by Uwe Johnson
Except at night, Edmondo lived on the street and under the tracks, and he explained the street to Marie. When he told her that a man walking unsteadily was a “junkie,” he said it not objectively but with visible hatred. There was something there. It was not a usual thing for someone who lived on this street to turn up with a “white” friend and then go into the house with her too, and it was probably on these steps leading up to Mrs. Barrios’s apartment that Marie first heard reference to human sexual relations. That embarrassed Edmondo, and his pride in his “white” friend was spoiled. Mrs. Barrios could not adjust quickly enough to the middle-class custom of sending one’s child out to visit a friend, and had, in addition, no room for them, not to mention toys, so she took something out of her welfare money and sent the children to the Apollo movie theater on 125th Street. This was Marie’s first feature film, a very sad story of a lady on the sofa and a sailor “who shooted,” and actually the whole thing took place in a car, or on a plane, Marie was confused about that part, and it got completely mixed up in her dreams. That was Marie’s first visit to Edmondo’s, and she often wanted to talk about it, in detail, but did not insist on there being a second.
There was a second, but she preferred having Edmondo over to her apartment. The babysitters who had to bring him home from kindergarten with her and then be responsible for him for five hours made it very clear that the next time he came over was the day they’d quit. You could see it. That night Marie’s room looked as if it had been searched in a desperate hurry, like in the movies, and panes of glass in Marie’s door were broken, and only Marie was in one piece and cheerful and a little dazed. One of the sitters reported that Edmondo could put a person in a “Noah’s Flood kind of mood,” for instance when no suggestion or command got through to him and he just lay on the floor and refused to move and awaited the adult’s reaction with the limited pleasure of a two-year-old: then you were in the middle of a tidal wave with nothing to grab hold of. Edmondo genuinely hadn’t understood. He was waiting to be hit, he would have stood up for a beating. One time I saw him disobey his mother, and Mrs. Barrios, ignoring the white middle-class parents on the field trip, blindly grabbed for something she could hit him with, anything, and got hold of a jump rope and tried to break it on the boy, who didn’t defend himself either. The educated, the liberals, the whites looked on very thoughtfully and seemed particularly struck by the fact that Mrs. Barrios stopped without warning from one second to the next, as though done with a job.
We could have asked Edmondo questions. His contempt for the junkies, there was something there. His desperately wanting to know whether Marie looked like his sister under her skirt, that might have helped him. D. E. was the first person to look at the boy for five minutes and say that he needed medical help, and Edmondo, in the presence of an adult, a white man, had been behaving very quietly and properly too. He was hard to understand. A boy who attacked anyone and everyone, often with no thought for the power relations involved, why was he so scared of dogs? Someone in Riverside Park was playing with his dog, a friendly boxer, and the dog was far away from us, and his barking showed no sign of anything but tremendous fun, and Edmondo hid behind my skirt and begged and pleaded for us to turn around and walk somewhere else. Are there dogs like that in East Harlem? Do the police use dogs like that? We didn’t ask him.
We only knew him for a year and a half, and then something happened at a summer camp for single mothers and their children. Edmondo wore the sweatshirt printed with the camp logo every day, as a shirt. He apparently did something there with a knife. He was nine and a half then, and strong. The psychiatrists transferred him to a special school. The school was more like a clinic. Apparently he had picked up some kind of sickness from life that the doctors didn’t often come across. Mrs. Barrios didn’t have to pay a cent for his housing and the attempted cures. At first, we were still allowed to visit him. He didn’t know who Marie was anymore. Marie acts like that visit never happened. Then we weren’t allowed to visit him anymore.
Even today, Marie says: He never hit me. And he was so strong he only had to touch you and you’d be falling down the stairs. He never did that to me.
Blessed be forgetting. Only she hasn’t forgotten.
The weather is so rainy. After all it’s almost Christmas.
December 12, 1967 Tuesday
“THE GLOW OF CHRISTMASTIDE LIGHTS CITY STREETS
. . .
In Manhattan, happy throngs of children and adults are drawn to the newly lighted Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and to the spectacular window displays that line the midtown area’s sleek streets.
Lord & Taylor’s windows are an animated phantasmagoria of scenes from Christmas in Vienna, with tiny figurines dancing in Schoenbrunn Palace; a conductor and a diva performing in the Vienna Opera House of a century ago; the door of St. Stephen’s Cathedral opening and closing, and children romping and bell ringers playing in an Alpine village.
The windows of B. Altman are a cornucopia of great art drawn from the Metropolitan Museum and depicting, in photographic slides, the themes of joy, beauty, the festive board, children, treasures and pageant.
Saks Fifth Avenue, which for years has ushered in the Christmas season with a display of choir boys and organ pipes, this year has emblazoned its facade with a tall Christmas tree.
. . .
It is quiet and warm in the Columbia Florist Shop at 200 West 231st Street. In the back of the small store, a woman prepares red Christmas candles for sale, putting little ribbons on them and setting them in their bright green bases. The busy time lies ahead, says Nick Dennis, the store manager.
‘It’s a little early yet,’ he explains, pointing to Dec. 15 on a calendar. ‘That’s when business picks up.’
Outside the night has turned cold and the lights twinkle everywhere in the city and for a moment, at least . . .”
© The New York Times
Today Francine came over to visit Marie. When I got home from work Marie’s double door was closed tight, letting through only the muffled sound of the guest’s voice. It was high-pitched, and sounded surprised, and next to it Marie suddenly seemed like an alto.
– And you and your mother really live alone here?
– In three rooms?
– Are all these books yours? Not even a couple of them borrowed?
– I don’t believe it. You don’t have cockroaches. There aren’t roaches in an apartment like this!
– Is that a picture of your father?
– Which way do you sleep on the bed? With your head by the wall? Or so you can see the trees and the sky and the river and the Palisades as soon as you open your eyes?
– Why do you say England’s not part of Europe?
– May I touch this book?
– You mean he gives you a typewriter just like that, because you want one?
– Is he the man your mother . . . sorry, I meant to say: He must be a good person.
– ’Cause he visits you guys.
– No one gets in the building if Mr. Robinson doesn’t let them in?
– Not even through the basement?
– If a water pipe breaks . . . I’m sure that doesn’t happen in a building like this.
– It does?
– The same day? The same day?
– And all you have to do is say thank you?
– Your carpet looks comfortable to sleep on.
– Really, you went to summer camp in Maine, on Orr’s Island? They teach sailing? I went to Green Acres once. That’s still in New York State of course.
– Say something in your language.
– Your mother’s language, I mean.
– And those five words mean: The more time you spend working on something, the harder it gets?
– De Leng hett de Last?
– So she speaks three languages—her own, and German, and ours!
– More? Wow!
– What’s your mother like, really?
– All mothers are lik
e that. I mean: is she dangerous?
– I’m afraid mine is sometimes. She doesn’t mean to be, but she is.
– You and your mom are just staying here for Christmas? But you could go to Vermont, or England . . . to Italy too?
– I’d go to Italy if I could.
– And you’re doing all that for your mother for Christmas? That must cost a lot of money.
– I could too? I could never do that.
– That’s great that you want to show me. That’s out of sight. But there’s no point, my mother’s never had anything like that.
– And she’d sell it.
– Yeah, the lighting. I don’t know how you’ll do the lighting.
But at this point Marie stuck her head out the double door and saw me sitting at the table reading the paper. The door shut again at once, just after I caught a considerate nod and a smile from Marie. She has declared her room off-limits: everyone else is allowed in, D. E. and Shakespeare and Esther, but not me. Marie is doing something secret in there. I told her she wasn’t allowed to give me any surprises for Christmas, and she said: It’s not for Christmas. It’s for New Year’s. It never crosses her mind that I could just walk in against her orders and see what it is.
Her plan involves more than just work, but it sounds like hard work too: blades on wood, hammers on nails, sanding, scrubbing. She also has to make her bed and deal with her clothes and take care of her room, and every night she takes the garbage bags out and leaves them by the freight elevator so that the trash and scraps give me no clues about what she’s done that day. She has said that it may not give me pleasure but she’s promised it will satisfy a wish I don’t know I have.
The voices in Marie’s room became unintelligible once they knew I was home. I could tell only that they were whispering, one in an eager stage whisper, the other shushing apologetically. They came out unexpectedly, and while Marie with her hands behind her back pulled the doors closed on her secret, Francine stood in front of me and took care of her Hellos and Goodbyes at the same time. She waited to see if I would hold out my hand for her to shake, and she kept her eyes lowered so as not to see whether the expression on the face before her was welcoming or something else. She made a curtsy and said: Good night, ma’am.
Already she had her coat on, schoolbag in hand, she was at the front door. If she was confused before, it was worse now. Mr. Robinson was standing in the open elevator, and he heartily wished me good evening, like a close friend of the family, which he is. Jason and Shakespeare were standing in the lobby inspecting, carefully and professionally, the tile that now was not only cracked but finally split into little unrepairable pieces. Francine knew that the one who liked to be called Shakespeare had an apartment in Brooklyn (a black working man with his own apartment) containing at least one cupboard secure enough to hold his collection of the stamps from our letters from Europe, and that he fixed problems in our apartment in exchange for nothing but kind words. But here was a second, and Jason was the third, “colored” man wishing us a nice day as if he genuinely meant it, as if we were all good neighbors, as if we knew each other personally and that that was how we wanted it. The little black girl ran out the door like they were after her. So fast that again I didn’t take in her face properly, and all I know is that she struck me as a child who reads a lot and afterward isn’t given much help thinking about what she’s read.
– She acted like she was scared of me, Marie.
– Well of course she’s scared of you! Sometimes you ask questions, Gesine . . .You know, Gesine, the kind of question . . .
– Don’t trust anybody over thirty.
– That’s not what Francine thinks, that’s what I think. But I mean something different. You know what I mean.
December 13, 1967 Wednesday
During the 1966–1967 fiscal year, with fewer than half a million soldiers in Vietnam, 748 persons were convicted for draft-dodging; in 1944, with 11.5 million under arms, there were 4,609. Now do the calculations yourself, and DON’T FORGET THE NEEDIEST!
Last Tuesday the Vietcong massacred 200 members of the mountain tribes, and Senator Percy of Illinois came to see it, and so on, and DON’T FORGET THE NEEDIEST!
The New York Times has also taken another look around East Germany and found the regime more jittery than ever, more mistrusting of its people; the people would like to get out sometimes, consider their government the least liberal of all the Socialist countries, and see Communism as the superior social system, and DON’T FORGET THE NEEDIEST!
In 1935 they would still have let Cresspahl out of the country. They wouldn’t have used force to keep him there.
– But he’d tied himself by that point down with his money seems to me: Marie says in German, or what passes these days for her German.
– Right. When you consider that an English pound was worth twelve marks thirty pfennigs in those days, there can’t have been much left.
– And he’d made a life for himself there: Marie says in English.
He had made a life for himself.
At first the Gneez guild hadn’t exactly abandoned him, but they had left him alone where he was, which was way up north on the coast. Any work that came to the carpenters in Gneez they needed for themselves. No one had asked this Cresspahl to come back to Germany. They were the ones who had spent the bad years driving around from village to village, town to town with their furniture samples, and people hadn’t been able to place any orders, or pay for them in the end if they did, and all the while he was sitting pretty abroad, making money. Plus he was Horst Papenbrock’s brother-in-law. It served him right to have to stoop to wheelwright work and fixing wagon shafts. If worst came to worst he could always go to his father-in-law, and where could they go? Not to the bank to dip into savings, more likely to bankruptcy court. You got that right. Cresspahl had paid his courtesy call to Willi Böttcher, the guild master in Gneez, and nothing since. Böttcher’s part in the conversation had been limited to numerous sighing Jå, Jå’s, which added up to conveying that he didn’t trust the new guy, not even enough to discuss whether or not times were tough these days. And Cresspahl hadn’t liked Böttcher’s son. The kid was sixteen years old, always bragging about his “service” in the HJ, which stood for Hitler-jugend, Hitler Youth. And about his friends in the regional HJ leadership and his nighttime shooting practice in Gneez Woods. Apparently that was another way to end up with the Nazis: sitting next to the Knoop kid in school since 1932. The Knoop kid was the son of Johannes Knoop, considered the biggest man in Gneez out of all 25,023 inhabitants—coal merchant, carriage trade, import and export. Johannes Knoop had an exclusive hunting license, and junior, Emil, had free access to the gun cabinet, and already by 1931 Emil Knoop with his father’s guns had brought his whole class, members of the Christian Boy Scouts one and all, into the HJ. From sitting next to Emil in high school, Klaus Böttcher had ended up something like Emil’s adjutant or staff sergeant. Then Johannes Knoop had had to send his brat off to boarding school, and the HJ in both Gneez and Jerichow were under Klaus Böttcher’s command. He went to school in the uniform, he went to the dentist in the uniform. In his father’s workshop, though, he had two left hands. And he had such a frivolous way of talking, this Klaussie. In June 1934, when the Austrian had half of the SA leadership shot, the Böttcher kid had said: Well, the Führer doesn’t know everything. Such comments were accompanied by such an exaggeratedly cocky look that it was like he was trying to make the other person laugh, or like he had no idea what his words meant, and Cresspahl didn’t care to take the time to figure out which. It hadn’t escaped him that the scamp wanted to know how come Cresspahl had the rank of an NCO, and it wasn’t just because he was curious, nor that his questions about Cresspahl’s life in London were ultimately grounded in respect, but this didn’t seem like the best strategy for getting into Willi Böttcher’s better graces. So however friendly the boy’s “Good morning” to Cresspahl might be, even from a military distance, Cresspahl’s response was curt.
He’d noticed all the same, though, that Klaus didn’t use the Heil Hitler with him, the way an HJ group leader was especially required to. For the time being he chalked that up to the silly behavior that children so often have.
Then Cresspahl had to drop off his papers proving pure Aryan descent at Böttcher’s, and the kid was waiting for him. He was again in full uniform, with a kind of thin leather knot in his tie and a braided cord dangling down his chest, and Cresspahl acted as though he were reviewing the child’s clothing for its compliance with military requirements. – Jå, the Youth Federation’s all through now: Klaussie said, in his cheery, fake-sophisticated way. – Yup: Cresspahl said, half opening Böttcher’s door. Böttcher’s entrance hall was as wide as half a street so that a truck could drive right up to the workshop. Klaussie, talking away, managed to steer Cresspahl back into the courtyard. It sounded like this time he really had something to say. It was about a hiker’s shack that the Youth Federation had built on the south shore of Gneez Lake. In 1931, the HJ had been illegal and had often rented the hut for secret meetings.
– We were illegal too, you know: Klaussie said in his obnoxiously worldly-wise way.
– ’n’ now we’re gonna occupy it for good tomorrow night, and Heine Klaproth’ll have a fit!: the guild master’s brat said.
– You just wait ’n’ see the look on ’is face day after tomorrow! Klaus said. Heine Klaproth was an apprentice with Cresspahl and had previously been a Christian Boy Scout. – You won’ tell ’im anything, will you? Klaus said, and he looked genuinely worried, and he could barely contain his glee at his Nordic cunning.
That night Cresspahl drove Arthur’s truck very slowly, as quietly as he could, down Adolf-Hitler-Street to Gneez and then on Schönberger Street all the way around Gneez Woods to the southern shore of Gneez Lake. It was October, and when he turned off the headlights he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The lake was pitch-black. Lantern light was reflected in the water only on the lakeside promenade, far away. On this side, the shore seemed very crowded, and Cresspahl couldn’t believe that the Boy Scouts had had so many members. – They’re SAJ: Heine Klaproth said, Socialist Workers Youth. Apparently they’d rented the shack too sometimes. So in the dark, without making a sound, they dismantled the building. There were only three carpenters and two carpenter’s apprentices among them, and even so by around three a.m. all that remained was the smooth soil where the hiker’s shack had once stood, and from the boat landing not even the pillars. Someone had brought a rake, and someone had swiped a sign from the Rose Garden in Gneez, and what they left behind was a neatly raked piece of shoreline with a plaque in the middle saying: KEEP OFF—FRESHLY SEEDED. And early that morning when Cresspahl drove around the north side of the woods with his share of the lumber, he passed a tired crowd of Hitler Youth coming back from nighttime exercises, and this time Klaus Böttcher greeted him not with Heil Hitler and not with Good morning and not with the slightest sign of having seen him at all.