Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Rosen-Montag’s wife gave her time to what was going on at the railroad garage and the dairy. Machinery worked away in the dirt between them. Anyone who was anyone had his or her own hard hat and passes to get by security on Lessingstrasse at the river site. Rosen-Montag’s wife made a big deal at morning meetings of whom she was sending to do what at Lessingsdorf. Those in his entourage who previously had paraded around as though they were indispensable looked nervous in the canteen hut. Some smoked behind Rosen-Montag’s hut, because they didn’t want anyone to see that Rosen-Montag’s wife hadn’t taken them along to key meetings with structural engineers.
Rosen-Montag wanted to return to small Berlin—chamber structures, as he called them. He wanted people to stay home and watch public events on monitors. Television created community. Human beings wanted to live in cities, but city spaces did not have to be Roman. Population did not have to aggregate. Life without a Crystal Palace or a Coliseum need not be a hardship, he said. He opposed the giganticism of what he called classical Modernism. He wanted to move from the beehive or anthill model of human dwelling to what he called the pod, or leaf and branch model. He was the enemy of population density.
A part of his mission was to bring “the old corridor street” back to Berlin, to create a system of narrow passages and pedestrian and bicycle ways and footbridges connecting West Berlin’s districts as though they were still villages in orbit around the capital. Rosen-Montag was a champion of reconstruction and the renovation of what exists, a new trend in Western urban policy.
He was against town planning, but he had to execute a plan that called for the instant filling in of his grid rather than development over time. As far as I could tell from one structure that had been finished, what he had going in Lessingsdorf was a dazzling series of stripped, echoing, nineteenth-century brick-vaulted halls. The laying out of the grid went on in a numbing blare of motors.
They said that it was unusual for Rosen-Montag to lose his temper with his own people, but nobody roared more that spring about the false utopia of solar panels than he did. Not that he was even using any. Sometimes he overheard what kids were talking about and went after them. He was especially touchy because he had been forced to abandon a projected encampment of sparkling Buckminster Fuller–type geodesic domes in the next block, his gesture at the radically hybrid.
One Friday I saw a hunk under a yellow hard hat doing battle with the boss over something banal like air ducts. The whole area looked like a science fiction excavation site. Deep pits crisscrossed the sandy terrain and inside them ran large, bright pink and blue pipes having to do with the modernization of heating systems in the city. Rosen-Montag and the hardhat were bellowing at each other across ditches.
It was German opera; the master and the assistant were thunderous gods. Rosen-Montag tore at his own cowboy shirt and his sunglasses added to his menace, but the yellow hardhat, dressed in a wife beater, stood his ground, his triceps slick. Rosen-Montag in his fury began to kick sand. Even his wife stopped what she was doing to marvel at his tantrum. Assistants eased toward him. The pointed toe of his black cowboy boot was powdered white. The hardhat coolly walked off into the shade of a warehouse.
When I found a reason to follow him and offered a menthol that he declined because he rolled his own cigarettes, I learned that his name was Manfred. He said in English that Rosen-Montag may have been a well-fucked dog once upon a time, but at forty-one he was already an idiot. He flipped open a lighter. His hands were not steady.
Manfred drove a jerking Deux Chevaux. I went to a corner pub with him in Schöneberg, near his place. He had quite a few beers and railed about the Bitburg visit. He came from a navy family in Kiel, submarine commanders who attacked convoys. He cursed his grandfather and he cursed the president of the United States. He was as handsome as Burt Lancaster in 1948. I had so much coffee, I walked the streets.
* * *
“Wagner is a cheap whore who stole everything from Haydn,” Cello finished from her end of the table and dusted the extra pepper from her hands. I could keep up with some of what she was saying.
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 held 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.