Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  You’ve been suffering on a hard chair for three hours, D. E.

  She doesn’t talk except over meals.

  And you risked boring Marie.

  She won’t take it the wrong way.

  You thought I’d appreciate it, D. E.?

  Glad to be of service, Gesine.

  Okay, well, thanks very much for the stories.

  Morning actually does begin with a holiday feeling. In New York it’s Election Day, the banks and stock exchange and schools and liquor stores are closed. The sounds from the house do not shatter one’s morning sleep. They’re so familiar that they transpose themselves into images behind closed eyes. The muffled little clicking is Frau Erichson laying the repolished silverware back in its velvet caddy. The terse double bang is the girl from the village who comes to help out in the mornings; when she has her hands full she pulls doors shut behind her with a sharply angled foot. There’s a child, too, singing the Coca-Cola Company song. That child would like to stay here, an hour and a half from New York. Far away, right at the outermost skin of the house, D. E.’s typewriter murmurs. That’s where money is being made, money that would be enough for us. Now they’re singing in trio in the kitchen, Marie seems to be conducting, and they’re asking the powers that be how in the world the Coca-Cola Company does it. It’s a day outside of the world. Here we are accepted. At the sound of a single foot being placed outside the door, they will get to work making a second breakfast. On the table will be not only The Philadelphia Inquirer but also The New York Times. This is how D. E. imagines my life.

  November 8, 1967 Wednesday

  There are also critics of the American war in Vietnam with the rank of lieutenant general of an airborne division. James M. Gavin does not so much have in mind the inhabitants of Vietnam. He simply considers the war too costly for his own country.

  The unemployment rate has increased from 4.1 percent to 4.3 percent, its highest level in two years. That makes 3.8 percent among whites. That makes 8.8 percent among Negroes. But only one in ten American citizens is Negro.

  Herr Paul Zapp, sixty-three years old, has been arrested in Bebra, a small Hessian town. He is responsible for the murder of at least 6,400 Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Until the day before yesterday, an assumed name was all he needed.

  Cresspahl came back from Malchow and went to look at the house that had been offered to his child. As he walked down Town Street people stared with curiosity, volunteered greetings, spontaneously, even strangers. Papenbrock had put an announcement of the death of Grete Cresspahl, née Niemann, in The Gneez Daily News. He probably was trying to tie his son-in-law to Jerichow, even if he had to start in the minds of the Jerichowers. Cresspahl hadn’t known anything about the announcement.

  At the south end of Town Street, the pastor’s house stands on the right side, red brick, white trim, mossy tiled roof. The garden wall is, on the other side, the cemetery wall. Kids can swing in semicircles on either half of the iron gate. Then the wall takes a sharp right turn to the west, along a sandy path called either Churchyard Road or Brickworks Road because of the long red hops kiln on the other side, whose walls are more boring than the wall that encloses the dead, with its upper stones set diagonally, its glazed green coping. Opposite the middle of the wall surrounding the brickworks, the cemetery wall bulges back with a little door in the center as wide as a man and the large arched gates of the mortuary, so poorly built that it had to be plastered. Standing where you can look through the brickworks gate at the large work yard to the left, you can also see over Creutz’s fence to the right. The church owns the land and has leased it to Creutz, since it doesn’t yet need it for the dead. Look over your right shoulder: no sign of the dead. Behind the thickly overgrown elder bushes along Creutz’s border, the rough dark bricks of the church shimmer through. The gabled tower and spire look tallest from here. Across from the entrance to the brickworks, in a well-tended garden behind a white cast-iron grate next to Creutz’s leased land, stands the brickworks owner’s villa. The ceremonial flagpole surrounded by flower beds once bore the flag of the fugitive kaiser. There are no buildings past it on the road, which runs between meadows and farmland, rising and falling, before petering out, not even leading to any village. At this point, some ways down toward the sea, the marsh comes into view. There, behind a weeded grassy area to the left, stands a low farmhouse under a black hipped roof. Now I’m home.

  Cresspahl didn’t go into the house first thing. Some of the windowpanes had been smashed in. That was all he needed to know for the time being.

  The farmers who’d developed this land had once been so rich that they’d even put up a brick barn. The barn, placed perpendicularly, was taller than the house, roofed with overlapping tar paper. Its north side was almost entirely doors: a high double door made of wood that the sea wind had eaten away at, with a hinged door for people set into one of the bigger doors. Inside, the compartments of the barn had been swept out. In the end the farmers turned thriftier. They’d left nothing behind but useless junk: a banged-up turnip cutter, broken carriage shafts, sauerkraut vats, and the mudguard of a Sunday carriage, undamaged, paint gleaming. The stalls in the east half stank of rotted straw. There were pig and sheep stalls, crib space for twelve head of cattle and four horses. Ever since they’d been herded off, nothing had lived here but the wind. The building was so chilly that there were no traces of teenage couples or cats. The manure pile must have taken three years to shrivel so dry. There were electric lights in the stalls, but anyone who tried the switch got a surge of current up to his shoulder, making his arm churn. His predecessors were trying to tell him something: Our misfortune is yours now.

  Behind the house stood a black tree full of blackbirds.

  To the south, the west, the north, there was empty space around the yard. Only the wind spoke. To the north there was a gap between the earth and the sky—a strip of the Baltic.

  1. If a person wanted to, he could replace two-thirds of the doors with glass. That would let in enough light for carpentry work.

  2. Most of the renovations could be done by Cresspahl himself, if he wanted.

  3. If a person wanted to, he could make the inhabitants of the villas put up with the noise of saws during normal working hours.

  If a person wanted to.

  It’s not right to leave New York, not even for a single day. We did and missed the city’s first snow. Today the day with its cold sun is acting all innocent.

  November 9, 1967 Thursday

  Adolf Heinz Beckerle went on trial yesterday in Frankfurt for having, as Hitler’s envoy to Bulgaria, assisted in the deportation of 11,343 Jews to death camps. He asserts that, on the contrary, 40,000 Bulgarian Jews owed their lives to him. Fritz Gebhard von Hahn, a former colleague of the West German chancellor, is charged along with him, on account of 20,000 Greek Jews.

  It is a short report, appearing far beneath the outermost skirt of The New York Times. She expresses her opinion more forcefully today about the mayor’s plan to let the business world sponsor a half-hour TV show for him. The old dame tears the Honorable John Vliet Lindsay a new one. – It’s about propriety! she cries, and lets fly again. She’s not frail yet.

  It’s Thursday and the wrong-number callers strike again, starting early in the afternoon. The first, still inexperienced in the trade, merely wanted to know whether Marie were “RIverside 9-2857.” She answered severely that he had reached 749-2857, and even though the numbers 7 and 4 correspond to the letters R and I on telephone dials, astonishment made the man hang up. – It’s like he doesn’t know American phones: Marie relays, with gusto. She thinks it’s a brand-new trick, and she’s discovered it.

  At first, we had to use the phone that Mademoiselles Bøtersen and Bertoux had left us along with the apartment. It answered to a number beginning with MOnument, and piped up often. In Germany, phones used to ring implacably, barkingly; here a gentle tinkle trickles out of the device, slowly, gracefully, like a cat stretching after it wakes up. Men asked fo
r Ingrid and wanted to talk to Françoise, and Françoise should bring Ingrid along to Grand Ticino, and hardly anyone could grasp that the girls now lived at the Kastrup and Geneva airports, in post-office boxes, and not a few were keen to know the first name that the new voice on the line had to offer. Then the telephone company operated, extracting the soul from the device’s casing and returning it to the warehouse where it would rest in peace for the time being.

  That was when RI9-2857 came into our lives, if only to provide a way to reach Dr. Brewster’s office or a children’s hospital. But the child wanted to play learning how to use a phone, and before long she was the one who took the yoke off the whimpering thing’s neck first and asked, American-style: Who’s this? not: Who’s there? It was on this telephone that Marie learned to tell lies under supervision. Because strangers called and wanted to hear not only that they’d reached the Cresspahl residence but also whether the Cresspahl residence was located on the third or thirteenth floor, numbered 13A or 134, because the phone book hadn’t yet relieved criminals of the need to prepare the finer details of their break-ins, and Marie not only described where to find apartment 204 but offered the extra information: I’m alone. Now we had to invent an Uncle Humphrey, a brawler and brute of a man, allegedly sleeping in the guest room, for whom Marie built a matchbox house under the telephone, and these strangers turned out not to want to speak to Uncle Humphrey after all.

  Not all the callers were plying the same trade. Some said they were trying to get to sleep by reading the phone book and the name “Cresspahl” had blasted them into alertness and now they desperately yearned to know the national origin of this name and wanted our opinion about the end of the world no less than they wanted a listener for stories of their wartime experiences in Germany. Some couldn’t make it through the night alone in a lonely room in a sleeping city and their only means of seeking a connection was by phoning other boroughs of that city (one Mr. Abraxas, from Brooklyn). We were spared the rage of divorced husbands against any and all female sole proprietors of telephone numbers, as well as the sexual fantasies of unknown drunks, because in this country the name “Gesine” failed to provide unambiguous information about the sex of its bearer. The others remained faithful. There were repeat customers, like the Indian engineer who called from New Haven the first time and insisted, come hell or high water, on being connected to a certain Elsa, apparently not only German but with a similar voice, so that he unburdened himself of all his painful disappointment at her behavior onto New York RI9-2857, in the unique German that the Leipzig International Institute in Saxony provided to foreign exchange students in the GDR as a means of making themselves understood. If this Janin Landa called only every month, George Abraxas checked in every two weeks. Then D. E. found us while idly flipping through the Manhattan phone book, and we had ourselves removed and are happy to pay the cost of doing so.

  We’re left with the ones who roll dice to come up with phone numbers, and those who discover in the course of their meticulous research a gap between 7492856 and 7492858, and those who dial direct from San Francisco to the East Coast just to tell us the time and the weather there, and those who accidentally get lost in the rotary dial and have nothing to say but their apologies. It’ll really be a problem when calls are put through automatically under the Atlantic, too, and German millionaires get a new game to play. Then we’ll have to rely entirely on Marie, who has recently put her trust in the absurd and repels unwanted calls by saying: This is an unlisted number. This is an unlisted number. It confuses even the most stubborn.

  Once, late last September, our phone put through a call like the ones in the fifties in West Berlin. The diaphragm at the other end of the line was set in motion by the vibration not of words but only of breathing. However regular the breaths were, they always sped up at some point and started to sound threatening. Nothing but breathing.

  You hear enough voices.

  If only the dead would keep their traps shut.

  Once, two weeks ago, a woman’s voice was reciting something, fast, indifferently, as though reading from an index card: Your name is Gesine Cresspahl, born March 3, 1933, in Jerichow, residing in the United States since April 28, 1961. – Yes: I said, and got only a click in response, and I wished I’d said I was somebody else, anybody.

  – This is a nonworking number: Marie is saying now, with the voice of a machine as it might emerge from a worn-down tape player. – This is a nonworking number. Then, unwillingly, unconvinced, she holds the receiver up to me over her shoulder and says: – Some guy named Karsch, doesn’t know where we live, doesn’t know who I am . . . How was I supposed to know! You’ve never told me about him!

  – I may need to borrow that child sometime: Karsch says.

  – Where are you, Karsch?

  – I’d rather not say: Karsch says.

  – Do you need something, Karsch?

  – It hasn’t gotten to that point yet: he says. – See you soon: he says: See you.

  He didn’t say: Talk to you soon. Him aside, Thursday is the day on which wrong-number callers most often strike.

  November 10, 1967 Friday

  Early last night, in secret, President Johnson arrived in the city. Five hundred policemen were surrounding the Americana Hotel, posted on the roofs of buildings around the hotel, and another hundred were in the ballroom, where the president told Jewish trade-union leaders: The nation risked a far more terrible war in the future if it did not succeed in this one in a small and distant country in Southeast Asia. Page 1.

  On page 17, under the White Plains busing problems and assurance that the mayor of Albany was not driving drunk, The New York Times offered the official list of the war dead—eleven and a half lines.

  The most important item to her on the front page, though, is the photograph of the West German passport used by Runge, the Soviet spy. Not only does she tell us everything declassified about his life, she also describes the structure of the Soviet intelligence agency, complete with org chart, so now we know who is responsible for the bloody business. Rodin, aka Nikolai B. Korovin. His mailing address is omitted, however.

  Lisbeth Cresspahl was not to be spared her mother-in-law’s funeral. Her sister, Hilde, spent a whole afternoon telling her about it.

  Papenbrock had suddenly had misgivings about none of his family being present for the occasion. So he’d sent at least Hilde to Lake Müritz.

  When she arrived the coffin was still open, laid out in the entrance hall of the Schmoog farmhouse. Berta Niemann and Erna Lübbe had been friends since 1873, a bond that continued after Erna married the heir to a farm and Berta married a wheelwright who worked on the village estate. Berta had wanted to visit her friend.

  To be polite, old Mrs. Cresspahl wanted to pay another call first, to the nobility for whom her husband had worked for forty-five years and she for forty-one. Since she turned up in city clothes and wasn’t recognized, the nobility invited her into the salon of the manor house and entertained her there even after she had given her explanations. She may, in the excitement, have drunk or swallowed something too quickly. She pulled herself together and asked Frau von Haase for permission to lie down for a moment. Frau von Haase took the question as reason for concern that the old woman was going to die on her sofa, and she ordered the horses readied, hitched to the carriage at least. While the carriage was racing wildly through the village street, Mrs. Cresspahl came to slightly and recognized the Schmoog farmhouse. Maybe she was afraid she would die in a hospital, or else she didn’t want to forgo the visit she’d actually wanted to pay. She insisted on being unloaded at the Schmoogs’.

  She lay in her friend’s bed for two days, not agitated, asleep most of the time. She was so tired that she let other people wait on her. When she opened her eyes, Mrs. Schmoog thought she could see in them disappointment at not finding someone else standing at her bedside. When Cresspahl ducked into the little room, the Schmoogs thought she was still alive. So she had been alone when she died.

  The
Schmoogs’ house has a windbreak of two crossed horse’s heads on the brow of its thatched roof, and painted there is a year from the early eighteenth century. The roof comes down low over the half-timbered masonry. The front part of the entrance hall led off to stalls for cows and horses. Now the hall had been swept clean with water, making the beaten clay look like uneven stone. The coffin had the place of honor. On the way to either the living room or the kitchen, you had to pay your respects.

  Erna Schmoog hadn’t managed too well with her friend’s hair. Wisps of it lay across the part. She apologized to Cresspahl. Cresspahl reminded her that that’s how her hair was when she was alive.

  When the mourners gathered from the village, it suddenly became apparent that Mrs. Schmoog was talking to her friend’s son in a carefree, almost cheerful way. Mrs. Schmoog was no older than the dead woman. Now she’d been able to show her husband, and the farmhands too, how she wanted her own death observed.

  The coffin was about to be closed when the assembled mourners parted, leaving a wide path free for an old man walking stooped down to his bent knees. He had gotten very short with age. He took off his top hat and held it in his hand before he even set foot in the entrance hall. He had not spoken a word to Berta Niemann since she’d married Heinrich Cresspahl senior, never given the Schmoogs the time of day either, first because of their continued friendship with the new Mrs. Cresspahl and second due to a fight from around 1890 over a strip of field. The old man had hardly shown his face in the village since the war. Now he was not embarrassed. He walked slowly over to the coffin. He stood before it for a long time. He tried to keep his back straight. Then it was possible to see from his neck that he had nodded to the dead woman. Then he turned around and shook hands with the dead woman’s daughter, then the son, then the other relatives.