Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

– You’re trying to blackmail me.

  – I want to come with you.

  – Be brave!

  – I can’t be brave sitting home alone waiting. With you I’d be a little braver. I promise.

  – All right, promise.

  It hadn’t cost much at all: two subway rides, $15.00 for the flight to Jamaica Bay, now $3.00 for the taxi to the helicopter terminal on the West Side, $5.00 for the shuttle bus to Newark Airport. In Newark we sent the extra money home by telegram. D. E.’s Bentley took some getting used to. The first address was a coffee shop in a service center on Route 1, just past Elizabeth, NJ. There really was a slip of paper waiting for us in the phone book. From that point on, it was a compilation reel from the last third of every single kidnapping movie: they sent us back to Newark, wanted to see us in Passaic, needed us to go to East Orange, made us park in front of Newark Airport for half an hour. After a while they decided to phone us at the various meeting points they’d ordered us to. These meeting points were dingier and dirtier each time, more like in the movies. Even Marie started getting a little bored. The men apologized: they hadn’t believed their eyes when they saw the Bentley driving up. They still didn’t know our name. But tomorrow they’d know whose car it was. This went on until early evening. Meanwhile, Marie asked about a christening in Jerichow thirty-four years ago, and the special features of the Portuguese language, and even seemed to be listening to the answers. In Roselle Park we had to go into a bar where female patrons stood out. The barman not only wiped down a table for us but the chairs, too. Disbelieving, confused looks kept coming at us from the bar, where men were hanging fat, stubborn rear ends off their barstools, which they didn’t like having a woman and child look at. Then someone stood up and stalked over to the telephone, stiff as if from riding, then someone stood up listing a little and stared at us, maybe it was him we were there to meet, it wasn’t clear. When the barman whispered a new address to us and we left the watering hole, everyone seemed extremely relieved. In Newark’s riot neighborhood a man climbed into the back of the car. At first he couldn’t believe he’d been dealing with Marie. Then he called her a “fast kid.” How would you say that in German? I wish he weren’t right. It was dark enough that we couldn’t see him clearly. He didn’t speak slang, didn’t even speak ungrammatically. If the voice were on tape, we would have been able to tell that the speaker had been raised by Italian parents; in the flesh, aimed at the back of our necks, the voice was nondescript, unremarkable, like any other from the neighborhood. The man had been sent by Mr. Karsh. It was a real transaction. No, Mr. Karsh hadn’t been kidnapped, not at all. He had gone to where he was now of his own free will, on his own two feet. He hadn’t even been specifically invited, and had since had his impolite, practically improper behavior pointed out to him. Mr. Karsh had asked permission to make up for the discourteous impression he’d made. A figure had been named. Mr. Karsh had accepted the price. It was a one-time transaction, which couldn’t be carried out without the consent of all parties.

  – Do you have any problems with that, lady?

  – None at all: Gesine said.

  – How about you, young lady?

  – Of course not: Marie said. – But I wish you’d hurry up. Tonight’s a school night.

  When the man in the backseat had counted out the bills, he stuffed them into the envelope, tucked the flap in again, and said: Not enough.

  – What do you mean not enough! Marie said. She acted outraged. Earlier, she’d had her doubts about whether the situation would all work out. To her $2,000 seemed too low a price for a living person, and she’s right, such piddling sums are unusual in this line of work. Now all she showed was anger at someone not sticking to an agreement.

  – We had expenses: the guy said. Phone calls, gas . . .

  It added up to another $13.00. Then he gave us a key and a location. The place was a half-burned-out row of stores in Newark. The fires during the riot had eaten away the plastic blinds, the store signs, the neon tubes and surfaces with the names of the stores, and had blackened the facades. The door was to a barbershop between a coin-operated laundromat and a smashed-in liquor store. The key fit. The smell of ashes and charred wood had revived under the dampness of the evening. Inside there was nothing recognizable. We were walking on shards of glass. When Marie ran back outside the glass crackled as though someone else was there. She relies completely on D. E.: if she needs a flashlight, he’ll have one for her. When the light went on in his car, its outline seemed to give a comfortable stretch and look bigger. The only functioning car on the whole desolate street, it looked undefended, undefendable. Marie came back with, yes, D. E.’s flashlight. She found the door to a back room. Here the windows weren’t broken yet, and the air was stuffy from heat turned up too high. Here, in one of the two barber chairs, someone was lying tied with straps around his chest, waist, and legs. They had leaned the chair back as far as it would go and raised the footrest. It may not have been too unbearable for someone used to sleeping on his back, if not for a whole day at a time. It was one of those situations where for a moment I can’t move. I want to keep moving, but that makes no difference. The person in the room wasn’t moving, and our entrance hadn’t been especially quiet. Marie, in her rage, was not at all careful when she tore the blindfold from his eyes. That woke Karsch up.

  He was ridiculously shamefaced during the whole drive back to Newark Airport and the Manhattan bus terminal. When we parted, he tried to apologize. We couldn’t accept that. He tried to thank us. Marie couldn’t accept that.

  – I didn’t do it for you! Marie said.

  Now it’s almost eleven the next morning, and now it’s over. Now the Newark police are looking for D. E.’s car, which Mrs. Erichson reported last night as having been stolen from Newark Airport. The airport is not where the police will start looking.

  Now comes Karsch’s call from London. Karsch is calling from a hotel on Gloucester Road, near the train station through which the line to Richmond upon Thames runs. Not only Karsch would be safe there.

  Now the chauffeur from the Italian delegation comes and talks with Amanda to arrange a personal meeting with Mrs. Cresspahl. Again he gives no indication of being accustomed to entering entirely different sorts of buildings. He shows no sign of recognition. His gestures are so formal that he gets in his own way. He holds his cap under his arm in the vicinity of his heart, which makes it hard for his other hand to pull the impressive-looking envelope out of his left pocket. Amanda, outside, can follow the scene perfectly from her sideways-facing typewriter desk. Her eyes blink and twinkle with amusement. The envelope contains a personal check from Dr. Pompa for $2,000 and not a penny more. Gentlemen pay their debts.

  Now the clock in the Commerce Department in Washington, which records a new citizen of the United States of America every 14.5 seconds, advances a step. Now it’s up to two hundred million.

  November 21, 1967 Tuesday

  The New York Times praises the reaction of the nation’s financial markets to Britain’s currency crisis, speaking of a remarkably cool and orderly performance. Chicago’s largest bank has raised its minimum rate by 0.5 percent, to 6 percent.

  It wasn’t eleven o’clock yesterday after all when the clock in Washington counted the 200 millionth US citizen. Officials slowed the count by three minutes to make sure that the president would be on hand at the right moment. In any case, the number was already too low. Since 1960 at least 5.7 percent of the population have been missed, among Negroes probably closer to 9.5 percent. To be on the safe side, The New York Times also alludes to the 790 million mainland Chinese.

  So, it was Potsdam Day, March 21, 1933, a Tuesday, when a madman named Hitler humbly bowed and accepted the German Reich from an old field marshal, and when Cresspahl returned to Richmond in South London. What a fool. Hopefully he realized right away what he was leaving behind.

  – People aren’t supposed to insult their own father: Marie says.

  – You’ve seen Richmond.

>   – I didn’t think it was all that: Marie says.

  We’ve seen it. It was a London November. What else do we remember? We arrived from Geneva, and Marie let her pleasure in being back among English speakers distract her so much that at Heathrow she tried to board the bus to the Air Terminal from the right-hand side. It was then explained to her. In the city, we searched Victoria station for the spot where Lisbeth Cresspahl dealt with an English baggage handler for the last time, in January 1933. D. E. offered to ask the station manager for information and was already on his way when we called him back. I didn’t need to know it that precisely. We had lunch on the first (the second) floor of the station, and again D. E. tried to help, by dragging Marie into a discussion of the British coinage system. I had all the peace and quiet I needed to look for my mother in the dining room. I didn’t find her.

  What else do we remember? Marie compared the London Underground to the subway system she thinks of as hers. She thought these escalators went down too far, and she felt claustrophobic on the trains because the tunnel arches are so close to the roof of the train car. The next evening, D. E. flew in from his radar conference in Brussels and moved us into one of his hotels, an American one. There we saw Herr Anselm Kristlein face-to-face for the first time. We had long thought that surely the British give poor foreigners a place for the night only when the queen is out of the city; otherwise how could she enjoy a peaceful night’s sleep! But the queen was in the city.

  We rode the District line to Richmond, first through an open stone cutting alongside brownish dusty cables that looked as if they’d been laid out in a calmer time, sixty years ago, and not patched up of necessity after a German bombing. Then the light from above ground came into the train, etched black and brown in the colors of an English November. The skyscrapers had to be thought away; my parents hadn’t seen those. The posters rode stiffly next to the changing pictures in the windows: Barclays and Midland banks carrying on a stylized war against each other with their just barely ethical promises. Were those barges on the Thames? Fog. I could have had the order of the stations memorized: Ravenscourt Park, Stamford Brook, Turnham Green, Gunnersbury, Kew Gardens, Richmond, and back to Upminster. Instead I had to buy a street map in Richmond; I didn’t even know whether Cresspahl had turned left or right from the station. The woman in her kiosk called me “Dearie.” Cresspahl had turned left, crossed the railroad bridge to the Quadrant, then turned onto Sheen Road, possibly taking a shortcut through Waterloo Place, past the frugal old stone cottages where he could have awaited his death. Lisbeth Cresspahl could have waited in one of the little houses on Sheen Road, all identically two-story with the same double bay window requiring a roof of its own; if worst came to worst we might have found her in William Hickey’s old age home, just before Manor Road branches off to the left and to where her husband had once had his workshop. Cresspahl never grew older than seventy-four, we know that, but she could have survived him here, and one of these red columns with the handleless pot lid is where she might even now have been mailing letters to New York: Dear Daughter.

  The English would’ve stuck us behind barbed wire before we knew it, dear daughter.

  Only for seven years.

  When they came to get Herr Mayer a second time, to send him to the internment camp, he excused himself for a moment and went into the next room and

  I don’t want to hear that.

  Because that’s what I did?

  Would you have done it in Richmond, too, over a few years in an internment camp?

  I didn’t live long enough to find out, daughter. I can’t know that, and I can’t promise that.

  We were traveling not alone but with D. E., and at first he turned the expedition into a thorough sightseeing tour of Richmond, showing us around the Green, to Maids of Honour Row, the Old Palace, Ham House, all elegant sites for the nobility and for culture. My parents would have avoided such places. So then he stuck to the middle-class parts of the city. He didn’t ask his questions out loud, he only inspected me sidelong as though by now I knew all about the restaurant in the Tower House by the bridge, so weather-beaten that it looked as if it were unsuitable for customers even thirty-five years ago, let alone for customers like my mother. On the river path he took Marie and walked up ahead, hand in hand, occupied with each other; he turned half around as if only to make sure I was still with them. It’s possible she walked here, in the winter of 1932, carefully shepherding her heavy belly through the excited children watching a diver at work. The river path was totally empty, the shrubbery bare. There was still a Gosling’s department store, on the corner of King Street. The Wright Bros. shop had the same phone number as back then: RIchmond-3601. I would have preferred to keep walking past Short’s Greyhound Restaurant, but the address, 24 George Street, had been recommended to D. E. All the postcards of Richmond show summer conditions: clouds of lilacs on the steamer landing, dollops of foliage bursting forth from the grand houses on the water side of Hill Street, old people in beach chairs on the sunny lawns beside a greenish Thames, Sundayish bustling around the Castle Restaurant building, as colorful as a circus on the other side, but in reality standing bare in the wind, huddled shivering under its threadbare colors. I didn’t see any of that. What Marie remembers best from Richmond is a large barnlike dollhouse in a store on the corner of Paradise Street and Church Walk, and it wasn’t easy to stop D. E. from buying it and sending it to America, for many pounds, $220. Wherever we went, the locals took us for tourists from the US of A. Two elderly women, retirees, were sitting by the window of a Chinese restaurant on Sheen Road and bantering easily with the owner, who was carrying a two-year-old boy on his hip. She might have tried Chinese food in her old age, too. She might have sat by the window like that, eventually with friends in Richmond after all, whiling away the day. She would have learned to pronounce tea as “tiyee.” The Parish Church might have worked out, in the end. I would have had the same red knees from the constant river wind as all the other girls walking to school in the city, in knee socks even in winter. I would have been a different person, except for my name. I wouldn’t be German; I would talk about Germans in the plural, as foreign, distanced. I would bear the guilt of a different nation.

  At first it was hard to find. Reggie Pascal’s workshop couldn’t have been on Manor Road. Single-family houses dawdled behind neatly separated front lawns all the way to the rail line, barely startled by the cars driving past. Chicken-wire gates with large red circles in the middle, going up and snapping down like a trap, barricaded the street from the rails. A narrow footbridge had been put up over the rails, and from there you could see it. Reggie Pascal’s workshop could have been in the triangle of land formed by the District line, the Southern Railway, and Manor Road, across from the gasworks. Maybe everything from before has been torn down. When Cresspahl gave up the business they tore down all the old buildings and yards where the Baltic Timber Company now sells hard and soft woods, by the yard too, inquiries welcome. If I’d grown up here it would have been in the odors of wood and gas, not mixed together, each in its place. At fifteen I would still have been jealous of the people who could live in the tiny “Railway Cottage” on the other side of the tracks. This would have been one of my most tenacious memories: standing on the footbridge over the Southern Railway, above the rattling trains, spitting affectionately onto the roofs of the train cars. I would come back and I would have to look every time to make out the gasworks boiler that had seemed so enormous to the child. They’ve painted it in the meantime. I would come back to Sheen Cemetery, very grassy in the northern part. There would have been places there among the flickering white of the skimpily carved crosses and figures. If they had died here, then here is where I could have visited my parents. If they had lived here, we would have spent more time together alive.

  – I didn’t think Richmond was all that: Marie says.

  November 22, 1967 Wednesday

  The American commander in chief in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, pred
icted a steady decline in the strength of Vietcong guerilla forces but did not want to forecast a military victory “in the classic sense”; in the battle for Hill 875 near Dakto, he has lost 239 men since early November, the North Vietnamese 1,181 (estimated). And Mr. George Stroup of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has disowned his son for defying the draft; he would prefer that this young man no longer go by the name that his father bore as a fighter pilot in World War II.

  Hippies have a house in east Denver and call it “Provo,” meaning to suggest that they are provoking the Establishment. There, Carol Metherd, twenty-four, cut the heart of her two-year-old son, William, out of his body and inserted into the cavity a soft-drink bottle with a broken neck. She was said to be under the influence of drugs; she wouldn’t talk but only stared at the wall.

  A trip with D. E. runs smoothly, like clockwork, including the one to England and Ireland and back, in a year before this one. Give him your plane tickets and he’ll recalculate the fares, and it has been known to happen that an airline had to cough up $2.00 in reimbursement. Let Marie mention something about an evening in “the Rainbow” on the sixty-fifth floor in New York, and the next day will find her high above London having lunch in the restaurant in the Post Office Tower without having suspected a thing even at the foot of the building. The child likes to be surprised. While Marie was still busy with her friends in South London, the breakfast conversation turned to Cresspahl’s time in the Netherlands, and three hours later we were walking down Amsterdam’s Brouwersgracht; not once had we felt rushed; and he paid not with his credit card but by changing tickets that could be changed only with true generosity. Let slip something about a hotel near St. Stephen’s Green, neither whose name nor whose address you can remember, and there we all were in Dublin the next morning with the porter greeting him by name. He gives tips, not too extravagant. And that is how we traveled through Ireland, and the suitcases were always on the platform, the trains about to depart, the taxis waiting at the door. D. E.’s way of doing things is not even expensive. He doesn’t rent a car to take us from Cork to Cobh, he avails himself of the little railroad plodding along the River Lee to the international port—the thing is, he knows it exists and its schedule too. (A foreigner disappeared while we were there, and The New York Times reporter described not only the search efforts carried out under the supervision of Detective Thomas Shean but the Lee, “which provides a scene of romantic beauty.”) In Limerick, we had our third morning free, and D. E. took us to a place called Kilkee, built around a green bay harbor on the Atlantic, and still we got to Shannon Airport in time for his two bottles of wine over lunch and a conversation with a customs official about the prospects of a Third World War (the man would bet on it). Then we took off, and the plane was in fact a DC-8, and there were only five passengers on board besides us, so a crash would have hardly been worth it, and nine hours later we were back home. Marie likes his style of taking care of others. Someone else, even if tricks like this fulfilled their unspoken wishes, would rather be permitted to watch how it’s done.