Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  I already know it. If I have to live with it, then I’d rather not do it around Jews.

  – What do you think of how Stalin’s daughter is acting? Gesine says after a while, and Marie realizes that the question slipped out by accident, that she wishes she hadn’t asked it, and in fact Mr. Weiszand’s friendly expression goes a tiny bit stiff, and he manages no more than: – It’s true, I was one of Mr. Stalin’s movable assets for a while, but still . . . : and Marie gives in to her boredom and carefully, craning her neck, starts reading The New York Times.

  “(Reuters) The newspaper Bild am Sonntag said today that Stalin’s eldest son was shot by the Nazis in 1944 after refusing to make an anti-Soviet speech to Russian workers at an armament’s factory in Berlin.”

  But Gesine’s raised eyebrows, her sidelong look, not accusing but only troubled, is more than Marie can bear, and she makes an effort to redeem her behavior. She walks between the tables to the counter by the entrance, surly under the attention of the other guests, and talks to the old man at the register for a while. He is dressed all in black, he keeps his face impassive, his eyes rarely move, and she isn’t happy about turning to him. But he answers her as though she were a grown-up, he doesn’t invite the onlookers to smile at her expense, and while giving her the information in a quiet, indifferent voice, he offers her the bowl of olives.

  – I can tell you what dej Bůh štěstí means: Marie says, back at the table. She says it twice, first in English, to restore Mr. Weiszand’s faith in her manners, then in German, for Gesine: God bring you good fortune, that’s what it means.

  October 3, 1967 Tuesday

  Emmy Creutz, the cemetery gardener’s wife in Jerichow, sends her bill, as she does every October. Dear Frau Cresspahl, To cover your grave sites for the winter will cost six marks each, bouquet included. In addition, the annual fee for perpetual care is due: three graves, twenty marks each.

  From Saigon, The New York Times reports bombing raids on North Vietnam. In seven raids in just three days, B-52 bombers have produced 110 secondary explosions. In one attack northwest of Conthien, the bombs produced 44 secondary explosions and three large fires, leaving the entire area in flames.

  Emmy Creutz encloses photographs of the grave sites with her bill, for Frau Cresspahl to review. Lisbeth Cresspahl’s metal cross has still not been scraped and repainted. Rust stains have been allowed to trickle down from the metal letters on the boulder that the town of Jerichow heaved onto Cresspahl’s skull. The slab with Jakob’s name, which is supposed to be lying on his mound, is still standing in front of it like a price tag. Where would Emmy Creutz be if she left the looks of the cemetery up to her customers.

  Erich Rajakovic, head of deportations in the Hague from 1941 to 1943, has been picked up in Istria. He is wanted in the Netherlands for the murder of 100,000 Jews (approx.).

  The photographs of the Jerichow graves show conditions in August, a flurry of wilted floral colors, no dark hues. Only over Lisbeth Cresspahl is the ivy growing that we wanted for all of them. But the Creutzes have to consider their bottom line. – The other two are lying in the midday sun: Emmy Creutz wrote: the ivy won’t grow there. We’re sorry, ivy isn’t that much work.

  In honor of the Soviet Revolution, The New York Times reports on the effects of the purges of comrades that Stalin carried out through Beria and Alexander N. Poskrebyshev. You could count on Poskrebyshev. He didn’t even lift a finger against having his wife, a longtime party member, shot.

  Emmy Creutz says she has partly applied our overpayment from billing year 1966–67 toward the planting of pansies (so that there’s always something in bloom on the grave, Frau Cresspahl). She seems to consider it a garden. For the remaining balance, and as an advance toward the 1968–69 fees, she requests additional payment in kind.

  General Poskrebyshev died his own proper death last fall, pampered in the Kremlin hospital. His memory was undimmed. He told a story there about his friend Beria: When asked whether a certain prominent Communist was still “sitting” (the Russian phrase for being in jail is “to sit”), Beria grinned. Nope, he said, he’s not sitting anymore. He’s lying flat on the floor. When General Poskrebyshev told the story he, too, roared with laughter.

  The payment Emmy Creutz would like is: 1 men’s sweater (acrylic), turtleneck, burgundy, size 48–50; 1 wash-and-wear dress shirt, size 43; 1 men’s windbreaker, size 56, nylon, lined, not too short, whatever color you think best, Frau Cresspahl. Emmy Creutz can only have heard of these items from ads on West German television.

  When asked about another victim, General Poskrebyshev screwed up his face and said: “Must have been shot. We didn’t start using poison until 1940, or thereabouts.”

  This costs us Saturday morning in the department stores around Herald Square. Then we have to send the package to Ite Milenius in Lübeck, so that Emmy Creutz is spared customs for goods mailed from the United States. Ite Milenius has to procure official certificates of disinfection, or else the clothes will be seized for the benefit of the German Democratic Republic. Ite Milenius is then supposed to divide the stuff into three smaller packages for Jerichow—addressed to Emmy, Erich, and Jürgen Creutz—since the German Democratic Republic does not permit three articles of clothing in one parcel. For her troubles, Ite Milenius will present us with a Christmas wish list of her own.

  In Darmstadt yesterday, eleven members of SS Sonderkommando 4A went on trial for participating in a total of 80,000 murders of Soviet citizens in 1941, 70,000 of them Jewish. In Kiev they drove 33,771 men, women, and children to the edge of the Babi Yar ravine, shot them, and pushed them in, in the space of less than thirty-six hours.

  So who is the burgundy-red sweater for? Creutz, seventy-one years old, or Jürgen, the deputy commander of the Schwerin military district, officer in the East German army, and enemy of West German television advertising? Maybe he wants to wear it with his dress uniform.

  In July, 72 percent of the American public were still in favor of continuing the war in Vietnam; in August it was still 61 percent. Now it’s fifty-eight out of a hundred.

  Amalie Creutz, the first wife, hanged herself in her bedroom in October 1945. She did it in broad daylight, around lunchtime, perhaps hoping she’d be found in time by the two workmen she had to cook for. She was pregnant, in her third month, from one or another of the eleven Soviet soldiers who’d raped her in the Countess Woods. Mayor Cresspahl’s petition for an abortion was rejected by the Gneez hospital and the health department in Schwerin. (And Cresspahl was thrown in jail by Red Army counterintelligence.) Now Amalie Creutz was afraid of her husband, still in a French prison. She was afraid of public opinion in Jerichow, which would prevent Creutz from believing her. Jakob’s mother helped bury her. In 1950, Creutz took to wife one of his employees: Emmy Burbach, from Reichenberg, Silesia, a widow. She was twelve years younger than him, and at first he was glad she took over running the business from him. He used to write on the top of her invoice letters to Cresspahl’s daughter: “Dear Gesine,” and underneath: “Yours, Erich Creutz.” Now it says: “Sincerely, Emmy Creutz.”

  Then we also have Marie Abs’s grave in Hanover, West Germany. That one lives on automatic bank transfers. If the sun fell out of the sky, we’d all be sitting in the dark.

  October 4, 1967 Wednesday

  Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s festival, begins today at sundown and will last until sundown on Friday. On the occasion and for the duration of the holiday, the city has suspended alternate-side-of-the-street parking. For the Jews, it is the start of the year 5728.

  Rajakovic has escaped safely to Austria. The Yugoslav police had warned him, not arrested him. (In addition, Rajakovic denies the allegation that he made his money from supplying Communist countries with strategic goods.)

  According to an analysis by Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish expert on social crises, the United States will have to shovel trillions of dollars and the efforts of a whole generation at the problem if it wants to fight poverty in this country realistica
lly and without regard to race. Marie is entirely unafraid to live in such a country.

  Lisbeth Cresspahl was afraid in England. She was frightened by the unemployed who came marching to London from Wales, northern England, and Scotland with the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement—a ragged mass of men in whom even she could see malnutrition and miserable living conditions. She was one of the onlookers standing in a thin line on Charing Cross, a respectable woman in a new coat, fox-fur collar around her neck, shoes in that year’s fashion, staring at the Hunger March a little stupidly and deeply shocked. She had not yet grasped that the demonstrators merely wanted to draw attention to their situation; she did not trust their patient, peaceful conduct. Moreover, the NUWM had been supported by the Communists. One time she’d had to take a message to Perceval and met his parents, the Ritchetts, Cresspahl’s age, a couple in squalid clothes and smelling foul who almost rudely tried to stop her from setting foot in the house. She would have been perfectly happy to leave it at feeling sorry for the young man for having to go home from work to slovenly parents in such a filthy hovel. For a long time she preferred not to believe that long periods without work and income produce such indifference, which the Ritchetts too were ashamed of, as though of a personal failing. Then she realized that Perceval was supporting his parents with his salary, siblings too, because the Richmond unemployment office had certain picayune doubts about the extent of their poverty. Now she pictured more such crushed households behind the bare windows on the workers’ streets and could almost understand the defiance of the unfed, preserving a sheen of respectability, with occasional shaves and bargain-basement clothes, only on the street and in the pub. She didn’t dare try to give the Ritchetts charity; they had made her ashamed too.

  Pay the boy more, Cresspahl.

  Give him something from your kitchen money, Lisbeth, and don’t let the competition find out.

  When she was still named Papenbrock, she’d felt safe. She was equipped not with a concept of justice but with a feeling for it. This feeling, under the guidance of the Protestant faith, allowed for differences, but nothing too extreme. The poverty in Mecklenburg had been hidden from her—behind a Mecklenburg soul that was centuries behind the times, behind the Papenbrock family’s firm belief in their right to a privileged existence, behind regular donations to the church, behind stupid proverbs like the one about virtue being its own reward or no one ever going hungry in the country. She had never felt unsafe there. Here she did, because she’d gathered from Cresspahl’s comments that they were more or less barely staying afloat on the edge of the Depression due to the arbitrary fact that the upper and middle classes still wanted to spend money on restoring and replicating their family furniture. He also tried to explain to her what had stuck with him from Labour Party meetings: that the unemployment was caused by England’s declining exports in every major branch of industry, and that a mechanism was at work here. He also seemed to think that the British policy was to sacrifice their own workers to concerns about the exchange rate of the pound sterling. She didn’t like hearing that. It meant that her situation depended on economic laws and actual people, not on fate. She could have resigned herself to fate. Now she felt trapped. Charity beyond a certain moderately benevolent level would have cut into her housekeeping money, would have compromised her dream of their own house. That meant she was being unjust, and she believed that injustice would bring down divine punishment, whether or not it manifested first as worldly. How were the two of them supposed to live, in the long run, in a country where the churches and squares were adorned and filled with monuments to the dead in the war against the Germans? How much longer would Cresspahl be allowed to work in a country where craftsmen put ads in the paper with the promise ONLY BRITISH MATERIAL USED, ONLY BRITISH LABOUR EMPLOYED? What could they count on here? And, deep down, again and again, she thought: It’s not so bad in Germany. Encountering capitalism for the first time, she saw it as something foreign.

  This insolence—she got it from you, Lisbeth.

  You got it from me, Gesine. And watch out that your child won’t feel she has to make excuses for you someday, the way you do for me.

  October 5, 1967 Thursday

  Phonopost: one (1) piece.

  D. E.,

  the ads say this audiotape is “low hiss”; maybe what you’re hearing in the background is really the heavy rain washing our windows. We’ve had Indian summer aplenty, and now it’s over.

  Here’s some news that will make you sad: The St. Louis Cardinals beat your Boston Red Sox two to one in Fenway Park, and apparently it wasn’t even an exciting game. What do you say to that?

  Second, Marie. Marie insists I keep telling her how it might have been when Grandmother married Grandfather. Her questions sharpen my thoughts, her listening seems attentive. She sits at the table with her hands on either side of her face, making a Mecklenburg coat of arms, your ox head. But what she wants to know is not the past, not even her past. For her it’s an introduction to possibilities she feels immune from. In another sense: stories. (I haven’t asked her.) That’s how we spend some of our evenings.

  A lot of the time, my stories feel like a skeleton. I can’t drape him in flesh, but at least I’ve gone looking for a coat for him: at the Institute for the Promotion of British Culture. This is located on Madison Avenue and Eighty-Third Street, not far from the splendid funeral home where people in New York’s Social Register are bade farewell. The institute’s windows are sealed, for the tony neighbors’ sakes, and the facade has been given a face-lift, and the walls inside are covered with eighteenth-century paintings and red paneling. They must have flown in the shabby armchairs from a London club, or else had someone artificially distress them into their current aristocratic condition. The staff acts like this mansion is open to plebes only because of the owner’s impecuniousness, and female plebes are hustled up to the archive by the back stairs.

  They have on microfilm in this institute the Richmond and Twickenham Times from the first number (1873) up to today. The newspaper calls itself a “Journal of Local News, Society, Art, and Literature” and is a distant relation of the old Times of London, in its title font and the personal announcements as lead stories, but it’s a small-town relation, with sensation-alistic, rather common ads on the front page, at least in volume 59 (1932).

  There are ads for “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes,” the same item Marie demands for breakfast today. It’s amazing how brand-name products outlive us! After every war they’re reborn, stronger than ever—Junker & Ruh, Siemens, Linde, Du Pont, General Motors. You’d say this was one of my disconnected thoughts. It wasn’t meant as a thought at all, though. Just a feeling. An emotional reaction, you’d call it.

  Right on the front page, in the middle, in bold, in almost every issue of the Richmond and Twickenham Times, is an advertisement for Gosling & Sons, Richmond’s Department Store, and now you’ll think I named Pascal’s heir after them. But that was his name, I can’t change it: Albert Gosling, patriot and informer.

  This isn’t how we spend every evening. On Monday, D. W. invited us out to dinner with the Czechs, and I admit it, you’re right, he keeps confusing the person with his or her nation-state of origin. For him, I am Germany—the old one and the current two. For him I sometimes have no face at all on my head, just the national colors; to him I am responsible for the West German railroad and the West German Nazis. But it’s not because I lack a sense of hygiene that I share his table. You and your fastidiousness. I’m interested in finding out what else he wants from me.

  Did the article on the shrapnel bombs appear in the Danish papers too? In The New York Times, it says that two little (tiny) children were brought into a press conference in Hanoi, survivors of a raid from September 27, one with such extensive wounds on the face that he was unable to speak. Marie can’t stop thinking about it. “D. E. has to do something about this,” she says.

  You won’t be able to reach us this weekend—we’ll be in Vermont. Your mother sounds rela
xed on the phone. Mr. Robinson asked after you. So, warm regards,

  Any unintended person who finds this audiotape is kindly requested to return it, postage paid, to Gesine Cresspahl, 243 Riverside Drive, Apt. 204, New York, NY, 10025; 212-749-2857.

  That goes for you too, D. E. But first you should tell it what’s going on with you.

  And, since you want to hear it, I’ll say it, in Platt: When theres no one else around, youre the best.

  Oh, something you’d be interested in just came on the New York Times radio: In Game 2 of the World Series, your Boston Red Sox, thanks to Yastrzemski, beat the St. Louis Cardinals five to nothing. I guess you’ll know what that means.

  October 6, 1967 Friday

  In Miami yesterday, five masked gunmen entered the du Ponts’ house (thirty-three rooms, golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool) and left after a leisurely two and a half hours with items valued at $1.5 million. Polite the whole time. When the tied-up du Ponts got chilly, a blanket was draped over them; when a spot on Mr. du Pont’s leg itched, one of the men scratched it. The du Ponts describe them not unfriendlily.

  Back home, in the Manhattan banking district, $1.7 million in negotiable securities has disappeared. Back home, a well-dressed man (dark fedora, sunglasses, automatic pistol) walked into a Western Union branch in Brownsville, Brooklyn, yesterday morning and asked the manager to write out a $12,500 money order. His confederate had to come back from the bank (2590 Atlantic Avenue) to have the document officially endorsed. When the bank called Western Union to check, Western Union, with the bore of the automatic on his temple, told the bank it was all right to cash the order. Then the bank tellers had to pool their money for the friendly client, awaiting his money with a smile and his beautiful teeth. It wouldn’t have gone so smoothly if it weren’t Jewish New Year, with the streets so deserted. This time The New York Times finds not a thing to criticize about the bank robbers’ technique. The New York Times is amused. “Thieves had a busy day today,” she says.