Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

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.