Black Deutschland (17 page)

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“Pancake days is happifying days.” There was a Colored Folks’ Day or Negro Jubilee Day at the Chicago World’s Fair in August 1893. It was put on after considerable protests from blacks. Indians were part of the World’s Fair, if only as trophies, humbled Gauls. But there was no mention of slavery. Frederick Douglass pointed out that there was no mention of the progress black people had made since slavery either. Because of the insult of the World’s Fair’s indifference to black Americans, they were urged to boycott what some were calling Watermelon Day.

Sissieretta Jones, the greatest black soprano of the day, had been scheduled to appear on Colored Folks’ Day in
Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, an opera in which Uncle Tom was to be burned alive. It started out with everyone believing in his own promises. It ended up a confidence game. The producers didn’t have an opera to stage, though they sold tickets.

Sissieretta Jones arrived weeks later, sang “Ocean Thou Mighty Monster,” and then got out of town with the money. Some people came just to see her gown. Her costumes were sculpted creations, as Beaux Arts as the pavilions. She could handle a long train and she liked to finish her satin front with every jewel she owned, every medal she’d ever been awarded, dozens of sewn or draped pieces. Stagehands were honored to carry her into place before the curtain rose. She shimmered and glistened in the sidelights. Then she breathed.

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I thought about the car wrecks I’d been in, my amazement at being thrown around, at being caught up in the old story of action and reaction, impersonal unless you believed in the gods, in their antipathy. Less than a year earlier I’d announced to the ChiChi that I’d taken Jackie O as my Higher Power because Mrs. Onassis never gave an interview. She knew how to keep things to herself. I was sorry I’d been flip. To be speechless was an expression of powerlessness, not pride.

I’d had another flop. Six people came to my hotel talk about Faner Hall at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. Nobody came from the IBA or the Lessing Project except for Manfred and Irma. I’d tried to strike an unbothered tone. But I couldn’t pull it off in a dusty side room that had once been part of something bigger. I was too proud of my interpretation of the gigantic Southern Illinois University classroom building to call off the talk to many empty ballroom chairs.

Faner Hall was a betrayal of the deconstructed building because the steel and concrete so plain on the outside protected a maze inside. Famously, people got lost in it. Twenty minutes was the most the eight of us—a janitor waited by the light switch—could manage. Manfred said he couldn’t follow what I was trying to say about Louis Kahn and that a visual component would have helped because Faner Hall was unknown in Germany. And once you’d walked through the white, green, and red ruined arch leading to the Hotel Stuttgarter Hof, you’d had that Berlin experience, too.

The May Day riots in Kreuzberg on the part of labor unions and anarchist youth would have been another Berlin experience, but in my belief in mistakes and punishments, I went back to the AA meeting in Dahlem instead. I didn’t come from a black family that prayed. Jesus was not in our closets. I went to Dahlem to protest. My Berlin dream was floating on the river. Either I sat still or there was no in-between. I was on the verge of having one of those AA breakdowns, but something held me back. It was shaming enough that Odell’s session buddies probably remembered my Ethel Merman imitation from my drinking days. Big Dash did. I couldn’t let myself lose it in front of the two black American noncom officers who were still coming to this Saturday evening meeting.

They nodded in unison; I nodded in return. That was somehow enough. Their solidarity with me restored me. This would forever mark out my generation of black expatriates—we exchanged silent greetings on the streets and in the cafés of Europe, even when young black American corporate lawyers living in Cheyne Walk or on Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street no longer wanted to have any idea why we would. But that night the presence in the AA meeting of two black soldiers urged me to compose myself.

Berlin did not see me weep for myself and repaid my adherence to its code with news of a room for rent down in Friedenau, almost the end of the U-Bahn line. An acquaintance of Irma’s had wall-to-wall blue carpet throughout his apartment. My shoes were to remain on a mat outside the front door, but I deposited them in a plastic bag at the threshold and took them to my peaceful room, where two windows looked out onto a shady street of small parked cars. My new landlord was from East Germany and spoke no English. I could of course use the bath and the toilet, but the rest of the apartment, including the kitchen, was not part of the deal.

I made myself useful, doing errands at Rosen-Montag’s wife’s command. In the company of a roadie in between jobs, I delivered to bookshops and institutions around West Berlin stock of Rosen-Montag’s book, the very work I was supposedly an editor of, and his books of drawings and blueprints concerning the Lessing Project. I missed my books and started to buy new ones. I walked through Lessingsdorf a little at a time and then took the subway from the Hansa Quarter station to the Zoo Station. There I had half a pizza. Then I went back down to Friedenau. In a matter of days I had a routine, just as AA advised. Long before dark, I raised the drawbridge between me and life as it was being led around me.

But my landlord was an usher at the Philharmonic Hall. Once persuaded that our tenant arrangement was okay, he got me into concerts. Sometimes, when the lights went down, I slept. I no longer accepted my shame about having done so. I was at home in the city, I insisted to myself. Then sometimes it was true what musicians said, that a live performance could teach you something about how a work was constructed. Music could do more than relieve your solitude or comfort you. It took you on a journey and made you a part of something beautiful.

One night in June, the crown of Scharoun’s hall was golden in its spotlights. The Wall, the twelve-foot-high continuous concrete barrier that split Potsdamerplatz into two identical, empty sides, was right behind us, bright on one side, dark on the other. The happy audience of the pianist Peter Serkin overtook demonstrators giddy from waging what they thought of as battle with the riot police. The U.S. president had spoken in front of the Reichstag that afternoon, the top of the Brandenburg Gate visible behind him. Young Berlin had been protesting his presence all day long, marching through the Tiergarten, chanting by the Wall.

A couple stopped to light up, praising the power of Serkin’s introspective Beethoven Opus 109, and five or six rubber-headed Reagans thundered past us, running for the cover of the trees and the safety of back courtyards beyond them. I could see black police vans on the other side of the church square and teams of policemen in tight black gear holding back dark German shepherds. Not the everyday police in green jackets. Someone threw a bottle. It didn’t seem like the police wanted to play anymore. They were no longer giving chase to the slogan shouters in Halloween masks.

I ambled into the dark of the Kulturzentrum. The laughing hair made me look. They were impossible to miss, sitting on the wide white steps leading up to the Fine Arts Museum. I was passing too near Cello and Rosen-Montag.

“You must hear this,” Rosen-Montag said in English, without preamble, as though I’d just come back into a room. He stood and lit his cigarette. I had mine. Cello remained seated, though she looked as if she were slaloming in place.

Cello said in German that when Peter Serkin’s father, Rudolf Serkin, made his debut in 1921, he played the fifth
Brandenburg
. He then asked Adolf Busch what he should play as an encore. The
Goldberg Variations
, the violinist who would be his father-in-law said. “So Serkin did. All thirty. Busch had been joking. When Serkin finished, six people were left in the hall: Adolf and Frieda Busch and Mr. and Mrs. Artur Schnabel and Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein.”

“You understand? Tell him your idea for ‘Tunes over the Water,’” Rosen-Montag said to her.

We smoked as Cello leaned farther back on her hands and faced the heavens, her enormous, firm breasts settling back down. She explained that barges of musicians on the Spree would serenade Lessingsdorf at its opening. There could be a competition. Mom would have said that she was wearing an excuse for a sleeveless pink dress.

Their eyes were wet with tears. Rosen-Montag had been bouncing on the balls of his long feet the whole time and Cello’s mounds of brown dough rolled with her laughter. More of her hair was twining its way around her throat. We finished our cigarettes and Rosen-Montag waved me off and sat beside Cello’s tresses. I didn’t really want to kiss her on the cheeks, but I wanted to be sure and needed to get close enough to inspect her pupils. She sat up and hugged her elbows, as she used to as a teenager.

“West Berlin is a very small town,” I heard Cello say in German as I walked away. The seats in Scharoun’s Philharmonic Hall went down toward the stage. It was not the kind of place where anyone’s head got in your way. Nevertheless, what a story Cello’s and Rosen-Montag’s hair was going to make for the people who’d been near them while Serkin played softly, arctic clear and softly.

*   *   *

“Use value is a fiction created by exchange value,” Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., once said, patting my shoulder. “May the funk be with you always.”

*   *   *

The seven hundred and fifty specially invited guests about whom Rosen-Montag was ambivalent wandered around his shining garage that had been sectioned into multilevel open office spaces; his vaulted dairy; and his airily reconstructed workers’ houses on a green square. And everyone was utterly charmed by the giant panels that filled Rosen-Montag’s grid. Trompe l’oeil after trompe l’oeil showed the arches and long French windows of elegant, affordable houses that might be there someday. The renovations around the Gendarmenmarkt in East Berlin were only slightly more real, I heard someone say. His painted houses should have given off a retrograde quality, but what he planned in brick seemed as airy as any glass box.

The late-June sky admired itself in the river and Lessingsdorf was a hit. It was an urban playground, a carnival, a peep show, a hall of mirrors. It offered West Berlin the sort of party the city adored. Shirley Bassey and an unafraid brass section were what people we didn’t know also wanted. That party went on, very well dressed, among Rosen-Montag’s elegant, happy-making imaginings. No one knew how he pulled these things off. They were giant magic tricks. His simple constructions and meters of bright paintings on canvas mounted on wood had a way of feeling like time travel.

There was no music on the water. But Rosen-Montag had won his fight to have reflective sheeting line the opposite bank of the Spree. Meanwhile, the crowd in Lessingsdorf was so sophisticated, either in black tie or black punk or black chic, there was so much middle-aged magenta hair and youthful blue hair that people didn’t want to be middle-brow and say the obvious—Potemkin Village—as they walked around the narrow streets of movie-set lighting and deep gutters and vaulted brick ceilings intended to speak to the brick passageways and courtyards of the serene School of the Arts campus at the end of the bus line outside Havana, Cuba.

No one had to be told not to leave a glass or a napkin on the sidewalk. This was a German party, after all. Not even the anarchist youth who’d been allowed to crash would litter. Rosen-Montag would not permit bins or cylinders, though codes required them. They lay under colorful plastic in the middle of one of those blocks. There were, however, terra-cotta urns all over the place, filled with sand where people plunged in their cigarettes. They marked Rosen-Montag’s progress as he moved around on the opening night of his creation, a reenactment of a Belle Epoque pleasure garden, a combination of fantasy and license, more than a twentieth-century revision of the eighteenth-century style.

It was clear I’d not seen Cello a week ago, though she must have known or been known to some in the concert audience, that gorgeous black American woman married to a distinguished patron of the city’s music. To her credit, she looked me dead in the eye. She wore new glasses, ultrahip frames from Milan. She took them off for me to admire. Her eyes were turned-off burners. I offered to take her and Dram over to Rosen-Montag and his wife to say hello. They’d said hello to the Rosen-Montags and to the governing mayor and his wife at the same time, but they thanked me for offering to be of service. Dram made a somewhat ironic bow. I’d forgot that his father tended to know the residents of Bellevue, the nearby Berlin home of the president of West Germany.

But his congratulations on the success of the Lessing Project were sincere. I could tell. He even found something to say about the book. The trick was to let Dram and Cello stream away before I had to talk about where I was living or they had to ask what I planned to do next. Their retreat was framed by forced perspective into gardens and side paths that did not exist. People looked back at Cello after she’d gone by, trying to name which diva or tennis star’s girlfriend she was.

I finally found Manfred and Irma in one of the large white marquees set up on the approach to the Hansa Bridge. He was pulling her arms down toward the floor, making her head bounce a few steps. He was telling her that nothing was finished, that he still had work to survey. He saw me and let her go. He went on with what he was saying, his normal accent full on.

Irma held up her hands, as if to say, No further explanation required. He reasoned with her, an unlit cigarette in his fist. She was to enjoy the party while he went around to see what tasks he would face in the morning, when the work was to continue. He said he had to find that person from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

He kissed her hair and muttered for me to look after her. She wiped her eyes with her hands and sat. I pulled up alongside her, both of us looking at the slit where he’d stalked out. Sometimes you have to overcome your fear of saying the obvious.