Cafe Babanussa

by Karen Hill

  On the night before her departure, Ruby picked up some cheese, a baguette, some fruit and a bar of chocolate and went to the river. As she sat down with her picnic by the Seine, the same blond man she had seen on the patio her first day in Paris approached and joined her on the bench.

  “At last,” he said in French. “No more waving. I can look you in the eyes and tell you how pretty you are.”

  Ruby felt her cheeks warm as she smiled awkwardly at her new companion. His rather large nose reminded her of Gérard Depardieu, but his slate-blue eyes were welcoming, with a hint of laughter at their edges. His hair was so thick and wavy that she wanted to run her fingers through it.

  “Yes, well . . . Um, what is your name?” asked Ruby. His accent seemed Eastern European, but she wasn’t sure.

  “I’m Werner. You are not from here, I gather, though you speak beautifully. What is your name, my little American?”

  “Ruby,” she said. “And I’m Canadian.”

  He took her hand in his and kissed it and said, “Hello, Ruby, la Canadienne. Pleased to meet you.”

  His eyes seemed to devour her. Ruby squirmed a little. “You’re not French, are you?”

  “No, I’m German, from Stuttgart.”

  “Oh! I’m going to Berlin tomorrow.”

  “Berlin, eh? That’s where I live. Why are you going there?”

  Ruby chatted easily about her life back in Don Mills and how her great-uncle’s time in Berlin had inspired her to travel, though she could see Werner struggling to follow.

  Werner switched to English. “Do you speak German?”

  “Nein. Not one bit.”

  “Let’s go for a walk and I can give you a crash course in swear words, teach you how to count, that sort of thing. We can do at least that much in one night. Are you staying there for a while?

  “Well, I don’t really know how long,” Ruby said, rising from the bench. “Maybe a year.”

  “Then you must learn some German,” he said firmly, and took her hand.

  Ruby laughed out loud. Somehow she felt comfortable around this man. He spoke simply and was straightforward and seemed genuinely interested in her. And he was nice to look at. Ah, what the hell, what harm can a little hand-holding do, she thought, wrapping her fingers around his as they headed off towards Notre-Dame.

  “Why is your English so impeccable?” she asked.

  “Impeccable?”

  Ruby smiled and said, “It’s excellent.”

  “I always had a thing for English and English literature, more so than French. We start early in school, and also I travelled to London a few times. What about you? How do you speak French so well?”

  “My mother is from Montreal. I love the romance languages. French, Spanish, Italian—love them all.”

  “What about your father, where is he from?”

  “He’s from Canada. He’s Black.”

  Werner nodded as if he had thought something like this all along. “Mischling . . . ,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.”

  “You’re mulatto.”

  Ruby stopped and dropped his hand. “That word is offensive. It should never be used anymore. Call me Black, call me mixed, but not that!”

  Werner apologized. An awkward silence fell over them.

  “It’s okay. You couldn’t be expected to know how awful that word is.” Ruby took his hand again and they stood looking out over the Seine. The incandescence of the city stretched out before them, and she felt like each and every twinkle that lit the sky was something to be discovered. Werner began chatting about Berlin, and he too seemed full of light, matching the Parisian night.

  They sat outside Notre-Dame de Paris for a while, taking in its grandeur and murmuring about hunchbacks, and then they walked back through the streets to La Pleine Lune. After eating, they ordered drinks and sat chatting some more, the cool night air blowing gently around them. Ruby felt intoxicated in more than one way. Werner’s intelligence and sunny humour had cast a spell on her. After an hour or two of earnest talking, staring and hand-holding, Ruby felt she was ready to begin her journey into independence and liberation. She asked Werner, “Okay, your place or mine?”

  “Oh, I like your style. Straight to the point.”

  “Well, why bother waiting?” Ruby said. “Tomorrow I’ll be gone and we’ll have never known.”

  “Never known what?”

  “Why, how we taste . . . the best dessert of all.”

  “Hmmm . . . I think I’m going home on the train with you tomorrow,” said Werner.

  The two of them wandered down the road and quietly climbed the stairs to Ruby’s room. Amidst awkward fumbling and giggling, they doffed their clothes and drank in the essence of their dissimilar bodies. His was long and gangly, skin rough and mottled next to her rounded café au lait limbs. Werner struggled with her bra straps, yanking at them impatiently until they snapped against her skin. “Do you need help?” Ruby teased.

  “German women don’t wear bras,” Werner said. “You’ll be rid of this contraption in no time.” They laughed as their bodies melded.

  “Please, make me one promise,” Werner whispered as he licked her earlobe later on.

  “What’s that?” Ruby asked.

  “Don’t say ‘I love you’ to me tonight.”

  Ruby giggled. “You must take me for a fool,” she said.

  “But why is it that so many Americans always say they love people they are just screwing?”

  “I don’t know about ‘so many Americans,’” Ruby replied, “but Canadians are different from Americans. Don’t lump us in with the Hollywood lot. Personally, I don’t know how you could tell if you really loved someone without having sex with them first.”

  Werner began to massage Ruby’s feet. Then he took her big toe in his mouth and said, “Mmm, juicy, smoky and a little salty. Just like a piece of ham.”

  “Are you calling me a pig?” asked Ruby as she wriggled around.

  “I will worship them one by one, how do you say, until the cows come home?”

  “First a pig, now a cow—Werner, you’re not very flattering.”

  “This little piggy goes to market, this little piggy comes running all the way home. That’s right, come to Werner, baby.”

  “Oh my god, get off my toes.” On and on they went through the night, with Werner joking all the way.

  Ruby postponed her departure to Berlin. She and Werner spent the next two weeks wandering the streets of Paris together. At the end of it all Ruby was ready to leave for Berlin, with Werner in tow.

  The train rumbled sluggishly through the flat and colourless countryside, having slowed measurably since they crossed the border into East Germany. Ruby chatted with Werner and with a young West German couple sitting opposite them. They all laughed at her attempts to pronounce the few German words she knew, the language sounding rough and angry to her untrained ear. Often she would open her eyes to see the young man and woman necking, hands caressing each other’s bodies without a care in the world.

  Werner carried on trying to drill some German words and phrases into her, but Ruby was only half-interested. Then he said, “I think you should stay with me. Let’s take a chance on each other and see how it works out. Anyhow, where else are you going to go?”

  “Well, I would have stayed in a youth hostel for a while. But thank you for asking me to stay with you.” Her first instinct was to go with the flow and say yes. It would be ideal for her, she thought, more than she could have asked for. “This will be true immersion in more than one sense,” she said as she smiled at Werner, who seemed both nervous and pleased about her answer. They pressed rather uncomfortably into each other and let the night fall upon them.

  Morning arrived cheerless and dim; whistles blew and the train jolted to a stop. Ruby saw guards perched on towers, rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “We’re here,” Werner said, yet there was no station or city to be seen.

 
; Ruby leaned out the window and spied a group of soldiers in grey uniforms that seemed to match the countryside walking purposefully along the side of the train, reining in large German shepherds on leashes. The dogs sniffed at the underbelly of the train.

  “What on earth are the dogs for?” she asked Werner.

  “To check if anyone is hiding underneath,” Werner replied a little curtly.

  “Anyone . . . ?” Ruby asked.

  “East Germans, of course. We’ve been passing through East Germany and are about to enter West Berlin and no one from the East is allowed in. Some people will try any means to escape to the West.”

  “Do they always do this?”

  “Yes.” His voice betrayed exasperation with her naïveté. It was ironic to Ruby that she, for some strange reason, was taking a reverse escape route, from West to East.

  A voice rang out. “Halten Sie bitte die Pässe bereit.” Get your passports ready.

  The East German officers came through first, silently checking everyone’s papers. Then came the West Germans, in dark olive-green uniforms, looking every inch as dour and authoritarian as their Eastern counterparts. They asked Ruby which baggage belonged to her, and after Werner translated, she pointed to the blue knapsack on the rack above her head. Only when they had finished carefully thumbing through her passport and returned it did she realize she’d been holding her breath.

  As the train took off again, she noticed a grey slab of concrete looming behind a tall barbed wire fence.

  There it was. So plain, so simple, so ugly.

  They chugged along parallel to the Wall for a while and then snaked towards the city through a dense forest. The leaves on the trees were a vibrant shade of green, and tree branches stuck out from every which way as they coursed along the rails towards the city.

  “This is the Grunewald,” Werner told her. “Berlin has the largest urban forests in all of Europe.”

  Ruby felt this was most appropriate for a city enclosed by a wall. Soon she was taking in the beauty of the cityscape that was gliding by her window, so different from the harsh regime that surrounded it. Church spires, intricate and colourful facades adorning tall buildings, a gilded palace. Against the grey hues, the place radiated a melancholy elegance.

  The train screeched into West Berlin’s downtown station, Zoologischer Garten. Werner was telling her that he didn’t believe in phones or televisions and she would have to place any calls from the public phone down the road from him.

  The long train ride had taken its toll, for her whole body ached as she lifted her knapsack onto her shoulders. She stepped onto the platform with the throngs of other passengers, Werner following her and offering to take her knapsack.

  “We made it,” Werner said and smiled at her.

  “That was quite some trip . . . and wow, I saw the Wall up close.”

  “You’ll be seeing plenty of that while you’re here—it’s everywhere.”

  Werner led her into the heart of the bustling station. He walked very quickly and she had difficulty keeping up with him. The subway was dirty and worn down, full of old men and women. They passed a group of young punks wearing studded leather bands, heavy black army boots, dog collars and safety pins hanging from their ears. Strips of hair split their shorn, shiny scalps in half. Two careening drunks waved bottles of beer like flags, shouting loudly at everyone and no one in particular.

  As Ruby and Werner squeezed out the doors with the other passengers, an older man jostled Ruby and sneered something under his breath.

  “What was that about?” she asked. “That guy bumped into me and then sounded really angry.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Our language always sounds harsh. It was nothing. Besides, Berliners are known to be grumpy.”

  “Just what I need when I’m striking out in a new place.”

  “Don’t be silly, you’ll be fine. But if you end up staying, you’ll have to learn German.”

  The cool spring air had a peculiar sharp scent that Ruby couldn’t identify. The buildings were tall, grey and close together, blocking an easy view of the sky. Not far from the station, Werner steered the way to a sombre six-storey building with a crumbling facade. Through the entryway, a wide corridor led into a cement-paved courtyard surrounded on all sides by more decrepit buildings. As she looked up at the high windows, she imagined countless pairs of eyes staring down on her.

  “I live in what’s called the Hinterhaus, or the backhouse. These courtyards were originally built so that a horse and buggy could come in, turn around and go back out. These houses are particular to Berlin—you won’t find many of them anywhere else in Germany. Come, let’s not stand here for too long,” he said, pushing her on. “My place is very small and there are some things you’ll have to get used to.”

  Ruby didn’t consider herself a fussy person, but she was still surprised by the little closetlike chamber on the second landing, just large enough for a toilet, but no sink. When they reached the third floor, she was out of breath. As Werner unlocked the door to his apartment, he apologized that there was no shower or hot water; they would have to go to the public bathhouse down the road to wash.

  “Of course I take sponge baths in the kitchen all the time, but every few days I go down the road and pay for a bath.”

  Ruby laughed and said, “I know a few people back home who would have a problem with that.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that Americans are really obsessed with being clean and take baths every day.”

  It occurred to Ruby that the meticulous, uptight German was just as much of a stereotype, yet she was too tired to ask whether that was just a myth. Inside the apartment, a short, dark hallway led to a kitchen barely wide enough for a table. From there, a door opened to a bed-sitting room with high ceilings. Werner had built a loft bed, leaving space below for a desk and sofa. Over the desk hung a print of Picasso’s Don Juan. In the corner stood a seven-foot-tall ceramic structure with two metal doors at the bottom and a third one in the middle. When Ruby touched it, the heat singed her fingers.

  “What’s this thing? An oven?”

  “That’s what heats the rooms in most of the old buildings like this in Berlin. You put bricks of coal on the grate inside that second metal door, light them and let them heat through. The ashes fall down below and have to be scraped out into a pail. That’ll be your job.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Now I’m Cinderella. Just what I always dreamed of.”

  “Actually, it’s a great way to heat the room, even if it is a bit messy. People used to bake things on the shelf inside that middle door. I’ll bake you into gingerbread in there if you misbehave.”

  “Don’t you be telling me how to behave, or else I’ll be the one shoving your head in there for some roasted Werner. Coal, huh? Is that what makes the air smell outside?”

  “Yeah, this is mainly brown coal from East Germany, full of sulphur. You have to be careful when you light it that it burns properly, or you can generate poisonous gases.”

  “So I might die while I’m sleeping?”

  “Not too likely, but it’s possible.”

  The rest of the walls in the flat were covered with shelves stuffed with hundreds of books. Most titles were German, but Ruby recognized the names of many authors, including a whole row of works by Marx and Engels and anarchist writers like Kropotkin and Malatesta. On the top of the shelves were several intriguing postcard-sized prints.

  Werner saw her studying them. “Those are reprints of woodcuts done by various artists,” he said.

  “What’s a woodcut?”

  Ruby’s parents were all about music and the civil and human rights movements. Their children had not been exposed to the fine arts very much, though Ruby had a flare for all sorts of crafts.

  “You don’t know? Where have you been all these years? How could you be so uninformed?”

  “Werner, don’t be such a snob. Not everyone has had a chance to learn about and experience the arts in the same way.”

  Werner
shrugged. “I am not a snob—it’s simply a special technique where you carve out a design on a block of wood and use it for making prints. I can show you in some of my encyclopedias. Or better yet, we can check some out at one of the museums.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “So, what do you think?” he asked, gesturing out into the room. “Does it measure up to your standards, my princess?”

  “It’s fine. A little dark, maybe,” she said.

  “The other buildings tend to block out the sun unless you live very high up or in the front house, facing out on the street.”

  It hadn’t escaped Ruby’s notice that he had been quick to close the blinds as soon as they arrived, leaving the flat very dark.

  “Do you want to stay? Try it out?”

  Ruby pursed her lips and thought for a bit. She didn’t feel that she had anything to lose by giving it a shot, and she liked that Werner looked nervous waiting for her answer. “Well, I think we should just go for it. Why not?”

  “Great. I’m so glad you’ll stay.” Werner’s smile lit up the dark room. “What would you like to do next?” he asked as he placed her knapsack down on the floor.

  “Sleep.”

  “I thought we might go out for a walk.”

  “Can we do that a little later? The train ride was unbearably long and I didn’t sleep much.”

  Werner seemed a touch disappointed but said, “Sure, sure, go ahead and lie down.”

  Ruby climbed the ladder onto the loft bed and sank under the duvet.

  When she woke an hour later, Werner was lying on the bed next to her, his eyes straying over her body. They snuggled close together. Ruby stretched herself out like a cat and began to take off her clothes. Werner practically jumped on her and was all over her and then in her in no time. Ruby was hot and bothered at first, but when they came to the finish line she began to imagine them rolling frozen grapes and ice cubes across each other’s bodies, with a squirt of chocolate sauce here and there. She remembered Pierre at university introducing her to frozen grapes. She loved it because you could eat them and they were so deliciously crunchy and sweet and would soften slowly in your mouth.