by Uwe Johnson
– It’s not a game, Gesine!
– Point differential remains as it was, Marie.
– All right. I assume there were things Cresspahl’s child didn’t like.
– Getting her hair cut.
– Like me! Like me! One–nothing, still your lead.
– But she cried only once over losing her hair. Then Cresspahl thought of something and took the child by the hand and they went for a walk down Town Street in Jerichow.
– Down Adolf-Hitler-Street. No points either way.
– Down the Austrian’s street in Jerichow, and he bought a leg of lamb from Klein the butcher, and some heavy corduroy pants at Tannebaum’s, and a postcard at the post office, and the child trailed after him the whole time, into one shop after another, and then also into Fiete Semmelweis’s, Hairdressers for Men and Women, Also Shaves. The child watched as Cresspahl, at not quite the right time, only two weeks after his last cut, let some of his hair be taken off. Cresspahl had murmured something to Semmelweis, to make sure he wouldn’t end up bald or anything, and Semmelweis was touched, charmed too, and the child saw that the business of cutting hair could be a pleasant, even fun affair for both men, and next time she let a little bit of her own hair get robbed from her without making a fuss, and she probably thought of it as a present for Cresspahl. Because she ran away from Lisbeth’s scissors, it was Cresspahl’s scissors she went to.
– Minus one to plus one. Your lead.
– I didn’t mean it that way, Marie.
– I do. I started this.
– But think about cutting your fingernails, Marie.
– So that you can lie that Cresspahl’s child cries when she gets her nails cut too, and then I’ll have a point? No cheating please.
– It’s not a fair contest, Marie! I mean: Wettstreit. There’s no way I can not win unless I cheat a little.
– I’ve got something. The child didn’t talk much.
– The child, even at two years old, was rather stubborn about keeping quiet. She listened to the grown-ups but rarely answered questions. Quite the diplomat. If Aggie Brüshaver asked the child how she was doing, she would have to guess the answer. When Heine Klaproth invited the child to come see his rabbits, he had to wait and see whether she was following him or had unexpectedly run off, with only a lone wooden clog showing she’d been there at all. Methfessel might stop her in the square and ask, in his conspiratorial voice, with his gentle lopsided smile: Do you want to be a lion? Eating everything again? But maybe she understood that he was beyond needing answers. She gave him a friendly look and then tugged a little on her father’s hand so that he’d look at her, and Cresspahl did and understood that she’d finished her parley with Methfessel and was ready to go now.
– Hm. Like me?
– Like you. You were still like that when we came to New York. Zero– one. Still my lead.
– And Cresspahl’s child loved to take walks.
– With him. She went with him to buy wood, to pay taxes, to the barber, to Wulff’s. Cresspahl had told her Wulff’s pub was an apple-juice store, and she must have understood. And she learned something else there: that she preferred apple juice to soda, when she shook her head Wulff took away the Fassbrause and brought the apple juice. None of that at home, none of that would ever happen with Lisbeth. The child liked going to “the apple-juice store,” and knew all the “apple-juice stores” in Jerichow. Lisbeth realized that one morning when she was out shopping and the child wanted to go into the Lübeck Court. Lisbeth didn’t understand and tried to keep walking. The child lay down on the dusty sidewalk in front of the steps of the Lübeck Court, flat on her belly, and had to be taken away by force, screaming. She expressed her defiance by refusing to walk, and Lisbeth had to carry her home through the whole town, and the child was screaming until inside Cresspahl’s door, and that was the first time people in Jerichow began to talk about Lisbeth’s abilities as a mother. The child was always doing things with her father—on walks, on drives, working in the garden, swimming in the Baltic, always, everywhere, whenever he wasn’t in the workshop, and because you never had any of that I am giving you a point right now and it can’t be taken back and if you refuse it there’ll be consequences, one–one, game over.
– Don’t cry, Gesine. Stop crying. Should I get you a glass of D. E.’s whiskey? Please, stop crying, Gesine!
Yes, sir: said the men in the truck.
One morning when the sky was gray
In mid-whiskey
God came to Mahagonny
God came to Mahagonny
In mid-whiskey
We noticed God in Mahagonny.
Looked at each other, the men of Mahagonny:
Yes: said the men of Mahagonny.
One morning when the sky was gray
In mid-whiskey
Come to Mahagonny
Come to Mahagonny.
In mid-whiskey
Get started in Mahagonny!
They looked at God, the men of Mahagonny:
No: said the men of Mahagonny.
December 16, 1967 Saturday
Today is a bad day for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not only was Sergeant Ulysses L. Harris of New Jersey convicted of espionage yesterday and sentenced to seven years hard labor but today The New York Times had to broadcast that fact to the world. In Italy, moreover, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lost its spy Giorgio Rinaldi for fifteen years in prison, Angela Maria Rinaldi for eleven, and Armando Girard for ten. Will they get compound interest on their continuing salaries?
The air force reports having heavily damaged two spans of the Longbien Bridge near Hanoi and hit a third. The comedian Bob Hope is off for his annual Christmas tour for the soldiers in Vietnam, Cardinal Spellman is dead after all, and DON’T FORGET THE NEEDIEST!
In the Morgan post office, primarily devoted to handling foreign mail, there was a second fire, but this time in all ten floors, destroying Christmas mail by the ton.
And justice has taken its course with Sonny Franzese and his three friends. Justice let another man, Mr. Walter Sher, who was sentenced to death for murder, write a letter stating that actually it was Mr. John Rapacki who’d helped Ernest (The Hawk) Rupolo into Jamaica Bay on August 24, 1964, with six bullet wounds and seventeen stab wounds in his body. Now the governor is commuting Mr. Walter Sher’s sentence to life imprisonment, and Mr. John Rapacki says that’s a lie and he can prove it. Either way, Franzese and his friends have been acquitted, and The New York Times observed that Franzese’s wife, trim and blond, was sobbing, and knows why: with emotion and relief. Have a nice Christmas, Mrs. Franzese!
Marie doesn’t find it especially out of the ordinary when the Cresspahl family is picked up from Riverside Drive late in the afternoon and taken to Connecticut by chauffeured limo. To judge by her behavior, she expected nothing less. Now the Cresspahl family not only has a friend who’ll share his big car and house in the country with them, which might be pure coincidence, if not just deserts; now there’s someone else inviting them to enjoy such luxuries, the boss, His Majesty the Vice President himself, and Marie feels safe living in a world where hard work and ability are rewarded as they deserve to be. While the car was still in the city, she may have been sorry that its windows were tinted a discreet dark green, not giving any of the kids in her class the chance to see her partaking of this stylish transportation; on the highway, she started experimenting with what the proper behavior might be for a conveyance of this kind. She decides on a stiff, upright posture in the plump padded seats. Then a hidden chest of drawers built into the front wall of the passenger compartment is too much for her. She considers it possible that there’s a bar inside it. She pulls one of the richly polished knobs in the most casual way she can manage. Heavens to Betsy, it is a bar, with a cooling unit too! There’s a wireless phone in this car! And here there’s a TV folded up to the size of a shoe box! Marie is so busy with her discoveries and her behavior that she doesn’t even notice that Arthur is only waiting for an inv
itation to lower the dividing glass and begin the conversation he now seems to think Employee Cresspahl, eleventh floor, is worthy of. But Cresspahl, eleventh floor, is talking to her child. Cresspahl, eleventh floor, has other things on her mind.
De Rosny’s house is a stone’s throw from the Long Island Sound in a parklike neighborhood where even the streets are private property. The area begins with a little rise built into and crossing the street, meant to inform drivers from elsewhere, with a bump to the wheels, that they are now entering a new land where special rules and customs apply. The house has no fewer than five columns, white, in front of its two floors, holding up nothing but a pediment jutting out from the roof. The wrought-iron gates open themselves at a radio signal from the car. Marie is only a little embarrassed that Arthur holds the door open for her, head bent, cap in the vicinity of his heart. She thinks such customs are natural when they are respected and performed. She has time to give him a grateful sidelong glance. She thinks that all this is due to her mother’s hard work.
She doesn’t understand a thing. She sees de Rosny, this gangly hardy man, as simply a nice person with especially believable manners. She doesn’t grasp that we depend on him. Even though she’s been told this many times. She lets him lead her through the lower floor, living rooms filled with inflatable furniture, rustic cupboards, hanging chairs, walls covered with reproductions of comic strips and ads for canned soup. So this is where The New York Times took photographs. Since then, Christmas preparations have been made here too. De Rosny has hung from the chandeliers the biggest and brightest stars you can buy from New York’s paper stores—practically morning stars. If you believe him, he set up the old Italian nativity scene especially for Marie, and Marie does believe him. He so thoroughly envelops Marie in the behavior one has toward a lady that she cannot help but conform to it. There’s nothing for it but to say “please” and “thank you” and “may I” and “but of course.” She would never permit herself an eyelash flutter like that with just me. Even her voice sounds different.
To Marie the whole evening is a friendly visit. She thinks it’s possible for people to have power over one another at work, due to chains of command and differing salaries, but nevertheless to fraternize like equals in their spare time. She feels so unconditionally welcome there, due solely to her beautiful eyes, that she puts the whole de Rosny family into her inner circle at once, and the first thing she’ll ask me after we leave is why Mrs. de Rosny spent the whole time on the second floor, wandering through the rooms there with a rather heavy tread. The New York Times won’t have taken any photographs there. Marie thinks Arthur’s metamorphosis into a servant is just funny, and bats her eyelashes at him when he wheels in cocktails on a converted baby carriage, Paris 1908, and she takes the orange juice Arthur has called a screwdriver as precisely the joke he’d intended. Marie sees the conversation before dinner as carefree stories of work in the distant city, and doesn’t realize that it’s actually a lightning-fast, merciless test of whether I fully and accurately understand the finance system of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, how much the Czechoslovakian government plans to raise the GDP by with its new 1966–70 Five-Year Plan, and even in which areas, for example by 50 percent in the chemical industry, and also whether the Czechs and Slovaks will succeed in meeting these goals, and if not then why not. What Professor Kouba had to say about the ČSSR’s New System of Economic Planning and Management in the February 1966 issue of Mirovaya Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya comes out of my mouth so fast that I wouldn’t be able to think of the German words for it, much less the thought behind them. It seems like I’ve passed the test, B minus maybe. All Marie has noticed is that once again her mother knows lots of things, and she displays her pride with big shining eyes.
It’s by no means a sure thing yet, however, that the gentlemen in Prague seriously want to nudge their economy to health with credit in Western currencies. Still, it wasn’t a Western banker who made a personal appearance at the Státní Banka Československá, it was the latter’s president who paid a visit to Karl Blessing of the West German Bundesbank. What a blessing there’s a Blessing. The question for me isn’t whether it’ll happen nor whether I’m willing. I don’t know of a single company except Revlon, never mind a bank, where a woman is even an assistant vice president, and de Rosny won’t change that. That’s one thing.
All Marie notices about the dinner is how formal it is. A housekeeper, a cook, and finally Arthur each played their part in making it so. Marie sees only that Arthur really and truly pours some wine into one of her three glasses. She takes de Rosny’s inquiries into my background for the pure expression of interest that one expects among friends. What he’s conducting is an interrogation. He can do that, he’s the boss, he’s investing money at his own risk so he assumes the right to ask questions, and his most courteous way of expressing himself and his most winsome face don’t make any difference. He wants to know quite simply everything I haven’t told the personnel department, from the Mecklenburg tradesmen’s guilds to my current feelings about the basic principles of Marxist dialectics. De Rosny can’t understand how Cresspahl was the mayor of Jerichow, and maybe he thinks it’s funny, in any case he wants it explained to him. With respect to Jakob, occupation and cause of death are enough. You are ever so thoughtful, Mr. Vice President. It comes out, though, that Jakob never did represent the German Democratic Republic at a European Railway Timetable Conference, in Lisbon or anywhere else, which is a blow to Marie. She’d been so sure of that. Oh well. And what would the Czechs and Slovaks think about me? How should I know? What he means is: the government and party of the Czechs and Slovaks. Most likely they aren’t mad at me. I don’t have to shove it in their faces, after all, that I passed through their country with a passport in which only the photograph was actually mine. But there might be something. The ČSSR is on very good terms with the German Democratic Republic, and they might decide to share the latter government’s pain over the fact that I tried living under them for only three and a half years, and then left for the back of beyond. That doesn’t bother de Rosny. On the contrary, he considers it an advantage, maybe. It’s true, I don’t have to put in writing for de Rosny, or the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR, or its Foreign Ministry either, the fact that I have a friend named Anita, Anita with the Red Hair, who helps private individuals out of the GDR, and that so far I have not been able to refuse her anything. Then there’s the job with NATO in the Military Maneuver Damages Compensation Department in the forest outside of Mönchenglad-bach. De Rosny considers that a fillip, if anything making me more trustworthy. Could be, but what about how I got the job? Well, if he doesn’t ask then I can’t answer. And for de Rosny it’s enough that I haven’t heard from Dr. Blach again since Captain Rohlfs handed him over to the East German courts, not even since they let him back out onto the streets. And so the second order of business this evening is taken care of. Apparently, all in all, I have adequate knowledge and an adequate life for the haul our esteemed boss de Rosny has planned in the Eastern European credit market. So now I’d like to go home.
But Marie has one more question. She has followed the examination of my biography like a bloodhound, and in fact did hear quite a few things for the first time. But now it turns out she’d been thinking about something else the whole time, and so now the moment has come to interview de Rosny. She brings out her question a little timidly, with lowered eyes at first, and stays on a general level, not mentioning de Rosny’s particular firm by name: Is it true that the banks are making money off the war in Vietnam?
De Rosny hasn’t opened his mouth yet and already Marie believes everything he’s going to say. Because he didn’t let himself be tempted into a disconcerted sidelong look at the mother raising her child with such Communist idées fixes; he even refrained from any look betraying amusement at the childishness of the question. He sits up straight in his chair, he leans forward, he rests his elbows on his damask, he lays, almost folds his hands over each other, and
he gives Marie a serious look. He is making the effort of an actor playing a doctor at a seriously ill patient’s bedside. His voice is deeper, even. – We: he says, and he pauses, as though compelled to consider everything once again, for the sake of total diligence. Now Marie is a little frightened. Money itself is speaking to her, and Money is looking at her with steady, concerned blue eyes while it talks to her face-to-face.
– We wish, with all our hearts, that the conflict in Indochina could be brought to an end, whatever the outcome, or at least that our country were no longer involved in it. We don’t believe that there will be peace with an American victory, not even in two years. And the peace in Indochina we could have in two years without a victory for our side, we want it now. Because war brings and increases inflation. Inflation, young lady, is a terrible thing for a bank. In the long run, a war puts the government in a position to tie the banks’ hands, dictate what they can and can’t do, down to the smallest details. Already it’s going to take a terrible effort to repair the sicknesses lurking behind our current economic bubble. I’ll tell you, young lady. If Mr. Johnson were to announce defeat in Vietnam, that we were cutting our losses, the market would jump fifty points. What am I talking about! Sixty points, on day one. And then there’s the human side, the most important consideration of all, my dear Mary. Bankers have human feelings too. Believe me: de Rosny says.
And Marie believes him. She gives her mother an astonished look, accusing her of having presented things in a very different light, but since her mother doesn’t speak up and contradict de Rosny, that’s that as far as Marie is concerned. Marie should never have been allowed to come to this house.
When we leave, there’s something else: a box covered in a white cloth is carried out to the car, and the Italian nativity scene is no longer where it was. Should an employee prove to be a thoroughly suitable person for a profitable assignment, one might well decide to tie her tighter to the firm with a gift worth, let’s say, a thousand dollars, even if it goes to her daughter.