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Anniversaries

Page 7

by Uwe Johnson


  She has learned to do it. Only rarely is she still startled by the smile that every morning instantaneously shows up on, slips aside from, and crashes down off the face of the girl at the department reception desk. She feels she is too slow for the elaborate, unvarying exchange: the hello, the inquiry into how it’s going, the answer, the counterquestion, the counteranswer, the goodbye. She has trouble making it to the end of the script within the four strides of a hallway encounter. She hasn’t learned that. Still, she feels that her smile covers her and she ramps it up to the point of downright merriment.

  She’s our German. Germans are different though.

  The department consists of an inner core of frosted-glass cubicles, an open room with groups of desks, and an outer fringe of offices with outside windows. After the metal door that clicks shut behind her, she passes the reception desk, four desks on the left, three inner offices on the right. She walks past Mrs. Agnolo’s typewriter feigning distraction and a conversation with the person at the next desk; Mrs. Agnolo has a son in Vietnam. Yesterday 36 Americans and 142 Vietnamese were killed south of Danang. She dreads the morning when the death notice will be brought to the office; the boy still has four months left to serve. Most of the inner offices are already lit up fluorescent white, the chairs in the open room are all occupied, but the girls are still taking out their work, digging around in their handbags, showing each other newspaper ads. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the Negroes threw bottles and rocks at policemen. Looting, arson—the other side of the East River. In Central Park, a fifteen-year-old girl was raped by two men who stomped her friend so severely that he might die. In two minutes, a net of keyboard noise will hang in the air, suddenly, as though someone had thrown a switch. A removable brown plastic nameplate has been slid into the little rails next to her workspace, imprinted with the name “Miss Cresspahl” in white letters. The cell measures three and a half by three meters, or twelve by ten feet here, with wall-to-wall carpeting, a steel filing cabinet, a desk, the typewriter stand, a dictation machine, telephone, swivel chair, double-decker filing tray, and chair for visitors. The coffee cart comes by at eleven, lunch is at twelve, the secretarial staff can leave at five, the telephone switchboard shuts down at six, the elevators stop working at eight. As Employee Cresspahl, eleventh floor, takes her mail from the in-box on Mrs. Williams’s desk, she looks through her open door at the slats of the blinds on the opposite building bordered by frosted blue glass, the mirror in which this day will sink down into darkness, leaving no trace.

  September 8, 1967 Friday

  The secretary of defense explains the wall he plans to build along the northern border of South Vietnam. He speaks of barbed wire, land mines, and sophisticated electronics; he says absolutely nothing.

  In the four days of fighting around Danang, 114 Marine infantry were killed and 283 wounded. The casualties on the other side were put at 376, but for them The New York Times does not tally the wounded separately.

  Always ready to be of service, the paper describes future curtailments among Ford’s suppliers: at stake is some $5 billion a year in parts and materials that won’t be able to be produced. Picketers are not harassed. Thirty years ago, at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, there were riots, beatings, and shootings. Thirty years ago, a child of Cresspahl’s fell into the water butt behind his house.

  You have a mind like a man’s, Mrs. Cresspahl!: says James Shuldiner, preoccupied. It is broad daylight in a Scandinavian sandwich shop on Second Avenue, at a tiny side table, elbow to elbow with eavesdroppers, and Mr. Shuldiner has never once asked Mrs. Cresspahl out to dinner, to one of the velvet-dark restaurants in the East Fifties, to a tablecloth, to checks discreetly delivered in leather covers, to intimacies. James Shuldiner is a thin gentleman with moist eyes, brooding, with clumsy movements, stiff, and under his shock of dark hair, still like the high-school student he was eleven years ago, a boy from Union City whom neither gang wanted, beaten up by both, who went straight from his last vacation into the army—Mr. Shuldiner, a careworn tax professional who might well take pride in a masculine mind. He has not put his hand on the lady’s, he looks not at her but at his egg salad; he has discovered something new to worry about. Still, he waits.

  – Thank you, kind sir: she says.

  Mrs. Cresspahl is not particularly proud of her mind. Mr. Shuldiner is amazed at her reference to the Cash and Carry law of 1937, which allowed the United States to supply weapons to nations at war; Mr. Shuldiner does not insist on calling her by her first name, and he talks to her not about his own concerns but those of international politics. She had searched her memory for the year 1937 and once again retrieved nothing but a static, disconnected fragment. This is how her mind’s storage system arbitrarily selects things for her, stored up in quantities beyond her control, only sometimes responsive to commands and intentions:

  In 1937, Stalin had much of his military staff executed,

  in 1937, Hitler had fully worked out his war plans,

  we have to buy at least one record by Pete Seeger because the TV networks have put him on the blacklist for an antimilitary song,

  (Marie says),

  today’s issue of The New York Times is the 40,039th,

  an advertising poster in the Ninety-Sixth Street/Broadway subway station has had handwritten on it since the day before yesterday: Fuck the Jews:

  this mind has helped her get through school exams, tests, interrogations, it gets her through her daily work, a man sees it as an ornamental trinket; what mattered most to her was one of its functions—memory, not the storage but the retrieval, the return to the past, the repetition of what was: being inside it once more, setting foot there again. There is no such thing.

  If only the mind could contain the past in the same receptacles we use for categorizing present reality! But the brain, in recalling the past, does not use the same many-layered grid of terrestrial time and causality and chronology and logic that it uses for thinking. (The concepts of thinking do not even apply there. And this is what we’re supposed to live our life with!) The repository of the mind is not organized to provide copies, in fact it resists retrieving things that have happened. When triggered, even by mere partial congruence, or at random, out of the blue, it spontaneously volunteers facts and figures, foreign words, isolated gestures. Give it an odor that combines tar, rot, and a sea breeze, the sidelong smell from Gustafsson’s famous fish salad, and ask it to fill with content the emptiness that was once reality, action, the feeling of being alive—it will refuse to comply. The blockade lets scraps, splinters, shards, and shavings get through, merely so that they can be scattered senselessly across the emptied-out, spaceless image, obliterating all traces of the scene we were in search of, leaving us blind with our eyes open. The piece of the past that is ours, because we were there, remains concealed in a mystery, sealed shut against Ali Baba’s magic words, hostile, inapproachable, mute and alluring like a huge gray cat behind a windowpane seen from far below as though with a child’s eyes.

  It can sit wherever it wants.

  Mr. Shuldiner interrupted his analysis of the latest violations of international law when Mrs. Cresspahl picked up her purse, her hand clutching the flabby black fabric like the nape of a cat’s neck, put it on her other wrist, and said something out loud in a dialect of German. Unoffended, leaning forward as an attentive listener, he asked her to explain:

  That’s what my father said once, when a cat sitting under the table scared me. It had laid down on the leather of his clogs to go to sleep. That must have been in 1937, too. The day I fell into the water butt.

  And your mother? Your mother just stood there? Mr. Shuldiner said eagerly.

  Lisbeth I’ll kill you.

  My mother was not just standing there. I’m sorry. My mind was elsewhere, Mr. Shuldiner.

  James Shuldiner dutifully accompanies Mrs. Cresspahl down Second Avenue, into one store after another, and watches with embarrassment as she tries to buy one apple. The gourmet markets sell apples
in packages, or by the pound, not individually. After Mrs. Cresspahl has managed to steal an apple from a supermarket, he tries to say goodbye. He watches her bite into the apple and says: That’s a pretty dress, Mrs. Cresspahl. He won’t say why he asked her out this time either. He walks uphill up the street, a haggard, somewhat bent man, black and white in his business suit. Maybe he is shaking his head.

  Say I saw a cat lying inside the kitchen window, and I climbed up on an upside-down bucket and from there up onto the water butt. Say the lid wasn’t there, and my mother was nearby. Say Cresspahl pulled me out, and she was watching. What am I supposed to do about it!

  September 9, 1967 Saturday

  This morning, justice almost reigns in New York. The air is still. The air cannot move under stationary warm fronts in the upper atmosphere; since yesterday it has not been able to rise into the cold and rid itself of what the city pumps into it from power stations, gasworks, chimneys, cars, jet engines, and steamships: the inversion has set an impenetrable dome over the city. The dirt in the air—soot, boiler ash, hydrocarbon emissions, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide—passes without regard of person through window cracks, into eyes, into wrinkles on skin; it scratches throats, dries mucous membranes, weighs on hearts, blackens tea, spices food, creates more work for lung doctors, shoe shiners, car washers, window cleaners, and Mr. Fang Liu in his basement shop near Broadway, who is now taking the Cresspahls’ laundry from Marie with swift, enthusiastic gestures. Few in the city can hide behind sealed double-glass windows and high-powered air conditioners, and they, imprisoned in their bare, musty towers on the East Side, miss out on the bright clouds in lurid colors that the moisture in the air paints in as a backdrop to Riverside Park, on the dull-colored tatters of haze draping the Hudson. In all the stores on Broadway where Marie is currently pushing her grocery cart around, the mere word pollution is enough to get a conversation going and call forth the New Yorker’s pride in the incomparably difficult life of a New Yorker. She can swap sighs and trade smiles of mutual sympathy when she brushes her hair back from her sweaty brow with her forearm. Outside on the muggy street she will feel like her face is hitting a wall of hot water.

  For Marie goes shopping on Broadway, some Saturdays. Early in the morning she sneaks barefoot up to Gesine’s bed, steals her alarm clock, and tiptoes to the front door, letting it click softly shut against the calibrated counterpressure of her springy fingertips. Although she has a sneaking suspicion that Gesine is deliberately keeping her breath regular, that she is awake and has long since been lying on her back, hands clasped behind her head, listening.

  Because six years ago, the four-year-old clung tight to Gesine at the kindergarten’s swinging doors, screamed with rage and beat against the doors of the elevator into which her mother had disappeared, often lay on the classroom floor during playtime, sad and unspeaking, deaf to persuasion, her face turned to the door. The teacher admonished Gesine over the phone. Three weeks later, she gave Gesine a list of the most important words that the child had refused to learn, which included hand and foot, stand, hold, look, and Gesine started buying West German newspapers, for the want ads. The child listened to the English Gesine spoke with politely resistant looks, never taking her eyes off her, and Gesine realized that what English meant for Marie was the outside world, the foreign, what at least at home she should be spared. She did not want to bribe the child to learn, though. She refused to let herself feel pity when she sent Marie up to the ice-cream truck at the park entrance by herself and had to watch her, clutching the quarter behind her back, take half a step back for every step forward, pushed aside by the other thronging children, unnoticed by the ice-cream man until he had already turned to drive on. Marie even refused to reveal the English she did know. When a supermarket cashier showed her a dollar bill and asked if she knew who that stout worthy gentleman in the middle was, and the customers behind her prompted her, loudly or in whispers, Marie just stood there, waiting, silent and sulking, to see if these people would finally give up and start speaking German. (Out on the street, she said, indignantly: George Washington! As if I didn’t know that! Who were all those ladies anyway!) For her, it had been a test of her self-confidence. It was only on a trip up the Hudson, when she let two boys rope her into a game of tag on the stairs and down the corridors of the multistory, building-like steamship, that she tipped her hand, running down the aisle between the rows of seats, past Gesine without realizing it, and saying to her, as though to a stranger: Excuse me! Later she could be found with the dazzled boys on the steps leading up to the bridge, telling them stories about Düsseldorf and the Rhine in an effervescent mix of shards of German and the sonic curves into which she had translated the sentence melodies of the radio announcers. But the boys were on their way back to their riverless city in Ohio that same night, and Marie was shoved and teased in the playground for the blubber-lipped, droning sounds that she thought Americans used. The children had learned from TV movies how to cage a victim against a wall with stiff outstretched arms, and Gesine waded into the scuffle and pulled her child out because Marie wasn’t defending herself.

  But Marie, now wheeling the whole week’s groceries out the elevator door as soon as the scissor gate clatters open, is talking at the top of her lungs to Mr. Robinson, and again Mr. Robinson holds the door and watches as the child pushes her way into the Cresspahl apartment and repeats her story about the bum who tried to rob her grocery cart on Broadway. And I didn’t worry about being a lady! At Schustek’s, it was Mr. Schustek himself, not an assistant, who’d served her, and she’d tasted three different kinds of sausage before she bought any. Gesine spends a long time standing in supermarket aisles, she is taken in by new product packaging, she buys on impulse, or out of curiosity, or because she’s hungry; the child marches straight through the traps and snares, blind to posters, deaf to announcements over the loudspeakers, looking slowly and steadily up and down the shelves, and she puts not an ounce, not a package in her cart except what’s on her list. Today she caught the same cashier to whom she had once refused to give information about George Washington overcharging her by twenty-one cents, and the cashier apologized without argument to the child and the customers in earshot. The child tries to reproduce for Gesine the face that one of these customers in earshot made, who up until then had gone on and on about the shenanigans at the cash register and now was scandalized that a ten-year-old had caught the criminal red-handed: the child contorts her face, all the way up to her hairline, with the matron’s sour disgust. Nor did Marie forget today’s New York Times, a tidy bale, its vending-machine crease unmarred: the consciousness of the day. She puts the paper down next to Gesine’s breakfast like a gift.

  The secretary of defense will not rule out the possibility that Red China will enter the Vietnam War. However, he says that it would be a most ill-advised decision.

  Only on page 48, between Business and Real Estate, does the circumspect organ of the press report that more than five hundred civilians in North Vietnam have been killed by American attacks during the first six months of 1967, by seventy-seven thousand tons of bombs in March alone.

  – And the twenty-one cents: the child says, after a prolonged account of everything she’d bought, with the ragged, catarrhal voice that six years in the contaminated New York air has given her: I gave it to the beggars. Sixteen cents to the one with blue hair, five to the one on Ninety-Eighth Street.

  September 10, 1967 Sunday

  Agriculture needs tax relief! The Treasury simply must accept payments in kind! The collective-bargaining laws need changing! What the government should do is crack down on price gouging from the middlemen! If only Berlin would at least curb imports!

  So ran the lament of Papenbrock Senior. Only such measures might get the Mecklenburg nobility at least through 1931!

  The old man did not raise his voice or even try to conceal his asthma in the pauses his cigar forced him to take; he leaned back in his upholstered armchair, limp, with eyes half cl
osed, in the sharply slanting reddish rays of sunlight that made it impossible to see out of his office windows. He was only playing for time with his visitor, a man by the name of Cresspahl who had sent a note on the stationery of the Lübeck Court requesting a private conversation. Besides, this Cresspahl was acting genuinely interested in the cares and troubles of the East Elbian aristocracy.

  – The landowner’s tax burdens probably should be covered, yes: Cresspahl said earnestly, in the same formal Plattdeutsch as Papenbrock spoke, sitting properly upright on the visitors’ sofa, keeping his gaze on Papenbrock’s bald head shining in the evening light. No matter how hard he looked, the father of the bride could find nothing undeferential about him.

  Papenbrock didn’t know what to do with him. He was sturdy, not fat, not to be talked down. He could afford a room in the Lübeck Court for a week and counting. The telegram he had received from England mentioned various jobs, although Frieda Klütz, the Jerichow telegraphist, had been unable to give Papenbrock a precise translation of the business matters in question. Papenbrock’s daughter had told him about £3,000 in an account in the Surrey Bank of Richmond, and Papenbrock had stifled his contemptuous snort because he had a certain respect for ready cash. The man hadn’t tried to impress his prospective father-in-law with a bank account in Jerichow, having learned his lesson from the German banking collapse in July. He had served in the army, and Papenbrock’s comrades-in-arms on the Russian front had made him an NCO. He was from Mecklenburg. But Papenbrock couldn’t bring himself to accept him.

  – Well if you, as a shrewd businessman, support the aristocracy’s policy demands . . . : Cresspahl said, encouragingly, leaning his shoulders slightly forward as though eager to hear about Papenbrock’s deals in the Mecklenburg-Schwerin ministries.

 

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