Black Deutschland (2 page)

“You remember where the kitchen is,” she said, in German. Back in Chicago, I was her cousin, but sometimes in Berlin she’d made it clear to me that I was her second cousin, a distant family obligation from the United States, a country relation she had to do something for. The boy in her arms and his six-year-old and five-year-old brothers trailing us down the hall that let in light from two sides were hardly kin to me. Cello handed Maximilian to the nanny and walked me, her mitzvah, past a pantry, a laundry room, and a bathroom. The corridor turned right. We walked through an open door and sat side by side on the bed.

How she accumulated shawls on her way down the hall I couldn’t say. She folded three or four layers of delicate stuff over her bare shoulders. Underneath us, the intricate pattern of a lovely white bed throw. Cello sprang up and ushered the children from the room, telling Otto and Konrad to join their sister and brother at the coloring table in the kitchen.

The furniture in the bedroom was on a smaller scale than what I was used to, real Biedermeier with white marble tops, the lamps dark Prussian iron. The last time I’d been in that room, there’d been only a camp bed and cartons piled on cartons. I wondered how I was going to ask Cello if I could make some room in the glass case for my own books, which would be arriving soon. I somehow had the feeling that the books had been in that case unexamined for a long time. Every space was taken up. Books were crammed on their sides. Cello didn’t read books, not really. She studied scores. Her eyes flashed across bars, like a burglar looking at windows for a way in. Yet somehow she had absorbed the vibe of the most important literary works of Western culture. She would have balked to be reminded that her father had this talent.

Cello’s father was my mom’s first cousin. He went nuts in the civil rights movement. Her mother thought she had a singing career, which meant that Cello and her little brother and sister pretty much stayed with us. Our extended family wasn’t large. There weren’t many of us, because of the family members who had no siblings or children or had just lost touch, not to mention those who weren’t speaking to us. Cello never could decide what to do with me. After all, I was the only person in West Berlin who’d known her when she was called Ruthanne. And I’d seen her face during one of her mother’s cabaret performances in Old Town in the 1970s.

Cello was infinitely more musical than her mother. The gap between them in regard to absolutely everything about music, from degree of talent to the type of music that engaged them, was deeply painful to Cello. It was my mom who called the blind piano tuner, got Cello to lessons, and discussed her next steps with her teachers, and no one more than Cello wanted her mother to be too wrapped up in her own singing lessons and choir practice to pay much attention to Cello’s day-to-day development. Cello had a life of her own elsewhere, behind the temple of the Art Institute, at the American Conservatory of Music, then on to the Chicago Musical College.

She was set apart by her destiny. She was not expected to look after her brother and sister; she was never asked to go to the store. Cello never had a child’s free time or an adolescent’s schedule of lassitude behind closed doors. She ate separately, later or earlier, like the poet-slave Phillis Wheatley in the home of her doting Methodist owners. Then she’d disappear upstairs. Once we’d finished, she liked to help my mom to wash up. We often had my mother’s social causes in the form of women bums and female cons staying with us, but Mom didn’t like for anyone else to help her do the dishes except Cello, no matter how many had been at the dinner table.

My mom was the person she talked to. Mom was the one in the family who knew the Chopin
Fantaisie-Impromptu
when she heard it and just what it would take for Cello to learn it as well as she wanted to. Cello practiced two hours a day downtown and then was driven home, where she played some more. But sometimes she sat on Mom’s piano bench, not playing. She had to take out some of the music stuffed in the seat in order to get it flat. She liked to costume herself in an ankle-length pale blue taffeta gown and sit there, head bowed, hands folded in her lap, lights low.

Her gift was her sanctuary. She represented Negro Achievement, whether a National Merit scholar in high school or a finalist in the Chicago Stokowski Society competition. Negro Achievement took her out of the women’s game, out of the black women’s game. She renounced the pleasures other girls lived for. Like a sprinter or a dancer, she sacrificed everything to the single-minded pursuit of perfection. She was going to give up everything for her art, and because she was a black artist, people around her who didn’t understand the music added, her attainments as an artist were also going to count in the freedom struggle.

No matter what the DuSable Club president handing her a modest check said, Cello never pretended that her presence at the Mozarteum was as necessary to the liberation of her people as the registration of black voters in Mississippi. I heard her tell Mom after one such ceremony that she’d managed not to laugh at the way the pastor kept referring to “J. S. Bach.” “Not C.P.E.?” I didn’t get it. She and my mom shared a language I didn’t speak. Cello lived on a plane I could never reach. My older brother had his sports zone, which was taken very seriously, but the most anyone ever thought he’d get were two chances, high school and college, to say farewell as a varsity player. Cello got away—first to Salzburg, then to Boston, and finally to Berlin. She was the only person I knew who lived in that somewhere else I yearned for, Europe.

After all that, she did not have the public career she had prepared for, but nevertheless to the family, especially to her mother, who was afraid of her, she was like somebody famous. She was the wife of a rich white man not from where we were from and therefore not bound by our rules. That made it a stinging judgment for Cello to have returned to Chicago only once in seven years. She displayed her sleeping infant daughter and her two sons, her fulfillment, to the women’s clubs, white and black, that had vied with one another to give her prizes. The children’s names were not unfamiliar in Northwest Chicago, but they were rare on the South Side.

Most people assumed she’d given up her concert ambitions in order to have children. Cello never said otherwise. She never talked about the calamity of her stage fright. A long time ago, Mom had wagered that if the fat twelve-year-old pianist lost weight, she would no longer lose her presence of mind in recital. My mom devoted herself to Cello’s problem and Cello responded by throwing herself into a regimen that murdered the evil twin in her head.

Cello wanted the concert stage and Mom figured out that Cello could shed the pounds holding her back if she had somewhere to treat the matter privately. Private, in this case, meant somewhere where no one knew her, which was another way of saying where there were no rowdy, hurtful black youths calling her names. That was the bond between us, the reason we only went so far with each other: the knowledge of what it had been like to be a fat black kid at a mostly white school. Mom arranged through a connection on one of her committees for Cello to have private swimming lessons at the medical school. Eat, swim, practice, eat, school, practice, eat, practice, sleep. That was why she was excused from meals with us, in order to protect her from the temptations of mashed potatoes. She ate small portions of regulated this and measured that all day long.

Her mother couldn’t handle a daughter with such special needs and there were times when Cello came to stay not because things were unstable at home again, but because Mom believed that Cello had a better chance of staying on course under our roof. For plenty of obvious reasons, she binged if around her father and mother for too long. Mom would insist on taking Cello’s brother and sister as well. Eat, swim, practice, eat, school, practice, and then more of the same until she made it to sleep. In every room of the house, a clinic of the self was in progress. Mom was a missionary and we, her children, were an indigenous people. She liked to feel us striving to better ourselves. Television was strictly controlled. But Cello was an altogether different story. The weight-loss program worked. It took five years, but it worked, and Cello went off to auditions that she and Mom both believed had a chance at last of going well.

*   *   *

In English, Cello, sitting next to me now, was saying that she remembered the last time I’d arrived in Berlin sober and how it took only one party for my sobriety to mean nothing. There had been chatty Japanese people with thick business cards and runny noses and then in no time there were painted Turkish boys gawking around her hallways. She exaggerated, but I was sitting on the pampered bed in the room she was letting me have for free. The wallpaper had a motif of a bird of paradise in a cage. There had been only one Turkish boy. He did wear eyeliner, a lot of it. And purple eye shadow. He’d never been in an apartment as large as hers. He meant no harm. But she’d had Dram inform me that they had to think of the children.

Cello repeated that she did not believe in new beginnings as a rule. People were who they were. People didn’t change. I remembered that her sister was the one who’d had the fight with her about how not all black men were like their father, starting with my father, for instance. Cello said she was doing this for me because I had so much to prove to my poor mother. It was almost my last chance. She said she was for the first time ever impressed by something I’d done. She got up and turned off the table lamps she’d turned on when we came in. Cello’s coughing fits before performances came back to wreck her life, but the weight never did.

My new beginning, she said, taking me back down her long corridor to the big salon. She said she agreed with N. I. Rosen-Montag and architects like him who were frank about what an opportunity the destruction of Berlin yet represented. Even before she’d seen my article in the
Herald Tribune
, she’d heard that he’d taken a lot of heat at a conference in Copenhagen for his jokes about the debt the German people owed to the Allied Bomber Command. He was often in the news for remarks like that. He could stir things up, get issues talked about. Talk shows and universities chased him. His influence on architecture came through his lectures, writings, and the dissemination of his exquisite drawings. His collections of poetic images sold widely in that world, though he had built hardly anything at all.

Rosen-Montag had also seen the article, in which I was scornful of those who lacked irony and Berlin cosmopolitanism, those who refused to acknowledge that by destruction Rosen-Montag meant reconstruction. I praised him for his dissent from Walter Gropius’s children and the arch social vision driving much postwar architecture. I made an analogy between blacks and white liberals in the civil rights movement who couldn’t give up the moral high ground and Germans who could only deal with their history by flailing themselves, but I probably didn’t mean it in the way the people who patted me on the back for it took it.

Then there was a big architectural theory meeting at the University of Chicago. Rosen-Montag conceded that Gropius meant well, but he marveled at the naïveté in our surprise that the isolated, supposedly self-sufficient towers of Gropiusstadt, or Gropius City, should have become the setting for the social ills associated with low-hope life. Gropiusstadt was at the far end of Neukölln, in the south of West Berlin, hard on the guarded border, too near the East Berlin airport. The complex of fiercely utilitarian apartment houses was hard to get to by U-Bahn, I told myself. I’d never been there, though I imagined that its shopping arcade was haunted by bored, disaffected working-class youths with rotten attitudes, just the kind of pimply, loud, large boys who might need my understanding in the middle of their greasy nowhere.

Rosen-Montag didn’t lecture, or really address us. He invited us into his head and we were sightseers on a retrospective tour of his disillusionment with postwar architecture in Berlin and around the world. He was dissatisfied with the modernist principles he’d grown up on, or with what had become of them, and to such an extent he had to ask what else could they have tended toward. It had always been so, that form had to follow function, but he’d nevertheless had many dark nights of conscience about his German masters of the minimal, they who’d taught him to love American grain silos and Shaker barns. He tore at his hair and twisted his sleeves as he spoke, his wide mouth the gateway of pressing thoughts, radical propositions. Oh, didn’t the Bauhaus Archive look like a toaster and Scharoun’s Siemenstadt housing like machine-gun nests? He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and seemed on the verge of peeling off his clothes altogether. He said an intellectual falling-out-of-love was no less traumatic than the extinction of a sexual fire.

Afterward, the room was hot with debate about the tenets of urban planning and Chandigarh, the town in India designed by Le Corbusier. An elderly avant-gardist, the one professor from the un-esteemed Chicago outlet of the University of Illinois who still hoped for something from me and for me, cut through the throng and introduced me to Rosen-Montag. He’d done Rosen-Montag a favor when he was an unknown in the United States, and Rosen-Montag had not forgotten.

I’d been sober thirty-three days and said the first thing that came into my head. I told him that I would never go back to the Berlin Zoo, because on my first trip to Berlin I saw an orangutan who had been trained to wash the floor of her cage with a bucket and a rag. They had put a mammy’s red kerchief on her head. She looked so sad, mopping and wringing. Rosen-Montag immediately offered me a position.

Cello said it was her chance to repay my mother for everything my mother had tried to do for her. She was going to help salvage me, she said. She was, as she said her grandmother used to say, going to help me win the race with myself. It irritated me when Cello attributed my mom’s words to her grandfather or grandmother, who did not like my mom. “I’m going to help you win that race with yourself”—that was what Mom used to say. And then she would ground me or try to make us earn the money for what we wanted. Cello’s grandmother never said things like that. Other peoples’ fates, especially that of her troubled son, Cello’s father, were not her concern. It would have been rude, not to mention inconvenient to her radio and television schedule, to try to make them so.