Though it was about a half hour from Kreuzberg, we enrolled Alchemy in the John Kennedy International School, which taught its classes in English and German. He showed a natural ear for languages and adjusted within weeks.
Nathaniel immediately immersed himself in the university life and in political groups in both East and West Berlin. He asked me to think about teaching some art classes. Think about it is about all I did. He and male his “colleagues” gathered on Friday nights for eating, drinking, and opinionating while the women sat like docile appendages. In what I thought was a sign of maturity, I suggested to Nathaniel that it was better for me to stay home with Alchemy because I might cause a scene. He wanted me to go. When one of them blabbered his claptrap, “The Wall is the great monstrosity of postmodern, postwar Europe,” I answered, “You’re wrong. The Wall is action. It’s beautiful. It’s the only true masterpiece of the twentieth century. True People’s Art. Someday it will be the reason communism dies. Maybe then you’ll recognize your myopia.” They all pooh-poohed me. Ha. I was right. I cried in happiness when the Wall was breached, and in sadness when it was torn down in a tyrannical act of aesthetic demolition. They should’ve rechristened it the Wall of Freedom — refashioned it as a monument to man’s stupidity and a gateway to the future. Now it’s only a memory, destined to be a mythical Atlantis of art.
I started skipping the Friday night gatherings. I did accompany Nathaniel to the East, where he made connections with dissidents. Unlike the West Germans, most of them spoke almost no English so he always had to go with a translator. It thrilled me, until I breathed in the city’s Gravity Disease. The Stasi, the ubiquitous East German secret police, served as the toxic communicators of the city’s societal tetanus. Only the East’s club scene had any attraction for me, and that held no interest for Nathaniel.
We began to live certain aspects of our lives separately, which suited both of us. I made my own friends. Among them were Arnost and Zdenek, or A and Z, two gay exiled Czechs whom I’d met at the Descungle nightclub. Owners of PhDs, A in art history and Z in poetry, they were overqualified Berlin taxi drivers. One night they took me to the SO36 club, and the twenty-two-year-old lead singer of the Wannaseeyas, Heinricha Von Priest — a tattooed, multipierced, multicolored-bobbed-hair, doll-faced Louise Brooks look-alike (yes, yes, it’s true, Brooks claimed to have had an affair with Greta) — eased in front of me while I trance-danced to an early bootleg of the Bronski Beat, which was the HQ for the punk arty scene. “Arnost claims you are Salome Savant.” I nodded. “I’ve idolized you for years. I have a photo from Art Is Dead on the wall of my squat. Can you sign it?” Quelle hor-ror! Heinricha was young enough to be my daughter. At forty-two, I was a relic.
A, Z, and Heinricha became my emissaries to the epicenter of Berlin decadence, the legal clubs of the West and the illegal and underground — literally — of the East, which made the drug and sex scenes at Studio 54 feel as innocent as a Doris Day movie. Whips, cuffs, chains, poppers, and paraphilia party favors were the ho-hum accoutrements of Berlin nightlife. The Wall made it possible. Every day after I dropped Alchemy at school, either A or Z drove me to a different spot along the Wall. With my clunky video camera (until the batteries ran out), I filmed ordinary Berliners and tourists taking pictures of themselves with the Wall as backdrop. I shot prostitutes, pickpockets, skinheads, transvestites, drunks peeing and puking, old women who looked like they could be Gloria Swanson’s sisters in Sunset Boulevard, the outcasts not only of Germany but all of Europe, who had migrated to Berlin.
I was excited by my cohort and with my film. Nathaniel was energized by his students and the political activism. He began work on The Further Adventures of Bohemian Scofflaw. Alchemy became precociously obsessed with his music. Every Sunday the three of us picnicked or biked in the Tiergarten. We were a happy family.
When winter descended, hooding the city like a death shroud, I became a walking hoarfrost corpse with camera; Zephyrus defeated by the exhaling breaths of Boreas, that for eons had trilled through the icy veins of Aryan falconers. I took refuge in the steamy warmth of our apartment and surrounded myself with newspaper and magazine photographs from the Nazi era. With A and Z as my interpreters, I contacted libraries and individuals with personal archives — which led me to the trove of Klaus Grimmelshausen, whose uncle had been an official Nazi party photographer. Z and I took the train to Grimmelshausen’s Nuremberg home. Sifting through the stacks of cataloged photos, I held in my hands, without consciously knowing it, what I’d been searching for — why I’d been brought to Berlin. My breath stopped — Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner with his nameless adjutant, whom I recognized as the future father of my dead child, standing by his side.
I made copies of that photo and many others, and took them to Berlin. I sang to dearest Art, “You were right. I should’ve trusted you. You smelled his evil.” I relived the civil war inside my womb, my DNA struggling — not to betray me but to cleanse me by strangling the oxygen from his offspring. Suddenly that long, suspended moment of misunderstood and tortured babydeath within me became quiescent, settled in the static of nontime. My Gravity Disease lightened; my soulsmell freed itself from the lingering guilty odor of infanticide.
I wanted to call Ruggles. No, that would be a defeat. He might want me to tell Nathaniel, and I wasn’t prepared to tell him just then.
When Xtine came for a visit, I met her at the Zoo Station and we went directly to the O Bar. I placed the photo on the table. “Teumer.” Horrified and anxious, she grasped my hand.
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“Yes. I could never forget that face. And it’s wonderful.” I leaned closer to her and kissed her cheek. “It all makes sense. It’s inspired me.”
I showed her my first collages of me and Teumer, and so began the Baddist Boys series. I contemplated showing them then. I didn’t. It was not yet the proper time.
Instead of the collages, I presented another performance almost twenty years after Art Is Dead, a symbolic death this time. Xtine helped me construct a life-size body cast of myself. I covered its vag and nipples with gold stars. I installed the sculpture in a street near us that dead-ended at the Wall and encircled it with barbed wire, papier-mâché, and synthetic bones. Alchemy stood with Nathaniel and his colleagues, who gazed agog as dusk surrendered to the night. Heinricha’s band played. Xtine began filming as I stripped down naked. A and Z bathed me in blood-red body paint. Between phrases on the wall — DON’T MESS WITH THE WONGS and CRIST DYED 4 U — I hugged my body against the West Wall and my silhouette merged into the celebratory mural, free from curators, critics, and pretension. Still dripping in paint, I lit a torch and set the entire installation aflame, dousing copies of the Teumer photo and Xeroxes of Duchamp and Greta with lighter fluid and flinging them into the embers. Their smoky visages commingled within the pyre. No one saw my tears as I danced around the ashes inseminating the Berlin night sky.