Authors: Darryl Pinckney
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.
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 can 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.
Somehow, after that, Cello began to think of herself as his collaborator, he said. He didn’t say anything about her access to funds and institutes and city politicians, her cachet as a Berlin personality, the retired black American artist married to Schuzburg Tools. We were having lunch in Café Einstein, near Nollendorfplatz, Herr Issyvoo’s old stomping ground, and I would have wagered that some of its cultured clientele had heard of Cello. It felt as though Hayden and I were meeting in secret, because he had asked me not to tell her of our appointment.
I wanted to ingratiate myself to him. I liked the conspiratorial atmosphere, but I couldn’t think what would be the equivalent of nylons in our exchange. When he complained about Cello’s tendency to rewrite his music, he ended by laughing it off, saying that she was just headstrong, and rubbing his sinewy neck.
He said he didn’t mind if I smoked, but he wouldn’t. I emptied two sugar packets into my cup. He only smoked after dinner. No wonder my skin was the way it was and his was perfect. He never used cologne; what beguiled was his wonderful Bond Street soap. His gray cashmere sweater was fragrant. His shoes were Italian, a brand I’d never heard of. He confessed to a weakness for clothes. He was a gay guy who got the boys he went after. I could tell. He did his hunting late at night, in clothes I never saw, among boys loaded with attitude and shirtless in autumn.
Stravinsky had three face-lifts, Hayden said. He said that Cello couldn’t bring herself to write about a black person shitting on Europe. It was going to be a problem, he said. Maybe Rimsky-Korsakov could set what she’d written, but he couldn’t. He said he thought better of letting me read her libretto because it was bad enough that he had even told me about their collaboration. She’d not mentioned it to me.
* * *
Cello and I were communicating mostly through the occasional phone message she left on my tiny bed. Rosen-Montag’s people called more often than Chicago. I hadn’t been around for dinner in a long time, and the one Sunday lunch out in Wannsee that I’d gone to over the summer had been a torment because I was missing a date with Manfred. When I told Hayden about Manfred, he said, “For who can make straight what God hath made a ’mo.”
I’d only told him because I hadn’t wanted to go back to Cello with the latest. She’d said nothing when I told her that there was an assistant architect working with me on the Lessing Project who was beginning to mean a great deal to me. We cared about each other, I said. Cello gave me no opening. She looked straight ahead. Two of her children played in the back seat of the Mercedes. She did not want me to discuss boys around them, I decided.
When Manfred accused himself of being lazy, of not having the self-respect to resign, I would tell him that that wasn’t true. “There’s a difference between troubled and lazy.”
He didn’t let me talk to him about what his trouble might be, which was why I ended up laying out to Hayden the facts of an afternoon when the trees in Berlin’s squares and along its boulevards were still full.
I’d left Manfred in his corner pub, seething as usual about the German fascist past. The next day he picked me up for our excursion to the radio tower and racetrack constructed in the 1920s dressed in the jeans and shirt he’d had on the night before. An American beauty was smiling up from the passenger seat of his Deux Chevaux. I stood there, a homo with a picnic lunch from Kaufhaus des Westens, “KaDeWe,” the woolly mammoth of a department store not far from Europa Center.
* * *
Mom used to say, “You have to kid yourself. How else do you keep going? That’s always been my motto: keep kidding yourself.”
* * *
I kept the ChiChi to myself. It was not a threat to my adult life. It was my time off, my skip through the looking glass, the boys’ club where in my head I scored all night, gently moving the poet’s thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg.
The loveliness of autumn in Berlin could not penetrate the ChiChi’s door. Behind it the atmosphere was like that of a ship far from land. Travelers tired of one another’s company, the regulars remembered that they’d bought me drinks every summer when I ran out of money. To them, I had arrived via helicopter, bringing supplies, more troops, the USO, or something. I bought everyone in the bar a drink my first night back. I paid off Big Dash’s tab. I wanted to wash after he smothered me in a humid embrace.
The windows of the ChiChi were painted over and then completely obscured by the haphazard decoration: a mass of tiny Christmas lights, the wires stapled to the walls; plastic ferns and plastic ivy everywhere on nails, hung with dozens of mutilated garden elves, some just torsos with dusty knives still in them. There were some good things from Odell’s collection of music posters and walls of postcards from servicemen and refugees and former barmaids who hadn’t forgotten the help and home Zippi and Odell had given them in cold, indifferent Berlin. The place looked like the inside of a shoebox of secrets. It was so swathed and coated and coded, no one ever knew what time it was outside. Nights passed unseen.
The dark toilets were beyond the ebony dance floor. The red kitchen was behind the green bar; the racks of green and brown and clear bottles and glasses looked over the bar at the crazy windows. Small round red tables were placed under the windows and along the remaining wall space. You took a seat and maybe someone interesting would join you.