Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  And who thanks her for it, other than with ten cents?

  We want to thank her, because it’s Christmas.

  Thank you very much, dear lady.

  It must be because it’s almost Christmas that people are acting so strange. It can’t be anything else.

  It started with Marie, wanting to explicitly give thanks for an apartment from which in the morning she can see a wintry river and the brightly sunlit cliffs on the other shore. She does so in a roundabout way, putting on a patronizing tone to say: Nice apartment you have here. Anything more might have betrayed emotion. Then she said: Some children really do have it lucky.

  And Shakespeare and Jason were downright exuberant, inexhaustible in describing Mrs. Cresspahl’s outward appearance, and it may have something to do with the fact that they are soon to receive envelopes with a little green paper inside, but it can’t be entirely about that.

  The black mechanic in the middle garage on Ninety-Sixth Street, the serious man who goes over to a broken car like a doctor on a soap opera, waved with his whole hand to Mrs. Cresspahl, in a brotherly way, and it might mean: Take care of yourself, sister. Look out for yourself. Hope you have a good day now. He can say all that without smiling.

  And again on West End Avenue, outside the liquor store, there was one of those tattered men each of whom has a sick aunt in New Jersey, which is why he needs at least thirty-five cents for the fare to see her, and Mrs. Cresspahl remained hard of heart and gave him not cash but a disdainful subway token, and he really and truly said: God bless you, lady. Impossible.

  The old man at the newsstand practically wouldn’t let Mrs. Cresspahl go, he talked to her and asked: Don’t you want your Der Spiegel? It’s just come up. He’s always acted like people were a burden with their constant requests, and today he looked up at the sky and looked the customer in the face and told her: Nice day. And it wasn’t just a statement of fact, it was not too far from a wish. Had someone given him a drink?

  And at least on the eleventh floor of the bank they couldn’t get over the fact that it was thirteen degrees (55°) on a 19th of December. Apparently that hadn’t happened in decades. Apparently the last time was in 1931! Everyone’s greetings are a hairsbreadth away from hugs. And no one pays attention to whether Mrs. Cresspahl answers a compliment on her appearance with a compliment in return, as the rules require. They may have meant it. Can it be true?

  And all day the weather was clear and mild, or as they say here, like a balm. Total strangers smiled at Mrs. Cresspahl on the sidewalk, in the subway even! The light in the air felt solid. You could throw yourself against it with your whole body, not just your eyelids.

  And in the cafeteria in the building, Sam himself intervened after I’d read his menu for the second time. – Get the pot roast, it’s delicious, I promise! he said, kissing his fingertips with pleasure. Then the waitress took what Sam felt was her time, and he admonished the cook personally through the hatch: One pot roast for the lady here with a smile on her face!

  And everyone else I ran into—Amanda, James Shuldiner, Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Ferwalter, Marjorie—they all wanted to know how Mrs. Cresspahl was doing, and every last one wanted a truthful, honest answer!

  And Marie broke the rules and called me at work to report that we’d gotten mail from Kliefoth, from Karsch, from D. E. And the man who sells us cheese would like, after approximately two years acquaintance, to ask Mrs. Cresspahl a question. He usually has a sour expression on his face, or else his pale complexion makes it look that way once it’s brought out by a black growth of incipient beard well before the eponymous five o’clock. His store is so crowded that the customers have to take a number to be served in their proper order, and he has never once given the slightest sign of recognizing us. But this evening he was alone.

  – So, ma’am, I have a question for you.

  – Go ahead.

  – You sometimes come in here with a child.

  – I do indeed. Sometimes with two.

  – I mean just the one.

  – The one with the braids?

  – Yes. That’s the one I mean.

  – And what’s your question?

  – Is she your child?

  – She is my child.

  – I see.

  – Yes.

  – In that case, I would like to ask you one more thing, if you don’t mind.

  – Yes?

  – Umm . . . Are you married?

  – The answer is affirmative.

  – Hmm. All right. Then that’s that.

  Das war es denn wohl. That takes care of that.

  And Marie had asked Mr. Robinson to let her have the elevator, and she was riding it up and down in the building, waiting for the elevator doors to open in front of the Mrs. Cresspahl I am taken to be, Mrs. Cresspahl who wasn’t expecting her child there, Gesine who I am for Marie.

  The day will come when she looks like me at first glance, but the world will like her at second, and not even she will know that she smiles back like Jakob.

  PART TWO

  December 1967–April 1968

  December 20, 1967 Wednesday

  THE WATER is hidden deep underground where the street has to pass over a mound of rock—chlorine-green, lukewarm water packed tight in a tiled box beneath the Hotel Marseilles on West End Avenue, Manhattan, Upper West Side, New York, New York. The water is loud, it cracks and splits open under the swimmers’ dives, sloshes against the sides, gurgles in the overflows, hurls the patter of walled-in echoes wildly this way and that. Tiptoes. Arms out. Ankles up. Head between arms. Soles flat next to each other. Now the water hits the top of your skull. The rapid passage under the water, following your hands, is through half-blind twilight.

  The children in the shallow end of the pool are already greeting the head that pops up in their midst. – Nice header, Gesine: they say. But they say Gee-sign, and what they very well might mean is that that wasn’t how they learned to dive. Curious header, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  The children of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive fill the Mediterranean Swimming Club at this time of day, between the end of work and dinnertime. They endure the presence among them of the old ladies bravely paddling away in their flowered swim caps; they keep an eye on the young athletes trying to forestall the decay of their bodies with underwater forced marches; it is quieter in the corner where a lone mother is standing still, conscientious, shy, with a toddler on her lap. But the children like to clear the diving lane only for their own kind, letting the grown-ups wait on the board, and boys like David Williams make a game out of unexpectedly plunging down into the middle of the doggedly flailing musclemen.

  They learned to dive differently. The jerk of the whole body, down to the ankles, from abruptly raised arms—missing. Look at this Marie Cresspahl, been in the country only six years: she glides into the water from the edge of the pool in a single unbroken movement, like a fish returning to its proper element. It is as though she simply lets herself drop, so lacking in visible kickoff is her jump. Marie is practicing diving with her friends—Pamela Blumenroth, Rebecca Ferwalter—but they don’t throw coins onto the bottom of the pool, they throw locker keys, whose dull color camouflages them. Without keys they won’t be able to leave the pool, so there is some fear in their giddy competitive screams, and when Marie comes up holding the rescued key in her outstretched hand, there is real relief in her small, wet face, shining with happiness. Later, when she pulls the tight swim cap off her head, she will look older than her ten and a half years amid her long-since winter-blond hair. In the white frame of her cap, the still-growing curve of her eye sockets is exposed under her abbreviated forehead, as though stripped of all protection.

  Above the noisy water, halfway up the blue-tiled walls of the room, a balcony runs around two sides: the back of Bar Marseilles, where there are tables for two. That’s how old this hotel is. For the customers of 1895, it was still enough to look down from far above at the swimmers, the barely clad; in a building today, the drinkers w
ould want stools at the edge of the pool, or alongside it behind a clear panorama window. Still, Mr. McIntyre up there hardly ever comes to a stop in front of his ninety-nine bottles of firewater: there are enough people living in this part of town who like to meet up amid the redwood walls, spend a little time every day sitting on the shiny worn leather and polishing with their elbows the massive bulge of the mahogany bar, already gleaming with age. Up there, six years ago, a Gesine Cresspahl sat too long and tried to use Irish turns of phrase to find a false entrance into the local life, often next to Mr. Blumenroth, who at the time did not look like a father of Pamela. The Jews haven’t given up on the Upper West Side yet—Jews are welcome here—but never once in six years has the head of a dark-skinned fellow American shown up at the delicately fretted balustrade, and just as, up there, it is not Mr. McIntyre’s prices that keep the blacks from a visit to the Marseilles, so too, down below, it is not only the $60 annual fee that keeps the whites in the water among none but themselves.

  On this particular evening, it’s two hotel guests who are trekking back and forth in the pool along the south edge, stubbornly keeping to their lanes—two young foreigners. They stop, almost as if offended, before the old ladies who prefer the shorter swim across the pool; they swallow water and their rage at the children plunging into the depths right in front of their noses. Maybe they’re Germans, technical trainees at their company’s New York headquarters, because they are speaking German, despite the fact that not only Gesine Cresspahl but the Jewish swimmers too, if pressed, can understand their rather bewildered comments and cries. They have no sense of where they are; they speak openly, and loud. It’s not clean enough for them here. They have a newly built pool at home. Many of the swimmers here look like they wouldn’t be out of place in Europe. And finally Marie comes up, with smooth soft strokes under the water, to report, triumphantly: They’re talking about you! They said you’re the right size! That your bustline is too low! That maybe you haven’t had children yet but you don’t need any pumping up! With your hair, your cheekbones, you must be from Poland—from a Slavic country! she says. Because the Cresspahls speak German only when no one else is there to hear it, Marie insists on that, this Marie whose gray-green eyes are now full of affection, believing she has relayed a compliment to her mother, something agreeable.

  And if you have kids, let’s hope they don’t have your bones, Cresspahl! I mean, if it’s a girl, hope she gets Lisbeth’s legs.

  The pool of the Mediterranean Swimming Club, sixty-five feet long, eight lanes, may be bigger than the “Mili” in Jerichow, where Gesine Cresspahl learned to swim, the child who I was. The one there is bigger in memory—say those who have since returned. I am not allowed back. It’s a long way from here, more than 4,500 miles, and even after an eight-hour flight you have to travel on until dark, and you still won’t be there. That’s more than 6,000 kilometers. That’s Wendish country, Mecklenburg, on another coast. I lived there for twenty years. “If you cross the sea you may find yourself / Betrayed, sold out, in an American woods. . . .”

  The rain shelters on the Mili in Jerichow-North were put up thirty years ago by my father, Heinrich Cresspahl, born in 1888, who left for the Netherlands to get away from the German wars, then went to England, and yet came back to Mecklenburg with my mother so that I could come into the world in Germany, a few years before the next war. She was so miserable already, my mother, Lisbeth, née Papenbrock. The airfield on the high Baltic coast near Jerichow, which my father helped build as a carpenter, was for a modern war, so a puny creek was stopped on its way to the sea and diverted and made to replenish the water of the military facility’s pool. The facility was given the nickname Mili by schoolchildren, only after the war, when the Soviet occupying forces blew up the Jerichow-North complex, razed it to the ground, and forget about the pool. In 1953 Cresspahl’s rain shelters had long since passed through Jerichow’s stoves; only a few rotted stumps remained. It was February, the pool drained, the bottom neatly carpeted in white snowdrifts. Jakob came clambering down after me without a second thought. We walked up and down the bottom of the pool until all the lanes were filled with our footprints. No picture of Jakob’s face on that day comes to mind, I would have to invent one. We were invisible, sheltered by the walls of the hole in the earth, hidden under the swirling sky, in the whistling silence. And he could tell me only how life abroad was for him, not how it would be for me.

  The White House has now permitted the air force to fly with relative freedom through the so-called buffer strip along the Chinese border in Vietnam. Fourteen American scholars assure the nation that accepting a Communist victory would likely lead to larger, more costly wars rather than to a lasting peace.

  Here is Mrs. Cresspahl, waiting at the edge of the swaying board until the diving lane is free. She lives around here, on the corner of Riverside Drive and Ninety-Sixth Street. Thirty-four years old. Her neck is stiff, she sucks in a belly. It won’t be long before she’s buying her shoes for comfort, not style. As she prepares herself for the dive, her eyes narrow, lips tauten. The sharp impact of the water on her head gives her a moment of numbness, blindness, absence; not for long.

  – Quite a header, Gee-sign!

  December 21, 1967 Thursday

  In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, some members are skeptical about whether the administration and Joint Chiefs of Staff told the truth in 1964, when they claimed that the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy were attacked by North Vietnamese ships on August 4 of said year. According to Mr. John W. White from Cheshire, Conn., who was serving at the time on the Pine Island, a nearby seaplane tender, and who heard the radio messages sent by the destroyers at the time, they were “confusing because the destroyers themselves were not certain they were being attacked.” Numerous signals were identified as incoming torpedoes, but then no torpedoes came. Was the radar actually picking up a number of small craft? Evidence of antiaircraft fire, flares? Could planes make out such small wakes from the air at night? At the time it was all considered true and sufficed to authorize the president to take the foreign war seriously.

  – A president can’t lie: Marie says: He’d always get caught!

  She is standing in the kitchenette near the entrance of our apartment, in an apron too big for her, a dishtowel over her arm, turning meat in a pan, pushing her hot hair from her brow with a bent forearm the same way her grandmother and grandmother’s mother did before her, not like a child helping out with the housework but like a member of the household who understands and accepts her role. Photographed like this, in ten years she would interpret herself as a child who grew up in fortunate circumstances, in a time of peace. She has taken her time, with a lower lip half tucked in and narrowed eyes, and when she spoke she was no doubt trying to show her mother that she was listening, but still reproaching the adult for her needless misgivings. It is a time of peace for her because she doesn’t see the war in Vietnam.

  She cannot see it. She has heard too many details from me about how war looks. She doesn’t know anyone from school whose family has been sent a full coffin by the government. She’s familiar with the ruins between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, but they were caused by the wrecking balls of land speculators from here, not by the bombs of an enemy from elsewhere. The small businesses on Broadway die out not because the heirs are casualties but because of the high rent and Mafia dollars. The government doesn’t confiscate cars; the gas stations reward the purchase of gas with free gifts. Marie doesn’t need to remember to lower her voice when a policeman is nearby. She can’t imagine Mr. Weiszand being woken up at six in the morning by four plainclothes officials and dragged off to jail simply because he’d incited and led an antiwar protest at Columbia University. What she knows about railroads, ships, and airplanes is that to travel on them takes money, not a travel permit from the authorities. I would have a hard time naming a single item that wasn’t for sale somewhere in New York. Our phone may be tapped but that doesn’t take a war. There would need to be an
army occupying Riverside Park across from our building and blocking the entrances to the Hudson River promenade with grenade launchers for Marie to be halfway convinced. Possibly, when it comes right down to it, she considers everything I tell her about Germany as nontransferable. That may be how they wage war in Europe, not here. She is here, though, and has enough to think about.

  Marie is against wars because people can get hurt in them. Plus, she can’t go against what I say outright; she doesn’t even want to hurt my feelings. She started an argument with a teacher in class once, over the justice of the hostilities in Southeast Asia, but she sounded her friends out beforehand—Marcia, Pamela, Deborah, Angela—less to lay in a stockpile of solidarity than to not risk any friendships. Around Marcia’s parents, Mr. & Mrs. Linus L. Carpenter, she wouldn’t even let the topic pass her lips: the Carpenters give money to civil rights groups and want dark-skinned fellow Americans to have decent housing everywhere except in their own building, and they think the situation in Vietnam is old news, talking about it is tactless by this point, if not downright unseemly. Mr. Carpenter III—Georgetown, Harvard, colonel of a copter battalion in the reserve, the Carpenter of Allen, Burns, Elman & Carpenter—has explained to Marie that in a democratic form of government everyone is responsible for handling their own duties and responsibilities, and war is the president’s. When Marie brought that home, cautiously, to test the waters, it also came out that she’d worn her GET OUT OF VIETNAM button only as long as it was fashionable in her class. She is as disingenuous as I have raised her to be.