Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The Flossenbürg concentration camp can best be described as a factory dealing in death. Vicious murders of Jews were the order of the day; lethal injections and shots in the back of the neck were everyday occurrences.

  T/4 Robinson had himself transferred to West Berlin for his last year. To West Berlin, as to everywhere it went around the world, the US Army exported the ghettos that it didn’t allow in its military bases back home; in West Berlin, too, the bars for second-class Americans were more rundown, more often targets of the police, and more expensive than the pubs for ordinary citizens. And in Berlin the Germans laughed at these foreigners parading down Clayallee on July Fourth in their armored vehicles, hands held flat under their chins, sitting ramrod straight in impractical postures, fiercely staring straight ahead, like dolls in a toy car. In Berlin he met a girl who wanted to improve her English; with his English from the streets of the Bronx, this girl was incomprehensible to Americans who had theirs from a school. T/4 Robinson had thought it was a romance. Berlin couldn’t keep him in Germany. The army couldn’t keep him.

  – Or maybe it was a girlfriend who planted the steamer trunk with the mummies in Anne Solomon’s basement: says Mr. Robinson, low-frequency radio technician, elevator operator, maintenance man, plumber, painter, dealer in used TV sets, custodian of the basement storage room (who pretends not to recognize Mrs. Cresspahl when he runs into her on Broadway while with elegantly dressed Negroes—strong, sturdy men with unusually cheerful demeanors), a person who cannot be questioned, cannot be known. He precedes Mrs. Cresspahl out of the elevator and taps on her doorbell until Marie opens the door, cautiously today, only as far as the chain will go, not entirely relieved when she sees him.

  We did what you asked: he promises the child, who is keeping her expectant eyes on him, reminding him: We checked. Puedes estar segura. En nuestra casa no hay cementerio particular.

  Turning away, he winks at Mrs. Cresspahl. While doing so, he lifts his hand and dabs at the skin around the corner of his left eye, several times, with careful fingers, as he always does when we’re sure that he’s lying.

  September 22, 1967 Friday

  – Mrs. Cresspahl? Mrs. Cresspahl! How nice, Mrs. Cresspahl. I mean: nice to meet you, by phone at least. Brewster. I mean: Mrs. Brewster, the wife. Dr. Brewster’s wife. Is your daughter there? Aha, she isn’t there. She’s on her way, she’s coming, but she’s not with you, is that right? She’s not here either. She was here, I mean: she didn’t come straight here. First she went to Dr. Brewster’s office on Park Avenue, but the only one there was Miss Gibson, yes, like the drink, she was having the super pack up the equipment. Miss Gibson was in tears a little, it always amazes me, the most unexpected people do like my husband, and a girlfriend of hers has a fiancé who has a brother in Vietnam who sent home a photograph where he had a kind of chain of cut-off ears from the Vietcong slung across his shoulder and I said, Nonsense, first of all we are a civilized country, secondly the Vietcong won’t take revenge on our doctors, especially not on my husband, the most unexpected people like him, as I said, but I wasn’t there, I was already in the Biltmore, we live in Greenwich, Connecticut, do you know Greenwich, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  The secretary of state has let his daughter marry a Negro, who is moreover a lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve who requested to serve in Vietnam.

  – You simply must come and pay us a visit in Greenwich, once we’re past our troubles of course, along with your daughter, I wish I could hug her, the way she comforted Miss Gibson and helped with the packing up and left all of a sudden, a modest child, Miss Gibson said, Miss Gibson called here, let the call go through, she said, because we’ve stopped picking up, I’m here with my two daughters, seven and nine, lovely children, you simply must meet them, we just can’t understand it, Dr. Brewster, a doctor, so respected, the way he got on board an airplane in Newark, already a real soldier, and two days later he’ll be in San Francisco and in Vietnam by October, it’s horrible, and these children’s refugee camps are apparently so unhygienic, what if he catches something, well that’s our contribution, our national duty, I’m sure your daughter must understand that too, there’s a patient here who’s just walked in, a ten-year-old girl, who wants to see him, Dr. Brewster, one more time, before, Miss Gibson said.

  Since 1961, approximately 13,365 American citizens have fallen in combat in Vietnam.

  – . . . such a polite child, Mrs. Cresspahl, you’ve done a wonderful job, that must have been her Sunday dress, a real lady, you must tell me her school’s address, my daughters out here in the country, you know, it can be so expensive, we’re thinking of moving to New York, Dr. Brewster will be in Vietnam for at least two years, in Danang, or Danghoi, someone get me a map, so your daughter looked around when she got to our suite, the Biltmore always gives me a suite, she was looking for Dr. Brewster, you know, and I tell her we already took him to Newark and that we’re moving to New York and I ask would she rather have Coke or a Sprite, it does better in the taste tests supposedly, and your daughter just looks at me, you know, I was sitting on the sofa and your daughter looked at me, so quietly, like she really understood what I was going through, like she could see it in my face, and what can I tell you, Mrs. Cresspahl, she turns around, turns on her heel and disappears, I was still in the doorway, she could have stayed of course, I didn’t mean it like that, she was gone, such a tactful child, Mrs. Cresspahl, and so brave, taking the subway this late, I haven’t been in the subway for ten years, all those drunks and Negroes and ritual murders, you must come and see us, I’ll give you my number, and of course your daughter can write to Dr. Brewster, I’ll pass the letters along, and I must congratulate you on such a daughter, Mrs. Cresspahl, I’ll call again, Mrs. Cresspahl. Mrs. Cresspahl! I only said: It’s better if you don’t call me. I’ll call you. It was a pleasure. Charming.

  Today The New York Times has decided to offer for our consideration, at last, the final problem plaguing the spirit of self-presentation virtuoso Svetlana Dzhugashvili: Can what is good ever be forgotten?

  September 23, 1967 Saturday

  In 1931, ten eggs cost seventy-eight pfennigs, a pound of butter one mark thirty. St. Peter’s Church in Jerichow charged two marks for wedding decorations and clean-up afterward, three marks for ringing the bells at the bridal car’s approach, one mark for lighting the altar candles, three marks for choir and organ during the ceremony, and it sold admission tickets to anyone not in the bride’s or groom’s family at twenty-five pfennigs each. Fees payable in advance. Lisbeth Papenbrock had ordered everything on offer except for the guest tickets and the painful singing; after lunch on Reformation Day she really and truly found herself being driven down Town Street to church in one of Swenson’s black rental cars; but she did not feel entirely at ease. She’d so often anticipated what she would be feeling now that now the hope crumpled and broke, not only under the stares coming from both sidewalks into the slowly driving car, which seemed polite, barely,

  I cant help it, I think Im pretty, said the cat, looking at its reflection in the well.

  Then in it fell.

  And you pushed it!

  Shes wearing silk but no honor. The war just thirteen years ago and shes goin to England.

  If youve got it long, show it long.

  We’ll cut hers short!

  Ottje Stoffregen’s drunk already.

  She should have gotten her myrtle from a flowerpot.

  not only under the stubborn silence of a family crisscrossed with conflicts since the night before—Louise with her husband and the bride because the wedding procession wouldn’t be on foot; Papenbrock with his elder daughter because she’d brought her bankrupt husband and drunk too; she in turn with Horst because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the anonymous letters Cresspahl had apparently been getting; Horst with his father because the latter wouldn’t let him wear his SA uniform to the ceremony (even though Pastor Methling was prepared to accept a detachment of uniformed Brownshirts as a display of patriotism), and be
cause his Krakow brother-in-law had been helped out of his debts again, and because Lisbeth’s dowry was coming out of his inheritance; Lisbeth with Horst because he’d called Cresspahl’s family proles; Papenbrock with everybody because they’d tried to make him invite the oldest son from “Rio de Janeiro”—

  what really bothered her was Cresspahl’s acquiescence. She didn’t find such behavior appropriate. He had agreed to have the wedding on Reformation Day, the notices drafted for The Rostock Gazette and The Gneez Daily News and The Lübeck Gazette had come back from Richmond without a single edit, he had let her have her choice of the theme of the sermon (“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God”: Luke 9:62), he may have insisted on inviting Dr. Semig but hadn’t insisted on the Wulffs, in the end he’d accepted one of Papenbrock’s hats so he’d have something to doff at the church door—all in exchange for her promise that, for the certainty that, at half past seven the number 2 express train from Gneez near Jerichow to Hamburg would rescue them. But if it was a deal he was making, why didn’t he add anything for her willingness to move abroad, which was, after all, the greater sacrifice?

  I’m doing this for you, Cresspahl. It’s for you. Do you even see it?

  Here is the first picture: The groom and my mother in front of the churchyard wall, her face reduced to eyes and lips, unrecognizable under the edge of the long veil that drew a line across her forehead and followed the shape of her skull above that line, revealing it in the form of a silly and vulnerable vessel; he (long since hatless) to her right, his left arm behind her back without touching her, a country fellow dressed up in a loose-fitting black suit (from Ladage & Oelke, Alster Arcades, Hamburg), not a local, offering to the camera lazily protruding lips instead of a smile, a stranger with faith in the Stettin–Hamburg express. Next comes Cresspahl’s mother, an old woman with twisted shoulders, so attentively is she listening with her overstrained, exhausted body; she has thin gray-black hair and her grimace of joy is somewhat spoiled by the yellowed stumps of her teeth. Our li’l grammy, eighteen months before her death. Placed next to her is Gertrud Niebuhr, her second child, shy and embarrassed at the deference and honor, who will relive the ceremony, in words, fully animated, only when she goes home; and Martin Niebuhr, friendly and stiff in his musty Sunday suit; and Peter Niebuhr, forestry student from Berlin, with glints in his glasses that hide his eyes, holding himself as though he has ended up in an all too distant land. They spoke only a very southern form of Plattdeutsch. Stellmann drags his tripod farther and farther back in front of them, sticks a hand out from his black cloth, three fingers raised as though he is taking a vow, and issues sharp orders, trying to enforce a better-synchronized play of facial expressions. Then there is the semicircle of assembled relatives plus a pastor in back obscured by a black block of sturdy men in black top hats, who’d accidentally stepped in front of the camera but let a little pleasure slip into their solemn stony faces because someone, other than them, had come a cropper this Reformation Day.

  I never saw that picture.

  The other picture is a photograph mounted on varnished cardboard with Stellmann the photographer’s name and address embossed on it: a view of a long table with lamplight and the light of the flashbulb reflected in the centerpieces and platters of meat. When I first saw it, it had barely been touched but the sepia had turned almost dark brown in its paperboard folder, blurring the faces. I recognized Papenbrock from his pear-shaped head, and also by the somewhat servile stiffness with which he leaned toward the lady on his right. This lady, in a suit that looked like a uniform, meant to emphasize her square shoulders, was perhaps Isa, a relative of the von Bothmers. The woman on Papenbrock’s left is my mother—so I have been told. By this point she is wearing a blouse, maybe greenish, loosely tied at her neck with a thin white cord; the photo catches her with one hand behind her head, touching her helmetlike hairdo, so that she laughs, delighting in her clumsiness, but also as if laughing does not suit her. This face looks like mine did in 1956. The photograph is ruined because Cresspahl is turning half of his broad back toward the lens, talking to the lawyer from Krakow who drank away Hilde Papenbrock’s inheritance and saddled her with one misfortune after another, and he, kicked out of the Mecklenburg bar association, thrusting his dark head forward undaunted, having a good time, or maybe just scheming, with his squinting eyes, his firm cheeks—this is the man Cresspahl’s drinking a toast to, with cognac. Next to them, the camera has caught a gentleman in the act of leaving: Semig, with his rabbity head, with the wide flat toothbrush mustache sticking out from his shaved rabbity head, Semig with his curved lips and wrinkled nose, but it’s not that he’s about to sneeze, not at all, he is trying to look amiable. He left before the end of the coffee. He stopped behind my mother and bent over her shoulder, not for long, for four words (You’ll be happy with the girl, Cresspahl). He nodded to the others as he left the room, and for a long time thereafter the von Bothmers as well as the Papenbrocks held up his behavior as amazingly tactful for a Jew, and for a university man. Pastor Methling was sore at Semig because now he couldn’t decently stay longer himself. The schnapps bottles appeared on the table as soon as he was out the door, and when my mother and Cresspahl arrived in Hamburg on the number 2 express train at around a quarter to ten and walked down Kirchenallee to the Reichshof Hotel,

  – . . . they were married: Marie says. (Saturday is South Ferry day when Marie says it is.)

  Che Guevara, the revolutionary, found it necessary to have himself photographed in the Bolivian jungle. True, The New York Times now shows him surrounded by comrades-in-arms. But does the whole world have to see him risk his neck and lose?

  September 24, 1967 Sunday

  “GERMAN-AMERICANS MARCH WITH YODELING, PRETTY FRAULEINS

  There was yodeling on Fifth Avenue and in Yorkville yesterday afternoon as the German-Americans held their annual Steuben Parade for the 10th time.

  There were also beer steins in all sizes, pretty girls of the New York Turn Verein turning cartwheels and elderly members of the German War Veterans Association displaying World War I Iron Crosses.

  And there was Governor Rockefeller, shaking every hand in a 10-foot radius on the reviewing stand on Fifth Avenue and 69th Street, slapping the backs of visitors from West Germany, applauding every passing lederhosen group and pinning a blue cornflower, the parade symbol, on the lapel of State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz.

  As usual during ethnic and other Fifth Avenue parades, East Side traffic was disrupted for hours. In addition to Fifth Avenue, the transverse roads crossing Central Park were temporarily closed to all vehicles except buses.

  One of the about 40 floats in the two-hour parade carried a large portrait of the late Chancellor, Dr. Konrad Adenauer, ‘Architect of German-American Cooperation.’ The display was sponsored by the New York Staats-Zeitung und Herold, a German-language daily.

  . . .

  Many German-American associations that took part in yesterday’s parade carry on the traditions and costumes of areas that never belonged to Germany, like Transylvania (a part of Rumania) or Gottschee (the Yugoslav Kocevje), or were severed from Germany after World War II, like Silesia, now a part of Poland.”

  © The New York Times

  “CLOTHIER FOUND SLAIN IN STORE

  Queens Man Shot to Death Near Waterfront Here

  The survivor of a German concentration camp who had befriended sailors of many nations in his waterfront haberdashery here was found shot to death in his store yesterday.

  The victim, Max Hahn, 64 years old, of 63-60 102d Street, Rego Park, Queens, was found on the floor of the store at 680 12th Avenue near 51st Street with two bullets in his chest. His feet and hands had been tied by his assailant who apparently had attempted to rob him, the police said.

  . . .

  Apparently the gunman killed Mr. Hahn after he had tied him up, shooting him twice in the chest at close range. Mr. Hahn’s pockets had been turned inside out, but
the police said they did not think that the killer had found any money.

  Most of Mr. Hahn’s customers were members of crews from the ships that docked in the Hudson River along the avenue. Mr. Hahn, a native of Poland, would stand in the doorway of the store or sit outside it and josh with the seamen as they walked by his store. His wife, Ida, helped out in the store, which was open six days a week, usually from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

  Their son had returned about two months ago from Israel where he had been attending college.”

  © The New York Times

  “Fall arrived briskly and brightly yesterday. The official change-over in seasons occurred at 1:38 p.m. . . .”

  © The New York Times

  September 25, 1967 Monday

  How come: he wonders, she wonders, we wonder: she is suspended, buckled in, tilted back, in a three-engine jet plane in a holding pattern over Pennsylvania? But the clumpy clouds in the foreground and the previously level strata to the north recall the Arctic (recall pictures of the Arctic), with the edges pictured somehow sharper, icier. Only the clock knew it was afternoon, the white radiance under the blue sphere merely repeating “light,” “light.” The airplane is tipped about forty degrees; it seems to be aiming at a sea-dark blue hole in which brownish-yellow flecks of dirt indicate human settlements. Only the wing’s surface slanting into the swelling balls of cloud shows the plane’s repeated turns. This must have been April 1962, when she was obtaining European passports with American visas, which arrived from Milan after a few weeks by registered mail, as though none of them had ever been to East Germany. That morning, in Minneapolis, in the mirror facing the bed, her whole body had looked yellow, one night closer to death. It is the sun, sinking into the cloud cover, that sets the wing’s surface ablaze with color. Gradually the white sculptures of the sky are flattened into a bluish, tufted plain. The captain, grumbling on behalf of his passengers, informs them about the new instructions from ground control in New York. New York—will we ever get there? Then the stewardesses serve the second round of Bloody Marys: cheap vodka swimming on a layer of tomato juice. A woman like her can afford weekend trips like this only with a pass, the kind major shareholders get. She cannot cross the Atlantic with it, can cross the Pacific only as far as Hawaii. In Milan, Vito Genovese was Karsch’s neighbor for a while. In Minneapolis, at the top of the Foshay Tower, there were two women and one man who turned to look down at the forests and the necklace of lakes to the north whenever other tourists pushed past behind them. ( Je vous assure que vos papiers d’identité ne serviront pas aux but anti-communistes.) Where was the child? The child was with Mrs. Ferwalter. No, on an eleventh floor. The child is supposed to buy The New York Times. The child, Cresspahl’s last two eyes, as survivor. Now the plane is circling below the clouds, above a twilit coastal area, tiny house lights, cars not visible. One of those echoing sonorous voices will say into the telephone: Marie, do you have a father, a grandmother, any relatives at all? You need to be brave now! The plane unexpectedly starts to race, hurtling low over the Atlantic toward Brooklyn, alongside the shrouded Verrazano Bridge, the Empire State Building rearing up solitary in the night and vanishing into nothing under its chignons of light. Coney Island—whirling colored lights. Lines of headlights on the expressways. Blue lights wrapped in fog. A long taxi on the runway, delays at the intersections. Once, a glimpse past the wing of a deep tunnel seething with cars. In the cubby for this flight’s passengers, there are no messages in the slot labeled “C.” The city bus is stuck in traffic. The gravestones to either side flicker under the city lights. The tunnel—the tiled Hades under the river. In the airport train station, numbers for taxis are handed out. This city won’t last much longer. What’s so special about First Avenue. This city will last maybe another two hundred years. (The doorman in the lobby of the Foshay Tower stood there as anxiously, as reproachfully, as if he were Foshay himself, who in the end lost everything—stocks, cash, tower.) On Ninety-Sixth Street the rails come out from under Park Avenue: the rich live on stilts. Not far from here, from these dilapidated remains of cars and the slimy garbage on the sidewalk, is where the widow of the murdered President Kennedy moved recently: 1040 Fifth Avenue. Their daughter goes to school around the corner. When Mrs. Kennedy’s plans to move there became public, the residents of the building started getting outrageous offers for their apartments, just for the chance to run into Secret Service men in the elevator. (One couple, who were planning to move to the country anyway, made a clean $10,000 profit on the sale of their apartment.) Central Park is pitch black. In the middle of the park there is a stable for police horses, a shooting range for policemen. One round trip to Minneapolis. Maybe the child has kept the tea warm and put the newspaper on the table, with a note: “Don’t change the alarm.” Because even if windswept Singer Bowl stadium in Queens was full of striking public-school teachers yesterday, Marie has her private school tomorrow. Now we want to read the advice column. “My wife having left my bed and board, I will no longer be responsible for any debts contracted by her.”