Forget Berlin (1)

from "I Have to Paint my Face"

Berlin, it was.

As I said, I had been to Germany before, and did not like it. I still had nightmares about the harassment I received at customs seventeen years ago. I told Jenny about it while in bed, cuddling, and all she did was kiss me and say, “trust me, Mark. Germany may not have changed, but Berlin has.” She kissed me on the lips again, and for once, I decided to let go of my anxieties and surrender to her—something I had always wanted to do to a woman, but out of fear, simply could not do. I breathed and sobbed a little. Then I realized I was right to surrender. Jenny kissed me.

“I love you, Mark,” she told me, and looked at me with the most tender look. She embraced me again and repeated those words softly.

Two days later we left the kids in care of Jenny’s mom, who agreed to stay at our house in Forestville. Irene cried at the idea that her mother was going away, but sulked when she saw me, and made a smirking face to indicate that she was faking it all the way. Deborah and Rebecca looked quite happy and cheerful when Grandma Sophie took over the household and we filed into the taxi, piling in our four cases of luggage—three of them were hers and one was mine—and heading off towards Reagan International. Why she needed three pieces of luggage was beyond me. Not to mention the fact that I had not seen her pack two of them. Jenny blandly told me, “I’m a woman, Mark. I’m a vain bitch. I love good clothes and I want to show those fucking Berliners how a real, classy woman handles herself in the city. Wait till they get a load of me!”

“Well,” I sighed, “whatever baby.”

Jenny laughed and patted my thigh.

During the whole ride up to the airport she kept close to me and kissed me every now and then. Once we got out, I was almost paralyzed with fear and excitement. I was going away, I thought. I was finally taking a vacation after almost twenty years of keeping my nose on the grinding wheel.

I could not believe it. The swarms of taxi cabs, airport workers in white shirts and tags—a lot of beefy, overweight black guys and girls in white shirts and blue pants and tags, pushing people around subtly or overtly, shouting this way, sir and that way, ma’am. It’s over here, it’s over there…I breathed in as I entered the automatic double doors of Reagan International, thinking, this used to be Washington National…what the fuck happened in the past twenty years that Reagan got to have an airport named after him?

“Mark—Mark, please, get another one of these bags, please? Sweetie?” Jenny sounded deeply irritated in spite of the too-sweet tone of her voice. “I’m not your fucking handmaiden baby, sorry.”

“I got it, babe. I got it. Just chill.”

“Uffff—fuck youuuuu,” I heard her whisper, as I took the pink Samsonite with rollers and helped push it in to the airport.

There was only one problem—we did not know where the line was to take us through to check in. When we found it, we discovered—to our horror—that it was that massive crowd we had been trying to avoid for the past fifteen minutes. Crowds and crowds of fat, goofy, nasally-voiced white Americans in shitty clothes (sneakers, rumpled mini-skirts, skinny jeans, t-shirts with stupid slogans, etc.) standing in a massive, immobile conga line and moving, it seemed, about an inch a minute. We found the end of the line. The man bringing up the rear was a heavily-muscled white man with deep red skin, bald head, yellow wrap-around shades and a goatee which had been dyed white. He was dressed in a light-blue Izod Lacoste short-sleeved shirt and snarling over his cell phone in the harshest, most guttural kind of New York accent—the kind that made you want to kick him, if you could get away with it. The accent and the vehemence behind it stunk of absolute aggression. I would kill somebody, I thought, if I had to live in New York…and yet the very sound of the name “New York” conjured up a concrete oasis/jungle where it seemed anything and everything was possible if only one had the money to make it so. New York made me think of violence, cars, cops, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and—women. Lots of hot, curvaceous women like little Debbie Gaskin, only of legal age. Great idea, I thought. Let’s move to New York, I told myself—without the dumb Jew broad. Move, goddammit, move, move.

It took an hour before we finally checked in, and by then I was practically fuming, but Jennifer was oddly placid about it all. We still had an hour and a half before takeoff. I was fuming because—unlike the other passengers—I had to strip down to my underwear and empty out my fucking wallet; take off my cap while some fat fag ran his hands through my hair and then up in my crotch and between my ass cheeks—he even threatened to anally probe me before I lied to him and said I had hemorrhoids, at which point he withdrew his stubby fingers, stripped off his filthy blue rubber gloves and hurled them in the trash. Now I was sitting in an airport café with a duty-free bottle of Jack Daniels and Jennifer was eating some meatballs and complaining about how clumpy and bland they were. Yucch, she whined, these schlubs couldn’t even boil an egg. I wasn’t hungry; I was too jittery and full of anticipation. Out of nervousness I decided to call home and ask if everything was okay. Grandma Sophie answered the phone and in her bland Baltimore accent told me everything is just fine, dear. Is this Marcus? Yes, it is, I said. Oh, you, the schwartze. Yes, Mrs. Gitler, I replied with grating teeth after a soft-to-medium shock, that’s me, all right. Sure, sure. You’re lying to yourself you fool. You’re just another kike like the rest of us. So when are you leaving for your trip? And exactly where are you going again?

“Berlin,” I said, whereupon Grandma Gitler hung up the phone. Jennifer looked up from her plate.

“Who was that?”

“Your mother,” I said, watching the irritated look on her face; it looked like the old, hateful Jennifer was starting to break through again, though faintly. “Why’d you call mom?”

“To see if everything was all right. She hung up when I said we were going to Berlin.”

“Mark,” Jennifer told me, with a slyly paternalistic look on her face, “that’s because she lost an uncle in Sachschenshausen. That’s why. In 1937.” She turned her lips down and threw up her left hand. “And that was BEFORE the fucking Holocaust. Well, now she knows the exact location of where we’re going. Thanks, Mark. Now she’ll never leave us alone with one fucking panicky SMS after another.”

“Just call back from time to time and tell her everything’s fine.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, baby.”

Jennifer looked up to the ceiling and crossed her arms. “I hope you don’t fuck me on this trip,” I said. I grinned mischievously, only to have Jenny tell me, “look, asshole. I didn’t mean it the way you thought. Just don’t. Fuck. Me. U—“

“Jenny, everything’s cool. Just stop it.”

“Don’t tell me to stop,” she snorted, visibly peeved.

One hour into the plane ride, I began to have a panic attack while Jenny was showing me shit from an in-flight newspaper. I thought I was going to faint. Jenny laughed and slapped the side of my face gently, then kissed me on the lips and slipped in some tongue. It took a great deal of effort to keep from vomiting in her face.

The rest of the time, I slept. I overheard Jenny talking to another female passenger on board the flight, and realized that she was speaking fluent German. That surprised the shit out of me. I didn’t know Jennifer knew any other language than English. The sound of her German woke me up and when I looked around, I was startled to find myself on an airplane, by the window, and Jennifer leaning over and talking to a grey-haired German lady who kept looking at me funny. I realized something else when I woke up. We had flown direct to Germany without any transfers. I looked at my ticket out of panicky curiosity to see if we had fucked up royally. As I did so I saw the old German woman, who had a broad negro nose with grayish-white skin, thin lips and squinting, evil eyes, was looking at me askance. She turned up her nose and muttered, “was is das hier? Wo ist diesem auslandische manner?”

“Oh? Why,” Jenny said, “this is my husband, mein ehemann. Marcus.”

“Guten Tag,” I said in my lousy German. The woman just looked at me silently, then sat down. “Great,” I spat, quietly. “Looks like that bitch wants to put me in that Saxon-Hausen place as well.”

“It’s Sachsenhausen,” Jenny purred, “mein chatzi. Mark, you’re in Germany, an‘ you’d better bone up on your Deutsch, baby! Or else you’re gonna have a problem being understood here!—“

“I see,” I said.

There wasn’t that much of a problem. We had landed in Dusseldorf; it was seven in the morning and our connecting flight was in three hours. I thought about the snub that old kraut bitch gave me on the flight and was deeply disconcerted as I wandered into Dusseldorf International with my hand luggage. Jenny and I paid one hundred and fifty dollars for the extra three bags since the fucking check-in clerks at Reagan International insisted that between us, we were only allowed one bag. Of course, it was bullshit, but we were afraid that we would be mistaken for “terrorists” so we did not bother arguing with the bastards, we just flopped them on.

Now, dog-tired, and feeling like I wanted to fall on the floor in the Dusseldorf Airport, I began to fear that I was going to be seen just as I was seen the last time I went to Germany—as a disease. I had gone to Hamburg in 1998 and cut short my two-week visit by one week and hurried out, because I could not stomach the insults. But in the airport, I felt I was literally on another planet; everything looked so white—the tiles, the surroundings, the people (of course), and everything was deathly quiet, save for Jennifer, who was the loudest thing in the entire airport. And she did not say much.

We found our proper gate and, not caring to explore the charms of Dusseldorf International, headed for customs. I braced for the interrogations and insults I got fifteen years ago. Instead I found a middle-aged, droopy-eyed, swarthy woman in a German police uniform asking to see my passport with a kindly face. “Toorrrk-chay?” she told me. “Umm,” I replied, “no.” I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I handed her my blue, brand-new passport that I fought tooth and nail to get, something I know I haven’t discussed yet. (I’ve already said enough. Most of what I’m saying now doesn’t amount to much, but I just want to get this down before it’s too late.)

The woman nodded, and handed the passport back to me. This same passport got a look-over from a German customs officer behind the glass, who looked at me and frowned, then looked at the name, and raised his brows. He looked sheepish. I bent towards Jennifer and carefully whispered in her ear, “they’ve already spotted their first Jew of the day.” Jennifer didn’t get the joke; she just shook her head and took up her hand luggage and—as if I was just an unruly, stupid child—told me to hurry along.

Then, it was out into the throng of Tegel Airport.

Tegel didn’t look like a real airport; it looked like an inner-city Greyhound bus station, with wings. And still it had that deathly quiet, even with all the Third World types running through it from India, Turkey, China, Nigeria, Brazil and God knows where else. Jennifer began to get surly again. “Will you hurry it up?” she snorted. She was quite drunk, though she didn’t think she was. “Do you have our passports, you little shit?”

“Jenny, stop insulting me like that in front of all these people—“

“Mark, I’m not, I’m fucking—whew! I need to sit my ass down somewhere! Where the fuck can you sit down in this fucking place?...Mark!...hey, is this even Berlin at all?...Looks like a fucking Peter Pan station in the hood! Shit…Mark...we’re fucked, maybe we should have gone to Brazil…”

Or maybe not, when I look back on it. Jenny did all right for herself. In Brazil she would have had stiff competition from Brazilian women. Berlin women posed no threat to her whatsoever. Nearly all of the women we saw—at least to me—were quite ugly, pallid, squalid, mean-looking things, and not just on the outside. They dressed poorly, too. Especially the German girls. I was surprised to find that the black women in Berlin had narrow hips, no behinds, impossibly long arms and flat feet, and all looked as if they came from the same fucked-up looking tribe somewhere in West Africa. They all wore stupid-looking dirty-blonde weaves and had faces that were too bloated and coarse for my tastes. The other chicks were no better: just variations on the same lousy theme. I began to suspect that Berlin was a haven for ugly, crude, unwanted bitches, so I knew Jennifer was going to enjoy the attention.

“I’ve never been here before, Jenny, so don’t expect me to know—“

“Yeh, right. You’ve been to Hamburg, right? I mean shit man, that’s—that’s just right next door and shit!”

The sun was not shining; it was very grey and surprisingly chilly outside. People were looking at us with those long, hard stares that I took to be outright hostility. I had forgotten that it was a German thing. At any rate I needed to go to the toilet. I told Jenny I would be back in ten to fifteen minutes to relieve myself. “Yeah, yeah, Mark, I’ll be here looking after your shit. Do that, dude.”

“What the hell has gotten into you lately?”

“Mark, I’m—fucking—exhausted, and fucking—shitfaced. Wwwo. Go on.” She was waving me away like I was a little puppy dog, or something. “Go, go to your—whatever, man. Do what you gotta do I’ll be here, and shit—it’s cool.”

“We’ll get a taxi to the Hotel Hardenberg.”

“Cool.”

“And you got the map?”

“Yep, yep.”

I let it go at that…

The bathroom was discreetly tucked away in a strange little nook along the long corridor of Tegel. I pushed my way in and found two German men, exceedingly well-dressed in incredibly shiny black shoes and narrow-lapelled screaming blue jackets. Hipsters, I thought. They didn’t pay me the slightest glance.

I went into the open stall and relieved myself in the bowl, flushed, wiped, and walked out. I washed my hands and looked at my face in the mirror. All of a sudden, it didn’t look so white anymore—at least in comparison to the Germans. Another stall opened up and an incredible stink wafted out of it; a tall, very fat white man with a mop of unruly white hair and round granny glasses stood next to me and pushed his beer belly against the sink and washed his hands. “Ach—scheisse,” he snorted under his breath, and walked out, taking a second glance back at me. “Fuck you,” I said, casually, out loud; he didn’t respond. “Man, this is a hell of a place to take a vacation after all that fucking work back home. I gotta get to Venice or something. Soon. I’m already fed up with this fucking grey-assed place”—I was still muttering to myself when I pushed my way into the foyer and clumsily ran into a skinny, wrinkled, seamed-face German woman who probably wasn’t a day over fifty. “Ehhh—wo bist du? Du arschloch, scheisse auslandische fotze! Kanacker!”

“Lady, what the fuck are you talking about? And why is your drunk ass in my way, please?”

“Oh, excuse meee, but I don’t know Engleeesh,” she spat, bulging her eyes out comically, before stumbling into the ladies’ room. Another drunk, I thought. A bad sign.

I went back to the spot where Jennifer was to find that she was missing. I reached for my cell phone. Unfortunately, when I turned it on, there was no signal. The luggage was gone, too, save for my carry-on and my own suitcase. “Jenny,” I muttered, quietly, to myself, starting to fear the worst. I sat down on one of the metal chairs at the airport and waited for her to return. A full hour passed and there was no Jennifer. I breathed in, trying not to feel heartbroken, telling myself that I should have known better than to fall for her devious bullshit. Nobody was paying me any mind. It was the same when I got up, tiring of the low-key rumble of noise in the background and the babble of clipped, hostile German and other languages like English, French and Spanish mixed in with it. I felt like a torn sock being kicked around by a crowd of young boys in the street; they didn’t see the sock and that crowd of krauts did not see me. I was about to go back to the bathroom when, in a wild surge of anger, trudged out of the airport with my two pieces of luggage. It was colder than I thought. I opened up my suitcase and pulled out a grey sweater and put it on, all the while keeping care that nobody grabbed anything from me. But nobody came near me.

Before I could finish putting my sweater on this bearded man with black, greasy hair came up to me, wearing a leather jacket and pink chinos. “Salaam wa-alaikum, bruder,” I thought he said. “Taxi? You speak English? Kelum Arabi?”

“English, please,” I said, rather rudely, and sort of ashamed for my abrupt manner—I had not intended to be a dick. “Do you need a taxi, sir?”

His English was surprisingly good, I thought. Almost like mine. I was put a little bit at ease because of it. “Yes,” I said, “to the Hotel Intercontinental.”

“Interconti?”

“That’s what it’s called?”

“Yes, sir. Welcome in Berlin.”

“Okaaay,” I said, in my best American-suburban way.

While in the taxi—I sat in the front, at his request—the taxi-man, who was Lebanese, hammered me with a few questions about where I was from and what my background was before—of all things—I heard my cell phone ringing. I was dumbfounded. I picked it out of my pants-pocket but before I could answer it, it stopped. “That your wife?”

“Yes,” I said, flicking through the numbers… “I think…yeah, it is. I seem to have lost her.”

“No good,” he said. “Your wife go away from you and tell you nothing? Man, that’s bad.”

“We’ve been together for fifteen years,” I said. “Fifteen years…man, I hope is not too much of a problem. It does not look good—maybe she is lost in the city oder what?”

“Yup,” I lied, looking at my cell phone at a message that wasn’t there—more to shut him up than to reassure myself that my marriage wasn’t failing, “this is her first time in Germany.”

“I see,” he said.

Just as I said this I got a message in my cell phone. I picked my cell phone out of my pocket and read it. It was from Jennifer. Apparently she had just made another reservation at the Hotel Kempinski instead and told me to forget about the Intercontinental. “It’s just too fucking expensive,” she said. “We can’t afford four hundred a night for a double room. That’s bullshit.”

“So how much is the Kempinski, then?”

“Eighty-five. Euros.”

“Which?”

“Euros, Mark. Eighty-five Euros.”

“So that’s about—“

“A hundred dollars or so. Not great but, I’m not going to stay in a flea-bag hotel full of fucking hipsters and towelheads! You dig?”

“Sure, baby, I dig. See you at the Hardenburg—“

“Wait, Mark, just—you have the address? It’s on Kurfurstendamm 27. Think you can find it?”

“I’ll tell the taxi man.”

“Tell who? What the fuck are you doing in a taxi? Why didn’t you wait at the airport for me like I told you to?”

“Because I couldn’t find you, sweetie. You were gone for over an hour. See you at the hotel. Bye.”

I curtly hung up on her and the cabbie chortled rudely. The people were pissing me off with their relentless rudeness. “Take me to the Kempinski, please. Sorry, but I don’t know German at all. My wife does.”

The city impressed me as a dead, flat place, devoid of any real energy, any real life. It was clean, I could say that. The streets were wide. But there was something dirty and disreputable about the place all the same. There seemed to be, strangely enough, very few people on the streets, and every one of them was clearly a German, not a foreigner. The bushes and trees were untrimmed and growing all over the place; that didn’t make good sense to me. The facades of the downtown buildings—was there even a downtown? It didn’t look like it—were still pretty grimy and un-renovated for the most part, and I could see a good deal of architectural patchwork, a good deal of tastelessness in the way the city had been laid out.

The cabbie indicated that we had arrived on The Koo-Damn, as he called it. So this was it? This was downtown Berlin? It must have been, because it was here that I started seeing colored faces, and to be frank they looked just as crude, vulgar, even brutal, as the faces of the Germans. The cab drove up in front of The Kempinski, which, I had to admit, was an impressive piece of work. It had a huge café terrace in front of it and it was crowded already, at two in the afternoon; it curved elegantly around the hotel entrance and made—initially, anyway—a most favorable impression upon me, so much so that when I got out of the cab, I headed for the terrace instead of the hotel lobby.

Once there, I got another call from Jenny. I was expecting her.

“Jenny, where are you now?”

“Why in the fuck did you hang up on me, you idiot?”

“And why in the fuck are you going through your shit right now, woman?!” I snapped at her. “Mark—“

“Jenny, look. Don’t give me that bullshit. This is not America, okay? Put that shit on the shelf and tell me where you at! I’m tired, I’ve been waiting for over a fucking hour for you and you got drunk on the plane. That’s your fault, Jenny. Yours. What goddamn STREET are you on, for crying out loud?”

Predictably, Jenny began to cry. I felt sorry for her, but it wasn’t like pity or anything. “I’m lost, Mark,” she blurted out, half-sobbing. “I don’t know where I am.”

“I’m at the Kempinski, Jenny,” I said, with an exasperated sigh. “Just flag down a cab and come to the Kempinski.”

“Wha—you mean—“

Oh, God, I thought. Jenny had gone on a drunken binge. Jenny was a fucking alky. That explained everything, I thought. That explained her “new” attitude towards me. The hatred was still there, I reasoned; she was just covering it up with booze, the dirty bitch. I sighed, put my phone into my carry-on bag and carried myself on into the hotel lobby, for want of doing anything else. I did not notice the people in the streets so much, other than I started seeing a good deal of Japanese people, as well as a large number of what looked like Arabs or Israelis. The lobby was spotless, antiseptic and, save for the piped-in music, deathly quiet. There were a few people sitting at reception. I went up to the reception desk to see if she really had made a reservation at this joint like she claimed she did. A younger, skinny, dark-haired Arab-looking guy with plucked eyebrows was giving me the creepiest look. He was the hotel receptionist, presumably. He looked totally gay, and knowing the reputation this city had, probably was. The name on his tag read “Akdemir.” That was a funny name, I thought, probably Israeli or something. Anyway, I politely confided in him about the so-called “reservation” that “Miss Jennifer Gitler” reserved for us at the Kempinski.

The Israeli guy said “let me see” in his best wussy manner and went to check the database. I was almost sure it was bullshit. “Oh,” said “Akdemir,” “I see it. Yes. We have a reservation here for you.”

“My wife is coming,” I said. “Unfortunately, she seems to have gotten lost in the city already.”

“Oh, really?” Akdemir chirped with incredible pomposity, as if he were acting in a bad play, “I take it, you people are not very experienced at world travel, eh?”

That pissed me off. The laughter that followed after he handed me my room-key and had the bellboy drag up my shit made me still madder. What the fuck was wrong with these crazy fools? It could not have been racism because the clown clearly didn’t see me as black—in fact, I looked more “white” than he did. It must have been these sicko Arab types fucking up the city, I thought—they should have stayed in the fucking Middle East where they belonged; they were even ruder than those stupid nigger clerks back home.

But when I was shown the suite we had rented for a week, my anger dissipated; it was a nice, roomy little joint with its own private bathroom and a double bed more than big enough for the two of us. I would like it here, I thought. The bellboy, yet another Arab-type, wheeled my bags inside the room and told me something in German, something like “bitte” and abruptly closed the door behind me. Not bad, I thought, looking around, and sitting on the chair allotted me, and picking up the remote lying on the table beside the chair and turning on the lamp that was on the table.

The television was all German shows, weird stuff. I looked for some porno but didn’t find any. Then I turned it off and pulled out my laptop. Before I did that, I reached inside my shirt pocket and pulled out my Pall Malls and stuck one between my lips and began to smoke. I took a deep breath.

The phone rang again. I took it off the bed and answered. “Yes, Jenny?”

“Mark, baby,” she whimpered, with a lot of English-speaking voices around her, “I’m still lost. I’m sorry—I guess I must be the biggest damn jerk, the biggest loser—“

“Baby, calm down. Just tell me the name of the street you’re on, okay?”

“It’s hard—wait, yeah, it says, Gneisenaustrasse.’

“Where the hell’s that at?”

“Fuck, I—I dunno!” I heard laughter in the back of her, and a bunch of people chattering; they sounded like young people from England or France, judging by their accents. I heard Jenny asking them in an obviously drunken voice where in the hell they all were. They laughed and I heard a girl say in a strong low-class British voice that they were in “Kreuzberg.” And then Jenny asked, where can I get, where can I get, over and over again rather incoherently, and then the laughter started up in the background again to my utter disbelief. I sucked my teeth; I would have laughed myself if it wasn’t so horribly pathetic. Her first fucking day on a trip to Berlin and she gets roaring drunk. I thought of something else with horror: her luggage. Where the fuck was her luggage? “Jenny!” I exclaimed. “Can you hear me? Do you have your baggage with you?”

“Hah? Mark? Yeah, I’ve been told to take a cab baby to Kufurstenstrasse. I’ll get in the cab, I’ll be fine. My what? What? Fuck, man…”

“Where is your luggage?”

“It’s at the airport, I left it there because it’s just too much SHIT to be carrying around!”

“And why did you drink up a whole fifth of Jack Daniels on the plane, Jenny?”

“I didn’t, asshole! I didn’t I didn’t I, I, Uhhh—“

“Jenny? Jenny will you—Oh, God. Jenny, please stop crying. Please.”

The phone went dead. I crinkled up my nose and felt nauseated, almost. I called her again. Thankfully she picked up. I told her to find a café there and wait for me while I showed up, but Jenny insisted I just stay put and not wander all around the city looking for her, since she was too “fucked up” at the moment for anyone to be bothered with her. Don’t worry about me, she said, I’m forty years old and can handle my own ass and have been handling it like that since I was fifteen fucking years old. Okay, I told her, handle it, then. Shake it but don’t break it, and God speed. I hung up and put the phone in my pocket.