by Uwe Johnson
The lady who sits at the register some days—elegant, petite, playing with her necklace with hands that show absolutely no trace of work—calls him by another name, though: Jerome, or Jeremy. Maybe he’s trying to make it easier and more efficient to deal with him, as Sam.
In the early afternoon, when the herd of tables crouch empty and abandoned by the street window and even the swivel stools at the three horseshoe counters are only sparsely occupied, Sam has nothing but phone orders to deal with, coffee for the hungover and ice for the early drinkers, and he chats on the side with the eaters perched at his counter. Today he’s talking about the murdered Linda Fitzpatrick’s predilection for methamphetamine hydrochloride, speed, the drug that gives an incredibly racing heightened awareness before felling its victim, broken and shattered. He can’t understand it. – If I couldn’t stay awake without that, fuggedaboutit: he says.
– And giving the address! A paper like the Times! Describing right where you can get the stuff! he says. He is writing something down, he’s busy, he can still shake his head, angry and demoralized. – Practically leading the kids there by the hand! he says.
Sometimes, for a few minutes at a time, the telephone and cash register leave him in peace, but he doesn’t sit down, he stands stooped over the low counter counting money. Bundle after bundle of green bills appears in his hands, and the way the money glides between his fingers makes it look like he’s washing his hands with it.
– Looks good today: Mrs. Cresspahl says. – Oh, Gesine: Sam says, joyless, exhausted, and now she sees something stiff and jerky about his movements, something hidden in the morning and lunchtime rush. She notices, too, for the first time, the deep-cleft wrinkles in the fat of his brow, the color of sick skin under his sweat. – This place: he says:
(and he doesn’t just work here. He is not being exploited here. The whole shop is his baby—he pays the rent, he’s the one who fitted it out, he pays the wages for three cooks, nine waitresses, two women working the register. He’s the boss)
– This place, you know how I’m going to leave this place? If I ever do leave it. In a box, that’s how. In a box!
In one of those rounded metal sheaths that the police use to carry off bodies, after two men in little black bowler hats pull their guns out of brown paper bags and shoot Sam for the pile of cash?
No. He must keep a revolver next to the register. He’s not going to let them get even a single day’s takings.
So there’ll be time to fetch a coffin, not the final one but a plain reusable city coffin, after Sam slumps to the floor outside the kitchen, a little surprised, but not angry, at the pain suddenly rising from his heart through his left arm into his brain and snuffing it out. Hopefully he won’t lose his glasses in the fall, so that we’ll be spared the face concealed behind them. That’s the way it’ll be.
– Pract’ly there already: Sam says indulgently. Maybe he was beaten a lot as a child.
– Now don’t look all scared, Gee-sign!
October 18, 1967 Wednesday
Today at sundown the Jews start their Feast of Booths, Sukkoth. For the Orthodox, it lasts nine days; Reform Jews celebrate only eight. The Bible mandates the festival in the third book of Moses, Leviticus 23:43: “that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I the LORD your God.”
Dear Anita Redcross. Dearest.
I’ve copied this out for you from The New York Times, because the young man you’re getting out of East Germany needs to know such things if he not only is Jewish but looks so Jewish that you won’t want to use any passport without an indication of Jewish faith.
I’ve had them as neighbors for six years now and I still can’t tell by looking. Maybe some people have the gift. I don’t. Are East German border officials specially trained in it?
I’ve found someone who looks like the boy in your photo. Yes, he’s twenty, not nineteen. He was raised speaking French, just like you wanted, a Belgian national. He’s visiting his grandparents two blocks from our corner, and since we know old Mr. and Mrs. Faure from around Broadway and Riverside Drive, they vouched for me. Actually, they trust me because of Marie. They take the child as a guarantee. Unfortunately, they think we’re undertaking this transport to the West out of love for the Jews, and they’re touched. The young man who gives me his passport is doing so for reasons he considers political.
You don’t have much time, because Henri R. Faure’s visa is valid only until November 18, so I have to reattach the Immigration Office form on top of it before then, so that he can prove not only that he hasn’t left the country but that the passport has been in his pocket the whole time.
You’ll give your “Henri R. Faure” the usual history, I’m sure; here for reference is a CV of the real one. Plus a book about Manhattan’s Upper West Side, The Airtight Cage by Joseph P. Lyford, so that your ward can tell the checkpoint guards something about his visit to his grandparents in New York, if he has to.
It was just by chance that I could find someone so quickly, and I wouldn’t risk Grandma Faure’s trust in any other cause. So let it be this one. Your nineteen-year-old couldn’t take any more of the GDR’s anti-Israeli propaganda after the Six-Day War and started talking, and had to leave his technical college, and now the security services have their eye on him. Someone like that needs to get out, even if he’s in for a shock. Just please let it not be some love affair.
I wouldn’t lift a finger for that cause anymore. Admit it, Anita! The Wall went up through the middle of Berlin and sympathy turned us into real fools. When one of your needy creatures appeared on your doorstep with some story about their love for a person in the country they were now cut off from, you usually said yes right away so you wouldn’t have to hear any more lovey-dovey confidences. We should have listened a little more closely. Some of those people’s pride was just hurt—how could the GDR infringe on their rights by depriving them of the object of their affections? Some men wanted to bring a lover or fiancée over just to show her how potent he was, in this regard too. Do you remember that poet from Munich who cried his eyes out in your lap? Two months after getting the girl he’d ordered, he tossed her aside. Remember Dietbert B., the photographer, the man of the world? To hear the two of them talk, you’d think their separation was killing them, that they couldn’t live apart, not for anything, but in fact there wasn’t enough to keep them together anywhere. Because absolute, unconditional love was only possible in the capitalist free market. What bullshit!
What I’m trying to say is: If you can’t get out of this line of business, I hope you’re not working Henriettaplatz-style for free anymore. It’s not that I want you to turn into a hard-nosed professional, but you should at least earn the butter on your bread with these transports out of the Land of Egypt.
Part II
No. We’re not homesick for Germany. Marie definitely isn’t. She’s already embarrassed when it comes out that she was born in Düsseldorf, not New York. And the house in Düsseldorf, the first place of my own, my first real home—they tore it down. I would love to be sitting under your gray skylight again, as it rattles from the roar of the jet planes on the flight path approaching the airport, but not so I could be in West Berlin again, only so that I could see your faces and hear what you’re up to.
Around the corner from us, on West End Avenue, is the Hotel Marseilles, a crenellated tower from the Middle Ages known as the turn of the century, with air conditioners sticking out the windows like rows of false teeth. The establishment offers a Bar & Restaurant & TV in Every Room & Swimming Pool. Taking a walk with Marie last Saturday, the words slipped out of me: Anita the Red could stay there. It was another few steps before I realized what I’d said, and that it’s actually possible. So we hereby invite you to New York to celebrate your PhD, some expenses paid. I’d love to tell you about a strange thing that happened to me in Minneapolis, among other things. And we would initiate you into reading The New York Times, t
he most experienced person in the world, the first to cross the Atlantic, the first to fly over the South Pole, the Firm You Can Trust.
Sincerely yours, G. C.
P.S. You are not allowed to put H. R. Faure’s passport photo into someone else’s documents.
Mr. Mark T. Markshaw, who is putting this in your hand, has been brought up in such a way as to be incapable of opening other people’s mail. At this point, he knows only that he is doing me a favor. If he feels like sightseeing in East Berlin, and you try to question him about the latest passport-control ceremonies at the border, he would know somewhat more. You shouldn’t ask that of him.
October 19, 1967 Thursday
The New York Times is in a fight with another paper. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution it had made the statement, wrapped up with a bow, that the exploitation of man was not over, only transferred to the world’s largest employer, the Soviet state. Pravda writes back: That cannot be true because there is no evidence with which to prove it.
Three gangsters paid a visit to a liquor-store owner in Brooklyn yesterday. Instead of handing over his cash, the owner starts shooting. One of the bandits grabs the owner’s four-year-old son, and one of the father’s bullets hits the child in the abdomen.
What did Cresspahl care about the headlines in bold with which British papers reported the naming of one Herr Hitler as the German chancellor of the Reich! The British papers weren’t too worked up about it either—after all, who but the leader of the largest party should fill that position, duly overseen by the assembled Right. Markets calm, the mark slightly higher against the pound.
But Cresspahl’s wife had sailed away, across the Channel, in the middle of a cold snap from Russia, thirty-one weeks pregnant. England may have been colder than it had been for seven years, but Dassow Lake near Lübeck was frozen over. The fisherman walked out to work and chopped holes in the outlying bays. – I’m cold: she’d said. Then she had sailed into the cold.
The night before her departure, Cresspahl had gone to the meeting of the Richmond Anglo-German Circle, alone. At home he would have had to try to talk her into staying; she would have expected it too. The guest speaker for the evening, Mr. von Dewall, an editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung, described it as the Germans’ desire not to be looked upon as a minor power. He anticipated a limited rearmament; he pointed to the example of unarmed China at the mercy of Japan. Dr. Jackson asked Wolf von Dewall for his impressions of England. The representative of the Frankfurter Zeitung spoke of the development of an entirely new type of person in Germany. The people there even had new faces, he said. Von Dewall admired the English. Slow to take action, pondering a long time first, in the end they invariably took a step in the right direction. Back home, Cresspahl couldn’t say anything about the talk; the German hunger for weapons, the stability of England would have looked like still more arguments against going to Jerichow. He did not want to describe Mr. von Dewall to her—she would have taken his anger as directed at her. He sat on the edge of her bed for a while in the darkness. Then he turned on the light, almost without a sound he thought, but her eyes were open, she was smiling like a child who knows the surprise prepared for her and is playacting so as not to spoil the fun, her own or the other person’s.
On January 31, 1933, the Daily Express reported from Berlin that a certain General Schleicher was attempting to found a military dictatorship with a military coup. The Potsdam garrison, prepared to march on the German capital, had not. The Social Democratic Party had decided to bring a vote of no confidence against the Harzburger Front coalition cabinet. On the inevitable other hand, the Communist Party had requested a vote of no confidence against the Hitler–von Papen government. Nothing new about that. To Cresspahl’s amazement, though, everyone seemed to find it normal for a young woman to go home for the birth of her first child. Now that it was about him, he found it not normal. He overheard his assistants talking about Mrs. Cresspahl. Perceval listed the housework he’d had to do for previous masters’ wives. Mrs. Cresspahl had had him knead gingerbread dough for a whole hour, but later she’d left a bowl of the finished cookies for him in the workshop. – I was flabbergasted: Perceval said. – But the boss’s face: he said. A real lousy sulky spiteful penny-pinching mug he has these days. I don’t get it. I’d be happy to have a kid from her! and Mr. Smith said, in a friendly way: Shut your trap, T. P. Mr. Smith, cadaverous from drinking, still had plenty of gritty strength left in his long arms, and he knew he could shut the younger man up with a look from between his bushy brows and the metal frame of his glasses. Mr. Smith’s devotion to drink had never made Cresspahl happy before, but that night he sent out for some beer. And not because Mr. Smith was relieving him of the burden of educating Perceval.
In Richmond there were sixty public houses with liquor licenses and Cresspahl was out almost every night, as though he wanted to get to know them all. He drank slowly, almost methodically, until he felt tired enough to fall asleep, but the moment he left the pub, carefully stepping between the freezing kids waiting there for their parents, he forgot the conversations he’d had inside. He had laughed along with the others at the tirades presented to the magistrate by Miss Newton, an elderly social worker, protesting against moving closing time half an hour later, ten thirty instead of ten. He had been asked about the number-one topic of conversation in the city: the incomprehensible closing of the Richmond Gasworks and laying off of all the workers. And they still wouldn’t tear down this rusty pink monster of a gasholder! He had to know something about it, had a business right next door didn he, carpentry or something. Only recently started drinking.
What Cresspahl could see before his eyes on his walk home through bare Petersham Road, in the whistling wind from the Channel storms, was Lisbeth’s face behind the window of the train leaving Victoria station. He had been so unhelpful while searching for a last possible thing to say that she had taken care of everything with the luggage porter and the ticket collector before he’d even opened his mouth. She’d shown him that she would have all the help she needed on her journey, and that she knew how to get it. That aside, he had realized that what she was doing here she was doing alone, without him, against him. She had pulled herself up into the train car with both arms. She had stood behind the pane of glass, arms hanging, as though she couldn’t open the window. She had not looked at anyone or anything but him. Her face was different. She looked younger, too young for her new experiences. She had a girl’s face again, a bit uncertain around the eyes, a bit stubborn. In his memory, in the darkness of his deserted unheated room, that face had been still until it swayed with the jerk of the departing train and slid obliquely away.
He sent her a postcard in mid-February, the Richmond Bridge, and under the pier he drew in for her the foundations of elm and oak wood that had lasted in the water for 156 years. He wrote about the progress on the jobs she knew about, and sent greetings from Dr. Salomon and Mrs. Allen. Then he ran out of room on the card. Because, however much he could barely live without her, it wouldn’t do for him to write it out for her, would it?
After she’d been gone three weeks, he was more or less convinced that he had agreed to her leaving for Jerichow. If he hadn’t exactly urged her to, then at least he hadn’t opposed it. Now he was entirely at ease, and in his memory she was, too.
October 20, 1967 Friday
The US losses in Vietnam last week bring the total numbers to 13,907 dead and 88,502 wounded since January 1, 1961.
Students at Brooklyn College, objecting to the presence of two navy recruiters, were roughly treated by the police. One of the pictures in The New York Times shows an officer, mouth wide open, venting his feelings on a smaller person, apparently a girl, with a billy club. The photo would be perfect for a wanted poster.
An antiwar protest is scheduled to take place this weekend in Washington, D.C. Paratroop units from the army’s Eighty-Second Airborne Division have been flown in to protect the Pentagon.
Cresspahl, on his way
from London to Jerichow, wanted to stop over in Lübeck. He kept telling himself he should hurry to Jerichow, and kept not wanting to listen. From the top of the ungainly staircase in the station hall, he could look down at the Stettin express, connection in Gneez to Jerichow. He knew he was supposed to be hurrying. He had a dull and unpleasant feeling of future guilt. Still that was preferable to the prospect of Papenbrock’s house, of Louise Papenbrock and the fake piety with which she would lead him to the door of the room which by that point, he imagined, contained a new baby. He wasn’t ready for that room yet. In any case, no one there was expecting him. He’d heard that babies in their first few days of life couldn’t really see anyway. By the time he stored his overnight bag in the station, procrastination had apparently triumphed. Practically a little vacation.