by Uwe Johnson
– She stands there half the afternoon.
– Because she can’t go home.
– At home she’s stuck in one room with three other children, and her mother.
– Two brothers, fifteen and one and a half, and a sister, who’s fourteen. They’re all only half siblings. Her father’s different too.
– None of the fathers lives there. If any of them did the mother wouldn’t get welfare, that’s the law.
– She’s probably there today because it’s a holiday.
– On holidays her youngest brother’s father sometimes comes over and brings some wine and drinks it with her mother and sleeps with the mother in one bed.
– She doesn’t mind anymore, except maybe on holidays. Turkey, pumpkin pie, maybe she doesn’t want to see how they don’t have it.
– Her allowance is twenty cents every two weeks, when the welfare check comes.
– There was also one time when she was standing by the subway station waiting for her own father. She doesn’t know what he looks like, he’s never been back since she was born. She knows his name is Benjamin, and she’s sure she’d recognize him.
– Her mother doesn’t tell her anything about this father. But she blabbed once, so Francine knows that twelve years ago he had a hotel room on West 102nd Street.
– At home she has to do her homework on a tea tray on her knees.
– Her little brother bothers her the most, the one from the fourth father. She has to change his diapers, carry him around, put him to bed.
– Her mother doesn’t take care of the children. She keeps the TV on from morning till night.
– At night, when her mother doesn’t have any visitors, she and the oldest brother sleep in one bed and Francine sleeps in the other bed with her sister and the baby.
– There are only two beds in the room. The older brother has to share a bed with his mother since he tried to do it with Francine’s sister.
– You know.
– He tried to again with her, and his mother beat him. That was a week ago. He hasn’t come back home since then.
– Maybe Francine’s waiting for this brother at the subway.
– But she doesn’t stick poison in her arm like he does.
– He started two years ago when he was twelve and a half.
– Most of the boys are in a gang, they sit on the roofs and do it together.
– Then he taught Francine’s sister how.
– She’s scared now.
– She’s scared because she thinks she’s going to have a baby.
– At first she did it with a friend in the bathroom a lot of times, so she’d have a baby. She wanted one so she’d get her own welfare payments and could live apart from her family, alone in her own room.
– But now she doesn’t want a child anymore. She’s decided she doesn’t know enough she could tell the child.
– Francine says she doesn’t shoot up.
– Francine says there’s a gang of girls in her building that hold a knife to your throat if you don’t want to shoot up with them.
– That’s why Francine likes standing on Broadway, where there are policemen around.
– She goes upstairs only when there’s a grown-up she trusts on the steps.
– But there aren’t many she trusts. There are a lot who’re addicted to drugs, or vermouth, or . . . I don’t know the word.
– It’s on West 103rd Street, right around the corner from us.
– All the apartments have been converted to rooms, with a family like that living in each one.
– The landlord sits in his apartment with the door open. It’s like an office, with a counter. But there’s not a window over the counter, there’s chicken wire. They have to pass him the rent through that.
– I didn’t go with her any farther than that.
– I’m not afraid to go up to her room. We have cockroaches too. I’m not afraid of the older brother either. I’m afraid that the mother won’t be nice to me. That she’ll act like everything’s my fault.
– Francine is doing a lot better in class now.
– I showed her the public library on 100th Street and went there with her because she didn’t want to go alone. The librarian gave her a card right away and said she could read there and write there too whenever it’s open. It isn’t always.
– Now Francine is grateful to me again: Marie says.
“One paratrooper, wounded, fell across the nozzle of his flamethrower, and was set afire,” The New York Times reports from Vietnam. Someday will we have forgotten that we could read this in the newspaper? It is even still real today?
November 24, 1967 Friday
The dollar is taking another beating. In London and Paris they’re buying gold like crazy. Incidentally, The New York Times estimates that America’s private capital invested in Europe since 1958 totals $10 billion, and she describes the spread of American consumer habits from Sweden to Spain. As examples of European influence in the other direction, she mentions the enjoyment of a Château Mouton Rothschild or Spanish Riscal, as well as a certain appreciation for the European obsession with bidets.
After the definitive American capture of Hill 875 in Vietnam, the country’s losses since January 1, 1961, now stand at 14,846 dead and 93,227 wounded, of whom admittedly only 49,312 required hospitalization.
The first documented case of the effects of LSD on a human fetus was reported today. A girl was born in Iowa whose right leg is shorter than her left and attached to her hip at an odd angle; her right foot is also too short and has only three toes. The mother, nineteen, took the drug only four times during the pregnancy.
The Cyprus crisis is important enough to The New York Times for the front page, column eight. She’s put the picture of the Greek tanks above the picture of the Turkish troop transports. Clearly we should pay more attention to what’s going on over there.
Marie does not condone Cresspahl having spent eight more months in Richmond, Greater London. She insists that once people have gotten married they need to live together. Here she has ideas about the way things should be.
Cresspahl had eight months to watch from a distance as the Nazis established their state. He must have followed the news. Ever since he moved to a city he’d read the papers, if in a rural way: only after the day’s work was done, only when he was sure there was no more useful work left to do, slowly, as recuperation almost, with a deep-rooted mistrust that reserved for his own eyes any conclusions about the truth of what he’d read. But he had in fact seen the things that the reports from Germany were telling him. Anything he’d missed in March, the London papers brought him thoroughly up-to-date on. On March 21, the president of the German Reich decreed that Nazi crimes would not be punished under the law. On the same day, he instituted the death penalty for misuse of the uniform or insignia of Hitler’s private army and established special courts. By that point Hindenburg had signed enough; now Hitler could go after the real power of the state. For the Nazi state was not yet finalized when Hitler was named Reich chancellor on January 30, 1933—only his followers thought it was. Others prefer to mark its beginning with the March elections, but Hitler received only 43.9 percent of the votes then, less than half. We would date the introduction of total dictatorship to March 24. On that day, the German parliament, insofar as it was not in jail, passed the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, with which the German parliament renounced its rights and transferred them to the new government. From then on, Hitler could give the force of law to whatever came to his mind, and so he began, already in March, by dissolving the state governments and introducing hanging as a means of execution, effective immediately, and by October 1939 he had increased the number of his laws to 4,500 and was using the parliament as nothing but a glee club, the most costly one in the world, its repertoire consisting of a total of two songs: first, the national anthem of the time, and second, a hymn to an SA functionary who had died from having snatched a whore away from her pimp, that is to sa
y, had laid down his life for Germany. These were the added attractions that the government of the German Reich offered in March 1933 to Mr. Heinrich Cresspahl, Richmond, England, in the event of his return.
When Perceval realized that the master’s wife was not going to be following him back from Germany after a couple of days, and not after a few weeks, he quit. He offered no reasons but also didn’t want to look Cresspahl in the eye. Once he had his reference in hand he simply stopped coming to the workshop from one day to the next. During the three preceding weeks, Mr. Smith had kept him hard at work so that the remaining orders could be fulfilled without him if need be; still, Cresspahl began to miss the boy. Even fifteen years later, he could still tell stories about how Perceval was one of those people who, for all their height, for all the food they ate, kept an angular, bony appearance. Huge ears. Extremely pale skin on his face, through which the blood would rush. When he was lifting something heavy, his whole body looked contorted; he often forgot to use more than strength in his work. His work had to be checked. Maybe he didn’t have what it takes to be an independent carpenter. He enjoyed the work itself less than the praise for having done it—but he had to have the praise. Cresspahl asked around town sometimes, but Perceval hadn’t applied for any jobs in Richmond. His parents came to see Cresspahl and knew nothing of his whereabouts. Perceval never came back. One night in mid-April, though, one of Cresspahl’s windowpanes on the second floor (where Lisbeth had had her sitting room) was smashed in, not without a certain care, but Cresspahl didn’t want to believe that of Perceval. Silent departure suited him better: Cresspahl thought.
In April, the Reich government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which Cresspahl didn’t pay attention to because it didn’t, he thought, affect his line of work. On April 1st, All Fools’ Day in England, the Reich government stationed sentries from its private army outside Jewish businesses in Germany, tried to prevent customers from entering the stores, with boycott posters or by physical force, and photographed them when they came back out. In Jerichow there was a store on Short Street, owned by a Jewish couple (Cresspahl didn’t know the name), which sold work uniforms. Couldn’t he just picture the people in Jerichow standing in a semicircle around the scene, with two unemployed men in uniform at the door and Ete Helms standing between them, making sure, as a representative of the city police, that everything proceeded properly? True, Cresspahl hadn’t been in Malchow for some time, certainly not to go shopping; there might be some Jewish businesses there he wasn’t recalling. Could he have thought that maybe the large photographs in the London newspaper were true only of Berlin, not of Mecklenburg? Attractions of this kind were what the government of the German Reich presented in April 1933 to Mr. Heinrich Cresspahl, Richmond, England, in the event of his return.
Mrs. Jones came from Brixton, unasked, and offered to take over the household, at least until she could find out why the young Mrs. Cresspahl had failed to return with her husband. Cresspahl bade her farewell and put a pound into her hand so nakedly that she never did come back. He went through the rooms with a broom once a week. Wherever the broom didn’t reach—in the curtains, under the cushions—the dust settled in and congealed with grime. It sometimes pleased Cresspahl to think that he could always just chop everything to pieces. Even the windowpanes he’d installed in place of the smashed ones had streaks—he had never wiped off his puttied fingerprints. Cresspahl ate lunch in the kitchen with Mr. Smith, sandwiches from a pub and beer for Mr. Smith, water for Cresspahl. In his younger years Mr. Smith had gone to sea, and one time the crew had forced him to step in for an incompetent cook. Invoking the fact that he had survived the journey, he occasionally tried to do something along the line of bacon and eggs. But he hadn’t learned how to wash pots and pans, and when he ran out of unused receptacles he gave up cooking. It sometimes happened that Cresspahl would ask him to stay after work, for dinner he said, although what he had on the kitchen table was gin. With half a pint in his belly, Mr. Smith lost all his shyness and started talking. He always referred to Perceval as T. P. He said T. P. had actually talked more about the master’s baby than about his wife. – Young blokes like that wanna family: Mr. Smith said, so slowly and clearly that Cresspahl realized how often he must have had the thought. It sometimes occurred to Cresspahl to offer him one of the empty rooms. But Mr. Smith didn’t need a family, and he would get to his feet at around ten, leaving a little something in the bottle. He held it well, at such moments all you could see was that he was compelled to say out loud everything he was planning to do. – Guess I’ll be going now: he said. – Time to be off then: he said. Then he left. At the door, he said: Glasses. Then he straightened his dull metal Health Service frames on his haggard little face. Cresspahl would hear him still talking on the stairs, and it sometimes happened that he would be saying to himself: That’s all right then, Mr. Smith.
In May, the German government repaid the German industrialists’ donations to Herr Hitler with various payments in kind. The government had the holiday of labor celebrated as a Day of National Work, then on May 2 occupied the union buildings. On May 10, it transferred the confiscated funds into its own institution, a thing known as the German Labor Front. The Communists had already been given the boot, now it was the Social Democrats’ turn to get what was coming. They were the only party not to have voted for Hitler’s Enabling Law. Now their having hurried to approve the Reich government’s foreign policy on May 19 availed them nothing. On May 10, their offices were occupied; on May 22, their party was outlawed. That’s how you do it. These were only some of the proposals the government of the German Reich made in May 1933 to Mr. Heinrich Cresspahl, Richmond, England, in the event of his return.
In May, Cresspahl asked Albert A. Gosling, Esq., to the workshop. He tried as hard as he could to tempt Gosling into a fight. He practically shoved the sparse entries in the order book into Gosling’s face; by May, he was already no longer accepting new work. Little Gosling with his big gestures was happy to offset the losses with the savings in Perceval’s salary: What a businessman. Even Mr. Smith, with his morning headache, felt a grin creep over his face and exchanged his wood plane for a very delicate rasp so he could eavesdrop better. Cresspahl pointed out to Gosling the trunks he’d built for himself, waiting next to the door. He didn’t tell him that the costly and elaborately worked chests were meant for Lisbeth’s belongings; he claimed outrageous allowances for the cost of their manufacture under the category: master’s personal needs. Gosling liked the trunks. He ordered one for himself, but made of redwood, with brass fittings and handles. Cresspahl brought up certain things Gosling was known to have said, in front of witnesses, directed against Cresspahl’s way of conducting the business (this he invented on the spur the moment). It turned out that Gosling had in fact been slandering not only the Germans but this one in particular, for Gosling took off his black hat. He hung his slightly overlarge umbrella on the workbench. He held out his hand to Cresspahl. He apologized. He saw the error of his ways. He was truly sorry, especially now that the German nation was showing the world what it meant to put one’s house in order. It was a crying shame, he said, that England had underestimated Mosley. This Mosley was the leader of the British Fascists. Cresspahl gave up on picking a fight with Albert Gosling.
If he could have gotten Gosling mad enough to terminate their agreement, he would have been free then and there.
A week later, Cresspahl terminated their agreement at Burse, Dunaway & Salomon. Now it would be another six months before he could leave. If he was looking for time to reconsider, he’d given himself plenty.
Right, Gesine?
Or was Lisbeth being given time to reconsider?
Right, Gesine?
You still had plans in Richmond, Cresspahl!
Right, Gesine?
November 25, 1967 Saturday
Today The New York Times informs us that yesterday, in Hirschenhausen, West Germany, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein, who planned Germ
any’s 1940 blitzkrieg against France, marked his eightieth birthday. The notice appears at the end of the daily war news from Vietnam.
A coffin from Vietnam was delivered to a Chico, California, couple containing the body of a stranger, not the one they were told it would be carrying: their son’s.
Yesterday at lunchtime, two congressmen went shopping in Harlem and easily confirmed that the supermarkets there do in fact raise prices on the days after welfare payments go out, repeatedly change the dates on unsold packages, and claim that spoiled meat and frozen food that had been allowed to thaw are suitable for sale. Representatives from the chain stores in question claimed again and again that such mistakes were due to “human error.”
What difference would it make if we stopped shopping at A&P?
At the end of April 1933, Dr. Berling told the young Mrs. Cresspahl she could now return to England. He spoke as though he had never advised her husband to stay in the new Germany. He was washing his hands behind her so all she could see of his face were his heavy bluish jowls. She couldn’t prove that he had been so bold as to give advice to a married daughter of an Albert Papenbrock. She was so dumbfounded that anyone could see the opposite of her wishes as reasonable that she didn’t give him a piece of her mind, not even when he said: And give my regards to the old Swede in Richmond! I’ve been to Richmond myself, you know. Bushy Park, the tame deer. . . You’re young, Fru Cresspahl. Make the most of it.
Still, now at least she had something she could put in her letter to Cresspahl. Not the whole conversation, just the regards from Dr. Berling.
She didn’t find much material in the child. She was busy with the baby many times a day, she could spend quarter hours watching this dumb Gesine indefatigably trying to heave her head from one ear onto the other, or blindly clutching with helpless hands at the space above her; on paper this turned into nothing clearer than “she can move more than last week” or “her eyes are sometimes green, sometimes gray.” And the writing made her stumble upon the desire to have Cresspahl see the child growing up with his own eyes after all, and the fact that he was busy severing business ties and breaking up a household in England for her. It wasn’t as if she turned these desires of hers into a conscience; it was just that writing to Cresspahl made her feel uncomfortable.