Black Deutschland (5 page)

Women’s scents dominated my hut. Women’s voices answered the phones, their German, French, and English requests and explanations a counter hum to the generator outside, directly behind me. I sat in the rear, facing the well toward the door. I had a wobbly white plastic desk and an overly designed chair with a thin seat. The press girl who was too busy for chitchat had a larger, steady desk to my left. I had to stand if I wanted to look out the dormer window on my right. Once, I saw an assistant in high-heeled black boots stagger over the gravel to clutch after a page of vellum sweeping away from her. Across from the window, two fax machines spat unpredictably, and when they did I thought of a particularly crazy person talking to himself in fits and starts in front of the once-proud Ida B. Wells Homes back in Chicago. Mostly, I read, hiding, I thought, how inadequate my German was for the job, though presumably it was not why I was there.

I hadn’t made friends at the workshop. Young Germans spoke English because of rock music, movies, and educational policies in the American and British sectors. But they returned my wave at five o’clock as though they were too exhausted for any more translation. I was the only one to quit at that hour and I did not come in on weekends, when the real life of the workshop got going. I’d come in on Monday and hear what had been decided, or finished, or that Rosen-Montag had drawn for six hours straight. The only music permitted conformed to his tastes, things that his arm could move well to.

I was missing out on evening action at the workshop because I was getting home in time for dinner with Cello and her family. I was missing out because I was going to the AA meeting on Saturdays down in Dahlem, stepping onto the bright orange underground train with a ticket, my days of daring to ride without a ticket over. A couple of black noncommissioned officers from the meeting invited me to play pool, but I was in an agony sitting there, looking stupid in their married quarters rec room, not knowing how to play, and they got tired of remembering to include me in the conversation. When they learned that I didn’t work for any U.S. outfit, they didn’t know what to say to me. They did not understand my job. I didn’t much either.

Rosen-Montag shook my hand when he at last returned to Berlin, but I had yet to have a one-on-one or a walking meeting with him, which he said our work would grow from. Each month I gave his wife a bundle of texts, the higher blather about themes I knew Rosen-Montag to be interested in, and she would report back in a week or so that I was to keep going, that my attack on the assumption that government-subsidized housing projects were permanent features of the urban landscape was exactly what he wanted to say. She handed me a slip, which I handed to a girl with hair so henna-rinsed it was magenta, and the girl had me sign a register, and then she slid across her sturdy metal table a white envelope with my name on it, an envelope swelling with fresh West German marks. Jed Goodfinch. Adult life was working out.

I had lunch alone, walking through the cold drizzle to a small Greek restaurant presided over by a hairy waiter, in the vicinity of the Anhalter station’s memorial fragment and the Gropius Building, a lovely Renaissance-style palace designed in the nineteenth century by the Bauhaus founder’s uncle. Or was he his great-uncle? It had been derelict since the war, its mosaic and tile decoration long since stolen, pried off the walls and on sale from antique dealers around the continent. Once a museum, recently restored, the Gropius Building was much admired, though it had no purpose anymore, like many prewar public spaces in Berlin. It was fun to trespass, to roam its staircases and darkened rooms. The sound my heels made jazzed me and brought out guards or assistant curators reluctant to correct a black American with International Building Exhibition identification. A mere street of cobblestones separated the Gropius Building from the Berlin Wall that followed its right angles.

Sometimes I brought intriguing volumes about urban design to the canteen hut, but I still finished my sausage sitting by myself. I hadn’t made my pilgrimage to the Schinkel Pavilion on the edge of the grounds of the Charlottenburg Palace since I’d been back in Berlin. I used to visit the idealized little house on the palace grounds in order to brood in front of a gloomy Caspar David Friedrich landscape. But my soulful moments at this shrine had been as made up as the Gothic ruin in the white mist he laid on so thickly.

There was no reason for anyone to go to the part of town the workshop was in, unless it was to attend a big party in one of the empty buildings the city couldn’t think of what to do with. After autumn expired and it was too cold for soulful walks that didn’t wake up my soul, I began to spend a fortune on taxis and turned in the receipts. I did not have new friends or the new feelings I wanted to have in Berlin, but I was doing what black expatriates in Europe had a harder time doing than getting people to go to lunch with them: I was earning a living.

*   *   *

“Could Schubert do anything besides modulate?” Cello moaned. “And then he puts in a repeat. Just goes on and on. It’s kind of hard to take. The
Trout Quintet
. It’s the most overplayed chamber piece on the planet. It’s a great piece, but that doesn’t mean it’s not overplayed.”

She grabbed her head at the thought of the concert she’d just endured. She leaned against the cabinet, her way of not having to sit down with me while doing enough to get debriefed on what I was up to. She said she was impressed by my sobriety, my seriousness. She said she’d been sure I would look up the drunks and disco trash that I used to hang with. English signaled that Cello, my fellow African American, was in an off-the-record mood with me. She congratulated me on the first anniversary of my sobriety. I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking about white wine anymore.

Usually my conservations with Cello were brief because they were in German. She and Dram took me at my word that I wanted them to correct my grammar. I wished they hadn’t taken me at my word when I offered a token room and board. But Cello was in favor of my adult life; Mom said Dad was relieved I could pay my way. They fed me dinner and Cello’s resentful Russian maid gave my bathroom the most cursory cleaning, but still they made her do it. I stayed caught up with the phone bill as well.

Cello unplugged her phones during the day, anyway, when she was deep into something like one of the Liszt
Transcendental
Études
, which, were she to be honest with herself, she said, was slightly beyond her in the first place. If she really couldn’t concentrate, or if a passage was really upsetting her, she’d throw on a coat and rush off with her satchel to Dahlem, where she kept the practice room Dram had got for her years before.

I had to use the phone in her study, when it was plugged in. It was the nearest to my maid’s room. When the call was for me, she had a way of knocking on my door, escorting me back into her study, handing me the receiver, and then withdrawing—far off to the kitchen—or retreating, closing the doors of her inner room with the Bösendorfer. The call was seldom for me. Mom did not like to have to make conversation with Cello. Dram did not believe in separate phone lines for husband and wife.

Cello was telling me that the hideous-looking church at Europa Center actually had pretty good programs of Bach cantatas. Then the phone rang. It was well after ten o’clock. Dram had gone to their bedroom as soon as they’d returned from the concert. The new nanny, from somewhere in Kent, had turned the heat up unacceptably. Cello told me in German that the call was for me. She was on her way out the door, but I motioned her back. She moved when she heard me address Rosen-Montag. My German fell apart as we negotiated in simple sentences where we were going to meet.

In the meantime, a bomb went off in a disco over in Schöneberg frequented by American soldiers, especially black guys. Hundreds of people were injured, among them scores of American personnel. Mom and Dad phoned to make sure I’d not gone disco dancing at a straight club that night. A sergeant and a Turkish girl were killed. Real life.

*   *   *

I was too happy for any of it to have been real. To my astonishment, when I contacted the black noncom officers from the AA meeting near the American base in Dahlem, they agreed to get Rosen-Montag’s name onto the VIP list, which hadn’t existed before I called, for a memorial that their group of black servicemen had arranged on its own. It happened to fall on the day an infantryman in a coma was to receive the Purple Heart. There were prayers in an auditorium provided by the Free University and a Gospel duet that didn’t need amplification.

The United States had bombed Tripoli and the press that showed up wanted to make something of the black support for taking the fight to terrorist regimes. Cello showed up, too, in a wide-brimmed black hat over one of her moire nightgowns about to fall from her candy-smooth shoulders under a gleaming Mata Hari jacket. She said many people they knew had come down to Dahlem for the memorial. People who would not have gone to an event associated with the U.S. Army, never mind in support of U.S. policy, felt that they could come in honor of the victims of the bombing, because this memorial was known to be black-organized. Odell once told me that a president of the German Federal Republic went to Africa in the early sixties and began his speech, “Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Negroes…”

The servicemen’s wives cut looks at Rosen-Montag’s wife and assistants, all in black. Photographers had noticed them as well and were whirring away. It looked like a fashion shoot trying to be provocative, sleek dominatrix boots and U.S. servicemen in uniform. Rosen-Montag asked which of them had friends who’d been hurt and took up his position behind them, his wife by his side. Rosen-Montag didn’t move in his seat the whole time. He paid strict attention to the proceedings. He knew how to be a white guy deferring to black authority, he who believed the poor as well as the rich should have beauty and high design in the home. It was an angry crowd, but not everyone hated the same thing or the same people while the duet sang of sacrifice.

In Berlin, I only saw U.S. soldiers at AA meetings or on the street when they were out of uniform, but you could spot them. I’d never been to the American PX. Détente prevailed, and the U.S. presence was supposed to be low-key. Maybe that was about to change again, to go back to when prayers were said in the hope that the United States have power in a city people claimed Hitler never trusted. I liked the suburban grammar-school-looking America House, Amerika Haus, a sort of club, help desk, and library with a lecture program, not far from the newspaper stands around the Zoo Station. I once went in just to sit, but I left when I saw Cello already doing that in the lobby, dozing down the pages of
Time
magazine, her canvas grocery bags helter-skelter around her.

It fell to me after the memorial to introduce black to white, American to German, Cello to Rosen-Montag’s wife. When Rosen-Montag talked to you, even to men, he concentrated fiercely, totally, on you. He was so into what you were saying, increasing so dramatically in size as he revved up to answer you, that when he focused his attention on someone or something else, your world was cast back into darkness. He turned to his wife and suddenly Cello was the most noticeable figure in the crowd. Two photographers took aim at her from the steps below.

A number of people from the Lessing workshop waited on the sidewalk. They’d been unable to get in. The afternoon was brilliant. Spring had come while we mourned, a typical Berlin incongruity. Black guys gathered around me as the brother who could put them in with these females. The press girl was in no time smoking with the black soldiers. I heard Rosen-Montag say that the charred Roxy Palace in Schöneberg where La Belle Disco had been looked like his childhood. He was from Hamburg. Cello said it also looked like hers and she was from Chicago.

*   *   *

We were behind her grandparents’ six-bedroom house on South Parkway. Her grandmother did her best to keep us from coming over, and to keep us out of the house when we did. It was old and dark with wood passages I longed to explore. I hated her grandmother for not letting us look around ever.

Cello, Ruthanne, was then twelve years old and I was seven. A ten-year-old boy she liked had me pinned against a bush.

“Taste it.”

“No.” I pushed away the stick on which was speared a little clump of something with grass mixed in.

“Go on, you know you want to.”

Cello held her dockyard-rope braids and my older brother and her little brother and sister watched, transfixed. Dogs in the alley and cars at the corner sounded very close.

The cute boy whacked the clump up against my chin. It felt sticky.

“What is it?”

“Chicken doo.”

Everyone ran, but I couldn’t.

*   *   *

“Your cousin is talented? What an extraordinary family you must come from,” Rosen-Montag said on the banks of the Spree, the sun pouring over his hair and shoulders. He liked what I’d said about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. He spoke only English to me and therefore so did the rest of the workshop. Now that he’d been seen talking to me, and I’d followed him with his assistants in a second car to construction sites, people who’d previously not bothered to talk to me talked to me.

Something was up. Even I could feel it. His siege was about to be radically modified, if not lifted. Rosen-Montag was seldom in his hut. He had more meetings with officials in government offices and more meetings in other countries with art commissioners. The fax machines chanted less often, the press girl made more phone calls than she received. There were fewer people around. Berlin had gone to his openings and groundbreaking ceremonies, had taken notes at his news conferences and lectures, but I heard remarks in the canteen, in English, pointedly, that now Berlin was laughing because the governing mayor had declined to attend a screening of a documentary about Rosen-Montag at an ultrahip cinema in Schöneberg. He’d had enough. Not even the architect’s name was really his name, it was a feeble joke, an alternative paper said up front.