Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  At the main post office in Richmond I asked for a form to send a telegram abroad and sat down at one of the tables facing George Street and then didn’t know what to write or who I could send it to. D. E. simply observes such occurrences. It’s a single glance, barely perceptible, since he deflects it at once into a careless, pensive attitude. And yet he’ll conceal that he’s troubled. In such moments, he sees in me not the person he wants to live with but someone at risk of going insane. And wants to live with me anyway.

  Write it down, Gesine.

  Mijnheer Hendrik Cresspahl, Amsterdam, 1925?

  Write it.

  That’d be evidence against me, D. E.

  I’ll protect you against such evidence.

  It is not his will he’s asserting; it’s my expressed request. We do live together, in different places. This too he has turned into an arrangement, where his need for perfect solutions overrides my mistrust of settled finality: what was planned as loose has become fixed, and moreover he is ever ready and able to show me that actually it hasn’t become fixed. He does make suggestions, though. One was the excursion to Kilkee, that horseshoe of mostly one-story buildings with rustic facades ringing a patch of captured ocean, with one or two seasonal hotels, a low-lying village with perpetual wind for a neighbor, Europe at its back, the Atlantic before it clear across to the coast of America. At the western end of the horseshoe, on Marine Parade, there was a house standing empty behind its proper middle-class front stairs, walls neatly built around five rooms, protected by the Duggerna Rocks from the full force of the storms. For D. E. it was possible. He could afford to buy it and in less than a year he would turn it into a system of machines serving the occupants’ every need; the local tradesmen, if no one else, would have had nice things to say about us moving there. It would have been forty-five minutes to Shannon Airport, where I would wait once every eight weeks, a wife to whom her husband comes home from work. Marie would have gotten used to a school in Limerick. It’s a quiet place in the fall, in winter, in spring—not even fifteen hundred people live there. A path over the cliff leads from the New Found Out bathing area, a grassy spot from which you can jump almost fifty feet down into the ocean, past the bay, where the Intrinsic was wrecked in January 1836, to Look Out Hill, two hundred feet above sea level. There the seasons would once again teach me the changing colors of water. The winter nights would be very dark and clear. I would come home chilled to the bone from nighttime walks, as I did to Cresspahl’s house. The cities would be very far away; the world, almost. That’s what D. E. thinks: that I need a house of my own. He doesn’t speak the question out loud; we’d simply taken one last side trip before flying home. He undoubtedly wrote down the names of the real estate agents in County Clare, Ireland, and the phone numbers at which they can be reached; maybe he’s still waiting.

  Similarly (I need only say that it’s what I want) he would find us an eight-room apartment on Riverside Drive, facing the Hudson too, on the top floor in fact, and buy it, with whatever necessities Mrs. Erichson is accustomed to. He is free with his money, which is after all sold work—free in a way that is not at all hurtful, although also not unobjectionable. When Marie, after the assassination of President Kennedy, couldn’t find her bearings again in everyday life, he whisked her away from a lunch onto a commuter flight to Washington and came back with a placated child, who now had at least seen the grave. In one of the antiquarian bookseller catalogs that the GDR mails him, I saw a picture of a map that showed Jerichow as a church tower and shipping insignia, and asked for it; I’d meant the black-and-white page of the catalog, but D. E. later hung the expensive colorful and medieval original on our wall. These aren’t gifts. He gives what he gives on condition that it be used and consumed with him, with him there.

  He wants “to live with us.” We are not even from the same place anymore. His past, the people, the country, Schusting Brand the cobbler, Wendisch Burg—he in no way regards them as real. He’s converted his memory into knowledge. His life with other people in Mecklenburg, only fourteen years ago after all, has been tucked away as though into an archive, where he continues the biographies of people and cities down to the present, or else closes the file in case of death. Yes, everything’s still there, and he can call it up at will, only it’s not alive. He no longer lives with it. He’d been in the States only a few years before he started using four dots to indicate ratios in his lectures instead of the German two, a diagonal line for division instead of a horizontal one, as though that was what he’d been taught to do in Wendisch Burg; when he wrote on the blackboard his letters came out the way they do here, fluent, anonymous characters. He is not a good teacher. His lectures fooled the students with their chatty tone; whoever tried to write down what he said instead of thinking it through was lost. D. E. had no desire to commit to anything beyond communicating that this was the known extent of physics knowledge, with the unspoken addendum: That’s the best we can do for now. He endured his students’ questions, their slowness, with a pleasant look on his face, he acted happy to help, but the delay pained him. Incidentally, he had forgotten that there was a guest sitting among the students during the lecture; he had to think his way back to me, even though he’d recognized me. He was respected at the college, and was friends with two or three especially gifted students, who thought they could pick his brain in strictest privacy in the cafeteria. In his field he is most at ease among his peers. His peers not only share his technical know-how and way of thinking—exempli gratia, about whether D. E.’s listening stations in Alaska and Greenland might be designed for other than defensive purposes—they also accept that the weapons systems of the USA are in a different category from those of the USSR, and from that point on his peers are no longer susceptible to any lines of moral questioning. An occasion involving morality was one of the few times D. E. almost flew off the handle. He didn’t quite shout, but his way of speaking turned nasty, arrogant, meant to express contempt. In his view, morality is the business of those who hold power, who are always blathering on about it, and nothing for their subordinates to concern themselves with: their concern is survival. There are people who visibly work for Defense, even if only in the bakeries on army bases—and everyone else is working for Defense, too; the distance between the groups is purely subjective, objectively insignificant. His peers are nonetheless capable of using the case of Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy, to discuss not the phenomenon of loyalty but the psychological knots of the traitor. In addition, they rely on the beautiful certainty that none of them will ever be treated as a war criminal, they all will be handled as specialists: that makes a person more comfortable expressing himself. At the same time: all D. E.’s friends in his field are interested in what the deal is with Socialism. For them it is a theoretical exercise, playing a game with an unavailable alternative; in them the roots of it are not biographical. There must be some marriages among them that were contracted at an age when young scientists join a political party; surely D. E. has analyzed the protests he arranged on behalf of Ingrid Babendererde not only in terms of their consequences but also in terms of the feelings they produced; fundamentally, though, these people want to be presented with a total revolution in the abstract, humanely carried out and humanistic in its effects. This comes out rationally as a longing for a Third Way; it is also no less sentimental than something three of these friends did concerning the Second Way currently on offer: for a year, they divided up among themselves the memoirs written by survivors of Stalin’s gulags, on a quest to find out whether the Soviet secret police had killed the actress Carola Neher themselves or let Hitler’s secret police take care of it. They wanted to clarify for themselves a bit more precisely how they felt about certain claims and a certain silence on the part of the poet Bertolt Brecht. The Carola Neher Club. One of them was Danish. The other lives in England, Prof. Dr. Dr. Harry Wittenberg, from a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany in 1934; he is named in D. E.’s will. It’s an attitude that has long since given up on individual protes
t and thus on any fundamental change in social conditions; it can live very nicely off its proofs and is actually quite a lot like what used to be called “petit bourgeois” thinking, which D. E. jokingly accuses me of.

  He does it jokingly. He doesn’t presume to know me. When I do something he thinks of as particular to me, he smiles in recognition, but openly, not taking observations and secretly tucking them away for later use. If he does have a mental picture of me, it is of little more than my needs (as he understands them). He reveals a lot—all of it acceptable, much of it delightful. He doesn’t discuss Marie’s father with her, or even with me, but he knows everything about Jakob’s life that you can learn from letters to and from friends in Mecklenburg. He spends $70.00 a month on alcohol, damn right, and if you don’t like it you can lump it, and when he drinks alone he punishes himself by serving his Beaujolais chilled. He too has his quirks and prejudices that he offers up as careful observations or unquestionable facts: for example, he calls the DC-8 the most efficient plane in the world, when all he knows about flying is what you need to get a license to fly a single-engine propeller plane. He plays the game you’re supposed to play here, of showing off your money: he shows off a house, a Bentley, but he’s paying for the house in installments and the car is used and he does his flying in borrowed planes. He likes keeping his real assets secret from his neighbors. His behavior is steady and consistent; he doesn’t fly into rages. He has arrogated no habitual rights from his visits to us; he comes as a guest, every time. He’s not jealous: it’s only what goes on in my thoughts that he wants to be the only one, or at least the first, to know. There are many things he is the only one to know. What else does he want? Can’t he rest on the laurels of his famous affairs, and conveniently acquire a family that already has a child, one who already understands him too? He says: No. Am I supposed to do at my leisure, financed by him, what he can’t do: live for one person alone? He would say: If it were up to me. He would even spare me the endless acting of “social life.” He doesn’t even want children from me. If I ended up in a cage with him, at least it would be a cage made to my measure and furnished according to my requirements, down to whatever discretionary bank accounts and credit cards I wanted. The only thing is, why does he need someone in his life?

  Marie could do it. She could stand to live with him in one apartment, in one house. On the Thames promenade in Richmond they were walking on ahead of me like they always do, side by side, without a care in the world. She was not only proud of the black coat with the fur collar that he’d bought for her on Regent Street, she was happy to be seen in the company of this elegant gentleman. They were laughing as they talked, and even the tilt of Marie’s head toward him showed how much she appreciated their banter. Marie walked with her hands clasped behind her back, because that was how he was walking.

  That I believe. The other thing I don’t believe.

  Today D. E. called from the north, on a suspiciously high-bandwidth line that brought his voice right into the room as though he were standing there. He’s in another time zone, and still he caught the exact quarter hour during which our household has been put to bed but Marie not yet. He took his time. He frittered away the minutes with questions about Karsch, about the weather, and the surveillance agency will scarcely have noticed that by the end of the conversation we’d gotten a good scolding. It was a mistake to report the theft of his car to the Newark police, because the license plates were false, obviously, he’d had them changed “where we always get gas.” – Happy Thanksgiving: D. E. says in a friendly voice, while he’s scheduled a holiday trip for us to a gas station across the Hudson. Marie, who ends the conversation, comes in to inform me that in radio lingo Amen is just as correct as Over and out, both with God and with people. Again he’s taught her something new, and something she can use only with him.

  It’s true, we hadn’t looked at the car’s license plates. It’s true, the Mafia has friends in the New Jersey police force. It’s true, yet again he’s thought of everything, and we’d doubted his superintelligence. All of it true, and almost unbearable.

  The government finally admits the truth: that it was keeping twenty-five thousand soldiers ready for the demonstrations last month, to prevent riots in the capital’s slums. There were not only troops to clear people off the streets but giant bulldozers ready to be deployed for that purpose.

  November 23, 1967 Thursday

  It is the fourth Thursday in November, Thanksgiving Day by law in America for the 327th time. But we had things to do in New Jersey and drove in a hurry under the streets upon which, as every year, Macy’s department store has sent its parade marching from Seventy-Seventh Street on Central Park West to Herald Square: enormous inflatable characters of American folklore, from a duck named Donald to a bear named Smokey, held and swayed by children in harlequin costumes, to the accompaniment of loud, raucous music, in order to thank in this fashion the Lord God.

  The Mafia was apparently still dazed by a tax agents’ raid on a phone bank in Brooklyn yesterday, where “Butch” (Joseph Musumeci), under the protection of “Kid Blast” (Albert Gallo), took bets on football, baseball, and New York horse-racing results, to the tune of an estimated $11 million a year. Now those involved have been indicted for failing to purchase a $50.00 federal gambling tax stamp, while D. E.’s car was sitting untouched in Newark Airport, with, yes, false license plates, a bit dirtier and still wet from this morning’s rain. And neither Karsch’s business partner nor the honorable police of the state of New Jersey stopped us as we drove to “where we always get gas.” An old mechanic was expecting us, constantly wiping his shovel-like black hands with two rags yet offering us neither. His main concern seemed to be that we not explain anything to him; he also didn’t let us watch him. After fifteen minutes he drove the Bentley with D. E.’s genuine inviolable plates back out of the repair shed, and even refused to accept a tip for working on a holiday. So much dignity, gravity, and patience in his face—we once took these things as signs of honesty; it’s how he’s reached the age of seventy. When we left he shook Marie’s hand, with a somewhat embarrassed smile, as though wanting to warn her about something, and Marie actually began a curtsy and thanked him seriously and called him “sir.” Sometimes, when I’m not watching, she is liable to treat Negroes in a haughty, imperious way; she doesn’t dare with a friend of D. E.’s. When Mrs. Erichson came to Newark Airport to locate her son’s stolen car with witnesses present, she was a little worried about the lie she was planning to tell the honorable policemen of the state of New Jersey over the phone, because it’s not as natural for her to lie in English as it is in Plattdeutsch, and we didn’t ask her about what this must have recalled to her mind from the early summer of 1933. – It’s always a pleasure to be of service to a true gentleman: the attendant had said about D. E., perhaps as a greeting meant for him. There is no question but that D. E. keeps secrets from us, so now we’ll keep some from him. Mrs. Erichson, in her nervousness, keeps calling us “child,” but the term also applies to her son, the professor and military consultant. By the afternoon we were back on Broadway, the part of it where we live.

  We came up out of the subway on the east side of Ninety-Sixth Street, and I recognized Francine from before. I didn’t know her name. She was standing pressed against the window of a junk shop, looking somehow persistent, as though planning to spend the whole day there, on strangely stiff legs, arms hanging down, not at all relaxed. She kept her eye on the stairs, indifferently, as though just counting people, one by one, uninterested in their individual differences. When she recognized Marie her gaze latched on at once, and her rigid tired face loosened up, prepared to smile. But she waited until Marie nodded to her, and then nodded back cautiously, as if afraid of being pushy. I recognized this look. Often, in the afternoon, around when people are returning from work, this girl had stood at this entrance, almost as tall as Marie, a “colored girl,” and she’d looked at me every time as though she were expecting me, and then immediately turned h
er face away. She walked after me once, keeping a great distance, from shopwindow to deli window across Ninety-Seventh and Ninety-Eighth Streets and across Broadway, and then disappeared, as though she were headed somewhere else after all. Then I forgot about her, and only a few details about her face remained in my forgetting: the color, usually called “chocolate”; the hair, not allowed to grow natural but twisted into strange little braids; the eyes, with a kind of absent look in her open gaze; markedly protruding lips that might indicate sadness, or might not. – That was Francine: Marie said.

  Marie said: