Authors: Darryl Pinckney
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 Speer, 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.
I hadn’t much sympathy for Brecht/Weill’s Jenny. The lesbian back in Schöneberg was anxious to get me out. She and her new girlfriend took lengthy baths together by scented candlelight. I stayed out of the apartment for as long as I could, walking and walking, learning once more to enjoy the company of my old friends, my footsteps. I was again keeping away from the ChiChi, now that Zippi had become the middleman between Bags and me. The last time I scooted down to him at the bar, he thumbed me back in her direction. She collected the money from me as well.
Hitler promulgated a law that if you were not already blond, you couldn’t dye your hair, Manfred told me. After
The Threepenny Opera
, I prepared to take myself by foot across town. In front of a late restaurant, comfortable people were having suppers of white asparagus and white wine under soft garden lights. I was not Invisible, I was that worse thing, Unwanted, a sign badly written and stuck with masking tape on my back. I was wearing the wrong thing. I went out anyway, to Kreuzberg, by taxi, left alone in a corner in every gay bar I entered.
* * *
A freshly shaven Manfred was in his car on my corner in the morning. He wanted to take me on another tour behind the meters of trompe l’oeil murals of row houses in Lessingsdorf that were to be either raised up into place or unveiled on existing surfaces.
“It will be ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ when the whole village is up,” Manfred laughed, a cigarette in his fist on the wheel. For some reason, he saw the whole thing as provocative. He said he confessed to Irma that he could not cope with the opening of the Lessing Project and the rationing of his cigarette intake at the same time. She wanted to burn his clothes.
I wanted to stay in Schöneberg, near Manfred and the cooled-out Saturday market in the church square, but Schöneberg didn’t want me. I answered ads in the back of a community newspaper. The ads were from women who said when I called that they were looking for women. Two were curious to see what an American guy might look like as a roomie, but the interviews didn’t go well. I didn’t get to say much. Of course the gender-empowered of Schöneberg were not racist.
Manfred seemed to know more about fresco-secco pigments than he had the day before. But guys understood: his business was his, not mine. He parked on the street next to the front gate and I heard him running on the gravel.
I choked on air when Rosen-Montag’s wife suddenly banged the car’s hood.
“Where were you.”
She gave the door another bang with her fist and rejoined her husband’s assistants. They let her go first through the gate. I was hoping she wouldn’t cancel the talk I was to give in a week’s time at a nearby hotel, which was an architectural curiosity because it used the remains of the entrance of a bombed hotel as its doorway.
Every week the project hierarchy seemed to intensify. Manfred jumped back into his car with new site passes and threw the engine into gear. The press girl had not been fired. It was too close to the opening for the kinds of scandal Rosen-Montag’s people did not want. What scandal they wanted, they got, and on camera. To start with, a number of academics had been filmed as they were given the news, along with sugary croissants, that there were too many passengers for the bus. They had excluded those most likely to have fits of self-importance.
Apparently Rosen-Montag had not disappointed either. The camera was also rolling when the lecture bus made its first stop, at an intersection of canal and rather unattractive apartments. They stood next to a carnival with a Ferris wheel. The press girl told Manfred that Rosen-Montag said he had nothing to say about these apartments. He said he was not from the Porto School and did not make bunkers for the poor. He imagined city homes of individual character. The problem was that followers of Portugal’s distinguished architects, regarded as the beginning of the Porto School, were on the bus.
Manfred liked for his car to be seen outside a nondescript restaurant abutting the elevated train tracks that had refused to sell to the Lessing Project or join in with its spirit of urban reclamation. There were two score of artisans and electricians, apprentices and street cleaners working frantically on the other side of Lessingstrasse, behind the high wooden fence. But where we stood was fringe West Berlin, weeds in the useless concrete, anarchist graffiti on the sides of the S-Bahn tracks.
Manfred said I’d been rejected as a roommate either because I was not a student or because I’d indicated that after the 750th anniversary celebrations my employment would be precarious.
It was the worst thing, this hopeless thing. It was going to be the worst thing, his happiness for you when you met someone who didn’t compare. I said I’d been cruising in the Tiergarten. Show me the way to the next pretty boy. For we must die.
He asked if I’d been safe, but he was glad to hear I’d been bad, because he’d not been able to imagine as a man how I could stand to be celibate. My eyes strafed the Khyber Pass of his chest. At least we had never talked about it. I never let discussion of the impossibility of the relationship I wanted with him take the place of the relationship I could not have with him.
We were standing in the restaurant parking lot with cups in our hands. We let the whine of saws and the smell of wood and metal at high temperatures from across the tracks distract us for a while. Manfred squinted at the towers in the trees and said that Rosen-Montag had ended the shorter-than-expected lecture tour with a chant: “Tear down the Hansa Quarter.” The Hansa Quarter and I were born the same year.