For fun I’ll ask the muttering old woman how she feels about the Neger-Neger (Nigger-Niggers) like myself and she’ll say, “Love them. Slept with a couple after the war. Nice boys. Polite. Big Schwänze, small minds, and even tinier ears. Maybe that’s why they’re so stupid, they don’t hear everything.” Oh, I love those Berlin days, empty streets, yowling dogs, and swinging on the swings with kindly, racist, octogenarian sex addicts. So it stands to reason that I hate undeclared and impromptu holidays like the fateful one when I’d flung myself into the streets with my usual hangover Weltschmerz and dirty-underwear petulance, and found the sidewalks packed stoop to curb with giddy, overly inquisitive Germans drinking Coca-Cola and noshing bananas and all moving in the same direction. As they passed me by, each one took a long moment to stare at me like a child on a field trip to the Völkerschau—people zoo. One boy, ignoring his mother’s don’t-feed-the-animals admonition, offered me a Coke and a smile. Both of which I gladly accepted.
At first I wasn’t quite certain they were German. They spoke German. They looked German, albeit with even tighter pants and uglier shoes, but there was something different about them. I figured maybe the Austrian national soccer team was in town or there was a kartoffelpuffer famine in Luxembourg. What was really eye-catching about the horde was how incredibly un-eye-catching they were. Not to say they were unappealing. On the whole they weren’t any uglier than any other mass assemblage since Bon Jovi’s last concert date. Yet even the most stunning physical specimens among them carried themselves without the slightest hint of pretension. The people seemed to be a lot like their clothes. They were a sturdy wash-and-wear group who favored comfort and practicality over style and flash. For them it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the person who made the clothes.
A towering blonde Calliope exited the perfumery pressing cardboard samples to her Linda Evangelista nose and blissfully inhaled for all she was worth. Somehow, against all odds, that breathtakingly beautiful woman with the statuesque figure and the tweaked oblique eyebrow countenance of a Vogue covergirl wasn’t vaingloriously strutting the catwalks of Paris, twirling a Givenchy bag and scanning the frigid fashionistas for her heroin dealer, but clomping the streets in the most ungainly pair of dog-shit-brown flats, digging wax out of her ears, and wiping the viscous find on the sleeves of her denim jacket. And she gawked at me like I was the monkey masturbating in the trees.
An impossibly ordinary-looking man interrupted the stare down.
“How much does such an automobile cost?” he asked me in English, running a hand admiringly over the fender of a parked Mercedes-Benz sedan.
“I don’t know. Fifty, sixty thousand?”
He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Returning to the Benz, he peered into the car with his hands cupped around his eyes, drooling at the leather interior and dashboard gadgetry.
“Scheisse, that’s ten years’ pay plus bribes, plus five. .” he mumbled something that sounded like “assassination bonuses,” then with a giddy, almost criminal look on his face spat out a dare disguised as an innocent question: “Ever ride in one?”
“Once.”
“Smooth?”
“Like I was flying in a dream, maybe better.”
“I knew it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Bitte.”
“Where did all these people come from? Was there a soccer game?”
The bland man stopped looking at the various pipe-cleanersized metal rods he’d removed from his jacket pocket.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The Wall fell.”
I boldly stepped into the second-most embarrassing moment of my life and asked, “What wall?”*
Thus confirming every stereotype of American ignorance about world affairs and geography. I, of course, knew of the Berlin Wall and its storied history, but as so often happens to black Americans abroad and domestically, I found myself trapped in a culturally biased break in the race-time continuum. Just as the bright but underprivileged inner-city child will correctly and for all the wrong reasons answer “b” to the following PSAT puzzler:
Mademoiselle Chiffon took a soothing sip of oolong tea and smiled mournfully at the strains of chamber music coming from the conservatory. Her genteel mind flashed to the carefree days she’d spent summering in the Tuscan hills before the war. Oh, Gaston, she thought to herself, am I forever doomed to hear your voice only in a string quartet’s violins? Silently, she cursed Bartók and returned the teapot to the __________while absentmindedly fingering her warm __________ __________.
a. sink, first-edition Molière
b. saucer, tea cozy, wet coochie
c. table, Chinese exercise balls
d. cupboard, baroque lute
I too nearly fell victim to the ignorance resultant from a lack of exposure. Like the tea cozy to the ghetto child, the Berlin Wall was not a part of my lexicon. I’d never seen it. When the indescribable man mentioned “the Wall,” any number of walls flashed through my mind. The Great Wall of China. The Wailing Wall. Pink Floyd’s classic album. The blue wall of silence the LAPD erected at the disciplinary hearing held for officers Bar-bella and Stevenson after they’d beat me and Blaze’s ass in the ninth grade for suspicion of stealing a car while we were at the bus stop waiting patiently for a bus.
The Mercedes’s door popped open with a satisfying click.
“Typical,” the faceless man said before sticking his mundane mug underneath the steering column and fiddling with the wires.
“You Americans own the world but never bother to venture into your own backyard. That’s the attitude that allowed us to steal the basketball final in the ’76 Olympics from under your noses, use Leo Strauss to infiltrate the Republican Party with his madcap philosophy of cruelty parading as humanism, convince you that VHS was superior to Betamax, and lure you into the Vietnam, Korean, and cola wars. New Coke? That was Vita Cola, the swill we East Germans have been drinking for forty years. No doubt your president will take credit for the fall of the Wall as signaling the end of Communism, but it’s all part of the master plan. It’s a misdirection maneuver somewhat analogous to your trick plays in American football, a geopolitical Statue of Liberty or fumblerooski, if you will. Soon, my dense Afro-American friend, you’ll be casting invisible digital votes in the name of democracy. Enslaving the vast majority of your work-force with a negligible minimum wage in the name of liberty. Charging mobile-phone users to make and receive calls in the name of free enterprise. Training the very same religious zealots of the desert who’ll. .”