Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  He still felt no regret at having resisted bringing Louise Papenbrock to England, even though then Lisbeth would have stayed at home and the child would have been born where it was going to live. Louise Papenbrock in his house—it wouldn’t have come off without bickering. At least in Jerichow he had no right to contradict her. For however naively Papenbrock might think he ran his household, it was Louise, with the old man on a long leash and the children on a short one. The bottle of kümmel that Papenbrock drank his way through in great secrecy—Louise replaced the empty with a new one. Louise decided how much the Papenbrock household donated to the church, and she let the new pastor, Brüshaver, feel how she disapproved of his lack of zeal at the pulpit. The meals served at the table were what she thought proper, and she said grace for as long as she wanted to. She’d had a bed made for Cresspahl in Lisbeth’s old room, on the third floor in the back, far away from Lisbeth and the child, without ever asking what he might prefer. And she had completely reorganized the household arrangements for the birth, all her provisions putting a fence up around Lisbeth that Cresspahl had to climb over, not needing Louise’s permission but only when instructed. He couldn’t even complain, since Louise Papenbrock had brought four children into the world with her hot-water bottles and overheated stoves; on the contrary, he had to be grateful.

  He was hardly ever alone with Lisbeth, and never without the likelihood of being disturbed.

  The day before the christening was to take place, Gertrud Niebuhr phoned Jerichow. Cresspahl answered the phone, and she took him, with perfect stubbornness, for the person she was expecting to reach: Papenbrock.

  – Hey, Papenbrock! she said, excited at the long-distance conversation, and it turned out that she, the scatterbrained sister, had lost Cresspahl’s Richmond address. She wanted to write to him. She wanted to write to him that it was going “not so good” with their mother. No, nothing serious.

  – Heinrich, that can’t be you on the phone! You’re still in Inglant!

  The day of the christening, Cresspahl took the train via Blankenberg and Sternberg and Goldberg to Malchow, away from Jerichow, with a sense of relief that would weigh on his conscience for some time.

  He had not yet looked at the house for his child, Gesine.

  Today is a great day for The New York Times. She has calculated her revenue for October and reports: A record of 8,256,618 lines of paid advertising! A record of 963,130 weekday copies sold! A record of 1,588,091 Sunday copies sold! She reports this on a page for which she otherwise could have gotten about $6,000. But she refuses to be miserly or churlish in her rejoicing.

  November 5, 1967 Sunday

  The North Vietnamese defense minister wrote an article in which he publicly acknowledged China’s support in the war. He resisted the urgent request from the Soviets to cut that sentence. Now it’s been published in Krasnaya Zvezda, so now it’s true in the Soviet Union, too.

  We walked down Broadway from our house to Seventy-Ninth Street and back up via Riverside Park, the promenade along the river, and the street, and never once saw Marjorie.

  Her name’s not Marjorie. We don’t know her name. We don’t know her. She came into our lives last winter, a girl waiting for the number 5 bus on Ninety-Seventh Street. It was a day of biting wind, cold enough to make the wait urgent and pleading. She was not standing huddled and miserable in the cold; she had turned her chilliness into a charming, meticulous pantomime. She seemed to be feeling cold out of camaraderie. We said very little to her, and already she confided in us that: she was glad she hadn’t missed out on this weather. She said it as a truth, and since it was her truth it didn’t come out too intrusive. She’s so confiding.

  She knows how to live with such grace. The word beautiful still applies to her. She can hide under billowing capes the fact that she has grown for a full sixteen years the way one should, slim but not lanky, with long legs that attract the gazes of female passersby too. It’s her face. Her face gives information about her that never disappoints, never has to be taken back. She has pale, transparent skin (one shade below pink), wears her dark brown cloud of hair down over her shoulder blades, has minutely specified eyebrows and heavy dark eyes—those are her resources. We look at her mouth, because it is young; we look at her lips, because of her totally conscious, deliberate smile. It is serious, considered. It means something. It can be understood. It’s friendly. What others are granted on special occasions is for her an embarrassment of riches to draw on at will.

  She sees us, she beams. She speaks with her dark eyes and we believe her. It’s impossible to guess why she’d be happy to see us; we accept her happiness without hesitation. Even when she’s walking down Riverside Drive surrounded by her laughing, chatting friends, she has a particular, individual look to give us, separately, us alone, and it says as clearly as if she had whispered the words secretly into our ear: It makes me happy to see you. It’s not even embarrassing. There is no doubt. She drapes her truth over us. She can still express only what she is. She has a way of turning toward us, attentive, alert, cheerful, almost deferential with sympathy, in a beautiful movement that comes from the shoulders and neck and is reflected in our feelings like a physical touch. Every time, her look encompasses us as though she recognizes us, and not only her image of us but who we really are. And we believe her. We don’t doubt her sincerity. You can exchange kindness with her as though it still mattered. At first we thought she wasn’t American.

  – She’s a general’s daughter: Marie says.

  – She isn’t. Don’t say that.

  – She is too. Quartermaster general, attorney general . . .

  She speaks a precise American English, rich in vocabulary, with almost no slang and only the slight trace of a Midwestern accent. She does not depend on language, she can make herself perfectly clear without this defective means—but it, too, she doesn’t use carelessly.

  Whenever we see her there’s something new about her appearance. She comes up to us with a big wide-brimmed hat—she wants us to appreciate it, to enjoy it. Buttons with demands addressed to the rest of humanity—she wears those too (Bring Our Boys Home! Support the Police: Bribe Your Friends and Helpers!), but on her handbag or the crown of her hat. One day she’s wearing her hair tied with four inches of ribbon, then the next time a headband is enough, and the time after that she’s embedded fifty grams of hairpins in the interlaced construction. Violet stockings are the only thing to wear on one day, copper-green on another—no other color would have been right. She walks down Broadway in a dress that her grandmother wore in Scarborough by the Great Lake, at the turn of the century (not in Scarborough): a ruffled swirling tale of a dress; she has hit on the height of fashion, and without trying. It’s the real dress from the real closet of her genuine grandmother. She says so.

  She got on the 5 bus in which we were sitting. She was delighted. We got off the bus at Eighty-Seventh Street, her stop too. She thought that was wonderful. We walked onto Eighty-Seventh Street together. She couldn’t be more pleased. We told her our destination. She told us hers. She could not have possibly hoped for more from this day than that we would turn out to have friends on the same street, even. Suddenly she stopped and shouted a name up at the eighteen stories, belting it out, assured of success, pleased at the power in her throat, then she waved to us with her whole long arm, called her friend’s name, waved, raised her beaming face to the sky.

  In our neighborhood it is only habit that makes us jump when someone taps us from behind on the shoulder. For when it’s done with a quick double tap, with light, straight fingers, it’s her. Her face isn’t scrunched up in a grimace, it is open, relaxed, unfolding in the expectation of pleasure to come. – Hi!: she says, and from her it would be clear to even the most obdurate foreigner that this is a greeting, a welcome. One of the most reasonable, natural, and credible sorts of welcome. She shows you so that you’ll learn it too.

  Someone out of the Thousand and One Nights.

  When school has made her tired, t
wo large blots appear on her cheeks, unambiguously red, danger signs.

  That winter, she stood on the corner of Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street where the ice-cold wind from the Hudson can blast unobstructed up the hill, and she sniffed the air, her fragile delicate profile obliviously raised, and she said, mysteriously, mischievously: It’s over now. With her face, even the tendons of her neck, she can transmit a feeling clear and entire, express herself beyond words in a language thought to be lost. What she has said is, in its entirety: Ice may go, snow may come, but the new season is in the air and growing stronger. The earth has remembered. Be mindful of this, Mrs. Cresspahl. Consider this smell.

  She doesn’t know our name. We don’t know her name. She wants nothing from us. There is nothing we could want from her. It’s unnecessary.

  If, Mrs. Cresspahl, the city of New York has ever done you harm or made you suffer, I have been sent to tell you: It shouldn’t have happened. It was a mistake. We’re sorry, and I will comfort you.

  Today she was nowhere to be seen.

  November 6, 1967 Monday

  The New York Times paid a visit to Rear Admiral Ralph W. Cousins’s flag-ship, the aircraft carrier Constellation, whose planes harry the North Vietnamese heartland with their attacks. Cousins is fifty-two years old, clear-eyed, soft-spoken, his black hair beginning to gray. He is a reader of respectable magazines and French mystery novels. After six hours of sleep in his large well-furnished cabin below the flight deck, he is woken at six thirty. Then he gets dressed. Then he drinks a cup of tea. Then he does calisthenics for ten minutes. Then he goes up to the bridge and settles into his white-upholstered revolving chair embroidered with two stars. Now he opens the manila folder containing the top secret messages printed on red paper.

  On Saturday evening, Gary Sickler, twenty-six, entered a liquor store in Poughkeepsie. The cuts on his hand were, he said, from an assault by two men and a girl. He led the police to the spot where the assault had occurred, in a fashionable, wooded residential neighborhood, and to a car in which lay the body of Kathleen Taylor, twenty-two, stabbed to death. Sickler, a convicted rapist, had been on parole.

  The friendly tobacconist Stephen Zachary Weinstein, from Philadelphia, was being sought for possibly having sedated with drugs, mistreated with blows, and finally strangled an eighteen-year-old student who wanted to buy himself a pipe. The student’s body was found in a trunk floating in the Delaware River, and S. Z. Weinstein was found because he’d tried to buy tickets to a play in New York. Many visitors to the city consider the New York theater an attraction not to be missed.

  The other picture on the front page of The New York Times is eight and a half inches by almost seven inches in size. It shows President Johnson with his wife, daughters, and sons-in-law. The news is the fact that these people had been to church.

  Cresspahl found his mother in a village to the southeast of Malchow, in a strange bed. She was not any shorter in death, but when he picked her up, she felt like a sleeping child in his arms.

  November 7, 1967 Tuesday

  No! No! No! Mrs. Erichson cried. She saw us at her front door and told us No, delight in her face, feigned denial in her voice, as though she didn’t see us, as though the telephone couldn’t possibly have spoken the truth, as though the Port Authority Bus Terminal must have burned down just that Monday evening, the Hudson engulfed the Lincoln Tunnel on today of all days, Highway 80 collapsed into the swamps of New Jersey, something, anything, so there was never any real chance we would turn up for dinner. – No! she said, more gently this time, simply to relish once more this after-taste of the obvious made piquant with a pinch of doubt, having long since pulled us into the front hall. It was meant to express pleasure. It’s a Mecklenburg quirk, this way of welcoming visitors or pieces of news. That’s what old people in Mecklenburg do.

  Now do make yourself comfortable, Gesine Cresspahl. And you did laugh, you know, against your will but you did.

  D. E. has rigged the house. Not only has he made the sagging shingled box as sturdy as a fresh young house with new beams and clamps, he’s transformed its lifestyle. The colonial-style furniture in the hall and the living rooms is too well preserved, too expensive for a farmer’s house. Behind handmade doors there are unexpected little rooms blazing with light and fitted out with the latest inventions of sanitary science. The old light fixtures never shone so bright before. The discreet grates in the century-old halls may be genuine brass, but central heating sends warm air through them into the antiques showrooms. Every corner of the house is according to plan: the leather cushions might be askew here, a telephone forgotten in the middle of a carpet there, a cat asleep on a typewriter, but the house would still meet the New York Times criteria for being an exemplar of tradition and modern technology in interior design. The house has been rethought from top to bottom, divided into a common area and three separate ones: Mrs. Erichson’s on the ground floor, next to the household facilities and the living area for all occupants; D. E.’s on the east side of the second floor; and a third domain on the same floor. This last, a row of brown doors running down a hallway of white paint and windows and muslin, is reached by a separate staircase, is separated from the other half of the floor by a door allowed on this side to keep its old bolt and lock. Here there’s a room with glass-fronted bookcases and a writing desk, a room for which the Hotel Marseilles on West End Avenue would pocket $35.00 a day and night, a lockable lair for, say, a ten-year-old child who likes being able to get down to the lawn unseen, unquestioned, unhindered, and most of all fast. It’s got everything. The child’s room has its hammock, its TV set, the towels are piled up extravagantly high in the bathroom, the escritoire in the study contains writing paper all ready, large and small and thick and thin, and arrayed behind the glass doors are the volumes of Artistic and Historical Monuments of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin along with Professor Wossidlo’s collection of local words and Herr Johannes Nichtweiß’s opinions on the Mecklenburg peasant clearance, 1st ed., Berlin (East), 1954. This half of the second floor is called the guest wing even though no guests have ever been here other than the Cresspahls. Here is where D. E. puts our suitcases, not inside but in the hall, next to the door.

  You could live here, Gesine Cresspahl. At least make yourself comfortable.

  The house has its rules, a rhythm that runs like clockwork, but in the kind of clock that merely shows guests the time rather than regulating their lives. In the hour before dinner, D. E. is to be found on one of the stools around the high breakfast counter by the kitchen window, conferring with his mother and his Copenhagen beer; last night Marie sat across from him, chin propped on the palms of both hands for the duration, receiving instruction on the ideas about the boundary layers of the primordial earth that Professor Andrija Mohorovičić fell prey to in 1908, and the American project of drilling holes in the ocean floor in his honor: Moholes. Voices, blending in with the leisurely scraping sound of pans being moved and the clicking open and shut of the refrigerator door, rose up through the woodwork as indistinct noise, more intimate than I was entirely comfortable with. Outside the window, the wind was busy catching handfuls of bare branches; it opened and closed its fist, paused panting to regather its strength. Beneath the sky’s darkness, the interior of the house swelled up, spread out, with light and warmth and human life. When Marie walked in with a cat on her shoulder hairily delineated from behind by the lamp’s glow, I mistook her for the child I was dreaming about, the child that I was.

  Are you sure you don’t need any more sleep, Gesine? We can have dinner whenever you want. The guests’ wishes are law in this house.

  The guests’ wishes are read from their eyes in this house. Even during the meal, D. E. didn’t talk about himself but used judicious questions, counterquestions, interjected questions to get his mother to tell her own stories. The old woman woke up fully in the night, held her head high. Her large gray bird’s eyes held her listeners’ gaze, made lowered eyelids feel uncomfortable. She wanted to see
her stories mirrored; she didn’t want to be exerting herself for nothing. How her father drove to the Güstrow wool market in 1911. Her face is chapped with age. The skin is deeply, sharply incised all over, deeper than the wind of seventy years could carve. How a landowner’s daughter was not supposed to marry into the city, not supposed to marry a hairdresser. The dark bags under her eyes make her face even thinner, withered, shrunken. She looks like she’s living with her very last strength, but she passed her driving test only last summer, she chops her own firewood. How the Great Depression affected the haircutting trade in Wendisch Burg. How Schusting Brand, the cobbler, came to get his hair cut there out of friendship and wanted to pay only half price out of friendship. We’ll have to remember him. Things were looking up for the Erichson Hair Salon after 1933, two girls on the ladies’ side and soon three apprentices for the men. Her own hair looks like a snow-white plank bleached under water, gouged by water, then broken off, jagged and splintery. She probably no longer washes it with anything but water. Conversations during haircuts. She didn’t think much of Herr Hitler. She says that as a favor to me, a favor to D. E. No, by conviction she was a royalist, she would have most liked to see the Mecklenburg princes back in power. So D. E. was a child who had to sweep up cut hair. During the new army’s Mecklenburg maneuvers, she saw Mussolini from just ten steps away. Mussolini in Mecklenburg? She went shopping for the Jews when they no longer felt safe on the streets of Wendisch Burg, and yet they were university graduates. If only we could believe that. If only she’d done that. Thank-you letters from Mexico City. Really. How Mr. Erichson senior suddenly started sending unusually friendly letters home from a labor camp near Stalingrad. That we’ll believe. In Wendisch Burg there are the fisherman-Babendererdes and the teacher-Babendererdes. They’re related to the Dührkops, bookbinders in Neustrelitz, who are related to the Bunges, leatherworkers in Schwerin, who’ve written just recently: In Schwerin a tourist from West Germany had a balcony fall on her head and now all the buildings in town are going to get their loose stucco knocked off. That we don’t believe. Yes, Schwerin is all mottled. But we won’t tell her we don’t believe it. Good night, Mrs. Erichson.