Anniversaries
Page 45
Since going back to Jerichow is not allowed, the dream has to invent a relative in Wismar, a lie, and the dream has to brazenly lie wooden stairs, worn down from all the rain, into the passport office, in a courtyard with wild vines on the walls. Anyone who knows this courtyard must have relatives there. Then it no longer matters that it’s forbidden to leave the Wismar district. You just go with some dead person or another. The best would be Pius Pagenkopf: when he was alive, he was a general in the Soviet Air Force and drove an old Studebaker from the Lend-Lease Act with the USA. Driving in an old Studebaker down Town Street in Jerichow: people will stop and shake their heads. Then all you can do is hurry to take refuge in the cemetery. Nobody’ll find me at the cemetery.
So, off we go. The bus from Rostock to Barth is empty, but I’ve never ridden that route and now really it’s going to Newark through the Hudson Tunnel. At Newark Airport the plane is standing there all by itself, far out on the runway, alone, and it’s about to start. I have a feeling it’s called TRANSALL ILYUSHIN. Sitting in the plane on fish crates are down-andout men in crocheted Norwegian sweaters. When the plane banks after takeoff, one of them leans over to me and, as I recognize him, he says: Gesine, don’t be like that. Don’t act like such a stranger. You’re just as doomed to crash as us.
– What about the pilot?
– It was his choice. They left it up to him. In the sky he can freely decide for himself. But that’s nothing to do with us.
December 8, 1967 Friday
Dear Marie. I’ll tell your tape about today.
This morning a man was slumped against the wall in the elevator, totally limp, and after the cabin had hurtled fifty feet through the building he woke up a little and said to me with a kind of amazement “Gee-sign,” and I addressed him with his title, to wake him up. But he still couldn’t recall that he was the boss in control of a significant portion of the American millions, and in this defenseless state another of his underlings ambushed him with the question of how he’d liked his picture in The New York Times. For de Rosny had let The New York Times photograph him at home. – That’s real fame, getting onto the women’s page: he said, and he probably lay right down on the carpet behind his padded doors and went back to sleep.
Forty-five minutes later one of the vice president’s secretaries called me. We’ve been invited to dinner. I was ready to accept right away but she is so used to fitting de Rosny into the most various times and places that she insisted on offering me three possible dates to negotiate over.
The New York Times has a description of how the president came to the city in secret to visit the dead cardinal: in his airplane to Floyd Bennett Field and by helicopter to Sheep Meadow in Central Park, so that he’d only be on the city streets for a mile. And he left the cathedral through the back door. The antiwar protestors have accomplished at least that much.
It’s hard to tell stories about the office. Life there goes like this: “People whose only job is to initial a checklist, verify the accuracy or the wording of an invoice, can never keep from reviewing the whole procedure in depth, and as a result they leave in the errors they’re supposed to catch! Sometimes it’s caught in time, but the firm should really have been on the road to ruin a long time ago.” You need to picture all this said with pride.
One of the managers, whose way of fulfilling his responsibilities is to make the rounds of the cubicles and individual offices, fills the air with the smell of farts whenever he’s called upon to stop and consider something. His goal is to become a vice president someday, and no one can bring themselves to tell him why that will never happen.
In one of the elevator cabins, one of the digits is missing in the building’s number set into the floor. That’s something you notice, and I still wonder some mornings if maybe I went into the wrong building and only realized it from a glance at the floor. In the corner of the bathroom there’s a crack in the caulking an eighth of an inch longer than it was last year. That’s something you notice.
Amanda, you know her. You know how she likes to flirt all the time with the men from sales passing through: “Oh, this horrible rainy weather! A man doesn’t mind of course but we girls can feel things in our hair, practically makes us want to tear it out . . . !” That’s how she talks. She doesn’t mean anything by it, and I’m sure she realizes it’s nonsense, but she can’t help it. And the men stand there at her desk in a total daze and think long and hard about what her words might mean and can’t figure it out, and then blame themselves. One of them today slunk off “like a sheep”: Amanda said.
At lunch today I saw a construction site filling half a block between Park and Lex. They don’t do this in Germany but here they cut windows into the wooden fence for passersby, so the sidewalk supervisors stand there leaning on the fence and looking at the rough plot of land where you can no longer imagine a building, or buildings, standing, except as a canned memory called up by the sign saying a restaurant is moving. Two crane-like cranes, that’s why they’re the same word in English!, were at work above the rubble field. One of them was lifting two steel-and-concrete staircase parts that ran in opposite directions, still joined at the seams: it let them swing in the air and then dashed them to the ground, and still they weren’t broken apart. Maybe that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. A topic the men could discuss among themselves. The other crane was lifting a square of T bars the welders had cleanly cut free of the steel framework of a former building at the edge of the field. It swung them off to one side, high above the workers’ hard hats. The murdered building’s skeleton was almost stripped bare by now. It won’t be coming back. After a while, they’ll have separated the valuable parts of the wreckage out from the rest, cleared away both, and smoothed the ground flat, and the future will be ready to go.
But I never want to live in Germany again. There’s a Nazi Party in West Germany now, and the Nazi Party has organized a goon squad and gives press conferences about it. And the press shows up. The abbreviation for the men keeping order at the event is SG, for Schutzgemeinschaft, and the head Nazi cannot understand, absolutely can’t for the life of him see why anyone would think that this had anything to do with Hitler’s SA, who also started out as security guards. And they’re already talking about “bonds of common blood” again, Blutsverbundenheit if I’m understanding the English. I wouldn’t want to live in Germany ever again.
In the afternoon there were three workmen kneeling and lying on the floor in the bank lobby, one of them almost flat on his belly, smearing some kind of polish on the yellow metal and the base and the belly of the six glass doors (and the kind we used for faucets and nameplates on doors in Jerichow was so proverbial it was like an intrinsic part of life itself, and I’ve forgotten it. Maybe I forget one second and a drip later all that’s left is the interpreted second, which memory fails to catch too). They were rubbing away. There were only three hours left until the end of the workday, when the packed elevators come hurtling down, protesting their heavy loads with anxious creaking. By the time I got downstairs the afternoon’s work had already been smudged by eight hundred hands.
Sometimes they cover door-size areas of the lobby’s marble with a skin that looks like plaster. Your father would have known exactly what they were doing; I don’t even want to ask.
I wanted to tell you about Mrs. Agnolo. Her son is stationed in Saigon as a pilot, and she’s counting the days of his year of service in Vietnam. I know because she tells us. She says it so eagerly, without being asked, as if the magic of speaking the words might help her son. She dresses as young as the girls she works with in our secretarial department, and tries to adopt similar behavior, whether casual or chatty, but if you know about her son you can see her age in her face, can see that the makeup isn’t doing its job. You can see her sitting at her typewriter not working, occupied with more than just filing her nails.
Last night a package addressed to Cuba blew up in the post-office branch on Ninth Avenue that handles foreign mail. Eight people were injured and oth
er boxes went flying, in one piece or smashed. Be glad you don’t get Christmas presents from Europe anymore, so you didn’t lose any there.
In the year that I’m saying this into your tape recorder, you were a child proud of things like the fact that more Christmas parcels and packages are delivered in New York than in all of Belgium—as many as in France. For you, New York was the greatest, from the Upper West Side to the Lower East.
There’s a picture in The New York Times today of the new Madison Square Garden arena, a gigantic oval for 20,000 people under an enormous sky, lit up very festively. The seats are still empty, or not ready yet, and I’m very glad that you will have memories like this from your childhood, and maybe I wish I had some like them for myself.
Then in the subway I saw a Negro boy, eight or ten years old, with a bulky shoeshine box between his legs. He’d fallen asleep on the crowded train, trustingly letting his head drop onto the arm of the lady sitting next to him. So she moved her shoulder forward a little, to support his head.
That’s everything I saw today.
December 9, 1967 Saturday
Former vice president Richard M. Nixon suggested in New York that the struggle against racial injustice was more important than the war in Vietnam. “The war in Asia is a limited one with limited means and limited goals,” he sez. “The war at home is a war for survival of a free society.” Maybe he thinks he’ll be getting the presidential nomination from Santa Claus.
Anyone with a soldier in Vietnam can call the Red Cross at 362-0600, and record a three-minute phonopost message for loved ones in the field. And it’s free, since it’s Christmas.
Yesterday, at Irving Place, Times Square, and Rockefeller Plaza, young people protested against the war. At 45 Rockefeller Plaza, Dow Chemical, the company that makes napalm B, has one of its headquarters. Dow Chemical has absolution from the secretary of defense: private industry, he says, has no influence on how the military uses its products. And in any case, napalm B accounts for only one half of one percent of Dow Chemical’s profits. Police with billy clubs “weeded out” the protestors from the Christmas shoppers and tourists, as The New York Times sees it. At Rockefeller Plaza, under the giant, the shining, the colorful Christmas tree.
By Christmas of 1934, Lisbeth Cresspahl was long since back in the bosom of the church. She helped out in Sunday school, took part in putting up and decorating the Christmas tree across from the altar. She and Pastor Brüshaver’s wife had become close. With her own sister’s family living across the street from her, Lisbeth’s most neighborly interactions were with Aggie Brüshaver. She crossed Brickworks Road, walked along the fence around the Paepcke property, past the back of Hilde’s house, then through Creutz’s gate and down the path between his beds and greenhouses to the back gate of the pastor’s garden. That was fine with old man Creutz—he liked having dealings with a young lady, a little conversation at least. And Homuth, who’d rented the church land behind the garden, didn’t object. The two women were careful and had beaten only a very narrow path along the edge of his field; at least the boys weren’t coming for his beets as long as the women were walking there. Cresspahl wasn’t concerned. Maybe it did Lisbeth some good to be something like a teacher. Brüshaver had met his second wife in the Rostock hospital where he was getting a second operation on his shoulder injury from the First World War; Aggie had been a deaconess, she knew more about helping in other people’s households than managing her own, and at least when it came to cooking she’d learned more from Lisbeth in six months than in the three years during which she’d had to read her success or failure on Brüshaver’s face. The husbands were not included in the women’s friendship. Cresspahl remembered the other man’s education and already had enough formality and stiffness from Arthur Semig; he also wanted nothing to do with anyone in the same line of business as Methling. If Brüshaver felt rejected, he showed it only with a little smile when they met on the street, an amusement that looked a bit secretive. Lisbeth didn’t do anything to remedy the situation, because she felt that Brüshaver should remain the pastor, the authority; Aggie thought Cresspahl was a grouch, to be honest, hard to get along with, and also she blamed him whenever Lisbeth had a depressed day. Cresspahl was happy to have the two women in his kitchen; he liked to see Lisbeth cheerful, cooking so eagerly that she brushed her hair from her face with her forearm, or trading stories about their children, Gesine and Aggie’s Martin, Mathias, and Marlene. Cresspahl thought: They’re talking about children and cooking. And they were too.
But Lisbeth heard from Aggie more about the Protestant Church’s conflicts with the Austrian than any other parishioner in or around Jerichow could know. The people listened when Brüshaver preached in his serious, reasonable, boring way, and thought it was very appropriate for him to point out the Christian duty to one’s neighbors after the Jew boycott, that was the man’s job, that’s why he was there and what he was paid to do. It hadn’t done Arthur Semig any good, and Brüshaver himself didn’t go to Tannebaum’s and buy anything there. Lisbeth, though, heard about the church’s squabbles with the state in the same tone and level of detail that the pastor and his wife used in discussing events among themselves. She had noticed on her own that Hitler’s SA had held Christian services for consecrating the flag or for troop musters, through mid-1933; she knew that Methling had been made SA chaplain with the rank of Sturmbannführer z.b.V. by the SA chief of staff in Berlin, in late 1932. From Aggie, though, she learned that there had been a “dictatorship” in the Evangelical Church of Mecklenburg, since April 1933, when Governor Granzow appointed a state commissioner to put the church administration in Schwerin under police observation. Next Rendtorff, the regional bishop, was driven out of office, and in his place came Schultz, the regional head of the “German Christians,” with such a radical Thuringian background that he wanted to perform christenings with soil instead of water, since he, like all the other Nazis, had fogs of “Blood and Soil” in his head; during Holy Communion he actually invoked the Austrian and interpreted the symbolic blood of the Lord as the blood of the martyrs of the Fascist movement. These were not harmless news items for Lisbeth Cresspahl née Papenbrock. The German Christians wanted a single unified Reich Protestant Church, but she didn’t want her Evangelical Church of Mecklenburg changed in the slightest, much less dissolved. In January 1934, Brüshaver had read to the congregation the declaration from Niemöller’s Pastors’ Emergency League: We must obey God more than man. That was the kind of talk that really struck home with this daughter of Louise Papenbrock. Whether it was a question of refusing to fill out the questionnaire with the paragraph about Aryan ancestry or a church wedding taking place under the non-church motto
So far from fear,
To Death so near,
Hail to thee, SA!
or the purity of Gospel message—for her the church was always right. The church must not be slighted. The church was being slighted. In March 1934, Brüshaver was summoned to have a talk with the high consistory in Gneez; Lisbeth heard from Aggie that he had been “given a stern warning” because he’d still refused to withdraw from the Pastors’ Emergency League. That was too much for Lisbeth. Her agitations could be happy excitement, when, for instance, it was about a struggle and victory for the right side was assured; her agitations were sometimes more panic-stricken, desperate, when this Austrian’s government agencies had no intention of acknowledging their injustice; at still other times they were hysterical, half crazy, such as when she could spend half the day singing one of the Pastors’ Emergency League’s slogans over and over, to a tune of her own, whether pumping water or peeling potatoes:
One People, One Reich, One Führer, One Fuss
She looked so stupid doing it. Cresspahl didn’t like that she was letting the problems of the church weigh so heavily on her conscience. He didn’t think she even understood what she was singing to herself. He would have felt ridiculous warning her about the secret police. Surely she realized that. And he was afraid she would answer h
im: Everyone has to stand up for what they believe.
Were you that cold in church, Lisbeth?
What do you mean, Cresspahl.
You were shivering, child.
When was I shivering.
When Brüshaver was telling the Christmas story.
I wasn’t shivering, Heinrich. You’re imagining things.
December 10, 1967 Sunday
Hanoi’s newspapers report that their National Liberation Front has killed, wounded, or captured 40,000 enemy troops in October and November, including 20,000 Americans and allies. So it says in The New York Times. With no hint that The New York Times had ever said anything different.
Publishers have lost confidence in the Bolivian government’s claims to own the rights to Che Guevara’s posthumous papers, and negotiations have broken down. When it comes to the interests of The New York Times, The New York Times reports that The New York Times is “reviewing the new situation.”
Next week, four writers are to go on trial in Moscow because they had let it be known that they weren’t happy about the trial of two writers, Daniel and Sinyavsky. Three of these writers wrote something, and the fourth, Vera Lashkova, allegedly helped type it up. That suffices for Article 70, crimes against the state, up to seven years in prison, up to five years in internal exile.
Someone’s gotten married! The president’s daughter got married! Lynda Johnson got married! She got married in the White House! She married a marine corps captain! A marine captain with marching orders for Vietnam! All right, calm down.
And Allen M. Johnson, of 54-09 Almeda Ave., Arverne, N.Y., wants the world to know that he will no longer be responsible for any debts contracted by his wife, Betty Johnson.
There was very little meat eaten in Jerichow in the fall of 1934, and it was Arthur Semig’s fault. It was Methfessel the butcher’s fault. It was the Nazis’ fault. Now whose fault was it?