Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

Yet I no longer accepted rides in his Deux Chevaux from the Lessingsdorf site, his yellow hard hat flung onto the back seat with the mess of his life. All roads he took led to his pub in Schöneberg. Instead, I had those soulful walks at last, in the brisk late autumn air, the waning light turning even nearby figures into silhouettes. I went into the Tiergarten, in a way that I would not have dared to enter Chicago’s Midway at the same hour. I emerged at the Great Star, Der Grosser Stern, a large traffic circle around a several-story monument finished with cannons captured from the French after the fall of Sedan in 1872. I took the long way around and dived back into the landscape of wet branches in the evening streetlights.

I ignored the boys not giving me a second look and made my way to the workshop, a forgotten encampment, with so many inside the Nissen huts unsure of what to do next, how to proceed. Women ran Rosen-Montag’s life until he broke out for however long he chose to, reminding them whose court it was. When he was away, and had refused to allow his wife to accompany him, his wife was impossible, sick with rage at the staff in the huts, sick with rage toward the contractors at the different sites, and sick with the unexpressed. Manfred had heard that three firms of builders were about to be dismissed. Everyone was staying out of everyone else’s way, it felt like to me, as though not to be noticed was a way to keep your job.

But I came on stronger than ever. I swaggered. Rosen-Montag’s wife even sent me to brief American journalists in her place. I requested Manfred specifically. He was acute about Rosen-Montag’s models. I didn’t let it get to me that I couldn’t introduce him to the anxious women around the huts; they’d been on the project far longer than I had. Yes, we know each other, a pretty girl would say, in German all of a sudden, with nothing further to add, she smiling, Manfred smiling, both looking at me and not at each other.

From the workshop huts I walked south, out of my way, in order then to go west along the Landwehr Canal. It was a long way to Europa Center and the ChiChi from there, but I always got to where I was going. The ChiChi was my café, my Dôme, my Deux Magots, my Blaue Reiter hangout.

I committed myself anew to the warrior architect who’d brought me back to Berlin. I believed that my articles helped protect him. I compared Rosen-Montag’s architecture to the filmmaking process. I said his few buildings that had been realized and his planned ones that we knew about were scripted, crafted, languorous and deliberate, casual and controlled, and I dared anyone to ask what that meant. Each building was a self-portrait, I said for no reason whatsoever, intimate, personal, and I concluded with something about his having achieved an organic pace in the development of his ideas since he was the first non-Japanese to win the coveted Hotta Prize in 1970, which launched his international career. I wrote seated at the bar, across from Zippi’s cash register and the coffee machine.

“All men are pyromaniacs. I’m a pyromaniac,” Bags said. “All men are.”

Zippi didn’t look up from the cocktail menu she was proofreading.

The prices being high meant that everything at the ChiChi had to be a little drawn out.

“All men are pyromaniacs,” Bags repeated. He’d decided that he could wait to tell his old lady that his girlfriend was pregnant.

“They’re not printing any more money.”

I wasn’t drinking, but I was sitting up half the night in a bar again.

Odell had a side business in copper scrap. He moved it at strange hours. I drove with Bags in a borrowed truck to a muddy garage in dark Moabit. I did the unloading. My shoes would not recover. Bags asked me to wait until we were back at the ChiChi before I lit up. Berlin was not New Jersey, but he didn’t want to take any chances, two black men in a passed-around truck. I ignored him. Bags turned a corner, pulled over by a brick wall, and leaned against his door. Even after I’d put it out, he kept looking at me, sure. He looked down at his crotch and then back at me and then out his window at the silent street.

Twice Bags asked me if I was telling the truth about having been tested. It was hard not to be offended when someone whose crotch you’d been doubled over, someone you’d been wordlessly intimate with, used words on you like they were a form of bug spray.

The laws of physics applied to bar babble. My talk was liquid filling up the volume it found to flow into. If I didn’t have a strong enough opinion, I presented an occasion for others in the bar to occupy empty parts. I didn’t want to be taken over, but I couldn’t help myself. I met Bags in the kitchen, for transaction purposes. For Zippi, I mixed the hash with non-menthol tobacco. Manfred never again joined me at the ChiChi. He didn’t see how cooled out I was after a toke, but at least I was not white wine’s bitch.

* * *

No fact ever killed off a myth, they say. Cello was boiling eggs. She gave herself time before she answered me. She was humming the last section of the D-Major Toccata and it made her happy. It was youthful and robust. Dram had heard her read through it and she’d decided to learn it for him. I was surprised that Cello needed her Dahlem practice room for Bach, but she said she wanted to have it down by the time Dram got back from Dortmund. Though my room was close to the front door and far from their bedroom, Dram knew how late I was getting in and said so, on Cello’s instructions, I assumed.

Cello had last seen the Rosen-Montags at the Gropius Building circus, from what I could tell. You had to be careful with Cello; she was so socially cagey. But I knew when she and Dram had gone out to dinners and I guessed that she would not have been able to resist telling me she’d seen my boss. I thought I hid successfully my glee that I was sitting on something Cello wanted: N. I. Rosen-Montag. I stored up bones to toss at her when we crossed paths. I was very casual and calm, deep in my thoughts as usual about my terribly interesting job and the visionary it put me in contact with. I was not drinking, yet I was an expert on something, the boss. I admired him, but I knew his limitations.

I’d explain that Rosen-Montag was the sort of man who remembered everything people said to him, but he didn’t realize that that was because people tended to say the same things to him all the time. I offered that Rosen-Montag had the mood swings of a dictator, killing people off one minute, sentimental about them the next. Of course a lot of what he said in meetings had to do with his extravagant regret that he hurt so many. I could tell that I sort of got to Cello, because one afternoon she said rapidly, almost angrily, that sometimes when people misbehaved they believed they were following the dictates of genius, when, in fact, it was just another relapse. She was always telling me that I was getting above myself, and at the time I assumed that that was what she meant.

“He’s awful. All liver, no brains,” Manfred said again, downcast by the terribly familiar phenomenon of having watched someone he respected blossom into an asshole.

I had no trouble seeing the justice of Manfred’s criticisms when we discussed Rosen-Montag over cigarettes by the Hansa warehouse slated to become a children’s clinic. But it was just as easy for me to go to the ChiChi to embroider my paragraphs on his work with yet more sincere and irresponsible language. I liked telling Dram that I’d been out late again with Manfred, even though it was untrue.

Rosen-Montag certainly blew Dram’s no-phone-calls-after-ten o’clock rule. My master’s women would summon me back among the phantoms of the workshop, in the hum with his drawings and notes in English and German. I would leave and look for Bags and sit with Zippi while Odell’s buddies discussed fugitives of the revolution who had come back from Algiers ten years earlier. The ChiChi was one place where Rosen-Montag couldn’t find me. Odell hung up the curtain in front of the entrance, so that when fools rushed in, the damp didn’t sneak in behind them.