“You must hear this,” Rosen-Montag said in English, without preamble, as though I’d just come back into a room. He stood and lit his cigarette. I had mine. Cello remained seated, though she looked as if she were slaloming in place.
Cello said in German that when Peter Serkin’s father, Rudolf Serkin, made his debut in 1921, he played the fifth Brandenburg. He then asked Adolf Busch what he should play as an encore. The Goldberg Variations, the violinist who would be his father-in-law said. “So Serkin did. All thirty. Busch had been joking. When Serkin finished, six people were left in the halclass="underline" Adolf and Frieda Busch and Mr. and Mrs. Artur Schnabel and Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein.”
“You understand? Tell him your idea for ‘Tunes over the Water,’” Rosen-Montag said to her.
We smoked as Cello leaned farther back on her hands and faced the heavens, her enormous, firm breasts settling back down. She explained that barges of musicians on the Spree would serenade Lessingsdorf at its opening. There could be a competition. Mom would have said that she was wearing an excuse for a sleeveless pink dress.
Their eyes were wet with tears. Rosen-Montag had been bouncing on the balls of his long feet the whole time and Cello’s mounds of brown dough rolled with her laughter. More of her hair was twining its way around her throat. We finished our cigarettes and Rosen-Montag waved me off and sat beside Cello’s tresses. I didn’t really want to kiss her on the cheeks, but I wanted to be sure and needed to get close enough to inspect her pupils. She sat up and hugged her elbows, as she used to as a teenager.
“West Berlin is a very small town,” I heard Cello say in German as I walked away. The seats in Scharoun’s Philharmonic Hall went down toward the stage. It was not the kind of place where anyone’s head got in your way. Nevertheless, what a story Cello’s and Rosen-Montag’s hair was going to make for the people who’d been near them while Serkin played softly, arctic clear and softly.
* * *
“Use value is a fiction created by exchange value,” Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., once said, patting my shoulder. “May the funk be with you always.”
* * *
The seven hundred and fifty specially invited guests about whom Rosen-Montag was ambivalent wandered around his shining garage that had been sectioned into multilevel open office spaces; his vaulted dairy; and his airily reconstructed workers’ houses on a green square. And everyone was utterly charmed by the giant panels that filled Rosen-Montag’s grid. Trompe l’oeil after trompe l’oeil showed the arches and long French windows of elegant, affordable houses that might be there someday. The renovations around the Gendarmenmarkt in East Berlin were only slightly more real, I heard someone say. His painted houses should have given off a retrograde quality, but what he planned in brick seemed as airy as any glass box.
The late-June sky admired itself in the river and Lessingsdorf was a hit. It was an urban playground, a carnival, a peep show, a hall of mirrors. It offered West Berlin the sort of party the city adored. Shirley Bassey and an unafraid brass section were what people we didn’t know also wanted. That party went on, very well dressed, among Rosen-Montag’s elegant, happy-making imaginings. No one knew how he pulled these things off. They were giant magic tricks. His simple constructions and meters of bright paintings on canvas mounted on wood had a way of feeling like time travel.
There was no music on the water. But Rosen-Montag had won his fight to have reflective sheeting line the opposite bank of the Spree. Meanwhile, the crowd in Lessingsdorf was so sophisticated, either in black tie or black punk or black chic, there was so much middle-aged magenta hair and youthful blue hair that people didn’t want to be middle-brow and say the obvious — Potemkin Village — as they walked around the narrow streets of movie-set lighting and deep gutters and vaulted brick ceilings intended to speak to the brick passageways and courtyards of the serene School of the Arts campus at the end of the bus line outside Havana, Cuba.
No one had to be told not to leave a glass or a napkin on the sidewalk. This was a German party, after all. Not even the anarchist youth who’d been allowed to crash would litter. Rosen-Montag would not permit bins or cylinders, though codes required them. They lay under colorful plastic in the middle of one of those blocks. There were, however, terra-cotta urns all over the place, filled with sand where people plunged in their cigarettes. They marked Rosen-Montag’s progress as he moved around on the opening night of his creation, a reenactment of a Belle Epoque pleasure garden, a combination of fantasy and license, more than a twentieth-century revision of the eighteenth-century style.
It was clear I’d not seen Cello a week ago, though she must have known or been known to some in the concert audience, that gorgeous black American woman married to a distinguished patron of the city’s music. To her credit, she looked me dead in the eye. She wore new glasses, ultrahip frames from Milan. She took them off for me to admire. Her eyes were turned-off burners. I offered to take her and Dram over to Rosen-Montag and his wife to say hello. They’d said hello to the Rosen-Montags and to the governing mayor and his wife at the same time, but they thanked me for offering to be of service. Dram made a somewhat ironic bow. I’d forgot that his father tended to know the residents of Bellevue, the nearby Berlin home of the president of West Germany.
But his congratulations on the success of the Lessing Project were sincere. I could tell. He even found something to say about the book. The trick was to let Dram and Cello stream away before I had to talk about where I was living or they had to ask what I planned to do next. Their retreat was framed by forced perspective into gardens and side paths that did not exist. People looked back at Cello after she’d gone by, trying to name which diva or tennis star’s girlfriend she was.
I finally found Manfred and Irma in one of the large white marquees set up on the approach to the Hansa Bridge. He was pulling her arms down toward the floor, making her head bounce a few steps. He was telling her that nothing was finished, that he still had work to survey. He saw me and let her go. He went on with what he was saying, his normal accent full on.
Irma held up her hands, as if to say, No further explanation required. He reasoned with her, an unlit cigarette in his fist. She was to enjoy the party while he went around to see what tasks he would face in the morning, when the work was to continue. He said he had to find that person from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
He kissed her hair and muttered for me to look after her. She wiped her eyes with her hands and sat. I pulled up alongside her, both of us looking at the slit where he’d stalked out. Sometimes you have to overcome your fear of saying the obvious.
* * *
By her old age, Sissieretta Jones had run out of money. She sold her houses. She sold her jewels and her medals, one by one, then in lots.
* * *
To kill a buffalo bull you must first cut off its tail when it is at full speed. Cello’s hair smelled of smoke. Maybe I was losing my sense of smell, but I detected smoke on her breath.
“Where have you been?”
Her practice room, she said.
Anyone could see that she had been crying. She was nearly an hour late. I wasn’t alone in the hut and was glad of it. They were packing up the enclave for Rosen-Montag’s archives. The billboard advertisements along the perimeter from corporate partners that Rosen-Montag had had his final preopening tantrum about were going up. The show was over for us now that the public was lining up to see his futurist village of good taste.
I guided Cello to the same empty restaurant in the hotel near the Zoo Station that Hayden had taken me to. Her driving was a worry. Rosen-Montag famously bunked off the day after his openings. Even before the party, it was clear that his wife was relieved to be getting him out of town.