* * *
My presence hurt them. They had a silent denouement. They were too decent not to be ashamed of the hurt my presence made them ever more conscious of. The longer the intervals between my visits, the more café time abroad I found on deposit. Ronald said openly that he wished it had been me, but Mom and Dad just became more recessive, because of what had happened to them through the actions of their elder son one early morning on the Long Island Expressway, and the hurt of no children for Solomon and Francesca to leave behind.
* * *
I don’t know anyone I knew twenty-five years ago. I went to a couple of goodbye parties way back there. One bald brother didn’t want to say what a commie he’d been over there in East Berlin with his big apartment, but he’d written for newspapers and he’d had a radio show. He made a big deal about needing to get back Stateside. Still paranoid after all those years, he was ditching his formerly state-controlled girlfriend in the process.
I am one of the black American leftovers who sit by themselves. We nod to one another, my fellow old heads and I, a veteran session musician, a widowed engineer, that second-rate Beat poet, now a celebrity because of his age, and low-frequency me. I have their general outlines and they pieces of mine. We exchanged them a few years ago, but since the engineer’s German wife died, we have not added to the kitty of information. They don’t come in as regularly as I do, a fat guy again. To gain weight is to become neutered. Yet the crew of dealers I manage in Hasenheide Park is scared of me.
I never tried to belong. I stayed in the great head with the unratified deeds, a phrase I always took to mean the things we do in the dark. I just wanted to be left alone. I was. I have been, my slowed footsteps a perfunctory but familiar chorus. During the worst of the antiforeigner attacks, the neo-Nazis never messed with American-looking blacks, not even at four in the morning. I was still bleary-eyed in Powell’s Bookstore basement with the deutsche taschenbuch verlag editions I couldn’t really read.
I kept moving. Armies withdrew, but I didn’t go anywhere. I became the kind of unexplained American in Berlin who only met people in public. I gave up a long time ago looking either for the brewery or for the polished steel line marking the Wall’s old course through the profound disappointment of what Potsdamerplatz became. Who knew that the East Bloc was broke or that on her mother’s side Cello had three cousins in two state penitentiaries. She’d never been threatened by my presence, but there I was, hanging on, like the flu.
I know I’m supposed to sound sorry. But am I? I eat alone at Christmas. I close the door and don’t have to swing it for anyone, not even for myself. Big Dash used to sing a Blues, “Empty Pants.” It is not that I am too old for a young man’s idea of freedom, which would somehow justify the sitting, the uninterrupted days of false expectations. It’s that my rendezvous with machines is drawing nearer and I am not brave.
Schöneberg has cafés full of one beautiful mixed-race girl after another. I sometimes wonder which one is Bags’s daughter by Afer’s girlfriend. A certain place is one of the oldest and dreariest of local pubs and therefore fashionable among the young who smoke.
Everyone loves that recording of Ella Fitzgerald forgetting in concert in Berlin the English words to “Mack the Knife.” Tell me tell me tell me could that boy do something right …
* * *
In all these seasons, I have seen her only once, and that already a while back, in what people still called the new Café Einstein, though by then it had been on the Linden for more than ten years. I’d been sitting there for at least twenty minutes, not noticing the music, when a waiter carried past me the sort of frothy-looking coffee with milk that I wasn’t having at the time. The imposing brown woman upright on a banquette was none other than Cello, able to fit into her vintage Agnes B. Berlin was in its bleak winter period, cold, deserted, damp, with pig dishes in many kitchen pots.
She was right out there, in the open, not hidden behind the newspaper racks. She would have had it shaved before she’d ever cut it. I could tell from her hairstyle just how crazy she was: it was pinned up into several thick, tight, glossy Spartan braids. A family of black lizards was riding on her head. The bartender smiled over the bar and down the long wall. The iPod behind him was suddenly playing something other than mellow pop, something that made me want to pay attention to the way people were looking at one another. It was Joe Williams singing “It’s the Talk of the Town.” The black wall of her sunglasses in the winter light gave her an advantage over everything she looked like she was ignoring. Her three divorces, campaigns of mutually assured destruction, told village Berlin of damage I’d known nothing about. But time had gone by. I wasn’t sure how many people cared about her overdose. No one was smoking.
She and Mom didn’t laugh at the old white lady back in Hyde Park who used to welcome audiences to the Harper Theater wearing an evening gown. The old dear was not from the artists’ colonies that Dad managed to scare Mom into having little to do with. Cello, Ruthanne, curtsied to the woman, mesmerized by French and Italian films Mom didn’t care that she was much too young for. The woman was someone Cello responded to, her movie theater one place where Cello would go. Curtsying made her happy; the foreign languages made her happy. Mom did what she didn’t like to do, dress up, and helped Cello step into yet more taffeta in order to continue the rebuilding of the destroyed fat girl, her brilliant black Rapunzel who’d vomited over herself backstage and couldn’t go on.
She sat alone, expecting no one. I stayed where I was. I had to. Our stories allowed for nothing else. I was sure she spotted me, from the way she started and reached for her jeweled throat. The waiter took away the coffee and brought her tea. He poured. She didn’t touch it. Her hands were shaking. Cello, the fat girl who butterflied into that ravishing woman, the young black artist who adored playing like a demon Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto but couldn’t with a spotlight on her, though Mom had put together an Olympic training team of therapist, yoga instructor, trusted former teacher, and dietician.
I didn’t care that she’d been right. There was no there where I came from anymore. I’d lost what there had been somehow, and not through not paying attention, busy as I was, wishing myself into a café scene without end, into a bygone era on loop, repeating and repeating in the museum emptiness. To put off grief, I offered my book of moonlight to the Spree. I thought to escape my Chicago River, domestic waters flavored by dead rats. I must have believed that it would be there always, ready to reverse current with me. Mistaken, I disappeared, blotchy and drug-trim, another lexicographer of desire and ruin.
The statue of Saint Maurice in the Gothic Cathedral of Magdeburg was my idea of Black Power. The look of him, helmeted, mailed, thirteenth century, and black. But I never much liked the story of this longtime patron saint, the Theban soldier of the Roman Empire. He got along with the pagan power structure, but when ordered to ravage a Christian town, he refused, his Christian legion was twice decimated, and then finally all were slaughtered. Europe brought people from Africa as slaves and the church had no problem with that and Europe made sure one of the wise men in the paintings was always black as coal.
* * *
I stayed behind, in Isherwood’s last days in Berlin, as he put them down in the final journal entry of his novel. I used to carry Isherwood around with me. I’d skip class for the day and go from the bar on North Wells Street to the bar on Woodlawn, lost in the daydream of being the rootless stranger in Berlin who seduced tough German boys.
At the end of his novel, Isherwood makes a tour of the dives before the police close them. In a communist bar near the Zoo, a whitewashed cellar of students at long wooden tables, he finds a beautiful boy in leather shorts and a Russian blouse wholly unaware of the torture he will face under the Nazis. History is not a game, Isherwood warns us — and himself, angry at the loss of the city where he could be what he most wanted. It was clear to me what he wanted from his portrait of Otto, who, in real life as Heinz, I read at Powell’s Bookstore, had nice legs. Isherwood explained in a memoir that he felt he had to chill how gay he was sounding in his novel by making Otto’s legs unattractive.