Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  To get his gun control bill through Congress, President Johnson has allowed states to permit the mail-order sale of rifles and shotguns. It doesn’t have to be revolvers.

  September 30, 1967 Saturday, South Ferry day

  The reopening of schools after the two-week strike did not go off entirely without incident. As one teacher was walking into her school in Brooklyn, someone in a passing car yelled, “Dirty Jew!” The teacher happens to be of Irish descent. Stock certificates worth a million stolen. Fifteen years in an East German prison for an American photographer. The West German government responds to a letter from the East German government, apparently without having read it.

  – Was she homesick in Richmond, your mother, this Lisbeth Papenbrock? the child says.

  – She was trapped. She’d used up her own money, her christening gifts, on that plane trip via Graal, and on purchases for her kitchen. She had to have a double boiler like the one her mother in Jerichow had, of course.

  – In Jerichow they would have just laughed at her, right? I guess she wanted to make the grade.

  – And ultimately the people of Richmond forced this Mrs. Cresspahl to deal with them. She was a customer, and if she can’t say what she wants then you just pull out all six drawers of rice and explain the various kinds to her and tell her the dishes that each one’s good for and she’ll eventually buy one. If you pile enough cooking pots on the shop counter, pots for boiling, steaming, roasting, casseroles, she’s bound to recognize one of them as the one she wants and buy it. And, not being shy by nature, she showed signs of her mother’s attitudes soon enough, her mother who was perfectly capable of telling a saleslady: You can take that one away right now, don’t bother showing me anything so cheap. (That was something Louise Papenbrock did only when Albert was out of earshot, though. Albert didn’t like her behavior to give clues to his net worth.)

  – What about the people who weren’t trying to sell her anything?

  – At first, Perceval and Jim were embarrassed about taking their meals with the master and his wife, and to start with all they liked about her Mecklenburg cooking was the money they didn’t have to spend at the fish-and-chips stand. Eventually she learned how to cook mutton. (The butcher could tell quickly whether a customer was a decent cook or not, and his recommendations to this customer were good ones.) Then there was Mrs. Jones, with her squinty-eyed granddaughter—she stayed on out of curiosity. Street kids, a ragged freezing pack of them, could count on a piece of bread from her. When they were hanging around the entrance gate to Kew Gardens, she would pay the admission for one of them to come in with her, preferably a girl. There was one dinner for Salomon. Salomon only stayed an hour, but he did come.

  – And the pastor.

  – Not the pastor. She couldn’t recognize her church services in this new language. She had more or less picked up the differences between High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church from the reference books at the library on the Green; none of these was good honest Protestant. Low Church might have worked for her, but she didn’t have the courage to walk through the door. There were civilian chairs inside, as for a traveling congregation. The preacher might call himself a pastor, but in her eyes his splendid purple robe made him a priest. And she was confused by all the different denominations in Richmond: Congregationalists, Baptists, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, Methodists, and Presbyterians on Little Green. In Jerichow there was only St. Peter’s Church. (And, she’d checked: Pastor Methling hadn’t retired due to illness.)

  – Was she as strapped for money as we are?

  – She had a hard time asking Cresspahl for more than the household allowance they’d agreed on. It hurt her pride. But she had a bit more to spend than us, and also the newly accrued dignity of a young housewife managing her husband’s money for the first time. And she didn’t want that house behind the gasworks, the house with a workshop, she wanted a new house designed solely to be lived in, something with bay windows or a balcony, with a garden in back (“for the children”). For lifetime possession of that you needed to put eight hundred pounds on the broker’s desk. Cresspahl had left it to her to save up at least half of that. He could have made the down payment for such a house on the spot, from savings; he didn’t tell her that. He wanted to give her some time, the way you give a child time.

  – What did she write in her letters home?

  – She bragged. What she described about Richmond was the park, the nice shops on George Street, equestrians in the park, parades of East Surreys in their red tunics, ice-skating on the rink by Richmond Bridge. She left out the rotting husks of buildings in her own neighborhood, where the working classes were shut away. If she was doing well in a foreign country, it should at least be a foreign country Jerichow could envy. Here in Richmond there were products from the colonies—coffee, tea, cocoa, hot chocolate powder—at incomparably lower prices. And, she wrote: Not a single one of the Communists’ twenty-six candidates had gone through in the October election, and twenty-one of them didn’t get even an eighth of the vote in their district, so they forfeited their deposit. (She did not write that Cresspahl considered Prime Minister MacDonald a traitor to the Labour Party for having agreed to reduce unemployment benefits.) She’d had dinner out once, at the Original Maids of Honour restaurant, for three shillings a head; she wrote about restaurants as though they went every week.

  – Did she show him the letters before she sent them?

  – She gave him the letters to read, and he understood what he read to mean that she was happy. He looked at her affectionately, from the side, a little from below, a touch uneasy, but so that she wouldn’t see him looking.

  – Was Cresspahl still getting anonymous letters from Jerichow?

  – She got one anonymous letter, postmarked West Central 1. It was typed, and expressed regret at her refusal to partake of social interactions abroad. On the other hand, it said, she and a certain Mrs. Trowbridge would have a lot in common.

  – She didn’t show Cresspahl that one.

  – No, she kept that one to herself. She hadn’t breathed a word to him either about Herbert Wehmke, midshipman. She wasn’t planning to keep it from him forever, but for a little while longer.

  – Want to make a bet? the child says: I bet it’s going to slam. Wanna bet?

  Because some captains steer into the ferry slip too late, so that the heavy ship bangs into the wall of wooden pilings as it pulls in, hard the first time, then with a more muffled sound. Then there’s the creaking of the thick logs in the frothy water.

  October 1, 1967 Sunday; heat turned on

  Now our morning dreams are interrupted again by the sounds of the hot water Mr. Robinson is sending up from the basement through floor after floor in exposed pipes. The water recoils from the cold air and pounds on every side under the unequal pressure, which means that while we sleep an old man appears, towering up by the head of the bed, with an iron throat, a jagged pipe in his gullet, breathing razor blades, eating glass and scrap metal. Little pebbles are bouncing up and down too, banging back and forth. The unexpectedly constricted breath of the water delivers quick frightened blows to the metal. The regular rhythm disintegrates into feeble, dwindling heartbeats. The fellow shows no sign of dying and shoves a barbed-wire broom down his throat, with scratching, tickling, scraping noises that sound practically pleasant. To finish the cleaning up, he sends in little men with sharp hammers, who tap the pipe with deliberate blows at unexpected intervals, alternating between the sharp end and the blunt end of the hammer. Then they’re all coughed up in several scraping heaves and thud back down with a chirp, like their bones are breaking. The fellow slowly washes them down, but not in one gulp, they go down separately, hopping around like fleas. A heap of broken glass clanks down, the pieces clinking into one another without, however, hitting bottom in the shattering crash it has led us to expect. The shards are clumped together in balls of glass that someone is gargling. Now he gives a little cough. Feeling unobserved, he hacks copiously and
repeatedly. Finally, he has a full-on coughing fit, his shoulders shaking convulsively. Finally, our sleep has been worn so threadbare that the images tear apart as they unspool. It is not a dream, it’s the morning warming-up of the pipes. The heat’s been turned on for the winter.

  Dear Superintendent, Once again I cannot believe this noise.

  Quite right, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  Not in New York!

  In New York the people living in slums have to bang on the pipes with hammers for hours before the super turns on the heat.

  Is it true that our seventy-year-old building is falling apart? The whole thing?

  Absolutely, Mrs. Cresspahl. The whole thing is falling apart. It’s the mortgages, they’re eating their way through the whole building, top to bottom. Good morning, by the way, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  Later, when the heating has toned its excitement down to helpless hissing in the radiator valves, the other sounds of Sunday start to emerge. Here is the crinkling with which the fallen leaves yield to the shoes of people walking by. Here is the alarm clock in one of the apartments upstairs, announcing that church service will start in an hour. Here is the flabby mishmash from the classical music station. Here is the whispering wind in the park, bringing children’s bored conversations in through the window. Here is the quiet clicking produced by the park attendant hanging with all his weight on the chains of the children’s swings, one after the other, to forestall any accidents for one more day.

  We mean the quiet park attendant, six and a half feet tall, skinny, taciturn, who greets the children as though they were his employers. We don’t mean his assistant from last summer, the Puerto Rican, strolling among the mothers wearing his green Parks Department shirt and pants like a military uniform, gloves tucked into his belt like a canteen, hollering with the children, parading around in a strut until everyone’s noticed him. We mean the black man who’s been working hard, you can see it on his overalls; his gloves are usually on his hands, as he sweeps up the leaves and garbage, from under and behind the benches too, into a pile, as he would in his own lawn, while the other man, proud too of the glints of gray in his hair, talked to the ladies. The other man could read and write, he didn’t have to keep working here. The black man stayed. He says hello to the adults who go to the playground, from long acquaintance but not familiarly, with a casual, as it were forgiving smile. We don’t know even his first name.

  Among the other early Sunday sounds are the creaking of the elevator cable as Esmeralda takes the boy from the West End newspaper distributor up to the fourteenth floor. He then comes jumping down the booming metal stairs behind the elevator shaft, three at a time, distributing The New York Times on floor after floor, five American pounds of paper landing in front of the numbered doors with a whopping slap, including the door to #204. Mrs. Cresspahl does not want to miss the Sunday paper again; as of yesterday, she is one of the clients of this ragged black boy who is about to let the heavy front door of the building bang shut behind him, his load lightened for the few strides separating him from his heavily loaded cart.

  Governor Romney has spent nineteen days touring the nation’s urban slums. He finds the cities on the brink of open rebellion. The New York psychologist Dr. Clark has described the ghetto Negro of today as cynical, bitter, hostile, and frustrated because the jobs situation, the housing situation, and the school situation in the country’s slums show no progress.

  The Soviets will put one of their writers on trial for having protested against writers being put on trial.

  In the battle around Conthien, American marines have a new expression for death by artillery fire: they say he’s “blown away.”

  Chairmen and shop stewards of seven unions representing employees of The New York Times have asked city, state, and federal officials for increased police protection. They do not feel safe from bodily harm while walking on the streets outside the Times building, which for the occasion reports its own address: 229 West 41st Street.

  And the usual murders.

  The park outside our windows is now entirely lit by the October sun that pushes every color one step closer toward the unbelievable: the yellow sprinkling of leaves on the grass, the elephant skin of the bare plane trees, the bright maze of branches in the thornbushes on the upper promenade, the cold Hudson, the hazy forest mist on the other side of the river, the steely sky. Sundayness has fallen on a Sunday. It is an almost innocent picture, in which children and people strolling along live as if harmlessly. It’s an illusion, and it feels like home.

  October 2, 1967 Monday

  DEJ BŮH ŠTӖSTÍ

  is painted in colored Gothic letters on the fluorescent-white glass surfaces cutting the foreground of the U Svatého Václava restaurant in half. The restaurant is tucked away in the East Seventies, in the middle of a Hungarian and German neighborhood. The way there runs from the Lexington Avenue subway, across Third and Second Avenues, past dilapidated buildings, over badly cracked sidewalks, by shop owners standing guard over their wares, under the watchful eyes of neighbors chatting on the stoops, between garbage and scar-encrusted cats, next to dismantled cars and the abandoned wastelands of schoolyards, to a little apartment building whose ground floor shows no sign of a restaurant. The blue door with its thinly outlined white and red rectangles denotes the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the customers inside, at tables far apart from one another, speak Czech: familiarly, unobtrusively, as though the age of the bourgeoisie in Prague’s Lesser Side, the Malá Strana, lived on. The regulars are elderly, formally dressed, dignified, couples silenced by long marriage as well as the solitary gentleman moving his lips above his raised glass as though speaking with the dead, the only ones who still recognize his doughy, old man’s face. Younger and more casually dressed are the ČSSR’s representatives to the UN, the administrators as well as the new power’s spies, who here, un-ashamed by the presence of newly disempowered compatriots or refugees, eat away at the same homesickness for Bohemian, Czech, European cooking. Maybe they all know what “Dej Bůh štěstí” means; we don’t, and Dmitri Weiszand won’t venture a translation.

  Dmitri Weiszand, Mrs. & Miss Cresspahl’s host this evening, is embarrassed. He should know what it means. For he—this gentleman with the Slavic bones in his face, the thick Eastern European accent, the warm demeanor—is a Pole by birth, from a country adjacent to Czechoslovakia, and to their language too, no? Then again, he is Polish only by birth. When the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland from the Nazi spoils of war in 1939, as agreed, it got the boy Weiszand into its clutches too, reassigned his citizenship, taught him Russian in the otherwise unchanged school, and another subject as well, just as difficult, called Patriotism. Even then he had to resign himself to the back bench. When the Germans reclaimed their booty two years later, they pocketed the Weiszand schoolboy too, but they had no citizenship at all for him and no school in which to learn Czech or anything else. Later, as an expedient at one point, he was a German for two years, and the Americans, when they let him into the country, put that in his papers as his country of origin. He can say probably ten words in German. And this Mr. Weiszand, with his youthful shock of brown hair, plump face, skin and expression almost unmarred by age, is in his forties, an alumnus of numerous camps in Eastern Europe, where he could have learned French, Romanian, Italian, Dutch, and even Czech, but the teachers weren’t on the ball, and when he was finally unloaded in New Jersey he arrived with no brothers or sisters, no parents, and the memory of them was as hard for him to endure as the Russian and Polish languages in which they appeared. – I have a friend who’s a Slavic professor: Mr. Weiszand says, embarrassed: He’ll find out for us, dej Bůh štěstí.

  Marie doesn’t like going to St. Wenceslas restaurant; it is one of Gesine’s whims that she indulges. She cannot reap amusement from the conversations at the neighboring tables. The distance between the tables, the white tablecloths, the napkins folded into bishop’s miters all remind her of trips to Europe, and she doesn’t like leaving this country. Th
e story of Saint Wenceslas, put to death by his brother Boleslav on September 28, 935—the management’s recollections of the good old days in Malá Strana, printed on the back of the menus—it’s too long ago for her. The young students working as servers here still speak with the accent of their homeland and are too attentive for her taste. D. E. wouldn’t like coming to a place like this either. Plus, she had to wear her red velvet dress with the lace collar. She uncomfortably eats some of her strange roast pork with the foreign bread dumplings, moves her cutlery stiffly back and forth, listens impatiently to the failed exchange of words between Dmitri and Gesine.

  – What do you have to say about the German neo-Nazis winning 8.8 percent in the Bremen election? Mr. Weiszand says, fingering the edge of the Cresspahls’ New York Times. Whatever these eight seats in the Bremen state legislature might mean, Marie knew that her mother would raise her shoulders in an unpleasant way, stare down at her plate, dodge the question. Now Marie remembers why D. E. avoids European restaurants in New York.