Here was Rena, a brown leather case lined in green figured velvet holding a spread-eagled wax nude with a white cat head made in white bunny fur. The lid was lined with doll furniture and decorated in fanned phony greenbacks. Niki was an American Tourister glazed in magenta enamel, metal-flaked like a drumkit. Inside, it had knackwursts made from condoms stuffed with foam rubber. For Yvonne, I'd found a child's suitcase and covered it in pastel blanket fuzz. Inside stretched guitar wire, and little baby dolls were tangled there. I was looking for a music box, so that when you opened the lid, it would play 'Michelle.'
Marvel's was turquoise, it opened to reveal white gravel stuck to the bottom, and a battery-powered flashlight signaling SOS in Morse code. One of our art student friends helped me wire it. Girl toy soldiers — free giveaways from an American movie — crawled among the moon rocks with their AK-47s. I'd painted tiny swastikas on their arms. There was a little TV screen in the lid, where a decoupaged Miss America beamed, her face dotted with clear nailpolish tears.
Starr and Ray shared a plastic cloth suitcase with cracked leather bindings, bleached tan with a faded plaid. When you propped it open, it released a heady scent of raw wood and Obsession. Against bright op-art jersey I'd crisscrossed strips of a Pendleton plaid. Inside the lid, a prom-pink satin rose uncoiled, richly vaginal, under a glow-in-the-dark Jesus. The edges were furred with wood shavings from a local cabinetmaker, poodle curly. The base held a tiny reliquary chest, filled with chunks of scrap lead. You couldn't get bullets in Europe, I'd had to make do. In a glass terrarium on the bottom, a snake crawled over yellow sand, broken glass, and a half-buried pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation.
Olivia Johnstone was a hatbox covered in green crocodile plastic that released Ma Griffe when you opened it. Dagmar, the perfume counter girl at the Wertheim Department Store, let,me wet cotton balls with the sample perfumes, which I stashed in film canisters in my pockets. Inside, I'd woven a nest of taupe and black stockings, which surrounded a Carnival mask of black feathers, and a beaker that held the white ocean. On its surface floated a gumball ring, also white.
They were all here. A lunchbox decoupaged in flea market postcards of fin de siecle aristocracy was the Amelia Ramos. Inside, antique forks thrust up through a mat of black wig hair striped in white. The forks looked like hands reaching out, begging.
And Claire. I built her memorial from a train case from the thirties, white leather with red patent trim. It cost me 5oDM, but it opened to watermarked mauve moire silk, like the grain in wood, like a funeral in a box. Inside the lid, I'd glued pieces of white-painted record vinyl to resemble the wings of butterflies. Each tiny cache drawer had a secret inside. A reticulated, miniature fish. A drawer full of pills. A strand of pearls. A fern fiddle. A sprig of rosemary. A picture of Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road. And in one drawer, twenty-seven names for tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Trdnen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazon. It was the one Oskar Schein kept wanting to buy. All my mothers. Like guests at a fairy-tale christening, they had bestowed their gifts on me. They were mine now. Olivia's generosity, her knowledge of men. Claire's tenderness and faith. If not for Marvel, how would I have penetrated the mysteries of the American family? If not for Niki, when might I have learned to laugh? And Yvonne, mi hermosa, you gave me the real mother, the blood mother, that wasn't behind wire, but somewhere inside. Rena stole my pride but gave me back something more, taught me to salvage, glean from the wreckage what could be remade and resold.
I carried all of them, sculpted by every hand I'd passed through, carelessly, or lovingly, it didn't matter. Amelia Ramos, that skunk-streaked bitch, taught me to stand up for myself, beat on the bars until I got what I needed. Starr tried to kill me, but also bought me my first high heels, made me entertain the possibility of God. Who would I give up now?
And in a blue suitcase with a white handle, the first and last room of the Astridkunsthalle. Lined in white raw silk, edges stained red, scented with violet perfume.
I sat on the floor in the gathering dusk of a gray afternoon on the threadbare carpet splotched in paint by generations of art students. This was my mother's time, dusk, though in Berlin winter it was dark by four, no timeless western twilights, surf on yellow sand. I opened the lid.
The scent of her violets always made me feel sad. The vial of tinted water was the exact color of the pool on Hollywood Boulevard. I sat in front of my mother's altar and built a set of drawings on clear plastic, watched the disjointed lines come together, until they formed the image of her in profile. Letters tied in barbed wire nestled in the suitcase bottom along with a spread of tarot cards, the queen of wands prominently featured. A row of glass fragments hung from the lid, I ran my fingers along them so they chimed, and imagined wind through the eucalyptus on a hot summer night.
We wrote a couple of times a month, using the comic book shop near the university as a letter-drop. Sometimes she had her lawyer send me a little money via Hana Gruen in Cologne, from her poems or more likely scammed off a fan. I told her I didn't want to know about her preparations for trial, but her letters boasted of offers lined up — Amherst, Stanford, Smith. Dangling the carrot of green college campuses. I imagined myself a professor's daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel's hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance. How safe it would be, contained, everything decided for me. I could be a child again, I could start over. Sure I wouldn't want to come home?
I reached out and touched a tine of the barbed wire, rang the chimes. The beauty and the madness, wasn't it. What was being weighed on the scales of the night.
LATER, I LAY under the feather bed, fully clothed, not for sleep but just to stay warm. The space heater buzzed and threw out the familiar smell of burned hair. The windowpanes were frosted over, and I could see my breath in the room. I was listening to a tape, a band called Magenta, our friends thought it was far out we knew the singer, Niki Colette. They were playing in Frankfurt next month, we already had tickets, a place to crash. I still heard from Yvonne at Christmastime, she was living in Huntington Beach with an ex-Marine named Herbert, with whom she had a son, Herbert, Jr.
I was waiting for Paul to come home, I was hungry. He was supposed to pick up some food after his appointment with a printer for his next graphic book. He was trying to get someone to print it cheap and take a piece of the sales. His last German publisher had OD'd in the fall, leaving us back at square one. But he had presold two hundred copies, not bad at all.
He came home about nine, took off his boots and climbed under the covers. He had a greasy paper bag of kebabs from the local Turkish fast food. My stomach growled. Paul threw a newspaper on top of me. 'Guess who?' he said.
It was tomorrow's International Herald Tribune, still smelling of wet ink. I looked at the front page. Croatia, OPEC, bomb threat at La Scala. I opened it and there she was on page three: JAILED POET FOUND INNOCENT AFTER NINE YEARS. Smiling her half-smile, waving like royalty returning from exile, happy but still mistrusting the masses. She had made it through trial without me. She was free.
