Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Papenbrock did not yet want Cresspahl to know who his friends were. This Cresspahl came from an area in the southeast where Papenbrock had once lost a lease on an estate. This Cresspahl might have been sitting behind a desk in the Waren town hall when Papenbrock had had to turn over his weapons to a worker’s committee. This Cresspahl had, in the meantime, lived ten years abroad—in the Netherlands, in England, with the winners of the war—and even Capt. (Ret.) Papenbrock would have a hard time making such a son-in-law acceptable to the Steel Helmet paramilitary. This Cresspahl didn’t even seem to realize that Papenbrock could have been his superior officer a few short years ago. However much his proper bourgeois frugality in Jerichow’s stores might count in his favor, he did sometimes sit in the back room with Peter Wulff, after closing time, talking with people who came from Wismar on bicycles and not even the police knew where they would spend the night.

  It was a couple weeks ago, in Itzehoe. The Nazis were having a meeting in Oesauer Berg, and when the Communists came after them, what do you think they had with them? Stanchions, pitchforks, bicycle chains, clubs wrapped in razor wire, two-by-fours with nails, billy clubs. Look it up in The Lübeck Gazette!

  The one man killed was a Communist, you know.

  I read that only the Nazis were shooting. So where would the Nazis have gotten their gunshot wounds from?

  Hey, why don’t you tell us about England.

  Papenbrock would prefer not to befriend a man who went around not wearing a hat. Who let himself be seen on the patio of the Archduke Hotel in Rande with a Dr. Semig. Arthur Semig, Dr. Vet. Med., might have two diplomas hanging on his wall and might wear his war medals through the streets of town on the Kaiser’s birthday, but Papenbrock thought that paying his bills on time, and by return mail, was more than enough. And yet there he was, sitting outside a Christian hotel under a sun umbrella, drinking cognac in front of other guests, rattling on to strangers about the state of the world.

  My dear Herr Cresspahl, do you want to know something? Only one offer was placed on a preserve in Schönberg recently, and do you know how high it was? Eight hundred centner. No. My dear Cresspahl, if you want to know the truth I should have been an innkeeper, not a veterinarian. You’ve seen it yourself, the bars are filled to bursting, it’s standing room only in the pubs by afternoon. Do you know what, a liter of milk brings in seven and a half cents. No. When a horse is colicky, the farmers wait and see, by God. The nobility hasn’t picked up the phone for an average-size pig in a long time. And who has his whole herd vaccinated against erysipelas nowadays? But when they do call, they arrange a price with me in advance. It used to be I would have hung up on the spot. But in times like these, and as a Jew . . .

  Really?

  But my dear Cresspahl, can’t you tell? They can see it, you know. Look at me, Cresspahl! Now you can tell, right?

  And Papenbrock did not know what to do with this Cresspahl. Who said he was free to meet after dinner, who let Papenbrock smoke his cigar alone, who did not insist on the glass of Rotspon the occasion warranted, who refused to be insulted by anything. He had money, almost as much as the gentleman in Lübeck. He wouldn’t go so far as to invite Dr. Semig to the wedding, most likely. And so Papenbrock slid out of his armchair, groped around in the room grown nearly black as night, bent down with all the weight of his sixty-three years, reached under his desk, put the open bottle on the table, poured, and said, unexpectedly switching to High German: “Herr Cresspahl . . .” He gestured for my speechless father to stand up, and began: Herr Cresspahl, it seems that we are going to be relatives. Tell me the first name they gave you, son.

  Lisbeth Papenbrock had my grandfather well trained.

  Gesine Cresspahl is spending this Sunday on Staten Island, in Tottenville and later on the Midland Beach boardwalk. The child had insisted on waiting out the rain there. The towers of Brooklyn are visible to the northeast, across the Atlantic bay, smudged gray by the weather but occasionally flashing white under breaks in the clouds. Beyond those coastal palaces, in the two-story slums, they’re killing each other.

  The outing made her miss The New York Times. She catches a glimpse of the remains of today’s edition in a garbage can. A large photograph facing up shows, not entirely clearly, a plump dark-haired girl of about fourteen lying in the arms of a man in peasant clothing who is about to give her a kiss. The man has a mustache; the collar of his shirt is not American. He bears a certain resemblance to Stalin in his prime.

  – And then? the child asks. Your mother was engaged, the way they do it in Europe?

  Then she and Heinrich Cresspahl, master carpenter from Richmond, were engaged. Louise Papenbrock had quietly set the table in the dining room again and was busy polishing the glasses when the men came in from the office. Cloth in hand, she clutched at Cresspahl’s, tried to look him in the eye, and said something about the need for God’s benevolence, which Cresspahl thought was harmless enough. Papenbrock, blinking, had already turned to go down to the wine cellar. My mother again acted the part of Papenbrock’s favorite daughter, circling the table, serving drinks, quiet, calm, satisfied. Louise Papenbrock cried at moments that seemed appropriate. Papenbrock alternated between cognac and Mosel and spoke of the beautiful children that his daughter and Cresspahl would bring into the world,

  but any girls better not have those bones of yours, Heinrich Cresspahl, prost!

  and of Heinz Zoll, Jerichow’s master carpenter whom he would buy out. And my mother sat down next to him and looked pleadingly at Cresspahl, but Cresspahl nodded his head seriously, and she said, a little anxious but not entirely unmischievous: We’re not staying Daddy. And Papenbrock clutched at his heart, where her hand already was, and grinned, a little embarrassed because he had shown his shock and was on the point of exaggerating it.

  – And Horst Papenbrock? the child asks.

  Horst Papenbrock wasn’t there. My mother had made sure of that. He was spending the evening with his Nazi buddies in Gneez.

  September 11, 1967 Monday

  In yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, Stalin’s daughter described “The Death of My Father”; in today’s, “Life With My Father and Mother.” The world’s best newspaper supplies photos of its own to enhance the defector’s memoirs—today a picture from 1935, in which Stalin is thumbing his nose at his chief bodyguard’s camera.

  And we’ve been loyal to this paper for six years! There was a time when we were at the mercy of a chained dog on an East German military base, trapped in an inner chicken-wire kraal within the outside fencing so that it could never befriend a civilian and thus it had no choice but to become a hypochondriac, introverted, and acutely irritable type that would stand outside its kennel barking like crazy even in the pouring rain, and while it was something besides zeal that made the dog’s voice crack, that cracking voice was the voice of Neues Deutschland; there was a time when we relied on the democratic virtues of an old maid—the officiousness, the love of bickering, the hypocrisy, the abstract conscience, the self-righteousness of spinsters left untouched for so long that they prefer to deny the existence of carnal intercourse altogether and on principle: the establishment press in the confines of the West German military base. We knew we could never entirely fail to appreciate an honest old Auntie like The New York Times. And in 1961 we had the choice between her and the Herald Tribune! Between a conservative dark suit of hard work and devotion to duty and, on the other hand, the more appealing layout and snazzier photos of another elderly figure, but one with her white hair wrapped in a silk scarf, bows at her neck, fashionable colors at her hips, and ankle boots bought on Via Condotti. For us it was no choice at all. Also in 1961, not like a blind chicken finding a lost piece of grain but like a watchful magpie stealing silver, The New York Times could be counted on to see which way the wind was blowing and where the Wall was going up around West Berlin, and to describe both of these things to us in firsthand quotations, second-order analyses, with glosses, photos, preliminary summaries, the lesser narrati
ve forms, and when all the strands of the rhapsodic subject were tied up and the first level of the dividing wall built, she channeled all her means of description into an epic river and delivered, in the serial form of daily dispatches from the construction site, a story that for her was already history. How could we doubt her? Back then she only cost five cents, too. Not just paper printed on both sides but the justified expectation that this housewife would refuse to sweep any news under the rug, would see dirty laundry as suitable for airing, would feel that every closet could and should be opened and that one needn’t fear finding a skeleton—all for five cents!

  This trustworthy individual furnished us with reasons to live in New York! For the first time, we could add logical reasons to the other ones meant to justify our presence, and could honestly say that a newspaper here was putting the news from Germany into a proper relationship, namely a subordinate one, with the news from the rest of the world, and in so doing it helped us and taught us to accept reality with the expectations and judgments our parents had tried to inculcate.

  It wasn’t just a matter of convenience. We got used to her the way one does to a person with a fixed place at the table, not forced to accept crumbs or exiled among the old folks. We thought about her: Don’t ever change. She felt that her country’s well-being and prosperity was the most important thing in the world, and we could use that to factor out her biases; her country, in its egotism, often couldn’t care less about her scruples and criticisms, and we felt reminded of the theory of tragedy of the classical century of German literature. We treated her obligingly and with consideration, strictly in accord with Brecht’s recommendations: what matters most to us is always first and foremost her experience. We watched her advise the Greek king to improve his country with a putsch, and observed that it was not the king but his generals who could understand the words of the oracle of Times Square, but cunning is the least we can ascribe to old aunts. And is it not to her that we owe our prompt knowledge of the fact that the Western bloc was making a place at the table for Fascists in Greece too? She stayed true to her principles and immediately expressed revulsion at the torture of politically suspect Greeks. And neither the newspaper’s owners nor the monopolies and political parties are responsible for dictating this picture of the present,

  they write what the subscribers expect; it’s you who’re naive, Gesine:

  as Countess Seydlitz says. Mrs. Albert Seydlitz means: Gesine, in her mistrust of bourgeois traditions, unintentionally also casts aspersions on fundamentally necessary traditions that have merely been abused. We do not live by bread alone, we need hard facts too, child.

  We feel a need for Auntie Times’s company; we grant her the honor due to our elders. She sets our table with the latest developments; we pay the higher rate and admire her civilized gestures. We find it almost touching, the pains she takes to keep us aware of the most basic information—when she has news to report from Cobh and first mentions that Cobh is located in southeastern Ireland, near Cork, in County Cork, and was once famous as a port of call for transatlantic steamships. We respect her objectivity and let her call herself “a New York newspaper.” A detail fanatic, yes, but a mystifier? No. We anxiously, though not without fondness, observe her efforts to at least admit the existence of changes in popular taste, for instance when she suddenly replaced her typeface with a larger one on July 3, 1966, or without warning one day, namely on February 21, 1967, started printing the date at the top of the page in Italics instead of roman; it looks good on her, and we trust her sense of proportion and propriety.

  There is one thing, we fondly dream, that she will never do to us: abandon her severe eight-column front page, not for the most modern and far-fetched tailored creation from Madison Avenue; wipe from her brow the uncial Gothic—the adornment of age, the monument to the past, as practically indispensable as the art nouveau ornaments atop the glass-slippered feet of the buildings of Manhattan—for an Antiqua font, howsoever British. Said buildings cannot stand up to the wrecking balls of unadulterated profit motives; it is she who continues to link the centuries together. Meanwhile, conservatively enough, she is now asking ten cents for her services. We’d gladly pay thirty.

  What does she care whether we—how shall we put it—approve of her? That must be why she can invite Stalin’s daughter into the house, still at age forty-one an immature child, perceptually defective, who has understood nothing about the twentieth century beyond the personal circumstances of her own life. Like any overdependent child, this incurable daughter wants only to unburden her father of the heartless findings of the history books, make excuses for him with the good qualities he showed in his free time, when he was close to her—not close enough, though, to enlighten her for instance about the idea that politics and revolution were not sent down from the heavens of religion, where, nonetheless, she imagines her dearly departed to be.

  But it is not merely with schadenfreude that Auntie Times gathers her family together for daily installments of the insights that twenty-five years of instruction in dialectical and historical materialism have produced in a privileged student thereof. It is not simply mockery when Auntie Times identifies Svetlana Stalina as a writer, or permits her to use her mother’s name, especially since wide knowledge of the true state of affairs removes the risk of losing readership. It is not only a trick when the Times lets pass the infanta’s claim that the destiny of the Soviet Union and of international Communism was, at the decisive moment, decided by a man named Lavrenty P. Beria, although an editorial box does mention that his time in office began only in 1938 (so for one thing the eleven million people killed by the Soviet land reforms of 1928 to 1932 would have to be chalked up to Mr. Trotsky, except that he was abroad just then, or else to His Honor Winston S. Churchill, with whom the father of the hapless girl had at least exchanged a few words on the subject (“the worst thing I ever had to do”), rather than with his poor child). It is not solely an occasion for pride when the Times deprives its own country of taxes and has the defector’s fee forwarded directly to a Liechtensteinian institution. We may suspect the existence of all these motivations, but we can be sure of other, more positive, tender feelings. Because yesterday’s edition prefaced its excerpts from the life of Stalin’s daughter with a picture of the author in a serious pose, as though graven on a coin, with a black collar, not quite equal to Auntie Times as a witness of History but still somewhere in her vicinity, someone who was there at rabbit hunts and family parties, one of the children pampered by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. The author’s historical relevance thus preemptively determined, the Times could open the second installment of this chat with a different photograph, in which the author appears with a softer hairdo, a cheerful smile, wearing a white collar. A likable picture. Bigger, too. Here The New York Times exudes benevolence, sympathy, protectiveness, a suitable attitude to take toward a younger niece, admittedly from the provinces and from more constrained circumstances but still a relative.

  Today we salute Mr. William S. Greenawalt from Brooklyn. He wrote a letter to The New York Times a good two weeks ago, in which he asked: If the Sanitation Department can manage to keep its white trucks white, why can’t the Transit Authority keep its red subway trains red?

  And The New York Times has decided that this, too, should find its place among the items worthy of and/or suitable for publication: fit to print.

  September 12, 1967 Tuesday

  If: Svetlana Stalina proclaims to the world in a newspaper: If Lavrenty P. Beria had not had the inexplicable support of my father, he would not have been able to kill Stalin’s old fellow fighters and half of his family.

  The president of the Supreme Soviet has acknowledged, after twenty-three years, that the nation of the Crimean Tatars was exiled to Central Asia unjustly for collaboration with the German Army. Still, the half-million rehabilitated citizens will not be allowed to return to their home-land.

  If. . .

  Mrs. Cresspahl receives a request to keep this afternoon fr
ee for a drive to Kennedy Airport; a letter there will need translating. An hour before work ends, Mrs. Cresspahl is picked up by a man in livery, an older, heavy-set, dark-skinned man who, with the solemnity of a footman, introduces himself as Vice President de Rosny’s chauffeur, refers to her as the latter’s interpreter, and adds: My name is Arthur. There are white streaks in his short curly hair, and as he speaks he holds the cap of his uniform somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. Mrs. Cresspahl tries to shake hands with him but he has already stepped aside. Left hanging, she half-heartedly tells him her own first name, and he answers, gravely, indulgently: That’s quite all right, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  Mrs. Cresspahl has to walk behind him, as though behind a servant. His uniform, his measured stride, his unseeing expression, all put a stop to the end-of-day chitchat passing between the rows of typewriters in the open office; he does not give her time to say goodbye, he is already holding open the door to the main hall so that she can pass through it like something invisible, at least to him. As they wait for the elevator he insists on taking her briefcase. On the way down, alone with her, he remarks on the weather, his face upturned toward the indicator saying what floor they’ve reached; he ignores her answers and repeats: Very good, ma’am: until, in the basement, he can bow to her and to de Rosny’s car, let go of the handle with which he has gently, firmly closed the car door, and place his cap back on his head. She feels sealed, shipped, and delivered like a package for someone.

  The vice president’s car, from the outside a fifteen-foot-long black battleship, encases a first-class private cabin, fully upholstered, with four seats, telephone, reading light, writing surface. The cabin is cut off from the outside world by dark tinted glass and a thick pane separating the driver’s area, and also, apparently, by perfectly smooth suspension, since the interior betrays no sign of the jolt with which the car comes off the steep ramp onto Forty-Sixth Street, nor the spurts with which it descends Second Avenue into the broad trough that leads to the tiled tubes of the Midtown Tunnel. This is one of Mrs. Cresspahl’s favorite routes, now that she has gotten used to the white light and cramped vaulted arches under the East River: It is the path to departure. A path out of the city, for the road steadily widens between the industrial buildings of Brooklyn, the spacious homes set back from the street, and finally the Long Island highways, until, near the cemeteries, the sky stretches nearly unobstructed across the horizon. The gravestones clustered in the fields re-create the rises and valleys of the original landscape, flicker low under dusty evergreens. The graveyards are cities, protected by walls, traversed by gracefully curving roads, densely built up with narrow gravestones like the old single-family houses in Manhattan before opening out again into green parklands where solitary mausoleums evoke the inequalities of earthly social relations. The road runs past LaGuardia Airport near the Sound, alongside piers and jetties and sails catching the wind, until finally the scabby scars of industrial exploitation and land speculation are entirely repressed by a luxurious landscape on both sides of the exits—mowed lawns, landscaped copses, right up to the cement corrals in the ring of passenger terminals where cars have been rounded up and wait in crowded rows, a glinting motionless herd. But this time the trip was ruined for Mrs. Cresspahl. She would have liked the man behind the wheel not to hold his fleshy neck quite so still, to lower the glass divider, to turn around just once and admit to having a last name. But at the International Arrivals hall, Arthur is quicker to the door than she is and says goodbye with a bow, every inch the rich man’s chauffeur, doffing his cap once more, looking into her face for only a moment, expressionless, and repeating, in his respectful, throatily rumbling voice: Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.