by Uwe Johnson
On page 2 of the paper is a photograph showing an American pilot pointing to a map to show where he’d shot down two North Vietnamese pilots and their planes; he is in profile, his lips pulled back from his teeth in what looks to be a tired, satisfied smile. The official death toll of Americans is on page 12 today, seven lines, with no connection to the news immediately above it. LONG ISLAND MAN AMONG WAR DEAD reads the headline. The following report lists twenty-eight.
Marie says:
– My braids are my property, I’ll cut them off when I want to.
– My grandfather was a rich man.
– Mrs. Kellogg shaves.
– I don’t mind the sight of blood. I want to be a doctor.
– My mother thinks Negroes have the same rights, and that’s where she stops thinking.
– Negroes have different bodies than us too.
– President Johnson is in the Pentagon’s pocket.
– James Fenimore Cooper is the greatest.
– My father was a delegate at the European Railway Timetable Conference in Lisbon, representing the German Democratic Republic.
– Düsseldorf-Lohausen is an international hub for air travel.
– My friends in England write to me twelve times a year.
– My mother is in banking.
– My mother is from a small town on the Baltic, but don’t rub it in.
– My mother has the best legs on the whole number 5 bus above Seventy-Second Street.
– Fathers have such a starved look.
– Bring our boys home!
– Sister Magdalena is an old bag.
– John Vliet Lindsay is the greatest.
– My mother always flies in the same plane as me so that we’ll die together.
– Everything would be better if John Kennedy was still alive.
– My best friends are Pamela, Edmondo, Rebecca, Paul and Michelle, Stephen, Annie, Kathy, Ivan, Martha Johnson, David W., Paul-Erik, Mayor Lindsay, Mary-Anne, Claire and Richard, Mr. Robinson, Esmeralda and Bill, Mr. Maxie Fruitmarket, Mr. Schustek, Timothy Shuldiner, Dmitri Weiszand, Jonas, D. E., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
– My mother knows the Swedish ambassador.
– Go ahead and get married, but I don’t want a father.
– I speak Spanish better than my mother.
– My mother wanted to go back to Germany after two years, and I said: We’re staying.
The New York Times reports as national news the death of an industrialist who in 1895 started as an errand boy working for $1.50 a week and died with assets of $2.5 billion, and the paper devotes more than two hundred lines to his memory.
The child walks past the glass wall of the station restaurant. She hasn’t turned her head, she just keeps walking amid the crush of parents and goodbyes. She has gotten skinny; her skin is tanned and dry. She looks older than ten. She is wearing the Vietnam pin on the collar of her wind-breaker. Her braids swing a little from side to side when she tries to look back in the glass panes of the exit. She stops and turns around without letting her left shoulder slip out from under Gesine’s outstretched hand.
Ich ha-be dich ge-se-hen: she says, stressing every syllable, speaking every word equally slowly. She repeats: I sawwww you! and this time gives the verb its own separate, triumphant soprano pitch. She doesn’t look like her father.
August 26, 1967 Saturday
Two US Army sergeants have been arrested and charged with delivering classified documents to Mr. Popov of the Soviet embassy and Mr. Kireyev of the United Nations—in shopping centers, in restaurants, just like in the movies. The Soviet gentlemen have now left the country, by air.
US fighter-bomber raids came within 18 miles of the Chinese border, and the United States lost its 660th plane, and the US secretary of defense tells astonished senators that North Vietnam cannot be bombed to the negotiating table.
Consumer prices rose so much that we had to pay 4.6 percent more in July for fruit and vegetables than we did in June, and a member of the American Nazi Party shot and killed his leader in the act of taking his clothes to a coin-operated Laundromat in Arlington, Virginia, and a swirl of soap flakes fluttered down around the dead man.
Would she have stayed in this country if not for the apartment by the river? Probably not. But after giving up the search, she found the tiny ad promising three rooms on Riverside Drive, “all with a view of the Hudson,” available for one year at $124 a month. The voice on the telephone seemed surprised at Gesine’s questions. Of course the apartment was overrun with applicants, “but we’re waiting to find someone we like.” Children were permitted. “If you happen to be colored, come anyway, don’t worry about that.” On her first trip to New York, Gesine had ridden the number 5 bus down Riverside Drive, the inside edge of a wide artificial landscape that starts with a promenade along the river, then continues, as you move inland, with a multilane divided expressway and practically horticultural on-ramp loops, then a spacious, hilly park fifty blocks long, with monuments, playgrounds, sports fields, sunbathing lawns, and bench-lined paths for strolling. Only then comes the actual street bordering the park, curved in numerous places, rising gently over graceful knolls and hills, stretching out slender exit fingers toward apartment buildings behind farther green islands: a rarity in Manhattan, a showpiece of the gardener’s art, and a street with views of trees, the water, a landscape. Back then, Gesine had hoped to someday live in one of these towering fortresses of prosperity, richly ornamented in Oriental, Italian, Egyptian, in any case magnificent style, their weather-beaten state making them if anything even more dignified. She’d thought she could never afford it.
Broadway, where it crosses Ninety-Sixth Street, is a marketplace of mostly small buildings with lots of foot traffic to the Irish bar, the drugstore on the southwest corner, the restaurant across the street, at the newsstand. Now as then, scruffy men stand leaning against the buildings: thieves and fences, drunks, crazies, many of African descent, jobless, sick, some begging. This Broadway is polyglot, with accents from every continent confusingly tackling American English: as you walk along you can hear Spanish from Puerto Rico and Cuba, Caribbean French, Japanese, Chinese, Yiddish, Russian, various vernaculars of the illegal, and again and again German as it was spoken thirty years ago in East Prussia, Berlin, Franconia, Saxony, Hesse. The child heard a high-bosomed matron, wearing an old-fashioned dress with a large flower pattern and ribbons, harangue in German a short downcast man in a black hat creeping alongside her, and she stood there, forgetting all else, and noticed Gesine’s tugging hand only after a while. It was a whitish-gray morning, with lots of people on the street moving carefully through air thick with moisture, and the intersection promised a memory of Italy on many mornings to come. Ninety-Seventh Street, sloping down to the west, was gloomier between the decrepit, age-worn hotels, dirty with slimy garbage in the gutter and splotchy bags and dented garbage cans on the sidewalk, and at the end it opened onto a wide, undulating field made up of the swift-flowing roadway of Riverside Drive, grassy slopes, wooded parkland. In the playground, children were jumping and frolicking under sparkling jets of water. In the shade by the park fence, families sat and lay on the cool grass. Behind puffy clouds of leaves hung the blue-gray picture of the mile-wide river and the opposite bank. They stood on the street for a while looking up at the building: yellow bricks, a band with an exotic bull pattern winding around it not far from the ground. To live here seemed so out of reach that Gesine mentally started parceling out her savings into bribes, imagined herself entering into complicated and shady dealings
If only I could send you in ahead
You say: You won’t regret it, sir. You say: The advantages of this apartment move me to offer you a token of my gratitude.
You’d never be able to talk like that.
The apartment door opens into a tiny hallway. There is a kitchenette in the wall on the left, with the massive refrigerator at the end. On the right the hallway opens into a large room. Two women Gesine’s a
ge, one with a Danish accent and one with a Swiss, were packing paperbacks into cardboard boxes; they said hello to the child first, serious, polite, as though speaking to a real person. The room has two windows out onto the bright open space above the street, over the park. The apartment continues to the right with a smaller room, behind curtained glass double doors, with another window facing the park. That was the Dane’s bedroom. On the other side of the apartment, behind a sturdy door, next to the bathroom, which has a window looking out over the park, is what was the Swiss woman’s room, with a window overlooking the park. In winter the cliffs of New Jersey are visible through the bare branches, and the breadth of the river and the hazy air can blur the architectural wasteland on the other side into an illusion of unspoiled countryside, a phantasm of openness and distance. Both women were stewardesses being transferred to Europe. They wanted to be able to leave their furniture behind for one year. They wanted to give up the apartment right away. It would not cost anything besides the rent. They asked Marie if she wanted to stay here, and Marie said an English word: “Yes.” The super, a heavyset, somewhat formal black man with a resplendent British accent, gave Gesine exact change, to the penny, for her deposit. The women took them out to lunch and let them help with the packing and then helped them bring their suitcases from the hotel, and the child seemed sad when the women left for the airport that night. After a year they didn’t come back, but we visited the Danish one on our vacation. We had an apartment and didn’t ask any questions. Over the next seven years, handmade pieces replaced much of the factory-made furniture, first in Marie’s room (the Swiss room), then in the middle room too: dark wood, a lime-green bookshelf with glass doors, blue burlap curtains, a fleecy rug on which the child reads the newspaper out loud, lying on her belly, chin in her hands, swinging her legs back and forth. All day long an even, regular, sonic field of rushing rain surrounds the apartment. Here there will be no flooding.
Marie collects pictures from the newspaper, and today she cuts out the one that in the foreground shows the body of the Nazi leader lying on his side, next to his car, and in the background, on the roof of the Laundromat, a policeman standing where the sniper had shot him from. “Rabbi Lelyveld,” she reads out loud from the article, “said that Rockwell was a nuisance rather than a menace.” Then the child says in English, in a lecturing tone: I can hear what the rabbi’s not saying when he says that.
August 27, 1967 Sunday
The East Germans in power say: We are introducing a five-day workweek, forty-three and three-quarters hours, a unique Socialist achievement. The American Nazi Party says: Our leader’s body belongs to the party. The wife of the arrested army sergeant says: It can’t be true, my husband isn’t a spy. The New York Times says: In America the forty-hour workweek was introduced in 1938.
And the weather in North Vietnam has cleared up enough to allow bombing to resume, and the Pentagon suggests that the North Vietnamese are tucking away planes of their own in China, and yesterday morning three men raided the Schuyler Arms Hotel on Ninety-Eighth Street, shot and wounded the night clerk, and got away with $68 in cash. It was about three a.m., two blocks from here.
And The New York Times devotes more than eight full columns, starting on the front page—184 inches—to Stalin’s daughter. This wayward daughter of Attila was sitting, according to the Times, among the Goths on Long Island, in a garden chair under a black oak tree, and she said: She is in favor of freedom, as a general principle.
She says: The New York Times relays: I believe that when people have freedom to do whatever they want, and to express whatever they like, and even have the freedom to riot—they will.
She means the race riots in Detroit.
She was wearing a simple white dress and beige flats as she sat there, in a small group of friends and journalists, expressing her thoughts in a relaxed and cheerful way. The New York Times considers it necessary that we know this.
This hope of salvation says: I like dogs better than cats. I used to have a dog—but no more.
When asked whether she has a bank account, the daughter of the leader of the Socialist camp answers yes. Then she giggles and asks back: Do you?
The New York Times vouchsafes us the information that this voluntary refugee has had to learn how to write checks.
The daughter of the most powerful Socialist statesman says: Although I always felt a personal attachment to my father, I was never an admirer of what was called “Stalinism” as a system.
Then she asked for a glass of water, “with ice, please.”
When she spoke of her children, she lowered her voice and looked off into the woods at the edge of the lawn.
She says: The chief evil influence in my father’s life was what made him leave his priesthood and become a Marxist.
She says: I think a religious feeling is inborn, just as a person is born a poet.
The New York Times, says The New York Times, will print excerpts from Stalin’s daughter’s book starting on September 10. It says so neither at the beginning nor at the end but in passing, on the edge of a page, near the bottom. The New York Times trusts its readers.
August 28, 1967 Monday
In an article on coordinated Vietcong attacks throughout South Vietnam, The New York Times reports the losses on our side (killed or wounded) as 268 (later 248) in Cantho, 79 in Hoian, 1 in Hue, 53 or more in Quangda and Dienban, moderate casualties near Pleiku, 13 at Banmethuot, and light casualties near Saigon, and gives the total as 335.
In the early thirties, Jerichow was one of the smallest towns in Mecklenburg-Schwerin: a market town of 2,151 inhabitants, located near the Baltic Sea between Lübeck and Wismar. It was a backwater with low brick buildings lining a cobblestone street, from the two-story town hall with fake classical fluting to a Romanesque church with a tower like a bishop’s miter, high and sharply pointed and with small protruding gables on all four sides, like a miter. On the north side of the market square, toward the sea, stood a hotel, the mayor’s office, a bank, the credit union, Wollenberg’s hardware store, Papenbrock’s house and business, and the old town center, with side streets branching off from there: Kattrepel, the Bäk, Short Street, School Street, Station Street. To the south was where the original town had been, around the church and the cemetery, five lanes of half-timber houses, until it burned down in 1732, rebuilt only in the nineteenth century with squat red-brick buildings shoulder to shoulder under skimpy roofs. Now the post office was there, the co-op department store, the brickworks past the churchyard, the brickworks owner’s villa. A lot of barns still stood on the outskirts of town, the side streets quickly turned into country lanes, and farmyard gates of old wood stood next to shopwindows on the main street. Townsmen-farmers lived there, on three hundred acres, along with merchants and tradesmen. Cresspahl came in from the south, on the Gneez country road, and drove up the main street past the market square and out the other side of Jerichow, just thinking that this must be the start of town when actually it was where the town ended. There were fields all the way to the sea.
Jerichow was not in fact a town. It had a town charter dating back to 1240, it had a municipal council, it purchased electricity from the Herrenwyk power plant, it had an automatic telephone exchange and a train station, but it belonged to the nobility whose estates surrounded it. This was not because of the fire. The nobility had taken the farms of the peasants who had made the land arable, annexed them to their own land, and made the peasants serfs; the weak princely house of Mecklenburg, up to its ears in debt, had confirmed their right to do so in the Constitutional Inheritance Law of 1755. Of the villages that had made Jerichow strong, only three remained—tiny, impoverished settlements. In this corner of the world, the gentry, in the form of employers, mayors, judges ruled over their day laborers, gained fame as robber barons, gained wealth as industrialists. Jerichow, for its part, had all but reverted to its original state as a village clearing. Its distance from the sea and the larger Baltic harbors were insurmountable obstacles to a sh
ipping trade. Where a Jerichow harbor might have been lay the fishing village of Rande, rich enough even at the turn of the century for a Grand Hotel, an Archduke Hotel, a City of Hamburg Hotel. Jerichow had remained a way station on the road to Rande, a place in which the carriages, now the omnibuses, never dropped off their big-spending summer visitors. Trade did not travel along the narrow country lanes; the large roads bypassed Jerichow far to the south. The nobility liked Jerichow the way it was, as an office, a warehouse district, a trading post, a loading station for their wheat and sugar beets. The nobility had no need of a town. Jerichow got its train line to Gneez, on the Hamburg–Stettin main line, because the nobility needed a means of transportation. Jerichow was too poor to build a sewer system; the nobility did not need one. There were no movie theaters in Jerichow: the nobility did not approve of that particular invention. Jerichow’s industry, brickmaking, belonged to the nobility, as did the bank, most of the buildings, the Lübeck Court Hotel. The Lübeck Court had a septic tank. The nobility bought replacement parts for their machines in Jerichow, made use of the municipal administration, the police, the lawyers, Papenbrock’s granaries, but they handled their important business in Lübeck, sent their children to boarding schools in Prussia, held religious services in their own private chapels, and had themselves buried behind their manor houses. At harvest time, when Ratzeburg or Schwerin was too far away, the gentlemen rode to the Lübeck Court of an evening and played cards at their own special table—ponderous, affable, droning men wallowing in their Low German, their Plattdeutsch. They thought Cresspahl, with his beer, was a traveling salesman because of the big-city license plate on his car.