Black Deutschland (9 page)

“All men are pyromaniacs. I’m a pyromaniac,” Bags said. “All men are.”

Zippi didn’t look up from the cocktail menu she was proofreading.

The prices being high meant that everything at the ChiChi had to be a little drawn out.

“All men are pyromaniacs,” Bags repeated. He’d decided that he could wait to tell his old lady that his girlfriend was pregnant.

“They’re not printing any more money.”

I wasn’t drinking, but I was sitting up half the night in a bar again.

Odell had a side business in copper scrap. He moved it at strange hours. I drove with Bags in a borrowed truck to a muddy garage in dark Moabit. I did the unloading. My shoes would not recover. Bags asked me to wait until we were back at the ChiChi before I lit up. Berlin was not New Jersey, but he didn’t want to take any chances, two black men in a passed-around truck. I ignored him. Bags turned a corner, pulled over by a brick wall, and leaned against his door. Even after I’d put it out, he kept looking at me, sure. He looked down at his crotch and then back at me and then out his window at the silent street.

Twice Bags asked me if I was telling the truth about having been tested. It was hard not to be offended when someone whose crotch you’d been doubled over, someone you’d been wordlessly intimate with, used words on you like they were a form of bug spray.

The laws of physics applied to bar babble. My talk was liquid filling up the volume it found to flow into. If I didn’t have a strong enough opinion, I presented an occasion for others in the bar to occupy empty parts. I didn’t want to be taken over, but I couldn’t help myself. I met Bags in the kitchen, for transaction purposes. For Zippi, I mixed the hash with non-menthol tobacco. Manfred never again joined me at the ChiChi. He didn’t see how cooled out I was after a toke, but at least I was not white wine’s bitch.

*   *   *

No fact ever killed off a myth, they say. Cello was boiling eggs. She gave herself time before she answered me. She was humming the last section of the D-Major Toccata and it made her happy. It was youthful and robust. Dram had heard her read through it and she’d decided to learn it for him. I was surprised that Cello needed her Dahlem practice room for Bach, but she said she wanted to have it down by the time Dram got back from Dortmund. Though my room was close to the front door and far from their bedroom, Dram knew how late I was getting in and said so, on Cello’s instructions, I assumed.

Cello had last seen the Rosen-Montags at the Gropius Building circus, from what I could tell. You had to be careful with Cello; she was so socially cagey. But I knew when she and Dram had gone out to dinners and I guessed that she would not have been able to resist telling me she’d seen my boss. I thought I hid successfully my glee that I was sitting on something Cello wanted: N. I. Rosen-Montag. I stored up bones to toss at her when we crossed paths. I was very casual and calm, deep in my thoughts as usual about my terribly interesting job and the visionary it put me in contact with. I was not drinking, yet I was an expert on something, the boss. I admired him, but I knew his limitations.

I’d explain that Rosen-Montag was the sort of man who remembered everything people said to him, but he didn’t realize that that was because people tended to say the same things to him all the time. I offered that Rosen-Montag had the mood swings of a dictator, killing people off one minute, sentimental about them the next. Of course a lot of what he said in meetings had to do with his extravagant regret that he hurt so many. I could tell that I sort of got to Cello, because one afternoon she said rapidly, almost angrily, that sometimes when people misbehaved they believed they were following the dictates of genius, when, in fact, it was just another relapse. She was always telling me that I was getting above myself, and at the time I assumed that that was what she meant.

“He’s awful. All liver, no brains,” Manfred said again, downcast by the terribly familiar phenomenon of having watched someone he respected blossom into an asshole.

I had no trouble seeing the justice of Manfred’s criticisms when we discussed Rosen-Montag over cigarettes by the Hansa warehouse slated to become a children’s clinic. But it was just as easy for me to go to the ChiChi to embroider my paragraphs on his work with yet more sincere and irresponsible language. I liked telling Dram that I’d been out late again with Manfred, even though it was untrue.

Rosen-Montag certainly blew Dram’s no-phone-calls-after-ten o’clock rule. My master’s women would summon me back among the phantoms of the workshop, in the hum with his drawings and notes in English and German. I would leave and look for Bags and sit with Zippi while Odell’s buddies discussed fugitives of the revolution who had come back from Algiers ten years earlier. The ChiChi was one place where Rosen-Montag couldn’t find me. Odell hung up the curtain in front of the entrance, so that when fools rushed in, the damp didn’t sneak in behind them.

“You can’t get good pussy in North Africa. That’s why they all come back. Nothing but boy ass and camel grease and if you see a pretty girl she is somebody’s sister and if you touch her you die,” Big Dash boomed.

*   *   *

Hayden came to the Nissen hut workshop and walked with me to the bad Greek restaurant. The weather was turning fast. When he saw the restaurant, he refused “to lunch” in a lichen-lined hole and took me in a taxi to an empty, expensive hotel restaurant near the Zoo. He said he didn’t know what to do. His soft, luxurious trench-coat collar was turned up spy-style. Cello had come back from her Swiss gold mine, but she was being coy about whether Hayden’s agent would see a contract and he needed to ask someone about an advance against his commission.

“Brancusi was a cross-dresser and a racist,” Hayden said over a shrimp cocktail that reminded me of the iceberg lettuce at Sunday lunches at O’Hare in my childhood.

The doctor would ask me what I was doing and I would be honest with him. I was practicing having cheekbones. The Almost Ran have round heads, never long ones. There are sometimes a lot of us in the choir.

Hayden was saying that he doubted whether Cello even told her money people about his piece, she was so intent on her libretto. She said she submitted the tape he’d made of a sketch, but he had no way of knowing what that meant.

“Plenty of women smart enough to be bitches make up their minds not to be.”

He exhaled. He put out the cigarette it was way too early for. He didn’t have to tell me that he didn’t believe in her opera, strapped as he was. But he wouldn’t let me be catty about the number of pianos Cello had, for all the good they did her. He said he was leaving to substitute for a friend at the last minute on a conductor’s job in Stuttgart. I picked up the check.

He said that I would learn that every artist in Berlin had a messed-up project, something life-defining on hold, something bringing him back, not letting him go.

In those days in West Berlin, restaurants and bars would phone to taxi ranks. You didn’t have to go to them. Not only that, the taxi driver would park and come inside and ask the maître d’ or the bartender for you by name.

Our tall driver that afternoon had a glossy black, curly beard and a thin hoop in his left earlobe. You knew his pubic hair looked exactly like his beard. He cool-jogged ahead to get the door for Hayden, the loose buckles on his thick-soled black boots tinkling. But Hayden walked by him, around to the passenger side up front, and came to rest.

I said I would walk. I said that where I was going was just around the corner, but nobody in Berlin was paying attention. I heard a door close, but I didn’t look back to see if the driver was running around to get the other door.

*   *   *

“You’re wise even when you’re flying a kite.” The things my dad said sounded like quotes or wise sayings. “These are pancake days.” But they weren’t, somehow. “You’re a pool of sanity in a sea of cologne. One doesn’t mind being either.” He was a black man who wore a bow tie and was never mistaken for a Black Muslim.

*   *   *

I was the most adroit negotiator since Lord Carrington had been in Zimbabwe. There was a chance Cello might introduce Hayden to her elderly Hungarian princess who had the Swiss-based foundation that helped American composers working in Europe.

“She’s so old she’s nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire,” Cello said in English.

“Miss Thing, you need to get out more.”

Cello despised camp. She was annoyed with me for taking her to meet with Hayden and when I first proposed that she discuss their problems with him when he got back to Berlin, the look on her face said that she would never forgive him for letting me in on her business.

“Stanley Dell tried to write a Jungian interpretation of Uncle Remus. I was thinking we could use that,” Hayden said.

I was impressed by Hayden. He wasn’t nervous, wasn’t in the least apologetic for who he was, was not cowed by her. She was wearing a couple of strong faces at that lunch. First, she looked down at him from a great height. Then she looked around at the Café Einstein, horrified, as though she’d been kidnapped and had only just regained consciousness and didn’t know entirely where she was. After a while, she’d go back to glaring at Hayden.

Hayden really tried to get on with her. “What you said after the reading meant a lot. And it helped.” They’d known each other for a while, I was thinking. “And it meant a lot that you even turned up.” He’d managed to organize on his own a read-through, with twelve singers, of some of his ambitious choral piece.

“When a man is desperate for a compliment, it is the same as shooting a horse,” Cello said in German and looked up at the wall, as if noticing something really interesting about the play of light on it that we just wouldn’t get so why point it out to us.

“I know we said we’d work on the opera,” Hayden continued in real person’s English.

“Your music sounded different, perhaps because a musician could learn it,” Cello persisted,
auf Deutsch
. She held her green tea with both hands and lifted the warm cup to her forehead.

“An idea has to speak to me. I have to hear something.”

“Ever been fucked by a bottom?” Her English came out angry. She brought the cup down. “A guy trying to prove he’s straight? It’s no fun.”

Hayden waved goodbye to Cello’s unforgettable hood of beautiful hair. Across Berlin, old videos and new songs were continuing in the usual venues. I thought his piece was wonderful. I was impressed with myself for being on his side and thrilled that Cello was not.

“Thank God the spirit of Chinese capitalism makes them willing to serve another drunken customer,” Hayden was saying some hours later. He said he was glad I didn’t mind that he was drinking for me as well.

I thought that, finally, I was going to hit the town with Hayden Birge. But at some surprising point he hugged me and walked away. In honor of his hurt, and my having been almost Grade A, I did not double back to the ChiChi.

I spent the weekend hanging out with Manfred and a braless blonde oncologist originally from Leipzig. She kept him on the move—three museum exhibitions, two movies—and cooked every meal. I understood her German. He’d come get me at her insistence. Manfred was the white boy I wanted to bring home to my black parents. Dram didn’t mind his calls and Manfred returned me well before curfew. He wasn’t drinking, at least not in front of me. I didn’t say anything to him about it. I didn’t have any coffee for two days. As a result, I slept twelve hours after I left him. When I woke, the sheets were soaked with the sweat of withdrawal.

I ran into Hayden in the large newsstand across from Zoo Station. He was subletting his place and taking a contract conducting in Wales for a while, just until he could get his shit back together. There was always one day in Berlin when darkness came faster than you were ready for it to. Rainy, icy winter had jumped down on you, throwing its low clouds across the bottom of the world.

*   *   *

“We don’t have a drummer here tonight, but we do have a hit list,” Cello’s father said to
The Price Is Right
on television.

*   *   *

Cello did not flee from me, but she had little to say to me or to anyone else when I was around. One of the reasons I liked Dram was that he maintained a sense of proportion about everything. He’d studied to be a scholar of music and had given it up to take his place in business. He did not confuse the two. Because he’d studied creativity, he did not consider businessmen as creative as artists.

His part was to be the bass line, the steady support that could be counted on without question. The flights were for Cello to make. She was his wild, unpredictable music. So, too, her kooky friends and relations. But only up to a point. He did not play when it came to his family. Therefore he had to speak to me immediately when their Soviet-certified doctor cleaning lady turned over to him the little fold-up of cocaine she found on the floor behind my toilet. He for one did not want to see a repeat of what had happened to me four years before. He didn’t want Cello to have to live through the fear again.

He wanted me to know that this was his decision alone, as head of his family and the protector of his children. He had not consulted Cello. She had been an ally of my good health, he said in English. I’d been living with them a long time, he continued in German. Perhaps a change was in order for us all.

The hashish from Bags never lasted long enough for me to bring any back to their place and though I knew he also had cocaine, I stayed away from it. Cello couldn’t face me, in a tired rather than sheepish or censorious way. As disappointed in me as she was, I had a suspicion that she knew something about where the drugs might have come from that she wasn’t telling. I did not question her. I was too amazed by this slice of real life. The moral upper hand was mine to study, homeless though I was. I wrote a long note of thanks addressed to them both.

Cello phoned me at my Nissen hut and said that I had a concubine’s mentality, but she didn’t understand why. She said my mother had lied to me all my life about my being good-looking and I should spend just enough time in front of a mirror to see myself as the world saw me. I was not my brother and never would be. It was hard to strike back at Cello because she went on for so long, and by the time she spat out one sequence of hurtful remarks I’d changed my mind about saying what I thought I had to say, because the rule was that Cello and I only went so far with each other. It’s just that the demarcation of what was considered “far” had shifted considerably into my territory.