Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Gesine, wake up. Where were you.

  – A few years ago.

  September 26, 1967 Tuesday

  “Despite the forecast of milder days ahead, there was a feeling of autumn in the air. And it wasn’t entirely welcome.

  ‘Looks like fall is really here,’ said a gas station proprietor in Upper Montclair. ‘I don’t know how many more winters I can stand.’ ” ©

  Cresspahl never reached old age.

  The soft gray-white light always new over the conspicuously green clusters of trees where the marsh used to be. His eyes weren’t so good anymore. Time and again the smell on the west wind of leaves still undiminished and fresh. So much painful hope. Now there was a brown patch of scrawny sticks in the hollow, and the smell of mold until the ground freezes.

  The town was small, like decades before. He could walk from one end to the other, take its measure, look at the children. The others were dead, of course.

  A few days ago a sprinkling of snow had fallen, which would have had to go on much longer to turn things white, if it hadn’t melted. Two four-year-olds were standing outside the Jerichow post office, catching the flakes in the bigger one’s cap; they showed the people walking past, Cresspahl too: Snow.

  Winter. Kern’s granddaughter had told him about one winter when the ice had shelved off of the coastal cliffs, leaving high piles of slabs. You could walk on the Baltic. For Elke Kern, that had been a First Time.

  The field his wife used to call the garden, behind the rack for drying the milk cans—he wanted to break up the soil there again. After his wife died, the fence rotted and the chickens ate up the garden and buried it. Then he’d torn down the wire.

  One can also pay one’s respects at the cemetery, if one is inclined to do as much as possible one Last Time. But he didn’t know the woman there anymore.

  Jakob, him he knew. He walked to Jakob’s grave. Had a chat with Jakob. So, Jakob. How’s things? Yes Cresspahl. Look at me, lying here on show. Creutz fixed up the grave like a display model, now he keeps bringing customers round to see me, and every time he says: I hope I’m laid out as nice as that someday. And then they buy.

  Be seeing you, Jakob.

  The cat lies all night where the stove has warmed up the floorboards, stretched out full-length. She’s listening.

  She’s listening to the pocket watch on the table, to the creaking of the chair.

  America is too far away for me to imagine.

  When Jöche wakes up, he’ll send his wife to look in on me. See if I’m still alive.

  In Malchow, a master would be laid on the wagon and brought to the grave only by other masters. The clothworkers and cobblers, they had hearses of their own.

  In Februarys, not from this century, there were market stalls in Malchow where they sold Heitwecken: stuffed cinnamon rolls sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and shaped like a jester’s cap. Sevenny-four years’s long enough.

  Now Jöche’s bicycle was leaning on the milk rack. Strips of Jöche’s living-room carpets were slung over the frame. Crates of empty beer bottles against the wall of the house. Jöche had left the railroad for the brewery. Where does all the beer he drinks go.

  Oh, they got along pretty good. Jöche’d split enough wood for two winters. Jöche’d turned the soil after all.

  He wants to seed grass.

  September 27, 1967 Wednesday

  On Monday, a bus driver in Harlem was attacked for the second time. As on the previous Tuesday, two light-skinned Negroes boarded the bus during rush hour and one grabbed the change money ($28.80) while the other put a knife to the driver’s throat. The slashes required seven stitches. The other passengers had fled the bus, if only so that they wouldn’t have to testify against the robbers. Now there are plainclothes policemen riding the bus in Harlem.

  The East Germans are trying to sell several hours of film footage here, showing captured American airmen in Hanoi. Their idea of an appropriate price is half a million dollars.

  And the honeymoon was over, wasn’t it, Lisbeth Papenbrock?

  And with no one to help her! Mrs. Jones, who had put a veneer of cleanliness on Cresspahl’s two rooms and still came by for the laundry, couldn’t tell her anything about the butchers and greengrocers of Richmond, she did her shopping at Brixton station. And, Mrs. Jones thought of Cresspahl’s new wife as a lady, avoiding unseemly conversations where she might have to express her unvarnished opinions. And, she couldn’t understand what Mrs. Jones was saying.

  Mrs. Jones said: What a distinctive face! Gushing over her grandchild, who had flat cheeks like hers and the same calculating look in the same long narrow eyes, the same mouth pressed tightly together in a line. Lisbeth Papenbrock heard: What a distinct faith! She had to repeat the sound of this English to herself again and again until a memory from her schooldays vaguely snapped into place. This language was so fast. And even though the melody of the sentences seemed stuck on a single high tone, it actually dived lower and swung higher quite often, changing the meaning. She couldn’t blame Mary Hahn for it; Mary Hahn had imposed a Scottish English in the Rostock Girls’ School. No matter how slowly and clearly Lisbeth Papenbrock tried to talk, the salespeople still interrupted their weighing and looked at her mouth. Cresspahl, who knew English as well as a Puerto Rican after two years in New York, Cresspahl they understood.

  And, she didn’t have the words! She could carry on a conversation about John Galsworthy or Sir Thomas Beecham but had to point for a Dutch oven or a colander. Every night she had Cresspahl translate for her the next day’s recipe from Frieda Ihlefelds Hauskochbuch (Home Cooking, 9th ed., Friedrich Bahn Books, Schwerin, Mecklenburg), but Cresspahl wasn’t very familiar with cooking terms and didn’t own a dictionary. (They had to buy a dictionary too. That wasn’t saving money.) And then she still had to come home from grocery shopping and go into the workshop and ask how you say Semmelmehl, deeply embarrassed in front of the assistants to whom Cresspahl described what the thing was by explaining how it was made, using hand gestures. “Bread crumbs.” And, she had to convert all the weights and measurements into English measure. And, she hadn’t been expected to mind her sixpence on her trip to Richmond, in the restaurants, at the hotel, but living in Richmond she was expected to mind her pennies.

  And, Cresspahl didn’t notice how she felt! Cresspahl came upstairs at mealtimes, a satisfied man, stretched his legs out under the table, and praised the cooking. And, she saw something new in him: he could play deaf. What he didn’t want to hear ran right off his alert friendly face like water. He looked at her, the corners of his mouth showing his delight; he looked just the tiniest bit past her eyes; he didn’t hear her complaints. That wasn’t how he’d been when she was still Lisbeth Papenbrock. She couldn’t win a fight that way.

  Heinrich, listen, terrible news! Pastor Methling wants to retire, he’s only sixty-eight, he must be sick.

  He’s an employee like any other. With a pension, why should he work any longer than he has to.

  Heinrich Cresspahl! Let me tell you! His work is for the Lord, and you’re making fun of a sick man.

  He’s lived a healthy life. And if the Lord rewards him for his work, that sounds like a good deal from his employer to me.

  After their first fight about church, she served him his meals but refused to eat with him. She left the house between mealtimes on long walks into the city, to punish him. She was cold in the foreign November. It was depressing how closely the historic buildings resembled her ideas of them. Flocks of birds over the rooftops on Parliament Street—she was less at home here than they were. A soldier in the King’s Guard marched back and forth with ponderous steps among the passersby, saber in front of his nose, and he looked like a giant rooster, since his helmet covered most of his face and the red plume on top kept moving. Another thing she could never remember: that the Union Jack consisted of a red St. George Cross edged in white, on a diagonal St. Andrew Cross on blue, with a red diagonal Cross of St. Patrick on it. In the grassy field between We
stminster Abbey and St. Margaret’s, poppy graveyards had been set out for the military, the paramilitary, the groups of firefighters, and so on: little wooden crosses with red rosettes were for sale, pre-sharpened for sticking in the ground. This was how the poppies had bloomed in Flanders at the end of the war. They weren’t there to commemorate the dead from her side. And when she finally went back to Cresspahl, past miles and miles of the same semidetached houses with the same balconies, now curved, now square, and the same painted columns, beneath the white-and-yellow streetlamps, her feet in wet leaves, she was not happy with the fact that her Christian duty required her to forgive him. It was hard for her to do that for him. She felt cheated.

  Cresspahl thought: A hug is apology enough. (He had no idea what he was apologizing for.)

  September 28, 1967 Thursday

  In the morning, in the first shaded breadth of five glass doors, I see reflected the opposite side of the street, lit white: its framed section of shop signs, display windows, and pedestrians acts hurt, like some peaceful creature, when I make a fifth of it shear away on an opened door. In the second surface, of the doors in the lobby, the reflection is formed more blurrily and the mirror almost entirely breaks apart into equal-size segments of doors swinging next to me, comes swinging back into place reflecting the pale marble surfaces in the lobby, and now is an image made of shadows, quiet, moving, edged with darkness suspended from above as though by treetops, and between the sliding replicas of shadowy people the background has receded far away, a whitish sea light seen under green leaves, boats on the water, indelible well-known outlines before me, names full of time, and only when I lose the image at the fluorescent-lit corner of the bank of elevators does my mind give the happy sight and moment and memory a sharp edge of danger and misfortune.

  The heavily overcast day with mist on the opposite bank of the river, on the parched colors of leaves by the blurry water, promises a morning in Wendisch Burg, sailing weather for a morning fourteen years ago, and produces a longing for a day that wasn’t like that, creates for me a past I didn’t live, turns me into a false person divided from herself by tricks of memory.

  Conversation in the elevator: You know so-and-so? She got married, and he still had to ship out the very next day.

  I wouldn’t know.

  Vietnam probably.

  (Eleven people listening.)

  Rain showers in the evening.

  September 29, 1967 Friday

  Now that’s how it should be. That’s what we expect. In the first section of the paper, our good old New York Times has not one word to say about the bullet hole made in the front window of the Franklin Society Savings & Loan yesterday. First do your homework, then you can play, Grete Selen-binder used to say, the namesake auntie, the aunt with the keys, with the crying. The homework here is air battles over Hanoi; teachers accepting a new contract with the city; the government of the ČSSR having robbed its writers of a journal; the left wing of the League of German Socialist Students in West Berlin being led by one Mr. Rudi Dutschke. “He is sometimes called ‘Red Rud’ or ‘Revolutionary Rudy,’ but he is no classic Marxist.” That takes care of that.

  Now you can play. On the first page of the second section, the Times makes herself comfortable, with epic photos and elegant printing covering 102 sq. in., and helps the dull-witted along with a nice play on words: “Two Midtown Bandits Ricochet and Retreat When Bullets Fly.” She gets any mere pleasure-seeking quickly under control, though, putting this censure right at the start: The two men bungled their holdup “from inept start to ignominious finish.” First mistake: They were conspicuous. Walked into the bank at 441 Lexington Avenue with brown paper bags under their arms, the kind we go shopping with, and narrow-brimmed hats pulled low toward their noses. Second mistake: In their nervousness they hit a guard over the head when he tried to ask them a question. Third: Insufficient familiarity with the terrain: when another guard started shooting, one of the robbers tried to pull open a door you had to push. When they finally solved that puzzle, they dashed out onto Lexington Avenue and vanished (in fact, “into the heavy crowds on Lexington Avenue”—an explanation provided for the benefit of the paper’s out-of-town subscribers). Fourth mistake: They left clues. They dropped their hats and the paper bags in which they had planned to carry off their loot.

  And now The New York Times puts on a show, as a well-earned reward for us after all that analysis: the whole story once again, from the top:

  It was about 10 a.m.

  At 441, that’s on East Forty-Fourth Street.

  Quiet in the bank.

  Just ten customers.

  The guard is in uniform. He is struck down!

  The two men turn toward the counter.

  One has a pistol.

  He points it at the office manager, because the office manager stepped forward.

  Some of the tellers scream and throw themselves to the floor behind the counter. From behind the counter, a plainclothes guard shoots at the two thugs.

  They can’t tell where the shots are coming from.

  They panic, they flee.

  Of the three shots fired, one made the hole in the front window.

  Under the hole, out the window (as seen from within), at least eleven men are standing, all serious, practically glowering, deep in thought.

  That’s what we mean: the great scientific turn of The New York Times, its sober yet gripping contribution to the sociology of bank robbing.

  And that is how a lady of the old school comports herself. She may condescend to film a bank robbery, but she doesn’t tolerate any fuss.

  Crumbs fall from the table on which she treats her subjects so importantly. We, forced to miss out in the office, can taste in these crumbs a hint of salvation—from our distance both from places in Asia and from the nearby building. We imagine her holding up for us the life we have missed, reheated but still fresh, as though it were possible to catch up.

  On Lexington Avenue the sidewalks are even narrower than elsewhere, both before and after work hours—more crowded than the other avenues with people praying for a cab, cursing at a bus, setting their heart on the next shuttle to Times Square. We won’t cross the street to take a look at the hole in the window, of course; we have a picture of it under our arm. Outside Grand Central, two newspaper vendors have set up their stall half immersed in the surging stream of pedestrians, compressing that stream into half the space, and whoever is pushed off the curb by the buffeting that results from the blockage hears them bark: “Wall Street. The latest. Wall Street. The latest,” and, softer, “Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir.” It goes lickety-split, coins and papers almost colliding in the same hand, and anyone with both hands already full gets the paper tucked under his arm for him. In the Graybar Building, in the dimly lit hall leading to Grand Central Terminal, two men stand behind a counter made of crates with exactly the same papers—silent, gloomy, blocked by no customers, but even passersby who have not yet purchased the latest from Wall Street don’t stop, as though there is something suspect about any goods so unflamboyantly on offer. We don’t buy here and we don’t buy there, we wait for The New York Times.