Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  It started in September when August Methfessel paid a visit to Dr. Semig. He came not in darkness but right in the middle of the day, and he didn’t go through his office door but stood right outside his garden gate and rang the bell. And since Dora Semig was now taking her time before opening the front door to the house, he stood there for quite a while, letting himself be seen by everyone living on the Bäk or walking by. He had something thick in his hand, pointed at one end and wrapped in white paper, maybe a bouquet of flowers?

  Dora Semig thought it was, and anyway was surprised enough to show Methfessel into her living room. But he wouldn’t sit down, he stood there awkwardly among the Köster Biedermeier and held what he’d brought with him firmly at his side. He was still standing like that when Dora came back with her husband.

  Then Methfessel stood up straighter, faced them like an usher at a funeral parlor, and said his piece. These were times, he said, when nobody even knows what kind of times these are, and often something said about someone was taken as something that someone couldn’t have possibly meant or, by the way, done at all. He didn’t look at Arthur and Dora as he said this; he kept his head slightly bent forward and his gaze to one side, as though reciting something written on Mrs. Semig’s polished floor. And so, what he was saying now and for all time was that he hoped bygones could stay bygones, that is, in the first sense, and especially in the second sense. Semig had no idea what he was getting at. Mrs. Semig couldn’t figure it out either. Methfessel sat down with a heavy sigh, placed the wrapped object on his knees, and told a story involving Baron von Rammin and Grandma Klug and her cat doing things entirely with and to and among one another. After a while, Semig showed signs of having caught a hint of what Methfessel had on his mind, offered him the expected drink, took his first demurral as final, and stood up, so as not to delay Methfessel’s departure from the living room. Methfessel shot up with surprising speed out of Dora’s armchair, whose thin legs under his large frame may well have been making him nervous, shook hands with the lady of the house, and walked to the door—but the door that led to Semig’s central hallway and office. Arthur apparently followed him like an obedient sheep.

  – Here: Methfessel said, behind the office door: – Here! he said, and quickly unwrapped by way of hello the piece of meat he had with him.

  – Take a look at that! he said, and for a second he was once again the wily and confident man he’d been before his trip to Fürstenberg. It was as if a load had been taken off his shoulders and put in the best possible hands, but in any case not in his. He sat there ready to help, at least with information. Dr. Semig had put on his white apron, to show Methfessel that all the proper procedures were being followed. He also did him the favor of carrying the sample over to the table by the window, where he had his microscope, his scissors, needles, pipettes, chemicals. But even if he had been able to undertake a bacteriological investigation there, he wouldn’t have done it in Methfessel’s presence. He stayed standing next to his swivel chair, so that Methfessel wouldn’t put down roots. But Methfessel didn’t want to leave. He also didn’t want to start, before a question helped get him going. How’s business? From the topic of business, Methfessel could finally move into his other topic, and now Semig had to listen to a long and roundabout harangue about the veterinarian who had recently taken Semig’s old regional inspector job. It did not the slightest bit of good to try to keep him from slandering a colleague (Semig didn’t care whether the colleague in question was Aryan or non-Aryan). After a while, he had his hand in front of his mouth, as he usually did when thinking or reflecting, and a little while after that he sat down, to listen better. This Dr. Hauschildt certainly was interpreting the legal requirements rather idiosyncratically. He apparently preferred to conduct his inspections of livestock by phone. He would ask Methfessel over the phone to state the general condition of the delivered animals, and it seemed that by this point in his life Methfessel found it hard to come out with a particular opinion or firm statement. It seemed Methfessel was now quite sensitive to being shouted at, even over the phone. Then this Hauschildt would say: Carry on, Methfessel!, all the while without having ever seen, even from afar, the animal’s posture or lips nostrils stool vulva vagina udder breathing. Now it’s true, Semig too sometimes used to get to Methfessel’s stall after dark, if he didn’t have any other time free, and make do with rounding the animals up and prodding them awake. But he’d been practicing for fifteen years in this neck of the woods alone, and what he saw with the naked eye was not likely to be much different under a microscope. While this Hauschildt was just out of veterinary school, where he’d apparently found plenty of time left over from his studies to organize a National Socialist Student League, and word was also going round that he’d been stumped and stymied by a case of prolapsed uterus at von Meyer’s. And Dr. Hauschildt’s inspection techniques as Methfessel described them were not in the textbook, and in the short time it took him to call with the findings of the trichina test he could barely have made it home! This Hauschildt had clearly given himself special permission not to have to do the trichina inspection at the slaughterhouse. And now Methfessel was both scared of the law and afraid of his conscience. It was disgusting how cringing and submissive they’d beaten this man into being. Methfessel refused to lodge a complaint personally in Gneez. – I’m not in the party: he said, and he knew for a fact that Dr. Hauschildt was in the party and that he and the district veterinarian were constantly in each other’s pockets, whether it was about neighboring seaside properties or shared sailboats or in the Ratskeller wasn’t clear, and it made Methfessel visibly anxious to know even that much. Semig should take the meat to Gneez, not him. – My dear Mr. Methfessel: Semig said, and August should have been able to hear that this wasn’t the condescension of years past, with which Dr. Semig used to brush aside stupid questions or naive expectations of a reduced fee. But Methfessel had no time for anyone else’s helplessness. He thought now this problem was out of his hands and off his neck, and left with the grave words: It’s on your conscience now, Doctuh! In the yard he made a cautious detour around Rex, who had practically offered him a paw. Rex was the German shepherd the Semigs had had since spring.

  At first, all Methfessel got out of this were rumors around Jerichow that he’d been willing to part with a whole joint of meat to get back in the Jew’s good graces.

  The veterinarian would have liked to think it over for a few days, but if his idea of professional ethics weren’t enough to push him over the line, the warm weather would have been. He wrote a relatively personal letter, which just might escape being filed with the business correspondence, and sent it to Schwerin that same evening with Methfessel’s meat, registered and express, and in Schwerin it turned out he still was seen as Dora Köster’s husband, and in the official notification sent to the district veterinarian in Gneez his name was not mentioned. Everything was “according to the representations of Mr. August Methfessel, master butcher, Jerichow.” And Methfessel was summoned to Gneez and signed a statement and thanked the officials there, somewhat comforted to find that law and hygiene maybe still did count for something in Germany today. And at the Gneez station, SA in civilian clothes jumped him.

  Now Methfessel was not happy. On his return to Jerichow he found his cold storage cleared out, since the bacteriologists in Schwerin had found Salmonella dublin, a contaminant, in the liver that he’d submitted. Compensation? Forget it! And by now Methfessel was to the point of thinking that of course Semig hadn’t had to bear the brunt. He was a university man, the gang stuck together, simple as that. He also didn’t want to begrudge Semig his peace and quiet until they sent him to Fürstenberg where Ossi Rahn was waiting for him. After a week Methfessel had almost entirely recovered and would have been strong enough to start butchering again, but he no longer wanted to. Dr. Hauschildt now came very punctually and screamed about every minute he was kept waiting, and inspected the livestock not alone but with a student assistant who could certify that all the regula
tions had been followed. And since the veterinarian no longer skipped a single incision in his carcass inspections, he spent a long time doing them, real teaching sessions for his student, and that was not what Methfessel had had in mind. Now it was Methfessel who had to call Gneez to get the test results, and Mrs. Hauschildt was often unable to say where her husband was at the moment or how the tests had turned out. Dr. Hauschildt was now quite fond of using the square inspection stamp for Methfessel’s meat, indicating Suitability for Limited Uses, and it sometimes happened that he picked up the triangular stamp, Unsuitable, and by this point in his life Methfessel had no interest in trying to prove that livestock farming in this neck of the woods couldn’t possibly have gotten so much worse from one week to the next. The round stamp had always been the rule with his meat. Methfessel had turned melancholy. When the cattle trucks arrived on the morning of slaughtering day, Methfessel would be standing in his yard holding his head like a deaf person, as though he, not the bullock being brought to him, had been given a blow to the head.

  And what a fellow he’d been!

  That red red face, that blond hair. Well fed.

  Blonder than the whole S. Å-Å-Å. put together.

  Then the cars with the pigs would pull up. The pigs would be drowsy from the ride, happily nestled up against one another, and Methfessel would stand there and watch as his assistants drove the terrified animals to the slaughtering room’s door with their brooms. Since he didn’t help it took the men longer, and the pigs had time to scent the blood of their comrades flowing across the threshold, and Methfessel’s neighbors complained about the pitiful shrieking. At first he’d still gone in with them, even if he went last, and it quickly fell silent again after a couple high sharp shrieks. But then Methfessel would come right back out the door, as if in a trance, a big strong man with sturdy arms, heavy shoulders, squat head, holding a bloody knife in his hand. He would shake his head, chew his blond mustache, he wasn’t himself. And he wouldn’t go inside, he’d hide in the woodshed, and after a while the men gave up trying to go get him. One of Elsa Pienagel’s windows looked out on Methfessel’s large yard, and that fall she often had visitors who came just to stand at the window when it was slaughtering day at Methfessel’s.

  So for quite some time there was not much beef and pork eaten in Jerichow, because Methfessel didn’t have any and Klein the butcher had been known for too long as the second-best butcher in Jerichow and the prejudice was hard to dispel. Many chickens lost their lives earlier than they were meant to, and rabbits too.

  Only at the Cresspahls’ was there yet another reason. Lisbeth had noticed something about the sides of pork when Methfessel still had some to hang on the hooks in his shop. The backs were so bent. There were little dimples over the vertebrae, like on people. Like on Gesine, too. From that moment on Lisbeth had an aversion to meat.

  We eat animals, and we kill them to do it. It’s not right.

  Really, Lisbeth? Tryin to save money?

  That wouldn’t be the worst idea, Cresspahl.

  So there was meat on the Cresspahls’ table only when he insisted, and she didn’t eat any of it.

  Now The New York Times is starting up again with her own brand of charity. Everywhere she can and some places she really can’t, she inserts the appeal: REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST! and what she wants is money for her charity fund. It’s not every news story that goes with a refrain like that: Remember the Neediest!

  December 11, 1967 Monday

  Marie cut three pictures out of today’s New York Times, to keep:

  The first, from the front page, brings into our home the merry widow of President Kennedy, because she went to a dinner for the Democratic Party at the Plaza Hotel.

  The second gives us Lynda Johnson’s wedding party, arranged in a semicircle, all with bowed heads, one person even kneeling. Yet they are not at prayer, they are watching a recording of the ceremony on television. The article ends with the refrain: Remember the Neediest!

  The third is an artwork showing a humbly clad woman with a small child in her arms, in a room almost completely bare. The floor looks broken, the window too, as if it’s letting in not only the light from the back courtyard but the wind too. “Many New Yorkers, such as this Puerto Rican mother and her child, face a long, cold winter with little hope, little money, and oftentimes no heat.”

  Edmondo Barrios, Marie’s first friend in this country, grew up in an apartment like that in East Harlem.

  He didn’t come up in the first stories she brought home from kindergarten. Instead, she complained about child-rearing in this country. From Düsseldorf, she was used to being allowed to cling totally and completely to another child, so here too she’d picked her favorite and sat down next to her and watched her mouth and followed her around (the way I go walking after D. E. when he gets up to go to the refrigerator for a new bottle and comes back to the table: just so I can see him while he speaks the sentence that I could have heard no less clearly if I’d remained seated). Pamela Blumenroth was this child’s name, and Marie didn’t want anyone to take her away. But Pamela had to be taken away because the teachers held that forming a bond with only one peer was risky for a four-year-old, and at snack time Marie was seated next to someone else, Mark the kisser, and she was supposed to play with him now, and she didn’t want him, she wanted Pamela. The goal of such child-rearing was for everyone to get to know everyone else in the class, and the word for it was togetherness, but for a long time Marie thought the word meant “forced separation.” She kept it a secret in school that the one she invited over to play for the afternoon was docile little Pamela, who back then had a face like an Irish farmwife, not Mark the kisser.

  So that Marie would learn to change friends like shirts, she also ended up with Edmondo. She had earlier spoken of him as “the boy who hits.” Then she realized that it was a particular category of children in the class that he regularly attacked, namely boys “who have skin like me,” and that’s how it came out that he was one of the “colored” children. Apparently this Edmondo needed no reason whatsoever to start a fight, he would just throw any random pink-skinned boy to the ground and sit on him and start punching. The victim’s classmates usually assumed that there must have been some reason and stuck to their rule of not interfering in a one-on-one fight. Up came Marie one day and put her hand on his arm and said, Lass das in German, Stop, and not as an order but as a wish, and to be absolutely sure he would understand her she shook her head in a kind way. Edmondo, in unutterable amazement, forgot about the fight that he’d felt was necessary just a moment ago. He followed this remarkable person, speaking her strange language, and from then on considered her his friend, and not like the black girls in the class, to whom he continued to behave like a merciless sultan, but like someone you genuinely want to understand, please, protect. It might have been even easier as Marie’s protector to get into situations requiring shoving and hitting, but Marie restrained him by giving the impression that she was there for him alone, as if that David Double-U wasn’t even in the room. She also had no fear of Edmondo. The teachers looked on in astonishment at this friendship between the black and the European, and in relief, too, because now it happened less often that Edmondo threw building blocks in order to hit someone’s eye, and now they almost never had to drag him out of a fight that could easily have ended with a broken bone for the loser, because Edmondo was eight whole years old and was in Marie’s class only because of the four-year delay in his intellectual development. Edmondo was attending the kindergarten with a stipend from the church itself and was seen as the first subject of an experiment, and aside from that his skin color protected him from expulsion. The church would not appreciate seeing its goodwill impugned unless absolutely necessary. Now that the difficult black boy was with the little German girl, the lessons went by almost like in a normal class, without extra work and commotion, and this isolated partnership, however little conducive to “togetherness,” was not broken up.

  Marie also went to
visit Edmondo in East Harlem, and life in the Barrios family was full of every imaginable stereotype of the ghetto. Edmondo’s last name was not his father’s but that of his younger brother’s father, the one who had ventured to marry Mrs. Barrios. Then he left too, and Edmondo’s father, a man whose first name was Rodrigo, probably would have wanted to live with Edmondo’s mother except that his presence would have meant an end to her welfare payments, and there was no way for him to support the family because he couldn’t find a job.

  When you gotta mop on your head instedda hair, you cant getta job.

  He came by occasionally, but not since Mrs. Barrios had gotten pregnant by another man for the second time.

  Mrs. Barrios readily told all of this to the foreigner, since Edmondo had told her so much about the foreigner’s daughter. She was a very pretty, slightly plump woman with lips of the kind that in this country are called Caucasian. She wore her hair short, like a man’s crew cut, and in profile with her head held high she could look fun, mischievous. Like her, every object in the apartment was absolutely spick-and-span. The apartment consisted of two and a half rooms, one behind the other. The back rooms got their light through the single window in the front room. Mrs. Barrios was proud of her apartment, which did look fully furnished since the one big bed for all the children took up almost all the space, and a picture of the Holy Mother of God cut out of a newspaper and glued onto a cardboard frame turned even a scratched-up wall into something more. Mrs. Barrios felt fortunate to live as she did. The expected, prefabricated mental picture one had of an East Harlem apartment was completed by the fact that the sole window really did look out on the aboveground tracks of the New York Central Railway, parading commuter trains to suburbs in the country past the residents here, and luxury trains too, even the 20th Century Limited.