Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Gesine had seen him for the first time in the Marienfelde refugee center in West Berlin: a skinny young man with a slim steep head, blond hair at the time, paying somewhat absentminded attention to her by asking her questions about Jerichow and holding forth on political theories with extensive recourse to physics vocabulary. The only thing they could talk about easily was the Babendererde incident. He made no effort to be assigned to the same city as her. She saw him for only two days before he was flown out to West Germany. He apparently told the immigration board: I chose the lesser evil. So they sent him to Stuttgart; he finished his doctorate in Hanover, moved from West Germany to England, and Defense bought his way to the United States in 1960. He did send postcards, sometimes letters, mainly about the actions and exploits of Eva Mau; from Stuttgart, young Mrs. Niebuhr née Babendererde sent reports of D. E.’s string of quick love affairs in a marveling, almost devoted tone. Even today she talks about D. E. as though about an older relative, as though grateful to him for something. Gesine had been in New York for eleven months before he found her while flipping through the phone book, and he invited her out to their first dinner, a hulking, uncommunicative, rather solemn patron. After meeting Marie, he proposed marriage.

  D. E. works in a place called Industrial Park in New Jersey, for a firm involved in the DEW Line. DEW stands for Distant Early Warning, a line of radar stations around the territories of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, designed to detect Soviet rockets in time for an American counterstrike. He must have given the military greater assurances than that he’d chosen the lesser evil before they let him join them and felt their secrets would be safe with him. He is barely a scientist anymore, he is a technician. He earns $25,000 a year by now, and his duties include inspection trips to England, Italy, France, Denmark, and Norway, and someone from the embassy is waiting for him at passport control. According to D. E., his Soviet opposite number sits locked in a military airport, buying and selling technical literature on the black market. His firm can count on government contracts for the improved systems of the seventies, and D. E. can count on the firm’s confidence in his abilities. D. E. does his best to impair these abilities through the regular intake of alcohol.

  The house D. E. offers us is situated by a wide stream in a wooded area of New Jersey. It is an old colonial wooden house, white clapboard and blue slate roof. He owns almost half of it so far. D. E.’s mother keeps house—a shy, bony, finicky woman who learned her English from her maids. D. E. was one of the few people smart enough to get their families out of East Germany before the open border in Berlin was closed. The place where they now live consists of a few scattered houses, and D. E.’s mother has arrived at her image of America from a certain similarity to the landscape around Wendisch Burg, and mostly from TV shows. She is so proud of her son that she wants to be buried where he found success. Around Gesine her behavior is careful, almost formal, as though trying to dispel some kind of fear. She sighs over D. E. when he betakes himself to his study in the evening with the French red wine that he orders by the case from an importer, but she says nothing, and every morning she has two new bottles ready for him. D. E. sits at his metal behemoth of a desk, a heavy, sorrowful figure in the night, and phones the island of Manhattan. He says: Dear Miss Mary, quite contrary, come see me, the weekend is so long. We’ll have a cookout in the yard. I’ll take you to the shore. He says: If she doesn’t want to, let me come see the two of you.

  You just don’t want to die alone.

  But with me the child would be taken care of.

  Unfortunately, D. E. has won the child over. Marie laughs at his funny faces, especially the wounded-dignity one; she laughs at his demonstrations of drawling Mecklenburg German, where to amuse her he ends every other sentence with a squeaking “Nich?,” and at his performances of Southern or New England dialects, and she envies him his English, because D. E. is like a parrot with languages. Marie believes his stories full of sudden twists and turns—about the lady who beat a policeman over the head with her shoe outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, about his cats who can count, about the vice presidents of his firm waging war against each other on the eighth floor. Marie designs secret codes ever since he taught her ciphering systems. Marie admires his behavior in restaurants, and the fact that he can afford restaurants on the fifty-second floor. Marie keeps her door open a crack on nights when D. E. is sitting at the table with his bottles and talking about lasers, about the political history of Mecklenburg, about Tom’s Bar. Marie thinks of the two upstairs guest rooms in D. E.’s house as her inalienable personal property. She even gave D. E. this name, because she liked the little hiccup between “Dee” and “Ee.” She doesn’t hold his drinking against him (he doesn’t lie on the steps in front of the emergency exit of the movie theater on Ninety-Seventh Street, dressed in rags, crusted with dirt, un-shaven, snoring loudly, hand still on the bottle in its brown paper bag; he’s not a Broadway bum, he’s a professor). Once, when D. E. said he was coming over, Marie went to the phone and ordered a supply of red wine and Gauloises and paid with the grocery money. But D. E. arrives with bags in both hands, flowers tucked under his arm, chocolate bars clamped between his fingers, and you can already hear his booming teasing voice in the hall saying something to Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Robinson stands in the elevator door to watch D. E. enter the Cresspahl residence with head raised, sniffing the air, shouting in awe and wonder: Smell That Dee-li-cious Meck-len-burg Cooking! And Marie laughs.

  September 2, 1967 Saturday

  Through the night, till the early-morning hours, cars were inching bumper to bumper along the river into the long weekend, sending short bursts of dull noise into the open windows on Riverside Drive. D. E. could not be dissuaded from a comparison with approaching artillery fire. Now the weekenders have left silence in their wake, and up to 660 of them, it is predicted, will have died in traffic accidents by the evening of Labor Day.

  The morning is cool, bright, and dry in the park. This playground, sprinkled with white light, is a part of Gesine’s earliest days in New York; here is where Marie brought her in contact with her first neighbors. This morning she is sitting on one of the benches around the edge of the arena and looking down at the half-naked children running in circles in the taut, intersecting jets of water from the three sprinklers. She is waiting for Mrs. Ferwalter, who spends Sabbath mornings here during the summer. If she turns halfway around, she can see between the leaves the window with the blue curtain behind which D. E. is sleeping off his wine, spread out across the whole bed, naked, arms at his sides, breathing shallowly with angrily protruding lips, alone in the apartment.

  Mrs. Ferwalter, Rebecca’s mother, is a short, fat woman—a stocky individual who likes to wear loose-fitting red dresses. Her cheekbones are wide, her forehead is narrow above almost black eyes and eyebrows, and the curve with which her head tapers to a narrow chin recalls her face as a girl. Now that face is in the firm grip of age and locked in a rigid expression of disgust that she doesn’t realize it has. She was born in 1922 and looks like she’s sixty. Six years ago, here in this playground, Mrs. Ferwalter heard Gesine speaking German to her child and stood up from the neighboring bench, walked heavily over on her pudgy legs, and sat down next to Gesine. – Maybe with yours can my child play, she said good-naturedly, in an accent that made her German sound almost Russian. She looked like someone who had recently been through a dangerous illness. Her coarse brown hair was cut short, unevenly, as if after a skull operation. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, and when she held the back of the bench for support as she sat down, Gesine saw the number tattooed on the inside of her left forearm. She looked away, at the woman’s plump legs, but there she saw varicose veins bulging out.

  You stay right there on that bench. You don’t know why I had to send Gronberg away. You don’t know anything.

  If only I’d known how easy it is for the dead to talk. The dead should keep their mouths shut.

  – I’m from Germany, Gesine had said, and Mrs. Fer
walter had answered, with a sigh, from the dry heat or perhaps it was a sigh of longing: I could hear. Europe . . .

  She had already called Rebecca over, who was five years old then, a well-behaved child with her mother’s hair, doll-like with her small suspicious mouth, dark eyebrows, wide starched collar, ironed jacket-and-skirt set, and like a puppet she made a jerky curtsy to Gesine. Marie came warily over, feet swinging in slow wide arcs, sometimes half turning away altogether, but her curiosity was too much for her. The two children held their hands behind their backs and looked scornfully at each other, but Mrs. Ferwalter ordered severely: Go and play nicely! and Rebecca obediently took the strange child over to the swings. Mrs. Ferwalter started to praise Marie: Your child is so quiet. She doesn’t race around. Doesn’t scream at her mother. She’s not American, she’s European. It’s a good way to raise children, the European way, she had said, in her broken English, her broken German, following both children with her always narrowed, almost squinting eyes, her thin lips pursed in disgust.

  Mrs. Ferwalter is from a Ruthenian village in eastern Slovakia, “where the Jews lived a comfortable life.” She emphasizes that it was a “good” village. The Christians tolerated those of a different faith, and the fifteen-year-old girl was not harassed even at night by the teenage boys on the Christian side. We can’t ask her about her parents. “I wasn’t pretty. They said I looked striking.” “My hair hung down to my waist.” In 1944, she was handed over to the Germans, probably by the Hungarians (we can’t ask her about that). The Germans took her to Mauthausen concentration camp. “One of the wardens, she was so nice, she had five children and had to, everything, yes.” She means a female SS guard. We can’t ask her about that. In a photograph from 1946 she has the face of a smooth-skinned thirty-five-year-old. She tried to stay in Czechoslovakia and in 1947 she married a leatherworker with a small leather-goods shop in Budweis. The Communist putsch made the country where she had grown up unsafe, and in 1958 she arrived in the United States via Turkey, Israel, and Canada. The doctors say that the fat in her shoulders, her neck, her whole body is a manifestation of concentration camp syndrome, whose symptoms also include her anxiety, her insomnia, and a chronic inflammation of the respiratory tract, which she has only one way of dealing with: sucking mucus down into her throat with a harsh, scratching sound. All of these facts are things we didn’t ask her about. She has mentioned them casually and in passing over the course of six years, the way friends bring up pieces of their lives.

  Mrs. Ferwalter was the first of the European émigrés on Riverside Drive to give Gesine advice about the neighborhood. She recommended a kindergarten for Marie, showed her the stores selling imported food, warned her away from the ones run by “bad Jews,” and always pointed out everything “European” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She is homesick for the taste of the bread in Budweis. Maybe she has clung to Gesine for these six years, with phone calls and walks and conversations in Riverside Park, because this German knows what the bread she misses tastes like.

  On Saturday mornings she waits in the park for her husband and son who have gone to synagogue. She herself takes certain liberties with her God, but she makes sure that Rebecca does not break the Sabbath and, for instance, start running around with other children or get too close to the ice-cream man. When she shouts for her daughter, her voice can be heard across the whole playground, a shrill shriek, and Rebecca sulks and trudges around the bench from which Mrs. Ferwalter reigns. When Mrs. Ferwalter thinks no one is watching, though, she leans over to Gesine and says, with a wink in Rebecca’s direction and a conspiratorial smile: Look at her strolling around, that child. She’s got long legs, that child.

  She lets Gesine read to her from the newspaper; she would never spend money on a paper herself. Rebecca’s school is expensive, and her husband doesn’t make much as the manager of a little shoe store on Broadway. She arranges her legs this way and that, crosses and uncrosses her ankles, fidgets on the bench. She cannot sit still. She nods with her fat chin—disgusted, sickened—at the news that the Soviets have expelled two US diplomats because the United States had previously expelled two Soviet diplomats. She nods, as though she knows all about espionage.

  The latest news about the Mafia. Apparently all five Mafia families in the New York area have gotten out of the drug-dealing business for good. They now prefer to use their cash reserves to seize power in legitimate undertakings. The prison sentences for some members of the families, up to forty years, were deterrent enough. For another thing, the Corsican and French heroin suppliers were mad that the Mafia refused to pay for a shipment worth $2.8 million ($100 million retail) on the grounds that they did not receive the delivery, the FBI did. Heroin trafficking now seems to run via Cuban and South American middlemen. The French like to pack the stuff in oscilloscopes.

  Mrs. Ferwalter has stood up and walked over to the playground entrance, where, between her husband and her son, each formally dressed in black suit and stubby black fur hat, Marie wheels up the grocery cart with the provisions for next week, intent, lips pursed tight with responsibility, and Mrs. Ferwalter leads her into the playground, one arm affectionately around her shoulder, and deposits her in front of Gesine, and cries: She’s a sport! Just like a real Czech!

  And her mouth is relaxed now, her eyes wide open.

  September 3, 1967 Sunday

  On a day like this, thirty-six years ago. On a white day like this, cool under a hard blue, in clean, briskly moving air. On the beach promenade in Rande, by the gray-and-green sea, across from the sharp, dark contour of the Holstein coast. Keeping on the sunny side under the flickering leaves. Cresspahl’s voice must have been a deep bass then, vowels starting way back in the throat in the Malchow version of Plattdeutsch; my mother’s voice small, supple, a high alto. Sometimes a turn of phrase in High German creeps into her speech: “God willing” or “for my mother’s sake.” She has lagged behind her parents, and Louise Papenbrock keeps turning her head to look back at the stranger who is asking her daughter something, maybe what time it is.

  But what’ll happen then?

  Shouldn’t we wait and see?

  But they’re planning something.

  That’s what I’m waiting to find out.

  Page 1. From The New York Times Special Correspondent in Bonn. Ilse Koch, “the Beast of Buchenwald,” was found dead in her prison cell yesterday. Her neck hung in a noose made from bedsheets and tied to the door latch. She was sixty.

  My name is Cresspahl. I’m forty-three years old. My father was a wheel-wright on the Bobzin estate near Malchow am See and is now dead. My mother has an annuity in Malchow. I am a master carpenter.

  A cabinetmaker.

  I can make wagon wheels too.

  I’m twenty-five and supposed to marry someone in Lübeck.

  Ilse Koch, a plump woman with vivid green eyes and flaming red hair (according to the description in The New York Times), was born in Dresden and in 1937 married a friend of Hitler’s, the commander of the Buchenwald concentration camp, in a spectacular nighttime outdoor pagan ceremony. The Kochs then lived in a mansion not far from the camp.

  “Would you care to be my wife?”

  Yes, I learned my English at boarding school. Rostock accent.

  51,572 political enemies, Jews, and forced laborers from all over Europe died in Buchenwald. On morning rides through the camp, Ilse Koch beat prisoners she came across with her riding crop. She ordered others beaten and killed, and forced prisoners to participate in orgies involving sadism and perversity. She ordered the killing of tattooed prisoners and made lampshades, gloves, and book covers from their skin and their bones.

  Will we change our names when we become British citizens?

  If you want.

  I want to keep your name.

  During the trial of Ilse Koch in 1947, a Dr. Konrad Morgen—investigator, prosecutor, judge for the SS—was called as a witness. He had investigated the Koch case in 1943, on orders from the SS authorities. According to his find
ings, she was an incurable moral degenerate, a perverted, nymphomaniacal, hysterical, power-mad she-devil. Her handicrafts disappeared after this investigation. Karl Koch was later shot by the Nazis.

  My older brother didn’t do too well. He’s in South America. My sister is in Krakow, married

  to a lawyer, who embezzles money.

  And Horst doesn’t have much going for him. So now I’m the favorite, unfortunately, and I’m supposed to move up to the city. You have to say you make four thousand marks a year.

  I can say six.

  And that Hitler’s an Austrian.

  Say that to Horst?

  To my father.

  If you want me to.

  During her detention, Ilse Koch became pregnant, and the Allies sentenced her merely to life imprisonment. Later her sentence was reduced to four years (in the opinion of one witness: because she had helped the Allies gather incriminating evidence for the Nuremberg trials). The West Germans arrested her in 1949 when she was released from Landsberg and sentenced her to life imprisonment in a new trial.