Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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She wasn’t frumpy enough for me, too ladylike and, even at a Rubenesque 165 pounds, too skinny. I’ve always been slightly disappointed that German women ran thin. I expected buxom prison guards with flabby arms, fullback thighs, and mean streaks as wide as their broad, flat, Aryan asses.
“I was in a record shop when I found a song I thought you might like, an old GDR propaganda tune from the early sixties, ‘Affenschande (Amerika stopft Affen in die Satelliten).’ Would you like to know the English?”
I speak German but sometimes it’s best never to let them know I spreche the Sprache. It’s safer that way.
“In English the title is something like, ‘Crying Shame (America Stuffs Apes in the Satellites)’ or so.”
“That’s funny.”
“Yes, it is. I also thought of a place where we can see the sunset as well. Shall I give you the record then?”
On the evening of my first Berlin sunset, only the thriftiest East Berliners hadn’t spent the complimentary one-hundred-deutschmark note they received as Bundestag howdy-dos to the Free World. When we met that night at the base of the Fern-sehturm, Klaudia von Robinson still had hers. Fernsehturm is the first German word any Berlin émigré learns. Built to commemorate the launching of the Sputnik satellite, the Fernsehturm is a forty-story television antenna that resembles a Soviet-era ICBM. Since the late fifties every guest worker, asylum seeker, and honorably discharged black American male with a predilection for white women has pointed at the city’s tallest structure and asked, What the fuck is that?
Standing at the base of the TV tower, Klaudia turned the bill over in her hands, contemplating the strange-looking money the way Jack must have contemplated his magic beans. The elevator doors opened. The bean stalk sprouted. We entered wondering what magical adventures lay ahead. Inside the elevator a placard written in German, Russian, and English said the elevator would ascend two hundred meters in thirty seconds.
The Fernsehturm has always frightened me. It looks operational. I’m convinced the tower is the Communist Trojan Horse wheeled up to the Brandenburg Gate as a gift and that, somewhere deep in the backwoods of Saxony, in an underground bunker hundreds of feet beneath the Hungarian oak, firethorn bushes, and black bears, a top-secret cadre of East German scientists still fights the Cold War, memorizing the day’s launch codes over breakfast. Swie-Zulu-Foxtrot-sieben-sieben-Whiskey-fünf. Mach mit, Kamerad. Mach mit.
Klaudia, sensing my nervousness, pointed to the face on her banknote.
“Who’s Clara Schumann?”
“She was a pianist, composer.”
“Where was she born?”
“Leipzig, I think. She was running with Brahms and them, so I’m guessing she was born in 1820 something. Maybe a little earlier.”
“Ha, an Ossie, on the West’s money.”
“In 1820 it wasn’t East Germany, it was eastern Germany. Wait, it wasn’t even Germany, it was Prussia or some shit.”
“Ja, das stimmt.”
“Who was on the one-hundred deutschmark in the GDR?”
“Karl Marx.”
At two hundred meters we stepped into the Telecafé, the revolving restaurant about two-thirds up the tower. Revolving restaurants are the world’s slow-spinning sociocultural centrifuges. The g-force they exert is slight, but enough to separate modernity from kitsch, communism from capitalism, love from lust. The hostess seated us at a cozy linen-covered table across from the wait station. The busboy jammed his hand into the forks, then the knives, then the spoons. The sound of the parting silverware was beautiful. I tried to fight the urge to tape it, thinking that recording random sounds would be rude on a first date. But the sound won. It always does.
Klaudia too respected sound. Quietly, she waited for the waiter to finish rummaging through the cutlery, then I switched the machine off.
“Kannst du wechseln?” she asked, waving her cherished bill in my face.
I handed her change for the hundred. She fanned open the bills, then jammed the mélange of greenish-yellow fives, purply-blue tens, and one blue-green twenty and olive-brown fifty into an empty water glass and slid the ersatz flower arrangement between the dinner candles.
The restaurant kept spinning. A sharply dressed trio of West German carpetbaggers circled the observation deck and stopped within spitting distance of me to point out their next land grab. Not knowing whom of us was nonradioactive chaff and who was pure uranium-235, I waited for the café’s centrifugal force to put some distance between us. I hate people with more money than me, which means I hate mostly everybody. The shortest speculator leaned rudely over our table. He said the green expanse out in the distance was the Pankow district. Speaking of amortization rates and marble staircases, his language was a patois of German banking terms and Beverly Hills real estate jargon. As he appraised the distant luxury villas occupied, according to him, by members of a soon-to-be-defunct politburo, his oversized tie fluttered off his potbelly and swung in front of my face like a Hermès pendulum. Without thinking, I reached out to touch it. I’d never felt anything so soft. It was a softness that made me question if I had made the right choices in life. I pressed the end of the tie against my cheek. The silk danced down the side of my face; its threads teasingly tangoed with my chin stubble, then freed themselves with mocking pops and haughty static crackles. Feeling the sexual tension, fat boy snatched his tie away and tucked it behind his belt buckle. He raised his hand to his forehead and made a motion as if he were turning the dial to a combination safe, the German sign for crazy. Ashamed of myself, I scooted away from the aisle and leaned against the window. The restaurant kept spinning. The carpetbaggers were hurled on their way, muttering about occupancy rates and the inevitability of the European Union. Outside the window Berlin, a panorama of stratified steel and concrete urbanity, drifted past. It was one of those Bash-o, frog-jumping-into-the-pond, timeless-haiku, apple-on-the-head-theory-of-gravity Newtonian moments. But my mind, corporate-tax-return blank, could only spell epiphany. E-p-i-p-h-a-n-y.
The restaurant kept spinning. Klaudia flipped open her pocket-sized German-English dictionary. Her plucked eyebrows were cinched so tightly they formed the McDonald’s arches above the bridge of her nose. I doubted she was looking up epiphany. I don’t think I’d said it aloud. Apparently she had something to say to me and was searching for exactly the right words. I couldn’t imagine what those words were. And I wasn’t about to try.
The restaurant kept spinning. Klaudia slammed shut her little green Wörterbuch. She’d found the words she’d been looking for. Her thin lips opened. Revealing a sexy gap in her teeth the size of a Little League strike zone. The restaurant kept spinning. What could she possibly have to say to me?
“Ferguson, I think I fall a little bit in love with you.”
I looked past her and, touching Klaudia’s cheek through the glass partition like a pathetic prison lifer, was the sinking Berlin sun. Her fingertip traced the edges of my lips. These Germans, they either want to fuck you or kill you. Sometimes both.
The twilight was uniquely uninspiring. The sun looked wobbly and slumped toward the horizon like a carsick child sinking deeper and deeper into the backseat. Its last act of consciousness, this solar hurl of refracted light, the colors of which were so putrid they scattered the birds and the clouds, and left the moon to clean up the mess.
CHAPTER 3
GERMANY CHANGED. After the Wall fell it reminded me of the Reconstruction period of American history, complete with scalawags, carpetbaggers, lynch mobs, and the woefully lynched. The country had every manifestation of the post-1865 Union save Negro senators and decent peanut butter. Turn on the television and there’d be minstrel shows—tuxedoed Schauspieler in blackface acting out Showboat and literally whistling Dixie. There were the requisite whining editorials warning the public that assimilation was a dream, that the inherently lazy and shiftless East Germans would never be productive citizens. There were East Germans passing for West Germans. Hiding their accents and fashion sense behind a
faux-Bavarian stoicism and glacier hat, and making sure that whenever someone said the words Helmut Kohl they responded with “that fat bastard.” It wasn’t even unusual to see Confederate flags stickered to car bumpers and flying proudly from car antennas. The stars and bars were a racist’s surrogate for the illegal swastika, though if you confronted somebody about it they’d claim it represented an appreciation of rockabilly music, especially that of Carl Perkins.
My adoptive fatherland was still an introspective country, but it was a new era; instead of gazing at its navel, the country stared at its big, historical, hairy balls. There was a real sense of joy and accomplishment. This time we were going to do things right. I say “we” because for a moment there I was starting to feel German. Though you never hear of a black person “going native” (that shameful fall from grace is reserved for whites), I had gone, if not native, then at least temporarily Teutonic for one special day. If you can find any footage of the inaugural love parade, that’s me in the ten-inch platform sneakers drinking peach schnapps, sporting a blown-out pink afro and only a pair of black leather chaps, showing my glossy black ass and leading my band of wild white aboriginals down the Ku’damm like a sunburned Kurtz in a parallel universe.
Like Conrad’s Belgian Congo, Germany in the early days of reunification was a land where light was dark and dark was darker. In tribute to this confusing state of flux I’d gotten into the habit of opening up my gigs with the Undertones hit “Teenage Kicks.” The band had broken up seemingly at the height of its success, and in the trades I had once read a quote from Feargal Sharkey, the lead singer: “The last couple of years in the Undertones, for all of us, was very difficult. The conversations generally tried to revolve around, Can you turn that up a bit, or Can you turn that down a bit?” That statement summed up exactly how I felt about the world at that time. And my world was the new Germany—same as it ever was. The vast uninhabited no-man’s-land was reforested into a rich-man’s-land concrete tract of apartment complexes, shopping centers, and office buildings. Actors who when the Wall fell had begged and pleaded to play beleaguered Jews in small-scale indie films now longed to play misunderstood Nazis in big-budget features. If you stopped in a Munich train station and asked the mean-looking woman at the information desk how to get to the Dachau Concentration Camp, she’d snarl, “It’s not a camp, it’s a memorial!” The government legislated spelling-reform laws in a covert attempt to institute a uniform thought process. The country that spells together stays together, and it’s no coincidence that as the ß disappeared, social welfare and a few unlucky people of color also vanished.
Initially, Doris and Lars were elated about the fall of the Wall. Their daytime excursions into East Berlin were like traveling to see an extended family of stepsisters and -brothers who had been sired by the same philandering father. They marveled at the bullet-ridden buildings, the ghastly mullet haircuts. Cherished their first sips of the famed Radeberger beer they had heard so much about. But just as the relationship with “Daddy’s other kids” begins to tire over yet another you-look-just-like-Uncle-Steve conversation, Doris and Lars’s affinity for their poor relations to the east began to sour. They began to view the East Germans, or Ossies, as fundamentally different from themselves. Lazy, unmotivated, and ungrateful. Every day they had a new joke about their backward countrymen:
Q: Why do East German policemen travel in threes?
A: One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.
The haughtiness they showed toward their Ossie brethren somehow led them to be less shy about expressing their frustrations with the burden of being German.
Once, on a drizzly May morning, Doris, Lars, and I were at an outdoor café sharing an English-language newspaper, when Doris made an outburst that almost caused me to choke on my bratwurst.
“I hate this old Jew!” she shouted, backhanding the World section.
The “old Jew” was David Levin, the paper’s Berlin correspondent. I rather liked and identified with his conflicted personal accounts of the new Germany. Doris felt them too biased and bitter, and apparently too Jewish and too old.
Hearing the word Jew uttered in public used to be a rare occurrence. If a German used it around you it was a sign of affection. It meant that they were comfortable with you—and you too comfortable with them. Sometimes Klaudia would say it when she felt embittered about the second-class treatment Afro-Germans received. If she was feeling particularly aggrieved she’d take a good look around, ensuring that no Jews or Jewish ghosts were within earshot, and hiss, “maybe if I was Jewish . . .,” never finishing the thought.
Both Doris and Klaudia felt a certain entitlement to the word. Klaudia’s sense of dispensation came from a “Hey, doesn’t anybody care, they sterilized us and sent us to the camps too?” outlook. Doris’s prerogative stemmed simply from the word being in the dictionary. If it was in the dictionary she was allowed to say it, wasn’t she?
“Old Jew?” I said, peering over my sports section while Lars wisely played deaf.
“The fucking guy never says anything positive about our country.”
Sometimes I’ll be on the train, standing in an out-of-the-way corner looking at the commuters, skin-pierced punks, and college kids all sitting ramrod straight in their seats, eyes front, hands folded in their laps, elbows tucked into their sides, and my prejudice and genocidal fears get the best of me. I think that one day a buzzer will ring and these people will all stand in unison, snap to attention with a heel click and a bellicose “Jawohl!,” and order me to take the next train. I know that this buzzer can sound in any country, at any time. And that some will stand in good faith and others will stand in fear, and that a select few will stand taller than the rest by fighting back, harboring, leafleting, dying, and trying. But still.
“It’s the sins of the fathers, not the sins of the grandfathers—why should we Germans suffer forever?” Doris said, though as a devout pantheist she should know better than to think there’s a statute of limitations on genocidal guilt, much less suffering.
What’s funny is that if that buzzer ever does go off, I know I’d run to her. I’d skulk my way to Kruezberg, sprinting from shadow to shadow, until I ended up in her arms. And she’d sell her barely used possessions and find a way to spirit me out of the country. Any other persecutees would be shit out of luck because I wouldn’t share a single can of soured herring with their asses.
Ladling spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, she summarized the article aloud, thinking that once I heard the unnecessarily mean-spirited screed, I’d see her anger as justified.
“Mr. Levin says that in the short time he’s lived in Germany he’s noticed that Germans rarely speak in the first-person singular. He claims it’s a symptom of groupthink. That talking to one German is like talking to eighty million German Siamese twins all conjoined at the mind. Ask someone what his opinion is, and the first word out of our mouths is we.”
“You do that all the time.”
“No we don’t!”
The way she bandied about Jew made me miss the Wall. Before reunification no one called me Neger to my face or said Jew as a pejorative. Now young boys jump out of parked cars and, in a pitiful imitation of the syndicated American cop shows they watch on television, point finger guns at my head and demand that I “freeze.” On the train a doughy white boy in the car ahead will catch my eye through the window and slide his finger across his throat. I’ll visit a sick friend in the hospital and the man in the bed next to her will call me “Smokey.”
I’m not the only one who misses the Wall; some Germans miss it too. The Wessies miss how special living on an island in the middle of a landmass made them feel. With no mandatory military service, West Berlin was a state-supported counterculture, a Jamestown without the Indians, Woodstock without the rain. East Berlin, on the other hand, was Wounded Knee without the news coverage, Wattstax without the soul music, and yet there are Ossies who miss the Wall. They miss the slow pace, the leisurel
y work hours, the obsession with free expression and not money, the lack of choice and the commensurate beauty of being able to go into a restaurant for dinner and not have to make nine imperialist decisions about your first course.
“Soup or salad?”
“Salad.”
“Green, spinach, Caesar, or arugula?”
“Spinach.”
“Italian, thousand island, French, blue cheese, or vinaigrette?”
“Blue cheese.”
“Regular or low-fat?”
Needless to say, the black expat population longed for the Wall’s return. Yes, the reunification had, as the black security guard and others like him had hoped, doubled the number of, pardon the misogynist redundancy, “fuckable white women”; however, it also had the unforeseen impact of quadrupling the number of white male assholes. Not that the asshole-per-capita ratio was any greater among East Germans. Reunification and the rise of neo-Nazi activity had given the West German asshole the freedom to show his true colors.
The personification of black American frustration in post-Wall Berlin was an eccentric black man who’d periodically come into the Slumberland pushing a wheelbarrow filled with assorted pieces of brick, stone, coins, and paper money. He never spoke, preferring to let the cardboard sign dangling from his neck do his talking for him. A placard said, HOW CAN WE READ THE WRITING ON THE WALL, IF THERE IS NO WALL. If you didn’t pitch some money or a good-sized rock into the wheelbarrow he’d stick a grimy finger in your drink.
Unlike the brickless brick mason, I had the Schwa to keep me sane in race-unconscious Berlin. Klaudia von Robinson’s brick-house blackness helped too. She and Fatima would show up unannounced at my door. I guess that’s how they did it in the former GDR. No phones. If I wasn’t home, they’d leave a message scrawled on a flier for Korean BBQ and jam it into the keyhole. If I had female company, they’d sit outside in the hallway, wait for the woman to leave, and then in a fit of pretend jealousy bust in demanding to know if I had licked her toes.