Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  tu nous excuseras, Gesine

  il n’y a rien à excuser. C’était pour ça que tu l’as fait venir, cette Européenne, encore une, qu’elle puisse raconter comment le Gros Gorille Américain traite sa femme. Restez, ne partez pas, Mrs. Cresspahl! Maintenant je vais vous dire enfin pourquoi vous m’emmerdez. Vous venez dans notre pays, avec des arrièrepensées. Là où nous tous partageons notre responsabilité, vous vous figez dans une conscience morale absolue, et vous l’exprimez par votre satané orgueil pour lequel même mon meilleur français n’est pas assez bon. Je me permets de vous faire remarquer que, pendant deux ans, j’ai vécu à Paris, j’ai des amis à Paris

  In Vietnam the marines will start handing out Purple Hearts only for serious injuries, since three decorations are enough for a transfer out of the war zone and the drain on manpower has gotten too severe.

  The main medical problems among the Vietnamese civilian population are tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, plague, malaria, polio, and intestinal parasites.

  Dotsenko, the nuclear physicist so enamored of democracy in Canada, must first get a divorce from his Soviet wife.

  And for the holiday The New York Times brings us a long article, delicious with specifics, about the Mafia families on Long Island—how they’re trying to invest their money in legitimate lines of business and how they’re jockeying to succeed Three-Finger Brown, as well as the latest news about Carlo Gambino, Johnny Dio, Joe Bananas, Eddie Toy, Vicious Vivian, and, last but not least, Sonny Franzese, on trial because “The Hawk” Rupolo was fished out of Jamaica Bay on August 24, 1964, with a slashed body, one eye shot out, hands tied, and concrete blocks on his feet. We need to send this article to Milan, to Vito Genovese’s former neighbor, Karsch.

  The New York Times came to meet us in Vermont, thick piles in a small-town general store where a disgruntled old woman suddenly snapped wide awake with curiosity because our car had the blue-and-yellow license plates of New York and we were there so early, having secretly in the cold morning slipped away from the house of our friends.

  The Cresspahls exchange compliments. – You’re a good driver: the child says. She says it only because now, in a gray early afternoon, we have made it back to Manhattan’s West Hundreds, to the scruffy Puerto Rican kids playing on the dirty street, the crumbling front steps. She says it because we’re coming home.

  October 9, 1967 Monday

  Yesterday morning, when Fred Wright, a handyman, got back to the basement on Avenue B where he sleeps, he found two bodies next to the furnace: that of eighteen-year-old Linda Rae Fitzpatrick and that of twenty-one-year-old James H. Hutchinson, both of them nude and lying on their stomachs, beaten to death, heads bashed in. The girl, from a wealthy Connecticut family, had been having a go at life with the hippies and unemployed in Manhattan’s East Village for only a few weeks; the boy was known as a cheap source of LSD, marijuana, and barbiturates. People called him “Groovy,” someone who knew the ropes, knew his way around.

  Another picture shows a little girl surrounded by dense foliage. Black hair, black dress, a bit preoccupied with her serious task, she is marching a downed US pilot somewhere at the point of a cute little gun. His head is hanging forward as if the tendons in his neck have been torn.

  Showers likely today.

  Without closing her eyes, Lisbeth Cresspahl could see before them her mother writing the letters Lisbeth received from Jerichow that November 1932. The old woman sitting at the kitchen table where she could stare at the granary wall while she thought, the wall still often painted with yellow and the shadows of swaying branches by the low sun. Long pauses while searching her mind for the week’s stories, head raised to the cool courtyard light, gaze fixed and unseeing. On Sunday, Papenbrock would add frivolous underlining and exclamation marks to all the Bible quotations and invocations to God she had put in. The fights between them had long since withered into teasing, and lately Lisbeth Cresspahl was starting to think that she and Cresspahl weren’t far from the same arrangement.

  Every Monday afternoon, whether the sea wind was sweeping wide shirttails of rain through the city streets or not, Louise Papenbrock would walk to the post office with her letter for England, look everyone on the sidewalk straight in the eye, stand in line with the letter there in her hand for all to see, and every time she would ask Knever, the senior postal clerk, to weigh it again and adjust the postage, so the letter scale in Papenbrock’s office became something else they talked about in Jerichow. Her goal was to make sure people knew that she’d married off two daughters—one of them, admittedly, under police observation in Krakow at the moment, but the other prosperous, respected, and even abroad.

  The more vaguely she described the news from Krakow, the easier it was to imagine what it might be. Just what you’d suspect from Hilde Papenbrock. She refused to take sides against her husband, Dr. Paepcke, former lawyer and notary, even when he used what his father-in-law had said was absolutely and irrevocably the last loan to lease a brickworks rather than pay back his earlier misappropriations. She let herself be talked into thinking there’d be enough of a profit to take care of their debts, and let him make it up to her for her worries with trips to Berlin, visits to one country estate after another, parties in the Krasemann am See spa hotel. Rumor had it she worshipped the ground her Alexander walked on; the fact was, she didn’t want to rob him of any fun. As a child, when she’d done something wrong, her eyelids would flutter, escaping her conscious control for a few seconds. Now, on a calm wet night, the brickworks had burned down. The Paepckes could prove that they were at the city cinema, but when they drove up to their house around midnight the police were there already, and they refused to come in for a drink, and they were inclined to accuse the gentleman of being there, and of arson, given that their insurance policy had just been increased. Hilde Paepcke was asked whether she knew anything about any Hindenburg lights. Whereupon she’d denied it a bit too quickly and categorically.

  It’s not my family, Cresspahl.

  It’s our family now, Lisbeth.

  Eventually you’ll have to bail them out too.

  I will not bail out total stupidity. They put a Hindenburg light on a brick floor. Any child could see how that fire started.

  The news about Horst Papenbrock was that the threatened encroachment on his inheritance had made him downright agreeable. Plus he was crestfallen at the Nazis’ poor showing in the Reichstag election of November 6: as he saw it, his group’s destiny was one smooth swift rise. He even seemed conciliatory to the sister who’d given up Germany for England, and in one letter he enclosed a photograph of a girl: a buxom brunette, her youth making her almost attractive if only she wouldn’t keep her face so stiff. Elisabeth Lieplow, from Kröpelin. The picture showed her in a sleeveless white jersey, on its breast the emblem of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ Hitler Youth. With swastika. He asked for the picture back, but asked Lisbeth to make sure old Papenbrock didn’t see it, not yet.

  And Lisbeth Cresspahl, at the end of a long and detailed letter about the business situation and Richmond Park and cooking recipes, added a short P.S. – In March: she wrote. – Early March. Cresspahl hopes it’s a girl. If I have my way, it’ll be a boy, named Heinrich.

  You mean Henry.

  Yes, Cresspahl, I mean Henry.

  That year, Adolf Hitler finally managed, with the help of an amenable senior official in Brunswick, to become an official citizen of the German Reich.

  October 10, 1967 Tuesday

  – Mrs. Cresspahl is not at her desk at the moment.

  – The police have two suspects.

  – Oh you mean the Linda Fitzpatrick thing.

  – Apparently they were having an LSD party in that basement.

  – I wish the suspect wasn’t a Negro.

  – Well, you know, down on Avenue B.

  – She had everything, the Times says.

  – Daughter of a spice importer in Greenwich, thirty-room house worth $155,000, swimming pool, horses, private school. If t
hat’s not enough.

  – Mrs. Cresspahl is not at her desk at the moment. May I take a message?

  – Yes. Where she is.

  – You used to live there too, didn’t you? East Eleventh. Wasn’t that near Avenue B?

  – No, First Ave. It was getting more and more Hispanic. If you came home late there’d be Puerto Rican kids on the stairs, like they’d been waiting for you all day. Friendly kids. Only after they’d cleaned out my apartment for the third time did I move to the Upper East Side.

  – My goodness, you know that Earl H. Duncan from Bolivar, Missouri? Turns out he didn’t send the sympathy letter back to Johnson because he’s against the war. He thinks the war isn’t being fought hard enough, he thinks that’s why his son was killed.

  – That was in the paper?

  – Yes, but where?

  – We’ll have to ask Gesine, she always reads the paper.

  – But only The New York Times.

  – So where is she.

  – Mrs. Cresspahl is not at her desk at the moment. This is Amanda speaking. May I take a message?

  – She was called up to the Greece office, room 2402.

  – I don’t know her at all. Is she the Danish translator or the German one?

  – The German. Thirtyish. Nice body.

  – Oh that one. She sometimes does special assignments for the vice president.

  – You should invite us the next time she has a party.

  – She doesn’t have parties.

  – Who’s she married to?

  – Beats me.

  – You remember that picture of this Che Guevara guy, Ernesto or Anselmo or something? In the field, in the Times recently?

  – Yeah. They’ve caught him.

  – Who’s they?

  – The Bolivian army.

  – Dead?

  – Yup, dead.

  – It’s crazy.

  – What, that they shot him?

  – No. That he let himself be photographed. I bet that’s not in Mao’s little book.

  – What does the Times say about it?

  – Just go into Cresspahl’s office. She usually has it.

  – Mrs. Cresspahl is not at her desk at the moment. This is Amanda speaking.

  – This is Cresspahl.

  – Oh, it was nothing. Someone sent a sympathy letter back to President Johnson and Naomi said you’d know more details.

  – Sorry, I don’t know.

  – So where was she?

  – Didn’t say.

  – Wait a second. Amanda, where was she?

  – Mrs. Cresspahl, I’ll connect you.

  – Oh shit.

  – Yes?

  – Sorry Gesine. You were gone half an hour, and naturally we were curious, sorry. Forget it. I’m sorry.

  – I was in the vice president’s office.

  – Of course, Gesine.

  – What do you mean, “of course”?

  – Mrs. Williams said something about that.

  – About the raise? I only just heard about it.

  – No. What do you mean raise?

  – You know. A salary increase.

  – Sorry. Aha. Aha! Congratulations!

  – Thank you very much. There’ll be bourbon in my office at five. Bring ice.

  – It was just a raise.

  – That took half an hour?

  – De Rosny is like that. I hear.

  – And now she’s throwing a party after all.

  – You should come. She’s fun, believe me. You’ll like her.

  – We’re not really supposed to have office parties.

  – Scaredy-cat. Where did you go to school?

  – It was just half an hour. Don’t be all jealous.

  – I bet I still make more than she does. Wanna bet?

  – Of course you do. Men.

  – We don’t hold it against her. Really we don’t.

  – I don’t have a Danish girl in my collection yet.

  – There you go.

  October 11, 1967 Wednesday

  How it rained last night! The windowpanes were crackling all afternoon yesterday, and at the end of the workday water was pouring down thick and heavy onto Third Avenue, onto the newspapers and handbags the pedestrians were holding over their heads. Our way to the subway entrance on Forty-Second Street was blocked by a big black lake in the gutter and an interminable red light, thanks to the rain and the police, respectively. Around ten o’clock, the park suddenly fell silent—not another drop to be heard. But between the scarred trunks of the plane trees the streetlamp light was caught in blurry haloes: the air was not clear.

  This morning, The New York Times brings us the photo the dead rebel Ernesto Che Guevara. His eyes are open, making him look awake. But his features are sickly and his head is supported by a hand, which shows: Now we can do this to him. He can no longer defend himself.

  The secretary of defense has stated that the bombing of North Vietnam has not affected that country’s ability to wage war.

  “So why don’t we stop all the bombings up North and just continue to lose American lives in the South?” asked a senator (D-Missouri).

  The letters Cresspahl received from Jerichow, that November 1932, were from the people in Peter Wulff’s back room: sarcastic comments about their beer and his marital bliss; stories that emerged sentence by sentence from the passing mention of people’s first names; and newspapers clippings. The letter writers wrote not about themselves but about the Communists from Gneez and Gadebusch paying nightly visits and having meetings to try to get back into their good graces. And yet these Social Democrats, now out of office, could not forget last August when the Communists had voted with the Nazis against the Prussian government. Back then, they’d talked about the “fat-cat economy” of the Socialists in power, and now here they were proposing a coalition against the Nazis. Not the Social Democrats’ idea of dignity, you know.

  They’re going down hard, Cresspahl. We should get involved with that?

  What brought about this political struggle in Jerichow were cigarettes made by a company in Dresden: Drummers. The manufacturer had made a deal with the Nazis to include a picture of a National Socialist politician in every pack. Böhnhase, the tobacconist on Town Street across from Papenbrock’s warehouse, had put nice big piles of them next to the lighters. So the Communists asked the Social Democrats to support their own brand, from Berlin, but in vain. Someone came up with the idea of asking Böhnhase in person. Böhnhase refused to carry Collectives, he didn’t understand the name, but he did put in a trial order for another Communist brand, Reds, and since Böhnhase was DNVP, the German National People’s Party, he wasn’t about to let the Social Democrats tell him what to do. The Reds became popular with farmers and farmworkers—the name sounded like something to do with potatoes and beets.

  Nor was it the Social Democrats who had freed the monument for the First World War dead from the pretentious memorial wreath Hitler’s SA had placed on it. There was talk about that in the Lübeck Court. – I am not aware of these snot-nosed SA brats having shed any of their blood in the war!: an estate holder named Kleineschulte is said to have shouted, arguably drunk and in any case late at night but still to great applause. This in the presence of a young von Plessen. Kleineschulte went on to stick the remains of the wreath on his dung heap. Horst Papenbrock couldn’t understand it, this Kleineschulte, owner of some two hundred acres on the Baltic, had earlier contributed money to the Nazi Party. He had recently started squinting one eye at young Papenbrock whenever he rode past in his carriage, which made him look even drowsier and more spiteful than usual, and that was when he was sober.

  On the road to Rande, a young shoemaker, a registered member of the Hitler Youth, was beaten so badly it took him three hours to crawl back to the hospital in Jerichow. The country gendarme was on vacation; the city police were busy. The aristocracy didn’t object. – You bed em you wed em, Kleineschulte apparently said, and this time not in a back room of the Lübeck Co
urt but at a city council meeting, on the record. The young man, still lying in the hospital with a broken arm, didn’t feel comfortable with the hue and cry about his martyrdom from the local Jerichow branch of the NSDAP, and one night, after seeing his picture in the Gneez paper for the second time, he tied two sheets together, climbed down to the street, and skipped town. If you believed Frieda Klütz, he was now in Hamburg, because a telegram had been sent to his parents from there, admittedly unsigned. Frieda Klütz was prepared to say what was in the telegram too, to anyone who would listen, but Peter Wulff knew already and left the old maid hanging, ready to burst with her untold secret. Erich Schulz was the young man’s name, one of the Schulzes from Outer Jerichow, the little hamlet east of the Rande country road.

  – We have them here too: Cresspahl wrote. – Here they call themselves Fascists. Their headquarters is in Chelsea, with guards at the door and troop transport trucks in the yard. Playing Freikorps. But I don’t think they’re allowed to kill anyone yet. Do you know someone named Elisabeth Lieplow, from Kröpelin? Drop me a line, stay in touch.

  The New York Times has asked around in Manhattan’s East Village on our behalf. What do the people who live there have to say about hippies?

  – The love thing is dead. The flower thing is dead. (A tall young man with wire-rimmed glasses.)

  – The hippies really bug us, because we know they can come down here and play their games for a while and then split. And we can’t, man. (A young Negro.)

  – They’re saying drop out of society. That’s not where it’s at for our young men—they want in! (A young Negro former gang leader, who now works with local youths.)

  – Groovy Hutchinson would have been dead in four years anyway. He was on meth, and you know what they say, “speed kills.” But he didn’t care. He was beautiful. (A girl called Ghost.)

  October 12, 1967 Thursday, Columbus Day