Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The stunt yielded more than some free wood. The SAJ had been the youth group for the Social Democrats, and now all of them from Gneez to Jerichow knew for certain that this Cresspahl was only pretending, just like they were.

  Heine Klaproth started acting like a member of the family. The boy had always worked hard, but now Lisbeth could hardly stop him from doing favors he thought he read in her eyes that she wanted. When the woodbox was barely half empty he was already on his way out to chop more.

  Lisbeth would probably have forbidden Cresspahl from doing this kind of night work and accused him of endangering the family, but since she only heard about it the next morning she thought it was pretty funny and merely regretted not being able to share the story with anyone, even Aggie Brüshaver.

  And now Cresspahl was expressly included with the carpenter’s guild regulars when they went out drinking. They told him the lay of the land. For one thing, he shouldn’t be taken in by the Nazis’ German Labor Front. In the first place, they’d stolen everything they had from the unions. And it wasn’t their pay rates.

  Just don’t raise up any new masters, right, Cresspahl?

  How does someone become a master, Gesine?

  By marriage.

  Gesine.

  All right, how?

  By working hard and being good, Gesine.

  By working hard and being good. Fair enough.

  They were nuts anyway, with their “beauty of labor” stuff. Flowers in the workshops! Have you ever seen a flower that can stand carpenter’s glue? Enlarge the windowpanes! Are we gardeners? Places to sit during breaks! I sit on what I’m making, that’s the only way my lunch tastes right. Put in lawns! Where’s Gertrud supposed to grow her radishes? But the worst, the lowest down dog of a plan was for those idiots in the Regional Home Improvement Office of the German Labor Front to standardize the orders. Standardized furniture cranked out by the thousand! Those are jobs for factories, not craftsmen. We don’t even get the bones from that fish!

  And you need to watch out around Irene Loohse, she’s got a brother-in-law, le-gal ad-vi-ser to the Labor Front, you might as well go straight to the police. Now ya know, Cresspahl.

  And they said, around the end of 1934: Hey, Heinrich, something’s going down. When it happens, we’ll cut you in.

  At first Cresspahl had wanted only to adjust to life in Germany and keep his integrity. It turned out not to be as bad as all that. His guildmates, you could get along with them, drink some beer, talk about machines and material and workmen, play some practical jokes on the Nazis—live your life. Not bad.

  Shut yer trap, Gesine. Keep yer trap shut.

  December 14, 1967 Thursday

  Dear Anita Red Hair.

  Dear Doctor of Oriental Archaeology!

  Dearliest.

  (Does the old man still say that?)

  Thank you for your letter and for actually sending Henri R. Faure’s passport back by November 15. Shakespeare sends his thanks for the Swiss stamps. Shakespeare, real name Mr. Shaks, first name (as I’m sure you’ve guessed) Bill, is an inexhaustibly nice black gentleman from Brooklyn, a plumbing virtuoso with the manners of a hotel manager. And he has given in to his name and not only knows half of Hamlet by heart but Richard the Fourth too. Collects our European stamps.

  It was nice of you to have your “Henri R. Faure” write a thank-you letter to Henri Faure. Now the old Faures are convinced that they haven’t been taken in by any shenanigans. Henri turned his passport around and around in his hands and found no trace of anything and couldn’t believe that such a small thing could be the ticket out of a country that doesn’t want to be left.

  The Faures still think we did it for Judaism, and they greet us on the street, even from a distance. They are truly of the old school—he doffs his hat with a firm, elegant flourish and they stop and converse with us every time. My French now has a slight Belgian accent.

  Meanwhile the GDR has lost a young “Zionist” who doesn’t want to go to Israel at all, it turns out, but to Canada. If only you had time to explain to your Workers’ Party how a certain part of the world works.

  Dear Anita, it’s terrible that you’ve lost your apartment. I’m sorry.

  I liked that it was so close to the roof, up with the birds and the planes and the treetops. I liked that it had three exits, as the poet mandates, and three steel doors that closed like a bank vault. Life was safe behind them. I liked that it had two sides. The gray side, with the slanted north-facing windows, with the rooftops beneath it all the way to the broken tooth you call the Gedächtniskirche, from a safe distance too. I liked the other side, the one that caught the sunlight and even in winter the smell of the dry wind. I remember how the floor sloped a little. I liked that planes flew in over the city and could see you down on the balcony. It was a birch whose top branches reached your balcony, wasn’t it? I liked about the apartment all the time you let me live there, and Marie remembers it too, if only the 125 stairs to your light switch and doorbell. I’ve lost something too, and Berlin won’t be what it used to be.

  I know you don’t have time for research and excavations on this continent at the moment, but it makes me sad. I could have used someone like you around at Christmas. Someone who knows how to recite the fishes’ night prayer, exempli gratia. I can’t stand Christmas. I don’t know what it is about it. I have no deaths from this time of year but I can’t stop dreaming about death. And Marie expects the holiday routine, and I have to go through all the motions. Someone was asking about you here just yesterday: as the poet says.

  Today is the day that The New York Times can finally report that the young man on the Greek throne has misplayed his hand and left the country. Sometimes I’m not sure that you and I would agree about such events. It’s been five years since we’ve seen each other after all.

  Actually, yes, I am sure. The other articles say, for instance, that Control Data Corporation has sold and delivered its 1604 computer to the Warnow Shipyards in Rostock, “because it is going to be used for commercial purposes.” And the Pentagon has almost finished a “bomb bus,” a spacecraft that drops off thermonuclear warheads stop by stop all over the world, just so the Soviets have a little less joy in their FOBS ballistic missiles, Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, you remember. The unemployment numbers are down to 3.9 percent, and were so high earlier because the statistics were fooled by the strikes. There are 200,000 addicts in New York, “people organizing their lives around the use of drugs,” and three of the detectives who work this beat are suspected of selling narcotics to peddlers themselves, and at the bottom of almost every article it says DON’T FORGET THE NEEDIEST, because Christmas is right around the corner. Yes, we’d agree.

  You can’t come see this country for yourself but I can tell you about it. How your letter came. Around nine in the morning, a postal van stopped right outside our building and the driver carried a little armful in to Mr. Robinson and chatted with him about union wages. By around nine thirty, Mr. Robinson had sorted the mail and was taking the elevator up to the top floor. From there he walked downstairs floor by floor, and in fact went down every hallway twice. The first time, he threw the printed matter onto the doorsteps. It’s a plopping echoing sound, which is what first announces the mail has arrived. You’ve got mail when your apartment door softly shudders from a gentle thump. Then he stuck the real letters between the door and the doorframe, at the height of the lock. There, you see, they are more taboo than the advertising left on the floor. Sometimes he comes by a third time, with a parcel or package, and rings the bell, and says: I’ve got NEWS for you! Not our door, it would be in vain for us, because I’ve long since left for work and Marie is already in school. I have never once seen Mr. Robinson do this, but ever since I heard the sound of it once, on a Saturday morning, that is how I imagine it and I know that that’s how it is. Incidentally, Mr. Robinson knows all the tenants’ daily schedules and he would keep a parcel for us in the staff room, and only start bringing it up and down in the elev
ator with him around four o’clock, so that he can present us with it as soon as he sees us. Now for how I can send off this letter to you. There are the ordinary mailboxes, blue with red hats. But they aren’t hanging screwed to the side of the building, they stand on their own on the street corners, and when you pull the handle under the domed brow they open their shovel mouth. They have olive green siblings but those are stepchildren, for their heads are entirely closed, and they have to announce to all the world: We do not accept mail. They do, though, from mail carriers. In the magnificent buildings of Riverside Drive, there are bronze panels, similar to coats of arms, set into the wall and displaying a slot and telling you your zip code. In our lobby the box is only old cast iron, not elegant, but still, for our building alone. And I don’t have to go to it. For in both office citadels and apartment buildings, flat glass shafts run from the top to the bottom, opening into mouths on each floor. In them the letter flutters downward, but as little as one floor down a passerby will already be startled by a racing spot hurtling through the corner of his eye down to our venerable receptacle, which the man from the post office visits several times a day in his truck, for example now, at nine at night. The truck, which I can see beneath my window, is blue and white, and shining red eyes turn on when it’s reversed, and it can give off shrill warning tones. The driver steps out of his roomy cabin and goes around to the door of the stowage, grabs a sack, enters the building, comes back out with his sack, gets into the stowage, and this time turns on the light, which to us, from above, looks yellow in the night-gray roof of the truck. And now for the post office itself. The mail carrier’s uniform is a light blue-gray shirt whose badge on the upper arm takes the name of the job literally: The man inside this garment is a “Carrier”: it says. We all know what Herodotus had to say about them. They wear gloves and even so can manage a large number of tiny keys that they have hanging on a chain from their belt or in their pants pocket. Since the mail is sacred, its offices are modeled on classical temples, and since it belongs to the federal union of states, wanted posters hang in its branch offices. A postal vehicle has right of way, even over a fire truck in action. In the city, post office windows are protectively clad in lattice grates; in the country, the desks and counters are open. Well, we don’t live in the country. But we’d be glad to drive you out to it.

  Marie requests your attention and says that she knows who you are.

  I would not be so bold, but would remain, Affectionately yours, G. C.

  Your letter will have a postmark from the Grand Central post office. Only the best for you.

  December 15, 1967 Friday

  There is one matter in which The New York Times shows herself to be the elderly lady she is: typos. Today she mentions a “Wost Important Target,” Longbien Bridge near Hanoi. May the pilots’ hands be as fluttery as those of The New York Times.

  She still considers the Greek king news. The man has moved out of the embassy in Rome, to a cousin’s place.

  These narcotics detectives apparently stole $2,783 from a suspect during a narcotics raid. And underneath appears the refrain: REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!

  The New York Times prints one story especially for Marie. The Honorable John Vliet Lindsay, seeing an empty cigarette box come flying out of the cab of a truck on Forty-Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue, ran after the truck and flung the box back at the three men inside the cab. – I’m the mayor: he said angrily. – I’m trying to keep the city clean. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

  – Yes, sir: said the men in the truck. They almost tipped their hats.

  But there are always people who refuse to treat an occasion with the seriousness it deserves. One passerby said to the mayor: Finders keepers, Mr. Mayor.

  And Marie is utterly guileless. She falls for it. She says: John Lindsay is totally right! He’s right! I don’t understand what you’re laughing about!

  Weather: Mostly fair, windy and colder today, tonight and tomorrow.

  – Time for a test: Marie says. – I want to see where you get these pasts of yours from. Enough lying. Tell me about Gesine as a child, when she was two!

  – Gesine as a child, when she was two, could sit up, stand, walk, talk a little, and she already read the newspaper.

  – Got you already!: Marie cries. – That’s what I did! You got that from me!

  – You, Marie, read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung when you were two, that’s right. But you weren’t allowed to put the least little rip in it, not even accidentally, and you learned that fast. You respected the printed word almost from the beginning. But the child in Cresspahl’s house read The Lübeck Gazette, the free newssheet for Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg. Her grown-ups watched with pleasure when she tore the paper in half, with a big swing of her whole arms, because at least that was one way to rid the world of lies, and at least in that state you could use the paper to start a fire with.

  – One–nothing: Marie says, sulking. Then she gets an idea that makes her look extremely crafty, her whole face lights up in an anticipatory smile, and she says: And Gesine as a child held the newspaper upside down.

  – She did.

  – Ha, like me! Marie says. – Like me!

  – One–one. Kudos, Marie.

  – I’m not done yet! she says. – What did the child say, when she did talk?

  – The child felt that the most important words were: Cresspahl, bear, buttermilk, cat. Those were the ones she tried to copy. And if her father’s name came out Esspaw, you can imagine the rest. All in Platt, by the way.

  – Not the word mother?

  – It’s possible. Most likely yes, so let’s assume so.

  – What about me?

  – That was your second word, and you used it in the form of my first name. You said: Ina. Ina.

  – No score: Marie says, disappointed.

  – No score.

  – And the bear? she says, as casually as she can.

  – Cresspahl’s daughter pronounced der Bär as d’Bä. She’d already realized you’re supposed to leave certain holes in what you say, she just didn’t know what exactly to put in them. She said all the articles in all the cases in one way, and all the forms of “to be,” “to have,” “to come” just by adding an s.: Wo ist der Bär? became ’O’s’d’Bä? The vowel in Bär was more like the English “bear.”

  – And this bear didn’t happen to be named Edward, living under the name of Sanders in gold letters in a forest all by himself ?: Marie says. She is talking very fast, she is sure of victory.

  – He was, and in other circles he was known as Winnie-the-Pooh.

  – Now I’ve got you: Marie says, cool as a gherkin. – You got that from me. We have the German translation in the glass bookcase, right there, and it says Copyright 1938. But we’re talking about March 1935. It didn’t exist yet. You took that from my life, so now it’s two to one, my lead.

  – Not so fast. There’s another book in that case, and if you look up Milne, Alan Alexander in it you’ll see: Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926 (Pu der Bär, 1928).

  – Dammit: Marie says. – Sorry. But it’s frustrating, isn’t it? By the way, I think we should subtract a point when someone makes a mistake. So now it’s one–zero, your lead.

  – You couldn’t have known that, Marie.

  – Anyway, it’s a rule, starting now.

  – Agreed. A rule.

  – So why do we have the German edition from 1938? It must be yours.

  – Because I got it in 1939, as a birthday present from Hilde Paepcke.

  – Then how did the child Gesine already know about Mr. Sanders, Winnie-the-Pooh, in 1935?

  – From Cresspahl. Cresspahl told the child stories.

  – Aha.

  – She didn’t know the name Edward Bear lived under, in a forest all by himself, nor the nom de guerre he adopted in company. She only knew that her own stuffed bear was named Bear, and that the bear Cresspahl had in mind was this Edward he’d met through some English children in 1929.
/>   – That was a trick, Gesine.

  – Yes, maybe. A point for you?

  – I earn my points fair and square. And here’s one. The child knew the bear’s English name. Like me.

  – I read to you from the book I got from Hilde Paepcke. In 1959 we were living in Düsseldorf, and you still knew your mother tongue. German.

  – Tripped myself up there: Marie says, now almost confused. But she’s brave. She says: All right, minus one to plus one. Your lead.

  – I really am against subtracting points, Marie.

  – You are a very good mother, Gesine. Every other mother I know would laugh. But it’s okay, you shouldn’t treat me with kid gloves.

  – A tua disposizione, Fanta Giro. Minus one to plus one. My lead.

  – How did I say my name, Gesine?

  – Meh-ee.

  – And Cresspahl’s child?

  – Gay Zina.

  – No points.

  – State of play unchanged.