Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  At a pinch I had enough money to last a week in London. There seemed no alternative but to leave Juan in England, return to Berlin alone and attempt to pull some strings from the German end to expedite the visa. But where was he to stay in the meantime? One option was Lincoln, where my friends the Gribbens were ensconced with their children, Christopher and Rosie, in a picture postcard Georgian house. From the front window of the house you looked out directly on to the great west facade of the cathedral. Juan refused to be impressed. He didn’t give a damn about carved choir stalls or floriated finials or the Lincoln Imp. And the wintry weather of that June, the chill of the Georgian house and the positively arctic temperature in the massive church depressed him still further.

  ‘If this is Europe,’ he said, ‘forget it. Forget it. I’m going home.’

  I half wished he would. And in the very act of contemplating that impossibility, for I knew they would never alter the return date of his charter-flight ticket, I was ashamed and fearful of my treachery. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t push me. Don’t push me any further.’ Yet I could hardly trust myself to speak at all. I was exasperated by his rudeness, almost beyond endurance. I was hurt by the way he rebuffed me. I felt crushed by the burden of his dependence, and I resented his resentment. If he felt trapped in this unlikely city on a hill, so far from the Europe of his imagining, then so did I: trapped by the commitment I had made, trapped by the romantic delusions of the last lonely months, and embarrassed and angry at his unwillingness to trust these friends who had taken us in at a moment’s notice.

  On that bleak day in June, in all the desolate expanse of Europe there was only one redeeming feature, and that was Rosie. She must have been seven or eight at the time, still young enough to believe that the world revolved around her, and charming enough to ensure that it mostly did. And so she found it quite unsurprising that, on the day before her ballet test, a beautiful foreign dancer should conveniently arrive in her living room. He should give her a lesson, she said, and help her with her preparation. She left him no choice. I watched as he began to instruct her, the white gold of her hair bobbing against his golden black, and I saw that her confidence warmed him, made him supple, and seemed to release in him a flow of irresistible grace. It was as though I saw the life in him returning. It lasted no more than a few minutes, no longer than the span of her concentration. Then, when the dancing stopped, the chill crept into him again. And at night, when we went to sleep in the front bedroom, illuminated by the cold reflection of the cathedral floodlight, he would not let me come near him.

  We decided to return to London, but the execution of even that simple operation proved unexpectedly complicated. Arriving late at the station, we leaped into the train at the last minute and found ourselves heading for Nottingham where they insisted that, if we wished to proceed to London, we must pay another full fare. An hour later, as we settled into the unheated carriage and the dismal prospect of Nottingham faded from view, with Juan defiantly playing his Walkman at full blast, the brightly anticipated reunion of our summer holiday was reduced to a moody snarl. It was as though, in the few months we had been apart, we had shrivelled, contracted into ourselves, so that we no longer connected.

  Back in London, I called a former colleague who was working at the British Library, cataloguing eighteenth-century French pamphlets. It was the worst possible moment. Normally imperturbable Jim, the only man I knew who conducted interviews with vice-chancellors in bare feet, was morosely licking some emotional wounds of his own. The idea of playing host to Juan cannot have been very appealing, and Juan made no attempt to hide his misery. He was bewildered, tense and sickening now with the first signs of bronchitis, which is how I left him in Jim’s flat in Brixton.

  Berlin. Does the train still come in so slowly to the Zoo station, arcing on the elevated rail past the last stucco facades of Charlottenburg? Does it stop at all? Or does it now, at the end of its long haul from the Hook of Holland or from Paris, rush through to the Friedrichstrasse in the heart of old new Berlin as though no Iron Curtain had ever intervened?

  Even to ask these questions is painful; they shatter the illusion that somehow the past can again be visited. I have perched on the low wall of the town square of Guantánamo; I have retraced out steps in the streets of New York; I have returned each year, when All Souls’ Day comes round, to the grave. But the Zoo station?

  Ten years ago it was firmly fixed in the permafrost of the Cold War. It was of one piece with a world in which Brezhnev still exercised his senile despotism over an evil empire and Ronald Reagan was rewriting the script of world politics in the spirit of Steven Spielberg. I do not recall thinking anything like this as I waited, once again, on the platform. If I had, I would have been better prepared for Juan’s arrival.

  No English summer could account for the beeswax pallor of his face as he bundled his bags, with exaggerated difficulty, down from the train. He looked as though he had caught a glimpse of hell. It dawned on me then, with a pang of guilt, that he had: at the border crossing, where the guard towers were hidden not quite discreetly enough at the edge of the forest, and where the East German passport controllers—always politely sinister—entered the train to administer their temporary terror. Of course, nothing had happened. Nothing except a rush of panic as he recalled the water and the night of Guantánamo Bay, as he watched them leaf through his second-class passport with the problematic words ‘Claimed Nationality: Cuban.’ Had he really returned, of his own free will, to the nightmare world of the Communist International?

  If he was ever going to relax in a holiday mood in Berlin, it was clear that we would first have to neutralise the Cold War. He was still wary, turned in on himself and uncharacteristically quiet when we set off, at his request, to confront the Wall. He disliked walking. ‘These legs were made for dancing,’ he once protested when I was too mean to hail a cab. But this day he walked purposefully, striding through the Tiergarten and pausing only briefly to inspect the toilet block that had achieved international exposure in the gay film Taxi zum Klo. Then we were at the Wall and on the viewing platform. To the left, on our side of the Wall, was the Reichstag; straight ahead, on the other side, the Brandenburg Gate with the famous Quadriga, repositioned so that the backsides of the bronze horses addressed the West with a permanent fourfold fart.

  For a long time he said nothing. He simply stared into the East. Then a coachload of American tourists arrived. Where were they from? ‘Atlanta.’ ‘And you?’ ‘New York City,’ said Juan. One of the women repeated the news to a friend who had missed the momentous information. New York. New York. Like a magical incantation the words seemed to reassure him, to establish firm ground under his feet, to animate him. He was an American on summer vacation.

  ‘Let’s go, Johnny, let’s go!’

  We were not finished yet. Instead of turning back through the Tiergarten, he started out along the Wall to the south, pausing now and again to touch it, to read the graffiti, to control, to check, I thought, that the Wall would hold. By the time we were nearing Checkpoint Charlie he was beginning to romance about it, eagerly pressing me for more and more escape stories. How I had acquired such a stock of anecdotes I cannot imagine, but they surfaced in my memory now. In the early days people had simply escaped across the low barbed-wire barricades that were strung up along the border streets. Then, when the Wall went up with its four metres of concrete slabs rounded off at the top with concrete piping, they had tunnelled beneath it, or, more spectacularly, abseiled across it on ropes from the windows and roofs of adjoining houses. At particular transit points they had crashed through it in coaches and ambulances and delivery vans, until the guard was reinforced and the approaches made more deadly. More recently, two East German families and their children had breezed across the border in a hot-air balloon and landed, if you could believe the photos, trilling as blithely as the Trapp family singers.

  We poked about the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, and watched the trickle of visitors disappearing throug
h the checkpoint into the labyrinth of control posts on the other side. At an Imbiss near the Kochstrasse U-Bahn we bought a Curry-wurst and Coke and then retraced our steps—Juan insisted—back to the Brandenburg Gate. He was mellower now, and slipped his arm under mine as we walked—an unusual gesture for him in public. By the time we reached the viewing stand, the last coach parties of the day had been and gone. We stood together on the platform, and in the early evening light two rabbits appears in the no-man’s land of the death strip. ‘Bunnies!’ he said, which, as far as we were concerned, finished off the Cold War.

  I had rented a shabby ground-floor apartment in the Fasanenstrasse. This street name must have been the first German word that Juan learned, and he pronounced it with an explosive stress on the second syllable, so that it came out sounding like a trumpet blast, as though it were the proudest address in Berlin. In fact, the house was decidedly substandard, one of those turn-of-the-century speculative grey barracks built around a dank courtyard. In the spring I had been surprised by a thin burst of blossom from a couple of lilac bushes; otherwise there was nothing in the courtyard but metal rubbish bins and a permanent smudge of black dust around the coal cellar.

  Our apartment had obviously been subdivided, possibly at the time of the postwar housing crisis. The bedroom and living room were separated by a thin wall of plasterboard, and the kitchen was a niche carved in turn out of the living room. This meant that the main room, still preserved in the original dimensions, was the bathroom, which boasted an enormous bath tub with magnificent claw feet and talons. This met with Juan’s instant approbation; he made the room his own, and he stocked it with Oil of Ulan and balsam shampoo and aloe shaving lotion and threw out my Wilkinson Sword razor blades and replaced them with Gillettes. Into this steamy sanctuary he would disappear for what seemed like hours at a time. Now and again I would hear snatches of song and then, increasingly, the strange sound of German words and phrases being rehearsed: Ach so!, which he contrived to pronounce like a stage Chinaman, or Fasanenstrasse, with the trumpet effect. But mostly he practised the ü-sound, as in Führer, and Türken raus! which he had seen daubed on the Wall, and Kurfürstendamm. He found this sound both irresistibly comic and elusive. He seized on a line from the German version of My Fair Lady, and the bathroom echoed raucously as he sang it again and again: ‘Es grünt so grün wenn Spaniens Blüten blühen.’

  Then, in a New York Spanish version of Henry Higgins’ English: ‘I think she’s got it. My God, I think she’s got it.’ And then off again, as the bathroom swelled and crashed with much splashing for the grand finale: ‘Es grünt so grün…’ Berlin was going to be a success.

  Whatever the case might have been in England, that summer the German sun shone warm and even, much as it must have done, I thought, in 1914. By the end of July they were watering the street trees. The manicured patches of beach around the Wannsee were covered with perfectly tanned bodies, and so, more interestingly, were the meadows in the Tiergarten. In the city on the Ku’damm, as the afternoon wore on, elegant people appeared in the cafes, or walked their Dalmatians, or gathered under the umbrellas at the tables on the Olivaer-Platz. It was perfect weather for flâneurs, perfect weather for Juan.

  That the Ku’damm is vulgar is one of those rare propositions on which old-time Berliners, world-weary academics and idealistic youths who had moved to Berlin to escape the draft would all agree. By common consent it had become too plastic or, from a different point of view, too brassy. There was too much naked money and too much dressed-up sex to spend it on. There were too many tourists, drinking Berliner Weisse made pink with a shot of raspberry syrup, crowding into the dubiously Argentinian steakhouses, and endlessly consuming monuments, ruins, cakes, coffee and pommes frites with ketchup, with hardly a pig’s knuckle or a plate of honest sauerkraut to be seen.

  Wherever the real Berlin was to be found, this was real enough for Juan. In the course of his daily promenading, he proceeded to establish several vantage points from which he could view the street at leisure. One of these was the window table in a tea shop where the menu, if that is the word to apply to a list of teas, was as long as the Twining’s catalogue. After you had ordered, the Fräulein brought your teapot to the table with a personalised alarm clock, timed to the exact infusing requirement of your preferred tea. If, as sometimes happened, two or three alarm clocks went off simultaneously, the tearoom, which was otherwise as solemn as a dentist’s waiting room, suddenly resembled the workshop of a mad bomber. Precision tea-drinking, Juan decided, was one of the great German contributions to the serious art of living.

  At the other end of the street he discovered a bench well placed to give him a view of an equally thought-provoking spectacle. It was opposite the square behind the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a much-photographed landmark that played host, no doubt reluctantly, to a permanent assemblage of punks. Be-ringed, be-razored and enchained with the same attention to detail as the precision tea shop, they seemed to have taken over the square as an outdoor living room. With their shaved or hennaed heads, and their faces grey with the pre-putrescent glow that is produced by a prolonged diet of vegetables and dope, they complemented beautifully the grotesque Gothic ruins of the church. Sooner or later, if you waited long enough, a vanload of policemen would arrive, and after a token struggle and a volley of mutual insults, the square would be cleared. The afternoon performance was complete, but not to worry, said Juan, they would be back tomorrow. And they were.

  La ronde: each scene in this self-absorbed world was entire in itself, yet endlessly repeated. Later, when we reminisced about Berlin, he remembered the fat woman with whom we were on nodding terms at Mario’s ice-cream parlour where she came, as we did, for her nightly indulgence. ‘Three flavours,’ she always instructed the waitress, ‘with mixed fruit and cream on top.’ And there were the old ladies, with their mannikin hats pinned primly over their thinning silver buns, wearing their perpetual widowhood like members of a dedicated order. And in the evenings the little bar, intimate with pink curtains and a soft glow from the trimmed lampshades, where the boys sipped white wine and menthol cigarettes, and sighed tragically over the impossibility of finding a real man.

  In the bar there were free copies of a magazine. It was called the Berliner Anzeiger, a very decorous title for what was really a monthly guide to gay Berlin. The August issue led off with an article on the Royal Porcelain Factory. There was an illustration of an eighteenth-century tea and coffee service, and under that a brief item calling for action against ‘the new diseases’. In America, the article said, these new diseases turned up mostly in the leather scene, and now they were appearing in Berlin. Kaposi’s sarcoma, and something else called GRID. It was nearly a year since I had read about the violet spots, but GRID?

  ‘Do you know about this GRID?’ I asked Juan.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s the gay cancer. People are talking about it in New York. It’s really hitting places like the Mine Shaft. Only the crazies want to go there any more.’

  Had he ever been there?

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you know I’m not into that scene.’

  It was such a slight conversation. In fact I only recall it because he kept the August copy of that magazine as a souvenir.

  He also kept some coloured catalogues from the KDW, the Berlin equivalent of Bloomingdale’s. This was the domain of Martin, whom he had spotted one afternoon in the crowd on the Ku’damm. They had danced together in New York until Martin had moved for a while to the ballet in Stuttgart. After that he had pitched up, temporarily out of work, in Berlin, where he now presided with much zest and coppery-black good looks over the tropical fruit department at the KDW. As the summer trade in tropical fruits was lethargic, there was plenty of time for gossiping, and Juan took frequent advantage of this civilised way of conducting business. One day when he was happily immersed in conversation with Martin among heaps of jackfruits and pineapples and potted display palms, he was approached by a customer who presumably had equall
y little to do with her time.

  ‘From which country are you coming?’ she enquired in English. Professionally alert, Martin intervened in his best jungle voice, ‘We are from Africa, gnädige Frau!’

  No doubt she recalled the demonstrations by Somali wood-carvers and Bedouin leather-workers with which department stores periodically promoted their ethnic wares. Gesturing at the mounds of fruit, she asked, ‘And are you part of the demonstration?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Martin, with sad eyes and still deeper tone, ‘We are for sale!’

  That was our Berlin, our island in the sun.

  Back at the Zoo station, with his two-day transit visa to Paris and a bottle of KDW perfume in his bag as a present for Hiram, Juan hugged me goodbye. We didn’t kiss. Two men couldn’t kiss in public. I knew he thought that. Not even on the Zoo station.

  Shortly before Christmas I was back in New York, making a brief stopover on the long way home from Berlin to Melbourne. Juan had arranged to sublet Danny’s apartment during my stay. This was a mutually acceptable arrangement because Danny spent most of his time at Hiram’s on the top floor of the same building, and there was no point in his paying out good rent simply to provide a home for the cockroaches. So we moved in, and out—while Juan set off a double-strength roach-exterminating chemical cocktail—and in again over the bodies of a thousand dead cucarachas.

  We were back on 14th Street, not a stone’s throw from the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe with her Aztec halo. On the block nothing much had changed: the shoe shop, the drugstore where they sold conditioner for Afro hair, the Spanish bookstore with its sun-bleached posters of Gaudí’s Barcelona church in the window, the haberdashers that smelled of linen and lavender when you pushed through the door. And near the corner, an Irish bar—the Shannon? the Shamrock?—with a sour smell that made Juan wrinkle up his nose as he passed, a remnant of an earlier era marooned now in a sea of Spanishness.