Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – So she couldn’t have had anything to complain about in Richmond: the child says about her grandmother, “your mother.”

  – There’s no comparison with Richmond in 1932. The crimes there were burglaries, drunken rowdiness, crossing the yellow line on the highway, traffic violations in general.

  – And Richmond’s attractions!: the child says, pleading on its behalf.

  – Yes, the hardworking city of Richmond, cradled lovingly in a bend in the southern Thames, also strangled between it and the barrier of Richmond Hill so that it couldn’t sprawl in land speculation and housing developments, and instead had to go up stone by carefully placed stone in the center; town houses and mansions arranged in terraces around Richmond Hill; a market town, city of gardeners, place of death of Elizabeth the Great, namesake of cities all over the world: Richmond, Kentucky; Richmond, Indiana; Richmond, Virginia . . .

  – I’ve done my homework: the child says, in English, not unconciliatorily.

  – She tried, our Lisbeth Cresspahl did. There was Richmond Bridge, captured on canvas thousands of times, by J. M. W. Turner even—an object of history and culture, late eighteenth century, a hundred yards long between the town and the princely edifices of East Twickenham, idyllically surrounded by pleasure boats and excursion ships. Lisbeth Cresspahl saw in it five white stone arches topped with a humpbacked paved surface; she was polite enough to commit the sight to memory, but it did not move her. Of course she walked to Richmond Hill Park almost regularly (always via Queen’s Road, not over Hill Rise, because of the former brewery where war wounded manufactured poppies for all of England); she often stood next to Thatched Cottage (which for her had a Plattdeutsch name: Reetdachhus) and took in the obligatory view down to the Thames, across steeply sloping meadows, between elegantly, pleasantly arranged groups of trees, down to the bushy riverbank, the island groves, the water, bluish in the evening shadows; her letters also listed what you could see in the distance on clear days: Windsor Castle, the Berkshire Downs, St. Ann’s Hill, Hog’s Back behind clouds of chestnut blossoms over Bushy Park with its tame does and deer—but all this did not console her. The landscape had been laid out sumptuously, wastefully, it was intimidating in the age of its culture, forbidding in its magnificence, thoroughly foreign. And she went there alone, not for the view but to be alone. She didn’t like thinking that it might be only with an effort of will that she could put down roots there.

  – No one had kept anything secret from her.

  – Cresspahl had prepared her. He’d called himself a kind of master tradesman and that’s really what was he was, not a fair target for the criticisms she wanted to level. He hadn’t described the area around the gasworks as a respectable neighborhood, and she’d gotten used to the gasometer, its pink painted dirty brown halfway up and peeling off above that in big rusty triangles; still, she was stung by the haughtiness with which the Richmond and Twickenham Times could take for granted that “few people in this poor part of town are likely to object” to the horrid view. She couldn’t expect the good citizens of Richmond to welcome her into their neighborly interactions, but she didn’t like how truly alone she was now, below the middle class, barely above the lower, and a foreigner too. Cresspahl had suggested she meet people through church, and she’d screamed at him, furious at herself for being unable to come to grips with the liturgy and ritual here. And now she thought it was horrible of him to veer away from the subject the moment the word church came up in conversation, calmly, not put out in the least, as though this was just an area reserved for her which he wasn’t allowed to set foot in. To end the fight, she’d bought a King James Bible at Hiscoke, a used bookstore on Hill Street; Cresspahl had picked up the leather-bound volume and silently put it down again and not given any sign of understanding that she was trying. Sometimes she felt like attacking him: You have everything you wanted! and she shrank back in fear of her own answer: That I wanted. She didn’t like the fact that such aggression even occurred to her. She put off going to the Aliens’ Registration Bureau, often for days; she didn’t like watching the official flip through their passports like things that were not going to be valid much longer. She hadn’t reached that point yet. And Cresspahl didn’t notice a thing! He took her to the Royal Horse Show one bright sunny June day, proud and happy to have Lisbeth Papenbrock on his arm, and that was how they looked in the photograph she had to send back to Germany—a confident pair, a happy couple, not how she felt. One time, she saw Cresspahl through an open door standing at a bar, glass in hand, talking comfortably with the man next to him, so carefree that it was like he didn’t need her, so distant that it was like she would never catch up to him. She couldn’t even reproach him for spending too much money at the pub. She couldn’t complain that he kept putting off getting her pregnant—a Papenbrock daughter had no language for that—and that after promising him children (“Four, Heinrich”), she wanted to get started. (She was afraid of the labor pains.) There were lots of little grievances that she couldn’t put into fair and reasonable words, and she felt so adrift that she even wrote some of them down in a little schoolbook so she could look over them later, maybe understand them. One August morning (the 12th, a Friday), in a storm with dangerous flashes of lightning and tropical rain, she was so plagued by the thought of dying and terrified at the thought that Cresspahl might find the hidden notebook afterward that she secretly threw it in the workshop brazier with the wood shavings. She was always making new resolutions but still kept getting into fights with Cresspahl, she didn’t know how to back down, turned wordlessly away, and stayed mired for days in silence, concealed from the workmen with strained chattiness, but when she was alone with Cresspahl and the cat she couldn’t even talk innocuously to the cat. Cresspahl could do it too; after several failed attempts to talk to her, he could live alongside her without a word, without a glance. What kept them together during these fights were the customary mealtimes, the moments of waking up, and only an awkward, mercurial time for reconciliation, without a word beforehand, in the North German way.

  – That’s the North German way? the child says. – I didn’t inherit that: Marie says, convinced, relieved.

  To date, 13,643 American war dead in Vietnam. Can it be that this is still not a high enough proportion of the two hundred million citizens of the United States of America?

  October 7, 1967 Saturday

  It was Marie who picked out the car in the rental-company garage, the car in which the Cresspahls leave Manhattan this morning: a sedan disguised as a sports car and named after the tough horses of Spanish descent on the American plains. It had to paw the ground for a long time in the traffic jams and construction zones on the Cross Bronx Expressway before, on the interchange above Saint Raymond’s Cemetery, it reached the finger of the Bruckner Expressway and could gallop north to the New England Thruway. It was Marie who decided that the Cresspahls should drive slowly up West End Avenue, at practically parade pace, so that her friends might see her too for once as a child with a car. Ultimately, it’s because of Marie that we’re taking this weekend trip to Vermont at all. But she doesn’t know that. She had to force all her wishes through a show of resistance from Gesine.

  Whenever I was nice to you you didn’t notice, Gesine.

  You liked me thinking you were strict, Cresspahl. That made things easier for you.

  And Marie smugly looks out at the New York Central Railroad yards alongside Route 95, at the New Rochelle, Larchmont, and Mamaroneck stations where other people go for the weekend. She refuses to react to the people looking out the windows of the Greyhound buses cruising like battleships past the Cresspahls’ low yellow car. But she’s acting a bit too businesslike when she reads the map, passes Gesine the coins to drop in the payment maw for the toll, scrunches her nose at the two young men in the Oldsmobile passing the Cresspahl car twice, for fun: she’s exaggerating, playing. Playing car trip.

  – So, if this Lisbeth Cresspahl, your mother: she says. She is staring straight ahead, at the f
our lanes, frowning, brooding.

  – Your grandmother: Gesine says. But the child refuses to react to that.

  – If she burned her book of complaints about Cresspahl? How do you know about it?

  – She started a new one. It’s back home in the safe-deposit box.

  – In New York? At Hanover Trust?

  – In Düsseldorf.

  – Can’t you make something like that for me?: the child says, talking fast, afraid to hear a no: Not complaints about me. What you’re thinking now, things I won’t understand until later. Complaints are okay too.

  – On paper, with the date and the weather?

  – On tape. Like the phonopost.

  – For when I’m dead?

  – Yes. For when you’re dead.

  It’s not the same country up here. The Harlem River below the Washington Bridge was lined with dirt, debris, scrap metal, and industry; the northern stretches of New York City, too, were wastelands of garbage between dilapidated shacks beneath the elegant elevated highways; finally, there started to be old lawns in front of surviving old houses, in village-like clusters, a not yet bulldozed past, until they too vanished behind the simulated landscape on both sides of the expressway: soft blankets of grass on the hills the road was cut into, intact groves of trees at the horizon, useless and lovely under the gray overcast sky. Only near the cities does this arcadian picture fall apart—on the sooty empty factory streets of Bridgeport, approaching New Haven, along the black, swampy, stinking shoreline when the view of the Atlantic is taken from us. But afterward the land was once more used for no purpose except to adorn the highway, which gradually widened in long slow rises and declines, pointed to parklands of meadows and towering forests, was interrupted at almost decent intervals by gas stations and the pavilions of the Howard Johnson’s. Under one rest stop’s village-church spire, Marie orders a second breakfast at around ten o’clock, for her mother too, who has brought with her The New York Times.

  It’s in Canada that Soviet nuclear physicist Boris Dotsenko wants to stay, not at the University of Kiev, which authorized his vacation. There they don’t like purely theoretical research: he says: And here it’s more democratic: he says.

  Earl H. Duncan of Bolivar, Missouri, has sent back President Johnson’s letter of sympathy for the death of his son in Vietnam, as a criticism of his conduct of the war. He calls Johnson responsible “for the unnecessary loss of lives of young American men, not to mention the thousands of crippled and maimed.” James R. Duncan, his son was called.

  Now it’s Marie reading out loud from The New York Times, just before the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, in bumper-to-bumper traffic moving only a few feet at a time. The taillights in front of the Cresspahls’ car force their way into the inside lane, blinking nervously, and the Cresspahls can just make out the circling colored lights of police cars and ambulances up ahead in the mist, near the center divider. It is suddenly surprisingly quiet, above the scaled-down, slowed-down sounds of engines.

  “He,” Marie reads, at first with the speed of a newscaster, then slower and slower as the meaning of the words sinks in, “lay on his back on the sidewalk, eyes closed, legs sprawled, hair matted, face scarred. The only signs of life were the trickle of blood from the gash in the forehead, and his lips, which every five or six seconds puffed out as he exhaled.”

  – It’s a good description: she adds: I’ve seen people like that, on the Bowery. In rags, no socks in their shoes. They’re the ones who come up to cars stopped at lights when they need money for booze, they wipe the windshields with greasy cloths and don’t let them go for less than ten cents. Or more. Now you’re going to ask me what I was doing on the Bowery, of all the streets in New York.

  – You were lost, right?

  – You do realize you got a cutting board for your birthday? They were cheapest at a store on the Bowery.

  – Thanks for the tip, Mary Cooper.

  It is Marie who, after Springfield, Mass., finds their route on back roads through Polish tobacco-farmer country, an area of low houses built far apart, past Emily Dickinson’s birthplace, then up above the Connecticut River, the wide waterway they repeatedly glimpse drowsing between the tall firs of the riverbanks. In the southeast corner of Vermont, between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, on the outskirts of an almost entirely wooden village, surrounded by a wet orchard, she finds our host’s white shingle house, advanced in years and sitting peacefully next to a crimson-red barn that earlier generations once painted with the blood of slaughtered animals. Marie refuses to believe that.

  Then the door of the added-on kitchen bursts open and a pack of little children, happy and dirty, rush at Marie. She stands in the middle of the group a bit stiffly, conscious of her dignity, her age, her status as a visitor from New York City. Is that what she wanted from this trip?

  October 8, 1967 Sunday

  – Where did you meet these Fleurys: the child says, not right away when we drive off but sixty miles later, after a thoughtful silence, and not accusingly. Last year Marie had still talked about “Annie,” if not so familiarly of “Frederick.”

  We met Annie Fleury five years ago, when her name was still Annie Killainen and she was explaining to tourists the artworks and symbols in the United Nations buildings—barely twenty years old, a lively, strapping girl with appleblossom coloring, standing in our doorway one day and looking very disappointed. For the Cresspahls do not have their name above the doorbell, and she was trying to visit the previous occupants of #204. She too is from the Baltic, from the Gulf of Bothnia, a farmer’s child who went to Helsinki and then Geneva with stipends. She could laugh so brightly—at her stories, her forgetfulness, her two left hands—that we kept her. Once we hurt her feelings by calling the Protestant church a limited liability corporation, but she was distressed for our sake, not her own, and she came over again, and brought Scandinavian toys for the child, and stayed overnight, a friend who insisted on making herself useful. Back then she still pantomimed all the American-style formalities required to make plans, and she had in her purse a photograph of the young man waiting for her in Kaskinen, a wholesaler’s son more than happy to get a multilingual secretary as a wife. She accepted not the TV journalist, not the St. Louis soap dealer, but F. F. Fleury, a Romance-language specialist from Boston who earned his living by typewriter. He promised her the right kind of life, a life in the country, and we didn’t like his way of speaking French because he, like Pauly Möllendorff in Gneez, did violence to his voice when articulating foreign words, as though contorting not just his mouth but himself, and the invitation to their wedding reached us so late that we couldn’t make it even by plane.

  When we visit them in their Vermont farmhouse, which he actually was able to put a down payment on with his translations, he doesn’t show his face for hours, he lets the afternoon wear on in his attic room while we help Annie put the house in order for Sunday. For not only is the house as venerable as a museum piece, it is also falling apart from age in various places, and because Mr. Fleury does not here show signs of the energy he displayed in abundance in college football, our friend can’t keep up with the housework, with three children,

  – F. F. Fleury Jr., the boxer: Marie says;

  – Annina S., the apple girl: Marie says;

  – Francis R., knock-knees: Marie says;

  and because she also has to discuss “choice passages” of Mr. Fleury’s daily labors at night, and also has to type up a clean copy of these and all the other passages during the day. She seemed happy enough while straightening up and baking, and even though we were alone, with all the children out in the dripping-wet woods, she didn’t complain, it’s just that she hardly seemed to perceive F. F. Fleury at all when he showed his face in the kitchen and she wordlessly handed him a drink, making him a new one unasked every time, five before dinner, many more throughout the meal and afterward, until he finally found his way out of his stubborn, violent silence into the argument that Annie let pass over her, without d
efending herself, sitting slightly hunched, with strangely squared shoulders, hands between her knees, almost happy, as though what she’d expected was finally happening.

  – You know them as well as I do, Marie.

  – No I don’t. I was sitting on the stairs in the dark. I heard you all. And I saw Annie.

  toi avec ton âme européenne, ou même russe, peut-être. Rien qu’ à vous entendre parler, vous autres! Mais la salle de bain? un champ de bataille où chaque jour de nouveau c’est le désordre qui gagne, les saletés des enfants partout où on met les pieds

  ne dis pas cela Frédéric

  tu ne te sers de ton âme touranienne que pour m’éloigner des enfants. Avec toi, en finnois, ils parlent de toutes choses, avec moi, en anglais, de très peu

  ne dis pas cela, Frédéric

  ton sacré goût pour la souffrance, ton accablement de ménage mal caché, tout cela est abstrait, tout cela se plaît dans le reproche

  ne dis pas cela, Frédéric

  et ça ne signifie pas comprendre mon travail. Mon travail n’a rien à faire avec vos traductions simultanées ridicules, il s’agit d’une reconstruction d’art! dont, apparemment, je ne comprends rien

  ne dis pas cela, Frédéric

  vos façons, vos expériences, vos attitudes d’Européens! et tout ça seulement à cause du petit peu de guerre que vous avez vu. Ce ne sont pas les Américains morts au Viet-nam qui vous font de la peine, ce sont les Vietnamiens! Retraite du Viet-nam, paix inconditionelle: c’est une exigence si absolue, si dogmatique, d’une morale si enfantine et d’une imagination si peu technique!