Black Deutschland (3 page)

I could tell that Cello couldn’t quite believe the news that I had been hired to work with Rosen-Montag on the book he was writing about his current project. I would also do a series of interviews with him as the work progressed. She was somewhat reconciled to my galling reversal of fortune, because I referred to myself as a cog in the wheel of Rosen-Montag’s propaganda ministry. I kept to myself the information that Rosen-Montag happened to have been on the wagon the night we met. He liked that I’d just got out of rehab, the sort of social fact you blurt out when you just get out of rehab and don’t know how to behave.

Cello moved us back to German conversation. I followed her to the front door, where I’d left my four suitcases. To get them on the plane had cost me. Now the bedroom where I’d smuggled in that painted Turkish boy was kept for Dram’s mother and father when they came up to town and needed to rest after lunch, or for Dram’s mother to change before a concert. Those were her sets of Brentano and Hölderlin and Heine in the bookcase. A short corridor to the side of the front door led to a small bathroom with a thin shower and, just before it, a maid’s room, with a sweet window onto the inner courtyard above the narrow bed.

“Dram is pleased,” Cello said, still in German. I was fairly sure she said that my having stumbled upon something interesting to do should keep me out of trouble, if I had the will not to sabotage myself. I was in no doubt that she said Dram would come at six o’clock to put the children to bed and to have dinner with us and then he would go back to the office, as he did every weeknight.

Her German was as intimidating as everything else about her. I’d once heard a boy from Poland converse in English with a boy from Yugoslavia. It was weird to hear English used as a device, with no cultural inflections. Cello would have said that she was making me practice my German, but she was also canceling out our equality. I didn’t know where she got her accent in German, but I was sure it must have been an upper-class one.

Maybe because she never felt that she could depend on her parents, Cello was not the kind of person to waste an opportunity. She always knew where she was. Her will, her application, never failed to impress adults, and her renown as an achiever made her peers a tad uncomfortable in her presence. I mean us, me. There she was, always far ahead, ahead even of my brother. The Negro Achiever was a species of secular saint. To be young, gifted and black, Nina Simone sings.

Cello knew that the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia rejected Nina Simone when she auditioned in the early 1950s. Cello said she heard that the school had long been accepting black students by the time Nina Simone applied and maybe the Curtis faculty’s criticisms of the jazz legend’s playing were fair. I was so shocked when she told me that.

*   *   *

I helped with the children’s tea that first month, but they remained leery of me. I thought Cello must have said something to them and to the nanny about not going down the narrow hall to the maid’s room anymore.

She had her narcissistic grandmother’s sense of style. In a time of tundra-wide minimalism, her deep rooms were crisscrossed with sofas and colorful textiles and tables large and small and mirrors round and square and chairs thick and thin and bookshelves high and low, one concert grand, one baby grand, and an upright in the so-called nursery off the kitchen. Early instruments and ethnic instruments hung on some walls, but mostly where a drawing or photograph might have been were windows. Sunlight attended the happiness of Cello’s days. Therefore the reception rooms in front had mirrors, but nothing framed, and the hallway leading to the bedrooms in the rear was bare, except for children’s drawings taped up at random. Dram encouraged the eldest to put on socks and slide with him on Sunday mornings.

Cello’s happiness included her status as the possessor/confuser of Dram, heir to a family manufacturing firm, Schuzburg Tools. A branch of the family had become immensely rich building Russia’s railroads. Mentioned in Tolstoy, they perished with the White Army. Dram’s branch of the Schuzburgs had survived because a nail was a nail, a contract a contract, a customer in the right, whether kaiser or National Socialist, NATO or African dictator. The family firm made things most people hardly thought about—hammers of every kind, nuts and bolts and screwdrivers of every size, more and more different kinds of hammers, then hundreds of varieties of electrical instruments.

Cello’s large-faced, husky husband gave up his music studies after his older brother was killed in a drunken accident not far from his home on the Schlachtensee. He rolled his car backward down a little birch-spotted embankment. It hit something and flipped over and smashed him. Dram buried his brother and went to work. His father didn’t ask him to come back. He just did. There was never a question that either of his two older sisters would take over after his brother’s death. Dram never talked forging capacities or galvanization facilities in front of me, but I knew from Cello that under his management the company was beginning to win prizes again and that its hundreds and hundreds of employees in West Berlin and Dortmund were deeply loyal to him. I’d already seen for myself how his father hung on his every word.

More so than my father or my brother, Dram represented to me the man who embraced with gusto his part in the life he’d made. He did not doubt he was entitled to his sense of well-being, his freedom to luxuriate in the squeals of his children, to defy his wife as her protector, to spoil her as his woman, to be indifferent to the domestic help once they’d been vetted. He stood his ground when wolfing at another man over a parking place directly in front of his building. He swung his dick widely in everything he did. Plus, he wasn’t motivated by German guilt. The men in Dram’s father’s family married cultured women, one of whom had recent Jewish-convert blood, which had put her children at risk during the Third Reich. Then, too, it became known in the 1970s that Dram’s mother had assisted people during the war who were hiding Jews and communists in the vicinity of Lake Constance.

Dram never once mentioned to his mother that the brilliant pianist he’d met when he was in graduate school was black. He told his parents that he was going back to Boston to get the woman who was to bear his children and when their taxi drove up Dram’s mother did not exclaim, You’re a Negro. Cello claimed that seven years later her mother-in-law had still not referred to her being black. The only thing she ever said, Cello boasted, was that her grandchildren were going to be beautiful.

Cello’s little sister, Rhonda, was the family knockout. My mom taught her early to grab a leaf or slap a wall, to do something aggressive when men were behind her on a street. Mom worked hard to countermand whatever Cello’s mother had told them about sex, without letting on that she considered their mother on the loose side. To her credit, Cello never saw herself as a beauty, no matter how imposing in her prim voluptuousness she had schooled herself to come off as. The fat girl lived on inside her, violent in her feelings against the rice pudding her children loved.

Dram’s sister played for the company on Cello’s first afternoon in Berlin. He had an upright in his apartment, but he got Cello a practice room with a good Blüthner down in Dahlem. Finally, the family was too curious and one Sunday lunch they begged her to play. This is Cello’s version of events. She doesn’t know why she chose a Chopin nocturne she’d never been able to master and so had never played to her own satisfaction or to anyone else’s, to be honest. When she was telling me this, I noticed in a way that I enjoyed how once again Cello had inserted into a story about herself some criticism meant to show how honest with herself she was capable of being. She was hard on herself. She knew that. It was a fault. She worked on it. Cello said that when she finished the nocturne, Frau Schuzburg came up behind her and whispered to her that she would never forget what Cello was giving up to marry Dram.

To my credit, I did not give in to the bitchiness I felt toward her at that moment. I did not say, What was that? As in, What did you give up? Because I knew she meant her concert career. It never took off, I knew, because she had coughing jags in the wings before she was to sit down to play for performances or just before she was to place herself under a recording microphone. The career she’d never know whether she could have had or not. I didn’t ask why Frau Schuzburg assumed Cello would be giving it up. I also refrained from asking how she had managed not to have one of her fits when playing for Dram’s family.

Someone once compared her to Philippa Schuyler, the prodigy whose Harlem Renaissance father, George Schuyler, a black journalist married to a white woman, held her up as an example of biological advancement through the mixing or “invigoration” of the races. Cello never spoke to that someone again. Black girls like Mom followed Shirley Temple’s career in the 1930s and 1940s and had time left over to clip stories about Philippa Schuyler and to tune in to her radio broadcasts. But at some point Schuyler decided that her friendless upbringing on raw food and tour dates had been a form of bondage and she stopped playing the piano. She joined the John Birch Society and died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Her mother committed suicide on the second anniversary of her death.

Cello’s sister was Cello’s only relative invited to her wedding on Lake Constance. Mom was very hurt by that.

*   *   *

I’d come a month early, to settle in, but really to be alone, to drift down memory’s canals while the family was away. But they weren’t going on holiday, after all. And so for those first thirty-one days, my beautiful August, I kept family hours. It had not been blue-black for long when I got into bed with a starchy-feeling towel and I got up when I heard the nanny whining all the way from the kitchen about the mess the children were making already.

I stayed away from Rosen-Montag’s workshop. The new one was still being set up, and they weren’t expecting me until September. He wasn’t back in Berlin yet. I went to the new State Library. Mostly I walked the passageways, train tracks, and dead ends by the river in the old warehouse district northwest of the Reichstag, where Rosen-Montag was to realize some of his schemes about restoring our living spaces to a human scale. So much of it was off-limits and covered up, I couldn’t guess what was going on.

I was also staying out of the apartment. Cello made no demands on me. She didn’t want me too involved with her family. She treated me like a convalescent. She was watching me. I wish she hadn’t told her mother-in-law that I was in AA, because brave Frau Schuzburg gave my hand a squeeze when they had me out to Wannsee for Sunday lunch. She was encouraging me not to end up drunk and behind the wheel.

I was staying out of the apartment so I wouldn’t be smoking in their house. I was free to do so in my room with the window open. But I wanted to impress Cello—and Dram—that I was doing my part to keep clean the air that their children breathed. She’d refused to become pregnant until he quit smoking. Maybe I was also staying out of the apartment in order to be like Dram, a man who came home from work, though I’d nothing to do just yet. Cello shut herself up with the baby grand during the day, interrupting herself frequently to oversee her children’s activities, and when I didn’t go out, it was easy to make myself scarce because that was how we grew up. I hid in my maid’s room, fortified by books and cassette tapes.

Keeping family hours took a decision out of my hands nightly. I would head around the block for a final cigarette, but come in after ten minutes. I turned my back on the city of orgies and joy. I was like someone on parole. I was frightened. I was worried enough that the clichés of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book were true that I found an AA meeting in English down in the suburb of Dahlem, near the U.S. army base. Soldiers bitched in country accents about their wives. It didn’t matter to me that the two German women who ran the meeting acted as sponsors to the handsomest of the discontents and never let anyone else talk to them. I was afraid not to go to a meeting. Cello’s “Good night” on Saturday night after I’d been to a meeting was genuinely warm, I felt. It was true that not to drink could make a drunk feel alone and lost.

When I hear recordings of Cecil Taylor live, I am once again downstairs in a West Berlin club, back in the golden age of chain smoking, drinking another glass of white wine in the free zone of staying up all night, talking out the lyric dark, and then falling still as his instrument meets the dawning light—“the brewing luminosity,” Taylor called it. Memory will let in the cool scenes, the hip blowouts. However, the real truth of my summer life in Berlin was held by the plastic interior of a tacky bar. Only the year before I’d spent whole days and nights in the ChiChi Bar, a dive set back from a wide, leafy deserted street behind the plaza of Europa Center.

I’d hung out in the ChiChi since my first trip to West Berlin. My fourth night there I let myself be picked up by a nice French girl and the night after that I successfully chatted up a boy from a small West German town. I’d shaken off the sour-smelling old man with his fake Ballets Russes act. The bar’s owners, Zippi and Odell, tore up my tab for the night my last night in town. In the years following, the first thing I’d do when I got back to town was head to Europa Center. No matter what I got up to in between, I ended my holidays licking my wounds at the ChiChi. I sent Zippi and Odell amusing postcards.

There was a traditional high culture that Cello and Dram lived in and there was an alternative high culture that I was about to go to work in, but the Berlin I lived in with my soul was around the train station and the porn theaters, the cheap lights and fried-food stalls. There were also loud beer bars and serious bookstores tucked under the S-Bahn tracks. I felt at home in a bad bar that did very well. Maybe the ChiChi had been “in” in the ’70s. It was listed as a gay bar in out-of-date guides, although anybody and everybody could be found there. White women scored with the black men more than the white men did. I perhaps wrongly assumed that things went on between the black men, American and African, but not counting Odell’s buddies. It hardly mattered, because the real business of everyone there was to drink.