Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The sun has withdrawn behind the river and now it illuminates the buildings on the shore from far below, so that they appear like lovely, if unidentifiable, vegetation. Now it’s starting to be too long that Marie’s been gone. Now Marie calls home. The news is that it’s a hard blow for the patrons of the former IND and BMT: their trains stop in stations that didn’t used to be there and don’t stop in stations they always used to stop in and some of them travel on lines they never used to travel on before. There are people standing in front of the new maps in the stations under Times Square and they can’t find a route along which they might get out again and make it home; it’s not only that the trains have been given names like Q J and QB but that you can’t catch them at Times Square anymore, only at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, never known as a transfer point before. A man is standing there in a blue uniform and he is a conductor and his name is Ossi Bell and between one and two o’clock he has given information to forty-three people to try to help them out of their deep confusion. Not that Marie needed any information from him: she has already figured out on her own that the express to Brighton Beach, which used to go via Broadway as the Q, now comes from the Bronx as the D and now we’ll have to catch it at Columbus Circle, and also that the trains to Rockaway Beach, whatever they’re called, still go express only in Manhattan and stop at every station in Brooklyn, and they should have changed that, Marie says. Marie thinks next summer is likely to come around, she is making plans for trips to the beach even if it’s only late November. Now if she wouldn’t mind getting home before dark. If she departs from Times Square now she should be at our front door in fifteen minutes.

  For there is one prejudice about the subway that feels truer, namely that subways are not for unaccompanied children, even a ten-year-old male child, even if he’s been toughened up in the roughest corners of Harlem or the Bronx. This is something Marie doesn’t want to admit. She refuses to acknowledge it and points out that there hasn’t been an accident in the subway due to subway traffic for almost forty years. When I encourage her to be a little more precise, she rattles off the things she’s learned in an exaggeratedly patient voice, sometimes with a snippy uptick of pitch at the ends of her sentences: She knows how to recognize a junkie. She can tell a drunk without even looking. She will never ever enter a train car that has only three people in it. If there’s a policeman she’ll stand near him. She doesn’t think it’s possible that even one of the two and a quarter million passengers a day who ride the subway might be dangerous, nor that she isn’t brighter and cleverer than all of them put together. She doesn’t see herself. What I see when she’s riding the subway is a skinny little girl in braids and a wind-breaker and white pants perched on a corner seat with her head leaned back against the wall of the train car, taking in with her eyes everything that moves—people, views out the windows, doors, policemen’s truncheons—in such a comprehensive, almost spellbound way that she looks like she’s dreaming. At the very least like she couldn’t defend herself. She doesn’t want to admit it, and even if she does phone home punctually in the intervals agreed on beforehand, she doesn’t want that to be taken to mean that the warnings are in any way justified, but rather that, with infinite pity, she is willing to go along with the whims that overanxious grown-ups can’t break free of. Plus, two years ago it caused a fight between us when she went to Flushing (to see where we’d almost ended up living), of her own accord and without saying anything first, and called home, happy as a clam, from somewhere named Queens Plaza only at a quarter past five. Now we have to speak gingerly on the topic of her trips, in passing, so as not to tear a hole in our domestic peace. Sometimes I almost wish she simply accepted it when someone told her not to do something.

  Marie walks through the door now, eighteen minutes after her call from Times Square, with a copy of the new subway map. And now we’ll see whether or not this is a child who respects tradition.

  Hanging above the telephone is our old map, donated by Union Dime Savings. It is defaced around the edges with scribbled phone numbers, it is admittedly about to tear at the rips it received back when I carried it around New York in my coat pocket while looking for an apartment. But there are also the little symbols on the map that Marie used to mark the stations she’d been to, and circles around the transfer stations, and a few words written in the Hudson, or the Atlantic, or Central Park, in her awkward kindergarten handwriting. Will she sacrifice the old map to the new?

  The new subway map is bigger—an elegant thing, mostly white, sprinkled with a well-chosen mix of eight colors. The shorelines are traced a shade deeper than the blue of the rest of the water, as in a dream, one not entirely devoid of danger. All the routes are laid neatly alongside one another in parallel lines or regular angles or textbook curves, and in proportions that falsely promise balance and completeness. Only the GG line, Queens– Brooklyn, has an unsightly angular bulge sagging out too far to the east-southeast. There seems to be something easy to misunderstand at Grand Concourse on 138th Street: the box indicating the trains that stop there conceals the fact that the 2 curves off to the right—we will have to look closely there many times in the future. Granted, the map is in accord with the reigning graphic-design trends of the moment. Will it end up on our wall? What is to become of the past?

  Marie takes the 1961 map off its nails, lays it carefully in its folds from 1961, smooths the 1967 map against the wall, and pushes the corners until the nails come through. There it hangs, the new one.

  – The other one is to keep: Marie says.

  – To keep for whom? For you?

  – For you, Gesine, good grief: Marie says.

  November 27, 1967 Monday

  A new political party has been founded in West Germany. Its platform calls for West Germany to quit NATO, a plebiscite on recognizing East Germany, and the abolition of incomes not earned by work. The New York Times sees little future in the undertaking, and gives it eleven and a half lines.

  The US ambassador in Vietnam explains: The war in Vietnam is misunderstood.

  Yesterday morning in the Bronx, James Dennis forced his way into the apartment of Wilbur Johnson, made Mrs. Johnson tie up her husband, raped Mrs. Johnson, and took the valuables in the apartment and his leave. Out on the street, he heard his name, looked up, and saw Johnson shooting at him. Apparently he had missed the shotgun in Johnson’s closet. They may not have known each other.

  That was Thanksgiving weekend.

  But in Richmond it was July, and Cresspahl was happy about a large tree in his yard. It was an elm. He’d been worried about it since spring, because it was sprouting a thick covering of leaves in the lower branches, was downright obese around the middle, but the crown had stayed sparse, looking a bit like a shamefaced bald head, and it was too young for that. Then he realized that the tree wasn’t sick, the crown was just exposed to the wind while lower down it was warmed on all sides by the walls of the surrounding buildings. As late as May he’d still been able to see through the branches, but now the tree was in fine fettle and had put forth leaves everywhere. That was the kind of thing my father worried about in the summer of 1933.

  That was in July, and already refugees from Germany were finding their way to the Richmond gasworks. They arrived with greetings from Erwin Plath and a message for Cresspahl’s ears only: When the cow loses her tail, she realizes what it was good for. Pained and dismissive, they cut him short, not wanting to hear why Cresspahl hadn’t paid Social Democratic Party dues for the past eleven years; what they wanted was a bed in a room with a door that locked. Later they told him about a “concentration camp” near Fürstenberg, where a guy by the name of Rahn was known as “Kind and Good Ossi,” because that was how his victims had to thank him for the beatings and punishments they received; one of them knew for a fact that Posner, the pediatrician in Rostock, had hanged himself just the other day, on July 8, “because he was a Jew.” Once they’d managed to sleep off the SA basements and the escape from Germany and the arrival in England, they
stood around awkwardly in the hot courtyard, elderly gentlemen mostly, stiff from sitting at the Mecklenburg desks of the Social Democratic Party, and awkward too when Mr. Smith tried to give them his idea of English. They didn’t stay long. They felt uncomfortable in this Cresspahl fellow’s house—not just because guests start to stink after three days, especially strangers, but because there was no woman there. A woman wouldn’t have put such outlandish food on the table, cold; with a woman, one could have talked about one’s own wife and family back in Germany. Clearly one wasn’t allowed to ask after wife and children in Cresspahl’s house. He was equally vague and grumpy on political topics, be they the British Union of Fascists or the Irish Republican Army. And in the long run you couldn’t just stand around watching him and this Mr. Smith work. Even the noise of their work followed you the whole time you were there. They soon found their way to the North Sheen station around the corner and went looking for their own people in the city, and they came back maybe once, with an entirely different kind of English, and then didn’t come back again. Only one of the first arrivals, Manning Susemihl, never left the house. He had been a courier for the Social Democrat district office in Schwerin—a young man, twenty-five, in whom you could still see the trusting and touching child, a better look for him than the welts across his chubby cheeks that had now healed into whitish scars. Manning chose a different room every day and straightened it up for his comrades, not because he felt any special need for order and cleanliness, not merely to pay for the roof over his head, but to belong under that roof, at least a little. He picked up a broom and swept his way stroke by stroke from the yard into the workshop, which he reached in the nick of time to do something that the master, with the worst will in the world, could find no fault with. It turned out that he didn’t know much about wood but did about colors. They took him on for staining and basically could use him for the mass of orders that Cresspahl had started accepting again so as not to waste all his time until November. Cresspahl paid him something for the weekends. But then he realized that Manning Susemihl had had enough dangerous trips to last a lifetime and was perfectly happy to have found both a countryman and long-term employment among the English (for, unlike what his surname said, he didn’t like new places). Cresspahl forced himself to tell Susemihl not only when he was leaving but also for where. He thought for a while that he could avoid losing this young man. For Manning had given him an accommodating look, with his shining, naively trusting eyes, and walked off with a nod, as if there were at least something about the decision he could understand. He was quieter on the following days, and it was no longer silent contentment. When they sat down together for a meal, he picked at his food, but the bread wasn’t that dry. He turned his face away a little when Cresspahl spoke to him and didn’t look him in the eye when he answered. He left the house in the evenings. Once he’d found another place to stay, he didn’t duck the goodbye. He was embarrassed. Cresspahl saw in him the accusation that he was embarrassed about but couldn’t let go of. – Ive tried it. No way. I dont get what you think youre doing: Manning Susemihl said.

  – Yeah: Cresspahl said. Back then he still had a way of retreating into his thoughts in the middle of a conversation, standing quietly, head to one side, as though he’d forgotten the other person was there.

  Cut your losses.

  They were your losses, Cresspahl.

  Thats what I’m saying: Get out, cut your losses.

  When Cresspahl went to North London one Sunday in July 1933, someone walked and boarded and rode after him, a little gentleman with an umbrella, his summer suit fitting so badly that it was as if he had borrowed it along with its elegant accoutrements. The news that Cresspahl was terminating their contract had hit Gosling like a ton of bricks, or at least the proverbial one brick said to be unjust because it fell on one’s head without warning. By that point Gosling had learned how to add two plus two, and even some odd numbers. He’d imagined Cresspahl safely on the leash that his foreign origin had tied around his neck. He had almost grasped that owning premises and machines, even if he was personally unable to live there or operate them, yielded less cash when simply sold than when people were employed to work there and on them. Sometimes he’d felt himself on the thinnest of ice, namely when he thought of times in which an even smaller number of people might be able to (or want to) buy the products of such labor, but never had he dreamed that the workers themselves, acting on their own faithless accord, might be able to do him out of these regular, and pretty nice, transfers of money into his bank account. At first he had pooh-poohed the letter from Burse, Dunaway & Salomon, income having brought out a certain arrogance in him. Then, with a cold shock of horror, he was forced to realize that this was not the day and age for taking a high-and-mighty tone, at least not for him; not even his wife believed his show of confidence. Apparently it was permitted by God and man, in the midst of plentiful, excessive, practically overflowing unemployment, that the wrong people might lose their source of income. Not only did he now have to expend time and effort dealing with the inheritance from Reggie Pascal, which he’d never had to before, and in a most painful way, namely by thinking about it; he also had to pound an unpleasantly extensive number of London’s pavements with his tender feet, from labor agencies to guild halls to union offices, and the purchases he’d had to make in the surrounding pubs did as little good to his taste buds as to his wallet. It turned out that any master carpenter worth the money had a business of his own, however encumbered in debt, or else had escaped into the furniture manufactories, where no matter how sales declined he would always be the last to be let go, and he did not then want to go back into public commercial life, especially not under the aegis of Albert A. Gosling, Esq., and he told him so too, looking down into his admittedly aristocratic face. He was free to hire any carpenter on the market; any one of them would have been able to use Reggie Pascal’s things to throw together some furniture that could be sold more cheaply than that at the department stores and would fall apart quicker too. But that wasn’t what this business’s clientele were looking for! They wanted their furniture saved, refurbished, improved! And they were capable not only of not paying for bad work but of taking him to court over it.

  It was irritating, insolent, insupportable for this German to take the noose off his neck when it had seemed so firmly in place; it was degrading for a personage such as Albert A. Gosling, Esq., to have to come cap in hand to a man like that. Now the money saved every week on young Ritchett’s former salary no longer seemed like such a good deal. (Every now and then T. P. had slipped Gosling some information about what went on in the workshop, or what Cresspahl had wanted him to think went on there; in fact, T. P. wanted Gosling to finally get the clobbering he deserved.) This Mr. Smith played dumb; he was perfectly capable of accepting one gin after the next, with thanks, and then ultimately losing the ability to speak. (Mr. Smith had listened to Manning Susemihl’s baffled questions about Cresspahl’s mental state in the same sleepy fashion, interjecting an unflappable and uncomprehending “Yes” in inappropriate places for so long that Susemihl finally gave up on him.)

  Cunning as a big game hunter, Gosling tried to encircle his prey by going to Salomon, not to Cresspahl directly, and asking Salomon what these “personal reasons” the German had put forth for giving notice might be. Salomon leaned his head on the inlaid lions on the back of his chair and stared at Gosling with as much amazement as if he were naked, or cloaked in animal skins. Gosling hastened to explain that it wasn’t that he’d wanted to know anything personal about Cresspahl’s reasons, and naturally not the reasons themselves, but only whether his abandoning the lease was in any way due to the person of Albert A. Gosling. Salomon let his simultaneously admonitory and wounded gaze rest for a while yet on the hairs under Gosling’s nose and, suddenly cooperative, proclaimed himself willing to make inquiries. After another while Gosling once again took his seat in Salomon’s visitor’s chair, uneasily stretched out his legs and yet at the same time tried to
sit up perfectly straight. Salomon sat comfortably and informed his client that the answer was in the affirmative. He’d put a consoling expression on his face, which Gosling didn’t trust. The client was eager to learn whether and that this misunderstanding could be overcome. To this question: Salomon informed him: the answer was in the negative. Gosling had him repeat the information several times and now was standing at the desk leaning on his umbrella in such an inner paroxysm of rage that it looked rather like a toy bow. It made no difference, he had no choice but to leave, harrumphing copiously.

  Gosling felt certain that this Jew was in bed with the German, was cooking up something, was of one mind and heart and soul with him, and anything else Jews are capable of. He didn’t dare go see Cresspahl; he didn’t like the idea of having to sit through an afternoon-long reprise of the objections and difficulties of the past few years. He decided to take Cresspahl’s decision as meaning that he wanted to go back to his own country because and ever since that Hitler fellow had started taking such forceful actions, like now with a Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, according to which individuals meeting certain criteria were required to register in person for their own castration. Then again, he didn’t understand this version of Cresspahl with the outlandish idea that someone could give up an economic livelihood for the sake of a patriotic conscience.