by Uwe Johnson
Jerichow called its main street, a narrow cutting from when the forest was being cleared, Town Street.
At breakfast, Cresspahl asked about the weather. He stepped inside the little shops, bought stationery or shirts of a better sort, asked casual questions. He stood for a while on the path behind Heinz Zoll’s yard—Zoll did the higher-end woodworking around here—and had a good long look at the lumber stored in the open shed. He started taking his beer in at Peter Wulff’s pub. Wulff was his age, less fat in those days, a hands-off tight-lipped bartender who observed Cresspahl’s patient waiting the same way Cresspahl did his. Cresspahl wrote a postcard for all to see and gave it to the hotel porter to mail to Richmond. He stopped in to see Jansen, the lawyer. He walked to Rande and had dinner in the City of Hamburg Hotel. He read all the advertisements on the page for the Jerichow area in The Gneez Daily News. He did not slow down when he passed by Papenbrock’s gate, but his walks did take him past it, and after a while he knew that the young man in charge of unloading the sacks in the yard was Horst Papenbrock, the son and heir, then thirty-one years old. Between its receding chin and its receding brow, Horst’s face was as sharply pointed as a fish’s. Through the open window, Cresspahl saw old Papenbrock at his desk, sweating above his comfortable, delicate stomach, his polite nods so vigorous that he seemed to be bowing in his seat. Apparently he did not like bargaining with his aristocratic clientele, or not for long, this Papenbrock who was so cheap that he never bought a car and drove his family to Travemünde for coffee in the delivery truck. Cresspahl did not see my mother. Cresspahl did see my grandmother helping out behind the counter in the bakery, a submissive, spry old lady with a rather treacly way of speaking, especially to children. Here he did nod hello through the open door as he walked past.
and I was never a sheep, Gesine.
They threw you down on your side, they tied your hooves together, they pinned your neck to the barn floor with their knees, they stripped off your wool with dull shears, and you never once opened your mouth, Louise née Utecht from Hageböcker Street in Güstrow, you sheep
Cresspahl knew that Horst Papenbrock and the farmer Griem were Nazis who had to go to Gneez for their street fighting because the Social Democrats in Jerichow were their neighbors, their relatives, their city councilmen. He knew that Papenbrock, with his grain business, his bakery, his deliveries to the surrounding countryside, was the richest man in Jerichow and a moneylender. He knew that history had left no trace in Jerichow except a Napoleonic fortification on the coast, five miles away. He knew that Jerichow could not support a second master carpenter.
Jerichow is surrounded by wheat fields. To the south, past the marsh, are the Countess Woods, then meadows bordered with hedges over six feet high. The weather is maritime. The wind comes mostly from the west, especially in midsummer and winter. It’s cool here. There are more overcast days per year here than anywhere else in the country. It rains less often here than elsewhere in Mecklenburg, and storms are rare. The apple trees blossom late, in mid-May; the winter rye is ripe on July 25. The frost sets in later and leaves earlier than in the rest of the county, but it barely penetrates the soil, because the air is always in motion from the wind, here.
August 29, 1967 Tuesday
There are still town houses dating from the last century on Third Avenue north of Forty-Second Street: four or five stories high, once-elegant brownstone or expensive brick facades, now grimy, the windows smeared and covered with dust, and only the ground floors occupied, with small businesses, snack shops, bars, whose neon signs and awnings conceal the corpses of the buildings above them. The businesses have enough walk-in customers, they could hardly get by on the tenants. The street’s future is supposed to lie in the glass-and-steel office buildings set back atop block-wide ten-story pedestals, stacked high in identical strata starting from the twentieth story, still sixty-five feet wide on the fiftieth floor. The frosted glass and metal between the ribbon windows can look dark blue, gray, green, or yellow; some buildings have brick columns stuck onto the facade at the bearing struts; another distinguishing feature is the names on the ground-floor marble facing. The buildings are easy to dismantle, their names neither inscribed on nor inlaid in the walls, only stuck on or screwed on, for easy removal.
The building in which Miss Cresspahl earns her salary consists of a block-long twelve-story plinth with a terrace atop it, set back, crowned by a smooth tower. The glass between the shining ribs has blue-gray stripes wrapping around it. Most of the windows show the slats of venetian blinds but a little fluorescent light still shimmers through the cracks. From across the street, with her head tilted all the way back, she should be able to make out which two windows are hers, but she always loses count. At street level, half of the front of the building is laid out as a normal bank, behind plate-glass windows taller than the people inside and out, neither tinted nor curtained nor ribbed with blinds, drawing a passerby’s gaze in to the fake-leather seats, low tables, desks on islands of carpet, counters, teller windows under the eye of automatic cameras, and brightly polished giant-frying-pan vault door. This parlor as big as a train station’s waiting room is still empty. The other half of the ground floor is a restaurant, shielding its customers from the light of day with lime-green curtains. The building’s main entrance with its four swinging doors pulls in so many people from the sidewalk that the rest hurrying past get out of step. Behind a wall of pale marble, the foyer opens onto three elevator lanes to the left, the building’s maintenance area branches off in the back, and the right wall is taken up by a long counter selling newspapers, candy, and tobacco products. Every elevator lane is managed by its own supervisor, whose blue-gray uniform bears the company’s name in embroidered script above the heart. She manages to nod to him. As she enters an elevator car, its green light indicating an upward course, she sees the building’s street number set into the floor, intended to alert the passenger if he has made a mistake. Among the approximately twenty-five occupants today, she sees no one she recognizes. When the steel double doors snap shut before her, it is nine minutes to nine o’clock.
The death toll for today is twenty Americans, fifteen South Vietnamese, and ninety-eight North Vietnamese, the latter estimated. The newspaper gives only two names from the list of the dead, who happened to be from the state of New York, as though the exact total counted for nothing really compared to the hundred and ninety-five million citizens of America. The slain Nazi will be permitted a burial of honor at a national military cemetery, since his only crime was incitement to the murder of Negroes and Jews. A Mrs. Hart is opposed to having his grave next to the graves of those who fell in the war against the Nazis. Four Germans have gone on trial in Westphalia on charges of having drowned prisoners and tortured them to death under ice-cold showers at the Mauthausen concentration camp. At least one million American housewives are alcoholics. And this time Stalin’s daughter is in the paper for not wanting $250,000 for a television interview. She’ll do it for free. She seems to have substantial future earnings in view.
– How was work today, Gesine?
Mrs. Williams is back in the office, she didn’t go to Greece after all, she was afraid of the military. A third memo has requested that employees lock their desks during lunch hour and keep their handbags with them at all times because of more thefts on the tenth floor. The latest rumor is that we’ve bought Xerox. My boss had to leave for Hawaii this afternoon, his son is being sent there for R&R from South Vietnam.
– And what did the paper say?
Mahalia Jackson was taken to a hospital in West Berlin.
August 30, 1967 Wednesday
Vietcong guerillas broke into a jail in the northern city of Quangngai and freed eight hundred prisoners. The paper gives the names of four men from the New York–New Jersey area killed in action, but not the total count. The soldiers on guard at the Culpeper National Cemetery in Virginia denied the dead Nazi burial because the party refused to take their swastika off of the hearse; now he is back in the
funeral home.
“Dear Gesine,
I waited for you till eight, then Pamela Blumenroth invited me to sleep over. Please don’t call.
No mail, except for me.
What you need is in the fridge.
Mrs. Ferwalter is mad at you or at me. She hasn’t called for a week.
We have to do something about D. E. He doesn’t believe that you were in New Jersey alone.
The phone lines got crossed again. This time he said his name was George and that he wanted to talk to a Luise. He was calling from Rhode Island.
Were you in New Jersey alone?
If there’s any news about Mahalia Jackson’s condition, bring it for me.
This Griem, from Jerichow, did you know him? Is he still alive?
The truth is I only waited until seven thirty. What kind of office is that, where people have to stay working till eight at night? Is that worth it for us?
With affectionate greetings,
Mary Fenimore Cressp. Cooper”
She uses British slang, “fridge,” out of loyalty to London SE.
What are the Chinese doing? In London they are starting a fight with the police, attacking them with baseball bats, iron bars, and axes. The one holding the ax is lanky, with glasses, still a schoolboy.
How did the Chinese find a baseball bat in England?
August 31, 1967 Thursday
The Vietcong are continuing their attacks in the South. The Soviets are conducting a secret trial of three writers. The Chinese forced a British chargé d’affaires in Peking to bend his head by pulling down on his hair—in retaliation, they say. Six other cemeteries rejected the body of the Nazi leader; the party has had him cremated and his ashes are under armed guard.
What kind of person does Gesine picture when she thinks of The New York Times as an aunt?
An older person. Teachers at the high school in Gneez used to be called “Auntie”—ladies of a certain age, humanistically educated, good-naturedly disapproving of the course of things but only in one-on-one conversations, helplessly. Once they had wanted to change the course of things: by studying at the universities under the Kaiser, by camping out and canoeing with men and without marriage certificates, by earning their own living despite the concerns of their middle-class families whose articles of faith they themselves defended against the changing times once they reached the same age and their hair turned gray and they tromped around in comfortable shoes and slacks whenever possible: It doesn’t do to put a revolution in the saddle, it might not have had enough riding lessons. And you have to think of the horse, too. It’s true that expressing such an opinion during class would have led to their dismissal. They were called Auntie with a certain indulgence, not unkindly, not unsympathetically. The term was malicious when applied to kindergarten teachers, those champion caregivers. Unathletic boys and overly timid girls were called Auntie, too, as a term of contempt.
That said, The New York Times strikes Gesine as like an aunt from a good family that has acquired a certain fortune on the backs of others but not in any brutal way, simply as the age dictates. It has rendered services to every government, and every government is in the history books. This surviving aunt carries on the family tradition. Gesine pictures age, a gaunt figure, a deeply lined face, a bitter twist to the mouth, but elegant dark clothes, an insistence on hairpins, a scratchy voice, smiles only in the corners of the eyes. Never, never losing her temper. In her bearing, in the way she holds her legs, she flirts with her age—a sign of her experience. She has been around, looked life straight in its tight-lipped face; no chance of anyone pulling the wool over her eyes. She has had her affairs but was certainly no adventuress; they were in the best hotels in Europe, as befit her station; that’s all in the past now. She so obviously expects respect that she almost invites one to refuse it. She is a little stubborn, almost pushy when she feels excluded by younger people. She likes the young people to have their fun as long as she is the one doling it out. Gesine pictures a living room, a salon, furnished in Empire style, where the aunt holds court. Everything proceeds in civilized fashion; one listens to one’s elders first. Tea is served, whiskey is served. Then tea again. Old lovers come for memory’s sake, the younger generation for instruction. The servants are fanatically discreet. Auntie smokes (cigarillos) and drinks, the hard stuff too; she gets jokes, except when forced to pronounce them unacceptable in the interests of the public. She keeps up with the times. She can cook, she can bake. Auntie has remained unmarried, a tacit indication of the requirements one would have had to meet. She gives advice on marital questions; she can imagine what it’s like to be married. (Anyway, a music critic’s job is to criticize music, not to write symphonies. Not even sonatas.) She is modern. (Gesine has no such aunt in her family.) This is someone you can go steal horses with whenever the law demands horse thefts.
And yet this person is not only pleasant.
Her bearing is useful, educational.
She does not raise her voice, she delivers a lecture.
On fifteen by twenty-three inches, over eight columns, she offers more than twenty stories for you to choose from.
She does not call an accused person guilty, not yet. Of the two murders a day in the city, she mentions only the instructive ones.
She does not use the president’s first name, at most a murder victim’s.
She describes hearsay as hearsay.
She lets even those she despises have their say.
She talks to sportsmen in the language of sportsmen.
Changes in the weather, too, she points out.
She helps the poor with charitable donations, and investigates poverty using the latest scientific methods.
She decries disproportionate sentencing.
At least she has pity.
She is impartial toward all forms of religion.
She safeguards purity of language—even correcting it in her clients’ advertisements.
She offers the reader at most two pages of ads without a news story (except on Sunday).
She never swears or takes the Lord’s name in vain.
She occasionally admits to errors.
She can restrain herself and call a murderer a controversial figure, from brigadier general up.
She drank in propriety with her mother’s milk. Why shouldn’t we trust her?
September 1, 1967 Friday
The American commander in South Vietnam says: The North Vietnamese are lying. Radio Hanoi reports US losses (killed, wounded, missing) as 110,000 for the first six months of this year. He says: 37,038.
As of today, New York State’s divorce law of 1787 is no longer valid. Those who marry now have to wait two years before they are free again.
You don’t have to marry me: D. E. says: you should just live with me.
D. E. sends flowers, telegrams, theater tickets, books. He takes Marie out to eat, has made friends with Esther, listens to Mr. Robinson’s stories about his military service in West Germany. D. E. lives in New Jersey but spends a lot of time in the bars around Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway, two blocks from Riverside Drive. On the phone he can almost always say: I’m in the neighborhood. D. E. is close to forty, tall, dressed in Italian jackets and Irish tweed, with a long, fleshy, patient face above which he wears his gray hair long and parted, as if trying to conceal his age. D. E. weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds and moves nimbly on small feet. D. E. drives a large English car, the colors of his suits are carefully chosen, he lacks for little. D. E. works in the arms industry.
D. E. says: I work for the Defense Department.
Gesine first heard D. E.’s name in Wendisch Burg, in 1953. He’d gone to the same school that Klaus Niebuhr and the Babendererde girl had had to withdraw from that spring; he was about to be expelled from his physics program in East Berlin after standing up in a faculty meeting and calling the Babendererde case a violation of the constitution of the German Democratic Republic (on the part of the German Democratic Republic). Not then, but after
the June 1953 uprising, he left the country. He will have made his decision using a list of positive and negative factors, the same kind of list that he draws up today when he can’t make up his mind between different cars or houses or political opinions. Back then, what stood in one column was Wendisch Burg, Socialism in the East German fashion, and a drawn-out love affair with Eva Mau; on the other side of the balance sheet was: The prospects for my education here are not good. So he hadn’t had to make up his mind himself.