Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Third: Marie says: that he wasn’t exactly desperate to make friends. That he didn’t need friends in Jerichow. Why didn’t he leave!

  – Pick the child up under his arm and take the train to Hamburg and give her a bite of his steak and a drink of his beer?

  – Oh: Marie says: aha. A man with a baby. No can do.

  – He no longer had any choice. Now he could keep his child, and his wife, only in Jerichow. Not in Richmond, not in Lisbeth’s foreign country.

  – What made him so sure?

  – She’d told him.

  – Weren’t men in charge in that land of Mecklenburg?

  – Usually, Marie.

  – So why didn’t he tell her: Take the baby, pull yourself together, and come with me?

  – You don’t usually approve of using force, Marie.

  – He didn’t care about not using force. He was scared.

  – He was scared of losing her.

  – He was chicken! He didn’t want to find out what she was capable of!

  – I can’t change any more than that.

  The subway cashiers will no longer accept five-dollar bills, for fear of counterfeits. Some of the money in our purse is probably fake.

  November 16, 1967 Thursday

  Mr. Josiah Thompson didn’t believe the official report about the death of President Kennedy either. After he concluded that there were three perpetrators, not the one officially recognized assassin, FBI agents paid him a visit to warn him that anything he said might be held against him. So he didn’t say anything. Then they went away. He still doesn’t know what they wanted to ask him about.

  The North Vietnamese shelled an airfield and ammunition dump in South Vietnam, setting a whole valley on fire. The American commander in chief in Vietnam finds the situation “very, very encouraging.”

  The New York Times has to correct herself. The secretary of state did not say that there was no alternative to escalation. He said: Whenever we try to start the process of de-escalation, we face rejection from the other side.

  The address Mrs. Ferwalter gave us is on the East Side, on a street in the Nineties near the East River. Where the street starts, the hopes that the small businesses once inspired in their owners are laid out dead behind metal scissor gates: half-demolished shop counters, broken glass, packaging that’s now garbage. Almost no children hang out on the street. The abandoned cars from four weeks ago are still sitting there, a little rustier now, a little more thoroughly cannibalized for salvage. The street has so little life left in it that people come from other neighborhoods to throw their bulk trash, from sofas to refrigerators, next to the dumpsters here, whose bellies no longer even stink. The moribund building itself cowers pitifully in a row of four-story fellows. The front steps look unused. The door stands open, wedged back at an angle, revealing that the fear of theft is gone, leaving only indifference. Most of the windows keep the daylight out with dusty blinds. The owner tried, ten years ago maybe, to paint the bricks of the facade a watery blue now that they were no longer sheathed in brownstone; since then the building has received no further assistance. There is not yet deliberate dirt covering the stairwells, just dust and sticky grime, a rotting mix. Behind the doors, it’s as quiet as a sickroom, and the faces that appear are lifeless, as though not much cooking goes on there. On the third (fourth) floor, Mr. Kreslil has pinned up his visiting card: yellowed elegant cardstock printed in fancy italics thirty years ago. It doesn’t mention that he gives private Czech lessons, and he has crossed out the abbreviation for “Professor” with a neat, unflustered stroke of the pen.

  The apartment is guarded by an old woman whose name, as we learned only slowly, is Jitka Kvachkova. The first time, she needed to hear our name and nonthreatening words repeated over and over before she was willing to unhook the door chain. She’s short. For all her roundness, she looks harried, fugitive. She has raised the height of her head with hair pulled up in a tight bun, too much for her low steep forehead to bear. Her eyes don’t relax once they’ve recognized the visitor, they keep looking past her for uninvited guests on the stairs, for danger. Her speech is so foreign that at first only her gestures made it clear that the visitor was being asked to wait a moment. She had such trouble believing we’d understood her that her manner seemed severe. There’s a rustle at her hips as of many skirts when she marches to the connecting door, hand far outstretched as though determined to lash out in rage. But once she’s through the door she speaks in a gentle, utterly submissive voice. The visitor has to wait to be announced, every time. We wait in a room that also functions as a kitchen, and at night as a bedroom; we wait in an armchair whose bottom is half falling out, the armrests still warm from Mrs. Kvachkova’s hands. The second time, we tiptoed over to the TV set facing the chair: still warm. By now she’s used to us and has continued to learn from TV shows what you say in this country when guests arrive or leave, but what she manages best is a smile that starts at several parts of her face at once, runs together, and eventually forms an overall, completely believable expression. It has also occasionally happened that she’s touched our arm and expressed sympathy for our weariness with a sorrowful shake of the head, bringing back thoughts of Jakob’s mother, who used to take the groggy Cresspahl child to the train for school in the early-morning darkness. Still, she insists on the ceremony of announcing the visitor. This bare room is hers, she lives there, she works there, but to outsiders it must play the part of Professor Kreslil’s anteroom, and she that of the housekeeper, not the woman who lives with him. Perhaps because that’s how they did things back in České Budějovice.

  The same as at Ottje Stoffregen’s, in Jerichow. After the war, Ottje Stoffregen lived in a room upstairs from the pharmacy and kept an evacuee from Pommern in the kitchen, and she had to audibly discuss with him whether or not to admit a visitor, as though he were sitting at his claw-foot desk bent over his work, not over bound volumes of magazines in which he had been permitted to publish before 1938. He would rise to his feet as though surfacing from pressing thoughts, go up to the visitor with outstretched hand, with a pleased but distracted, busy smile and a figure as gaunt as Professor Kreslil’s, on which his suits hung similarly loose and askew, the difference being that Stoffregen’s English tweed wasn’t shabby even after having been worn for ten years while Professor Kreslil’s clothes seemed to have been bought in that Czech forest through which the party of the working classes had herded one lone sheep, and the other difference being that Kreslil merely lacks the money for a dentist who could fill out his cheeks with proper dentures while Stoffregen had had his teeth knocked out and bore the gaps like a badge of honor, as though needing to act the part of the witch in the fairy tale, his grin constantly slipping into a familiarity that could not, in fact, be trusted. So it’s not the same as at Ottje Stoffregen’s. Kreslil, with his bowing and his formal way of speaking, belongs in a black suit at the best table at St. Wenceslas restaurant, and he has never once set foot in it; his coloring is different, too, shocks of white hair bookending healthy pink skin on his bald head while Stoffregen was yellow, and Stoffregen was too good to give lessons, there was nothing to learn from Stoffregen; Kreslil has set up his desk as if for a veritable feast of learning, with abundant pencils and paper and textbooks opened to the right page; his own books are ranked on the bookshelf far behind him, five blue volumes by one Anatol Kreslil, all with the same indecipherable title, and Kreslil sits up straight in a correct, angular way that one used to learn behind schoolroom desks, carefully clears his throat, begins by reviewing the homework from the previous lesson, smiles encouragingly behind his rimless bifocals, and is happy to see what I have learned, in fact it is now possible to tell him that our houses are far from the train station, naše domy jsou daleko od nádraží, but we’re missing something that would make these Czech words come easily, tato česká slova . . . , and there was a time at school when Miss Cresspahl didn’t want to learn any more of the language of the occupying power and spent a whole year neve
r getting beyond the story of the little old grandfather and the turnip that just wouldn’t be pulled out, and he pulled and he pulled, tyeshil, tyeshil, a nye vyteshil, and in Prague a stranger stopped me, a man in a post office uniform, in the middle of the main train station, Wilsonovo nádraží, three steps from the information booth, and he let me direct him there with a “ptejte se tam” as though not expecting the usual form “zeptejte se tam,” passport please, with that American passport I’d rather have ended up at the police station than the American embassy, but no one came into the compartment during the trip to Berlin East station, all night long, the secret police are not so pedantic when it comes to the function of verbal aspects in Slavic languages, and again and again Kreslil’s Czech takes me back to my Russian and then he retreats into a reserved, severe expression and looks disapprovingly at me while I sleep, it’s another refresher course in the history of Socialism, I have seen myself sleeping with shoulders slightly hunched and head drooped and face slack, in one of Blach’s pictures, sleeping like the dead, Kreslil wakes me up for a single word of German out of a sleep that cost ten dollars and walks me to the door past the outraged Mrs. Kvachkova, I have not spoken Russian, not spoken German, I don’t say anything, how could I have fallen asleep here. How can I sleep in these people’s home. Wake me up.

  November 17, 1967 Friday

  It’s not him. The old man making his way around the streets of Panama, peddling combs, wine, and secondhand clothes, is not Heinrich Müller. If the head of Hitler’s secret police is still alive, then he’s still at large.

  On page 3, which The New York Times usually sets aside for photojournalism from Vietnam, she today shows the 75-foot-long cage in Catanzaro where the Italian justice system is holding 121 members of the Mafia who are on trial. If Karsch can stay in this country now, he must have his people in Calabria.

  Avenarius Kollmorgen was looking forward to an enjoyable evening. He spent more than enough nights at home alone; he’d read about the renunciations that come with age, but that wasn’t how he felt about it, not with respect to other people, not with respect to pleasures. Not that he needed other people, only their company. At bottom, he wanted to be left alone. He had broken with his parents by studying law, not the arts they’d wanted him to study. He had gotten over his first name, which others had made literarily and philosophically famous as a last name. On top of everything, he didn’t even want Richard Wagner as a grandfather. He had also succeeded in creating a self-image as not the “Avi” from Wismar public school, not the “Arius” of Erlangen University, but really and truly the genuine, secret Avenarius Kollmorgen who no longer needed to go around telling anyone about himself. He knew this Avenarius to be a gentle, sensitive creature. Fine, he had made no mark in any art. Yes, he’d left Rostock for a much smaller city by the Baltic, where he wasn’t easy to find. Admittedly, he lived alone. Where was the woman to whom he could have explained and explicated himself? The children who ran after him shouting singsong rhymes in the street, the Jerichowers who found his way of talking and way of walking amusing—let them think him a devious sort, arrogant, even crotchety. That wasn’t the worst disguise. And if he didn’t often set foot in the Lübeck Court, that wasn’t because the stairs were a bit too steep for his rather short legs, it was only because he didn’t like what they did with their wines. They bought doubtful vintages. Then they stored the bottles in the sunny side of the cellar. Such substances had never been served in the Kollmorgen house. Also, he wasn’t so good with crowds. He didn’t have much he could talk about, he knew so many secrets that the boundary between them and public knowledge sometimes grew somewhat blurry. No, what he needed were individuals, people he could seat in a particular chair in his own house and who’d play by his rules, unable to prevent Avenarius K. from observing, analyzing, and seeing right through them at his leisure. And, of course, occasional visitors served as a welcome alibi for the neighbors, who saw empty bottles accumulate in the courtyard almost every morning. So it was just fine when Albert Papenbrock came by with his son-in-law, even on a Saturday evening, to discuss the rather unusual gift being deeded to a two-week-old child. Papenbrock was getting on in years himself, too. Possibly, as the night wore on, Papenbrock would reveal certain weaknesses to which a Kollmorgen would not be prey for some time. And he’d been curious about this son-in-law for a long time. In 1931 he’d found his way not to Kollmorgen but to Dr. Jansen. Funny, in a certain sense of the word. Nothing against his colleague Jansen, for that matter. Kollmorgen stood up from his Seneca and marched to the kitchen, his back ramrod straight enough almost to tip him over backward, and he shooed Geesche Helms’s sister out of the house. For all her nosiness, she never seemed to find the vintages she was sent to retrieve. Then the short stocky gentleman clambered down to the cellar, sighing happily over the small amount of work that would yield such a generous reward.

  When he’d installed his clients in their armchairs—plump stuffed traps they wouldn’t have such an easy time getting free of—the two men still seemed to be on the same side. Papenbrock had come for a pleasant evening, not for any long negotiations. No sooner was his cigar lit than he pointed his chin over to the bottles arrayed on one side, and a Kollmorgen doesn’t need to be asked twice. The other fellow . . . —Cresspahl, isn’t it?—sat rather straighter, not like a guest, looking a bit drowsy with his pipe, his mind clearly elsewhere. He seemed to be waiting. Yes, Kollmorgen too could hardly stand the suspense. The preliminaries took a certain amount of time, alas unavoidable. First, the weather. Not bad for mid-March. And with that, how business was looking (good) was taken care of too (second). Third, the family. Maybe better not. Politics. Definitely not. Well, down to brass tacks. It won’t take long, surely. And, in this hope, Dr. Kollmorgen spread the pages of his draft out on the extensive surface of his bulging thighs, draped his elbows comfortably on the padded armrests of his chair, and began his presentation. He rocked back and forth from sheer anticipation and well-being. To keep his daughter’s husband in the country, Papenbrock was giving his granddaughter a property that would be hers not before March 3, 1954. He, Kollmorgen, would not live to see that day, so it was of necessity on this one that he would have to get all the entertainment he was entitled to out of the proceedings.

  – And the other children? he said.

  He held his round head, flattened in the back and excessively large, very high; raised wild eyebrows up into his forehead; acted as serious as he could. Let the clients do their worst, he could take it. In the event of multiple children, the property could only be divided up by its monetary value, since various different dates of attaining majority would be in play, along with additional legal proceedings, not to mention other official processes. The question was justified; there was nothing the gentlemen could do about it. This . . . —Cresspahl, isn’t it?—gave no sign of irritation, he simply nodded quietly, head to one side, the way amateurs in chess acknowledge the opening their opponent has chosen to deploy, as if to say that this one is fine, though another would’ve been better. It was really too bad that Avenarius was too isolated from the world by this time to befriend anyone even as a chess partner. Then he noticed Papenbrock’s hand, frozen in midair holding a full glass then weaving erratically to the point where a drop shot up over the glass’s rim. Papenbrock hadn’t prepared for this. It was no use trying to get his own back by puffing smoke and suggesting a proviso clause. Well, let Papenbrock think he had rallied. Let him scoff at Kollmorgen’s alleged idiosyncrasies. That was just fine.

  Since the mother’s inheritance is hereby and of her own free will being settled on the child, the property thus deeded would revert upon the death of the child first to the mother and only then to the father, and then to the current owner. The father, as trustee, is not authorized to borrow against the assigned property, nor to encumber it with a mortgage. He is to pay for the property and building maintenance from the usufruct, and is responsible for any and all state and local taxes and fees. The child’s ownership is prot
ected against the father top to bottom, back to front. That’s how the gentlemen want it, no?

  – Well then theres nothin in it for us: Cresspahl said, not bitter and no less calm than Papenbrock had been as he’d listened to the terms.

  Papenbrock heaved himself upright in two stages, so that he could look his son-in-law straight in the face—not merely surprised but hurt. In an aggrieved tone of voice, he named the sum he had already put into the property, slightly rounded up actually, even though every phase of the purchase had gone through Kollmorgen’s office. Avenarius, in his delight, tried to top off Cresspahl’s glass. Not enough was missing from it.

  – Maintenance!: Cresspahl said. The way everything theres fallin apart, the wind’ll take care a that.

  He made not the slightest protest when Papenbrock, obliged to rein himself in somewhat, brought up a certain account at the Surrey Bank of Richmond; he dismissed it with a nod, and in so doing made it crystal clear to Papenbrock that the account really was as substantial as Lisbeth had said, maybe even more substantial by now. This made him stumble in his calculations, during which time Avenarius reveled in the certainty that Papenbrock had been counting on certain sentimental family feelings. He made a note of this mistake in his head, on the right, just above his fat hairy ear, to savor to the full later. He couldn’t afford to miss anything transpiring at the moment. There was no need to pit these two against each other. Observation, innocent undistracted observation—that was his favorite thing.

  Papenbrock had been acting like he’d been trying to give his son-in-law an indirect gift, that is to say, via Cresspahl’s daughter, so as not to insult him. This Cresspahl, meanwhile, was taking refuge behind his obligation to scrutinize the gift for the advantages it actually gave to his daughter. Avenarius couldn’t have planned it any better himself. He leaned back unassumingly, forced his hands together over his belly, without forgoing the rocking on his elbows, and turned his head back and forth from one man to the other so as not to miss a single blow, a single direct hit. He liked how this . . . Cresspahl was landing them. He carried himself not in a defiant or challenging way, as the situation might well have warranted; his manner was slow, thorough, like someone who’d promised to think things over. And now the thinking-over was done. Papenbrock had immediately snatched at the sheet of paper on which Cresspahl had made his calculations, and as a result was torn back and forth between the numbers he was reading and the words he was hearing out of Cresspahl’s mouth. That was too bad, Kollmorgen felt, for Papenbrock thus failed to feel the full scope of his defeat. Cresspahl, on the other hand, could recite by heart the fact that the property had no significant market value at the present time. It would nonetheless still be a much more reasonable course to sell it. The money could be placed in a trust account until the child came of age—ideally half in a German account, half in a British one, to cover any divergent economic developments and facilitate the trustee’s management of the usufruct. At least that way the gift would incur no further costs. And, speaking of which, the trustee could hardly agree to use his cash on something over which he had no disposal rights. The way things stood now, there was nothing in it at all for them. Not to mention the maintenance, still less to mention the repairs. If Papenbrock seriously wanted to do something for the child, any renovation was up to him. But that was entirely the giver’s business. He was perfectly free to have repairs carried out by persons he contracted to do the work, or else to let the child’s legal guardian hire contractors, but in either case he would need to be responsible for the full costs, since it was part of his gift. After the deeded property was restored to a normal condition, it still would not meet the demands of the craft that was the trustee’s business, and moreover he would still have to establish and build up a business here, and then, Cresspahl said, obligingly, as a good-natured promise: Then itll be time to talk about my money.