs. Williams went over and supervised the extra cleaning by a furious nurse’s aide. Cello reported how much it meant to her to have the chance to tell her grandmother how she’d made her feel all those years, she who had a disconcerting way of looking through her own mother, leaving her to her sister. Cello’s deposition lasted for more than two hours. Aunt Loretta couldn’t talk anymore. She had to lie there and take it. She was a beetle on her back and if Mrs. Williams was an ant pulling off her legs, then Cello was the meadowlark that cracked her in its beak.
* * *
It was Whitsuntide and Rosen-Montag had received the Schopenhauer Medal of Freedom, awarded by the institute endowed by Dram’s father. In the newspaper photograph, Rosen-Montag stands between the director and the director’s astonished wife, a lamb in the instant the fatal jolt is administered. Rosen-Montag is bare-chested under his fitted dinner jacket. It was a cinch he wasn’t wearing underwear or socks either.
And then the next night the two of them showed up at the café, Cello and Dram. Lucky had resigned from the Co-op. He claimed a post office box was the only thing he needed. Allah is with those who restrain themselves. He had so little to storm out with. I nearly offered him the Schwinn I’d lost interest in, though winter had got on the train out of Dodge.
Yao looked at my impeccably groomed guests and excused himself. They’d been to a private evening at the Philharmonic. Dram spoke. I owed Hayden an apology. I’d been thinking only of myself. Duallo had come to mean something to them, too.
I thought I deserved admiration I wasn’t getting for my indifference to whatever treaty of promiscuity Hayden and Father Paul had signed during the international emergency of a sexually transmitted disease.
Cello was smoking; her dangerous hair wandered in a fog and on the other side of it we might happen upon the remains of a recent battlefield. West Berlin was a city where the necessities had to be imported: food, clothes, coal, but not beer. I got up when I felt like it and filled an order or two. Some Co-op members went behind the bar to help themselves. One of those spring evenings in Berlin had happened and the sounds we could hear in our isolated corner of cloud were those of transportation, cars and a bus somewhere.