“Music that has independent voices is a challenge,” Dram went on. “That is why pianists are intense.” His hand sought his wife’s hair. “It is because of the multivoiced music that they play.”
“I thought Busoni’s Bach arrangements had gone out of fashion,” Cello said in German to Hayden.
“Composers like his own compositions,” the African American composer answered the African American pianist, in German.
“Interested in Bach arrangements from the unfashionable period,” Cello said. Hayden appeared to understand what she meant by the unfashionable period.
“Schoenberg’s St. Anne is intense,” Dram said in English, looking at Afer and the others in our big circle. “Over the top at all times. The orchestra sounds giant, giant.”
“E-flat Major and there’s a glockenspiel,” Hayden said in peacekeeping English.
Nobody was smoking. Nothing felt fun, though Duallo sat within smelling distance.
“In the middle of World War One, in Chicago, because he had renounced the eating of meat, Nijinsky’s wife left him,” Lotte said, in very slow English. She appealed to us one by one. “He wanted to go back to Russia and live in a commune of no women.”
People laughed and went back to talking about the film, wanting to start this part of the evening over.
“Did you see him dance?” Father Paul asked in German. He’d given up on English and understood surprisingly little of the film.
“How did you guess that I grew up in a mental asylum.” Lotte had reverted to her Berlinisch.
Lucky did not know who Nijinsky was and said so.
Father Paul stood and made a rapid turn on the front of one foot. Duallo got up, and together they pirouetted twice. The café applauded and I was proud and nervous. I do not know how I knew that Hayden was miffed that I was sitting there as big chested and proprietary as he was. He’d seen where Duallo had been all night — next to me. Maybe I could pull this off, after all, though Hayden knew I’d cheated and was screwing above my sex grade.
* * *
Cello said she was thinking of going to Budapest for Bartók’s state funeral. She confessed to me that she’d hired two German women to wash her hair, like the women in myth around that loom. She had the nicely pliable English nanny take Maximilian out for the afternoon. They went to a boutique with plenty of Agnès B. “She doesn’t take him to Karstadt.” While they were out, the German women would come, the boss one spilling over with “Gnaediges Frau, gnaediges Frau.” They massaged and patted her burden. It took hours to treat and comb, dry and brush.
I called Cello from the café on her birthday. Mom had got up early to phone her. They’d ended up laughing about Mom’s one-man protest against street artist Zeno’s mural in the Fifty-Fifth Street underpass, the same week Cello had a major competition. To Mom, people’s art was a social misdemeanor. Cello remembered when Mom had tried to stop Regents Park, that high-rise complex, and Dad ran home to get his chain cutters. Mom lectured Dad so hard the cops didn’t arrest her. They said they could see he had his hands full. Cello said she asked Mom why her meetings in Zurich with the Hungarian countess could not be as important to her as Dram’s design meetings in Dortmund were to him.
To my credit, I did not tell Cello that it was not too late for her to become an institution builder. She knew that I knew about her and her siblings, but she did not inquire about us, because, knowing Cello as I did, her not letting herself know anything about us kept her from feeling that Dad had perhaps cheated her, that I was hanging out on what was perhaps something that had been gouged out of hers.
It hit me then that Cello had taken me up this time because it excited her to be around someone who knew what she could not as a well-bred girl refer to. She’d worn her tenth wedding anniversary necklace, gold inlaid with tin, only once, and the occasion had been safely in West Germany, in Stuttgart. But Cello did go so far as to say to me that she’d often experienced the tedium of white people who thought all black people were poor until the day before yesterday. I wondered if she dared to say such things to Dram. Somehow I thought not. Bewitched as he was, he nevertheless knew an heiress when he danced with one. As Dram and Afer reviewed the situation in South Africa, with contributions from Yao, Cello couldn’t hide an expression that I hoped the father of her children was unaware of.
“Never worry about how tough the run is going to be if you can work every problem in the book,” Dad used to say.
Lotte told us that in 1937 the SS estimated that there were two million cute boys in the Third Reich.
* * *
The coolest thing I had ever done had been not to tell Cello about Duallo. She was irked that I thought myself so fly. Maybe I could pull this off, after all. Yet I did not enjoy the derisive looks Hayden cut at Cello, who had been a long time getting the message, she was so used to me being alone.
“But wasn’t he with Rhonda?” she whispered as Uwe followed Lotte to the door and gave him a warm get-home-safely. Uwe’s play was awful, but he’d made his stage debut. Dram patted me on the shoulder when I whisked away the chair Lotte had vacated.
My back hurt, not from carrying trays of dirty cups and sloppy beer glasses, but from trying to read lips. Any chance I got, I stupidly cruised by wherever Duallo was, just to connect with him, I told myself, when in fact it was to say to whomsoever to him cometh that the nectar in question was mine.
Father Paul was complaining to Duallo that he was tired of commuting back and forth. He had family and his studies in Austria, but Hayden would not look for work in Vienna. I convinced myself that Duallo wasn’t following his German.
Hayden jumped on him, snarling that nobody in Austria was ever going to give a black man the position someone of his caliber and experience deserved. Father Paul put his hands in his lap. His love was hurt.
I made coffee. The café was noisy. Wooden chairs scraped the unpolished floorboards. The house leader bawled for two beers and two coffees; the area where I worked was slippery. Co-op members had a good time ripping further the remnants of leaflets and old posters glued to the bumpy walls.
Hayden asked me to phone for a taxi. He wouldn’t dream of taking Dram away from his political philosophy and shook hands with Yao, Afer, Lucky, the house leader, Uwe, Dram, and Duallo. He threaded through the configuration of tables to kiss Cello and me, too. Father Paul was like a feather on his palm.
Hayden had seen in the paper that Lessingsdorf was being disassembled, the trompe l’oeil pulled down. There was some controversy over the workers’ houses and warehouse offices and until the disputes were resolved they were likely to remain unoccupied, an addition to the unused in West Berlin, but not exactly real estate that had no value either. I couldn’t see Cello’s face.
Stagnation had changed the occupied city, the house leader proposed to Dram. Stagnation on both sides of the border, the house leader’s partner, the incredible baker, added. Reforms wouldn’t save either side. Their two tired children stood around her, gnawing on the only sweet buns she let them have per weekend. I never translated for Duallo. Fortunately, he’d not asked me to. He said his classes were very, very hard.
Another Co-op member said he wanted to go back to the question of which was the occupied city, East or West Berlin. He propped open the front door as he spoke. The air became colder, but not less smoky. The lights in the café flickered now and then.
For me, it had been an emotionally unsatisfying evening ever since Duallo and Father Paul hugged goodbye. And it wasn’t over. I regretted that I’d not paid attention to the film. At least I would have had that self-respecting experience. I got more orders for coffee and beer and red wine. Duallo came behind the bar to help me, his eyes that I could not read full on me.