Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  She can’t stand up against this country with the tools I’ve given her any better than I can. This is a country in which President Johnson is allowed to exploit Christmastime sentimentality with a televised interview promoting his policies at home and abroad, and can talk about “a Kennedy-McCarthy movement,” and The New York Times will speak in a not dissatisfied tone of that “deadly hyphen” likening Senator Kennedy to the various peace groups more closely than he probably wants. Marie watched Johnson’s dignified, devious appearance last night at the Carpenters’ house, and came back outraged that the president could describe her senator as an unduly ambitious man who merely coveted his, Johnson’s, job. She didn’t notice that Kennedy was being denounced for wanting peace. She has been living here six years. She doesn’t want to live anywhere else. She doesn’t want to live in a country she can’t trust. She trusts this one.

  Her politeness is well nigh limitless. While setting the table and serving dinner she was still thinking, and before the first bite she said: You’re saying that when a president’s lie comes out, it’s too late for us, and late enough for him?

  She can look like such a little sophist sometimes. Chin on folded hands, head tilted amiably to one side, that’s how she gazed at me, having proven that she listens to her mother’s every word. She has added a second answer to her first one, and neither one shocked her in the least.

  December 22, 1967 Friday

  What a newspaper we have in this town! The New York Times reports that, according to real live astronomers, the sun in the northern hemisphere will be above the horizon for the shortest period of time and that winter officially arrived at 8:17 a.m. today.

  It reports, too, that in August 1964 four crew members of the Turner Joy really did see the wake of a North Vietnamese torpedo in the Gulf of Tonkin, three hundred feet off the ship’s port side; that the government, however, had already prepared contingent drafts of a full declaration of war, long before August 1964.

  And Marie says, in a rather tense and snippy voice: – I can’t live the way you want me to live! I’m not supposed to lie because you don’t like lies? You’d have lost your job ages ago, I’d have been expelled, if we didn’t lie like three American presidents in a row! You didn’t stop your war and now you want me to do it for you? When you were young they were preparing their war all around you and you didn’t notice anything!

  – No one told me anything, Marie.

  – But you could see it! Apologies are in order, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – Stop crying, Marie.

  – Say sowwy, like I used to when I was a baby.

  – Sowwy, Marie.

  My war was well hidden. Even the name of the town of Jerichow was remote in Germany. Vacationers driving by on the road to the Rande seaside resort, what did they see? A quarter mile of rough paved road, making the cars hop and curtsy. Barns. Yards. The red eastern wall of the brickworks with its two real and fifteen false windows. Cool gravestones in the shadows. One street, narrow like a village’s, with low buildings on either side, two-story, semi-decrepit plaster on the fronts, timbered sides. A monstrosity of a church with a bishop’s-miter spire towering over it all, beclouded with treetops up to the start of the projecting gables. Lots of shops with display windows that used to be living-room windows. Karstadt’s bunker-like box, a country general store. Or else they came by bus from the train station, and started with the market square, its almost regal buildings. Papenbrock’s house, like the Lübeck Court, less modest than the town hall. Horse-drawn carts on the way to the weighing house. Hardly any local cars. Holiday quiet. Where the out-of-towners expected the actual town to start, they found themselves scooting down the smooth country road to the Baltic. To the left, a ways off, clusters of new construction, perhaps a workers’ settlement, why not, as it said on the signs: “New Land North.” Just where a strangely generous concrete road branched off, the main road dipped and behind the hotels of Rande thickly covered in bushes stretched the sea striped with sunlight. Off to the west, behind, forgotten, was the Jerichow-North Military Airfield. 1936.

  But it wasn’t called by its name in Jerichow. For more than a year now, the town’s merchants and tradesmen had been working on it, making money, yet the site was called Mariengabe, after the village that made way for it. This had always been a customs border control area, so the new restricted zone didn’t stand out. Vacationers looking for the abundant hiking trails mentioned in their out-of-date guidebooks were met with, and warned away by, army patrols at a good distance from the construction site. The local nobility had kept their regular table in the Lübeck Court; topics of conversation included the Olympic Games in Kiel, when necessary the 1934 drought, and still more reluctantly the Four-Year Plan. For Friedrich Jansen, mayor of Jerichow and district leader of the ruling party, had set up a regulars’ table of his own, at the windows overlooking the stable yard, where he spent long evenings, mostly with out-of-town visitors. Oftentimes these were gentlemen from the secret police in Hamburg, in black uniforms, some had literal heavy leather coats to hang on the pegs. The workers in “Mariengabe” had refused to work for half a day in September 1936; there was talk of Communist leaflets. Herr von Maltzahn had found one in his forests and zealously pressed it into Friedrich Jansen’s hand, “unread.” Nowadays von Maltzahn was talking not about an airfield but about “our revenge for Versailles.” Herr von Lüsewitz had received satisfactory compensation for his land holdings in what used to be Mariengabe, and since then liked to bring up his “sacrifice.” Friedrich Jansen simply brought out his phrase about “Nordic cunning” and clearly knew “a pack of wine-guzzling aristocrat trash” when he saw it. In Peter Wulff’s pub, people used expressions like “the big dog” and “a bloody miracle” to avoid mentioning the airfield, but not when anyone from out of town was drinking there, even if they were sitting out of earshot, no matter how good their Plattdeutsch sounded. Stoffregen, the head teacher, also tended to change the subject from the airfield right away, in his case to the Jews and the assassination of the head of the Swiss branch of the NSDAP abroad, which he described as an “unmasking.” Kliefoth, the senior teacher, was widely understood to have left Berlin for a region in which the Nazis had come to power a full six months sooner than elsewhere for a reason—he would be forgiven here, but for what?—and word was that Kliefoth had interrupted a conversation about “the construction work” among fellow passengers on the train to Gneez with the comment: I’m warning you. Apparently he hadn’t explained this notion of his. Swenson had made such a “modest” profit from his omnibus line between the station and Jerichow-North that he’d been able to buy a second van, and he called his participation in the construction of the airfield “doing his duty.” Pastor Brüshaver attempted an outright joke, describing the thing as the “Reich Mission for People’s Sport,” after the signs set up at the western end of the construction zone; Pastor Brüshaver’s son was in Spain flying missions against the forces of the legal government there and had a good chance of earning as his reward the command of an airfield, all they had to do was finish it. And my father had the saws in his workshop going morning till night, and at lunch tried to get the noise out of his ears by shaking his head, and he had a bank account in Rostock and one in Lübeck and received payments via a giro account in Hamburg too for the work of eight employees and had dutifully joined the German Labor Front and faithfully gave Heine Klaproth time off to serve in the Hitler Youth as the law required and had twenty ears listening to him around the lunch table, mine included, and he talked about Mariengabe.

  He thought it was a good name, he said. Mary’s Gift. Where someone was giving, someone wouldn’t mind taking. Water was harder than stone, and anything that fell from the sky into the Baltic wasn’t something he’d care to take. He’d seen airplanes in England. Lisbeth had even flown in one. She couldn’t deny that now. Jerichow wasn’t famous for anything yet, except Friedrich Jansen, but that would surely change with the bombs the English were going to be unloading here first. J
erichow and the English had a date, you might say.

  Heinrich, your talk’ll get us killed! Heinrich, the child!! Heinrich Cresspahl!

  My father didn’t talk about bombs, he talked in Platt about “dropping shit,” and these and any other unexpected thoughts he saw fit to voice—calmly, slowly, almost casually—they all found their way not directly to Friedrich Jansen and his fine leather notebook but first to the next-door house and across the yards and into the lawns and over the fields and only once Jerichow had been taken care of was it Friedrich Jansen’s turn. Party Comrade Jansen passed them on word-for-word to the Gestapo in Gneez. That was a mistake. A stern official document was sent to his mayoral office, complete with national emblem and seal, from a Hamburg air force office, advising him in no uncertain terms to stop pestering them. By including his own name he had revealed that he had personal fish to fry, and the German air force was not interested in being the one to flip it for him. Moreover, it was proven scientific fact that water did do more damage to falling planes than land. Finally, not even a person with the rank of district leader was permitted to presume to insinuate that the air force command might be underestimating the potential enemy. As for the fundamentals of the situation, the relevant circles of the air force command tended to share the conviction that certain tradesmen were contributing more, and more effectively, to the expansion of the German air defense than certain timeservers in the ranks of the party and local administration. Heil Hitler! Friedrich Jansen had to sit there and keep his mouth shut now even when someone showed him how this Cresspahl shook his head during his speeches. As if he had water in his ears. Or when someone sat at Friedrich Jansen’s regulars’ table for a while even now, to cheer him up with Cresspahl’s insinuations, and also because it really was annoying the way this Cresspahl talked so openly about war, like it was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t necessarily gonna happen. He was acting like a real spoilsport, to tell you the truth. He really was.

  – Mariengabe: Marie says, upset and brooding. – I hope the English unloaded there plenty. ’Twould suit me fine.

  – Sowwy, Marie.

  What a newspaper we have in this town! She recognizes even us as customers, and takes the trouble to remind foreigners that we have to report our address to the federal government in January.

  And Marie heads over to our post office on 105th Street that very afternoon to get the forms. Because what if we were deported! It’s unthinkable!

  243 Riverside Drive, New York, N.Y. 10025

  December 23, 1967

  Dear Dr. Kliefoth,

  Many thanks for your kind inquiries after my child. Let me tell you a little about her.

  Marie is ten and a half years old, four foot eleven, considered tall for her age. I don’t have any recent photographs of her; in older ones, she generally liked to strike a pose. She thinks of herself as someone who observes the person behind the camera in a curious and at the same time solicitous way. A passport official would note her head shape as LONG/ OVAL, but it’s not as long as an egg; in truth it seems rather spherical in profile. In winter her hair is almost sandy-colored, especially her eyebrows. Eyes gray and green, depending on the light. Clear. Long, fanned-out lashes, not from me. I can see her father (whom of course you never met) in her face; my friends see me in it. I can also see several typical Mecklenburg qualities in it: a certain irony in the tilt of the neck, the upturned gaze from her lowered brow, the stony secretive mien, in general the trickiness, the plotting, the mischief. All in a foreign language. It is middle-class American, disciplined by a traditional school, standoffish against slang. But what she speaks, she lives. I, with my interpreter’s certificate, often have to look things up. Serendipity. She currently has a thing for circumlocutions: I scorn the action, for instance, referring to an unpleasant task. A new way to apologize: I stand corrected, spoken in the accent of the Upper West Side of New York, which you would not find it so easy to grade.

  She speaks German like she has a sore throat. She probably had to sacrifice the language she brought with her to get fully comfortable on the street, in the school, in the city. Düsseldorf, Berlin, Jerichow—for her that’s geography. Germany, not Deutschland. She remembers more about vacations in Denmark. To take her back to the German language now would be more catastrophic for her than the move into American was. She would be happier if we had a real passport, an American one.

  I can’t give you as much information about Christmas in New York as you need. The visual assault starts unjustifiably early, up to four weeks in advance. Businesses attack first, and not only with targeted decoration. Acoustically, too, stores hammer into their customers’ heads why they’re supposed to hand over their money this time: Christmas music and Our Lingerie Guaranteed Imported Direct from Paris. On the streets, the Salvation Army has emerged from its lairs: trumpets and handbells. Finally, even the shabbiest bar will put up an electric runt of a Christmas tree between the bottles. The rich on Park Avenue, whose traffic islands in the summer are filled with flowers watered from “sources lying outside the city,” set up large and lavishly lit Christmas trees, but not all the way to Ninety-Sixth Street, where the poor neighborhood, the black neighborhood, starts. We have Christmas trees near us on Broadway too, chicken-wired together at night into thick clumps, by day standing free, each in its own stand. Like luxury goods. They’re on sale for the first-generation European immigrants—their children have already adopted the holly sprigs. Since Marie is in charge of the decoration in our house, we have holly. That’s the word for Stechpalmenzweige. Other accessories considered important are the holiday postcards that the recipient can put up on the mantelpiece, to show how many correspondents he or she is loved by, and how many of that number can announce the prosperous course of their respective lives by means of lavish printing and graphics. We don’t have a mantelpiece. Marie was also quick to move the dispensing of gifts from the night of the 24th to the American date, in her scorn for European customs. You also need a stocking to hang on the chimney. We do have a stocking. Then it’s the job of an individual named Saint Nicholas, alias Santa Claus, alias Santa, to fill the stockings with gifts in the night. You’d recognize this dispenser of gifts because

  He has a broad face and a little round belly,

  That shakes when he laughs like a bowlful of jelly.

  For Marie this is how it all has to proceed, because she considers it a required ceremony. She would probably prefer to celebrate (in a more technical sense) “Chanukah” with her Jewish friends. I don’t know how to spell that in German. She’s found out everything she can about this holiday: that it is celebrated from the 25th day of the month of Kislev through the 2nd of Adar, in commemoration of the rededication of the temple by the Maccabees after their victory over the Syrians under Antiochus IV. Your almanac no doubt has that much. Marie’s holiday is over and done with on Tuesday morning, but this year her friends Pamela and Rebecca only start theirs on Tuesday evening, and children get presents on all eight days! You may also be aware that Chanukah begins with the lighting of the menorah, the nine-armed candelabra. But even though we’re friends with Jewish neighbors, even if we count as exceptions to the Germans of the Twelve Years, to them we’re still goys and Marie will never be allowed to watch Mr. Ferwalter light his menorah. Incidentally, the Jews reproach the so-called Christians for all the Christmas hustle and bustle, while the latter counter that Chanukah is if anything even more sentimental.

  Perhaps you can gather from all this what status the birth of Jesus Christ has in the commercial realm. Yes, in the bank where I work there are gigantic wreaths of pine branches hanging on the wall between the elevators, with elaborate red ribbons, discreet, not cheap; customers as well as visitors are meant to see from them how the firm sees itself, and not only financially. But if tomorrow were a weekday, not a Sunday, I would have to go to work.

  That’s all I’ve seen. That’s all I’ve been told.

  This afternoon we got caught in an antiwar demonstration on Fifth Ave
nue—“afternoon” not in your understanding of the term, it wasn’t one o’clock yet, but it was after twelve. Such sentences were called “real Kliefoths” in probably every one of your English classes, did you know that? There were about three hundred protestors at the demonstration and definitely at least that many policemen. We were trying to go to Dunhill’s at Rockefeller Center, to buy you your morning tobacco, and the police were standing serious guard on the mall, the promenade there, because Rockefeller Center is, after all, private property. The policemen were making an effort to act calm, they were trying to keep the protestors on the sidewalk with bullhorns—how do you say that in German?—as though all they cared about was directing traffic, and the protestors had forgotten their megaphones. Only after one of them trumpeted a word into my ear three times did it register. LOVE is what he wanted, LIEBE. They called themselves Santa’s Helpers and were unconventionally dressed, half from boutiques and half from the army surplus stores. What’s more they had long hair, and the general public, loyal, patriotic, loaded down with their last-minute shopping, in inner turmoil from the large sums of money they’d just spent not to mention the outer sweat—this public shouted things about baths and hygiene. And that outraged Marie. She has learned that everyone should have the right to express their opinions in public; now here came people trying to impose their own clothes and hairstyles on others.

  The leader of the protest was a young man with a mane of blond hair carrying an American flag and a sign in the same colors, reading KILL. The last I saw of him was when he tried to invade Saks with his friends, Santa’s Helpers. Meanwhile the Salvation Army tootled calmly on, and fellows in hooded red coats and fake beards still waited to have their pictures taken with the kids. Finally the crowd pushed us out to Madison Avenue. The police were not openly angry, just exasperated from their prolonged effort to seem calm; they did still call me “Lady,” but criticized me for bringing a child through their event with Santa’s Helpers, telling me firmly to “go home.” Now for a second time Marie was outraged. There might be moments when she still feels like a child—this wasn’t one of them. In her anger, she forgot herself and called the policeman, admittedly in an undertone: a pig. Ein Schwein. I wasn’t familiar with the term. Then she apologized for her ill-advised choice of words.