“He was fine,” Big Dash fanned. “That man was so fine.”
Bags hovered close to me. Instead of letting me drop him off, he convinced me to come upstairs and hang with him and his amused old lady a hot minute. They were getting the marijuana in all the way from Washington State. I was too aroused to stay any longer.
* * *
There was the city of Jopp, but it was called Jaffa, after one of Noah’s sons, Japhet, who founded it. And some men said that it was the oldest city in the world, for it was founded before Noah’s flood.
I couldn’t see how anyone ever believed what Mandeville said. It was clear to me he had never gone anywhere he claimed. Yao accepted my suggestion that the bookstore have a discount shelf, and Mandeville was my first donation. Then I got ruthless and really purged my shelves.
* * *
Poles and French-speaking Africans with suitcases were still turning up at the city’s borders. Bags spread his arms at the Polish flea market behind the State Library, around the corner from Potsdamerplatz. He said whatever we were doing, we weren’t selling Gucci shit, like the Senegalese brothers in Italy, or grandma’s drawers, as these Polish families were forced to. The area looked like a refugee camp; the items for sale on blankets or on top of suitcases or just in the dirt were hopeless.
Clothes of every description, assorted bric-a-brac, radios, classical records, and not every participant would make eye contact. One man sat resolutely over his book, a large selection of toys at his plastic shoes. They’d been coming for months, the Poles, every weekend, released by Solidarity to scrabble around West Berlin because the few marks they could come up with were many zlotys back in Poland.
The sort of Germans I didn’t know — people who, say, got up in the morning to go work at the facility where the Federal Republic printed its money — complained about the noise and the stench of the Poles in the neighborhood. Some Co-op members were confused by their failure to find representatives of the heroic people whom they could sponsor in Berlin.
One astute girl figured out that the Polish guys haggling with Turkish guys over stuff unseen were Catholic, not lefties, and the Café Rosa had someone new in it at any hour of the day. The flea market commerce had become more organized and I sometimes saw at Bahnhof Zoo crews of men with duffel bags of goods for resale.
Bags said he knew an African guy with a dry-cleaning shop on Hermannplatz who had a basement full of ivory. He said he didn’t like him and you could be sure he was paying off the authorities. Only fools would talk about the machine guns for sale at the Anhalter Bahnhof.
He and his old lady didn’t share the same taste in films. He did his business while she went to the black-and-white French classics. One acquaintance he pointed out in the ChiChi he said did a brisk business knocking off Mercedes cars, driving them to the West, and then shipping them to the Arab world. He’d go into a Mercedes showroom somewhere, pretend he needed a new alarm system, learn how it worked, and then use that information on the street.
Bags said everybody in Berlin talked too much and all junk shops were fronts. He took me to a dirty shop off Kantstrasse. The black American proprietor was commie and crazy. He cackled at the end of every sentence. His toupee made him look like a Motown nostalgia act. He said he survived on the S and M paraphernalia he made in the back. He also sold hash, so openly that Bags said when we went back to the ChiChi that he’d wanted me to meet that a-hole because he was sure he was an informer.
Bags asked me if he should get a tattoo for his other arm and I said no, which was what his old lady had said. He didn’t know why she liked performance art. He locked an arm around my neck and said I needed to get my ’fro shaped. He knew where to send me. He said African students who came over from East Berlin to shop were routinely thrown in jail and deported, not back to East Germany, but to Africa.
Odell was going through a phase, too. He played “Fight the Power” incessantly. His jazzmen protested.
Bags said just because I had refused to notice it, that didn’t mean that clerks weren’t watching me, too, to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything. If I wasn’t thinking I was special, then maybe I had made the mistake of thinking Berlin was.
* * *
Lotte said that even had she known who Marian Anderson was, she would not have gone to her concert in Berlin in 1934, young and starving as she, he, was then in her life of living by the church bells.
Josephine Baker was another story. Lotte knew who she was, but had been too young. Then, after the war, well, she just didn’t. There was no point in her saying she’d try to come back for Alma’s evening of improvised music down in ZFB. She said she’d reached the age where the arrival of midnight sent her into a tailspin if she wasn’t sitting in her own chair.
Liebknecht was not Rosa’s lover, Alma said, shocked. Rosa had her own lover; she would not have taken the man of a friend. She was not that kind of woman. Alma had sung at a special memorial in Zurich back in January. She wanted to write to Margarethe von Trotta and she never wrote letters. I’d not seen much of her, because Uwe followed her barefoot everywhere and was shirtless when in her rooms.
In the candlelight of the closed café, Co-op members were drinking up the stock. It had been Yao’s shift, which was the only reason he had an audience. I’d heard that at first they were glad to have the wisdom of an exile from the 1960s generation. But every encounter with him was the same and after a while they didn’t encourage him when he got on to his late-night subject: Africans had it worse than black Americans in West Berlin, in spite of government benefits.
He managed to be morally superior about the fatwa, too. The Co-op didn’t contest the justice of his position in relation to their history, but once they’d acknowledged that being German disqualified them from human feeling they clammed up. He was at the same time telling some Co-op members that as rebels they had a father complex about the state.
Alma said Austria had much to answer for, so it might as well succor East Germans.
* * *
Outside, different kinds of lights divided in the distance. Someone in the café was remembering the Democracy Wall and it took no time for someone else to bring up “the German Autumn.” That was the year to have been in Berlin, 1977. Berlin was really the free city Berlin in those days. “You should have been here in 1977.”
* * *
Alma was gone again, on her autumn music tour, taking Uwe with her. Lotte grieved alone in her window. My marijuana thing had calmed down. I couldn’t believe how much money I’d been spending, including an idiotic investment in Bags. I’d slashed at the amount of time I had to do jack with my footsteps in Europe.
Cello forgot that Solomon no longer lived in San Francisco. He hadn’t been in the earthquake on CNN. She said she might as well have a coffee while I was making it. Shawls and sweaters settled around her. It meant something when she, a lady, took a seat at a bar. Cello and I would always make up, I thought. She didn’t want a cigarette. She struck her breast and coughed, as if to show how horrible.
Her hair was extraordinarily restless, milling from her forehead, tumbling over her formidable huntress cups. She asked for the phone. The light caught a glistening behind her narrow glasses. She pushed the phone away and covered herself with her hair. Cello didn’t have any friends either, not really. Where was Hayden?
“Was gibt’s?”
“Wir sind verliebt. Nevin und Ich.”
I hadn’t thought to inspect her pupils.
Cello said she wanted to tell Mom, but couldn’t yet. She was leaving Dram for Rosen-Montag. She called him Nevin.