Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  September 16, 1967 Saturday

  Saturday is South Ferry day. When Marie announces at noon their departure for the Battery, South Ferry day has begun.

  Marie first saw the ferries that run between Staten Island and the southern tip of Manhattan from the tourist deck of the France, back when she still had to be lifted up to see over the railing. She stared with hostility at the skyscraper cactus of Manhattan, growing to gigantic proportions instead of shrinking to human ones; she observed with curiosity the ferryboats crisscrossing the New York harbor alongside the ocean liner: multistory buildings, orange with blue trim, moving fast like fire engines. She nodded in a daze when Gesine couldn’t tell her what the vessels were, but she recognized them when we saw them a second time, on an outing, even though the ferry doors were like blinders blocking her view of the exterior.

  The South Ferry was the first thing in New York she longed for, badly enough that she could reliably wait without whining for her wish to come true: the ride on the Brooklyn express to Chambers Street, the slow crawl on the local line to the screeching loop of the train at the South Ferry station, the emergence from underground into the big waiting room, all without rushing and fussing. When the giant doors rolled back into the walls, though, she started to tug at Gesine’s hand, pull her through the gangways and over the bridges onto the ship, as though in all that space for three thousand people there was one single spot that was hers and she didn’t want to lose it. Back then, she would draw pictures for her Düsseldorf friends that showed New York as nothing but a harbor for floating orange caves with lots of windows, carrying a kindergarten along with a large number of cars. Back then, she didn’t mind when people asked her why she wanted to spend Gesine’s days off taking trips on the South Ferry, and she answered: because it’s a floating house; because it’s a street between islands that crosses itself; because it’s a restaurant you can take a trip in without needing to say goodbyes.

  It was also at the South Ferry turnstiles that, for the first time in the city, she was allowed to pay for a trip herself. This was where she joined the community of citizens.

  Nowadays, she invariably begins her use of the ship on the car deck, supervising the ferry workers as they cast off the cables and raise the scissor gate before pulling their gloves off and sauntering through the car tunnel to the other end of the ship. In the smoking areas, on the main deck and down below, she goes looking for the shoeshine man with whom she has a standing arrangement for her Sunday shoes and a running skeptical conversation about his concession and his life on the ferry. At the snack counter, too, among the tourists on the foredeck, among the family outings and retirees and children between the rows of scuffed brown seats, she finds enough people to observe, so carefully, so politely, that she can just happen to slip away and disappear if spoken to. She disappears down the passageway, lost in her observations, a gangly child wearing a faded wind-breaker with her braids and brown dress shoes shined to perfection with her slightly worn white pants. She does not tell her mother what she liked about the Negro girl her age hauling a two-year-old around on her hip, teasing the baby’s lunging lurching mouth with an ice-cream cone; she says nothing about the old man with the crossword puzzle who asked her for a French word meaning lobby (she told him). Only when she thinks no one is watching does she turn her head to the side and take a few nonchalant steps behind the child playing mother. She avoids policemen, as she has every official in uniform since 1965 when she saw film footage of American soldiers in the Dominican Republic; policemen are the only ones she can respond to with nothing but a lopsided, uncertain smile. She only occasionally, keeping a respectful distance, circles the bench where her mother sits turning the pages of her newspaper, conveying with the nod of a stranger that she doesn’t want to bother her. During the forty-five minutes it takes to go to Staten Island and back, she has covered the three hundred feet from stem to stern several times.

  A Black Muslim on trial before the state supreme court for shooting three policemen was gagged with a small hand towel when his protests against the court proceedings disrupted the court proceedings. The draft board has unexpectedly declared two of the teachers on strike eligible for the draft. An army private in California faces eleven years of hard labor for refusing to board a troop plane to Vietnam (his war, he says, is being fought in the ghettos of Philadelphia). The head of the Egyptian armed forces in the Israeli war has committed suicide by taking poison. The German chemist Albert Widmann, who helped design and test mobile gas chambers, has been released in Stuttgart. For the first time in six days, The New York Times spares us the pleading yowls of Svetlana Dzhugashvili.

  Only on the trip back, when the ferry has already gotten as far as South Brooklyn, does Marie take Gesine up to the top deck and identify the ships lying in the gloomy fog outside the Narrows, the fortress on Governors Island, and the barracks the army built next to the classic red-and-white buildings from the last century; she doesn’t care that her face is getting scoured by the heavy wet wind driving offshoots of Hurricane Doria against the hanging nets of cables on the three bridges over the darkening East River. She says, earnestly, unblinkingly: Thank you very much for taking me, as though she’d needed supervision on the South Ferry. It has never occurred to her to take the South Ferry by herself, not yet.

  Then we went to Rande and took the excursion steamer to Travemünde. She came along, to Hamburg. She wasn’t sad.

  We were very tired, we were very merry.

  We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

  September 17, 1967 Sunday

  Yesterday at noon, on Bayswater Road in London, a man was seen being taken into a car against his will by four men. He was heard shouting for the police. That afternoon, Scotland Yard sent squad cars to Heathrow, where they blocked a runway to prevent an Aeroflot plane’s departure. The police, after a tug-of-war with the captain and crew of the surrounded airplane, took a young Soviet physicist who had been studying in Birmingham for eight months off the plane. He did not seem very coherent under questioning by the British officers. A Soviet embassy official in London said that Mr. Tkachenko had wanted to leave England earlier than planned due to a nervous breakdown, and that the embassy doctor had given him an injection. (After which Mr. Tkachenko called for the police.)

  Cresspahl, back in London at the start of the thirty-sixth tax week of 1931, began preparing in all seriousness for a life with Papenbrock’s youngest daughter. The two assistants he now operated the business with often saw him standing in its courtyard surrounded by backyards, eyes on the brick pavement or the chimney of the Richmond gasworks, one hand on the back of his neck, deep in thought, without ever shaking his head at himself. But since both men had worked for him, usually alongside him, for more than a year, they just pointed the old man out to each other with a smile and a tilt of the head, as he stood there in the heat for minutes at a time like a blind man until at last he heard that the wood planer inside had stopped running. The younger assistant, Perceval, went reconnoitering late one night but all he had to report in the end was that the old man had been busy in the workshop at midnight. At that point, they offered to work overtime. But Cresspahl had no intention of firing either one.

  Cresspahl didn’t own the business. The business, Pascal and Son, was owned by one Albert A. Gosling, Esq. This Albert A. Gosling was a wiry, anxious little man, part owner of a fabric store in Uxbridge, who had gotten himself named Pascal’s legal heir. Reggie Pascal, the Son in the company name, had had no children of his own and had wanted to leave his business to the carpenter’s guild of Richmond, but Gosling, a distant relative, contested the will. Being a retailer, he saw the workshop merely as a piece of property he could sell. The lawyers, Burse, Dunaway & Salomon, unhappily following their client’s alternately warlike and wimplike instructions, pulled themselves together and explained to him that the firm of Pascal and Son, established a generation ago, with a steady middle-class and aristocratic clientele, was a good investment. When Albert A.
Gosling signaled that he had grasped at least the fact that capital yields interest, Burse, Dunaway & Salomon put an ad in the Richmond and Twickenham Times for a master carpenter prepared to manage a business on the owner’s behalf. Cresspahl noticed the listing when he returned from a trip to Dorking with Mrs. Trowbridge and took her out to dinner at Short’s Greyhound Restaurant on George Street in Richmond. Or was it she who noticed the ad? That whole spring of 1928, Albert Gosling would show up in the workshop wearing a new bowler hat and trying to keep a sharp eye on Cresspahl. But since he didn’t know a rasp from a clamp, he would talk about his lifelong fondness for Reggie Pascal—on whose bones in North Sheen Cemetery he had in fact laid nothing, not a wreath, not a petal—and request advance partial payments. His suspicious whining upset Cresspahl’s workers, and Cresspahl insisted that all payments go via the lawyers. Burse, Dunaway & Salomon en masse begged Gosling to leave the workshop alone; Dunaway, in a fit of temper, at one point shoved the file so far across his desk that it hung over the edge and almost fell to the floor. Gosling invested his income in new tailored suits and adopted a neat little goatee and spent more time standing around with assorted young gentlemen at Paddington station than standing with his wife in the shop in Uxbridge; when he came to Richmond, it was more often than not to while away the hours in respectable drinking establishments bad-mouthing the Germans against whom he said he had risked his life. Cresspahl heard about that not only from the waiters but from Perceval, an apprentice at the time. (Perceval would have liked watching the master let Gosling have it, at least once.) To which Mr. Smith added that during the war Gosling had actually worked in the navy supply base in Dartmouth, counting caps. Salomon, who as Burse’s and Dunaway’s junior partner had been stuck with the Pascal account, had taken a liking to this stubborn craftsman from “Michelinberg” who had things to talk about besides the economic crisis or the Jews. Salomon would have liked very much to advise him to give up the arrangement, but his duty to his client’s mandates, especially in light of Cresspahl’s tidy profits, took precedence in the end. Cresspahl had met members of the Jewish faith not only as merchants in the villages around Malchow but also as NCOs on the western front, and he had no trouble learning how to get along with Arthur Salomon, so unabashedly proud of his prep school accent, his conservative black, his brazilwood office furniture, the legal tomes ranged behind his small, alert, embittered head. Cresspahl instructed him to fake an offer to buy Pascal’s property, although at a lower price. Then he had him draw up a settlement for Mrs. Elizabeth Trowbridge.

  For maybe three weeks, how a rather provincial girl had looked waving from the St. Pauli Piers in Hamburg remained fixed in his mind—the whole trip from Hamburg to Kingston on Hull to King’s Cross station (one day and ten hours), plus another twenty days at work, including during his last dinner with Elizabeth Trowbridge. Then Lisbeth Papenbrock sent him a work by the Gneez photographer Horst Stellmann, Portraits Our Specialty: a nondescript girl, her center-parted hair tucked behind her ears, Lisbeth Papenbrock, hands folded over her stomach, in front of Stellmann’s peculiarly gathered drapery backdrop. Cautiously amused, she is looking at the large-format camera behind which Stellmann is squirming under his black cloth, and her lips were slightly parted, and Cresspahl instantly forgot all the earlier pictures.

  A little awry

  delights the Lord’s eye.

  September 18, 1967 Monday

  Where we live, Broadway is old. We’re far from its legendary stretch above Times Square, where quick turnover has set sandblasters loose polishing the weather-beaten tower of The New York Times, where old buildings are torn down in secret behind scaffolds hung with tarps, where the sturdy doorknobs and locks and banisters of the Astor Hotel are auctioned off to make room for glass and plastic and anodized aluminum, where the street is decked with enormous sheets of light: flickering under movie marquees, in the impure colors of neon gases, as messages dashing around surfaces, under spotlights, under searchlights, and as circling, leaping, bursting illuminated advertising. In our neighborhood, on the Upper West Side, the lights are more modest and closer to the ground.

  Our Broadway starts at Seventy-Second Street where it intersects Amsterdam Ave. and clips off the Verdi Square park. A roomy median strip, supplied with benches at the intersections and occasionally shrubbery, divides the street into two wide roadways. Specimens of Renaissance architecture, elephantine in scale, tower on either side; the window-covered boxes under lyrical cornices extending far to the north testify to the feverish confidence in a real estate market that began to go crazy around 1900, when the subway was built under Broadway. These are hotels, cinemas, and apartment buildings from an era when profits were reinvested, when buildings still used art nouveau or Italianate embellishments around their knees and brows to advertise their value. The boom was not enough to let these ornate monsters close ranks—between them crouch the more faintheartedly calculated rental buildings, modest, four-story, making less of an effort to conceal their fire escapes, and now their age unmasks them. Few hotels have been able to keep either their well-to-do clientele or the reputation promised by their facade; they now by and large house long-term guests, poor pensioners, hardly anyone with children. The apartment buildings do not have to advertise their vacancies for long: while their addresses may not be especially prestigious, they are well supplied with subway stations, bus lines in all four directions, and ground floors packed with an unbroken line of businesses—delis, supermarkets, laundromats, barbershops, diners, grocery stores, bars, storefront churches, shoe repair shops, dry cleaners, tax advisers, driving schools, and travel agencies—even if the front windows are sometimes a bit dusty, the fabrics tattered, and the countertops not as gleaming as on the East Side. But nothing new has been built on this street for forty years, and despite the teeming lights at the foot of the facades, Broadway brings to mind postcards from the era of horse-drawn carriages, when residents spoke of “the boulevard.”

  Old people keep quiet on the traffic islands in the middle of Broadway, step gingerly into the quick stream of walkers crossing them, hover at the edge of a crowd that has formed around a peddler, spend long hours over a single cup of coffee in an Automat cafeteria. Abandoned. They failed to save their possessions in Europe from the Nazis, they received no significant compensation, they cannot prolong their bourgeois past into the burnished apartments of Riverside Drive, they live alone. Abandoned by their children, predeceased by their spouse of many decades, by themselves they live out the last warm days on Broadway, where at least they have movement and traffic and business nearby, until it’s time to go back to their furnished rooms, to the old age homes on West End Avenue. These are not elderly gentlemen taking a break during a well-planned stroll, not older ladies savoring an impulse purchase on a bench in the middle of Broadway: these are wards of government welfare, and little more than their clean clothes and erect posture separates them from the ragged man with black skin sweating out some dangerous booze on the thrumming subway grate behind them. They are willing to talk to the person next to them, but grudgingly. The Novoye Slovo, from which two people read the state of the world together, is not enough; the fact that their mothers were practically neighbors in Ruthenian villages is not enough for solidarity; and what kind of closeness is supposed to arise from reciprocal stories of marriages or children’s careers when the children themselves do not come—not for a visit, and not to meet them in the cheap cafeterias where the water is free and sometimes the cream and sugar too. And it’s not even true that their twenty cents and years of loyalty bought them any right to be provided by society with a meeting place, because when their cafeteria’s lease runs out the owners move on, looking for customers with less time on their hands and more cash. There are still the benches.