Black Deutschland

by Darryl Pinckney

  Rosen-Montag’s wife introduced me in English and I began. After a while, I could tell that I was failing to make much of an impression on the dozen people around the table, but at least I was getting by, as usual, getting away with it, as always, because no one cared. I was a diversion, a black American on the project. The largest print run for the huge illustrated book was in English, however.

  “These photographs speak of imperium,” Rosen-Montag interrupted, in English.

  Mom and Dad had a tattered bound book of souvenir portfolios of the great international exhibition held in Chicago in the Gilded Age. I must have looked at this warped book when very young, because Mom said the brown crayon attempts at boxes around the Beaux Arts domes and fountains in some of the photographs were mine. It contained black-and-white views of the White City, the fantasy town of neoclassical pavilions erected beside Lake Michigan.

  “They have nothing to do with my work,” Rosen-Montag said, running his hand through his lion hair.

  The Columbian Exposition opened in 1893 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of what they called the New World. Every territory and each state in the Union sent exhibits. Dozens of countries built exhibition halls made from steel, staff, and plaster. A Hawaiian volcano of electric lava stood next to Old Vienna. The furs in the Russia pavilion were for sale and so were the Krupp cannons in the German Hall. There was a Women’s Building and a Horticultural Building, an Electrical Building and a Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building with a mile-long arcade under its roof.

  I clicked the button that changed the images Manfred had helped me to assemble on the carousel. He’d done most of the figuring-out that got the grainy pages of the borrowed book turned into slides. He’d wished me luck and gone off to fight with East Berlin state company representatives about a shipment of gravel and concrete. I looked at faces that had quickly made themselves replicas of Rosen-Montag’s face. By the time I completed the circuit around the long table, I’d caught a chill.

  I wanted to tell them to study the derby-headed, darkly dressed masses in Mom and Dad’s old book. Against the vanilla of the pillars and parapets, the arches and façades, the tiny figures looked like fallen music notes. “In the environs of the White City, there was nothing left to wish for.” Chicago aspired to put on for the world a show of magnificence, but very few of the fairy palaces were built to survive a Chicago winter. There was nothing permanent about them.

  “I understand absolutely nothing,” Rosen-Montag pleaded in German to his entourage standing behind him.

  I kept talking, as though I were a recording. I talked to the tops of heads. As soon as I said that Bismarck considered international exhibitions a necessary evil, I saw all too clearly that I had taken the wrong approach. I only meant to say that Rosen-Montag’s project would be what a future generation looked back on and wished itself into. I never considered that I might be implying Lessingsdorf was as impermanent as the Chicago Exposition. It was the scene of new inventions and new styles and the Lessing Project offered the same, I’d planned on saying.

  “Who has extended to the Bismarck this invitation,” Rosen-Montag demanded of his wife. I began to see what Manfred had tried to convince me of. As if daring anyone to try to shake him up and hold him accountable, Rosen-Montag was on the offensive with everyone, wherever he went, about everything. He was unhappy. He showed it to everyone. People redoubled their efforts to please him.

  My German entered the space like a variety of squirrel rare in the city. I rifled through the Manfred raps in my head and tried to give his views about how in Berlin there was a tendency to build horizontally, along a west-east axis, instead of a north-south one. I turned from side to side. We had internalized the Wall. Uneasy laughter among the assistants made me think I’d said that we had eaten the Wall.

  I tried to attack the skyline of my hometown, a gray specter on the water when viewed from shores of the South Side. I said something about phallic architecture, or thought I had, and got somewhat more relaxed laughs. The truth was that I never minded the skyline. But I wasn’t interested in the questions tall buildings asked. I was happy on the seventh floor around the atrium of the old Sante Fe Building. Mom and Dad’s dating stories were about places like Grand Central. He kissed her hand the day they tore it down.

  Rosen-Montag maybe felt pity when I tried to speak on their level, in their language. I went 1930s Hollywood Negro. I was smiling and perspiring. I was moments away from tap-dancing. I swam back to English and the beauty of decentralization.

  I clicked the carousel to the image of a divided screen: on the left side, a panoramic black-and-white view of the Chicago Exposition taken from what was called the Spectatorium; on the right, a colorful, touched-up aerial view of Lessingsdorf that Manfred had taken from the runway rooftop of one of the apartment blocks in the Hansa Quarter.

  I said that Berlin’s 750th anniversary was a time to remind ourselves that the city’s history need not be dominated by the legacy of Nazi devastation. I said it was not true that East and West Berlin were two forms of government yet one city in spirit. Rosen-Montag stopped fidgeting. He’d been stroking the skin inside his shirt. He asked for a coffee. He liked departure from the conventional rhetoric of the celebrations.

  Rosen-Montag said evenly in English that Paul Goodman, a prophet of decentralization, had left his world a far better place than Bismarck had his, but what was he to do with Paul Goodman at this stage.

  I had nowhere to go with it. A phrase from Brecht-Weill launched into my head. O moon of Alabama. I almost sang it to Rosen-Montag because I had nothing else.

  The people in the Chicago photo must have known they were at something special. But we could not see any women, and all the men were white. The important division was the border between what we had been and what we were becoming.

  “To call for decentralization away from utopian centers moves no one, and not the German people, that is certain.” Rosen-Montag was asking me what this meant and I had no idea.

  “Turn to the River,” I said to the hut, ditching the remainder of my presentation. “In this is the meaning of the Lessing Project. Water is the life of Berlin.”

  My use of a project mantra, Turn to the River, calmed Rosen-Montag somewhat. His coffee came, borne by a willowy French girl with coal-dark eyes. He had the power to ornament his life with such creatures. The conference table asked for coffee, its mood a little deflated. There would be no sacrifice, but allowances had to be made for the black American, Rosen-Montag’s experiment, much as the eighteenth-century court of the Prince and Princess of Brunswick had to put up with their royal highnesses’ determination to send a black man, Anton Wilhelm Amo, to university to study theology in order to prove that a black man could study theology.

  Throughout history, water has meant communication, I went on. There was still no wooden dock for the pleasure boat that was to take passengers from Lessingsdorf to the lakes in the west. I said Rosen-Montag was the first architect working in West Berlin in a long time to dream along a north-south axis. I got a sigh from him.

  Manfred had heard that Rosen-Montag was furious that the opening of the Lessing Project was not the inaugural event of that season’s 750th anniversary celebrations. I clicked to the final images in the carousel of the Chicago Exposition as seen from Lake Michigan and then one of Rosen-Montag’s project as seen from the river. It looked its best from that view. It looked most real from that angle as well. Perception has a destiny, Emerson said.

  Suddenly the table was talking generally. They were trying to come up with a summary of what I meant. I was so tense that I didn’t notice I was understanding their language, I was just understanding. I was at last living in the moment, as AA urged me to. Because my remarks had been obscure and inconclusive, so were the comments of the foundation people concerning Rosen-Montag’s book. But then, it existed. They didn’t have to have a critical opinion. They just had to hope it sold. It didn’t matter that nobody understood what I�
��d been trying to say about the book, since I’d not had time to mention it during my talk.

  Outside the hut, people going by avoided me. I smoked and separated sounds. O moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye. By the end of the day I had been reorganized. I’d already found two tiny desks pushed alongside mine for the entourage girls who were members of a new publications team that had been put in place while I was in Chicago. Later, I telephoned Manfred from his pub, but he wouldn’t meet me even when I told him that the lesbian had asked me to move out.

  They’d kept driving in East Berlin when the authorities in West Berlin tried to empty the streets for two days back in February. Factories in East Germany did not close. People were going to work by car all over northern Germany, therefore what was the point of further inconveniencing West Berlin, Manfred said every sane person had tried to say.

  * * *

  One building of the Chicago Exposition was still in use. It was not on what had been the actual fairground, but it was near Jackson Park. I wanted to go there. Dad said, “That’s Jackson Park down the street, Jedediah.” I was twelve years old and I did not know where I lived.

  * * *

  The press girl was not going to survive the debacle of the afternoon’s architecture tour bus. First, there were not enough places. Manfred snatched my pass. He walked up behind the press girl and slapped the pass against her stomach. She did not turn around, but her hand took over from his as he spoke into her ear. She was facing several important personages who had been promised seats for Rosen-Montag’s lecture in the field on contemporary architecture in West Berlin.

  The sun was out in the west, but it was drizzling in the Tiergarten. Manfred ushered me out of the office hut and shoved me ahead of him onto the gravel.

  “Have you rescued me from the Order Police?” I said.

  “Shove dynamite into red baboon asses,” he said.

  I liked it when Manfred took the training wheels off his German and spoke angrily in his northern accent. But he could tell when I’d missed something. That I wasn’t following, that I was just being admiring, frustrated him, even bored him. I was not as smart as he thought.

  He asked me to remember how critical Rosen-Montag was of most new architecture in West Berlin. Moreover, his passengers would be admirers of the immensely popular director of IBA, the International Building Exhibition, whom Rosen-Montag had been attacking in recent interviews. “Wrong bus, Rosa Parks,” Manfred said in English and pulled open the canteen hut door.

  It was true that Rosen-Montag didn’t like much in the way of recent work. But Berlin would agree with many of his judgments. The Social Science Center complex designed by James Stirling got nicknamed Birthday Cake because of its most distinctive feature: a layered half-moon building. The rounded side faced the street, the pink middle floor sandwiched between a pale blue ground floor and a pale blue top floor. “And they have murdered a wonderful old building to make room. They beat it to death with sledgehammers,” Rosen-Montag said to me at our only private meeting. Yet he had once loved Stirling.

  He could still speak well of Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun, but then they were dead. He had some sympathy for their reform movement. That didn’t stop him from misbehaving at the opening of Scharoun’s long-delayed chamber music hall at the Kulturzentrum, that tiny area of library, museums, and concert halls tucked under where the Berlin Wall turned east, cutting through Potsdamerplatz, once one of the busiest squares in Europe. And while I was amused that there was a U-Bahn stop called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he thought Taut’s sprawling housing estate down there a laugh riot of the misguided in materials and design.

  Mostly he mourned the decay of the New Objectivity he’d been made by. He didn’t like a building in Kreuzberg that was a highly praised part of the IBA. To him, Bonjour Tristesse, as the curved apartment house on a poor street was called, resembled a diesel engine about to run him over.

  Manfred said again that I didn’t want to be anywhere near the blame-thrower Rosen-Montag’s people would strap on after such a public relations miscalculation. He was grubby from inspecting cargo on the river. The canteen was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. He parked me by a noisy wall.

  Manfred had a type: the most attractive woman in the room. He barreled steadily past any man to reach the smile he hoped to create in her face. He put his weight into his step. Girls vibrated along with the floorboards at his approach. If they weren’t free, he did not press, but in his stories about the open American road, the spoken-for were the ones who went after him hardest.

  I could see that he had our coffees but that he was taking his time rolling a cigarette, taking up a lot of counter space to do it. Then I saw a long-limbed woman, the kind he liked, draw next to him. She spoke. He handed her the cigarette and lit it for her. Then she was following him to my wall. He went back for the third coffee, leaving this new silky blonde and me to establish in declarative English our connections to Rosen-Montag. She didn’t have one. She was an expert in stucco restoration. She’d come from Warsaw for the IBA. She’d heard about the bus tour. She was probably wearing her best business suit.

  Manfred inserted a chair between her silkiness and the next guy at our back table. He said the architects and journalists were bound to stone Rosen-Montag, that the bus probably wouldn’t make it as far as the National Gallery by Mies. The Culture Center was not easy to get to, broken off from the rest of the city. I could tell he wanted to ask her how she got permission to travel to West Berlin.

  He cupped his hands around his GI’s lighter. He looked up quickly. An uncool guy would have grinned. She hadn’t time to disguise her gaze. His expression remained friendly while he placed a proprietary boot against the leg of her chair and slouched a bit, opening his thighs. He held his coffee cup and his cigarette in the same hand. She waited, unembarrassed.

  I was seeing what she was seeing and I’d seen all he’d needed to. She was a beautiful woman. She was much older than we were, poised and vulnerable. It was as though Ingrid Bergman as Anastasia had left her Technicolor court to rendezvous with Burt Lancaster in black-and-white.

  The smoke was criminal. Manfred asked in formal German, a contrast to his posture, what she thought of the accelerated construction going on in East Berlin. I only caught the first part of what he said, but I could supply the rest. In preparation for its 750th anniversary, East Berlin had been knocking itself out. New apartment buildings were going up daringly close to the Wall and the medieval quarter had been worked over, the bricks that could be seen repointed. The East could not let itself be upstaged by the West.

  Her long answer came with elegant movements of her hands. I couldn’t see her face anymore, she had turned toward him completely, but I could see that he wanted her to see his eyes roam happily over her face. He just held the cigarette, as if forgetting to smoke, and then stabbed it out in his saucer. He folded his hands. After a while he twitched his nose, his cute trick, and reached for the cigarette she was neglecting.

  Guys were supposed to understand. He’d stopped paying attention to me as soon as she arrived. I ceased to exist. He was focused on her. I didn’t have to take it personally. He’d blocked out everyone else as well. It was important to him that she saw that and believed him. I was watching, but anyone could. The noise gave them the privacy they needed to let talking become sitting there, a waiting for him.

  Remnants of the Red Army Faction had attacked a U.S. Army train in retaliation for one of its members receiving a life sentence for the execution of a businessman ten years earlier, during the young leftist terror of the “German Autumn.” Berlin recalled with incredulity the bombings, courtroom shootings, and safe houses, the violence that they said came out of the anti–Vietnam War movement. But it was the Nazis Manfred talked about. They were still the biggest story in town, bigger even than the Russians stationed in the loneliness of East Berlin’s outskirts. Manfred stepped to the side when he stood, and she did not look back as she went ahead of him.

  Albert Sp
eer, Hitler’s architect, who was my age when he was hired, said that in 1938, when he showed his father, also an architect, the model of a transformed Berlin, Germania, capital of the Thousand-Year Reich, the colossal dome of the Great Hall and the swollen neoclassicism of the Arch of Triumph and the Palace of the Führer, his father said, “You’ve all gone completely crazy.” I’d seen the Pergamon Altar over in East Berlin that Speer claimed as his inspiration. Manfred had never been to the East.

  * * *

  I stayed on the city bus past the ChiChi. I got off not far from Savignyplatz and walked back in the direction of Bahnhof Zoo. I saw that The Threepenny Opera was still playing in the big theater along the way and I decided to see it. I was in Berlin, in the grip of a stupid situation. How had I not noticed before that this work was about fools getting what they deserved.

  Hayden Birge was reserved at intermission. I stopped wagging my tail and climbed down off his leg. A thick-necked boy beside him excused himself to go to the men’s room. Hayden relaxed. He said I would not believe the number of gymnasts from around the world who were in Berlin and in need of consolation. The muscular, compact Austrian had been knocked out in the early rounds of the international competition that was taking place down at the huge Deutschlandhalle.

  I told him I’d left Cello’s place, but I did not mention the cocaine. Though of course I’d been to Europa Center and the ChiChi, I said for effect that I was taking a risk showing myself in Charlottenburg. He said what everyone else said, that I’d lived on Cello for more than a year. Sure it was a big apartment, but not only did Cello need her space, so did I, and I had to accept that. He was so unfazed by my news, I didn’t ask if he’d seen her. He barely answered when I asked how long he’d been back in town. His Tyrolean returned. Hayden again became as smooth and alert as a leopard. He fluttered fingers at me. He and his date headed back to their seats, Hayden lavishing his succulent smile on the boy. He hadn’t bothered to say we should get together or that he’d call.