Anniversaries
Page 41
And Gosling was curious. He saw the German waiting at the Richmond station for a train into the city and boarded and went north to Seven Sisters Road and followed him into a side street where the German rang the doorbell of a single-family house. The German came back after such a brief exchange of words that Gosling didn’t expect much of a haul when he went up to the door himself. A woman opened it, someone renting out a room who might well have earlier lived alone in the once stately building, and Gosling always thought people in trouble were the easiest prey. At first she refused to answer his questions. Gosling gave her to understand in no uncertain terms that hindering a police action would make her punishable by law. Now the woman was positively eager, and if she did hesitate, Gosling had only to take his accent up a notch and snarl a little more sharply.
The foreign stranger had asked about a Mrs. Trowbridge. It was the first time he’d come here. Mrs. Trowbridge had taken two rooms upstairs in September 1931. She had moved out when the other lodgers complained about her baby’s crying. A lady, a considerate, unassuming person, but with a baby that did make a fuss sometimes. And Mrs. Trowbridge’s husband? Mrs. Trowbridge was a widow. And where had she moved out to? To relatives near Bristol, but she’d left no address, and why would she, she’d kept to herself so much when she was here.
Gosling would have been less disappointed had his criminological skills sufficed to prompt him to ask about the German’s reaction to this un-informative account, which was not in fact uninformative. As it was, he didn’t find out for the time being that Cresspahl, clearly stunned for a moment, had said: What baby? What do you mean a baby?
That was in July, while the light was still pure white, without the brownish tinge that August’s withering vegetation imparts to the landscape.
November 28, 1967 Tuesday
The New York Times still can’t let go of the cataclysm she understands the changes in subway service to represent. On the front page, admittedly at the bottom, she presents no fewer than three photos of confused-looking passengers, each with an intentionally humorous caption, for instance the one in which a train driver can give other people information but has to think twice about his own route home. She quotes a senior official of the Transportation Authority who’s pleased that there are now only 105 to 110 riders per car in some trains, where before there had been 180 to 212. That’s not the only reason she quotes him. He also invoked the concept of “a comfort level” of 180 passengers. What might that mean? A “comfort level” in the subway is “when a man standing can read The New York Times”: so reports The New York Times.
Yesterday a representative of the Dow Chemical Company, speaking to an audience of students in Washington Heights, defended the manufacture of napalm and the act of supplying it to the US government. First of all, the spokesman, Dean Wakefield, does not consider the war in Vietnam to be, “on the whole,” a moral problem. Dow Chemical was merely fulfilling its responsibility to the national commitment of a democratic society (in Vietnam). In any case, the chemical agent is so simple to produce that the army could make it itself. (The New York Times explains what napalm is.) When asked his views about the Krupp family, who made munitions for Nazi Germany, Wakefield called them “bad people.” To the question of where he gets the moral standards by which he can pass moral judgments on businesses, Mr. Wakefield replied: From history. “From history.”
It’s been a long time since we’ve bought any household products made by Dow Chemical Company. But are we supposed to stop riding the railroad since it profits from the transportation of war materiel? Are we supposed to stop flying on airlines that take troops to Vietnam? Are we supposed to not buy a single thing because that generates a tax, and we don’t know what that tax money will eventually be used for? Where is the moral Switzerland we can emigrate to?
The mail today consists of a letter with very large stamps. Depicted on each is an oak tree along with a man holding a book. The Jerichow postmark is missing the w. I lived there for ten years. Is that a possible place to go back to?
“WORKERS’ SEASIDE RESORT—RANDE
Municipal Council
35 National Unity Street
Telephone: JErichow-2-55
November 24, 1967
RE: Your inquiry dated August 20, 1967—Number of Jewish guests at the resort in the years preceding 1933
Dear Fräulein Cresspahl!
We are compelled to begin our response to your inquiry by clarifying that we know you are a citizen of the German Democratic Republic. You are the daughter of Heinrich Cresspahl (deceased) and the owner of the property at 3-4 Brickworks Road in Jerichow where he lived until his death. You are still registered with the police as resident there, having failed to file a change of address with the authorities, as we can clearly see from the file on our desk.
Surely you understand how unpleasant it is to receive a letter from you from the United States of America, a country that is conducting a ruthless war of extermination against the brave Vietnamese people—a letter from a citizen who has not only abandoned her homeland, at a time when it was forced to fight grimly for its survival and the efforts of every individual were vital, but also betrayed Socialism.
This is the background information we must take into consideration in evaluating and responding to your inquiry.
We must first remind you of the special conditions under which the German Democratic Republic lives, labors, and ensures peace. You no doubt know that our country now ranks eighth in the world in industrial production, after almost twenty years of the hard work of reconstruction; you surely realize that deep-reaching social-revolutionary upheavals have proceeded hand in hand with such efforts and that now, for the first time on German soil, in the one and only Socialist state of the German nation, men and women find themselves face-to-face with a life of human dignity. However, one cannot lose sight of the fact that we share a common border with a social system of the capitalist type, in which all the old generals and Junkers, revanchists and warmongers, and needless to say the capitalist Flicks and their cronies have seized power and continue to plot day and night, as is their nature, about how they can damage our new State, now that their efforts to wipe it off the face of the earth have met with such humiliating failure. Such a common border, however, exists not only along the frontier of the territory of the German Democratic Republic but anywhere our enemies attempt to penetrate, even in the superstructure.
Under these circumstances, we find ourselves with the following question to put to you: What is the purpose of Citizen Cresspahl’s inquiry? What can someone who has deserted into the class enemy’s camp want with certain information from the prehistory of the German Democratic Republic, stemming from a time before she was even born? It cannot possibly have to do with any manifestation of nostalgia or personal recollection. The presumption of an objective intention is therefore justified. Our concern is with the possible transformation of this particular data, when seen from a simple social-critical perspective even by the non-Marxist-Leninist-trained eye, into actual occurrences involving the participation and collaboration of actual persons. It would take no special effort, and would acquire a certain fundamental plausibility, for an enemy of our State to undertake to create the impression, by manipulating various pieces of information factual enough in a limited sense, that the persons who exerted through their active actions or omissions an influence on the number of seaside resort guests of the Jewish faith in the years subsequent to 1933, and the persons working shoulder to shoulder today to build the most advanced form of life yet known, that of Socialism, are the same individuals. This in itself would be tantamount to the baseless accusation of latent anti-Semitism in the German Democratic Republic. No support for any such assertion can or will be offered here.
This mentality betrays a lack of the most basic understanding of human psychology, inasmuch as it disregards the thesis of the determination of Consciousness by Being and the principle of dialectical development. A human being under the inhuman Fascist
hegemony who succumbed to the temptation to perpetuate discriminatory acts against Jewish citizens is no longer the same person once he has consciously worked through the fact of this temptation, entirely aside from the fact that in our current system such people are barred from the path to leading functions in the State and party. This is in accord with the policy of our State, which guarantees to all minorities, whether national or religious, treatment in accord with the principle of equal rights. This fact is itself the best proof that the German Democratic Republic is justified in its unrelenting defensive struggle against the racist, supremacist, and colonialist forces of Zionism, which raised its treacherous bloody head not six months ago in the Middle East.
In addition, we wish to inform you that Gneez District Council Department of Statistics regulations prohibit the releasing of isolated statistical information to private individuals, even should that information exist.
Finally, we would like to remind you that your unlawful departure from the territory of the German Democratic Republic fourteen years ago has not released you from the duties and obligations of a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, and that the People and the Government, in accord with the principles of our constitution, expect you to work for peace and mutual understanding among nations, and against the imperialist warmongers.
Yours in peace!
Schettlicht. Klug. Susemihl. Kraczinski. Methfessel.
German Democratic Republic
Gneez District Council
Municipality: Rande.”
Sometimes Marie says about Sister Magdalena: “I wish she were in Jericho!” It never even occurs to her, so firmly does the local language do her thinking for her, that Jericho is a very faraway place, and not a nice one. In English “Go to Jericho!” means “Go to hell!,” and when you merely wish someone were in Jericho you want them to be in the back of beyond, far far away, anywhere but here.
November 29, 1967 Wednesday
Dear Marie.
Today I’m going to try for the first time to tell you some things on tape, “for when I am dead.” You asked me to, seven weeks ago, when we were driving up to Annie’s in Vermont. Remember?
I read the Times today / Oh boy.
Now you have it on tape that I can’t sing. “Like crystal, with a tiny crack in it,” Jule Westphal used to tell me. Then she let me stay in the school choir after all. Second alto.
Eisenhower, if they’d give him another chance, would march into North Vietnam, into Cambodia and Laos too if necessary. He wouldn’t call it an invasion of North Vietnam but “removing a thorn in our sides.” I’m telling you this because you used to think he was cute.
Now I’ll read you something from The New York Times: “Within an hour of sundown the first tremors of trepidation rise in the West 60s, 70s and 80s. Stores are closing by 7 p.m. and within two hours such thoroughfares as Riverside Drive and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues are only fitfully alive or almost deserted.” It’s like that in the West 90s, too, where we live.
As a child I spoke with a slight lisp, and that’s a big help to me now with tee-aitch. Should I try it again? “Removing a thorn in our sides.” Can you hear it?
In Jerichow in the fall of 1956 they treated me like a child, like a crazy woman. As if I didn’t understand their situation
Sometimes I’m so tired I talk exactly as muddled as I think
I don’t think in a very organized way, if you ask me
Where I come from it’s not there anymore
There are still some books from there, you won’t be able to read them. The ones in the glass-front bookcase. Of all the sayings, my favorites were the ones with “sä de Jung”: “. . . said the boy.” The fox and the cat and the hedgehog and almost all the birds could talk too. My very favorite was the one about the boy who sat on his bed and was so tired he couldn’t lie down, so he called his mother and said, “Knock me over.” But de Jung was a kid who had a hard life.
None of your ancestors could write their name. Cresspahl was the first.
The only horses you know are mangy, with flowers on their heads and rotten rags around their feet. We’ve never taken a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park, initially because of money and then because we thought it was for tourists.
In the beginning, you wanted to go back to Germany, believe me. But after just six months you stared at the supermarket girl’s mouth the second time she showed you a one-dollar bill and asked you if you knew the name of the man on it. And you said: George Washington. And she said: Do you like him? And you said: Yes ma’am.
When I drop a plate or a bowl, you say sternly: Watch your language.
Sometimes, when you switch from something you think to something you know, you talk like a horse who sees the door to its stable, and when you talk it’s like you’re going home like a horse with no one at the reins.
Back when you were learning to write you would take the letters I wrote out for you to copy, which I didn’t always close, and turn them into carefully closed ones, extend diagonal lines to join downstrokes, complete loops until the ends met.
Yesterday I explained a photograph to you: Ratzeburg, 1960. – Yes, I can picture it: you said. You sure know how to lay the manners on thick. When I was a girl I wanted so much to increase the surface on which love for one’s mother might grow. I carried around a picture of her from when she was a child. 1913. – Was that her? I asked Cresspahl. In a long long dress. The picture had a very brown tint. I didn’t believe him. She committed . . . She did something to herself.
Your father died before he had any idea of the meaning of the word death. I only know the most necessary things about your father.
And I don’t trust what I do know, because it hasn’t always been there in my memory and then suddenly it turns up as a thought that just came to me. Maybe my memory is only creating from within a sentence that Jakob said or maybe said, might have said. Once the sentence is all finished and there, my memory constructs other sentences around it, even the voices of totally different people. That’s what I’m afraid of. Suddenly my mind is having a conversation about a conversation that I wasn’t even there for originally, and the only truth about it is the memory of his intonation, the way Jakob talked
Today that sentence is . . . that I won’t say it. It’s harmless, no secrets no feelings. It’s the saying it out loud that would make it unbearable, horrible
All I know about your father is what a person can know about the dead. Handball player, Socialist, lodger. After a while things take their places in front of a person and leave only a little space in which the person supposedly lived. I have to reconstruct what he cared about. He cared about his mother, but he left her to me and went away. Your father was good with girls. He was good with old women, good with Cresspahl usually, with cats, with all his friends. Jakob was the only one Wolfgang Bartsch could work a whole shift with in peace. Jöche needs to just keep his mouth shut, Jöche only happened to be there, Jöche was much too young. (In 1956, Jöche spread the story that Cresspahl had been in Jerichow for forty years. You see what I mean.) Jakob could even get along with people who’d totally run out of patience—salesgirls at the end of the day, freight-train conductor women. He was better with me than I am with anyone
If I, . . . Listen Marie.
If I let myself get involved with someone, their death could hurt me. I don’t want to feel that pain ever again. So that means I can’t let anyone in.
This proviso does not apply to a child by the name of Marie Cresspahl.
Sorry.
You know I don’t talk during the day.
November 30, 1967 Thursday
The North Vietnamese army announces: The battle of Dakto in southern Vietnam was a victory for them.
The Mafia used to do it like this: The family buys a normal bar that’s losing money, redecorates it, and brings in a couple of homosexuals to lure the others. For more than a year, however, it has no longer been a violation of the state liquor laws for a bartender to serve a k
nown deviate, and the city’s drinking establishments for sexual minorities have been generating ever more interesting profits. So now the Mafia is starting to sell off the bars to regular operators and invest the proceeds and capital in private clubs for homosexuals who have good disposable income, and it’s enjoying not only greater but quicker profits. It’s easy to recognize plainclothes policemen among these customers. Things are well in hand again, it’s business as usual.
Cresspahl did it like this: He went back to Germany six weeks after the Law to Guarantee the Public Order of October 13, 1933, was passed, which threatened with death or life in jail or fifteen years in jail anyone who acted to introduce into Germany for the purpose of distribution any (treasonous) printed matter with knowledge of its treasonous content, or who distributed such printed matter after its introduction into Germany, or who otherwise abetted in Germany any criminal act of high treason performed abroad.
In his coat pocket he was carrying a newspaper, clearly recognizable as printed matter, which contained the verdict given at the London trial conducted as a counterpart to the Leipzig proceedings concerning the Reichstag fire. One step outside the customs zone in Hamburg and they could have proved it all against him: introduction, distribution, high treason. Not a great way to start providing for the care and maintenance of wife and child, Cresspahl.
I just forgot I had it on me, Gesine.
Thats what you wouldve said, huh, Cresspahl?.
Theyda believed me and the police would have too, and the neighbors cat. You know that.
Cresspahl came within an inch of traveling down the Elbe with three hundred pieces of printed matter in a hidden compartment in one of Lisbeth’s wooden chests, not one piece in his pocket. Susemihl had come to Richmond in all seriousness with the suggestion—innocent, jittery with excitement, enraptured with his clever idea. But he hadn’t concealed the fact that such an errand would be a way for Cresspahl to redeem himself somewhat in his eyes, and he’d shifted too soon from the tone of a younger man to that of someone giving orders, so Cresspahl felt treated like merely a convenient opportunity, someone Susemihl didn’t really care about. Then an argument started, confined to politics because neither of them wanted to get personal. Since it hadn’t helped the SPD that they’d voted against Hitler’s Enabling Law, it made perfect sense that they’d move their central headquarters to Prague plus expel every Jewish member of the central committee. Susemihl refused to believe that. Cresspahl could prove to him that the decree was dated June 19. Susemihl wanted to know why Cresspahl now cared about the Jews. Cresspahl now cared that it was shitty to hang victims of persecution out to dry. Susemihl heard from Cresspahl’s tone, imperturbable and final, that he hadn’t maligned the party inadvertently. He tried to say, with a pale face and strained forgiveness: Cresspahl really didn’t understand anything about politics, fundamentally. This was supposed to lead into his goodbyes, and Cresspahl hit him precisely between his shining, suddenly outraged eyes, and didn’t leave him lying in the kitchen doorway but threw him out into the yard, and the fact that it was raining was fine with him too. There’s a kind of sudden, wide-awake onrush of rage that comes over a person when they’re losing something, when there’s something to be lost, don’t you think, Cresspahl?