Outside the hut, people going by avoided me. I smoked and separated sounds. O moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye. By the end of the day I had been reorganized. I’d already found two tiny desks pushed alongside mine for the entourage girls who were members of a new publications team that had been put in place while I was in Chicago. Later, I telephoned Manfred from his pub, but he wouldn’t meet me even when I told him that the lesbian had asked me to move out.
They’d kept driving in East Berlin when the authorities in West Berlin tried to empty the streets for two days back in February. Factories in East Germany did not close. People were going to work by car all over northern Germany, therefore what was the point of further inconveniencing West Berlin, Manfred said every sane person had tried to say.
* * *
One building of the Chicago Exposition was still in use. It was not on what had been the actual fairground, but it was near Jackson Park. I wanted to go there. Dad said, “That’s Jackson Park down the street, Jedediah.” I was twelve years old and I did not know where I lived.
* * *
The press girl was not going to survive the debacle of the afternoon’s architecture tour bus. First, there were not enough places. Manfred snatched my pass. He walked up behind the press girl and slapped the pass against her stomach. She did not turn around, but her hand took over from his as he spoke into her ear. She was facing several important personages who had been promised seats for Rosen-Montag’s lecture in the field on contemporary architecture in West Berlin.
The sun was out in the west, but it was drizzling in the Tiergarten. Manfred ushered me out of the office hut and shoved me ahead of him onto the gravel.
“Have you rescued me from the Order Police?” I said.
“Shove dynamite into red baboon asses,” he said.
I liked it when Manfred took the training wheels off his German and spoke angrily in his northern accent. But he could tell when I’d missed something. That I wasn’t following, that I was just being admiring, frustrated him, even bored him. I was not as smart as he thought.
He asked me to remember how critical Rosen-Montag was of most new architecture in West Berlin. Moreover, his passengers would be admirers of the immensely popular director of IBA, the International Building Exhibition, whom Rosen-Montag had been attacking in recent interviews. “Wrong bus, Rosa Parks,” Manfred said in English and pulled open the canteen hut door.
It was true that Rosen-Montag didn’t like much in the way of recent work. But Berlin would agree with many of his judgments. The Social Science Center complex designed by James Stirling got nicknamed Birthday Cake because of its most distinctive feature: a layered half-moon building. The rounded side faced the street, the pink middle floor sandwiched between a pale blue ground floor and a pale blue top floor. “And they have murdered a wonderful old building to make room. They beat it to death with sledgehammers,” Rosen-Montag said to me at our only private meeting. Yet he had once loved Stirling.
He could still speak well of Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun, but then they were dead. He had some sympathy for their reform movement. That didn’t stop him from misbehaving at the opening of Scharoun’s long-delayed chamber music hall at the Kulturzentrum, that tiny area of library, museums, and concert halls tucked under where the Berlin Wall turned east, cutting through Potsdamerplatz, once one of the busiest squares in Europe. And while I was amused that there was a U-Bahn stop called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he thought Taut’s sprawling housing estate down there a laugh riot of the misguided in materials and design.
Mostly he mourned the decay of the New Objectivity he’d been made by. He didn’t like a building in Kreuzberg that was a highly praised part of the IBA. To him, Bonjour Tristesse, as the curved apartment house on a poor street was called, resembled a diesel engine about to run him over.
Manfred said again that I didn’t want to be anywhere near the blame-thrower Rosen-Montag’s people would strap on after such a public relations miscalculation. He was grubby from inspecting cargo on the river. The canteen was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. He parked me by a noisy wall.
Manfred had a type: the most attractive woman in the room. He barreled steadily past any man to reach the smile he hoped to create in her face. He put his weight into his step. Girls vibrated along with the floorboards at his approach. If they weren’t free, he did not press, but in his stories about the open American road, the spoken-for were the ones who went after him hardest.
I could see that he had our coffees but that he was taking his time rolling a cigarette, taking up a lot of counter space to do it. Then I saw a long-limbed woman, the kind he liked, draw next to him. She spoke. He handed her the cigarette and lit it for her. Then she was following him to my wall. He went back for the third coffee, leaving this new silky blonde and me to establish in declarative English our connections to Rosen-Montag. She didn’t have one. She was an expert in stucco restoration. She’d come from Warsaw for the IBA. She’d heard about the bus tour. She was probably wearing her best business suit.
Manfred inserted a chair between her silkiness and the next guy at our back table. He said the architects and journalists were bound to stone Rosen-Montag, that the bus probably wouldn’t make it as far as the National Gallery by Mies. The Culture Center was not easy to get to, broken off from the rest of the city. I could tell he wanted to ask her how she got permission to travel to West Berlin.
He cupped his hands around his GI’s lighter. He looked up quickly. An uncool guy would have grinned. She hadn’t time to disguise her gaze. His expression remained friendly while he placed a proprietary boot against the leg of her chair and slouched a bit, opening his thighs. He held his coffee cup and his cigarette in the same hand. She waited, unembarrassed.
I was seeing what she was seeing and I’d seen all he’d needed to. She was a beautiful woman. She was much older than we were, poised and vulnerable. It was as though Ingrid Bergman as Anastasia had left her Technicolor court to rendezvous with Burt Lancaster in black-and-white.
The smoke was criminal. Manfred asked in formal German, a contrast to his posture, what she thought of the accelerated construction going on in East Berlin. I only caught the first part of what he said, but I could supply the rest. In preparation for its 750th anniversary, East Berlin had been knocking itself out. New apartment buildings were going up daringly close to the Wall and the medieval quarter had been worked over, the bricks that could be seen repointed. The East could not let itself be upstaged by the West.
Her long answer came with elegant movements of her hands. I couldn’t see her face anymore, she had turned toward him completely, but I could see that he wanted her to see his eyes roam happily over her face. He just held the cigarette, as if forgetting to smoke, and then stabbed it out in his saucer. He folded his hands. After a while he twitched his nose, his cute trick, and reached for the cigarette she was neglecting.
Guys were supposed to understand. He’d stopped paying attention to me as soon as she arrived. I ceased to exist. He was focused on her. I didn’t have to take it personally. He’d blocked out everyone else as well. It was important to him that she saw that and believed him. I was watching, but anyone could. The noise gave them the privacy they needed to let talking become sitting there, a waiting for him.