Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  October 15, 1967 Sunday

  ALL THE NEWS, promise the words on The New York Times factory on the West Side as you drive past it heading north on the highway along the river. Only slowly does the qualification slide into view through the windshield: THAT’S FIT TO PRINT. It’s hard to translate, even into English, what exactly the news has to be for the Times to print it: appropriate, proper, worthy, serviceable—who knows. The newspaper has long shirked the task of specifying its motto any further, but today it does give a hint, in a headline over an article about another paper, the Communist Worker, which comes out only twice a week and has no more than 14,218 paying readers. “All the News That Fits the Line”—the party line, that is. This is how the Times takes a dig at the competition, its own self-confidence perfectly intact despite the vaguer promise at the top of the page.

  In a Newark tavern on Lafayette Street, the owner and two brothers, all in their thirties, were found dead this morning, shot at close range. Apparently they had been having a drink with their killers. It might have had something to do with dividing the spoils from a wildcat strike by longshoremen in Port Newark.

  A sixty-five-year-old man, his throat cut from ear to ear, was found lying in a badly prepared fire in an apartment house in Forest Hills, Queens. His hands were tied behind his back with wire.

  West German students have publicly burned newspapers to express their political opinion.

  Heinrich Schneider, fifty-three years old, accused of burning eight hundred Polish Jews to death in a Bialystok synagogue in 1941, hanged himself in his prison cell in Wuppertal the night before last.

  Marie’s homework assignment is: “I look out the window. . .” She has been sitting by the window half the morning, at the typewriter on which she is drafting her essay. When she stops and thinks, her hands slip down onto her knees, she hunches her back, and she stares so fixedly out at Riverside Park, head to one side, that she doesn’t notice a gaze on her, doesn’t hear a footstep. Maybe she’s taking a stab at the playground, which by now is clearly visible through the bare plane trees. The playground across from our building, surrounded without and watched over within by tall old trees, is a large enclosure on several levels, starting with a big flat area at the north end, full of slides, seesaws, sandboxes, and fenced-in groups of swings and bordered by mostly broken green benches. This zone opens out into a circular space surrounded by high walls, and in it a concentric area ringed by a metal fence; at a break in the wall on the southern edge, steps lead up to a terrace of benches, picnic tables, and an attendant’s hut that looks like a little castle, followed by more steps up to the highest level, some fifteen feet above the playground. She might be describing: how the tables will soon be moved indoors. She might be describing: how the buxom babysitter with the rosy farmgirl cheeks has not been seen here for weeks and is now wiping children’s noses and applying Band-Aids with her deft, stubby fingers, with the same lilting Irish voice, somewhere else. Marie might be describing: how the colors are tiered under the clear sky, with the blue of the steep New Jersey cliffs between the softer color of the vegetation and the sharper gray of the river, all sprinkled with sand-colored tree boughs and thin patches of leaves on the upper promenade, and, along the lower edge of the view, the poisonous car paint next to the solemn gloom of a park fence deep in shadow. She might be describing: Rebecca Ferwalter, whose muffled scream, in which a certain name can only be surmised, can now be heard from outside below the window. But Marie makes plans with her friend for later that afternoon and goes on tapping away at the typewriter undisturbed for a long time, before pulling the last page out and leaving the draft for Gesine next to the newspaper, not urgently, almost distractedly, as though her mind were still enlarging on what she has seen.

  “I look out the window, the big front window of the Good Eats diner on Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway, facing south. The time is an evening in late May last year. The building across the street is on fire. It is a two-story building with a cafeteria, a drugstore, and offices. The smoke was not billowing, it was coming out the empty windows all white, like fog or breath. There was a crowd of people watching on the sidewalks, mostly colored people, but well-behaved. They made sure they weren’t blocking each other’s view. I could see over the shoulders of the ones outside the window. The murmur got louder when the jets of water revealed flames on the second floor. The fire hid in the floor until it showed itself again with billows of smoke. Streams of water as thick as an arm shot up from the engine far below, and also stabbed down into the building from a cherry-picker platform and from telescoping ladders. A lot of vehicles were stopped in the intersection: red fire trucks, ambulances (private and city), green-and-white police cars. In the middle of the south lanes of Broadway, two men, not in uniform, stood by themselves. They acted like they owned the fire. The people on the stools next to me craned the necks holding up their chewing heads. They didn’t always manage to lean on their elbows. Sometimes one of them tottered when a policeman pushing his way to the phones in the back bumped into him. On the other side of the window, the water was washing the front of the building and knocking the wooden shutters off. The four big billboards still stood high above the roof, lit by floodlights. This was the first time I had ever seen them. The street looked dry even though none of the hydrants sealed tight around the hose couplings. A block away from the intersection it looked like steam was coming up from the asphalt. Policemen were standing there with flashlights, waving aside cars that had no idea what was happening. All the side streets were packed with nervous headlights. My mother said, This is what it’s like in a war.”

  – I did not say that.

  – You did too.

  – Did not. What I said, the morning after, when there were yellow police planks boarding up the building and the firemen were looking through the charred wood and soggy rubble, when the air was dry again: I said it smelled like war.

  – We’re not allowed to write about smells.

  – Can you say “it looks a little like”?

  Marie snorts unhappily through her nose as she changes the ending. Tomorrow Sister Magdalena will ask her if she was thinking about Vietnam. And then it will become a topic at the next parents’ meeting. You are not raising your child properly, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  October 16, 1967 Monday

  It’s not only Linda Fitzpatrick’s parents who can’t believe that their daughter let herself be lured to her death in an East Village basement with LSD, The New York Times can’t let go of it either. On the front page, along with the 701st plane shot down over Vietnam, next to the vice president’s fear of the Chinese Communist Peril, the newspaper prints a private photo showing the dead girl at the tiller of a massive sailboat and goes on to compare (over more than a whole page) the family’s description of her with the statements of her East Village companions. The hippies say that the girl thought she was a witch. In Indianapolis she had met two warlocks, or male witches, in their late twenties. One had taken her mind apart and scattered it all over the floor and then put it back together again. She herself stated that ever since then she’d felt that the warlock owned her. The warlock, “Pepsi” by name, stated that she was a real meth monster—a speed freak. A good kid otherwise, he said.

  Cresspahl suspected nothing, not in the least.

  He had thought Lisbeth Papenbrock was settled in, had gotten used to Richmond, to England. When she heard the phone ring she no longer looked around for him but just picked it up, almost without thinking, and slogged her way through the whole conversation in the foreign language with practically no misunderstandings. English had crept into her German sentences. – Oewe dat’s’n full-time job, she’d said without realizing it until Cresspahl looked up unexpectedly. – Or nich? she added, head to one side, embarrassed and teasing, so that he wouldn’t put her mistake into words. In moments like this he believed they were thinking alike. In the Royalty Cinema, as Buster Keaton in Speak Easily blossomed from professor of Greek mythology to manager of a musical-comedy
troupe, he had secretly watched her; he trusted her quiet, knowing laughter. She had let herself be talked into coming to the Christmas party at the Station Hotel for Richmond’s Anglo-German Circle, had suffered bravely through the singing of German Christmas carols, from “Silent Night” to the address to the Christmas tree, before insisting they leave at the appearance of the new member, Father Christmas with his large sack, so that the circle’s president, Mrs. Allen, had had to mail them the present for Mrs. Cresspahl later (a celluloid baby rattle). He had taken that to mean: she no longer needed German things.

  He had counted on her growing interest in the town. When she expressed her approval of Ham’s incorporation into Richmond, when she mentioned the mayor’s name, Reid, as though she had known it for years, it sounded like Richmond was her place now—she was participating in at least its outward life. She’d told him about the work being done on Richmond Bridge: a pier on the Middlesex side had had to be reinforced; about what that diver was doing down on the bottom of the Thames, secured with air lines, lifelines, and signal ropes; about the crowd of children on the river path, passing critical judgment on the sinking of each bag of concrete and transposing their dream careers underwater.

  December 1932 had been unusually warm, with plenty of sunshine, and she’d come back from every one of her walks with something from the city, not with homesickness for Jerichow. She had left the bakery with her coat open, for a moment her protruding belly could be seen by passersby, and an old woman, a beggar it seemed, had said to her: God bless you, dearie. The sixpence the insulted old woman refused went into her savings. When Wright Brothers, the department store on George Street, announced a sale in its upstairs windows—the massive corner building was going to be renovated, adding electric lifts and a new tearoom—Mrs. Cresspahl dialed RIchmond–3601 and had them put aside, before the crowds turned up, the baby things she had her eye on, at the sale price of course. She had also engaged with Richmond in the manner befitting a Papenbrock daughter: reading up on the history of the town until she could point out to Cresspahl the actual window in the ruins of the old Tudor palace from which, on March 24, 1603, the ring had been thrown to the waiting knight, which meant that Elizabeth, Queen of England and Ireland, had finally died from her cold, leaving the way free for James VI of Scotland. Lisbeth Cresspahl even knew this James well enough to call him a libertine.

  All the arrangements had been made: hospital, doctor, a woman to help around the house starting on February 10, 1933—not Mrs. Jones, who had wanted to give up two other jobs for this one, but a certified baby nurse who also knew her way around the kitchen. Cresspahl had heard about the ridiculousness of first-time fathers, so he watched to see if his wife laughed when he refused to let her carry anything heavy, or monitored her meals to make sure she was following the doctor’s orders. She did not laugh. Sometimes she seemed not to hear him, only the child beneath her folded hands. But since the autumn there had been no more painful silences. He often found himself thinking: It will all be fine.

  Once, in January, he ran into her on a side street off of George Street. The sidewalk and street were almost empty. She could have seen him approaching. She was walking slowly, stepping carefully, one hand on her hip, not looking ahead but only up at the buildings. As though looking for something above their pretentious ornaments and domes. She held her face almost motionless. Her skin looked cold, red from the wind. Her gaze was strangely clear, revealing no thoughts. She walked right past him even though he’d stopped. Given a choice between her and the child, he would have decided against the child.

  Then, in late January, she asked him to call Moxon, Salt & Co. on Regent Street. This was the agent for the North German Lloyd’s. She wanted a steamboat ticket to Hamburg. Cresspahl was so little on his guard that he was about to answer right away. Then he saw that she had prepared for the argument as though for a difficult job, and that she would sit there like that for as long as it took, a little bent forward, her forearms on her knees, supporting her belly, submissive and absolutely unyielding. He cautiously said: You can’t have both, a child at home with you and me in Jerichow. And she said, not unfriendly: How is the child any of your business, Cresspahl.

  – And that’s why I was born in Jerichow.

  – Would you significantly prefer it to have been born in Richmond? the child says, Marie says. That’s how her German sounds now. She is sitting with her dinner before her, fists propped under her chin, avidly curious.

  – That’s what I’m saying. To have been born in England, and grown up there, and never left.

  – I don’t get it. Oh. Right. Right, sorry.

  October 17, 1967 Tuesday

  GIRLS SAY YES

  TO MEN WHO SAY NO

  (on a sign at a demonstration against the draft in San Francisco). The marines have bombed their own positions in Vietnam for the second time in three days.

  The New York Times has been informed in Prague that Miss Zdena Hendrych, the daughter of the second-in-command in the Communist Party, stole a Central Committee document from her father’s desk out of love for the writer Jan Beneš. Now the document is with an émigré organization in Paris, Beneš is in prison for five years, and Papa Hendrych is furious at writers. Even though Vaculik, Liehm, Klima, Kundera, and Prochazka haven’t smuggled the truth across the border, just put pieces of the truth on public display inside the country.

  Tovarishch Stalin skazal, chto my dolzhny byt' inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush!

  Comrade Stalin has said that we are to be the engineers of human souls!

  – Come on over! Sam says. – Step right up! Hello sweetie! Two teas with, one coffee without! Who’re you talkin to! Let’s go! Three Danishes, right! Here’s yours, Gee-sign!

  Sam mans the to-go counter in the back of the building cafeteria. The crowd of people waiting in front of him is thickest in the morning, right before work starts, with customers off the street as well as from inside the bank, so he talks almost uninterruptedly and seems almost impatient when his voice stops. You can’t tell Sam’s age by looking. Sometimes a familiar turn of phrase makes him seem close in age to the young typists, whose lives he knows as well as their names; sometimes his sagging features, wiped out from work, put him closer to fifty. He is squat, stocky, fat in a very solid way. When he’s talking to a customer, something about his look hooks into them; in his few idle moments, the eyes under his five-and-dime glasses look heavy, sad. He moves quickly, making his thin, pajama-like jacket hang crooked, and a little yellow something on a chain swings back and forth as if motorized above the neckline of his undershirt. His voice changes volume like someone’s flipped a switch: after saying hello in a casual, conversational tone he will produce a guttural bark to pass an order to the kitchen behind him, and then, precisely articulated, call out the orders ready for pickup. But he’s more than an announcer—he takes money, makes change, grabs filled bags from the service hatch, and writes down new orders coming in over his three phones on the wall, and to these he has to staple the accompanying cash slips, marking them with a quick handwritten swirl that always starts with the same cramped arc, its meaning revealed only by the various executions of the long tail. To write he has to hunch over and rest on his elbows; to take orders he has to stand up straight and tap his fingers in the air to encourage his customer to talk faster; to reach the kitchen hatch he has to turn his hips; when one of his three phones chirps, he has to reach over to the wall while balancing a bag full of coffee cups on his other, open hand. Sometimes he runs out of hands. He never complains; only when he presses the back of his hand against his receding hair is anything like suffering visible.

  The first few times, he seemed overwhelmed; by now, he strikes us as being happy at his job, if only because he can do it so well. He talks no differently to the bank employees than he does to the deliverymen, mostly black or shabby white men, who carry the call-in orders upstairs to the bank offices and to the surrounding buildings, except for the encouraging word he occasionally gives the
deliverymen along with the order. Something like: Attaboy—almost as if talking to a child. Still, the embattled bag-bearers often acknowledge his good intentions with a martyred smile. Nor does he draw his customers into conversation indiscriminately—his inter-locutor needs to be in the mood. Never once has he honored with a single word the gentleman who comes down the long hall toward him five mornings a week, in a leather jacket instead of a suit, even though the bag for this customer is ready on the counter the moment he reaches it, with exact change always in his hand, and the two men briefly glance into each other’s eyes and part in silence, so we will never know what’s in the man’s bag, a full breakfast or a Diet Coke, because his order is never called out. Others he calls Jennifer dear, wishing them an extra good morning, complimenting their haircuts, noticing a new sweater at first glance, and the advice he most often gives is that classic American line: Take it easy. He can come up out of his writing crouch and say, with an almost nurturing look: So, something to eat today too?, and it’s not a sales pitch, and he never extorts the purchaser’s loyalty with even two words inviting them to come again. That’s why we do come again, and accept his help getting through the start of the day. – We’re very grateful to you, Sam.