Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Then he walked over to the Schmoogs and shook hands with all of them, including the sons, the daughters-in-law, the grandchildren.

  Then everyone crowded around the coffin again so that the pastor wouldn’t see anything. Cresspahl put the lid on. Then they helped him loosely screw it on.

  It was two hours to Malchow at a walking pace. The village had lent out its hearse. There were not many wreaths propped against the coffin. Still, the Papenbrock family’s wreath looked more frugal than the others.

  The estate owners had sent a cart with rubber tires and benches. Between that and the third cart, there were enough seats for the elderly and the women. Cresspahl and his sister would doubtless have walked behind the coffin anyway. They let Hilde walk next to them.

  In Malchow, the following people carried the coffin into the church: Martin Niebuhr, Peter Niebuhr, Alexander Paepcke. Günter Schmoog, Paul Schmoog, Heinz Mootsaak. They left Cresspahl alone in the church so that he could get his mother settled properly again. When he came out of the church door, the six men went in without him and screwed the coffin shut, this time tightly. Then the service began.

  Cresspahl was very friendly to everyone, to Hilde too. At Meininger’s, on Long Street, she sat next to him. He carried himself like someone who had brought a task to completion. At one point he stood up and thanked everyone for coming. After that, he watched the eating and drinking around him without impatience. One more bill to be paid. Then he could leave.

  Hilde deliberately brought her sister to tears. It’d be better for her if Cresspahl got his way.

  She didn’t just tell her how it was. She turned what had happened into vague reproaches, as though morality could still frighten her younger sister. By the time Cresspahl got back to Jerichow, Hilde had gotten her sister to the point where he had to console Lisbeth for his own loss. She would have gone to the train station with him then, if he’d asked her then.

  November 11, 1967 Saturday, Veterans Day

  Karsch may take an R for something other than a 7 on an American phone, but he hasn’t overlooked that the mail here is not delivered on days when those who took part in past wars are marching. His letter was brought by a man in a chauffeur’s uniform. The man didn’t wait even a second for a tip, and his face betrayed no hint that he was used to being received in better-maintained buildings. The letter is not from Karsch. It is a written notice from the Italian delegation at the UN, signed by Dr. Pompa, instructing the security guards there to permit the bearer of this document and one child passage through the employee entrance. On the business card that Karsch enclosed, the dot before the name with which Karsch, like General Narses, indicates that his written instructions are not to be followed wasn’t there, and if that’s the way Karsch wants it, that’s what we’ll give him.

  The 104 bus goes from our house down Broadway and then east on Forty-Second Street to the UN. Marie prefers the row of seats in the back so that she has windows on both sides, and down to the Seventies she keeps the west sidewalk of Broadway in sight, looking for children, passersby, or policemen she knows. Marie has put on a dress without complaining, almost hurried to the appointment. – Just so I can meet all your friends: she said. She has never been to the part of the UN where visitors aren’t allowed.

  The government wants to give Thailand a present—about $50 million worth of antiaircraft missiles—if Thailand sends ten thousand soldiers to Vietnam.

  Dr. Gallup has once again gone down among the nation and posed questions. This time he learned that out of a hundred people, fifty-nine are in favor of continuing the American war in Vietnam.

  Last night, Frank “Frankie the 500” Telleri and the D’Angelo brothers (Thomas and James) gathered for a meal of veal parmigiana and white wine in an upscale restaurant in the Ridgewood section of Queens. In comes a squat guy in a black fedora, black raincoat, glasses, and pulls out some type of machine gun and shoots twenty to twenty-five holes in the three men. The police surmise that the killings were no ordinary incident but a settling of gangland scores.

  Marie is disappointed. The UN security guards are Americans, quite possibly from the Bronx and Manhattan; the escalators look like the ones she knows from any of the better subway stations; the restaurant is run by a completely mundane hotel chain; not even the long bar is anything sacred. Mr. Karsch is going to have a hard row to hoe with the child.

  Mr. Pompa and Mr. Karsch come walking down the hall like twins, both of them tall and imposing in their casual suits, both with the gait of people afraid to step on small objects, both irrevocably well on in years and perhaps intelligible only to each other now. Except Mr. Pompa’s skin sits firm and comfortable on his face, his eyes are commanding, and he still monitors his smile. Karsch is soft in the face. He takes care where he looks, he protects himself, he doesn’t want to see everything, God forbid. Now he sees us.

  Ti voglio bene.

  Ti voglio bene.

  It’s Karsch, and we can hug him without a second thought, a person changing as he turns in our direction. That doesn’t happen—still feeling close to someone after years and years, no question about it, no testing the waters, feeling a totally genuine pleasure at seeing them again. That does happen.

  It’s Karsch, who keeps his back straight when saying hello to a child, not trying to curry favor, serious, almost formal, so that Marie can’t find an opening to take offense. Karsch, the first at the table to notice that the child doesn’t speak Italian and switch without a fuss into his undistorted British English that Mr. Pompa, on the other hand, can understand. Karsch, to whom the waiters come like doctors, and he talks to them unabashedly with his fingers, with his hands. Karsch, who talks about the weather and flying conditions for as long as Dr. Pompa is there, who asks about us as soon as the stranger has taken his leave, who tells us about himself without self-pity. He still lives alone in two rooms in Milan. These are not the rooms next door to Vito Genovese anymore; it’s not his own house. His son in Hamburg is no longer of an age to collect all the Lufthansa freebies he gets on his flights across the Alps, the boy costs money like a grown-up now. Karsch has come to New York to work on a book.

  He looks sick. His hair has turned almost entirely white, with only a few darker strands left. He is wearing it long; it sits on his temples like little clouds. With his hair, and the rumples in his exquisite jacket, and the tie from the store near La Scala half askew, he involuntarily betrays that he has no one in his life to look after him. He isn’t sad. His glasses are rimmed in thin flashing steel and the reflections in them mask his eyes. He’s not trying to hide, he just doesn’t want to show himself much. And when Karsch pours some more red wine, the bottle moves past his glass with neck held high. Karsch no longer drinks.

  – What’s the book about: Marie says at last, disregarding issues of rudeness and proper behavior to strangers in restaurants. A stranger can’t see that she’s flustered, that her fingertips are shaking.

  – About families, family ties, family visits: Karsch says.

  – In Italy?

  – In Italy, and in your country: Karsch says.

  – Why don’t you write about Germany?

  – Reading its own books upon publication is not a distinguishing feature of the German people: Karsch says, amused for private reasons, not making fun of Marie. The East Prussian and Hamburg accents have been completely washed away from his German. He talks so evenly that Marie has to look in his eyes to understand that he’s not complaining.

  – They’re not the kind of books you’re thinking, Marie: Mrs. Cresspahl says, to distract the child: they’re books about real events and real people.

  But Marie refuses to be distracted.

  – So you want to be read right away, is that it?: she says severely, still in a tone of interrogation. She doesn’t let Karsch’s lazy nod intimidate her a bit.

  – What kinds of families?: she says. Karsch taps the middle of the folded New York Times, where there is an article about the stolen credit card scam that the Mafi
a families—the Gallos in Brooklyn and the Gambinos—have been running until recently.

  Have you run into trouble with these people, Karsch?

  A little, Gesine.

  And now you don’t want anyone to know that we know you, so that’s why you’ve brought us here to the depths of the UN?

  The food wasn’t that bad, Gesine.

  Good old considerate Karsch.

  I’d rather you tell me why the child is so jealous, Gesine.

  For now Marie wants to know who’s paying Karsch for these transatlantic trips, whether Karsch really pays his own bills, whether it’s true that no government and no university helps him, if he really makes a living the way he lives, if he really does do everything differently than D. E. She’s gotten a bit carried away in her agitation, and a stranger can’t see how much she’d give for shelter behind impeccable behavior. She manages it only at the goodbyes. It’s a promise meant as an apology. – The next time you call us, I’ll recognize you: she says.

  She looks at Karsch as he innocently ambles away down the corridor, preoccupied and forgetful under his ruffled hair, greeted with waves from colleagues, drawn into conversations by familiar grips on his arm, a man with lots of friends, including famous people, and she says she hates him, and we can believe it. She refuses eye contact. She pulls the collar of her coat up high enough to make the points reach her eyes, as though by accident. – I hate him! she says. – I hate him!

  November 12, 1967 Sunday

  Time to give you our annual speech about your death. The date doesn’t matter.

  I understand, you’re dead. It’s your business.

  But it’s our business whether we want to keep you. You always want to be in our thoughts. We have enough without you.

  You’re the one who left. It was obvious five years beforehand, when you took the first steps. You let it happen.

  You could have gotten help. You didn’t even want to admit you needed help.

  Not one single person in all of Jerichow, all of Mecklenburg, all of Germany satisfied your pride. You were too good for them.

  You didn’t like living like that, and so you went away. Did you think you’d arrive somewhere? (We know, you thought it possible you might arrive somewhere, even if a welcome was now ruled out.) So how was it?

  You didn’t want to hurt everyone. But you hurt him. You hurt me. A child. We don’t forgive you, not at all.

  Have it your way. We take the trip. We dream the plane, we dream the flight, we travel by night, we fly through the air, we transfer somewhere, we have to keep going through time, all the more impenetrable the more of it there is. Now we’re where you were.

  There, where you’re dead, we don’t see you.

  Now it’s quickly back over England and Ireland and Newfoundland and Canada to New York, ten minutes late. You can follow us here only if we give our permission.

  You wouldn’t exist if we didn’t want you to anymore.

  Don’t get your useless hopes up.

  Don’t be impatient. Have we left you in the lurch even once in twenty-nine years?

  Behave yourself. No back talk. Not today.

  November 13, 1967 Monday

  The rumor of Franco’s murder that traveled with the snack cart through every floor of the bank this morning did not withstand the light of day. He’s still alive.

  – Unfortunately: Amanda says. – And we have a list as long as my arm, don’t we, Gesine?

  Amanda means the list of surviving dictators awaiting assassination. Amanda is Mrs. Williams, and today Mrs. Williams goes home a different way, and Mrs. Cresspahl does too, and they run into each other on the bus that’s trudging up Third Avenue like an animal staggering with exhaustion. At five in the afternoon the bus on Third takes twenty minutes to move just ten blocks uptown. The driver has trouble maneuvering the long box away from the stop and back into traffic, has to force it, inch by inch, parallel to the surrounding cars that never jerk forward more than a few steps at a time, and as a result has to watch from afar as the green light comes and goes several times. Once he gets to the intersection, cars turning in from the side streets are stuck in it, and now a new task begins—trying to at least suggest a swerve to the right between the hemmed-in private vehicles and taxis. The stopped bus looms amid the low cars like an elephant good-naturedly performing his dressage routine for now but capable at any moment of breaking out with all the strength currently parked in a bellowing idle. Its green skin just needs to turn gray and wrinkle into hard furrows. The driver, though, has to not only direct the vehicle, steer, step on the gas, step on the gas, brake, signal, but also open the doors, change money, keep an eye on the clattering of the correct fare into the coin counter, monitor the surrounding traffic as well as his passengers’ behavior in his rearview mirrors, close the doors, clear the coins from the meter with his free hand and put each denomination into the correct cash-register tube while driving, arrange the exchanged dollar bills by hand, folding them and putting them away, and remain insensitive the whole time to the lumpish clouds of resignation and impatience behind his back. Amanda volunteers the vow that she would never marry a Manhattan bus driver. Amanda’s voice is not obtrusively loud, but she doesn’t mind being overheard either. She wouldn’t even help finance a murder; she would fight tooth and nail not to look at a shot and bleeding dictator; she doesn’t mean the actual literal deed, she’s just taking a stand on the side of those who share her convictions, a group among which she counts us. The whole long day, since early morning, was not enough to starve out her goodwill; just as she greeted every visitor to our department, every passing vice president, with bursting or muffled joy, from nine o’clock till closing time, a recurring smile still flits across her just twenty-eight-year-old face like an ingrained habit, like a curtain perpetually raised and then bouncing back into place as soon as the stage threatens to become visible. A year and a half ago Mr. Kennicott II, the personnel manager, introduced her to the department as Amanda, so she was on a first-name basis with everyone except for the bosses. Naomi here, Jocelyn there. Then, on the fifth day, she wasn’t at the phone when payroll asked for a Mrs. Williams, and neither Naomi nor Jocelyn knew her under that name, only Mrs. Cresspahl, who was still making the faux pas of using last names. Such things don’t bother Amanda; she ignores them, assuming unintentional discourtesy. Her friendliness is not indiscriminate. When she hands out the biweekly checks to the girls in her typing pool, she does so with remarks on the ship that’s back in the water or the chimney smoking again; she delivers Mrs. Cresspahl’s sealed envelope like the mail, though, but puts it next to the in-box, and her expression may be congratulatory but it is not overly familiar. She treats differences in work and in payment discreetly. She takes dictation from Mrs. Cresspahl, gives assignments to her typists; she follows the formalities of request and mutual consultation with everyone except the male heads of the department. She is as eager to hear news of others’ private lives as she is to report on her own: in moderation, fino a un certo punto. She is from one of the flocks of bungalows near St. Paul and tells stories about Minnesota winters; she flies home for her father’s funeral and mentions it three months later, in passing, thereby avoiding the feelings of others. She has married a student who now works as a psychologist for the city police; she had inadvertently recommended a position with the police as a way to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. She has a job as a senior secretary solely to furnish her Bleecker Street apartment entirely in Scandinavian style, or for her next summer vacation to southern Europe; she wouldn’t admit that she won’t consider having children without sufficient savings. She knows Mrs. Cresspahl’s real family situation and addresses her around others as a married woman, to shield her; she passes along the lunch invitations from all sorts of different men in an amused way, showing no sign even of curiosity, much less approval; she knows about Marie’s missteps in language and thought, not the worst ones, but the most amusing; now and then, the feeling seems like friendship. It’s nic
e to be seen in public with her, even on the M101 bus at rush hour. Bystanders feel refreshed by her tireless, still-girlish voice; approve of her saucy banter; observe with worship or open regret her firm, curvaceous legs, then the abundant shapes in her slim military-style coat, and finally her wide, half-awake face, which comes across as naive to anyone who misses the occasional pursing of the lips, the narrowing of the eyes to a single point. There’s room for more people than her in the friendliness she generates. Now she’s talking about the purse-snatchings on the South American floor, in her faux-surprised, smart-aleck, flippant tone of voice, hanging at exemplary ease on the strap, absorbing unperturbed the unexpected lurches of the bus, enjoying the indecisive stares of the seated gentlemen. She’s a fun person. Is she a friend or isn’t she? Ask her for money and she’ll check to see how long she can spare it for. Wave her over to your lunch table and she’ll look happy, not irritated, at the inconvenience of wasted time before she can leave. Send her on errands and she’ll deny that it puts her out in the least. Ask her to lie for you: she’ll do it. Why then this certainty that we have only words between us, not understanding? How can anything be missing? The fact is, we do detect the well-meaning superiority of the former student when she discusses the Williamsburg minister who, in his sermon yesterday morning before the president of the United States, asked him for “some logical, straightforward explanation” of the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. Amanda finds the request amusing. – Maybe he wanted to take advantage of the president being in the front pew: she says, and her bemused malice applies to both the man of God and the powerful sheep in his parish.