We were standing in the restaurant parking lot with cups in our hands. We let the whine of saws and the smell of wood and metal at high temperatures from across the tracks distract us for a while. Manfred squinted at the towers in the trees and said that Rosen-Montag had ended the shorter-than-expected lecture tour with a chant: “Tear down the Hansa Quarter.” The Hansa Quarter and I were born the same year.
* * *
“Pancake days is happifying days.” There was a Colored Folks’ Day or Negro Jubilee Day at the Chicago World’s Fair in August 1893. It was put on after considerable protests from blacks. Indians were part of the World’s Fair, if only as trophies, humbled Gauls. But there was no mention of slavery. Frederick Douglass pointed out that there was no mention of the progress black people had made since slavery either. Because of the insult of the World’s Fair’s indifference to black Americans, they were urged to boycott what some were calling Watermelon Day.
Sissieretta Jones, the greatest black soprano of the day, had been scheduled to appear on Colored Folks’ Day in Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an opera in which Uncle Tom was to be burned alive. It started out with everyone believing in his own promises. It ended up a confidence game. The producers didn’t have an opera to stage, though they sold tickets.
Sissieretta Jones arrived weeks later, sang “Ocean Thou Mighty Monster,” and then got out of town with the money. Some people came just to see her gown. Her costumes were sculpted creations, as Beaux Arts as the pavilions. She could handle a long train and she liked to finish her satin front with every jewel she owned, every medal she’d ever been awarded, dozens of sewn or draped pieces. Stagehands were honored to carry her into place before the curtain rose. She shimmered and glistened in the sidelights. Then she breathed.
* * *
I thought about the car wrecks I’d been in, my amazement at being thrown around, at being caught up in the old story of action and reaction, impersonal unless you believed in the gods, in their antipathy. Less than a year earlier I’d announced to the ChiChi that I’d taken Jackie O as my Higher Power because Mrs. Onassis never gave an interview. She knew how to keep things to herself. I was sorry I’d been flip. To be speechless was an expression of powerlessness, not pride.
I’d had another flop. Six people came to my hotel talk about Faner Hall at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. Nobody came from the IBA or the Lessing Project except for Manfred and Irma. I’d tried to strike an unbothered tone. But I couldn’t pull it off in a dusty side room that had once been part of something bigger. I was too proud of my interpretation of the gigantic Southern Illinois University classroom building to call off the talk to many empty ballroom chairs.
Faner Hall was a betrayal of the deconstructed building because the steel and concrete so plain on the outside protected a maze inside. Famously, people got lost in it. Twenty minutes was the most the eight of us — a janitor waited by the light switch — could manage. Manfred said he couldn’t follow what I was trying to say about Louis Kahn and that a visual component would have helped because Faner Hall was unknown in Germany. And once you’d walked through the white, green, and red ruined arch leading to the Hotel Stuttgarter Hof, you’d had that Berlin experience, too.
The May Day riots in Kreuzberg on the part of labor unions and anarchist youth would have been another Berlin experience, but in my belief in mistakes and punishments, I went back to the AA meeting in Dahlem instead. I didn’t come from a black family that prayed. Jesus was not in our closets. I went to Dahlem to protest. My Berlin dream was floating on the river. Either I sat still or there was no in-between. I was on the verge of having one of those AA breakdowns, but something held me back. It was shaming enough that Odell’s session buddies probably remembered my Ethel Merman imitation from my drinking days. Big Dash did. I couldn’t let myself lose it in front of the two black American noncom officers who were still coming to this Saturday evening meeting.
They nodded in unison; I nodded in return. That was somehow enough. Their solidarity with me restored me. This would forever mark out my generation of black expatriates — we exchanged silent greetings on the streets and in the cafés of Europe, even when young black American corporate lawyers living in Cheyne Walk or on Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street no longer wanted to have any idea why we would. But that night the presence in the AA meeting of two black soldiers urged me to compose myself.
Berlin did not see me weep for myself and repaid my adherence to its code with news of a room for rent down in Friedenau, almost the end of the U-Bahn line. An acquaintance of Irma’s had wall-to-wall blue carpet throughout his apartment. My shoes were to remain on a mat outside the front door, but I deposited them in a plastic bag at the threshold and took them to my peaceful room, where two windows looked out onto a shady street of small parked cars. My new landlord was from East Germany and spoke no English. I could of course use the bath and the toilet, but the rest of the apartment, including the kitchen, was not part of the deal.
I made myself useful, doing errands at Rosen-Montag’s wife’s command. In the company of a roadie in between jobs, I delivered to bookshops and institutions around West Berlin stock of Rosen-Montag’s book, the very work I was supposedly an editor of, and his books of drawings and blueprints concerning the Lessing Project. I missed my books and started to buy new ones. I walked through Lessingsdorf a little at a time and then took the subway from the Hansa Quarter station to the Zoo Station. There I had half a pizza. Then I went back down to Friedenau. In a matter of days I had a routine, just as AA advised. Long before dark, I raised the drawbridge between me and life as it was being led around me.
But my landlord was an usher at the Philharmonic Hall. Once persuaded that our tenant arrangement was okay, he got me into concerts. Sometimes, when the lights went down, I slept. I no longer accepted my shame about having done so. I was at home in the city, I insisted to myself. Then sometimes it was true what musicians said, that a live performance could teach you something about how a work was constructed. Music could do more than relieve your solitude or comfort you. It took you on a journey and made you a part of something beautiful.
One night in June, the crown of Scharoun’s hall was golden in its spotlights. The Wall, the twelve-foot-high continuous concrete barrier that split Potsdamerplatz into two identical, empty sides, was right behind us, bright on one side, dark on the other. The happy audience of the pianist Peter Serkin overtook demonstrators giddy from waging what they thought of as battle with the riot police. The U.S. president had spoken in front of the Reichstag that afternoon, the top of the Brandenburg Gate visible behind him. Young Berlin had been protesting his presence all day long, marching through the Tiergarten, chanting by the Wall.
A couple stopped to light up, praising the power of Serkin’s introspective Beethoven Opus 109, and five or six rubber-headed Reagans thundered past us, running for the cover of the trees and the safety of back courtyards beyond them. I could see black police vans on the other side of the church square and teams of policemen in tight black gear holding back dark German shepherds. Not the everyday police in green jackets. Someone threw a bottle. It didn’t seem like the police wanted to play anymore. They were no longer giving chase to the slogan shouters in Halloween masks.
I ambled into the dark of the Kulturzentrum. The laughing hair made me look. They were impossible to miss, sitting on the wide white steps leading up to the Fine Arts Museum. I was passing too near Cello and Rosen-Montag.