My trove of Chicago basketball remarks had little value in the international marketplace of sports. Yet I refused to exit Odell’s orbit. I’d waited for Bags, stepped into the kitchen with him and Zippi, bought him a drink, but I would not get lost. Zippi was back down by her cash register, arms folded. Even barricaded inside the ChiChi, I could feel that a clear spring night in Berlin was about to happen, that the downtown streets were gleaming with what West Berliners considered traffic. Cars had been controversial in the winter because of the smog attack. But now people could breathe again. Working mothers were stopping at the butcher’s; divorced men were hurrying home to telescopes; lights in big apartments were going on.
I’d missed it, not shared in a Berlin winter of hardship, the high-pressure system of Central Europe. Odell’s guys drew closer together and left the rest of the bar out. The music got a little louder. More German women entered, staff of some kind from a nearby discount department store, ChiChi regulars getting their weekend binge going a day early. I waited until no one could hear me. I asked Bags if I was talking to a new daddy.
He said the woman he lived with didn’t care that he’d got another woman pregnant so long as he stayed where he was, with her. He had a son and daughter back in the States, he said. They were teenagers. Where they lived people had only one reason to want a handgun. “A motherfucking rifle won’t motherfucking fit in your glove compartment.” He pressed his nozzle of fingers against my temple.
* * *
To continue the celebration of the second anniversary of my not having had a glass of white wine, I was prepared to burn off more of what I’d got from Bags. Manfred put my glass of water before me and pointed at the little rectangle of hashish I’d unwrapped.
“Irma is against stuff,” he said in German.
I put it away. “Here progress has come to die,” I repeated, in German.
If Venice was a museum of the Renaissance, then Berlin was the museum of Modernism. “Na, ja, Mensch,” Manfred finished.
I was familiar with his rap and enjoyed the feeling as I listened to him that I could comprehend a complex argument in another language. Manfred once took me down to Free University to sit in on a lecture given by Klaus Heinrich, a philosopher and a cult figure among students in West Berlin. After der Herr Professor said good afternoon in German, I understood not a single word of what he went on to say for over an hour. I didn’t even hear conjunctions — and, or — I was so stunned by the isolation my ignorance had pitched me into.
After I left for Chicago, Manfred carried my books down to his storage cubicle in the cellar. There were various plants around his apartment, signs of the blonde oncologist’s presence in his life. I took the first opportunity to get out of their way. Her greeting when I got back had been warm, but clearly Manfred was under orders to let me make my own arrangements for dinner. He offered to take me with him in the mornings and bring me back to Schöneberg in the evenings and that was going to be enough.
To get out of their way, I let one of the girls at Rosen-Montag’s Nissen enclave put me in touch with a lesbian friend who was looking for a roommate. The futon I borrowed from Manfred filled the tiny room. I spent my life there crawling around on it. But the place was not far from Manfred’s. He could keep an eye on me, he said. I reminded him that he was a year younger than me. He said he was the one who defended his older siblings with his fists against their asshole father. The bony lesbian whose roomie I’d become fretted that I was too uptight an American for her liberated lifestyle, symbolized by her having painted her walls bloodred and taken the door off the bathroom.
In spite of himself, Manfred was protective of Lessingsdorf, Rosen-Montag’s mad partial grid, his intersections of illusory and real places. Manfred cared about how things turned out. Lessingsdorf was being billed as “The Interrogation of a City.” Rosen-Montag’s foundation people loved it. Everyone loved it except Rosen-Montag. He hated everything; his vision was being betrayed at every corner. He and his wife and principal engineers would bluster at one another in the cold. Rosen-Montag would storm off, disappear, sometimes for hours, or whole nights. For some reason, his famous cool was gone. Manfred loved the long hours, the unreasonable demands on the workforce to meet deadlines. People were going crazy. Not since the Olympic Stadium, I joked to Manfred. It was notorious. He didn’t laugh.
I’d missed the smog and I’d missed out on the bonding that went on among the workers of the Lessing Project in the desperate winter months. Manfred was still going to look out for me, the unsuspecting American adrift in the unrepentant Fatherland, but he was busier than ever. No matter what he said about Rosen-Montag, he saw himself as poisonously German in his sense of duty.
As I lit a menthol cigarette, Manfred scooted away a little and continued, saying that Rudolf Hess defined a leader as someone who can’t empathize with other human beings. I was trying not to translate, not to hunt for English words. I wanted to be in the German. But Manfred was talking about Rosen-Montag’s problems with a design review board, and annoyed with my smile of pleasure, as though he’d sung “The Miller Songs” for me alone, he switched to English. “The chief difference between the engineer and the artist is the technical function, which is much stronger than the artistic one.”
Manfred tried to impress me with the bureaucratic destroyer lumbering in our direction. That Rosen-Montag had been summoned for review at this stage was very political, he said. Several such boards had approved his plans over a period of years. They would not be his friends; they would answer to the Senate. Its business would not be announced. The project was to be examined behind closed doors.
Manfred was rationing his cigarettes. He refused to cheat. We weren’t having coffee, because it made him want to smoke. Irma was sensitive to the smell. She would never cease reacting to a childhood spent in the GDR, he’d said when we first talked about her. He pushed open the window onto spring and dusted his hands. Soot lay everywhere in Berlin.
Though it was not as fat as previous ones, I had an envelope of West German marks. I was in Manfred’s kitchen, made neat by his girlfriend. He was glad I lived in his neighborhood, however much it irked him that I said people liked to predict Rosen-Montag’s downfall. It didn’t matter that I waited until she was dead to the world before I visited the lesbian’s toilet-for-the-emancipated. Reinstalled in West Berlin, I again left the world of facts.
* * *
It was a book-launch presentation, but it felt like a tribunal. I could taste in my cigarette behind Rosen-Montag’s hut the atmosphere of trial, of my having to justify my presence in the Lessing Project. Even Manfred was taken aback that my meaningless launch had been put on the schedule of Rosen-Montag’s overawed and therefore troublesome foundation board.
Rosen-Montag’s assistants brought in men in suits and women in sensible heels, their hairdos human colors. But their necks strained toward seats around the conference table as though on leashes. We had no idea why they should listen to me on the subject of what architects call the aesthetic utterance through the art of space. No one had opened the red folders containing my text, but then they’d only just got them, and they hadn’t come with coffee.