Cobblestones

Each evening when the sun dips idly between the houses and streets of Berlin-Wedding, the warm light catches briefly on one of the many brass memorial plaques nestled in between the gray cobblestones. It reads: Hier Wohnte Edgar Ngu Ebanda, J.G. 1897, Ausgegrenzt/Entrechtet/Überlebt. 

The black-green lantern flickers, its murky glow trembling like a flame in the wind, and Edgar turns up his collar against a gust of winter air. Before attempting to cross the street, he glances left and right, worried less about cars than about malevolent strangers. When he left the filmset, twilight had already set in and now he is out alone in that untrue metropolis-dark that always reminds him of Paris and Vienna, although his years traveling with the Völkerschau are long past. Still, even if Berlin’s nights are pierced by lanterns and bright windows, it remains a perilous time to be outside. The prospect of violence and abuse has persistently been an undercurrent in Edgar’s life, be it during his childhood in Duala under German colonial rule, his young adulthood touring Europe as part of a human menagerie or when he settled in Berlin in the golden years of the Weimar Republic. Yet nowadays, it’s more than an undercurrent. He knows compatriots who were evicted from their homes, friends who were arrested and never seen again, not to mention the case of Lari Gilges, abducted, tortured and brutally murdered by SS men. Needless to say, Edgar checks his surroundings again before hurrying across the street. 

At home, he finds his wife Louise tightly twirling a fork in her hand. The table is set, the food gone cold, her mood gone sour, but her tense features relax when she sees Edgar. He kisses the crown of her head, her curls tickling his chin, and sits. He doesn’t mind the food gone cold, not with the money he made today. Finding work is increasingly difficult and in a sick way, he feels relieved whenever there is word of a new thinly-veiled propaganda piece in the works. As long as propaganda movies are produced, the studios will need people like Edgar to play the villains, the bandits, the savages, and as long as Edgar is needed, there is a thin chance that Louise and him will be safe. Dinner is a silent affair. Louise doesn’t speak much these days and at times Edgar fears forgetting the sound of her voice. When they married in ’25, they used to fantasize aloud about the future until their mouths were parched from speaking and their tongues tingled with pleasant exhaustion. Edgar was still playing the beast in movies then and even if there was no hope he’d be playing the prince one day, it felt possible to dream. It felt possible to fight for that dream too, for equality and justice and freedom… But that was the past. Edgar is tired now. There is an ulcer of terror growing at the bottom of his stomach, swelling steadily with each new day. He wonders about his movies sometimes. Wonders if the men who watch them will one day happen to pass a Black man on the street and see in that man the roles Edgar portrays. Wonders if they will be satisfied to holler or if they will bash his head against the cobblestones until he moves no more. But Edgar doesn’t wonder often. In times of need, there is no seeking absolution, no chasing dreams. There is only survival. Edgar finishes his food and squeezes Louise’s hand. She doesn’t look at him, eyes lost elsewhere, but squeezes back wordlessly.