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Anniversaries

Page 42

by Uwe Johnson


  Right you are, Gesine. And you dont just know it from me. Youve got some a that yourself.

  Do not.

  No?

  It’s true that Cresspahl missed his chance to personally approve the German Reich’s exit from the League of Nations in the November 1933 plebiscite, and add his checkmark to help the Nazi Party to their 92 percent yes votes in the simultaneous Reichstag election—he happened not to be in the country. He didn’t even bring a child into the world to show his confidence in the Nazi future, like the young parents of 1934; his child had been meant to grow up in England. But the thing is, he did leave her with the Nazis. And when he pulled into Jerichow at the end of November, who was it who’d been named the chief of the political police of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin?

  Heinrich Himmler.

  Didnt you see that coming?

  Nope.

  The orders to triple the size of the army within five years came in April. The first Employment Battle was in September. In October the German delegation left the Geneva Disarmament Conference. In October the army prepared for sanctions from the League of Nations. You’d been in a war. You didn’t want to be in another one. Why did you go back to where there was going to be a war, Cresspahl?

  No one could see it coming yet, Gesine.

  Yes you could.

  Nope.

  Really? Simple as that? Suddenly there was capital punishment for political offenses, but you were planning to stay out of politics anyway? They were heading for another war, but you wouldn’t be called up, you were already forty-five? Maybe they hated the Jews but nothing would happen to them when you were around? They banned all the political parties, and you used to be in one, but maybe it was better with only one party after all?

  Something like that, Gesine.

  I dont believe it.

  Hindsight doesnt just give you 20/20 vision it makes you a totally different and better person, doesnt it. Someone who cant understand other people anymore. What about you, Gesine? Where do you live? Cant you see your own war? Why dont you leave so that you wont be guilty? You know good and well what its like for growing children. Whatll Marie say when she realizes?

  That the dead should keep ther mouths shut.

  Its not enough for you that theyre dead?

  If Im not supposed to say anything, why are you talking?

  I dont want to scare you, Gesine.

  You just dont want to say it.

  You say it.

  You had your wife in Germany and other than that you didnt really think about it.

  Other than that I didnt really think about it.

  Cresspahl went for walks with Papenbrock’s younger daughter, not only at night on the rocky coast near Rande but down the street in broad daylight, arm in arm, and again the people in Jerichow were saying they went together like glue and gloss. One night these Cresspahls couldn’t even wait to get back inside Papenbrock’s house, they were standing in a doorway not a hundred feet away, kissing, and when Ete Helms’s footsteps had fallen silent for too long they let each other go, in no hurry, and calmly wished him a pleasant evening. Ete Helms almost felt like telling them to keep going: he said back home. The stories were good-natured, the curiosity not malicious. Maybe there existed a man and a woman in this world who could do it—live together in a way that was ultimately not possible.

  – Why won’t you go on with the story today: the child eventually says.

  – Czech tired me out, Marie.

  – Say something: she demands.

  – Jen dou vode mnĕ dál

   láska mi vobešla

  –More!

  – Šaty mĕla podzimkové

   a vlasy mĕla podzimkové

   a oči mĕla podzimkové . . .

  – Okay! Marie says. – I just wanted to see if you’ve been doing your homework.

  December 1, 1967 Friday

  Yesterday’s snowstorm cloaked the trees outside our window like sparkling white strangers, cleared the sky, and set a blinding mirror in Riverside Park for the now unobstructed sun. It left behind a wind that wrote on everyone’s bones that it was colder than six, no, six and a half degrees below zero (20°). The brightness, the cold clarity of the air had given the city a neat and tidy new suit, like a hardened juvenile delinquent trying to make a fresh start despite it all. On Broadway at the subway entrance, an alcoholic had slipped on yesterday’s frozen slush and fallen fast into a peaceful slumber. The people, hurrying though they were, stepped carefully over the prostrate unfortunate’s legs, like a horse stepping over a rider he’s thrown.

  Today The New York Times gives the names of the soldiers from New York and the surrounding area killed in the line of duty in Vietnam, but doesn’t say how many war dead there were from the country as a whole.

  About Admiral Roy L. Johnson, the retiring commander of the Pacific fleet, she reports: He is going to Virginia “to live.”

  John “Sonny” Franzese, on trial again for the murder of Ernest “The Hawk” Rupolo, yesterday impugned a chief state witness as much too criminal to be credible.

  Near us, on Amsterdam Avenue and Seventy-First Street, a run-down hotel, the Sherman Square, is set to be torn down to make way for a luxury apartment building more than thirty stories high. The entrepreneurs hope that the poor and disreputable (the “small, sleazy elements”) will leave the Upper West Side when their homes (their “haunts”) are torn down. “This is the only way the city can grow.”

  Instead of a letter, Karsch has sent us a blank check “for whatever a new phone number costs.” That was written in German, and Marie could read it, and she thinks it’s only right and proper. But it cost nothing to get a new number. Our telephone company is driven by private considerations and would rather we make use of their services than be mad at them. Two days after our request we were “back in business,” as the technician who installed the line put it, a man chatty about his work routine who went on and on trying to convince us to go duck hunting in the marshlands of New Jersey. So what are we supposed to do with a check from the Bank of the Holy Spirit in Milan, to be filled out with any sum we want?

  There are two proof sheets stapled to the check, apparently the end of an article Karsch wrote about his trip to America. So, Karsch is one of those people allowed to work in peace and then to reread what they’ve written one last time before it’s too late to correct any mistakes. But here he omitted any handwritten explanation, and the article is in Italian, which Marie can’t read, and which Marie wants translated, right now, on the double. Every word.

  So, before he came to New York, Karsch had paid a visit to see the Mafia in New England. He’s less familiar with that part of the country and doesn’t know as many people there as his colleague, Bill Davidson, who two weeks earlier published a similar article in The Saturday Evening Post, but it looks like the FBI let Karsch too read from the material their surveillance devices had lip-read from the Mafia fathers and lieutenants in the mafiosi’s own offices, and it reads like Karsch too paid a call to Raymond Loreda Patriarca, the head of all the branches of the family in the Boston area, and saw with his own eyes the old man sitting on the stoop of one of his properties on warm afternoons, elegantly clad in a white sweater, white socks, and alligator shoes, playing with a fat cigar, wearing the benign expression of someone who knows his bodyguards are nearby and can see them too. “But when someone feels he’s the Godfather, how can he not believe in his own innocence?” in Karsch’s words.

  True, he describes the different sources of Mafia income, from money-lending to fixed football games and horse races, to manufacturing LSD, to transporting drugs for and paid for by allied families, but then, as he writes, his gaze falls once more on Boston Harbor and Old Ironsides, the ship named after the American Constitution, open for sightseeing, and Karsch writes: That day it was closed. It’s almost like he’s just chatting with his readers, sure of being able to carry out their assignments. He doesn’t include as much from Patriarca’s CV as Davidso
n had, but to make up for that he has the life stories of Patriarca’s parents, immigrants from Italy, from Sicily. Karsch puts the rumor that the New England Mafia wants to bump off their Godfather—because of his age and possible weakness under police questioning—in such a way that it just barely escapes turning into an aspersion on the leader. He doesn’t omit the story of how Patriarca once got around a personnel shortage by hiring non-Italians, without however initiating them into the practice and ideology of the Cosa Nostra, especially the Mafia oath of omertà, and so now there’s no mystery about why the structure of his empire is beginning to crack. Karsch offers up some sociology: how the Boston Mafia has sunk to the level of bar brawls and uses noisy dustups on the street and easily found bodies to do what Chicago can do quietly, discreetly, without leaving a trace; how nowadays Mafia families in other cities often send for “the Boston boys” to do their dirtiest work. His way of portraying the relationships between the Mafia and New England politicians instantly makes the reader outraged; but Karsch is already standing in Harvard Square, Cambridge, looking friendly, describing the confluent streets and the subway kiosk and the newspaper stand where next to the Literaturnaya Gazeta from Moscow are displayed the papers from Italy.

  Mostly, though, he has a thing for children. The first is a girl he observes in the Italian neighborhood of Boston, a nine-year-old lady behind a vegetable stand expecting exactly the same restrained and respectful behavior from her customers that she gives them—dark eyes, almost black, mostly kept hidden behind their eyelids, charming sweeps of dark hair on her brow, gulping motions in her sinewy throat, maybe fear after all.

  So, in Providence Karsch was trounced by Mafia specialists. He doesn’t go the least bit easy on himself: he admits defeat, he doesn’t act proud of having survived the beating.

  The second child was a four-year-old Swedish girl in the Copter Club on top of the Pan American Building in New York, to whom it was increasingly inescapable that in a few minutes she would have to go up to the roof and board a helicopter to Kennedy Airport. Scared as she was, she sat down with the man alone at the next table and comforted him about the fact that she had to abandon him, she was about to fly off with her parents to “where our family was born from.” When the announcement came, it took her by surprise after all. Pale but determined, she dragged along a heavy carry-on bag because that was what one did, but just before she got to the up escalator she turned around again and waved at the stranger so that it wouldn’t occur to him to be sad about her departure.

  So, Karsch went to New Jersey because of another rumor. He’d heard so often about a giant grill, prepared to order, on which the New Jersey Mafia would roast unfaithful members or intractable enemies, that he couldn’t not try to see it for himself. Not only did he find the compound, a magnificent mansion surrounded by large grounds with sports fields, but he was invited in by the lord of that manor, a first-generation Italian immigrant who was delighted to practice his native tongue again with Karsch, happy to show him around the property, and moreover asked him, over impeccable cocktails, to send his greetings to his relatives near . . . He even had two of his bodyguards accompany the guest to a PATH station for the train to New York; along the way, the bodyguards decided to fleece this European a little, for their own benefit for once, and they detained him for two days, as politely as one could wish, in the back room of a Newark barbershop. It was basically ridiculous, filling the role of victim of a sideline of two foot soldiers, and things got a little wobbly only when the bodyguards realized that if this foreigner told their boss they had gone against orders, it might pose a risk to them. All the same, two days in the position of someone getting a shave was still ridiculous. Karsch was rescued from this situation by the third child.

  The paragraph on this child—which he hadn’t even marked—does not describe the child’s appearance. It says only that the child, another girl, was a fourth grader who couldn’t believe that a grown man could care more about how embarrassing his situation was than about what had caused it. The girl had told this correspondent that he couldn’t have avoided the incident even if he had been carrying a gun. The correspondent was completely cured of the romanticism of the crime thanks to the child’s behavior. He understood in the end that the child didn’t want his thanks; solidarity fared better when simply noticed.

  – A tua disposizione, Fanta Giro: the article ends.

  – I don’t mind if he calls us again: Marie says.

  December 2, 1967 Saturday

  Yesterday Lord Russell’s tribunal for war crimes in Vietnam, seated in Roskilde, near Copenhagen, found the USA guilty on all charges, including genocide, use of forbidden weapons, maltreatment and killing of prisoners, violence against prisoners, and forced movement of prisoners, and also aggression against Laos and Cambodia.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, a member of the international tribunal at Roskilde, has already punished the USA once—refusing an invitation to the country two and a half years ago because its government was waging a war in Vietnam. Sartre’s reasoning made every foreigner traveling to or living in the USA an accomplice.

  In 1933, the Italian state railroad system lowered its prices by 70 percent to attract foreign tourists to the country and to an Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. Sartre bought himself cheap tickets and visited Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Milan, Orvieto, Rome, and other cities. In Rome, the philosopher satisfied the requirement for buying the tickets and paid a visit to the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, taking a look at the glass cases displaying the revolvers and rubber truncheons of the “Fascist martyrs.”

  Back then, Sartre used to read the newspapers “not well but assiduously.” In the fall of 1933, he went to Germany and spent a year at the Institut Français in Berlin.

  The winter of 1933 was not a good time for Cresspahl to settle into Jerichow. Back then bricklayers didn’t yet know how to work in cold temperatures, and he could tell that his daughter’s property wouldn’t be ready to live and work in until next spring at the earliest. Yes, he was with his wife again under one roof, but that roof was atop Papenbrock’s house.

  On the other hand, the separation from her had been good for triggering the process by which deprivation and longing scrape and retouch and paint the remembered image of the other person until anticipation suppresses everything inconvenient and the desirable qualities and behaviors are so firmly in mind that the dream can occlude the reality of the other person for days on end; for Lisbeth the separation had been maybe a bit too long. True, he’d arrived in Jerichow at an hour when everyone was already asleep, and his knocking on Papenbrock’s door might have sounded like someone bringing bad news, but why was she totally unable to recover from the shock, unable to stop crying, until Louise Papenbrock brought her back to bed? Old man Papenbrock had been ready to keep Cresspahl and two bottles of Rotspon company until the wee hours of the next morning, with pleasure; to Cresspahl it seemed that she wanted to put off being alone with him. Her behavior made it seem like his arrival was something she’d been dreading, now come to pass. He had tried to forget that first night, and by the next morning he saw what he was hoping to see, and her way of looking at him, teasingly, head to one side, fit so seamlessly shadow-lessly into his expectations that he once again thought to himself that yes, he would make an honest go of life here in this Jerichow. But then it bothered him to have the child referred to again and again as “your daughter,” in a tone of voice that implied something besides what he could see. Nor could he always tell what it was that sent her so unexpectedly from a fun-loving mood into gloomy brooding; he asked her once, and her answer had been almost a reprimand: she had no idea what gloominess in her face he was referring to, she said, and he didn’t ask again. Sometimes, too, she was so moody, touchy, impatient that he looked at her to see if she could stand to hear about Elizabeth Trowbridge. He put it off until later, reluctantly.

  Whats wrong, Lisbeth.

  What do you mean whats wrong, Cresspahl.

  I wish y
oud cheer up.

  The child. The child’s face was red from all the beets she was eating. When she was full she was friendly to everybody. The child seemed to know every person in the house and accepted Cresspahl as another one. The child bleated her squished throaty noises as excitedly on Papenbrock’s lap as on his. When the child was brought in to the grown-ups it was Papenbrock who walked her up and down the room and made sure that nothing colored blue was in sight, since the child thought anything blue was the Delftware bowl she was fed from. Everyone had their routine with the child; Cresspahl could only look on. When the child was alone she put one hand next to her head and turned her head toward the hand and observed her hand and moved it and curled it up and tried to understand what it was and why it was doing what it was doing. Cresspahl sometimes stood there and watched the child and waited to see if the child would turn toward him. But he had come into the room too quietly, and no oneto-one discussion ever quite got under way.

 

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