Black Deutschland (4 page)

Addiction insulated the bar against fashion. There was a group of regulars who’d put in much bar time together. They were the audience for the life-changing mistakes that the ChiChi specialized in. It was a place where people experiencing a bad night strayed in to finish things off with meltdowns, blackouts, fistfights, seizures. Sex was just the messy afterthought, something to do when daylight hit.

“What time do you close here?” I asked Zippi my first night at the ChiChi.

She lifted her head from the bar. “We are never closed here.”

In all of my walks when first back in Berlin as a recovering alcoholic, I never let myself go to Europa Center. If I got out at Zoo Station, I took a long, roundabout way to Cello’s apartment, just to avoid going by the old smells and sights. Avoid people, places, and things, I wanted someone to say at my AA meeting in Dahlem, because I’d yet to open my mouth in that meeting. Back up in the center of town, I’d walk with my final cigarette of the day and look down the Ku’damm toward the bright intersection and the street that led up to the train station. I could feel my steps continuing. I always loved the sound of my footsteps in Berlin. The Negro in Europe.

And I knew they’d be there at the ChiChi. It was never too early for Odell to slap a wet towel on the bar and Zippi to slam the cash register. There was always a fight going on between them; there were always drinks of some kind sitting in front of them. Maybe Big Dash had come in, reeking of Indian spices. I could see them, some of whom I’d groped, quiet because it was early yet, drinking fast, their cigarette packs and fancy lighters on the bar, on their way to not needing to drink as fast, and not one of them thinking of me.

Alcohol wasn’t thinking of me either. You cannot one-up someone who has dumped you, but my former love, white wine, was showing that to be not always the case. I left white wine, yet when I stood there on the Ku’damm, with the sky blue behind me and the east ahead of me end-of-summer dark, it was white wine that was over me already and in the arms of someone else.

TWO

The conquest of the earth was not a pretty thing. The splendor and misery were gone. Symbolic, unchaste Berlin was still the barracks town of Frederick the Great, but the once-teeming capital had also become a small town with a big past. You could crawl into the disfigured city as into a shell. You could treat it as either inhabited ruin or blank space. You could write your own ticket, regard the city as backdrop, a theatrical setting, and appropriate the citizens as extras for your daily dramas, your tremendous inner opera buffa.

The wintry light cast a spell. You were going to walk out the door and reinvent yourself. You were going to turn a corner and there in the neon haze would be the agent of your conversion. Or you could go around in a nervous silence for days, as if the city had been depopulated, leaving only an architecture of signs, layer upon layer, and a dialogue between vanished buildings and their replacements. A preserved fragment of the bombed-out-then-mostly-demolished Anhalter train station shot up from the hard earth to scream at a white block from the 1970s that was like the architectural equivalent of a bimbo.

“Paradise is locked and bolted. We have to make the journey around the world to see if it is open at the back,” Kleist said. Berlin hid its historical face until you slipped over there, into East Berlin, into the immensity of Unter den Linden, Apollonian Baroque and the ineptitude of Karl-Marx-Platz. I didn’t try to stop myself from liking the dereliction, the forgotten pockets of buildings still so scarred by bullets that I would not have been surprised had Marlene Dietrich emerged from a doorway to sing “Black Market.” Overdressed, laden with the Communist state’s unconvincing currency, I found the usual racial situation reversed. These white people who spoke low like inhabitants of a ghost town were the primitives, the needy tribesmen I couldn’t take back with me. The sky was a glittering frontier of fumes, creeping mists, and the Berlin Wall itself the white surf.

Back in louder, wandering West Berlin, I turned around and faced the Wall, an exhibition of found art, an explosion of graffiti, like a high school yearbook. I was told that a man was sometimes lowered in a cage from the featureless earth of No Man’s Land to wash away the many-colored scrawls of slogans and hearts. I didn’t believe it, though none of the graffiti went back very far, certainly not as far back as the crosses behind the Reichstag in memory of those killed trying to escape that August of 1961, when the Wall went up overnight.

The Wall made the lucky part of Berlin artificial, held its grumbling, caustic population in the jealous embrace of privilege. It was a poor city, West Berlin. The conquered city had become the subsidized city. Old Germans willing to live in encircled West Berlin received tax breaks and the young were exempt from national service. The real estate was worth nothing and there was no heavy industry to speak of, just the hundreds clocking in at Schuzburg Tools and other family companies like it. The city services were not massive. Workers of the world—clock out and spend four weeks in a spa. The only big business, it seemed, was culture. The students, filmmakers, artists, musicians, actors, writers, and professors were the aristocracy, and a foreigner, an intruder, never had to make sense.

*   *   *

I longed, as did Cello’s nanny, for those times when the family was out. She and I gravitated to the balconies, in spite of the wet and cold. We went out onto separate balconies. It was understood. Our needs. I smoked. She ate hidden chocolates. Neither of us had had anywhere to go on New Year’s Eve. We said when we met in the kitchen that we were exhausted from the noisy family Christmas and didn’t want to go anywhere anyway. She was paid extra to watch the children that night and Cello approved of my staying quiet.

Valentine’s Day went unmentioned in the kitchen, but not the Ides of March. The nanny said she didn’t give a fig about Shakespeare. All her life she’d been disgusted with the Bard. On her nights off, she’d taken to coming in giggly from a bar frequented by British soldiers. She was getting drunken phone calls after ten o’clock. I knew that Cello would have Dram speak to her before too long. I was not sorry to see her go. She’d been good with the children, which many mothers resent in a nanny after a while. But she wanted to trade confidences with me about Cello, as though she were my equal, or rather as if I were down there with her.

She broke down the day of her departure. Cello took the children to their grandparents on Wannsee the night before. Dram informed the paid-off girl that the children would not be coming back that night, that it was best a parting scene not be imposed on them. He assured her that Cello was at that moment explaining to them that their au pair was going home because her own family missed her and that they should be happy for her.

Dram wasn’t there the morning she left. I’m the one who watched the tears erupt when she pulled her bags into the entrance hall. Her curling iron was in its box in a plastic bag. I made her sit down. I got her a tissue. She’d been a fool to agree not to tell the children anything until the last minute. I listened to her sob about how unfair it was to expect a young person not to have a social life; how unreasonable it was to keep the oldest out of school just to prevent him from saying goodbye to her; how unfair it was that their mother couldn’t see they’d become attached to her. She didn’t trust a reference from Cello not to be a stab in the back. I called her a taxi. I helped her take her bags downstairs. I hugged her. Humiliated, she was on her way back to her previous job in the gift-wrapping department at Marks and Spencer.

She told me to beware. She’d heard Cello and Dram having an intense discussion about me. Obviously she didn’t know what they said, because in her ten months in Berlin she’d learned not a word of German. But they’d repeated my name often, she said, and not in a nice way, she didn’t think.

*   *   *

N. I. Rosen-Montag had proposed the reclamation of an industrial wasteland on a bend in the River Spree, near the housing estates of the Hansa Quarter, as a focal point of the International Building Exhibition, or IBA, a series of meetings of architects, designers, and planners that was taking place in West Berlin over a period of years.

Much outrage followed the announcement that Rosen-Montag, a paper architect, had been given such pride of place, not to mention the huge commission, the chance finally to build. That was some time before I quit drinking and taking drugs. By the time I joined the project, hip Berlin columnists were gleefully relaying rumors that Rosen-Montag’s small-dwelling idea, his back-to-the-eighteenth-century-scale crusade, was seriously behind schedule and likely to be wildly over budget.

What made his peers quiver was the fact that he was a part of both the New Building and the Old Building sections of IBA, the sole architect to be so engaged. He could construct anew, fill in grassy gaps, and he could remake and revive old buildings, be an exponent of what the IBA director called “critical reconstruction.”

The Lessing Project, Lessingsdorf, was always going to have a hard time asserting itself against the modernist parks of the Hansa Quarter, overgrown strips between broad streets by railroad tracks. The Hansa Quarter was sacred ground for modernists. A postwar model city with contributions from many international architects, it had been the star attraction of an International Building Exhibition thirty years earlier. How dare Rosen-Montag insinuate himself into the landscape. On the map, Rosen-Montag’s sudden grid at a bend in the Spree looked like a Band-Aid on the raised knee of a napping Berlin.

Everything Rosen-Montag did woke up a front page in West Berlin. Perversely, he didn’t establish his workshop near the site between the river and the Hansa Quarter that he was being paid an incredible sum to reimagine. Instead, his headquarters sneaked into being south of the Tiergarten, behind the deserted, decaying embassies of the Axis powers in the old diplomatic quarter. His workshop consisted of an enclosed courtyard of white gravel on which sat six corrugated steel half cylinders arranged in an allée, vintage Nissen huts got for scandalous expense from Australia.

Rosen-Montag’s people translated without discussion the statement I prepared on the historic spirits that inhabit such structures and the benefit to arts groups the city-maintained space would provide after Rosen-Montag closed shop. Then, too, some French guy in the eighteenth century had proclaimed the hut as the foundation of all architecture. The generators behind the huts hummed in my ears when I lay down to sleep.

Rosen-Montag’s heavily locked-up site west of the Reichstag had been photographed from above and everything below the surface had been explored. Thousands of photographs, drawings, slides, blueprints, maps, and models were stored in their own hut back in the embassy quarter. Only two of the seven structures he was working on had been completed, a disused railroad garage and an old dairy. The city had had to buy them, at inflated prices, from the absentee owners because Rosen-Montag would start at no other point in his plans. He was still haggling with the authorities about the number of square meters of government-controlled property they were going to let him express himself on.

No matter what he was asked at the inaugural press conference that I had seen a film of, Rosen-Montag in reply praised the Berlin Senate for its vision. By the time he rose from behind the bank of hostile microphones it was as though he’d come to support the embattled Senate, the defenders of culture and historical truth, rather than the Senate having boldly hired him to do Cicero knew not what.

Rosen-Montag was so good-looking and charming he could get away with anything. He set great store by his having been born on the day of Germany’s unconditional surrender. It had been a bleak December day when he finally opened his workshop to journalists, but he stripped off his sweater and took questions in an overcrowded, steaming hut with his shirt unbuttoned to his belt. Aviator sunglasses crowned his head. His hair was all volume and he had a long stride and big feet. The women patrolling the huts knew where he was at all times, and no one was more alert to his movements than his wife.

She had been Rosen-Montag’s assistant on a project to reinvigorate a dangerous barrio in Rio, a project abandoned after a member of his staff was shot and killed. She’d become his project manager and his second wife and she kept a cold eye on the young women who followed him everywhere with clipboards and black binders thick with his drawings, musings, shopping lists. We wore discount versions of his elegant fitted clothes—black jeans, black T-shirts, black jackets, lustrous black leather overcoats—but we looked like a United Colors of Benetton clothing ad nonetheless, because Rosen-Montag liked to lace his German and French workforce with faces from around the globe—Japanese girls, Brazilian girls, an Egyptian girl, a guy from Bhutan, me.

Rosen-Montag had no interest in men; he was not even competitive with other men, though he loved to interrogate dead great ones, Schoenberg, Schinkel, Marx. He did the thinking and sketching; apprentices of different grades turned his drawings into specs and his diagrams into models, no women among the apprentices. He also did not hire women for the heavy jobs and his wife was careful not to either. But women ran his life, girls handpicked by his wife according to undisclosed criteria. He went everywhere with an entourage; white smoke wreathed the yellow bulbs in his hut as the slender women around him picked tobacco from their tongues and debated what appointments he could cancel in his impossible schedule.

The huts were meticulously clean. No roll of tracing paper was allowed to remain where it had fallen; every scrap of foam core had to be captured. But sometimes things smelled like a poker game because of the beers mixed with the smoke. I especially loved the stink of the apprentices and architecture students in black woolen sweaters that they hadn’t cleaned all winter. The two studio huts where blueprints dried and models were constructed smelled of boys’ armpits and ammonia. In the narrow canteen hut, any pasta sauce and even cigarettes were overpowered by the mustiness of old Europe, the Europe that Americans got on the plane home and complained about as not taking showers every day.