The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

1. GRAYSCALE

This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks are inky-rich, the whites are milky singularities, the grayscale between is perfectly-judged. Satchmo, an immolated saint, has burned clear, finally, of all kitsch and his rehabilitation proves that we are capable of anything.

T. and I are standing as far apart as two Bohemians can, while still holding hands, looking at different paintings, grunting or sighing our assessments, our cool contentments or stern critiques, protected by the gallerist’s approving leer. The gallerist is a friend; she lowers the volume of the background music to afford us whispers. The city lowers its volume to afford us whispers. The ability to whisper is a function of IQ., or so I have read. T.’s whispers are suggestive and wet as little berries hung ripe on the air. She is taller than I. For her, the world will always be new. 

-This is going to be great, tonight, at Bleeker Street, I say, pulling her close. She smells of everything fresh and healthy and young. Bertolucci’s first major statement in years, when it came out. A scandal. We have to get there early. 

-What’s it about again?  

-Existentialism.  Brando.  X-rated. 

-X-rated? How will I get in? If they card me I’m dead. 

-Think of it like Nick and Nora, I say, it’ll be an adventure and squeeze a muscular handful of her incredible ass through denim as soft as old money. She can’t understand why I prefer her to dress this way and she never will, because she’ll always be seventeen, just as I’ll always be forty two, older but not old, wise to life but not a fossil of cynicism and vigorously sex-possessed but not scary. I light a cigarette and touch it to my lips and sip it like ghostly grey wine through a straw, knowing it will never hurt me. Her bluejeans and sneakers and white dress shirt, tail out. And that striped t-shirt she sometimes wears, Seberg to my American Belmondo. I confess we own berets. I will teach her to smoke my cigars. 

We gaze on a minor Warhol with affectionate contempt.

What is that melody?

It seems like days since last we’ve made love, but it’s only been minutes. An hour. She rode me in a corner of my loft beneath an Arbus. We heard a distant gunshot through an open window so like the sound effect from a radio drama of the ‘forties that we laughed and took a break and switched positions. A joke about Bridge. But the second position was more intense. No laughing. Just gunshots. 

What is that melody? 

Even crime transcends its dictionary definition to function as a compositional element, a narrative texture, in the masterpiece of this island. Rape and murder are the black that contrasts the white of witty banter; they are not foregrounded, they are anecdotal; no one we know has been touched or threatened by this kind of pain or grief or life-altering inconvenience. They merely tell stories about it. Something you watch out for, distracted by main events, like hornets in autumn on the cape. It’s the colorful nonsense of the uneducated poor, as distant as whatever music they listen to (neither Gershwin nor Schubert). 

We both suddenly remember and hum the rest of the tune together, accompanying the scratchy, fifty-year-old recording the gallerist has turned up again as we nod our smiled goodbyes and back through the glass into the vibrant sheen of the Sunday-dappled sidewalk. Looks like rain, later. An aesthetically-perfect thunderstorm. 

Body and Soul. 

*** 

Over dinner at our favorite bistro, Y. and I wallow in the almost obscene luxury of complaining about our copious lives. It’s an old script. A litany. A call-and-response in which we take our tacit comfort. Y.’s job is too good (he wishes he were a starving artist) and I worry out loud about having a seventeen-year-old lover who looks like a model, is obsequious to the point of being a fuckable housepet and boasts a lineage that intimidates every doorman in this impossible-to-intimidate town. My brow is knitted as I enumerate, again, every relevant superlative over the down-to-earth pizza we can share without needing to eye its last slice awkwardly with angst or regret. We usually simply leave the last slice untouched; a sacrifice to our casual Gods. The background chatter is reassuringly lively. Yet not too.  

-She’s seventeen, I say, with a gesture more French than Rabbinical, though there is something vaguely and indefinably Jewish about the depth and pessimism of even my most light-hearted banter and there is something cozy in that; the ethnic weft; the white-but-not-too-ness. Also: it’s a devastatingly sexy contrast to the über-Wasp (Malevitch?) whiteness of my to-die-for lover, who’s so tomboyish, when I think about it, that she verges on being my catamite. I often fantasize about sodomy; the other kind. I touch the cool crook of Y.’s short-sleeved arm conversationally and say, with a Groucho Marks cadence, have I mentioned already she was a virgin when I first had Biblical knowledge of her? At the age of sixteen? In a hansom cab on Thanksgiving? 

Y. counters with a story. I’m reminded of Borges but don’t say so and don’t know why. Story as follows. 

A well-known director, otherwise associated with audience-pleasing romantic comedies, and known to write his own scripts, has an idea for a science fiction film, something dystopian, very dark, Owellian in the sense that a perpetual foreign war is described and slogans are everywhere and uniformed agents with unspecified powers keep the people in check. Dissent is not tolerated. Intellectuals sell-out, civilians disappear, the technology has reached a black-box level of godly near-magic that renders the regime invincible. A literal thousand-year-Reich is implied but never stated. The technology is both a giant’s oppressive fist and a drug-like distraction capable of soul-raping wonders. This is the scenario described. As I say: very dark. Bleak. Almost too dark to contemplate, but the well-known director, tired of being known for light fare, believes that this film will establish him as an artist of the first rank, up there with Welles. He throws himself into the project, despite his other commitments (the post-production of one romantic comedy and the pre-production of its follow-up), giving every extra moment; every gap of breathing-space in the continuum of his success-hijacked existence; to the conceptualization of this dark, depressing script. 

But these prior commitments are endless; money has to be made. Time passes. Months become years, then decades, as the dystopian project (working title: 2002) fades in the intensity of its claim on his actual working time, but never frees his mind. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about it, until the day he suddenly realizes that thirty years have gone by and the scenario of the film he was never able to realize has come horribly true. That is, the hellish dystopia is Now and no one can escape it by simply walking out of a movie theater. 

*** 

The cab ride home from the movie is wordless. That’s the difference between great art and mere entertainment: great art shuts you up. It’s a short ride but a long silence. I can read T.’s thoughts. Easy as perusing a book in a rack near the cashier in a shop at the Airport. 

I had forgotten, of course, that the movie is more than existentialist sex in lower-strata Paris. E.g., I’d remembered the butter scene but not the scene with the open casket; I’d remembered the shaving sequence but not the eponymous tango. T. and I were kissing passionately, already, through the opening credits, and then we weren’t and then we weren’t even holding hands. Agnès Varda’s Camus cribs. 

I’m thinking all this, and about Y.’s dinner story, while T. thinks only of the Jean-Pierre Léaud character, the single (hapless) innocent in the film. The hack is a regular Joe who can’t take his eyes off of T. in the rearview and I can read his little thoughts, too. In his mind, there’s nothing wrong with this morose little girl that his blue collar expertise in bed couldn’t cure by bringing her down a peg. By opening her to the smell of her own prejudices. The musk of her own prejudices. Barbieri’s sepiatone soundtrack invades the grayscale of my beautiful Gershwin thoughts; Barbieri’s soundtrack and Schneider’s bosomy tits. Should we have seen the Fellini instead? 

Was Brando cheated, ironically, out of that phallic Oscar that so looks like a self he once was? 

A pothole jolts me back to the actual. This borough after hours is a reflection of pearls in a flute of black water from the Lethe. Or the Styx? Anyway, every morning, all is forgiven as the slate is wiped clean; memories are chalk dust. I lean close to T. and whisper, Do you trust me? 

-Of course. 

-Play along. 

I say to the driver, She’s something, isn’t she? 

-Pardon? You talking to me?

-My date. I can see that you like her. 

He laughs and says nothing. I press further.

-Don’t think I have a problem with that, because I don’t. 

-Oh yeah? 

-Yes. Are you married? 

-Who isn’t? 

-How long? 

-The usual. 

-Any kids? 

-Not any more. What about you two? He winks in the mirror at T. 

-You love your wife?

-Why not? 

-How would you like to spend the night with my date here? 

The quality of his attention is instantly altered. His eyes are off  T. and dead on me, half-hidden and wary in the mirror’s black shine. 

-Funny, you don’t look like a pimp.  

-We’re not talking about a sum of money. 

-What are we talking about? 

-An experiment. A game. 

-Yeah? 

-You get my date and I get your wife. Six hours. Hotel of your choice. Tonight. 

-And what does she think of all this?

-She thinks what I tell her to think. 

-You look like a college professor but you talk like a what. I don’t know. 

-Are you interested or not? 

-I’m interested in everything. Oil crisis. The Knicks. That silly prick Carter, what he’s doing to this country, people say bring back Nixon. Nixon was a crook you could trust. Rich Arabs and uppity blacks. That Patty Hearst twat. I read the papers, I watch the evening news when I’m home. You think I’m uninformed? 

I squeeze T.’s hand and lean in close again and say, You see? It’s all just talk. It was just a movie. This is what real guys are like, afraid of their sexual shadows. Safe as milk. Never ever forget that Jean-Pierre Lèaud and Marlon Brando are just actors, but this is real life and it’s without consequences. Cinema is the art of the worst-case scenario and I can feel her relax into the revelation; the literal muscles involved. I congratulate myself on saving the evening. I tip the cabbie so big, in the end, it probably insults him. I want him to be insulted: to admit that is liberating. 

There is no sex tonight. We only murmur and spoon. 

Just to be safe. 

*** 

Y. and I stroll to the squash courts on a brilliant-yet-sunless Monday morning. A warm silver sky; the inhumanly reflective retina of a deity too close to distinguish. We both know what we will say before we say it, Y. and I. And so we say it, as we have and ever shall, without pleasure, but with the blank serenity that taunts free will with the brilliance of a nova-hot projector bulb, melting through time like a sign. 

-Jew eat? 

-No, Jew?

2.  The Red Taxi 

Leaving the Happy Ours at about four in the morning in an oblique drizzle with the collar of his jacket pulled tight around his throat, Salter is lucky to flag down a taxi about two blocks from the club. Soaking wet and shivery as he slips in the taxi, he is pleasantly aware of the voluptuous possibility of catching a cold, that sweet vision of being bundled in a soft warm bed in a dry warm flat and deserving lots of tender pity. But his mother is far away and his Nigerian wife has never been a bountiful source of tender pity. The taxi is on its way to rushing someplace before Salter even has a chance to specify where. The driver is of such an eccentric appearance that if it weren’t for the weather, Salter would’ve waved the red taxi on. 

The black vinyl streets in the downpour and the runners of light in the vinyl which the taxi chases like a red cat. The back of the driver’s massive bald head on which has been tattooed a barcode. The driver is wearing black goggles that no normal human could use in any situation other than sleeping or staring at the corona of a solar eclipse and he has tiny tuliping ears like a pig’s. He reaches for a vintage aviator’s cap on the seat beside him and slaps it on, flaps down, hiding his ears and tattoo. A blunt row of darkling choppers in the rearview as he scratches his neck and tilts his head to facilitate the scratching. 

The driver switches on the radio: from Bob Marley to NWA to Gary Numan in the space of ten minutes. Gary Numan suits Berlin’s sluiced nightscape better than Marley or NWA or anything else that Salter can imagine. Listening to Gary Numan in a taxi late at night in Berlin in the fall in a downpour is as good as Sunday morning fucking on a plump Lebanese virgin to Johnny Mathis or making a morning-after omelette for a spacey Japanese single mother to Ramsey Lewis covering Vince Guaraldi’s Cast Your Fate to the Wind. This is exactly what music is there for: to heighten reality’s value. Salter is cold and wet but inspired. He asks the driver in his halting German to crank up the heat and the driver complies without a word. 

Salter leans back on the seat of the taxi and closes his eyes and dwells on the impossibilty of the fact that fifteen years has gone by since the night he was first driven into town from Tegel airport, fresh out of America, possessed by a mutt emotion blending fear and excitement and giving off the stupid stink of his provincial manners. The taxi radio is now playing What Becomes of the Broken Hearted by Jimmy Ruffin and it is all Salter can do to prevent himself from crying all over this Russian’s taxi at four in the morning. But not with grief. It’s just the inherent drama of a life and to think he’s nearly lived a whole life already and the very thought of it moves him. Outside, too, the deluge sways and twists melodramatically like silver beaded curtains under the dripping streetlights of Friedrichstrasse, as though the weather too is moved by its own long story; the eons it has already seen, eons of raging against and then soothing the dumb face of the earth, futile as the activity may be. 

“Hey, wake up,” rumbles the taxi driver. “Is illegal for you to snore here.” 

They are gliding down the Strasse des 17. Juni in the red Merc taxi and the hookers burn brighter than roadwork flares in top-heavy spandex… they are silver or blue or magenta foil wrapping on soft bulging chocolates for Easter. Salter has a theory that modern sexual presentation taps into food cravings more than anything else… a glistening tan cleavage as seen in so many ads selling so many products is more than anything reminiscent of the sweating golden Thanksgiving Turkey or the greasy Christmas goose, not to mention the ripe red fruit of sugary lips… because of subliminal yearnings towards the modern taboo of cannibalism. Maybe not. The hookers pose on platform boots and the black wind tousles their umbrella-protected Victorian hair as their umbrellas twirl in the rain. They flare like a parade of new appliances in the taxi’s headlights. Some of them are movie-star beautiful… one after another Aryan goddess every fifty meters along the median of the long approach to the Brandenburg Gate. Some kind of inverted Nazi spectacle. The driver eyes Salter in the rearview and says, with what sounds like a Russian accent, in the Vodka-hardened octave of a bear, “Amerikaner?” 

Salter gets out his talisman… his passport… and waves it, for proof. He’s been mistaken for a Cuban, Pakistani, Brazilian, Moroccan, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, black Sicilian and some or another kind of African at various times in the past and is used to being challenged on the matter of his identity. “Born in Chicago, man.” 

The driver thumbs-up in the rearview. “Read my lips! It’s the real thing!” 

“Huh?” 

“I am American also!” 

“Really.” 

The driver bangs his breastbone with his knuckles. “In here.” 

“Ah.” 

“Soul brother,” says the driver, trying something out on Salter. 

Salter chuckles. The driver scratches his neck on the same red harried patch. 

“Uncle Tom.” The driver frowns speculatively into the mirror. “Uncle Tom is good or bad?” 

“Bad.” 

“Bad?” The driver indulges in a moment of skeptical reflection. “Okay okay,” he changes the subject, “Are you looking for something, maybe? Drugs? Leather pants? Persian Carpets? Sluts?” 

“No thanks.” 

“No? Soul brother needs sluts… marvelous sluts.” The driver jerks his head at a spectacular rain-whipped Circe with impossible legs and ship-prow tits and big flat eyes like roadkill coming up fast in the left corner of the windshield. They douse her in a plume of rain and a gust inverts her white umbrella. “Not like German bitch.” He makes a naughty-naughty finger in the rearview mirror. “Is Thai.”

“From Thailand?”

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old!”

“Jesus.” 

“Don’t ask don’t tell.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Marvelous Thai sluts! Before twenty five they are granny.” He slaps the steering wheel for emphasis. “At twenty seven marry lonely citizen of E.U. and retire.” He laughs like a motor starting. “Never screw again. Only shop. Do you know famous book by great Russian writer about little girl who screws old man?” 

“No.”

“Is like that.”  

“I don’t read much.” 

“Is too bad. Good book.” 

Salter shrugs. 

“No?” 

“No.” 

Pavel makes an a-okay with his fat thumb and short fingers and shows his twilight teeth. 

“Soul brother.” 

They listen to Johnny Cash singing Ring of Fire as the taxi sails under the massive stone arch of the Charlottenburger Tor which straddles the boulevard. A minor landmark between the Brandenburg Gate behind them and the unremarkable fountain at the center of the roundabout at Ernst Reuter Platz ahead, the floodlit arch is being renovated and is covered in a gargantuan tarp on which is printed a retouched photo of the arch itself looking better than it ever did or could. Salter is finally feeling warm and it’s so good to feel warm… what else does anyone need, besides food, really? Warmth and food. Exactly what they probably had going for them in Africa for a few millions years… why bother with innovation when you have warmth and food and plenty of pussy? What else would Salter need but a leopard skin toga and a cozy grass-roofed mud-walled hut and a cow or two, a couple of pigs and a girl. The driver turns down the radio. They are about to make a left on Bismarckstrasse and the turn signal is going thek…thek…thek…

“America!” 

“Yes?” 

“My mother is good woman.” 

“Congratulations.”

“My father is good man!” 

“I hear you.” 

“Five brothers. Two sisters.” He held up an open hand for the first numerical value and a peace sign for the second. “Happy family.”

“Big family.” 

“Small family is no family. How many?”

“Me?” 

“Yes, America, soul brother… how many sisters?” 

“None.” 

“How many brothers?” 

“None.”

 The driver is shaking his head. 

Salter says, “No brothers, no sisters, no father… just a mother.”

“Good woman?”

“My mother is a very good woman.” 

“Cooks for you. Cleans for you. Feeds cat.” 

“No. She… uh… lives far away. Very far. Chicago. I haven’t seen her in…” And here Salter finds himself feeling too guilty and embarrassed to say what he’s about to say but then he thinks why the fuck do I care what some refugee taxi driver thinks? So Salter watches the driver’s face in the rearview closely as he says, “I haven’t seen my mother in fifteen years.” 

In response to which there is a long silence. The driver turns up the radio again as though he’d rather not contemplate the awful information that Salter has inflicted on him. They listen to the end of Ring of Fire and German DJ patter as Walk on the Wild Side fades up when the driver, as if struck anew by inspiration, again turns down the radio. Salter can barely hear a ghostly Lou Reed droning. You’d assume that a Lou Reed isn’t racist. But how would you know? 

“America! You are married?” 

Salter digs in his hip pocket for his wallet and produces a creased photograph of the beautiful African wife. She’s a model: it’s nice being able to say that your wife is a model, though all the apparent information in that sentence is misleading. Retrieving the photo from Pavel, Salter smiles: Sadie was once reading an article in The New Yorker about “Mystery writer” James Elroy and she looked up from the magazine with an expression of utter consternation on her small stunning face saying if they know who he is, how can he be a mystery writer?

“So, what about you?” inquires Salter. The low rumble of the motor of the driver’s laughter kicks in again and revs a little higher. At last he’s found something that he doesn’t have to feel ashamed of being luckier than the American at. No non-American is comfortable in the presence of an American who isn’t better off in something. “Are you a married man?” 

“Da,” he says. “Da! Pavel, too, is married!” He can’t stop laughing. When Salter doesn’t seem to get the joke, Pavel explains. 

“Wife of Pavel is young Thai granny!” 

They are only five or ten minutes from Salter’s flat and he begins to feel that same muted despondency he always feels near the end of a taxi ride home. The rain has let up and there are star-filled black rips in the cloud cover, but, speeding along the opera-house district of Bismarckstrasse, approaching his destination, Salter’s heart sinks like it’s been fumbled down a well.

What Salter likes about the taxi driver is that he’s a Russian who looks and sounds and acts like… a Russian… un-tormented by the ambiguities of identity that have dogged Salter his entire life. It must be fucking wonderful to fit so neatly in your pigeonhole. Downright cozy. A pigeonhole is not only an identifier but a tight-fitting form of shelter, remember. Salter says, “do you believe in God, man?”

Sounding aggrieved, Pavel says, “I think is vacancy for position.” 

“I agree.” 

“Anyone to apply. No experience necessary. Good salary and benefits. Retirement package. Now take application.”

“But who in his right mind would want the job?” 

“Your president of U.S. maybe? America!” 

“What?”

“Pavel shocked. Pavel thinks all soul brothers go church on Sunday, eat chicken, fear big Jesus. No? Is not true?” 

“Not for me it isn’t. I think one religion is pretty much as dumb as the next, if you think about it, but if a black man’s gotta choose, why choose the book that your slave masters forced on you? Give me a Bible and I’ll…” 

Pavel taps the top of his head. “Pavel has philosophy. Will change life. America curious?” 

“Sure.” 

“So what.” 

“What?” 

“Is my philosophy. Two words. So what.” 

“That just about covers everything, doesn’t it?” 

“Da.” 

“E equals MC squared.” 

“So what.” 

“All men are created equal.”

“So what.”

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” 

“So what.” 

“You’re right. It works.” 

“So what. Pavel has told you. So what.” 

Kant Strasse is a narrow commercial boulevard of cheapo grocery stores and buy-on-installment-plan jewelers and knock-off computer shops and all manner of discount, fly-by-night storefronts, almost entirely Russian-owned. It is also dotted discreetly with second story brothels and topless bars with velvet drapes for doorways. The surrounding neighborhood, which is Charlottenburg, was once the richest Bezirk in Berlin, and it’s still in many spots a showcase for 19th century Gründerzeit architectural splendor, cleaner than baroque but no less imposing and sweetly graced with the wedding cake detailing of the noble epoch. Charlottenburg is after all the home of the glorious 18th century Prussian Castle, the Schloss Charlottenburg. But the Allies bombed the dust out of the neighborhood as a morale-buster during the war, targeting the richest streets and the Germans didn’t have the will to restore most of the lost elegance afterwards, even in the breif period during which there was money to do it. Most of that money went towards buying back the dilapidated East from Moscow, final testimony to the entrepreneurial genius of the Communists. Salter watches his corner approach and says, “Don’t stop. Keep driving. Please.” 

“Keep driving? Is joke? Man with beautiful wife doesn’t want go home?” 

“Not yet. Keep driving.” 

Pavel leans forward and the taxi lurches through the red light at Salter’s corner. Up Kant Strasse in the direction of the main train station, the Bahnhof Zoo, and up along a side-street filthy with tourist shops and cheap restaurants (vibrant with colorful pickpockets when the weather is warm) past the tourist-trap/ruin of the Gedächtneskirche, the Allies-bombed gothic church preserved in a skeletal state as a monument to the hazards of fucking with the Allies… through clouds of neon-saturated droplets of rain and the not-quite convincing display of big city lights Berlin has to offer. Salter and Pavel are enjoying Desmond Dekker’s eerily catchy Israelites, making Salter wish it was London and the year 1969 instead. All that innocence. Pavel waits until the fade-out to break the spell, lifting his cap to scratch the barcode tattoo on the back of his smooth fat head.

“America! You are celebrity. Pavel is Oriana Fallacci for Rolling Stone magazines. This is scoop. How long? In Fatherland. How long?” 

“Fifteen years, man.” 

“Fifteen years!” Pavel slaps his side. “Nieren of Pavel are only ten!”

“Nieren? Kidneys. Kidneys?” 

“Da! Die beiden. Both.” 

“Transplant? Transplant.” 

“Da. Why?” 

“Why what?” 

“Why you leave homeland? Religious persecution? Famine? Trouble with crime lord?” 

“That’s a good question. I still don’t know the answer…I just…”

“If you go back ….” Pavel draws his yellow-nailed finger across his neck and grimaces. 

“Huh? Kind of. More like…” 

“Death of soul.” 

Two or more Ausländers together in Germany with nothing else to discuss will very quickly get to the Teuton-bashing, something Salter feels more and more guilty about as time goes on but the more sincerely he resolves never again to give in to the urge the more he finds the powerful tug of its catharsis, so he says, “By the way, I should pay you a compliment, man: I would never talk this much to a German taxi driver.”

“Pavel would never talk this much to German passenger.” 

“That’s why you always see so many Germans talking to themselves… no one else wants to do it.” 

Salter continues, “Man, about three years ago, it was four in the morning and I wanted to cross the street? It was a red light but there were no cars for miles in any direction and it was cold and I was tired and I just wanted to get home, you know, so I crossed the light against the red. Big deal. Only I hadn’t taken two steps across the street when this old Kraut is leaning out of his window in his goddamn pyjamas yelling at me for breaking the laws of the German Federal Republic!” 

Salter says, “One night I’m in this chick’s flat. She invited me over to watch a video. She asks if I want something to drink and I say sure, and she says help yourself. So I go into her kitchen, right? Look in the fridge and find a bottle of Coca Cola. I grab the first clean cup I can find which turns out to be a coffee mug and I pour some Coke in it and join her in the living room, where she gives me a look like I’m seriously fucking insane. Without a word she takes the mug from me, marches right back into the kitchen, finds a glass that says Coke on it, pours the Coke out of the mug into the glass…” 

Pavel and Salter share a good hard laugh at that and then Pavel, lifting his goggles to wipe the tears, says, “America! Want to play game?” 

“Depends on the game.” 

“We make gambling bet.” 

“Okay.”

“If Pavel show you crazy Berlin unbelievable thing, Pavel win one hundred Euro of your cash money. Las Vegas. If Pavel not show crazy thing, taxi ride whole night is kostenlos… free. Okay? Is deal?” 

Salter considers the offer, checks his wallet to make sure he has enough money to play and says, “Deal.” 

“Okay.” 

“Ready.” 

 ”Number one…America knows Der reinrassigen indo-germanischen Bruderschaft des Islam?” 

“Huh? The…Aryan pure race…brotherhood of…Islam?” 

“Da. Nazi Jihad. Mosque in Zehlendorf in woods. Unbelievable.” 

“Never heard of it.” 

“Blue eyes, blond hair, pray on rug to Allah and Allah’s son who is little man with funny mustache. German bitches in chador… headscarves… tall young good looking peoples… is crazy.” 

“Nazi Moslems?” 

“Jewhaters unite.”

“But it’s not so crazy, when you think about it. Germans are always forming strange unions and brotherhoods and committees and things. Gotta be crazier than that to win my hundred, man.” 

“Okay. Mr. America knows 24-Stunden Freikorper Waschsalon?” 

“24 hour nudist… uh… laundromat?” 

“Is in Stieglitz. Lots of crazy old peoples…” 

“Yeah, well, that does sound pretty crazy… but, see… I don’t really…” 

“Okay okay. America has heard of Permanent Party in crazy German’s flat in Kreuzberg?” 

“Yeah, I know that one. It’s a protest, isn’t it?” 

“Crazy German refuse to stop party until current American administration…” 

“I know. People from all over Europe come to it, bring their own drinks, sign a guestbook. Never been there. It’s been going for five straight years now, right? Listen, haven’t you got anything else up your sleeve, Pavel? Something really crazy?” 

“America is black Jew and drive hard bargain. Pavel must think…” 

Salter glances at his watch: in a few minutes he will be forty five years old. “As long as we keep driving…” 

But Pavel slows and stops the taxi in the middle of the street, an unremarkable street in East Berlin. There is a construction site a ways up the block, to the left, over which towers a cloud-penetrating crane. To their immediate right is the side entrance of a red brick structure that could be a hospital or a high school. Set waist-high in the structure’s wall ten paces from its side-entrance is an aluminum drawer or chute-cover, with a handle on it, which resembles very much an over-night depository at a library or a videothek. The taxi is idling. 

“Why are we stopping here, Pavel?” 

“America, may I introduce you to St. Hedwigs Krankenhaus… hospital of Saint Hedwig. Look, soul brother number one. Take peek.” Pavel points to the right at the aluminum depository thingy in the red brick wall. “Is Babyklappe. If girl have baby and don’t want she open little door and in put baby and go home. What a relief! Or maybe go dancing. Disco lights flash inside and nuns come take baby out box. Put in orphanage.” He adds, softly, “Crazy, no?” 

Salter hands Pavel his hundred Euro bill.

And then there’s Frederick, who discovers that The Sheltering Sky  is premiering at the English-language cinema right up the street, a ten minute walk from his rented room on Hauptstrasse. Not another Odeon! Cinemas called Odeon and restaurants called Tivoli: failures of the entrepreneurial imagination. Having reclined in the dirty velour seats of various Odeons in seven American states he thinks how if he ever runs his own little arthouse cinema  -a dream on par with living in a lighthouse- he’ll call it by its proper name, which would be Odeum.

He turned thirty a month prior, in London, weepy-drunk in his sublet with two slags he snagged in the off-license. The even-drunker, if that’s possible, blonde had three feet of thick braid sashing her bare back and asked him if he’d like to have it and Frederick slurred his assent in the form of the eternal question. So he found a chopped gold snake in the bathtub the next day and spent a tense noon struggling to reconstruct the events. He eventually found the courage to check the freezer for a head or a blonde tit in a baggie. He packed it in his luggage with the tailored shirts laughing.

The little bald refugee from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it.

-Oh, you know. Look around. See what’s what.

The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the cinema lights go down. He doesn’t know for what he came to Berlin but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen window as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight. Banshee brakes, infant muezzin, dogs in the gene joy of fight. Frederick recalls a news item concerning an opera lover who’d baked feces (authorities never specified if it was his own) in a tray of fudge brownies and had given one each to every of the dozen unrequited loves in his apartment building and Frederick makes a mental note to politely decline any food or drink Herr Ludwig offers. The word feces seems blacker, Greeker,  with an “a” in it. A church bell older than the country of his birth is chiming the hour.

It must be some sort of omen that The Sheltering Sky is playing the very day he lands in Berlin,  though the idea of Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket, thinking of apter actresses and astonished to see people drinking beer from plastic cups in the cinema foyer and one of the patrons Frederick espies holding just such a cup at chest-height is not much more than ten years old, upperlip frothed as he chats, open-faced, with his parents. Frederick is finally granted the sensation of being adrift in a foreign country.

Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of, he eases into his dirty velour seat (Germans to the left, Germans to the right; Germans in front and behind him) and nods off under the influence of the after-tasty narcotic of jetlag, dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise, a ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.

“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.

“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.

Later that evening, wakened by an usher and reluctant to go ‘home’, Frederick wanders downtown, following the bus route, a forty minute walk the first half of which takes him through a Turkish neighborhood with operetta-like touches of the bazaar, showing fruit vendors crying out and burka’d matrons at waddle like sinister nuns and veiled glances from sloe-eyed houris with infidel-bashing tits. The Germans are a spectral presence and remind him of UN inspectors in their own country. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo and the angled black doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.

He is staring at an exquisite little blackhaired girl in a party of six at the VIP table under the window of the DJ’s booth. Her lipstick is as black as everything else in the bitter bang and webby fog of the long room until someone lights her cigarette, turning her lips for an instant the color of poppies, a bloodred field Frederick saw from a bus in the Sierra Gourda in Andalusia while writing in a now-lost notebook, stories about Levantine girls who make love like damp Joans of Arc in smoke-vomitting flames and either attempt murder or commit suicide after the party and in doing so reveal themselves to be the protagonist’s long-lost twin. Or something.

Winter comes to Berlin with the unspectacular viciousness of a jilted lover.  At the height of the  summer one blindly intuits that life will never be cold again and it is exactly then the cold comes falling back as the enemy’s pulped face on the window or heirloomed breaths of the mythical ancestor’s tubercular sleep, a misery so general it’s an insult.  Six months of drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. The notorious German dream of bunker life.

Frederick’s affair with the blackhaired girl thrives in this desolation. They meet on a blustery corner and exchange those double-cheek kisses and shiver indecisively in front of one cafe after another until finally abandoning the pretense and hurrying back to his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the greatgrandniece of Gustave Mahler. Cackling under a duvet at the caterwauling Mahler. Sariah is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid, as though her virginity stubbornly heals between fuckings. He thinks she fucks like dogs swim. They always seem surprised they can do it.

How it started. He took her to the third day of a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small that the ceiling was someone’s living room floor.

They are watching The Birds in German and can hear a pavane of footsteps crisscrossing the parquet overhead. Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night in which everything appears to be pretending to be busy they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as Khomeini came to power in ‘79, says  I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.

“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”

“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother-  they’re all women. Okay.”

He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark -his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his exgirlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”

“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly coifed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a -a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”

“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jadegreen Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spungold hair is immaculately coifed.”

“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”

He finally looks over to see a silver eleven of tears runneling the Persian girl’s cheeks and down her neck to salt the never-sucked breasts in her schoolgirlish jumper and jacket.

Frederick is trembly climbing over her, sliding into her, the yellowtiled stove a stone headache of heat behind them as he relishes the strenuous work of mining her innocence for pleasure. Sariah with the Salome hair. Hair like a garment and pussy her little black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. He jigs her across the room, gasping in her mouth, her legs around his waist, her brown back slamming the door. Fraulein Mahler wails across Herr Ludwig’s basic chords. There is homework all over the warped parquet and he steps in it. He slips on world history and comes.

Sariah has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the kitchen table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.

Summer is the relief that everyone has promised. The city gushes green and the Tiergarten park is clothed in flesh, the women blasé about unpacking their marshmallows, the men strutting their bellies and cocks, the gregarious Turks organize epic barbecues in their nudity-free corner of the park with music and card games and dancing. The Germans keep apart and sun themselves with mute efficiency. Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she and Frederick traverse a field of what looks like an obscenely neat aircrash.

Their relationship is topsecret and they become as crafty as addicts at the protocol of deception. Sariah’s mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls him from pay phones, or leaves scribbled notes about when and where it is safe to meet. As their second half year commences, Frederick is introduced as an English tutor. The matriarch unwittingly pays for them to see R-rated English language movies at the Odeon. The day before Sariah tells him she’s pregnant, Frederick dreams it: he’s following a long trail of tiny footprints in warm snow to a tree. He looks up the tree and his mother is in it, hung by a leafy umbilical.

At Chez Jacques, their favorite cafe, Sariah says her period is late. Frederick finishes his spaghetti, staring at her in the tender light, the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques. He looks at Sariah and sees it in her, a mistake the size of a thumbnail and lodged in her core. Why does he feel such peace at that moment? She, too, is unaccountably serene in the face of this disaster. Why does genuine peace briefly fill them with its fearless heaviness? They are bound by an Old Testament pact that hinges on a sacrifice. On a real death.

Her belly doesn’t grow very much in six weeks, but fat lines, the consecration of a ghostpriest’s ashed thumb, bisect her navel and her nipples and the breasts balloon and her scent changes from musk to cinnamon to saltwater. Her mother tells her she looks like the moon.

You look like the moon, Azizam.

A foggy morning. The slender birches along Mahlerstrasse hooded in ectoplasm. Cross Mahlerstrasse and then Alymerstrasse and hurry between two buildings and over a carless blacktop to U-Bahnhof Hirschfeldtplatz, descend to an empty platform. Wait in silence. Stare down the tracks.

The waiting room is ringed with occupied chairs. Sariah stands with her arms at her sides at the receptionist’s desk while Frederick sits stealing glances at the other patients. One in particular, all alone, is sniffing and gulping and rubbing her raw wet cheeks with the sleeve of an old sweater. She appeals to Frederick’s mercy with crushed pink eyes and he cowers behind an obsolete Vogue and  it occurs to him right there in the abortion clinic, months after the fact, that Sariah’s religion-based reading of The Birds may well have turned out to be the freshest interpretation in years, an interpretation he himself could have appropriated, but he stepped on her argument with his glib presentation, showing off, and now it’s too late.

He has just gotten to his incomprehensible horoscope when a nurse calls out a broken version of his name. She is walking as fast as a dreamfigure down a long white hall but he catches up with her and she points at the door he is to enter and says hinter rechts (rear right) without stopping.

The room is divided into six cubicles, each cubicle made of three rolling walls and a curtained entrance and in each cubicle is a high bed, on wheels, affording minimal privacy on a sort of honor system. Flustered, Frederick turns left, or links, rather than right and enters the wrong cubicle, parting the curtains. He comes upon a girl, shirtless in a bra but no panties, knocked out and skinny on her bed, the inverted italic v of her legs bent open, her eyes just fluttering slits. Her bruised white arm, the i.v. needle still taped to it, is at a wild corpse angle, reaching, but not reaching, for the leather backpack, square with textbooks, that sits on a chair beside the bed.

She is young, tall, with wild blond hair like slashed violin bows piled on the pillow. She is blond in all the places where Sariah is black. Around the mound of her sparse pubes is a saucer-sized winestain or how he sees it as a shockingly well-placed comment which purples the skin around the furled lips and stains the lips themselves nearly glossy black as burnt sugar against which the wisps of her bush are pale as devilglows of static under a duvet on the longlost night of a boy’s first masturbate winter.

Frederick, angry, can imagine the creep who has gotten her pregnant making jokes about it. About the birthmark. Jokes about Negroes or blowtorches. He can imagine how this unexampled angel is probably ashamed to fuck and how the birthmark’s kicky ugliness has undercut her ability to select an apt lover because our souls turn so sadly on trivial pivots and Frederick can well imagine this lucky creep exploiting the wound and pumping long-stroked into her with an exaggerated sense of his right to.