by Uwe Johnson
Well, old Swede. Guess you didn’t try that hard. It’s not a boy.
When can she travel?
When can she go to England?
Go home.
It’s up to the mother. Ask her in three weeks.
Not any sooner?
Come on, old Swede. Why do you want to go back to England now anyway? Now that Germany’s finally on the rise again.
That’s not how it looks from over there.
– And now the story of the cup tub: Marie says. – The one they gave you baths in because you were so small.
– That was Louise Utecht who was so small. That was in 1871, on Hageböcker Street in Güstrow. That’s not my story.
– All right, something about their marriage.
– Cresspahl, when he was walking past the head of his wife’s bed to the side room, caught a look from her—dazed, like out of a dream. He wanted to wait until she was alone anyway. At first the red wine only made him sleepy. For a while he couldn’t get the picture out of his head of Horst Papenbrock in the uniform of a Hitler Storm Trooper, toasting him, counting something off for him on fingers bent one after the other, like a math teacher giddily proving a theorem. Then he managed to forget him and think about Meta Wulff instead. He could trust Meta Wulff completely, and he told her about his night in the Lübeck jail. He had definitely already seen Dr. Semig, but an exclamation had slipped out when he saw him that he wished he could get back, if only he could find it in some far-flung corner of his memory. Then, after the second bottle, he had drunk himself sober. The afternoon music on Market Square: that had been the SA’s 162nd Regiment band from Lübeck. What Horst Papenbrock had been counting off on his fingers: the arrests of Communist functionaries—twenty-seven in Rostock, ten each in Schwerin and Wismar and Güstrow, fifty-eight in the country district of Mecklenburg. The racket under the windows was from one of the loudspeakers the Johs. Schmidt Musikhaus had set up on Town Street and the market square, carrying Hitler’s speech from Hamburg. The flickering light between the gables of the buildings came from the torches shining on the uniforms of the SA and the Steel Helmet Brigade as they marched to the Rifle Club, and the gentle breeze came from the door that Papenbrock had now reopened because he felt that this crowd was in no way a threat to his own property. The fire and sparks in the smoke on the other side of town came from the torches thrown into a pyre, and the song drifting in from the low-hanging night was coming out of Papenbrock’s mouth as well while he groped his way up the stairs, humming contentedly,
Myself I have surrendered
With all my heart and hand
To you oh land of life and love
My precious Fatherland.
and while Cresspahl bolted his door shut, he suddenly found himself thinking in his version of English: Aw-right. We won’t surrender. No heart and hand, no body and soul. Precious or not, you want something from us and we’re not gonna give it to you.
The baby was a girl, so he owed Lisbeth something in return. But even if the child didn’t recognize him, it had seen him.
– Your mother, Lisbeth: Marie says. – Tell me something from her point of view.
– I can’t.
– You can’t think what she was thinking?
– Not what she was thinking, not how she was thinking. I don’t understand her anymore.
That was today, late this afternoon, when the ferry was already halfway back to Whitehall Terminal. A Japanese gentleman had asked Marie for help, pressing his camera into her hand with extraordinarily fulsome apologies, and she had positioned him and his family in front of Manhattan’s skyscrapers with expert instructions and hand gestures before flexing her knees to absorb the swayings of the ship’s deck and pressing proof of the visitors’ trip around the world into their camera. As she disembarked over the gangway and up the stairs and down the ramp alongside the ferry building, she answered the tourists’ friendly looks three times, not with a smile but with a slight bow suggested from her shoulders and recognition in her eyes. – Welcome a Stranger: I said in English, and even though she obviously recognized the quote from the Transit Authority’s buses, she replied, almost in earnest, almost excited: – That’s right, Gesine. Welcome a stranger.
October 22, 1967 Sunday
Start, Gesine.
No you start.
Why didn’t you go to the demonstration in Washington yesterday.
Because I don’t believe in it. The president’s policy in Vietnam won’t be changed by the protests of a minority.
You wanted to save the bus fare.
Not even the president decides the president’s policies.
Dos Passos.
No. Baran and Sweezy. Monopoly Capital.
There were fifty thousand protestors.
And there are two hundred million Americans. President Johnson was holding a luncheon.
The New York Times devoted a quarter of the front page to what happened in Washington and abroad, and almost two more pages inside.
It’s The New York Times’s job to report what happens, isn’t it.
Reports in The New York Times might change what the nation thinks.
We don’t even know what the paper means with those photographs. That front-page picture of three US marshals beating someone already on the ground with their white nightsticks, is it supposed to elicit outrage from its subscribers? The picture next to it, of the young men shouting, is that one in there because of the unbourgeois beard, the disguising sunglasses, the twisted mouth?
Publicizing the antiwar movement in the media—isn’t that an opportunity for the opposition?
A possible opportunity.
So you’re saying that as far as you’re concerned an opportunity doesn’t count unless it’s already a certainty.
Something like that.
Were you scared of the white nightsticks, Gesine? Admit it, you’re glad you weren’t one of the people the soldiers beat back down the Pentagon steps with their rifle butts. That’s not your blood on the steps.
I can’t raise the child if I’m crippled.
The child, the child. Your patented excuse.
My patented excuse.
You’re scared of jail.
What good would I be to anybody in jail? Yes, I’d be scared to go jail, any jail, in any country.
Norman Mailer got arrested at the Pentagon yesterday.
For “technical violation” of a police line. How much you want to bet he’s long since back home in Brooklyn Heights?
He declared his opposition to US policy in Vietnam.
And did what writers do, and next he’ll be selling us his story about it.
The Vietcong flag in the march, that’s what bothered you.
What do I care about the Vietcong? All I want is foreign troops out of Vietnam.
Our troops.
Foreign troops.
All the pot smoke from your fellow demonstrators would have made you doubt the cause.
The cause is clearer when you’re high?
One little aesthetic flaw in the act and you won’t do it?
It’s not just the act that would come back to haunt me but the flaw too.
And you don’t like not being in control of what the act means.
I don’t want a rejection of North American expansion into Asia to be twisted around into approval of Soviet expansion.
You’re jabbering like a goddamn intellectual.
And you’re jabbering like people who aren’t exactly around anymore.
The fact is, you took the easy way out. You didn’t want to be there as someone over thirty. You didn’t want to stand out among all those students, children, young people.
Who should I have gone with? The flower children? The New York High School for Music and the Arts?
You didn’t want to be recognized as a foreigner.
It’s true, I did feel I’d have had to go in disguise.
You wouldn’t have been on your own, for once.
That beautiful camar
aderie around the campfires in front of the Pentagon, I don’t feel that way anymore. Surrounded by soldiers with bayonets fixed and expertly braced against their hips—I don’t fall for the line about heroism in the face of danger. The smell of smoke and tear gas in the air wouldn’t make me think of the suffering that’s scientifically proven to precede inevitable victory. Group sing-alongs of “Down by the Riverside.” The prospect of remembering that would have made me squirm even while I was there.
Well, as long as you’re not embarrassed, now or later.
As long as I don’t do anything I’m ashamed to remember.
Even them burning police barricades in their campfires would have been too much for you.
The point wasn’t to destroy public property. That’s not going to win taxpayers over to peace marches.
You’re a taxpayer. Your taxes go to the war too.
I should be paying taxes for British arms sales to Africa instead? For the West German arms industry? For the costs of the Soviet occupations?
Yesterday, when you got off the ferry, you didn’t understand the little demonstration in Battery Park. You didn’t get why so many drivers, including those of city buses and police cars, had their headlights on in broad daylight.
They drove around like that in mourning for John F. Kennedy too.
Yesterday they did it in solidarity, to support the nation’s war in Vietnam.
I admit it, I was glad not to know. “Mistakes happen sometimes.”
“That’s what she said”
“. . . and then she had her fifth kid.”
And just reading in the newspaper about yesterday’s demonstrations all over the world, that’s enough for you? You can live like that, without being there, joining in, getting involved, taking action?
That’s what I have left: I can learn how things work. At least live with my eyes open.
Gesine, why didn’t you go to the demonstration in Washington yesterday?
I’m not saying.
You can tell us.
I can’t. Not even in a mental conversation.
There’s only one thing left it could be.
If I don’t think it through, it doesn’t exist.
Yesterday Mrs. Ernest Hemingway complained to The Times of London about their publishing letters her deceased husband wrote between 1950 and 1956 to one Adriana Ivancich, a young woman who says she was the basis for the character of Renata in Hemingway’s novel Across the River and into the Trees.
The New York Times was unable to reach this basis, now Countess Rex, by telephone in Milan yesterday afternoon.
October 23, 1967 Monday
You don’t want to open your mouth today, Gesine? Not a peep? Keeping your trap shut?
That’s normal for New York, apparently. One man described going for twenty-one days without a word—a record. That’s typical for alienated life in New York, apparently.
Why don’t you want to say anything, Gesine.
I don’t feel like talking.
Work conversations don’t count. Marie doesn’t count, even though she walked out the door without a word after unexpectedly giving Gesine a big hug, briefly but firmly, so that the feeling of her body from knees to shoulders lingered for a few breaths. (Don’t ask me anything, Marie.)
Seeing Jason goes off without a word, without a grimace. Where the metal staircase around the elevator shaft opens to the building staff’s room, there stood Jason in the doorframe, massive, black, gloomy, melancholy, blocking the noise from the radios and TVs for a moment, then withdrawing into the darkness behind his eyes. (Lovely morning today, Jason.)
The mechanics in the middle garage are awake enough, they call out, greet Mrs. Cresspahl as their sister, one of them whistles. (I’ll wear my skirts as short as I want.)
On the corner of Ninety-Sixth and West End Avenue, the police car has driven up and dropped off the guard who watches over the children’s walk to Emily Dickinson School every schoolday. As he strides into the center of the intersection, he firmly pulls on his white gloves and eyes the pedestrians on the sidewalk, who, annoyed, embarrassed, have to obey the traffic light this time. (Yes, officer.)
Behind the window of his Good Eats Diner, Charlie stands stock-still, holds his high forehead and gray shock of hair toward Broadway without seeing it, and ignores his hands spatuling up a hamburger. In a corner of the diner’s window, a printed card with grease spots recommends Charlie’s cooking to clients of a West German travel agency. (What do the Jews in the office upstairs think about that, Charlie?)
The old man at the newsstand has his hands in the pouch of his apron and his eye on the customer exchanging coins for a paper, so intently that it’s as if he’s looking for something to come out of her mouth. (Today I’m the one who’s forgotten how to say good morning.) That wasn’t an easy one. She almost went back, to make it up to him with a comment about the weather. (Has Der Spiegel come in yet?)
On the stinking stairs down to the subway, a woman steps out of the wall like someone in a dream, dressed respectably, middle-class, of no interest to the male passengers, and she says: Dearie, sweetie, can you spare a dime? (I have a great Brecht poem you might like, you poor crazy housewife.)
The A express train is packed solid today, getting more and more crowded by the minute to the mindlessly flowing monologue of a dark-skinned man talking at the ceiling in a husky, abrasive voice, head thrown back like someone drowning: Theyre tryin tuh corrup the nigguh! Theyre thinkin an schemin an plannin to corrup the nigguh wit sex! (You don’t say.)
In the Grand Central Terminal concourse a dignified old lady in a lace blouse and tailored black suit is digging around in the pay phone coin returns for forgotten change, and senses she’s being watched, and asks us, in the lilting tones of an expensive college, where she might find the train from Montreal. (Call information, madam.)
At Sam’s, we have to count on him having our regular order memorized, and in fact the rush at his counter when our bag is ready prevents him from handing it over with the usual exchange of pleasantries; maybe his nod, the gloomy glance from above his bellowing mouth, wasn’t meant for us. (Hi, Sam. Tea with lemon. Thanks, Sam. Don’t work too hard, Sam. Back atcha, Sam.)
And so we make it to the first row of elevators in silence, make it up to the eleventh floor, past the girls in the typing pool, to our desk, and then have two hours of silence in front of the humming, clacking machine, until Amanda parks herself on the second chair with a steaming cup of coffee and a lit cigarette, equipped for a long visit, and ask us how it’s going. She insists on an answer. Game over. – You can see for yourself, I’m radiant: Mrs. Cresspahl says.
Meanwhile the demonstration in Washington is one for the history books, you can find an analysis of the news in The New York Times. If you believe the Times, everyone lost. The administration is sad, due to its damaged reputation abroad. The demonstrators are sad, because they didn’t win enough people over to their side against the president. The vilification directed at his person (“LBJ the Butcher”) might reverse his declining fortunes in the polls. The signs and lines from the theatrical performances are too indecent for publication (“too obscene to print”). Most of the people arrested apparently acted like upstanding bourgeois citizens caught in a misdemeanor while out drinking on a Saturday night; Norman Mailer, though and of course, was visibly and dramatically himself. The various groups involved were united on neither the goal nor the tactics of the protest. Advantage of idealism had been taken. The radicals had wanted a battle and they’d gotten one. That’s how it was, according to the Times.
The Soviets claim not to know that Yevgeny Y. Runge, the secret agent who defected, ever served in the Soviet army or Soviet security forces. Claim not to know.
On the way home we tried again not to talk. But Mrs. O’Brady at the cigarette stand would only sell us cigarettes in exchange for some chitchat about how dangerous cigarettes are, Mr. Stample (James F. “Shorty” Stample) was not in the mood to drink alone at Grand Central, a
nd when we got rid of him a young man stopped us in the middle of Lexington Avenue and asked us how to get to Times Square, not to any other address in all of New York. (I’ve never run across that scam. You must have seen the words Times Square somewhere, buddy.) But there really was confusion in his youthful face with its fuzzy rust-red beard, his accent was plausibly British, close enough to be a New Zealander, he really did look like someone set down suddenly and without warning in a foreign country, so we brought him along under Grand Central Terminal to the warren of tunnels under Times Square, talking the whole time, enjoying the other English, the one from another country, from childhood. And Marie was leaning on the railing at the Ninety-Sixth Street subway exit, a determined, somewhat worried child, who allowed us another few steps without talking before the day needed to be cleared up.
– Are you still sad, Gesine?
– No.
– Do you remember what was bothering you?
– No.
– It’s these darn Mondays, Gesine. Sometimes I can’t take it either, Gesine.
October 24, 1967 Tuesday
Not only has Albert “Kid Blast” Gallo had to cede control of the Brooklyn Mafia to Joseph Colombo, he’s been arrested, around seven a.m. yesterday, something about a little racketeering and extortion in a racetrack ticket-cashing scheme.