Hayden was very cute. I liked him right away. He smelled wonderful, and his burgundy linen loved his lean body. A native of Brooklyn who’d gone through Juilliard, he was looking for funding for his latest piece, In a Country Garden Counting Tiles on an Adjacent Roof, a three-hour work for unaccompanied chorus singing motets in the Bruckner style. I couldn’t tell how serious he was about anything he said and he wasn’t going to help me out. He had beautiful cherry lips, a beautiful smile.
I noticed that he looked down to the balcony where Cello and Rosen-Montag were laughing in full view of every satellite in the Clarke Belt. Hayden had been waiting for it. Rosen-Montag’s wife gave in and took her demitasse out to join them. Hayden’s smile at me got wider. It was as though he’d just taught me something. I imagined Rosen-Montag’s entourage waiting in the street below, like a team of horses.
Hayden slapped my wrist and called me “child.” He told me that clearly I needed to get out and he would chaperone me gladly. I knew he was going to tell Cello the next day that he was right, I was definitely not his type, but we could be friends. He loved Scharoun’s Philharmonic Hall. It looked to him like Noah’s Ark. He loved Berlin, he said, and no matter where he worked, he considered it his base. He stabbed out most of his cigarette and rolled his eyes about Samuel Barber, whom I’d just discovered. The slow movement of the Barber quartet, live or recorded, was played at every memorial he went to in New York lately. The Adagio for Strings was almost a reason not to go to New York.
I think when we came in Rosen-Montag was saying that twenty-two thousand miles into space is private property. Dram called us to order and said that everyone in Berlin was thinking of the ill winds from the Ukraine. How could parents not be in despair. Europe had been at peace for more than forty years and that was a miracle. Few in his profession had done as much as Herr Rosen-Montag, he said, to goad us into thinking of our future in the language of the green earth. I laughed a little bit after everyone else.
“Remember Franz Josef Strauss”—Cello quickly explained to me in English that he was a right-wing Bavarian politician—“and his ‘Better a Cold Warrior than a Warm Brother,’ an attack on gay people and an endorsement of a nuclear world.” Dram gestured in the direction of Hayden and me, the two black men in the room. Cello was simultaneously translating in my ear and Dram was saying, to a dinner party, that it was a time to express solidarity with the Russians as fellow Europeans. If Chernobyl taught us anything, it was that we were interconnected. Rosen-Montag clapped the heartiest of all. Dram held out his hand to Cello, but she shook her head and blew him a kiss and stayed with us, applauding him.
Cello was dressed in a fantastic array of light apron over stitched bodice over red silk slip, her legs in silver fishnet and her feet in black kid slippers. Dram, however, undressed for dinner. He created in the kitchen and left the devastation to their cleaning lady, who’d been an anesthesiologist back in Yekaterinburg. She’d been a wreck for days. Because Dram made pitching in seem like an upper-class trait, I pretended not to notice that no one helped me either to clear or to serve after the first platters and bowls had been carried festively to the table. I did service, from the chilled consommé to that fraternity-sock cheese. It didn’t matter, just as not drinking white wine with them or not being Hayden’s type didn’t matter.
* * *
I hollered that he opposed the placement of buildings in relation to nature instead of in relation to themselves and the streets. Manfred yelled back that he threw a bug down in the dirt of the Mark Brandenburg and told us to pick it up. I sometimes wondered what the lights of West Berlin must have looked like at night from the surrounding East Bloc — dark villages of the Mark Brandenburg, the old state and ancestral seat of the long-deposed Hohenzollerns.
The band on the ground floor of the Gropius Building was so loud we had to climb high to get away from it. Manfred said that a party at the abandoned Hamburg station would have been cooler. It was the first sandstone terminal to be built in Berlin. He had taken me into the black pit of the dead structure, but what sounded like bats made me uneasy. He held my wrist as he led the way back out.
He was taking the stairs two at a time. He said that it was completely okay by him that, to Rosen-Montag, Thomas Jefferson was the inventor of the street grid and not the author of the United States Declaration of Independence. He slammed his empty plastic cup and it popped back up at him. “Death to tyrants.”
I told him about Sally Hemings, the slave mistress to Jefferson the slaveholder and the half sister of his dead wife.
Manfred said Rosen-Montag also fucked his slaves. It was the only thing he knew about the Romans.
There was an uncrowded bar on the third floor and nothing on the walls, so people were smoking. They were smoking all over Berlin. The winters in Berlin smelled of coal and the horrible gasoline of East Germany. Coal went away in the spring, leaving the smell of tobacco to get stronger. East Bloc cigarettes and cigars were as noxious as its fuel. The stench was vital enough to float across the border. I told snippy Americans who backed away from my breath that I’d moved to Europe just to smoke. As far as all those people in the cafés, restaurants, bars, discos, kitchens, beer gardens, and offices of Berlin were concerned, Marlene’s eyes were still fluttering as she got lit up, Emil Jannings’s cheeks were sunken as he pulled on a torpedo-shaped cigar, and Zarah Leander had dangling from her mouth a long white tube of tobacco in need of a match.
Manfred ventured that I smoked Reynos because I knew that Europeans rarely bummed menthols. Furthermore, he added, black people loved the taste of menthol. He waited. I laughed. He was happy. He’d been able to say it and do me the courtesy of maybe expecting manful indignation in response to his having taken liberties with my culture. “Jed, Mann.” He gave my wrist a hard squeeze.
When I came back from my voyage to the men’s room, some stacked but not-pretty American girl had taken my seat. He’d studied in America for four years. I heard him tell her, “Had Byron lived, he would have gone to teach in America. He was thinking of America. He certainly would have made a lecture tour. And he would have been prosecuted for sexual harassment. Possibly of little boys.”
Right there in the museum, someone passed me a nasty-tasting joint, the flavor of burning human hair.
The American bunny wanted to dance. She identified the blaring sound as a country-western spoof, “The Other Sofa Comes on Friday.” I ignored her look when they got up and I followed them. A girl was always going to want to save him. She was short.
When we wedged our way downstairs, Manfred murmured into my neck that he preferred to go somewhere quiet than to stay on at Rosen-Montag’s ego-insane party. The American chick could not believe that her lusciousness had not moved him. I was to look for Cello, but even she in slippers from Damascus didn’t matter. We left what Manfred said was a double funeral. Rosen-Montag’s reputation would be nowhere soon and the Gropius Building had been so successful at hosting temporary exhibitions that it was to become a permanent space for traveling shows.
That I had had what in AA would qualify as a “slip,” because of that joint, also didn’t matter. Manfred pressed my knee in the taxi. We went back to his neighborhood pub and discussed German history. Moonlight changes the shape of a river, Twain said.