Black Deutschland Page 2
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.
I could tell that Cello couldn’t quite believe the news that I had been hire
d to work with Rosen-Montag on the book he was writing about his current project. I would also do a series of interviews with him as the work progressed. She was somewhat reconciled to my galling reversal of fortune, because I referred to myself as a cog in the wheel of Rosen-Montag’s propaganda ministry. I kept to myself the information that Rosen-Montag happened to have been on the wagon the night we met. He liked that I’d just got out of rehab, the sort of social fact you blurt out when you just get out of rehab and don’t know how to behave.
Cello moved us back to German conversation. I followed her to the front door, where I’d left my four suitcases. To get them on the plane had cost me. Now the bedroom where I’d smuggled in that painted Turkish boy was kept for Dram’s mother and father when they came up to town and needed to rest after lunch, or for Dram’s mother to change before a concert. Those were her sets of Brentano and Hölderlin and Heine in the bookcase. A short corridor to the side of the front door led to a small bathroom with a thin shower and, just before it, a maid’s room, with a sweet window onto the inner courtyard above the narrow bed.
“Dram is pleased,” Cello said, still in German. I was fairly sure she said that my having stumbled upon something interesting to do should keep me out of trouble, if I had the will not to sabotage myself. I was in no doubt that she said Dram would come at six o’clock to put the children to bed and to have dinner with us and then he would go back to the office, as he did every weeknight.
Her German was as intimidating as everything else about her. I’d once heard a boy from Poland converse in English with a boy from Yugoslavia. It was weird to hear English used as a device, with no cultural inflections. Cello would have said that she was making me practice my German, but she was also canceling out our equality. I didn’t know where she got her accent in German, but I was sure it must have been an upper-class one.
Maybe because she never felt that she could depend on her parents, Cello was not the kind of person to waste an opportunity. She always knew where she was. Her will, her application, never failed to impress adults, and her renown as an achiever made her peers a tad uncomfortable in her presence. I mean us, me. There she was, always far ahead, ahead even of my brother. The Negro Achiever was a species of secular saint. To be young, gifted and black, Nina Simone sings.
Cello knew that the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia rejected Nina Simone when she auditioned in the early 1950s. Cello said she heard that the school had long been accepting black students by the time Nina Simone applied and maybe the Curtis faculty’s criticisms of the jazz legend’s playing were fair. I was so shocked when she told me that.
* * *
I helped with the children’s tea that first month, but they remained leery of me. I thought Cello must have said something to them and to the nanny about not going down the narrow hall to the maid’s room anymore.
She had her narcissistic grandmother’s sense of style. In a time of tundra-wide minimalism, her deep rooms were crisscrossed with sofas and colorful textiles and tables large and small and mirrors round and square and chairs thick and thin and bookshelves high and low, one concert grand, one baby grand, and an upright in the so-called nursery off the kitchen. Early instruments and ethnic instruments hung on some walls, but mostly where a drawing or photograph might have been were windows. Sunlight attended the happiness of Cello’s days. Therefore the reception rooms in front had mirrors, but nothing framed, and the hallway leading to the bedrooms in the rear was bare, except for children’s drawings taped up at random. Dram encouraged the eldest to put on socks and slide with him on Sunday mornings.
Cello’s happiness included her status as the possessor/confuser of Dram, heir to a family manufacturing firm, Schuzburg Tools. A branch of the family had become immensely rich building Russia’s railroads. Mentioned in Tolstoy, they perished with the White Army. Dram’s branch of the Schuzburgs had survived because a nail was a nail, a contract a contract, a customer in the right, whether kaiser or National Socialist, NATO or African dictator. The family firm made things most people hardly thought about—hammers of every kind, nuts and bolts and screwdrivers of every size, more and more different kinds of hammers, then hundreds of varieties of electrical instruments.
Cello’s large-faced, husky husband gave up his music studies after his older brother was killed in a drunken accident not far from his home on the Schlachtensee. He rolled his car backward down a little birch-spotted embankment. It hit something and flipped over and smashed him. Dram buried his brother and went to work. His father didn’t ask him to come back. He just did. There was never a question that either of his two older sisters would take over after his brother’s death. Dram never talked forging capacities or galvanization facilities in front of me, but I knew from Cello that under his management the company was beginning to win prizes again and that its hundreds and hundreds of employees in West Berlin and Dortmund were deeply loyal to him. I’d already seen for myself how his father hung on his every word.
More so than my father or my brother, Dram represented to me the man who embraced with gusto his part in the life he’d made. He did not doubt he was entitled to his sense of well-being, his freedom to luxuriate in the squeals of his children, to defy his wife as her protector, to spoil her as his woman, to be indifferent to the domestic help once they’d been vetted. He stood his ground when wolfing at another man over a parking place directly in front of his building. He swung his dick widely in everything he did. Plus, he wasn’t motivated by German guilt. The men in Dram’s father’s family married cultured women, one of whom had recent Jewish-convert blood, which had put her children at risk during the Third Reich. Then, too, it became known in the 1970s that Dram’s mother had assisted people during the war who were hiding Jews and communists in the vicinity of Lake Constance.
Dram never once mentioned to his mother that the brilliant pianist he’d met when he was in graduate school was black. He told his parents that he was going back to Boston to get the woman who was to bear his children and when their taxi drove up Dram’s mother did not exclaim, You’re a Negro. Cello claimed that seven years later her mother-in-law had still not referred to her being black. The only thing she ever said, Cello boasted, was that her grandchildren were going to be beautiful.
Cello’s little sister, Rhonda, was the family knockout. My mom taught her early to grab a leaf or slap a wall, to do something aggressive when men were behind her on a street. Mom worked hard to countermand whatever Cello’s mother had told them about sex, without letting on that she considered their mother on the loose side. To her credit, Cello never saw herself as a beauty, no matter how imposing in her prim voluptuousness she had schooled herself to come off as. The fat girl lived on inside her, violent in her feelings against the rice pudding her children loved.
Dram’s sister played for the company on Cello’s first afternoon in Berlin. He had an upright in his apartment, but he got Cello a practice room with a good Blüthner down in Dahlem. Finally, the family was too curious and one Sunday lunch they begged her to play. This is Cello’s version of events. She doesn’t know why she chose a Chopin nocturne she’d never been able to master and so had never played to her own satisfaction or to anyone else’s, to be honest. When she was telling me this, I noticed in a way that I enjoyed how once again Cello had inserted into a story about herself some criticism meant to show how honest with herself she was capable of being. She was hard on herself. She knew that. It was a fault. She worked on it. Cello said that when she finished the nocturne, Frau Schuzburg came up behind her and whispered to her that she would never forget what Cello was giving up to marry Dram.
To my credit, I did not give in to the bitchiness I felt toward her at that moment. I did not say, What was that? As in, What did you give up? Because I knew she meant her concert career. It never took off, I knew, because she had coughing jags in the wings before she was to sit down to play for performances or just before she was to place herself under a recording microphone. The career she’d never know whether
she could have had or not. I didn’t ask why Frau Schuzburg assumed Cello would be giving it up. I also refrained from asking how she had managed not to have one of her fits when playing for Dram’s family.
Someone once compared her to Philippa Schuyler, the prodigy whose Harlem Renaissance father, George Schuyler, a black journalist married to a white woman, held her up as an example of biological advancement through the mixing or “invigoration” of the races. Cello never spoke to that someone again. Black girls like Mom followed Shirley Temple’s career in the 1930s and 1940s and had time left over to clip stories about Philippa Schuyler and to tune in to her radio broadcasts. But at some point Schuyler decided that her friendless upbringing on raw food and tour dates had been a form of bondage and she stopped playing the piano. She joined the John Birch Society and died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Her mother committed suicide on the second anniversary of her death.
Cello’s sister was Cello’s only relative invited to her wedding on Lake Constance. Mom was very hurt by that.
* * *
I’d come a month early, to settle in, but really to be alone, to drift down memory’s canals while the family was away. But they weren’t going on holiday, after all. And so for those first thirty-one days, my beautiful August, I kept family hours. It had not been blue-black for long when I got into bed with a starchy-feeling towel and I got up when I heard the nanny whining all the way from the kitchen about the mess the children were making already.