Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – I don’t know much about ministers: Mrs. Cresspahl says, suddenly so intent on creating some distance between them that she didn’t even anticipate Amanda’s preemptive apology and has to make a greater effort to ward it off than the joke expected of her would have required. Now the conversation is halting.

  Meanwhile, since the East Sixties, even though the people on his bus are no longer so crowded together, they are standing almost separated, the driver has given up trying to approach the right-hand curb; even though the downtown traffic is thinning out, he stops only when a ding of the signal asks him to. There are dispatchers stationed every twenty blocks here, who check and note down how closely the schedule is being followed, and the driver has to make up for his delays and get back into the prescribed time. Furthermore, it turns out that Amanda had sized him up correctly in her single passing glance, because the armor of patience and equanimity he’d shown himself steeled with—against private drivers’ infelicities, police cars’ right of way, and the usual stop-and-go—is starting to crack under his accumulated, compressed rage and may burst by the end of his shift. – All right now, ladies, let’s keep it moving: he says, in a tone that invites the remaining passengers to join in his displeasure. Earlier, beneath his cap shoved back on his head to precisely the same extent, he’d looked ready to crack jokes. Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Cresspahl stand on Third Avenue in the East Nineties and neither wants to explain to the other why she was taking a northbound bus to Greenwich Village, an East Side bus to the West Side.

  – Getting cold again: Mrs. Williams says. She stamps her feet, she wants to part in a moment of explicit agreement. To the east, the island drops steeply off to the darkly reflective bowl of the East River, at Hell Gate.

  – Sorry: Mrs. Cresspahl says. Which can be taken to refer to her hurrying to cross the street while she has a green light, or to something else.

  I’m sorry, really, Mrs. Williams.

  But there you have it—we don’t mentally hear her voice answer.

  November 14, 1967 Tuesday

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy, not in the administration, does not share the administration’s view when it comes to, say, Vietnam. “Despite the killing and despite the destruction, we are in no better position now than we were a year ago, and we will not be in any better position a year from now,” he writes, and moreover recommends negotiations with the Vietcong. The administration, though, will hear no talk of missed chances for negotiation.

  In Bolivia, Che Guevara, trafficker in revolution, has allowed not only himself to be captured but also his diary.

  Four young men were seized yesterday as they loaded what police said was a quarter of a million dollars worth of marijuana into their station wagon on West End Avenue.

  – 785 West End Avenue, where’s that, Marie?

  – Drop the last digit, divide by two, add sixty: it’s around the corner from us, Mrs., madam, Gesine.

  – Did you know that that happened on Ninety-Ninth Street?

  – Esmeralda told me, Jason had told her, and Jason saw it. I don’t need The New York Times for that, unlike a certain lady I know, madam, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  By the third weekend in March 1933, Cresspahl had wasted his fourteenth day in Mecklenburg, and when he went to pay various calls in Jerichow, people thought he was coming to say his goodbyes. There was no way the man could leave his workshop back in England to take care of itself any longer. That much was clear to them.

  Martha Maass saw him walk past the doors of the stationery store and the printer’s, and gave up on him as a customer. Why would this Cresspahl need any stationery in Jerichow, what other advertisements did he have to mock up? That night, she and her husband agreed that he’d seemed reasonable enough to them, these being times when they would set to work on announcements smaller than that of the opening of a new woodworking establishment. Still, Maass put the conversation to bed with the somewhat disgruntled remark: People just passin through shouldn let the door hit em on the way out.

  Cresspahl walked past Dr. Erdamer’s house without glancing over the bushes, even though he heard the doors open and close and thought he heard the daughter calling his name. Then he was sure of it, and he still didn’t turn around. It wasn’t entirely unfathomable to him why the furloughed mayor might have wanted him to change his mind. The city council meeting had given him not only complete but commendatory recognition of his services in 1931–32, unanimously, maybe because they wanted him to keep managing the town affairs as an unofficial deputy, but definitely because of pressure from old Papenbrock. Papenbrock had also seen to it that the mayor’s exit was reformulated as a personal request. Now Erdamer was sending his daughter out hatless and coatless into the street after Papenbrock’s son-in-law, who didn’t want to take on anything else as a representative of his father-in-law—at least not this.

  No one asked Papenbrock questions. He had to explain what he wanted, just to be sure—on the estates, occasionally to the authorities in Schwerin, but not in Jerichow. In Jerichow, the fact that he wanted things a certain way was still enough. And so he was not always understood quite correctly. He’d wanted to avoid an impropriety affecting a civil servant, an educated man, a man of his own standing. As far as Maass, Böhnhase, Pahl, Methfessel, business, trade were concerned, Papenbrock “had put a stop to it.” If he demanded decent behavior, then of whom more than Sonny Boy? That fit all the stories of the old man keeping his brat under his thumb even with no one ever there to see it. Not only had Papenbrock refused to bestow a single word or loan on Horst’s SA, he was in the new government with the conservative German National People’s Party. Papenbrock’s voice still carried weight, and maybe the old man had arranged for the quick dismissal of charges against anyone his son turned over to the Gneez courts, whether Sass the customs official, who’d apparently maligned the new Reich chancellor, or the Communist journeyman tailor in whose room they’d found an SA uniform. When the Mecklenburg state legislature decreed that all official buildings should fly the old imperial black-white-and-red flag and the swastika flag from March 13 through March 15, who was it who made sure that the flag of the state of Mecklenburg—merely permitted, not mandated—be run up alongside them, and at the same height too? Papenbrock. Who had ordered three additional blue-yellow-and-red flags from Pahl—the state flag, that is, not merely a banner with the historical Mecklenburg colors of blue, yellow, and red? Papenbrock. True, he hadn’t said why, but his actions spoke clearly enough, and they said: that the state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin would outlast this regime, too, the seventh in the space of a year. Then Papenbrock’s son-in-law turned up, apparently to say goodbye. Not only was he not a business rival, he had not appeared anywhere in public with his brother-in-law. Well, all right, give the man a drink and wish him bon voyage.

  Dr. Semig was out. The door was answered by Dora Semig, born Dora Köster in Schwerin, so like her husband that you felt you were looking at him when you saw her: both were tall, thin, whole body sturdy and strong, with a somewhat stiff, dry-skinned face nonetheless capable of quick, soft, friendly movements. That was the Dora Semig he knew. Today she kept her lips pressed tight together, eyes fixed, and refused to say hello even after she’d recognized Cresspahl. He was standing one stair below her. She held the door firmly. She didn’t seem scared, more like hostile. At around two in the morning on March 13 the doorbell had rung at the home of Dr. Spiegel, a Jewish lawyer in Kiel. Mrs. Spiegel, hearing shouts of “Police! Police!” had opened the door. The shouters were not policemen, and they killed Dr. Spiegel with a bullet to the head. Now the Semigs’ maid had given notice. Dora Semig had been brought up with maids. Never in her life had she had to answer a door herself. She looked so grumpy that Cresspahl didn’t wholly believe her. He moved half a step back to take a look into the courtyard. Semig’s carriage wasn’t there. Now Cresspahl had made Dora laugh. It started small, against her will. Then her lips parted slightly in the middle. Then the corners of her eyes started to move a little. Then she laughed. She
wasn’t even offended when Cresspahl said he didn’t have time to wait for Dr. Semig.

  He went to see a lot of people. Wulff, like the others, was expecting Cresspahl’s departure. Plus Cresspahl didn’t feel like drinking alone. Wulff put a glass for himself down on the bar a bit abruptly, the same way he did everything that afternoon with a certain satisfied fury, whether sending Elli Wagenführ from table to table with sidelong looks or holding his emptied glass up to Cresspahl with an expression of having had to swallow a bitter pill. Elli Wagenführ, who’d known Peter Wulff for at least six months of evening waitressing and could use her sharp tongue on him when necessary the same way she could rap customers on the knuckles, today had nothing to say to him but drink orders, and when she had to go behind the counter she never budged from the sink. Wulff didn’t care whether Cresspahl had something he wanted to discuss, he had a few things to say himself. Warncke, the Communist representative to the state legislature, had gotten himself captured in Neustrelitz. The party branch in Krakow am See had dissolved voluntarily, sending all of its membership records and documents to the Mecklenburg criminal authorities, with the assurance: “We’re done with all that!” – We’re done with all that!: Peter Wulff remarked to no one in particular and in High German, as though imitating someone speaking High German. – It stinks like where an owls sat!: he said in Platt, incensed like a man who may have seen something coming but wasn’t so happy, was in fact rather upset, to have been proven right. He reviled Warncke and every other Communist he could think of with thumbnail biographies—this one’s grandfather’s lapses, that one’s childhood bed-wetting. They had disappointed him, so deeply that he felt more hurt than he’d expected. It was as if a separation had existed only in words up until then, and now he was making it real. He was talking like someone who’d prepared to take a trip, one not without danger, but still an entertaining prospect, and now it was finally getting under way, now at last the waiting was over, and he was thinking with grim anticipation of the day to come—but he was talking to no one in particular, not paying much attention to Cresspahl, because he didn’t reckon he’d be seeing him in the future, or even after this weekend.

  It didn’t occur to him that Cresspahl might want something from him. Cresspahl stood there in front of him, unassuming, one hand calmly in his pants pocket and the other resting lightly on the edge of the bar, keeping his head erect and his face impassive. He watched Wulff and gave no response—not with a wrinkle of brow, with his eyes, with the corners of his mouth. Wulff might well think Cresspahl had wrapped up all his affairs. He’d never known him to be especially talkative. He had a hard enough time finding something appropriate to say about the man’s dead mother; he didn’t want to let himself in for dealing with a departure. He refilled their glasses, raised his to make it clear that this round was on the house, and said: Well its not for me, sez the wolf.

  – But a little lamb sure hits the spot, he sez: Cresspahl said.

  He hadn’t looked to anyone like a man who maybe didn’t exactly need advice, but still would have welcomed some.

  November 15, 1967 Wednesday

  – I don’t like what comes next: Marie says. – Can’t you change it?

  So what was it the rebel Che Guevara wanted to bring about in Bolivia? A second Vietnam.

  The New York Times has dedicated to the roughly three thousand youths protesting against the American war in Vietnam last night around the New York Hilton Hotel not only a thirty-five-square-inch photograph, under a headline of its own, but also her famed column eight. When policemen on motor scooters drove into the line of youths who had linked their hands to block traffic, she heard one of the custodians of law and order say: You want to be treated like animals, we’ll treat you like animals.

  The Soviet Union lets two of the spies they’ve turned take the floor. One of them knows that America was trying to stage a military coup in India, and the other says that what he missed about English life were beer and oysters, and an occasional afternoon at the soccer matches. The former’s name might actually be Smith.

  In Queens, John Franzese, “Sonny” to mafiosi, was on trial for first-degree murder in the 1964 slaying of Ernest “The Hawk” Rupolo. A mistrial had to be declared because several jurors had read about the defendants in the newspaper. Sonny looked relieved, relaxed, and his dear wife, Tina, blew him a kiss from across the courtroom, which, The New York Times does not neglect to mention, was wood-paneled.

  – Can’t you tell it differently? Marie says. – Did every English child really have to be christened in those days?

  – But she was a German child, in the country, in Mecklenburg.

  – And again Cresspahl did it for this Lisbeth person?

  – He did it for his wife, and even arranged for a church ceremony, for Sunday, March 19, 1933. This time he ended up seeing Pastor Brüshaver himself, not Brüshaver’s wife. When Cresspahl saw him sitting at his desk he understood why people called him a bureaucrat. Brüshaver wrote down the date, even though it was only two days in the future; he entered the fee he received into a ledger; he acted like a bookkeeper whose firm has been given an order. That’s how Cresspahl saw him. Brüshaver was a squat, stout man, not especially strong looking. He had flesh on his bones that wasn’t fat or flabby, it sat firmly on him—it was just so visible. His hands were so soft on the desktop. His jowls didn’t sag, his chin was no more than round, yet he was swollen with flesh. It moved little, it hadn’t worked much. Sad flesh. Cresspahl looked at him not at all like someone who made his living with hands; he’d also noticed that the soil in the garden behind the pastor’s house was freshly turned, not too neatly, but deep enough. The two men were roughly the same age; you didn’t see the pastor’s age in his face, at most you could see it in the eyes, in the even, unwavering, heavy gaze, which suggested not just attention but actual observation. Cresspahl was annoyed that, while they talked, Brüshaver was clearly continuing to think about something else he had no intention of sharing, like a doctor keeping a troubling finding from his patient. Like a doctor! that’s what the people of Jerichow said about him. And he had small lips, innocent like a child’s. There was also something professional about the way he moved his lips as he wrote out the baptismal reading, as though savoring something, reacquainting himself with his understanding of more than was to be found in the mere words of Psalm 71, verse 6. At least he knew his business and the passage in question. Cresspahl was not inclined to say more than that in his favor.

  – Say it in English, if you have to say it: Marie says.

  – By thee have I been holden up from the womb: thou art he that took me out of my mother’s bowels: my praise shall be continually of thee.

  – Dam-nation! Marie thunders. But the outrage captured on tape is not real; her laughter unexpectedly follows and lets the modulation of what she’s just said reverberate with inner amusement. – My foot! she says.

  – Should someone have changed that?

  – No. But he changed your name!

  – Nobody changed my name, Marie.

  – So your name is Gesine Henriette C.?

  – No.

  – See, Gesine Lisbeth? When you’re telling a story you’ve got to keep track of everything.

  – Maybe he just wanted to keep the name Henry free for the next child. For one of the next children.

  – Maybe he wanted to do that Lisbeth of yours another favor.

  – Maybe he traded it for her permission to let Dr. Semig be godfather at the christening.

  – He hadn’t picked Semig at his earlier appointment. What happened to Alexander Paepcke?

  – Paepcke had something to attend to at the Güstrow courthouse too early the next morning. But there were plenty of people who would have been glad to take his place.

  – After what had happened that week, it had to be a Jew?

  – A Christian, Marie. A Christian. After this new gambit, Brüshaver had tried to make his client reconsider by giving him another one of his looks, as if he
must have been so busy listening to and looking at him that he’d misheard and misseen. Until Cresspahl stated for the record, as though repeating it: Herr Semig is not a Jew, he was baptized like his father, and his grandfather too, and the Kösters wouldn’t have turned a blind eye and given away their daughter . . . : all said in the calm, obliging tone that he otherwise used to suggest stepping outside to settle things, and Brüshaver nodded. He didn’t nod with his whole head, but he moved his creaseless eyelids in a brief, acquiescent way, and added: People will talk, Mr. Cresspahl. Twaddle, if you ask me, Mr. Cresspahl.

  – I don’t like it: Marie says.

  – That Cresspahl invited a Jerichow veterinarian to a christening?

  – If he wanted to pick a fight with Jerichow, he should have stayed in Jerichow. Should have been staying.

  – You want me to change that?

  – You should tell it differently.

  – Well, we’ll present it a bit differently.

  – Don’t forget the child being put on display at Papenbrock’s house.

  – Now Cresspahl had to disabuse the pastor of the idea that they were in agreement on all points except the one in which the church was, after all, only supposed to assist. When Brüshaver repeated the baptismal reading, just to be sure, Cresspahl misunderstood it as a question, hesitated before answering, and eventually said: Nah. It came out sounding mildly amused, but still like a snub for a foolish presumption. It meant that, first, Lisbeth Papenbrock had to go looking for a Bible passage herself, and second, that Cresspahl didn’t expect . . . that the church . . . he wouldn’t . . . the church wouldn’t . . .