by Uwe Johnson
It was long after midnight that Avenarius Kollmorgen found himself pacing through his three rooms, standing up less than ramrod straight, sometimes hugging himself a little with pleasure. He carried his glass with him, sipping expertly, and as he swallowed he raised a serene and joyous face to the ceiling. He had seen Papenbrock in defeat, observed him closely. Papenbrock had signed over money for his feelings, and a lot more money than he’d wanted to. Papenbrock had thought his son-in-law was at such a disadvantage that he had failed to reckon with his own handicaps. Now Avenarius knew a bit more about Papenbrock. His picture of him had become more complete. He knew all about pictures, there was always some point or another where the picture failed to coincide with the actual person, he knew this from the pictures of himself in circulation, but while people couldn’t apply their picture of Avenarius Kollmorgen to him, he knew full well how to exploit his of them. Oh yes indeed. Best of all was recalling the moment when Papenbrock had realized his situation and put the half-drunk glass of wine down and said goodbye to his hopes for an evening chat among like-minded men. Yes, this had been a great and memorable evening for Avenarius K. Even the private army of this Austrian, this . . . Hitler, had refrained for once from rumbling and bellowing in the market square and intruding on the performance taking place here, which had surpassed Avenarius’s fondest dreams.
The stocky abbreviated gentleman stopped at one of his windows, stuck his hefty head out through the curtains, and looked out onto the nighttime market square lying before him between the shining white gabled houses like a giant stage. Someday a stage like that should be built for him, Avenarius, so that someday all the audiences from Wismar to Lübeck could see him as the wise and yet deeply sensitive being he really was. They would not understand. But he didn’t need their attempts at understanding. They would misjudge him, they could do nothing else. He was content to enjoy his solitude. That way no one disturbed him in the sublime amusement that he and he alone was capable of gleaning from the banal business of others. Still, to give credit where credit was due, he’d had no reason to expect such an evening. He had no right to so much pleasure. And if no right to that, then no right to another bottle of Pommard either; since, however, he had nonetheless been granted the one, he had perforce to go fetch the other. Otherwise the world would be out of joint, and it was he alone who could put it right. All right, down to your cellar, Avenarius.
November 18, 1967 Saturday, South Ferry day,
maybe the last one this year. Because last night, the second snowstorm in a week moved through New York State and New England, and even if it swept past the city with nothing more than rain and isolated flurries, the temperature has been stuck in the low 40s for some time. Gesine still subtracts thirty-two, multiplies by five, then divides by nine to get her 6°C to the same result as Marie, who has long since been able to translate 42°F into a physical sensation: It’s cold.
Marie doesn’t say so. She runs around the outer walkways during the ferry ride, both ways, and on only the windy side during the trip back to Manhattan, even though Gesine is sitting indoors on the other side. So she can’t be seen. So she doesn’t have to show herself. So she doesn’t have to talk. Yesterday she put the mail next to the phone without sorting it into personal, strangers, and junk, as though she hadn’t looked through the envelopes and in particular hadn’t noticed the one with her school’s official letterhead. She went into her room as if by chance whenever Gesine happened to walk anywhere near the phone, and it’s unclear whether she was listening this morning when her mother made an appointment with Sister Magdalena. Two can play at this game. Gesine leaves it to her to bring it up, the same way Marie has left it to Gesine for the past four hours. Now, when the ferry is level with Liberty Island, she comes back inside, rubbing her hands, so cold she’s hunched over. She says nothing about school, mentions only the Statue of Liberty, erected in New York Harbor by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and bearing the face of none other than his dear mother.
– She has goose feet: Marie says.
She needs to sit down next to Gesine, a little out of her line of sight while Gesine keeps her eyes looking straight ahead, before she decides.
– Okay, so: she says: I’m sorry.
She pushes her hood back onto her neck but ignores her braid, still stuck in the blue wool fleece. She leans forward, elbows resting on her thighs, and even shakes her head back and forth like a man regretting a piece of foolishness even though in his heart he won’t admit responsibility since he can’t understand what it is he’s done. – I just don’t understand how they found out! she says.
Sister Magdalena didn’t seem especially upset. She’d set out the tea things in her tiny upstairs room in the new wing of the school, her little wood-paneled cell that, for all the tidiness of bed and desk, still suggested a furnished rented room, a merely temporary place to sleep. Sister Magdalena was wearing the same dark gray dress that she wears to teach classes on other days, the dress Marie suspects she sleeps in, “and on her back, too, without moving.” She was very hard to recognize from the little patch of face that her vows permit her to show to the outside world because, in addition, she barely moved it. She kept it firmly in that tolerant expression in which severity and goodness can coexist, and was unaware of prompting thoughts of bald-headed Paris mannequins. Sister Magdalena is thirty or fifty or forty years old: even the age of her voice is hidden in an unchanging tone that blends humility and determination. With her teacup and her hostess manners, she tried to imply an innocuous visit, but she sat stiffly on her chair, knee pressed to knee, shoe to shoe; even her hands resting loosely in each other left no doubt that this visit was a summons. She had concerns about Marie. She presented her complaints as concern for the child, as sympathy, in the pedagogical language that masks findings and the intentions behind them under expressions from life outside of school—detours and interconnections in which any direct question gets wrapped and smothered like a fly caught in a spider’s web. She started by saying that children express feelings. Then she described the differences among various feelings. She explained the varying degrees of control that children have over their feelings. Puberty was euphemized as “a change not only in the soul.” So, Marie had expressed feelings, was that it? No, that was not it. But she had tried to express feelings. In history class, she’d voiced anger at the way America’s conquerors had treated the Indians, and this interfered with the lesson plan and necessitated a discussion that for all its psychological gains jeopardized their adherence to the syllabus. Not only had she made an utterly irrelevant connection to the Vietnam War in an essay she’d written, “I look out the window. . .”; she had also, in conversations during lunch and recess, created difficulties, even confusion, for the other girls with respect to their own feelings about said war. She had raised her voice. So was that what you called me in to discuss? No. The issue was the girl’s tendency to take the side of the downtrodden in historical events, to the point of almost moral solidarity. No one would deny that the war in Vietnam was a tragedy, but so were many other historical occurrences, and the school’s goal was to convey not the unjust aspects of the topic being taught but the content of the material as such. A child willing to get worked up over established facts might pose a threat to the community in learning and life that the school strives to create. Is that the issue? No, Mrs. Cresspahl. Sister Magdalena had concerns about nothing less than the child’s spiritual well-being.
How are we supposed to explain that to Marie? Should we tell her: Marie, you’re too biased? Change that, Marie?
Sister Magdalena, mild and inexorable, had continued without a pause in her multistep, terraced deductions. Our interjected questions plagued her like wasp stings, she was not at all equipped to handle interruptions, and when she showed she was suffering, with strains at the corner of her mouth and the mildest creasing of the skin on her brow, she was actually trying to convey a rebuke. She diluted this expression into a wry smile meant to bemoan her human frailties—an only ha
lf-hearted pretense of apology. That was how she avoided answering. She seemed to be asking questions herself, although not quite. She spoke of the hardships and deprivations that working parents must suffer, especially in their then passing them along to their children. Especially with single parents, living apart, the refusal to impose authority can have other consequences, worse consequences for children than the desired and to some extent laudable ones. Children calling their parents by their first name, not addressing them as parents, might have a different meaning from family to family. It gave a sense of closeness, an illusory equality more likely to wreak havoc in a child’s mind than nurture it. At no point did Sister Magdalena speak concretely. She even mentioned the school psychiatrist merely as a mutual acquaintance who had, of course, performed important services both in his work and in the wider field of human behavior. She was gathering information but refusing to distill it into facts. It was as if impressions were enough. We couldn’t possibly explain anything to her. All that mattered was to make the right gestures—being worried about Marie’s place in the school, concerned about Sister Magdalena’s clearly sleepless nights, willing and eager to improve—in the vague hope of their being more or less plausible. And it wasn’t as if we were outright lying. Sister Magdalena is the classroom teacher, and after a summons to see her the next step is being called in to see the administration. The school is overcrowded, in every grade, precisely because of the solid curriculum, and our paying full tuition, having not requested financial aid, won’t save us since the other applicants have at their disposal the sacrament of baptism, which Marie cannot produce. The third summons, to the principal’s office, is tantamount to the child’s expulsion. There is no appeal against the insights of someone who’s taught fifth grade for eleven years. The institution recently expelled a child with a congenitally deformed hip because she was ultimately incapable of conforming to the educators’ ideas of a desirable child. No outright lying—the lie was elsewhere: in the polite conduct of the conversation, in our expected and unquestioned respect for Sister Magdalena’s psychological abilities, everything down to the unwavering friendliness with which we said our goodbyes at the elevator door, Sister Magdalena refusing to walk away until the elevator arrived. On the street, in a worldly guise, we wouldn’t recognize her. – It was such a pleasure speaking with you, Mrs. Cresspahl. – Not at all. The pleasure was mine, Sister Magdalena.
I’m sorry, Jakob.
Okay, Gesine. For what now?
That I said “We’re not living apart.”
Which is true.
That I said “He’s dead.”
It always helps to do that, doesn’t it, Gesine?
I’m sorry Jakob.
Get the child out of there, Gesine.
And take her where, Jakob? To the moon?
Dublin. London. Copenhagen.
Should we order Marie to just kindly respect my authority? Should we scare her—with the bogeyman? with the psychiatrist? with expulsion? Should we tell her: Don’t talk in school about what we talk about at home?
The child is so deep in thought that she neglects to watch the ferry arrive in the dock, even though the braking of the boat has long since been making the hull shake and most of the passengers have already headed for the doors and stairways in wedge-shaped crowds. – I don’t understand: she says. – I was alone in the classroom when I wrote it on the board, and Sister Magdalena erased it without asking when the next class started.
– What did you write on the blackboard?
It’s hard for the child. She doesn’t quite squirm but she does hem and haw, holds her head to the side, leaning away.
– “Bugs Bunny for President”: she finally admits. – Can I apologize to the old bag in writing, or do I have to do it in person?
The New York Times does not share the view that President Johnson is doing his job worse than that cartoon character who’s forever concocting inventions supposedly designed to benefit his fellow creatures but actually designed to hurt and thwart them. The New York Times puts three photographs of the president’s press conference on the front page, and the article runs to almost two pages: how he stepped out from behind the podium, waved his arms, chopped the air, drew imaginary lines with his fingers, ran the vocal gamut from loudly angry to gently modest, walked up and down in front of the camera like a revival preacher. The real Johnson. About those criticizing his conduct of the war: He did not want to call them unpatriotic. But they were living in glass houses.
November 19, 1967 Sunday
At last it’s no longer a trade secret we need to keep: the devaluation of the pound sterling is stated in The New York Times.
Edward Ravender, a real estate broker, a Negro among whites, lives in a house with a swimming pool in Oceanside, Long Island. These whites have thrown rocks at his windows, door, and chimney, strewn empty beer cans across his lawn, burned a cross on it. He wanted to stick it out. Last night, they threw a bomb into his dining room. If it had gone off, his three-year-old son and twenty-day-old daughter would not have survived. Now Mr. Ravender is selling his house, worth $50,000, for the first reasonable offer.
Marie wants to know what happens at a church christening. She’s disappointed to hear that the baby just has a little warm water brushed onto her forehead and her parents and godparents promise the church to bring up the future person in accord with the church’s wishes. In return, the church’s authorized representative confirms the child’s name. Describing it that way might perhaps convince Marie not to carry out her plan to undergo the ceremony herself in five years. And that was, in fact, the whole procedure after the service in St. Peter’s Church in Jerichow on March 19, 1933. Part of the congregation remained in their seats through the sleepy sound of the organ music with which Jule Westphal, the organist, was trying to usher them out of the house of God; some even moved up to vacant front pews set aside for the nobility, under the disapproving eye of the verger who, under Methling’s regime, would have been allowed not only to intervene but also to collect the admission fees. Ol’ Bastian was not happy with the new pastor. Pathetic, this Brüshaver. Warming up baptismal water, have you ever heard of that! Mollycoddling from the get-go, not to mention the extra work for Pauli Bastian in his declining days. Pauli kept his face stiff as a board while the Cresspahls and Papenbrocks walked up the center aisle with the baby, and the wrinkles that developed on his face, centered on the midpoint of his nose, formed a pattern not suitable for small children. Cresspahl carried the child high on his chest, very tense until he could hand her back to her mother at the altar. The women were all in high spirits. Louise Papenbrock had nodded more gently when she found herself in the front pew next to Dora Semig—born a Köster, after all, from Schwerin. Semig’s wife watched everything being done to the child as though everyone were bent on making her laugh and on the point of succeeding. Hilde Paepcke couldn’t keep her head still: she looked up at Cresspahl, made signs with her eyes and her lips to Lisbeth, not as an older sister but as a child playing along. Hilde Paepcke was rehearsing the christening ceremony for the child she had in her own belly. Lisbeth, my mother, your grandmother, didn’t reveal much, but it was clear from the way she looked at Brüshaver and from her eager and timely joining in the prayers and responses that she was celebrating a very special occasion, and that she had gotten everything she wanted. About Louise Papenbrock it could be said without reservation that she’d lost control of her face, and that possibly the spectacle was letting her retouch her memories of the earlier christenings in her life, at least make them more bearable. Ladies such as Käthe Klupsch, for whom the occasion was proceeding nowhere near tragically and tearfully enough, we will not discuss. Cresspahl’s expression showed nothing. He had his work face on. The other godparent, Arthur Semig, Dr. Vet. Med., held his hands loosely clasped over his belly and was unabashedly delighted. He stood next to Lisbeth Cresspahl and looked down at the baby’s head turned toward him, at the eyelids twitching in half sleep, the lips opening and closing with
relish, the cat’s-paws in the corners of her eyes, you call them crow’s-feet, and the grown man was so besotted with the baby that he crinkled his nose as oblivious to his surroundings