Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Don’t like this country? Go find another one.

  Inside the terminal there is a glassed-in passageway suspended above the baggage claim area, which allows a full view of the conveyor belts in the customs lanes, a quarter view of the array of baggage carrousels, and a one-eighth view of the exits from passport control so that travelers below can be spotted from above. The thick teak railing inside the passageway’s glass is crowded with the propped elbows of people meeting passengers, those of an Italian family on Gesine’s left and those of an Indian couple on her right, all gazing down in comfort at the crushed, confused, exhausted travelers and the contents of their open suitcases, in which customs officers are probing around with firm, shrewd fingers. Gesine is expecting a white man, around sixty, with a flabby, gray, indistinct face, a man in loose gray clothes, a banking executive who will nonetheless have to open and present his leather bags to customs. She remembers what her boss looks like from the interview three years ago, from nods in the elevator lanes, and most clearly from the passport photo in company brochures. It is only from that passport photo that she now recognizes the man coming into view on the far side from the customs inspection area, his unopened suitcases on a porter’s luggage cart alongside him, being escorted through an automatic door by a uniformed official and seen off with a police salute. He is clearly not of French descent after all but one of the Irish. Mrs. Cresspahl meets him at the foot of the stairs, a sprightly gentleman in a very blue linen suit, a lean, stooped man with firm muscles supporting his jowls in pleats, a speaker of long and intricate sentences who seamlessly thanks Mrs. Cresspahl for coming, affably bosses the porter around, ushers Mrs. Cresspahl with old-fashioned chivalry through the automatic doors, tips the porter precisely 11 percent, and walks straight over to Arthur, showing not the least surprise, for Arthur who has been circling the airport ring road for fifty minutes in his black limo has now arrived to the minute, pulling up to the curb next to his boss’s canvas suitcases. Arthur! this boss says, and Arthur, cap on his head, white teeth smiling beneath the dark brown furrows of his brow, says: So, Chief.

  On the drive back, the divider behind Arthur’s seat is down; he drives one-handed, the other arm resting on the back of the seat so he can turn around more easily. De Rosny is sitting on the appropriate diagonal in his line of sight and they’re catching each other up on what’s new in their lives.

  Mr. de Rosny has not flown straight back from Hawaii, no no. He’s had a stopover in California, had this suit made in Italy, spent two days enduring Parisian cuisine, and just managed to get a seat on an American airline, he’s glad to be back in New York. How about you, Arthur?

  Arthur has bought his wife a new washing machine. His second-youngest son has passed his med school exams—not aced them, but passed. Arthur spent the weekend in Connecticut, that backyard of his sure is nice. The wife is worried about the teacher’s strike, the younger kids are missing school, although the teachers’ demands, especially for smaller classes and higher pay. . .

  – And how did you and she get along? the boss asks, tossing his head toward Mrs. Cresspahl. – She was fine: Arthur says, and Mrs. Cresspahl catches his eye in the rearview mirror for a moment. He doesn’t wink at her, just gives a tiny, reassuring widening of the eyelids.

  I might have known that the boss would put his arm around your shoulders, hold the door for you, let you choose where to sit. Gesine, or whatever your name is.

  All right, Arthur. And, go to hell, Arthur.

  September 13, 1967 Wednesday

  The New York Times illustrates today’s round of Svetlana Stalina’s reminiscences with a photo from 1941, showing the girl a bit fat for a fifteen-year-old, in a white blouse with two intertwined S’s, standing in front of the grille of an imposing ZIS limousine, the “family car.” In 1942, the wayward daughter reports, a great many people in camps were shot . . . I have no idea why it happened . . .

  And more news from the entertainment industry: On Sunday night, Frank Sinatra talked back to an employer of his and was knocked down, losing two teeth in the process . . .

  Federal Judge Dudley B. Bonsal has ordered the transit authority to allow antiwar ad posters in the subway too: because of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  Gesine’s ten days on the Atlantic have now been buried under three weeks back in the city, and the codes of employee behavior have once again taken over. Again she sets her clocks and watch five minutes fast, so as not to be late to the office. She denies to herself the existence of these five extra minutes, when she goes to sleep, when she wakes up; only when the subway is late does she consciously draw on this reserve. She generalizes occasional subway lateness into a negative rule so as to completely safeguard her commute against delays, and she either mentally stores up any minutes fewer than five that have accrued from finishing breakfast early or else doesn’t trust her watch. She tracks her stockpiled time using the announcements on the radio, while at the same time hiding behind mistrust of the speaker’s nonchalance:

  Well, folks, if you were trying to get out of the house by half past, you’re now seven minutes late!

  Aside from that, she tries to minimize her empirically derived thirty-five minutes from apartment to typewriter by transferring quickly and interpreting traffic lights in daredevil fashion, without, however, crediting herself with any time thereby gained. The accumulated surplus sometimes sends her forth from the Upper West Side as early as ten past eight, and often brings her under the insistent clock in Grand Central Terminal

  This is the clock that wakes up America!

  at eight thirty. Not infrequently, she has reached the public electric clock in the office, its spider-leg second hand slicing away at the dial, by a quarter to nine. With the fifteen minutes gained she could in theory unfold her newspaper, but she thinks it would be petty to start work precisely at nine zero zero and zero seconds, so she reaches into her in-box after all. This hamsterish timekeeping has no effect on the pace of her work, because tasks are given to her as they come in; there are half hours on duty when Mrs. Cresspahl reads encyclopedias, bent diligently over her desk, with the door open . . . Not until ten to five does she start to pay her hoarded minutes back into real time. It’s easy to lose one or two of the actual temporal units in the process: she usually isn’t standing at her apartment door until five forty. She considers this difference of a twelfth of an hour a real loss, whether or not Marie has been waiting for her.

  The management has not introduced punch clocks, and the word punctual never comes up in their regular memoranda to the staff. Gesine is no more devoted to this particular company than she was to previous employers. Showing up two minutes late in the morning is not enough to give her a bad conscience. Others may interpret her early arrival as overeagerness, even brown-nosing. And yet she cannot forego this juggling with imaginary time. She has nothing else she can count on. She lets Mrs. Williams tease her about German punctuality; she lets D. E. blather on about traumatic punishments for tardiness in school. All she has is the check that comes through interoffice mail at the middle and end of each month, in a sealed envelope, $8,000 a year before taxes. That check is nothing compared to a union that could go on strike, like the workers against Ford, the railway-men against the LIRR, the teachers against the city. She can be given two weeks’ notice at any time, and she has only five months’ salary in a savings account to pay for Marie’s school until she finds another job. She refuses to pass up any extra guarantee she can find, not even that of optical presence, of being at her place of work on time.

  And as for the intimate overtime in the Waldorf Astoria Towers . . . a hundred feet up above the night, above abandoned Lexington Avenue, a hundred feet al fresco above the drunken gentlemen, lost tourists, taxis regally circling in the stinking canal of the street . . . in the musty air of air conditioners, the air from grandmothers’ dresser drawers full of curiosities and treasures . . . overtime for Vice President de Rosny, who was brought to his suite like a beloved visiting prince, provided by t
he hotel with a bar with fresh ice, a second TV set, an electric typewriter in a kind of wheeled cradle . . . overtime to translate a letter from Prague, written in Polish French, about nightclubs, Super 8 film, a girl named Maria-Sofia, government credit tied to the dollar. . . overtime with cocktails . . . overtime that included being driven home in a black chariot, through the reddish backlight of the West Forties, under the gushing arcs from open fire hydrants, up the West Side Highway, high above the gray steaming Hudson and the mist-shrouded other shore, on past the swept and raked Riverside Park, across the world . . . hours spent after closing time, above and beyond the ordinary requirements . . . ?

  It was a night out. It was fun. It was an exception. It was overtime, unpaid.

  September 14, 1967 Thursday

  In an interview about the battles around Dongson yesterday, Lieut. Col. William Rockety mentions a North Vietnamese who pushed through to the American mortar positions and killed two Marine infantrymen before being killed. “One North Vietnamese”: Lieut. Col. Rockety tells The New York Times: “was really courageous—or crazy.”

  The intensification of the Vietnam War has created more than one million jobs in the United States over the past two years, in virtually every branch of industry (except shipbuilding and new construction). This is almost one quarter of the total rise in employment opportunities.

  How far from disgust was Cresspahl in August 1931, wasting day after day in Jerichow, a healthy man lazing about in the middle of harvest time, blind, trapped by his mental picture of Papenbrock’s youngest daughter, as though she were the one thing he needed in life?

  The repetition must have disgusted Cresspahl. Fine, at sixteen a girl’s proximity, her breath, her glance, her voice, the feel of her skin could still be the most important thing in his world; at sixteen his prospects and plans and whole future might depend on slow persistent pursuit of a fifteen-year-old girl, no longer seeing her as his guild master’s granddaughter but as ineluctable necessity, the key to a still-secret plan for his whole life to come. At sixteen, as a carpenter’s apprentice in Malchow, in the early years of the century, sure. But in 1931, in Jerichow near Gneez, at forty-three?

  The repetition is unbearable, isn’t it—that one’s need for another person should again and again force consciousness through the same old grid, that feelings stirred up so long ago should return fresh and new, that one’s imagination should once again indefatigably interpret someone’s mere exterior as a sign of every conceivable correspondence between her and oneself, that one’s image of a person should suddenly and without warning mask the real person’s lacks and failings, that one’s heart pounding faster and faster at the merest glimpse of her should feel as scary and alive as it did at the sight of someone else, five, twelve, twenty-eight years ago, as though here at last some new incomparable reality, never touched, never felt, was about to be revealed? He must have been half out of his mind.

  He stood, a sturdy man with strong arms, drowsy, friendly, next to the weighing house on the market square as one cart after another from the surrounding farms drove up to it, walking down the rows of the hot tired horses, past the crouching and sweating carters, as though the work was something for him to contemplate. Next to the weighing house he was not so near Papenbrock’s house that he seemed to be waiting, but near enough to see a window swing open.

  He went for a drive, in the veterinarian’s carriage, past the grain carts crunching along the summer road, innocent as any other summer visitor, simply someone out enjoying the scenery, enjoying the summer, incessantly casually bringing the conversation around to the local grain trade, and hearing in everything Dr. Semig said about Papenbrock’s business sense only one thing: You’ll be happy with the girl, Cresspahl. Happy.

  He walked, in collar and tie, idle, past the groups of mowers in the scorching grain fields, as though on vacation, far from the pounding noise of the threshing machines, under a hard sky stretched above the paths around Jerichow, from manor house to manor house, from the coastal bluffs to the Countess Woods, around the marsh, along all the streets in town, for no other reason than that Papenbrock’s daughter had grown up there: he wanted to know what she’d had to give up.

  He sat, on a research trip to the station pub, the Nazis’ hangout, and drank the sour beer and waited for three nights until Horst Papenbrock turned up, then let him rail against the Dawes Plan and the Reichstag election last September, and matched Horst’s Kniesenack pint for pint and his liquor shot for shot. He carried the staggering, merry, weepy Papenbrock son and heir across the market square around midnight and propped him up against his father’s gate and went to Peter Wulff’s back room to tell him about it, not very drunk himself, very pleased, entirely satisfied.

  He traveled, to Hamburg for a day, and came back, and appeared on the road to Papenbrock’s house and office, modest, in an English shirt from Ladage & Oelke, a dark suit, and no hat; he had given the people of Jerichow weeks of amusement with his love affair, while his head was full of the secret existing between him and Lisbeth Papenbrock, for no one’s eyes but his and hers.

  A Protestant. Protestants.

  Must have money if he can spend so much time doing whatever he wants.

  With Nazis. Goes boozing with a Nazi.

  Well he’s not in it for the money.

  You don’t have the guts. You wouldn’t make a fool of yourself in front of two thousand people.

  That’s what he imagines life has to offer: a religious girl.

  Yeah, she didn’t pick you, Stoffregen.

  She’ll never come back. She’ll go with him wherever he says. She was already holding hands with him just now when they turned onto Field Road from the market.

  They were lying there in the woods. He didn’t hear me ride by on my bike, and she had her eyes open.

  On Rehberge Hill. Where you can see a bit of the sea, over by the cliff.

  One person warned him. Meta Wulff joined Peter and Cresspahl after closing time and started talking about Pastor Methling, about Lisbeth sitting in the second row, right under the pulpit, every single church day. Wulff growled at her to stop, but Meta, a fisherman’s daughter from the Dievenow River, gave him a slap below the shoulder blades and rubbed his back and went on talking about the Bible study group that Papenbrock’s daughter held for children in the parish hall, far above and beyond her Christian duties. Cresspahl took none of it in except: She’s good with children, too.

  Under Auntie Times’s broad skirt sits Stalin’s daughter, explaining her mother’s 1932 suicide: “People were a lot more honest and emotional in those days. If they didn’t like life the way it was, they shot themselves. Who does that kind of thing now?”

  He was half out of his mind.

  September 15, 1967 Friday

  This summer is over.

  During the past week, 2,376 people were killed in action in Vietnam. Yesterday, the Soviets denied that they were mistreating one of their writers at a labor camp. Public school teachers continue their strike. South Korea intends to build a wall of barbed wire and electronics along its northern border. Jan Szymczak from Brooklyn says his wife has left him, after arriving from Poland to live with him only in February; he refuses to pay any debts she incurs, as of today.

  This summer is over. This summer, Chomba, having made millions from the revolution, was kidnapped and brought to Algeria, and his former friends are sharpening the guillotine. This summer, the thirty-third military conflict since the end of World War II got under way, and the cubicles upstairs in the bank were overcrowded with announcers reporting from Israel on transistor radios, doors that had been open since the building went up were almost shut if not entirely closed, and Mr. Shuldiner talked all through a lunch about Jewish imperialism; on Broadway, the lanky gentlemen with their full beards, sidelocks, and opaque expressions jumped when neighbors slapped them on the shoulders in congratulation, and found it hard to join the sidewalk debates on realpolitik that followed, and one of them, fleeing into the Eighty-Sixth Stree
t subway station, collided with Mrs. Cresspahl, who had been listening to the discussion from five steps away; – I’m no hero, I’m a theologian: he said. In the victory parade down Riverside Drive, Marie walked at the end of a row next to Rebecca Ferwalter, as though she belonged there, not wearing the blue-and-white outfit but waving a little flag, the Star of David. Kosygin drove north up Third Avenue in a black funeral car, and the onlookers in their modern climate-controlled office towers could not open windows to wave to him. Then he went to see Niagara Falls anyway. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev appeared on TV screens once again, a worn-out old man, jabbering on about deeds he shrugged off. On the wall between our windows hangs the photograph of a California housewife who received a telegram telling her that her son had died in Vietnam and then sat down again for the photographer, pretending to read it. Crime is up 17 percent in six months. With two murders a day in New York, how long will it be before one of them takes the life of Mrs. Cresspahl? Which night will be the one when the window is broken in, when a shadow under the bridge comes to life holding a knife, when an arm around her neck drags her off the street into a basement? Three-Finger Brown, a Mafia leader, died in his bed and the police took photographs of the mourners paying their respects at the graveside. Negroes have risen up in 22 cities, their death toll stands at 86 for now, and meanwhile the New York City police number 32,365 men. We sat on the Hudson River promenade, among people fishing, family outings, tennis games, and looked across the turgid river thick with garbage at the red strangled evening light, and listened to civil war in New Jersey, from which there is free access to Manhattan along railroad tracks and the roads under the river. Late one night a call came from West Berlin, from Anita, the bar owner, and she’d wanted to ask: You still alive, Gesine? If we only knew whether John Kennedy had been killed by a lone wolf or someone acting on orders. The air force is losing mini-mines on the Florida coast and doesn’t know how it’s happening. Railroads, telephone companies, automobile factories, and schools are undergoing strikes. It’s not our problem, we’re here as guests, we’re not responsible. We’re not responsible yet. More Americans than South Vietnamese soldiers are being killed in Vietnam, and General Westmoreland has called up more. The legislature is laughing out loud over a law against the plague of rats in the slums. De Gaulle promises freedom to Quebec. Again and again, the great powers photograph the dark side of the moon. Krupp has died, Ilse Koch has killed herself. One of the inventors of the gas chamber, a fat German man in his mid-fifties, was seen entering the dock in a Stuttgart courtroom. This summer is over, it’s now our future past, that’s what we can expect from life. But still, underneath Broadway, at the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station, when an express thunders past heading north along the center tracks, we look at the stiff and expressionless people in the juddering train windows and fear someday being no longer among them—a future when it is only through our homesickness that we will live in New York City.