by Uwe Johnson
Do you sleep with a pillow? Do you believe in God? Is Richmond far from the sea?
In October 1966, the Bavarian government rejected Ilse Koch’s application for a pension. In 1962 she had even appealed to the European Commission of Human Rights.
Do you want children, Heinrich Cresspahl?
September 4, 1967 Monday, Labor Day
We’re supposed to believe that? That more than three hundred Czechoslovak intellectuals around the world have appealed to Western writers to join a protest against their own censors? To John Steinbeck, of all people? We don’t want to believe it. Steinbeck paid a visit to Vietnam to see the war, and nothing there bothered him. Still, The New York Times seems to believe the news. The New York Times prints it on the front page.
The Vietcong marked election day in South Vietnam by staging a series of terrorist attacks and shellings against voters in twenty-one provinces. At least twenty-six civilians are dead. The Americans bombed near Hanoi.
The New York Times would like to draw our attention to the weather. It offers as evidence a photograph showing the corner of Eighty-Ninth Street and Riverside Drive: thick lumpy treetops surrounding a monument bathed in light, hardly any pedestrians, cars parked. Nearer, Arcadia, to thee.
The city is completely quiet. The ear misses the sounds of car engines, helicopters, sirens. The light is white, like yesterday. The wind from the Great Lakes has pushed all the dirty clouds from above the city out to the Atlantic, the chimneys have been idle for two days, and the air is brisk, clear, and cool. It is the first weekend this summer that it hasn’t rained. From Riverside Drive, seen across the whole width of the Hudson, the brownish boxes and cylinders on the New Jersey side are sharp and undeniable: modern architecture, the view set aside for Riverside Drive in the 1880s destroyed.
The buildings on this street, hardly any of them under ten stories tall, were built for the new aristocracy of the nineteenth century, for the new money—railroad money, mining money, natural gas money, oil money, speculation money, all the money of the industrial explosion. Riverside Drive was meant to surpass Fifth Avenue as a residential area, with its magnificent entryways, formal lobbies, eight-room suites, servant’s quarters, hidden service entrances, liveried employees, and private views of the river, of the forest of wild clouds atop the other shore’s cliffs, of nature. There is not a single store or business along all of Riverside Drive, and only two or three hotels, even these residential hotels for long-term guests. The dwelling places of Business were meant to be Noble. Figures such as William Randolph Hearst lived here, in fact on three floors that he later converted to a three-story atrium with his own private elevator, then on still more floors, until by 1913 he had bought all twelve. In that era, an address on Riverside Drive meant wealth and credit, power and princely status. It was a street for whites, Anglo-Saxons, Protestants. After the First World War, they were joined by the Jews from Harlem who felt that their formerly exclusive neighborhood no longer befitted their station, as well as by immigrants from the Lower East Side whose income now made such a prestigious address affordable—émigrés who had made it. In the thirties, the Jews from Germany came, first with their household belongings in crates, then without any luggage, then from the German-occupied countries of Europe, and after the war came the survivors of the camps, and finally the citizens of the State of Israel, inveterate Europeans who had not been able to cope with Israel’s climate and besiegement. As a result, a Jewish colony had formed on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue just behind it, joined by religion, blood ties, and memories of Europe.
The Belgians called me Madame, and the Americans say Darling. In Europe children bow to grown-ups. My family was in Germany for five hundred years. My father used to come home with long baguettes under his arm. My father—
Your father was killed by the Germans, Mrs. Blumenroth.
My father died young, Mrs. Cresspahl.
Riverside Drive did not overtake Fifth Avenue as a residential address; President Kennedy’s widow does not live here. Retirees live here, middle-income people, office workers, students with roommates. Countess Seydlitz lives here. Ellison, the writer, lives here. (The assistant at Schustek the butcher’s refuses to move here; he believes in having his own lawn in front of his own house.) Most of the buildings still consider themselves too genteel to rent to dark-skinned citizens: Negroes are permitted to superintend them, keep them clean, operate the elevators, polish the brass. And old age lurks in these monuments of prosperity, like a neglected disease. Many of the elegant suites have been divided up into stingy little apartments; neighbors complain about leaky pipes, rattling plumbing, repeated malfunctions in the elevators, and a sheen of grime against which broom and water are powerless on the marble paneling and antiquated furniture in the lobbies. In some buildings the rents have been frozen by law since the war. Doormen, not only to greet the tenants but also to scare away burglars and child-snatchers, are a rare sight nowadays; often, the manned elevators have been replaced with automatic ones, in which the passengers eye strangers warily. Apartments here are still much sought after and change hands privately. There are high ceilings, old-fashioned floor plans; the walls do a good job muffling sound; the management takes care of the garbage and repairs. The street is considered practically safe. (On the park benches, there is a lot of talk these days about the homosexuals cruising one another at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which they call the Wedding Cake.) And the street is one of the quiet ones. At most it sees two parades a year. Long grass grows in the cracks between the squares of the sidewalk. For half the year, the sound of cars from the highway along the Hudson is filtered through leaves in the park, and except during rush hour Riverside Drive carries only local traffic, it is empty and noiseless at night until six in the morning, when the first people will drive to work and the hollow whistles of the railroad under the hills of the park will force their way into our shallow sleep, tomorrow. This is where we live.
September 5, 1967 Tuesday
At six thirty yesterday evening, four policemen came upon four or five Negro youths assaulting an old white man in one of the ghettos of Brooklyn. They managed to arrest one youth and shot another in the back of the head. A crowd quickly gathered, hurling bottles and rocks at the police and shouting: Kill ’em! Teenagers looted one liquor store; other shopwindows were smashed. The police lifted their barricades in the area around ten p.m., but shortly after eleven, fifteen Molotov cocktails exploded in the street. By that time, the shot young man had been dead for two hours. Richard Ross, fourteen years old.
The Soviet Union is believed to have provided $500 million in weapons to developing countries since 1955.
Sometimes the elevator in the bank building falls a short way down as it starts up, as though genuflecting. Almost twenty people in the ascending cabin listen to two girls complain, insistently but not angrily, about the store on the corner. They haven’t raised the price of their coffee, true, but they’re selling it in smaller cups. Gesine meets the amused looks of the people next to her, who start exchanging nods. The little movements of their necks make them look like people just waking up. All the buttons on the panel next to the door are filled with yellow light: the elevator is going to stop on every floor. Yes, it’s a local today, she agrees, smiling, not paying attention. In the lit rectangles over the doors, the name of the firm appears twelve times over, the same three words twelve times with the same symbol—five red lines—but without indicating the department, except for the third floor: Reception. On the third floor, visitors are screened and the regular customers’ account records are kept. On the fourth floor, the two girls with their bags of coffee get out, and some of the passengers smile once more, as though a probable event had in fact happened. Fourth floor is data entry. Her first job in this country had been in data entry, at a three-foot-wide desk, third from the left in a row of twelve, in front of a calculating machine whose clattering reached her ear strangely detached from the fog of noise in the large room. On the
fifth floor are the stockroom and central mail room. She never goes to the fifth floor anymore, now that Mrs. Williams takes care of keeping her supplied with paper, pencils, and typewriter ribbons. At first she’d resisted being waited on like that; then she realized Mrs. Williams liked these short walks away from her desk, spread throughout the day. The sixth floor, called East and West after the coasts, was where she’d started at this bank, at a metal desk in an open office, visible from all four sides, with her typewriter and a department head’s extension telephone. On the seventh floor are the cafeteria and conference rooms. This cafeteria still uses the larger coffee cups, and a good number of people get out of the elevator here. On the eighth floor are the technology and human resources departments; on the ninth, the bank’s memory; on the tenth, the legal department and library. Coming from the frosted-glass sky of the elevator, within which a loose tube gives off little flickers of darkness as in a rainstorm, is muffled muzak that blends in with the clatter of the doors shearing open and the ding of the journey’s signals. On the eleventh floor, Gesine gets out and turns west. The elevator shafts and utility pipes divide the building in half, and on this floor the eastern half is the South America department, the western half is part of Western Europe. She calls it the eleventh floor, even to herself, counting the way the Americans do, not the tenth as it would be called in Germany. The door closes behind her with a heavy smack.
Good morning Gee-sign.
Good morning.
September 6, 1967 Wednesday
Since yesterday morning, 54 Americans marines and 160 North Vietnamese troops have been killed in continued fighting in the Queson Valley, 136 North Vietnamese near Tamky, 3 Americans by Nuibaden Mountain, 16 Vietnamese at Cantho, 5 Americans and 37 Vietnamese near Conthien, 34 Vietnamese in Quangngai Province.
Again last night Negroes pelted policemen and firefighters with stones, bottles, and Molotov cocktails in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Garbage fires in trash cans and on the street filled the air with smoke. Mayor Lindsay met with spokesmen from the ghetto at the station house. The New York Times mentions that he was wearing a blue suit and blue knit sport shirt.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, a man rushed into the Bluebird Tavern in the Bronx, fired eight rifle shots, and left without saying a word. One dead, two wounded.
In 1920, during the Kapp Putsch, Baron Stephan le Fort, retired cavalry captain, owner of the Boek estate (6,479 acres), shelled the town of Waren on Lake Müritz with a cannon because workers had taken over. The scars in Town Hall are still visible today. When the farmworkers in the area heard about the five dead in Waren, they set out with hunting guns and scythes to search the nearby estates for the rifles, machine guns, and ammunition that the Güstrow armed forces had sent to the owners. The estate holder in Vietsen, Papenbrock, whose household included five men who’d fought in the Baltic—officially as tutors, apprentices, a secretary—sent them out through the back when the gardener came running up to report the enemy’s approach. Papenbrock, then fifty-two years old, took up a post on the outside staircase, shoulders thrown back, belly hanging over his belt, in English breeches and boots, and he said: Gentlemen, I give you my word as an officer. There are no weapons here. (If you want to look anyway, please be quiet in the children’s room and let the girls sleep.)
My mother, a girl of fourteen, stood on the floorboards in her ankle-length white nightgown winding her hair around her wrist and looking back and forth between Papenbrock, her sister Hilde, and the laborers questioning her in Platt. The expression on Papenbrock’s face alternated between threatening and affectionate. Finally, taking a deep breath, and with downcast eyes, she said: Through the door. In the children’s room there was a door hidden behind the oak wardrobe that weighed hundreds of pounds with all the linens inside, and through that door were nine infantry rifles and two hundred and ten bullets in ammo belts. My mother was put on bread and water for two weeks. Papenbrock spoke of betrayal by his own flesh and blood. His wife spoke of the Christian’s love of truth. Papenbrock’s hand flashed out to her cheek and he didn’t go to church all that summer. There was talk on the surrounding estates about Papenbrock’s honor as an officer. In 1922, Papenbrock gave up the estate.
In Vietsen we girls each had our own chambermaid.
Then there were the maids for the ironing room, the kitchen, the laundry, there were the housekeepers, and the mamsell.
Louise Papenbrock had a private chaplain for a while.
Once, Hilde asked someone to fetch her stockings from the wardrobe, because the four steps down the hall were too far for her, and Papenbrock yelled at her. She had to give the maid half a mark.
When Papenbrock wanted to go somewhere, he would phone the village stationmaster and have him stop the train he wanted in the middle of the field near the estate. The man would say: Yes, sir. For two Christmas chickens.
And when Papenbrock came back, he would pull the emergency brake near the estate, pay the two hundred mark fine, and climb into the carriage that Fritz had driven up the country lane to meet the train.
Fritz came with us to Jerichow. He died there.
When Robert was seventeen, Hilde always had to wake him up two hours before school started, so that Louise Papenbrock wouldn’t find the maid in his bed.
Her name was Gerda. She was my age. She married someone in the village when she got pregnant.
And Papenbrock paid for the trousseau.
And yet again Louise Papenbrock could not understand what her husband was doing.
Robert rode a horse to death once in a race against a car.
When Robert wanted to try to ride to Teterow in an hour, I took the horse by the halter and led it to the stable. He stood next to me and kept saying, softly because of the stable boys: Gimme th’horse. It was dark in the stable, it was cloudy that evening, just before a storm, and I didn’t see him take his revolver out of his pocket. He said: Gimme th’horse or I’ll shoot.
Go ahead.
I ducked, as a joke, and all I lost was a hair.
And the horse reared up. It was ruined for riding.
Don’t tell Mama, he said.
Mama never found out anything.
Your uncle Robert would show up drunk at school, run up debts in restaurants, shoot at sparrows in the middle of town and hit windows. When he got a teacher’s daughter pregnant, he had to be sent off to Parchim. In Parchim
he took a room at the Count Moltke Hotel.
And strolled around town with a little silver-handled cane.
He was sitting in the Golden Grapes on Long Street with his roast duck and red wine and he saw out the window the principal passing by with his wife and he invited the shocked couple in for roast duck and red wine, and that was the end of him in Parchim.
After Parchim I don’t know.
From Parchim he went to Hamburg.
With three marks in silver, from Parchim to Hamburg?
First Robert got cash for two horses he’d borrowed then he drank the leg off the devil.
In Vietsen, they said he was learning the import-export business in Rio de Janeiro.
In Vietsen they used to say: Open the door, the grain Jews are coming.
In Vietsen your great-grandmother was still alive. She was the one who always killed the geese.
Henrietta was her name. She was from a noble family. She used words like: perron, dependency. Or: lavoir-basin.
During the search of the house, one of the laborers said to me: Put something on your feet, kid.
Papenbrock gave up Vietsen because the nobility cut him dead after March 1920.
Papenbrock’s lease in Vietsen was not renewed because he hadn’t drained the land as the contract required.
Because everyone was laughing about his children’s room.
Because he hadn’t drained the land.
We don’t know, Gesine.
Why do you want to know, Gesine.
Because of Cresspahl. Why did Cresspahl want anything to do with a
family like that?
September 7, 1967 Thursday
The newspaper vendor on the southwest corner of Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street prefers his customer to put her ten cents in his hand and not, as one would if his crooked fingers worked like uninjured ones, next to the pile of papers. On the steps leading underground, whose metal treads are more worn down on the left, you have to take short steps. It is expedient to have the subway token between your thumb and index finger five steps before the turnstiles. After you take the tunnel under the local track to the southbound platform, the first door of the last car stops one and a half paces from the stair rail. The train has passed through Harlem; the seats are packed tight with sleeping dark-skinned passengers. The New York Times has to be folded in the seconds remaining before the jolt of departure, before the passenger steadies himself against the lurches of the train with the strap hanging above every seat. The administration sees its forecast of a strong economic expansion confirmed; the administration reports convincing indications of rising inflationary tendencies. In the mornings, the passageways and stairs under Times Square are divided with chains and by transit policemen into lanes for the streams of pedestrians moving among the four subway lines; of the three tracks for the shuttle to Grand Central Terminal, the middle one is considered best. At this time of day, physical contact with other passengers is almost impossible to avoid. The autoworkers in Detroit are on strike against Ford. Years ago, in the large main hall of Grand Central Terminal, under the blue and gold starry sky of the barrel-vault ceiling, an express train to Chicago was being announced; never again has she hit that precise moment. Groggy commuters thread their way out from underground, heading east toward Lexington Avenue, not yet up for the battle for taxis. In the meantime, of the seven hundred faces she has seen this morning, almost all have been forgotten. Now the smiling starts.