Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The tellers’ windows are closed for the holiday, but people are working on every floor of the bank above the lobby. The restaurant in the basement was so crowded at lunchtime that a line of people stood waiting, staring down at seated eaters’ necks, while the waitresses whipped away empty plates so greedily that reading the paper was out of the question. We couldn’t get our regular waitress either—the brisk, distracted, attentive one who complains so delightfully and says, as though to a comrade in suffering: Oh, Gesine . . .

  The New York Times has received a report from La Paz that the guerilla Ernesto Che Guevara probably lived another twenty-four hours after his capture before being killed. Seven bullets, one fatal wound in each lung and a third straight through the heart.

  The Soviet Union has replaced 80 percent of the planes, tanks, and artillery that the Arabs lost during the Six-Day War in June, according to the Israelis, who are seeking permits from the Western powers to buy more weapons.

  And the mail today is delivered as usual too. The phonopost from Greece is already unpacked and ready to go in the tape player Marie has set up. She is sitting at the other end of the table, waiting to hear it, eager, bright-eyed. She’s already listened to it twice.

  To phone number SIX-AUKS in New York. To the authorized personnel of apartment 204. Dear colleagues and friends, patriots and traitors, dear six razorbill auks, murrelet auks, Icelandic great auks, puffins, and dovekies. Greetings.

  You have you’re a bit you’ve labeled the tape can’t I change it do I have to erase one of your words with every word of mine why. Why Gesine are you only lending me your voice not giving it why if you trusted my promises I could have recorded over it anyway oh yes. No.

  Dear Mary, Mary, not contrary, I did it the way you guys told me to. When I got there everybody was there already and I went to your hotel in Copenhagen and had a room up so high where the rooms never stop flying out over the crooked red roofs it smelled like America in the halls not Hilton more like Sheraton Boston. The Danes were all mad that a West German a Defense Department engineer had called Jutland the ideal unsinkable aircraft carrier of the Bundesrepublik they should just sink themselves all right so much for state secrets. With my Danish I don’t know something is rotten in it.

  Raced a gate agent at Kastrup on the scooters they have there they do Marie airport scooters. Two East German planes standing there in the rain little tear-stained dogs seriously. On the contrary Communism is good for you get some today ask for it by name.

  Not Germany. Already knew how to sink it in case of emergency totally perfect nothing but Swiss on the plane a big family on their way home with my French I don’t know something is gamy in it. In the West German news magazine they actually without batting an eye printed our daft old Auntie Hallelujah what she calls memoirs no it’s true phone-tapping scandal can West Berlin be saved now they’ve got enough of that. Lake Constance at the Überlingen end like rotting soup then Switzerland blue and white and green colors so pure you could run experiments on them.

  Zürich stopover the snack bar was besieged by a group of traveling musicians from New Orleans if you ask me Birmingham two girls delicate as little birds dressed exactly like your great-grandmother as a child Henriette von Heintz did I get that right they wanted Sprite don’t have any the men wanted hamburgers don’t have any I translated what they wanted into close approximations the waitress asked And what would the Negro gentleman like and I gasped. The shit follows you everywhere I had just been feeling almost homesick.

  Dear Mary I have obtained a passel of caran d’ache that’s the word the Russians used when they invented the pencil. Karandasch. Svetlana A. Stalina s karandaschom.

  You can have your Karsch. No answer to my first telegram a big article di Karsch in the paper an analysis of the German firm Quandt one of the bosses just died in a plane crash here near Turin Karsch is leading the Italian business world through the icons of the West German financial pages if you ask me after my second telegram he told me to meet him at a café at La Scala after waiting two hours I left and that’s why I’m landing in Milan now. Milano.

  In a letter from a reader in the West German news magazine thirty-seven labels for Düsseldorf including newspaper city city of academic publishing film city the writing desk of the Ruhr city of postmarks city of lakes city of US peace dollars city of rest and relaxation pearl of the world’s airports is that where you two lived. Düsseldorf city of local newspapers.

  Public outrage in Italy because the Coca-Cola Company is keeping its flavor a secret that breaks the local laws Coke requests a new law and in West Germany they already have one only two people know the recipe for Coke chief chemists in Atlanta they are never allowed to fly on the same plane otherwise not even Coke would know what it’s made of anymore the Italian chemists are helpless they would really have liked one of the two special canisters of concentrate that are flown in from Atlanta. No state secrets other than that.

  What you can now hear is the unmistakable unique sound of a DC-9 engine starting its descent to the Albanian coast now it’s turning around after all I shouldn’t say this I’m not saying it obviously I can live without you two but I don’t want to many thanks for your nasty remarks about my beloved Boston Red Sox the day will come descending now into Athens.

  Dear censor this communiqué is in clear not encrypted Missingsch my Greek I don’t know needs brushing up there’s nothing more to it everything’s on it so kindly be careful when you rewind I demand compensation for any and every erased comma Missingsch is an impure alloy of Plattdeutsch pronunciation and High German linguistic development remember that Marie yours D. E.

  I won’t say it. End of message.

  October 13, 1967 Friday; Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement

  For a while now Manhattan’s buses have been driving ridiculous slogans around on their long temples, on either side of the route number; at night we saw them glowing fluorescent white beneath our windows, urging everyone to SAY HELLO TO A STRANGER, a half-bald Latin American type holding out an inviting hand; DECRY COMPLACENCY, unlike the groggy overindulger shown here; BE KIND, BE GENTLE, as a lamb, say. We have not yet been able to put these suggestions into practice, we have merely taken note of them. Now they’re real, since The New York Times, the paper of record, is reporting on them. The Transit Authority received a shipment of new buses before they could sell the advertising space on them. That’s what really happened. All these exhortations to good deeds mean nothing more than THIS SPACE AVAILABLE.

  The secretary of state, the Honorable Dean Rusk, firmly believes that backing out of our treaty obligations to South Vietnam would subject the country to mortal danger. Incidentally, he is not the least little bit intimidated by antiwar intellectuals; he says Einstein was a genius in mathematical physics, an amateur in music, and a baby in politics.

  The Soviet Union has increased its annual military spending by 15 percent, to 16,700,000,000 rubles.

  Was it possible in early 1933 to see what was coming?

  Cresspahl sent Peter Wulff, Jerichow/Meckl., a clipping from the News Chronicle, from the first week in January: Germany, it said, would have a good year, if current indications were not deceiving. The economic recovery anticipated for 1933 would put an end to the Red menace in Germany. This was the kind of thing they sent each other, as hints, as requests for information, as banter. Neither believed in recovery. What Peter Wulff believed from The Gneez Daily News were the official announcements and the local news, at least half of it.

  – If there is one it won’t be in Mecklenburg: he wrote back.

  – The government in Schwerin is freezing payments until the end of the month, except for interest payments and their own wages. Now a lawyer from Rostock has opened bankruptcy proceedings against the state, good for him. Stay where you are, man, which is not to say I approve of English beer in the slightest. Warm regards, Wulff.

  – How did they get to be friends?

  – Maybe it was because they were the same age.
Both middle class, for a few years both had been members of the Social Democrats. The main thing was they could be together, sit together, without talking. That only looked like closeness. And they both liked pulling the other’s leg, and could take it as well as dish it out. Cresspahl had watched in silent amusement as Meta Wulff kindly, approvingly rubbed her husband’s back, while Peter tilted his head, a bit martyred before Cresspahl’s eyes. Cresspahl had had to let Meta Wulff talk about May–December marriages, and Peter Wulff had looked at him, apparently neutral but clearly enjoying his defenseless condition.

  – Is that North German too?

  – It’s Mecklenburgish, and that’s something you did inherit.

  – Well, if it’s practical then I don’t mind.

  – And they’d both seen service on the western front.

  The western front came up in the clippings from the Daily Express that Cresspahl mailed to Wulff’s pub and general store along with a sheet of paper on which Lisbeth Cresspahl had translated the marked passages. In Germany, the war veteran August Jäger had just been sentenced for “desertion and treason.” In April 1915, he had been taken prisoner by a French patrol near Langemarck and had revealed details about a planned German gas attack: the date, and how many gas cylinders there were, and where they were stored. On April 14, the English liaison officer for the two French divisions went to English Second Army headquarters and reported that there were sixty gas cylinders just behind the German lines, in bombproof concrete bunkers, one every twenty to forty meters all along the Twenty-Sixth Division front from Langemarck to the hill. General Plumer did nothing but send a squadron of reconnaissance planes over the German positions, who were taken in by the camouflage on the gas bunkers. He believed so firmly that this was deliberate misinformation that he didn’t even notify the War Office. On April 22, the gas came and killed British and French men by the thousands. Now the Daily Express was calling for a trial of the Allied military officers responsible, to match the one against August Jäger in Germany. Giant headlines.

  Cresspahl had no need to add any comment here. They both remembered it. Cresspahl had seen a whole schoolyard full of bluish-black corpses. They were of the same mind, or close enough.

  Generals on trial, when’s that ever happened.

  This Jäger, maybe he had something against gas.

  The Students of Langemarck. Stupid jackasses.

  Singing the Germany Hymn under heavy fire.

  They were in a hole.

  They sang out of fear, normal shit-your-pants fear.

  The heroes of Langemarck huh.

  I’ll tell you what you can do with your Langemarck.

  At the Jerichow celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the German Reich, Mayor Erdamer had to stop in the middle of his speech and then, with a big harrumph, address a rumor that was going around the city and the estates, about which words failed him, and which, also in the name of the Stahlhelm, the Steel Helmet Brigade, he had decided to put a definite stop to, and also in the name of the heroic Students of Langemarck. He had gotten himself all worked up, he was aghast at ruining this simple story, and every so often he gazed almost pleadingly at his audience, like a little boy begging the bigger boys for mercy. Don’t, please. Then, a bit uncertain, rubbing his stiff tuft of white hair with one hand, he released them to the fun part of the evening, a comic play followed by dancing late into the night.

  Wulff had found out a little about Elisabeth Lieplow from Kröpelin. She was a troop leader in the BDM and had made a bad impression in the village of Beckhorst adjoining the Beckhorst estate, not because she’d had her troop parade around in the currently banned uniform but because she’d sent them out on a Sunday morning, to the field at the edge of the village, and had them undress for gymnastics half an hour before church started. All the churchgoers had to file past a pack of scantily clad girls jerking their bodies this way and that, doing splits and back bends. Wulff made no mention of Horst Papenbrock because he knew Lisbeth would read the letter.

  If we’d had breakfast at the 52nd St. Café between Sixth Ave. and Broadway yesterday, we too would have seen six men and a woman, all Negroes around thirty years old, walk in brandishing a sawed-off shotgun and knives and take $3,150 from the cash registers and customers’ pockets, then spray their victims with a gas from black aerosol cans that made them unable to fight, to run, to see. The effects were not unlike those of the police substance known as Mace. Mace comes in black cans but is sold only to the police and the military. The New York Times seems to be suggesting a question.

  Today is Yom Kippur. Since sundown, the Jews have been sitting and kneeling in their synagogues and temples, busy praying, fasting, and accounting for their actions. “Kol Nidre” is how the prayer for forgiveness begins. For a long time now, Marie has wanted to attend such a service with her friend Rebecca, but Rebecca wouldn’t take her even if Mrs. Ferwalter didn’t say she couldn’t. We’ve never been invited for a meal with the Ferwalters. We’re friends with them, but to them we will always be goyim.

  October 14, 1967 Saturday

  Today there’s a picture on the front page of The New York Times showing in the foreground the well-known anti-Fascist Willy Brandt as the foreign minister of West Germany, and behind and above him, blurrier, the leader of the so-called Christian Democrats, who, during the reign of the Fascists, had been blind, deaf, and paralyzed. Also on the first page, The New York Times addresses the class from the valuable upper-right column, reminding us: “Germany was divided after a series of decisions by the Allies at London and Yalta in World War II.” This is how history is absorbed from a distance of 3,800 miles; this is how she tries to make us feel comfortable here in America.

  True, our Upper West Side of Manhattan is only an imagined homeland. We have adapted to it—permanently, indissolubly; we cannot hope for reciprocation. Yet an hour’s stroll through the neighborhood is enough to inoculate us for years against the prospect of leaving. The bus driver who pulls over and opens the door for us in the rain today lets us wave him onward, and raises three fingers in greeting as the doors clap shut; despite being stopped almost immediately by a light turning red, he looks back at us without anger, friendly, like a neighbor. We’d miss him. The utility pole at the corner of Riverside and Ninety-Seventh, we wouldn’t want to do without that. Every time we see it we count its burdens, we greet it like a friend. Not only does it hold the thick end of a whip with which it cracks the light over our heads (as a poet once said), it also supports the signs for both streets, two clusters of traffic lights, the one-way sign, and on top a little yellow light, which indicates the fire alarm fixed to its trunk as one last encumbrance. For us, Ninety-Seventh Street is packed with the past, crowded with presence. In the building on the north corner, behind a window on the second (not first) floor, is Caroline with her sewing machine—where we go to do our sewing. On the south side, there are deep trenches cut between the sidewalk and the buildings, and the Puerto Rican children on the basement stairs aren’t there to play, they are on their way down to their apartments. They live down there. Across the street is where an old Jewish woman once stopped us, years ago, to complain about the neighborhood going downhill: it used to be so nice, so Jewish. She was a mess, like she’d gone a long time without a mirror. Four or five paces on the uneven sidewalk opposite—that is now her place. – They’ve destroyed everything: she complained, a tiny creature swaying on stiff legs. Maybe she thought these apartment buildings at the western end of Ninety-Seventh Street had been built as respectable addresses, for solid middle-class families like, perhaps, her own, who wanted bay windows and stone ornaments on yellow brick facades, among other things, to show the rent they were able to pay. The open trash cans next to the stately portals disgust her, the blaring of record players from the upper floors too—a greeting we’ve come to expect every time. We already know these songs about a Caribbean sky, from the transistor radio Esmeralda rides up and down the elevator in our building with; the music doesn’t ruin
a thing as far as we’re concerned. It’s true that the kids on the front stoops near West End Avenue let us pass through their field of vision as though we were invisible; Marie, too, gives them only surreptitious looks, trying to read from their lips the Spanish she can’t quite grasp from hearing it. But these strapping young men lounging in the doorways have never shown anger or envy toward us. Yet we, in Jerichow, in our childhood fights, our childhood fears, could always count on our parents coming to save us.

  And you want to live in one of these hotels when you’re on your last legs?

  Just look at this child, Cresspahl. Now she’s promised me a house on Staten Island for my old age.

  These hotels, if they promise twenty-four-hour telephone staffing they must be expecting you to call for help.

  Don’t brag, Cresspahl. Just because you’ve already gone through with your death. I won’t need your help for that.

  For years now, the sign hanging outside the Hartcourt Arms has said NO VACANCY, and another of these accommodations has just been given a brand spanking new coat of pink paint—that’s business. Then, past the vomit-stained steps of the Riviera Theatre, our Broadway begins. Broadway is our neighborhood’s main street, its market square. We hardly need leave it to buy anything we want, whether we’re in the mood for Japanese beer, Kamchatka king crabs, Irish honey, Düsseldorf mustard, or Dresden stollen. There are Chinese restaurants where Chinese people eat too, Israeli diners, bodegas, an establishment called the Maharaja, Italian ice-cream parlors and pizzerias; newspapers for the Eastern European émigrés hang alongside the West German tabloids and news magazine. Here, at the shoe repair, the florist, the little delis, at Schustek’s, people ask after our health, our holidays, the child’s school, and we too resort to this consumerist social lubricant, marveling at Schustek’s deft cleaver blows between the pig ribs, complaining about the weather. We are customers in good standing at Schustek’s; we could get food for weeks on a tab. Mr. Schustek still has a little of his Westphalian German, and his two Puerto Rican assistants speak and understand enough Yiddish for the store’s clientele. He doesn’t observe the Sabbath; Mrs. Ferwalter does not shop here. On these sidewalks, we can tell locals from outsiders—the former give us a blank withdrawn look that only just betrays having seen us. We speak to the man working the afternoon shift at the newsstand only when spoken to. That’s because last winter, bundled up tight and stamping his feet against the cold, he compared the weather to January in Berlin, and we said: We’ve been to Berlin too. At which point he pulled out a flask and observed us in silence as he drank, not squinting but imperturbable, until we finally moved off. We had called his time in Berlin a bit too precisely to mind. About the old gentleman nodding to us through the cafeteria window, all we know is that he regularly shouts “Hey, darling!” to us. He is carefully dressed in his old-fashioned clothes, and we can see between his lapels that he has pulled his waistband almost up to his nipples. With a totally empty stare he gazes out over his raised cup and sees something different. Cresspahl used to sit like that after the war—there but far far away, in a time that existed only in his mind. Now the beggar with the blue-black hair is walking toward us up Ninety-Sixth Street and we duck into Good Eats, where we are greeted as neighbors, regular visitors but not regular enough. The children of East Germany born the year I was born call that “perpetuating the capitalist system.” Are we supposed to say: Charlie, you just want our money? Charlie would say: You want one of my triple-decker sandwiches, the way only I can make it, and you can get it in exchange for your money, Gesine. Right? Right. And your girl wants toast with maple syrup, the usual. Yeah, it’s been almost a year and a half since the building across the street burned down. A ruin on a corner like this! Not that I mind that the cafeteria there is out of commission. It’ll probably stay that way too. Takes a long time to start rebuilding because of the insurance companies, they don’t want to get involved, our neighborhood’s too unsafe for them.