by Uwe Johnson
She was so out of sorts that she caught herself doing things she hadn’t meant to. Once, in the middle of the day, she took off every stitch of clothing she had on and adjusted the large mirror in the sitting room so she could inspect herself from head to toe. There were no more visible signs, almost, that she’d had a child. She had borne the child for Cresspahl—that was one of the promises she’d kept. Why wasn’t that enough?
She had let Cresspahl have Semig as the child’s godfather. Why wasn’t her consent enough? Now Cresspahl was sitting pretty in England and he wanted her to defend the Semigs for him. Yes, since April 11, the day of Semig’s dismissal, she had shown up at his door only once. It wasn’t that the looks from his neighbors in the Bäk bothered her; it was Semig’s house. It had always been quiet. Clearly the Semigs preferred not to have children; now, in addition, there was no more bustling from the maid in the kitchen, no more knocks on the door, rings from the telephone, clatter of carts and carriages driving into the courtyard. And Semig had a way of coming out of his consulting room to the parlor for ten minutes, to be polite, and then sitting there without saying a word, gazing absentmindedly at his knit fingertips. He looked strange, too, since he’d shaved off his little rectangular mustache. As for Dora, the Köster side kept coming back out, however benevolently the visitor tried to shrug off the injustice against Semig as an injustice; she averted her gaze like an old schoolmarm deciding not to notice a child’s unimprovable behavior. Meanwhile, they could hear Semig pacing back and forth in the empty office in the next room. Lisbeth had only hinted that Cresspahl might buy the car that had just been delivered to Dr. Semig and that he now had no use for. The Semigs interpreted everything as pity, whether a visit or an offer to help. They were so focused on their misfortune that they didn’t even listen to you. Cresspahl imagined it would be easy to continue to deal with them, and simply the right thing to do. He had no idea how hard it was for her.
Earlier, praying had helped her. Now she had her St. Peter’s Church right there and could sit in her usual place, and still she didn’t come home comforted afterward. Her requests were specific and disheartened. She prayed for Pahl to stop throwing himself at the Nazis with his tailored uniforms at discount prices for friends. She prayed for Edith to be able to stop stealing from Louise Papenbrock’s pantry. She prayed for Käthe Klupsch to stop bad-mouthing the Jews so blasphemously in the shops. She prayed that she wouldn’t have to use words with Cresspahl anymore, that he would once again understand her nonverbally. She prayed for help, prayed to be able to do what she wanted to do.
And that you’d live, Gesine.
You think I don’t have an answer for that? I do, you know. I just won’t say it.
If she’d known Brüshaver, the new pastor, better, she could have gone to him and asked him outright whether the church perceived sufficient wrongdoing to justify living in another country. Then she would have forced herself to think: Brüshaver says so too. Brüshaver had been preaching repeatedly in recent weeks about a Christian’s duty toward others as toward oneself; she didn’t catch the hint in that. She would have gone to see Methling, but Methling had aligned himself with the new regime. And it was too hard for her to think of Methling and the church as separate.
She didn’t mean wrongdoing in a civil sense. Even Papenbrock might wander aimlessly around the house muttering to himself about bankrupts getting rich on other people’s property; that was wrongdoing on the part of the authorities, hence justified. She meant injustice, the wickedness that the commandments prohibited and the Bible said would be punished.
And Cresspahl had such the upper hand! His opinions about the Nazis had been proven right, one after the other. Except that they would start a war. That was just crazy, carping about the militaristic name of the new union, the Labor Front. It’s just that Cresspahl wanted to sit out the wickedness in that England of his solely so as not to share the guilt for it. Was that not selfish? Could a person leave his own country just to live in safety? How could she have put that in a letter to him?
She sometimes managed to work herself up into feeling angry at Cresspahl. Whenever she’d gone to other men with her wishes, whether possible or deliberately unthinkable ones, she’d always been able to choose, then and there, between renouncing either her wish or the gentlemen’s future company. When she’d told eager young Herbert Wehmke, all of eighteen years old, that he should just abduct her out the third floor of Papenbrock’s house, she knew he would make his exit in a hail of sparks. From Cresspahl, too, she had demanded something he couldn’t easily do, but Cresspahl had listened to her and dragged her by her own wishes into a situation she was partly responsible for. He refused to accept sole responsibility himself. Maybe that was respect for her, but it was too much to ask of her. Cresspahl wanted from her no more and no less than that she wring the neck of every last one of her reasons and come to England with the child. Sometimes she felt like it was possible, and not even the Jerichowers’ talk could have held her back; then it occurred to her again that she would have to swallow some of her pride.
They had agreed, of course, to a separation until November; she had insisted on it herself, so that she too would have a sacrifice she could point to. But for Cresspahl actually to not come for a single visit in the meantime, that was something else. Maybe there were business reasons and whatnot; to her it seemed like pigheadedness.
By late June, Papenbrock had gotten into the habit of shaking his head in any situation and saying: Nah. The first few times he had brought conversation around the dining table to a halt. Then his family came to understand that it was merely a way for him to collect his thoughts. For Papenbrock was no longer part of the power structure. The offices of the German National People’s Party had been occupied by the police and searched, exactly like those of the Communists and the Social Democrats; on June 21, the party dissolved itself, and on the 29th, Hugenberg left the government. Papenbrock’s talking to himself, his distracted behavior, made Louise very worried. She tried scolding him, in a playful way she had long since unlearned, and sat there stiff as a board when he unexpectedly stopped behind her chair, put his hand on her shoulder, and moved it back and forth a little. He stared into space, ignored the others at the table. The gesture had signified more than the usual consideration. It had seemed almost tender.
In early July, Papenbrock got a phone call from Schwerin. In Berlin, in the River Dahme near the Grünau ferry, several bags of dead bodies had washed up. One of the bags had contained a man by the name of Johannes Stelling, beaten to death. Johannes Stelling had previously been the governor of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
Papenbrock didn’t promise to attend the secret memorial service for Stelling; he did call his children in from the street.
Horst Papenbrock showed up to lunch and his suitcase was standing in the hall, packed. Horst was ordered into the office. Papenbrock screamed at him for half an hour, just as a precaution. That afternoon Horst was on his way to Hamburg and Brazil. He hadn’t put up much of a fight. When he said goodbye to the family, he’d seemed strangely relieved.
Lisbeth wouldn’t have minded if Papenbrock had ordered her to leave for England. But Papenbrock never thought about his daughters’ wishes he had already granted. Lisbeth had things the way she’d wanted them. And he had no intention of meddling in Cresspahl’s affairs.
That left Hilde. For the time being, Hilde’s place was here in the Papenbrock house. She was too frivolous for these times, and Alexander Paepcke needed something substantial to show for himself before being allowed to come take her away again. Late that afternoon, Papenbrock had telephoned Krakow; the next morning, Hilde was in Jerichow.
– Y’learn somethin new every day: Papenbrock said over breakfast to his two daughters, a bit sheepishly. He wasn’t entirely happy to realize that his children would rather be given orders than make decisions for themselves. But he was content at least to know it now and willing to accept it as part of who the children were. He considered it a characteristic
of theirs; it didn’t occur to him that that was how he had raised them.
“Hilde and the baby and I went to Rande for a swim”: Lisbeth Cresspahl wrote to her husband in England. “They had some unemployed people shoveling new sand onto the beach, it’s almost like Travemünde there now. . .”: she wrote.
November 26, 1967 Sunday
Yesterday morning James Looby, twenty-two, a college student from Bayonne, New Jersey, went for a walk in our neighborhood. On Amsterdam Avenue, at Seventieth Street, he was approached by three young men who asked him for a cigarette. He was a nonsmoker and didn’t have a cigarette to give them. As a result, he got a six-inch knife in his belly. He had wanted to be a teacher.
This morning the subway started running eight of its thirty-six lines differently, and Marie left early this morning to try out the new routes and signage, at least in Manhattan. Unlike the South Ferry, Marie has hardly bothered with the subways. She never reported train dreams; the gray train cars didn’t turn up in her letters to Düsseldorf or even in her pencil drawings from 1962. When she left the house a little while ago she didn’t show any signs of anticipation, just the stoic indifference of New Yorkers who will need to take the subway tomorrow and prefer to familiarize themselves with the new lines today. There may also have been a certain pride in the distinctive qualities of New York, a claim to share in the ownership of this city. Someday, she promised herself, she would travel every subway line—all 238 miles, all 482 stations, day and night—with the single token coin you need for admission into the system, “if I can get up the guts”; this, too, at a point in time that she reserved for herself the right to determine.
When we got here six years ago, her experience with the West Berlin U-Bahn was just enough that she was willing to go underground with me, and also just enough that she didn’t notice the differences between the two systems. The platforms here, which often serve trains on both sides (express and local), at first seemed much narrower than the European ones, so that the newcomer preferred to stand in the middle, out of a ridiculous fear of falling onto the tracks. The stations here have tiled walls, as we were accustomed to, but between the tracks, even where the trains go in opposite directions, there are steel beams, close together and not braced near the ceilings, which at the same time seem to weigh more heavily. The platforms were emptier here; not only did they lack the little cabins for the dispatchers, and thus the dispatchers themselves, but also the city maps and even the timetables, so that the subway schedule seemed plunged into an incalculable arbitrariness and one’s wait for a train was an endeavor without any guarantee of success. Marie, not even four years old, didn’t care about all that; still, she heard the sound of her first train and held her mother’s hand tighter and shut her eyes for a moment when the heavy column of train cars rolled out of the tunnel past her. Then the only things left to learn were that because of her fare category as a young child she had to duck under the turnstiles at the entrances, which she didn’t like doing because she had to let go of her mother’s protective hand, and that the train doors could slam shut without an announcement and without warning, so that a child would have to quickly yank her careless mother in after her. It didn’t take long before she preferred the corner seats, not only because they were near the doors but also for reasons of comfort. And she started correcting my pronunciation of the word subway, as if its fourth letter had never had anything to do with the German w.
We got used to it quickly and had various judgments, or maybe prejudices, to help us too. People had come back to Düsseldorf from trips to New York and had called the conditions in the subway “inhuman,” in general and especially during rush hour. This was not true. Certainly it did happen sometimes that we ended up not only at the edge of the platform but also right in front of the door of an arriving train, and that the people waiting behind us shoved everything before them like some kind of superhuman fist; but the people in the train car gently stepped back and Marie was always given a greater amount of breathing room than she needed, and in any case it was really only in the short rush of getting on or off the train that the riders were tightly packed, not during the ride, when everyone kept their distance, be it ever so slight, even the unhelpfully overweight women, among whom the black women, taking a deep breath and catching and keeping all the movements of their body in a kind of gyroscopic system, were the most graceful. (Amanda is sure that she once ended up with some sperm on the lap of her overcoat in the pushing and shoving. Nothing like that ever happened to me, so her opinion of the subway isn’t something I’m able to share.) For six years now I have spent the minutes shortly before nine in the morning and shortly after five in the afternoon in the subway every workday, and there were only a few occasions when I had to miss out on reading at least something in The New York Times. Let’s hear it for the New York subway system.
Marie calls home the first time from Chambers Street (so she says). It is, in fact, true that the Transit Authority is no longer grouping the subway into the three organizations out of which it was created: the IND, BMT, and IRT, definitively consolidated in the possession of the city in 1940. Our system was called Interborough Rapid Transit; now not even the abbreviation remains, nor the black or dark blue color of its individual lines on the maps. Our favorite trains, earlier named the Broadway and Seventh Avenue line after the streets it passed under, are now called merely 1, 2, and 3 and are indicated on the revised map with the colors orange, light blue, and bright red, easy to confuse, by the way, with the E train in Queens, or the 8, the elevated line over Third Avenue in the Bronx, for anyone who does not have the relationships between the various parts of the city firmly in mind. About Marie, it is safe to say that she has them firmly in mind. “Now I’ll try the Sixth Avenue,” she says.
According to another prejudice carried to West Germany, New Yorkers were always in a terrible hurry, whether on the streets or in the subway. This too was not the case. There is not a single public clock hanging in any of the subway stations, so everyone has to mentally work out his own hurry for himself, without the help of the Transit Authority. Even on the most crowded platforms, people move as though surrounded by a personal radar system, never touching the people next to them; it is so unusual to see someone running that when such a person does approach, a path opens up in the middle of the crowd. In the low-ceilinged passageways under Grand Central Terminal, when thousands of people are making their way to the subway tunnels deep underground, everyone’s slow inching ahead is unpleasant at first, even a little creepy, but soon their patience and discipline make an impression and win one’s trust. And if the streams of walkers under Times Square ever do get tangled up with each other, despite the barriers separating them, the conductors shout only “Step lively!” not “Hurryup hurryup,” and the unruffled black man in the loudspeaker room is as considerate as ever and happy to pronounce his words of wisdom:
Walk, don’t run!
A fall is no fun!
Step lively, ladies and gentlemen!
Watch your step, please!
There is a train due on track 3.
One other prejudice was homegrown, nourished on the hope that possessors of money riding the train, exposed to the calls pleas instructions suggestions offers and threats of the advertising industry as defenselessly as they are in a packed subway car, might cease to turn down the repeated advertisements. I, for one, no longer see the posters. I remember only my first one, from 1961, which asked riders whether they have nine lives like a cat or actually only one life, and then to think carefully about that fact. I do see, though, the embellishments the ads get from the riders themselves, who find the toothpaste smile of a model beautiful only after it has received spots written in marker over the front teeth, or who prefer their photos of aristocratically upturned noses with bushily splayed-out mustaches added underneath.
I call my bank president Henry. What do you call your bank president?
I call him an ass and a son of a bitch.
The hotel we sta
yed in when we first arrived in New York handed out a subway map, compliments of Union Dime Savings Bank, and for six years that map has hung on the wall above our telephone. It’s a bit like a brochure for a nature park. The rivers, the bay, and the Atlantic surround the pieces of land with a dirty pale green; a lot of cheerful forest green is daubed wherever there are parks or even airports or cemeteries, as well as under the compass that indicates twenty-four directions. Across the islands and half islands and over the water, however, run subway lines that are now no more, red and dark blue and orange, prettily knotted together in southern Manhattan and near Jay Street in Brooklyn, awkwardly rounded into curves or even sticking out sideways, almost jerkily, like footpaths in the forest. The sightseeing attractions of the city are almost always printed right in their actual locations (at the time, there was still the electric ferry from Sixty-Ninth Street in Brooklyn to Staten Island—we missed our chance); across the river from us, the map gives not only the state of New Jersey but a place called Edgewater; the approximate shapes of the bridges are sketched in over the rivers; clumsy airplanes hang above the two airports; the statue named Liberty is standing on a sharp-pointed advent star; and, yes, there’s a South Ferry actually setting out from Battery Park, trailing a delicate wisp of white smoke above it. Two extra elements in yellow indicate the offices of the bank that is providing all this information, and wherever the subways and parks leave any free space, the bank has put in cute little mailboxes, in case anyone wants to transact financial business by mail. All this generosity and thoughtfulness has earned the bank not a dime from our household, while we have been given an indelible image of the subway system in our memory. Many thanks, Union Dime Savings!