Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Is this why she had to be born in Jerichow?

  Yes.

  Yes?

  It wasn’t right for me there, Cresspahl.

  You wanted a house in Richmond.

  And now I want one here.

  You got by just fine in Richmond.

  Even the colors were too much for me.

  The colors. Lisbeth.

  Yes. The red. The blue. On the ships, the mailboxes, the uniforms. Such cold colors.

  The colors that that painter used, Con . . .

  John Constable. Now he was a painter. Those were landscapes.

  You liked them.

  As art, not to live in.

  Whose idea was this?

  Papenbrock’s.

  Lisbeth.

  I asked him.

  When?

  When the child was born.

  Lisbeth. Lisbeth.

  Ach, Cresspahl. When I got here from England.

  Lisbeth. Lisbeth. Lisbeth.

  You’re talking as if we still had a choice.

  We?

  Yes, I mean we, Cresspahl. We.

  Papenbrock informed his son-in-law of the bestowal in his daughter’s presence. He relied on the fact that no one starts shouting with a convalescing new mother in bed in the room. He’d also wanted to monitor the couple’s initial discussion. In fact, Cresspahl’s first comment was that they’d have to think it over. Him then leaving the room with a downright casual glance at Lisbeth Cresspahl was not what Papenbrock had expected. He was still sure he’d get his way, but had lost all hope of enjoying the process.

  November 3, 1967 Friday

  The chancellor of West Germany, formerly a member and public official of the Nazis, has named as his government’s new spokesman a former member and public official of the Nazis.

  They just never learn. They look at the hand with which they’re slapping survivors in the face and they don’t understand it: said the writer Uwe Johnson. For that he got a slap in the face.

  It turns out that the writer Uwe Johnson had failed to understand something too. Nine months ago now, on the evening of January 16, he took his seat behind the long table covered in green cloth that the Jewish American Congress had set up in the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel. Appearing next to the leonine head of Rabbi Joachim Prinz (formerly of Berlin-Dahlem), he waited to tell the Jews of New York something about the election gains of the West German Nazi Party.

  Where were you sitting, Gesine?

  Somewhere I could see you, Comrade Writer.

  In the back?

  Yes, way in the back, right next to a door.

  Such speakers from Germany have to be introduced the way they deserve. This one was introduced by a functionary of the Jewish American Congress, with the story of a friend who’d recently decided to fly Lufthansa, the German airline, from Philadelphia to Düsseldorf, and had reserved a kosher meal as well as his seat. Once he was buckled into the Germans’ airplane, they had no kosher meal for him but they did do, from the English Channel on, what during the First World War was called loop the loops. – So I said to my friend, Why did you have to tell them you were Jewish?

  The roomful of Jews laughed, not maliciously, almost charmed. The wave of delight bypassed a few islands of individual audience members, who were quietly, attentively watching the German on the podium polish the bowl of his pipe in the cup of his hand. Another wave of laughter swept through the ballroom when the microphone stopped working and Rabbi Joachim Prinz (formerly of Berlin-Dahlem) comically raised his arms and frantically thundered: They’re everywhere! (The Germans, the Nazis.) Even here!

  The German who actually was there acted as if he understood not only English but the mood that had been prepared for him in the audience. He looked up at the cheerful, carefree speaker introducing him to the Jews. He was curious. From the room, the expression on his upturned face looked humorless and severe. Yet the jokes had been meant to be laughed at. Invited to the podium, the writer Uwe Johnson did not, say, leave the event at once (with thanks for the introduction) but instead began his talk in all seriousness, admittedly not with the late Middle Ages but still with the year 1945 and the subsequent development of two German states. He failed, however, to pull off the New England cadences he seemed to be trying to adopt for the occasion, and lapsed back into the wrong vowels, the wrong stresses, the not even British accent his school had let him get away with.

  Gesine Cresspahl seems to be embarrassed for a fellow German.

  I take it back. Some of it. For your vanity’s sake, Writer.

  For the sake of one of my teachers, okay?

  Fine.

  – Ladies and gentlemen: Johnson said. The front half of the room showered him with shouts, not yet collective, of: Louder! – I would like to thank the JAC for the invitation to speak here tonight about: Johnson said. Now the back half of the room was calibrated to the rhythm of the front half, and lagged only slightly in the cry: Louder!! – Let me begin with, and even mention, the East German Republic, also known as the DDR: Johnson said, and this time he entered into the next surge of shrieks from the auditorium, took advantage of the superbly functioning sound system, and sent the full force of his voice bursting from all the loudspeakers, unbearably loud: YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME SHOUT!, ladies and gentlemen. After he shouted that, the audience adopted a dozing position and let him believe that anyone could hear him, or understand him.

  I’m sorry, Gesine.

  Absolutely not. That was the most reasonable thing you managed to do all night.

  They wanted to see if I would defend myself?

  Are you always so dense?

  At no point did they applaud him, including when he could no longer fail to mention the appointment of a Nazi to the position of chancellor of West Germany. – It wasn’t meant as a slap in the face of surviving victims, though the world felt it was. It simply lacked any understanding of the fact that every German government this century will be judged by its distance from the Nazi establishment. The chancellor had not been elected because of his connection with the Nazis, it’s just that this side of things had been forgotten. Johnson would have done better not to say anything about forgetting. In any case, his sentences were too long, too German, and even though he sometimes, for short stretches, managed to catch the American melody, he seemed helpless. You couldn’t have confidence that he even understood, much less could explain, the country he had made himself responsible for explaining; he had not yet grasped that the time and place had deprived him of a tour guide’s blameless neutrality, turning every analytical word in his mouth defensive. He may have realized something during the next speech, by Charles G. Moerdler (formerly of Leipzig, Saxony), before whose lips the technology now really did break down and who was not once urged by the audience to speak louder, who moreover was not merely one of them but also the housing and real estate consultant for the city of New York, making sure that his name, sticking in the mind of signatories to his resolution, would look familiar when seen on future ballots. Johnson sat slumped behind the green table, firmly covering his manuscript with his two hands, his bald head reflecting the spotlights, his eyes scanning the room from between his brows and the rims of his glasses. Strangely, he was wearing a black leather jacket with his dress shirt, the kind of jacket only Negroes wear usually, some Negroes, the Negro with the woolly beard and flashing eyes glancing up from his drowsy face, who we saw Wednesday night in the West Side subway, for instance, but the man in the subway certainly looked more comfortable, in his tight shiny leather, with one hand in his pocket, holding something angular.

  Who’s telling this story, Gesine?

  We both are. You know that, Johnson.

  Then the writer got a little taste of reality. The hotel staff set up two microphones on stands in the ballroom’s center aisle, and behind them ten and eleven people were waiting their turn to respond to Johnson’s declarations, deliberations, disclosures. And they said: My mother. Theresienstadt. My whole family. Treblinka. My children. B
irkenau. My life. Auschwitz. My sister. Bergen-Belsen. Ninety-seven years old. Mauthausen. Two, four, and five years old. Majdanek.

  – He didn’t do it: the rabbi said.

  – He’s one of them: they said.

  – No one’s asking you to forgive him: the rabbi said.

  – We don’t forgive him: they said.

  – You should talk with him: the rabbi said.

  – You talk with us, Rabbi: they said.

  – He’s our guest: the rabbi said.

  – Outside he’s an enemy: they said.

  – Be reasonable, my brothers: the rabbi said.

  – He’s not doing anything against the new Nazis: they said.

  – How can he, in his line of work: the rabbi said.

  – He shouldn’t do it professionally, he should do it as a human being: they said.

  – You heard what he said: the rabbi said.

  – He should still be ashamed of himself: they said.

  – Do you have anything else to say, Mr. Johnson?: the rabbi said.

  – Everything has been said already: Johnson said.

  – Thank you, Mr. Johnson: the rabbi said.

  The writer Johnson appeared once more, in the lobby of the Roosevelt, in the crowd, in conversation with Rabbi Joachim Prinz (formerly of Berlin-Dahlem) and the gentleman who’d introduced Johnson among the Jews. They’d have been happy to grab a drink with their guest, a bite to eat. Their guest put his coat on quickly, as if afraid they might snatch it from him. We were standing just a few steps away and could see from how he was holding his head that he was in the process of telling a genuine, true-blue, colorfast, airtight lie. Then he disappeared around the corner of Madison Avenue onto Forty-Fifth Street, in a hurry, toward Grand Central, toward the subway, toward his lie. He is not going to try to explain his individuality as an individual to the Jews again. In future he will keep his head down for as long as a government speaks in his name. He has absolutely nothing further to say about the new West German press secretary. He’s not going to do that again.

  Yes, if only I’d asked your advice first, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  We weren’t talking to each other yet, Mr. Johnson.

  The chancellor of West Germany, a member of the Nazi Party, a henchman to Jew-killers, remembered an old friend from the same department. True, the latter joined the party only in 1938. Still, he too never left it. He is exactly the right person to speak as press secretary for the West German government. The West German government wants friendship with the American people, with the 5,936,000 Jews in North America, two million in this city alone, the city where we live.

  November 4, 1967 Saturday, South Ferry day

  The secretary of defense has heard that the Soviets will shortly be able to put into orbit around the earth a bomb carrying a payload of up to the equivalent of three million tons of TNT, which could be called down upon any point under its path, with only about three minutes’ warning before it hit its target: an excellent city-buster.

  – Like a fist slamming into the port: Marie says. She looks into the spitting rain over the water in an appraising way, as if calculating the height of the splash that would blow the ferry with her on it and the steamer on the blurry horizon and the tugboats and the cargo ship with train cars of freight and the zippy Coast Guard greyhounds into the sky.

  – And Staten Island too, and Long Island, and Manhattan, and large parts of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.

  – Are you trying to scare me?

  – No.

  – Then don’t tell me the truth too soon: she says. She hangs from her elbows on the railing of the outer walkway and holds her face to be washed by the wind. Her face is smeared shut with the feel of the weather, covered as though with another skin. If her eyes were shut she’d look blind now. Only the short pale hairs sneaking out of her hood at the sides of her forehead invite recognition. But she’s waiting. She is absolutely certain that Borough Hall in Richmond will appear from behind the curtain of mist, as indestructible in reality as it is in memory. – I don’t want to live anywhere but New York: she says.

  Cresspahl didn’t want to even imagine a life in Jerichow. That would be a life with the Papenbrocks.

  He’d gotten mixed up with the Papenbrocks two years earlier, secretly sure he would never have to feel for them, deal with them. What he’d noticed about Lisbeth were the ways she seemed different from her family. Now he was being forced to get to know them after all.

  – Is there really no one in the world I’m related to? Marie says.

  – No one but me.

  – Right, you. But I can choose everyone else.

  He’d expected a hostile reception from Horst Papenbrock. Now Horst was behaving almost reasonably at the few meals he ate at home, the few meals his official obligations left him time for. He asked Cresspahl to call him by his first name but answered with Cresspahl’s last: something of the behavior proper to a younger man. He didn’t try to make his SA activities the topic of conversation, didn’t try to enter the conversation at all, even when the granary he was in charge of was discussed. He sat quietly with his plate in front of him, left hand relaxed in his lap, right hand spooning up soup, slurping carefully, looking absolutely fixedly down as though the liquid there were a mirror, or writing. He didn’t look tired, more like he was making plans. When Edith announced that some of his followers were out in the hall, he underwent a kind of transformation as he stood up, throwing back his shoulders, raising his chin, striding to the door as though onto a stage, the hand with his napkin slightly swaying at his side so that the cloth caressed his brown boots. He came back after an exchange of words that reached the eaters’ ears through the door, sounding strangely sharp and staccato; his doll-like face was filled with delight, out to the tip of the sharp triangle of his nose and suffusing all within; he had a half smile of anticipation and now held the napkin in his fist and struck the side of his boot with it, firmly yet inattentively. Clearly he was not used to showing pleasure. The workers from Papenbrock’s yard and granary had never treated him as their boss; they had adopted the old man’s nickname for him, “sonny boy,” calling him Papenbrock’s Sonny Boy. Now they looked away when his military style of giving orders made them want to laugh. He was still in no hurry to impose discipline in the granary. In the pub, Cresspahl had heard tell that young Papenbrock had been driving the car from which Voss had been thrown onto the street in Rande, not bludgeoned to death, incidentally, but whipped to death. The person saying this hadn’t known who Cresspahl was, and when a nudge to the ribs had told him that one of Papenbrock’s relatives was at the next table, he looked him straight in the eye, as though a fight would be just fine with him. Cresspahl was not unwilling, but this particular cause was not to his taste. Horst denied it about Voss in Rande. Horst said he didn’t want anything to do with garbage like that. “Garbage like that” was explained to Cresspahl as meaning, for Horst, settling old scores, old feuds, old insults, as opposed to National Socialism, which Horst spoke of, not insistently but when the occasion called for it, in a shy, halting way, as if it were something sacred. Certainly there were plenty of girls in and around Jerichow who had been happy to do it with someone else, not Horst. Cresspahl wanted no responsibility for him whether in uniform or not, so he parried even Horst’s respectful inquiries into his wartime service, fobbed him off like a puppy with preoccupied silence, a nonchalance just barely acceptable. Why bother with a good relationship he had no intention of needing.

  Things went all right with the old man. It wasn’t exactly fun when Papenbrock tried to rope him into a game where shots had to be gulped down at regular intervals behind Louise’s back. It wasn’t great when the old man talked about, if not precisely the Cresspahls’ return to Germany, then the people in Jerichow, in Gneez, in Schwerin who had always been amenable to Papenbrock’s suggestions (that was Papenbrock’s idea of tact. He was not trying to influence Cresspahl, he was trying to help). It rubbed Cresspahl the wrong way how the old man w
atched his son, his youngest hatchling, bleakly but still gleeful, the strict yet permissive father still undecided whether Horst’s associations with the new power were good or bad for business, but at bottom ready to accept either eventuality without hesitation. At first, all Horst wanted from his father was a truck, but before Papenbrock would loan his company name to the SA he wanted to hear, again and again, why the national renewal needed it. What he wanted most out of Horst was to hear about the planks in the Nazi program that threatened the department stores and large landowners, and under his amused gaze, in Horst’s embarrassed recital, the Nazis’ future started to seem unreal, or at least not dangerous. What was not all right was Papenbrock wanting to hear, in detail, how Cresspahl had built up such a large balance at the Surrey Bank of Richmond, and whether Lisbeth’s numbers from 1931 were anywhere near accurate. That was not acceptable at all. It was amusing to watch Papenbrock putting his devious ways to work against his own family, for instance when he pontificated vaguely about cobblers’ daughters without admitting he’d ever heard of Horst’s Miss Lieplow, prompting a disgruntled but still-obedient look from Horst, like that of someone who has suddenly run into an obstacle. Papenbrock had always enjoyed creating problems for his prodigal son; his enjoyment with this one was less obvious. His daughters, on the other hand, he let twist him around their little fingers, “take the butter off his bread,” every time. He wanted to smooth the way for his daughters to like him. That was all right. Things with Papenbrock went all right.

  Things went better than all right with Hilde. Hilde Paepcke had left Krakow, left her husband to his fights with a fire insurance company that had no intention of forgetting those Hindenburg lights; Hilde wanted to see Lisbeth’s baby, she wanted to be the child’s godmother, she wanted to go back home. Hilde was pregnant. She wanted children before Alexander completely and totally broke through the floor under their bourgeois feet; she wanted to “save something from the bankruptcy.” Or so she told Cresspahl, when promenading with him in Rande, arm in arm, in a sudden closeness, never discussed. When Cresspahl finally realized that she wasn’t letting her breasts and hips brush against him by accident, they came to an understanding with a shameless, delighted, sidelong look, and Hilde said, cockily, jauntily, without a hint of regret: Well now innt that too bad. – The things you miss out on in life: Cresspahl said. He, on his own, invited Hilde and Alexander to come visit them in Richmond.