I’d read Isherwood’s novel so often I had no trouble inserting myself into its scene. I am the negro boxer — small n of the British 1930s — whom Isherwood sees at the far end of Potsdamerstrasse, working at a fairground, in an attraction of fixed boxing and wrestling matches. I take my turn knocking guys out and getting knocked out. And I, the black boxer in his stance, am going to meet Otto’s brother, Lothar, a smoldering Nazi whose bed Isherwood was given when he moved in with the working-class Nowaks. I am going to guide him to the light and we will never age.
* * *
I knew that one day I would get too old to move those boxes of books, but I could not give them up. They held my undying love. I looked back and saw myself standing in the rain with a suitcase. The salaat al-mahgreb drifted from an innermost courtyard. Rise up with your bad self one last time, O splendid Susan Sontag. She told me home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a previous novel, High Cotton (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and two works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He is a recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York. You can sign up for email updates here.