She was Rosen-Montag’s dream date. I had to sit back as the two of them enjoyed the fluffiness of their wit. I found out things I did not know about him. He hated being at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton because its architecture made him feel he could never get cozy in his bones. The outdoors oppressed every interior. Yet he adored the work of Ludwig Leo, which was usually hidden in trees, behind some park, his startling little buildings, a lifeguards’ training station or a pump house dotted around West Berlin. They fell from outer space. They fell off an unidentified flying object, he said.
It had thrown me a little when Cello repeated that she wasn’t asking me to invite the Rosen-Montags to dinner, she was telling me when they were coming. She and Dram hardly ever had anyone over, apart from Dram’s parents, spinster sisters, and a merry pair of married television actors with a child Otto’s age. He liked to watch their video of The Magic Flute as often as Otto did.
They didn’t know anyone, she claimed, and yet she and Dram had a social life outside the home that she hushed up about around me. She made his secretary do everything. Dram knew rising Social Democrat politicians in West Berlin from the time when they had been university leaders of Maoist cells that issued communiqués as their contribution to world revolution. Dram and Cello hated to leave the children, but sometimes they felt obligated to attend dinners for international artists appearing at the Philharmonic or for elder statesmen receiving honors at the Free University. And there were any number of Schuzburg Tool occasions, but within the firm, very private.
Once I got through the first anniversary of my sobriety, she passed on to me the invitations she received to gallery openings and poetry readings. Cello was a woman people in certain circles wanted to meet. “West Berlin is a village,” she liked to say. But I had no idea how she had managed to land a couple so in demand internationally. It was the kind of information Cello lived to withhold. My pride would not let me inquire.
Dram had done the cooking, free to be German, because Cello had more than enough discipline to resist the most mocking sauce. I was so pleased when I understood something said in the general conversation that in my brain I lay down on the rug with my understanding and so missed the next part of the conversation. This was German for adults.
“No one knows the tuning Beethoven was used to. We don’t know how they tuned E-flat against G-flat. Only certain voicings will work in distant keys. Or else it will sound out of tune. He avoided certain tones in some keys. Like you wouldn’t put garlic with celery,” Cello said to me in English in the kitchen, a translation of what she had said to Rosen-Montag, seated on her right, of course. I was to her left. She handed me a huge wooden board of revolting cheese to take back to the dining room, far, far away.
“When it comes to spatial matters, all humans are Euclideans,” Rosen-Montag declared. I recognized the language of his manifestos. He got a ribbing from his dinner companions, but the candlelight made them tender. The balcony doors were thrown open to a civilized Berlin evening. I was the only one not drinking. What else Rosen-Montag was telling a free and skeptical Berlin about Euclid, I couldn’t say. I once saw a news clip of a British pop star being interviewed at Cannes. He answered in English, but with a thick French accent. He sounded like Inspector Clouseau. I could tell he thought he would be speaking French any minute; he was on that runway to instant capability, the liftoff of immediate expertise.
It looks very bad in the X-ray, I’d say to the doctor. No matter the situation, I had to be one of the experts. When I drank, I could talk wind velocity with smudged, drained firemen. I entered into any scene where life put me, an expert, a veteran, an old China hand, regardless of what it was about. When not drinking, I disappeared into the cushions.
To pay me for Rosen-Montag, so to speak, Cello offered the director of a scholarly institute underwritten by Dram’s father. I made a stab at explaining in English how much I agreed with Rosen-Montag’s low opinion of Riverside, Illinois, Frederick Law Olmsted’s suburb outside Chicago. Cute curving streets, hickory-filled spaces, gables, gingerbread. But the director was desperate to turn to Rosen-Montag’s wife, who was bewitching Dram, or she could pretend she was, because he had such good manners. When the table got up and resettled in the great salon for coffee, she acted like she’d never heard of the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, and the director took my place beside her.
Rosen-Montag had been a machinist and carpenter in his radical youth. He and Dram talked welding for a while, a word I knew well enough. I noticed that Dram touched Cello whenever she flowed by, checking to see that she was having a good time. Her amazing hair was all over the place, let out for the evening, flying around her head and mouth, making her look like Ophelia drowning, when all she was doing was just standing there. They took turns going to look in on the sleeping children.
Smokers predominated and Cello ordered each of us to select a balcony. I was at last alone with Hayden Birge, a composer, a guy my age she always said I should meet, the other black American gay guy at the dinner, whom she’d seated at the opposite end of the table, far away. I’d seen him struggling down there with the director’s well-bred but incurious wife, a corner that was not going well but that Dram couldn’t do much about, because Rosen-Montag’s wife would not let him leave her. The director had glanced up at his wife in her failure to get Rosen-Montag to look at her. I’d smiled at her, both of us left out of what Rosen-Montag was telling Cello, but she hadn’t reacted.
Hayden was very cute. I liked him right away. He smelled wonderful, and his burgundy linen loved his lean body. A native of Brooklyn who’d gone through Juilliard, he was looking for funding for his latest piece, In a Country Garden Counting Tiles on an Adjacent Roof, a three-hour work for unaccompanied chorus singing motets in the Bruckner style. I couldn’t tell how serious he was about anything he said and he wasn’t going to help me out. He had beautiful cherry lips, a beautiful smile.
I noticed that he looked down to the balcony where Cello and Rosen-Montag were laughing in full view of every satellite in the Clarke Belt. Hayden had been waiting for it. Rosen-Montag’s wife gave in and took her demitasse out to join them. Hayden’s smile at me got wider. It was as though he’d just taught me something. I imagined Rosen-Montag’s entourage waiting in the street below, like a team of horses.
Hayden slapped my wrist and called me “child.” He told me that clearly I needed to get out and he would chaperone me gladly. I knew he was going to tell Cello the next day that he was right, I was definitely not his type, but we could be friends. He loved Scharoun’s Philharmonic Hall. It looked to him like Noah’s Ark. He loved Berlin, he said, and no matter where he worked, he considered it his base. He stabbed out most of his cigarette and rolled his eyes about Samuel Barber, whom I’d just discovered. The slow movement of the Barber quartet, live or recorded, was played at every memorial he went to in New York lately. The Adagio for Strings was almost a reason not to go to New York.
I think when we came in Rosen-Montag was saying that twenty-two thousand miles into space is private property. Dram called us to order and said that everyone in Berlin was thinking of the ill winds from the Ukraine. How could parents not be in despair. Europe had been at peace for more than forty years and that was a miracle. Few in his profession had done as much as Herr Rosen-Montag, he said, to goad us into thinking of our future in the language of the green earth. I laughed a little bit after everyone else.
“Remember Franz Josef Strauss”—Cello quickly explained to me in English that he was a right-wing Bavarian politician—“and his ‘Better a Cold Warrior than a Warm Brother,’ an attack on gay people and an endorsement of a nuclear world.” Dram gestured in the direction of Hayden and me, the two black men in the room. Cello was simultaneously translating in my ear and Dram was saying, to a dinner party, that it was a time to express solidarity with the Russians as fellow Europeans. If Chernobyl taught us anything, it was that we were interconnected. Rosen-Montag clapped the heartiest of all. Dram he
ld out his hand to Cello, but she shook her head and blew him a kiss and stayed with us, applauding him.
Cello was dressed in a fantastic array of light apron over stitched bodice over red silk slip, her legs in silver fishnet and her feet in black kid slippers. Dram, however, undressed for dinner. He created in the kitchen and left the devastation to their cleaning lady, who’d been an anesthesiologist back in Yekaterinburg. She’d been a wreck for days. Because Dram made pitching in seem like an upper-class trait, I pretended not to notice that no one helped me either to clear or to serve after the first platters and bowls had been carried festively to the table. I did service, from the chilled consommé to that fraternity-sock cheese. It didn’t matter, just as not drinking white wine with them or not being Hayden’s type didn’t matter.
* * *
I hollered that he opposed the placement of buildings in relation to nature instead of in relation to themselves and the streets. Manfred yelled back that he threw a bug down in the dirt of the Mark Brandenburg and told us to pick it up. I sometimes wondered what the lights of West Berlin must have looked like at night from the surrounding East Bloc–dark villages of the Mark Brandenburg, the old state and ancestral seat of the long-deposed Hohenzollerns.
The band on the ground floor of the Gropius Building was so loud we had to climb high to get away from it. Manfred said that a party at the abandoned Hamburg station would have been cooler. It was the first sandstone terminal to be built in Berlin. He had taken me into the black pit of the dead structure, but what sounded like bats made me uneasy. He held my wrist as he led the way back out.
He was taking the stairs two at a time. He said that it was completely okay by him that, to Rosen-Montag, Thomas Jefferson was the inventor of the street grid and not the author of the United States Declaration of Independence. He slammed his empty plastic cup and it popped back up at him. “Death to tyrants.”
I told him about Sally Hemings, the slave mistress to Jefferson the slaveholder and the half sister of his dead wife.
Manfred said Rosen-Montag also fucked his slaves. It was the only thing he knew about the Romans.
There was an uncrowded bar on the third floor and nothing on the walls, so people were smoking. They were smoking all over Berlin. The winters in Berlin smelled of coal and the horrible gasoline of East Germany. Coal went away in the spring, leaving the smell of tobacco to get stronger. East Bloc cigarettes and cigars were as noxious as its fuel. The stench was vital enough to float across the border. I told snippy Americans who backed away from my breath that I’d moved to Europe just to smoke. As far as all those people in the cafés, restaurants, bars, discos, kitchens, beer gardens, and offices of Berlin were concerned, Marlene’s eyes were still fluttering as she got lit up, Emil Jannings’s cheeks were sunken as he pulled on a torpedo-shaped cigar, and Zarah Leander had dangling from her mouth a long white tube of tobacco in need of a match.
Manfred ventured that I smoked Reynos because I knew that Europeans rarely bummed menthols. Furthermore, he added, black people loved the taste of menthol. He waited. I laughed. He was happy. He’d been able to say it and do me the courtesy of maybe expecting manful indignation in response to his having taken liberties with my culture. “Jed, Mann.” He gave my wrist a hard squeeze.
When I came back from my voyage to the men’s room, some stacked but not-pretty American girl had taken my seat. He’d studied in America for four years. I heard him tell her, “Had Byron lived, he would have gone to teach in America. He was thinking of America. He certainly would have made a lecture tour. And he would have been prosecuted for sexual harassment. Possibly of little boys.”
Right there in the museum, someone passed me a nasty-tasting joint, the flavor of burning human hair.
The American bunny wanted to dance. She identified the blaring sound as a country-western spoof, “The Other Sofa Comes on Friday.” I ignored her look when they got up and I followed them. A girl was always going to want to save him. She was short.
When we wedged our way downstairs, Manfred murmured into my neck that he preferred to go somewhere quiet than to stay on at Rosen-Montag’s ego-insane party. The American chick could not believe that her lusciousness had not moved him. I was to look for Cello, but even she in slippers from Damascus didn’t matter. We left what Manfred said was a double funeral. Rosen-Montag’s reputation would be nowhere soon and the Gropius Building had been so successful at hosting temporary exhibitions that it was to become a permanent space for traveling shows.
That I had had what in AA would qualify as a “slip,” because of that joint, also didn’t matter. Manfred pressed my knee in the taxi. We went back to his neighborhood pub and discussed German history. Moonlight changes the shape of a river, Twain said.
* * *
Dram said that he taught Cello to drive in the empty, cracked streets of the old diplomatic quarter and they probably conceived Otto in a squelchy expanse somewhere between the sealed Japanese and Italian embassies. It was very uncharacteristic of him to say such a thing. We were taking garbage down the circular back stairs to be recycled.
I’d been lying to Cello about attending AA meetings and the next Saturday, when I said I was going to the American soldiers’ meeting down in Dahlem, I went to a straight-porn cinema instead, and was fascinated to observe Rosen-Montag a few rows ahead of me and off to my right. He held a beer and was smiling up at the dubbed hijinks. The blonde next to him looked just like the blonde getting hammered in the film, except she clearly wasn’t getting what she wanted and wasn’t willing to fake anything.
She turned toward Rosen-Montag in her seat and whined something, smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear. Her nails were incredibly long and vulgar and unhygienic looking. She had a terrifically angry nose. But Rosen-Montag was ignoring her, smiling at the tit dunes up on the screen. Then the beer dived out of his fingers and the blonde threw her legs over his lap. Rosen-Montag looked back over his shoulder, as though for a waiter, and didn’t see me. I thought I detected glassine excitement in the size of his pupils, even at that distance.
The story of Saint Paul in Rome is the story of a major party killer. I came up from the downstairs porn theater and lit another cigarette. The smoke blew me in the direction of the Europa Center. I had not had a drink in more than a year, but I was twenty-eight years old and I had not been naked with another human being in an even longer time than I’d not had a drink.
THREE
In 1934 a composer’s widow comes in secret to dangerous Berlin in order to fulfill her dying daughter’s last wish. She must abduct the young Ethiopian prince, whose presence they have heard is magic. She must rescue him from the Nazis, who have him under arrest in the cellar of the Crown Prince Palace. They have hidden him away from the sound of music. When he hears music, he dances, and when he dances, he enchants, he brings peace, ends war.
The composer’s widow sings an old Gypsy folk song that lulls its hearers to sleep. With the help of the Berlin envoys of Haile Selassie, she smuggles the prince from the palace. The child is frightened and inadvertently gives them away. The composer’s widow betrays the emperor’s emissaries and outruns them, as well as the Nazis, to the Austrian border. But the story about the little prince is untrue. He is no dancer, no gentle creature. She soothes the prince to sleep with Gypsy song. He is agitated when he wakes. She gets him to the bedside of her daughter. The little white girl is happy to have the royal golliwog to entertain her. The little black boy, however, is far from happy. He isn’t full of magic; he’s a prince.
The prince goes on a rampage around the isolated villa. He throws objects, smashes windows, swings the cat by its tail. He eludes capture. The composer’s widow sings the old Gypsy folk song and it puts him to sleep. But if she stops singing, he wakes up and flies at her. It is a curse. Other pieces of music will not pacify him. She must sing the Gypsy song over and over. While singing, she writes a note for her daughter to take to the gamekeeper. She carries the prince into the woods so that her daughter ca
n wake. The little girl wakes, sees the note on her pillow, and crawls to the gamekeeper’s cottage.
The gamekeeper finds the exhausted composer’s widow and the sleeping prince in the woods. The gamekeeper has come with Gypsies he’s paid to sing. They put the little prince in a cage and stop singing. He rages as they carry him to jail. After Germany annexes Austria, the euthanasia laws of the Nazi regime come into effect and the little prince is taken away to a concentration camp.
* * *
Hayden Birge wanted to call the opera he was supposed to be writing Freaking Black, but Cello didn’t like the title. He said it was based on a strange story his favorite teacher, a dear old queen, had told him about Alma Mahler’s purchase of an Ethiopian prodigy to entertain her daughter, who was dying of polio. The boy played beautifully, but he was seriously disturbed: whenever he wasn’t playing, he exhibited disgusting antisocial behavior, shitting over everything. Hayden said that Cello’s libretto was not what he had been expecting.
To me, her libretto sounded like children’s theater, and I detested both folklore and children’s theater. Hayden said its plot problems were the least of it. He said he had had in mind a libretto of utter craziness, like those letters in which Mozart tells the people he loves to shit so much in their beds that their beds explode. Cello feared they would appear to be ripping off Amadeus.
Hayden had had a success two years before with a concert performance of a chamber opera that he said was about uptight Europe—Lully’s Toe. The right people in West Berlin saw it and it got written about. Cello phoned a Swiss foundation that paid his musicians. Then she persuaded the director of her father-in-law’s institute to donate its stage. The institute hadn’t been behind the piece until the first night, when it was clear that people liked it. Once Hayden had introduced the sextet and soprano and countertenor and reminded the Germans that they could laugh, they did. But Hayden’s program note was positively ghoulish about how fatally infected Lully’s toe got after he smashed it with a heavy stick he was using to beat time. Hayden said that in the piece he went overboard on the things about Europe that the inability to keep time and the crushed toe were metaphors for.
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