by Uwe Johnson
Out of weakness, hence guilt.
Guilt was not talk for a doctor’s ears, even if he was the last person she talked to. And she asked his forgiveness for that. For if her latest, her biggest sin reached the ears of the church, she would have to forgo the last sacrament. This way, though, dying in secret guilt, she could be sure of a Christian burial.
That left the guilt of deception, but not of malice. One of the smaller sins, venial, the kind a child has. And this was the only way Cresspahl would not learn of his guilt and would be able to live until his death, at least, free of the guilt.
And Dr. Berling said:
She doesnt remember any of it. People talk in a fever. Not one remembers a thing.
And he said:
Always this mawkishness around Christmas. Candles! Singsong! It’s to blame for a lot, old Swede. You can bet on it.
He said:
She’ll recover. Just wait a couple years, old Swede. After two years she won’t be able to stand it without a second child.
And:
Godet Niejår, Cresspahl! Happy New Year!
December 26, 1967 Tuesday
Christmas is over, and The New York Times once again feels she needs sixty-eight pages to bring us all the city’s shopping opportunities as well as the world’s news: The air force has resumed bombing in North Vietnam. Fire on a Norwegian freighter in the harbor. The Free State of Bavaria sees itself as a bridgehead to Eastern Europe. Peking is silent on its atomic blast. Mayor Lindsay regrets errors, promises improvements, and by the way has a hidden television camera in his home office that allows him to appear live on six New York channels. Now we know that; who knows why.
One day, Marie will also say about me, among other things: My mother used to read The New York Times. Not as an indiscretion; as a description. She will compare me to Cresspahl in London, who wanted to hear the Labour Party speaking through the Daily Herald; to Lisbeth Cresspahl, who not inadvertently brought the Manchester Guardian back from the city but who in Mecklenburg was perfectly happy that there was only the Lübecker General-Anzeiger to subscribe to, not the Lübecker Volksbote, Social Democratic, banned, plundered.
Marie, that’s not how it was. In April 1961, when we arrived in New York, we had other papers to choose from: the News, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram & Sun, the Post, the Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, the Long Island Press, and the Times. I bought the Times for its British ancestry, and didn’t even know that it was part of the minority that had endorsed John Kennedy for president against Richard Nixon. In the bank, they’d advised me to read the Times: for the rental listings every day, not only on weekends. We found our apartment in New York with the Times, five windows looking out on river colors, on Riverside Park, on open sky. I first realized The New York Times was a habit when they were out of it on Lexington Avenue and one day a polite child, not yet four years old, indicated with a jerk of the head on Seventh what I was looking for: a newsstand, with newspapers, though not the Times; and I didn’t feel like buying the News. You saw yet again that grown-ups are strange, and still you couldn’t let go of my hand in a place where the language, the colors of the cars, and the height of the buildings were strange, to say nothing of your mother.
Say what you want when you’re over thirty: My mother fell for the conservative appearance, while imagining she hadn’t fallen for inch-thick reporting about nothing, embarrassing photos of nobodies. You can say: My mother wanted to learn an educated, propertied American English, more than the one the workers spoke and the cops and the robbers. It may even be true. But if I did need such language to fool anyone, then I also needed it to pass muster with bosses who’d gone to universities. Make fun of it if you want, that I learned New York from the Times: not only who our senator was but how he’d obtained the vote; not only the mayor’s name but the limits to his authority; what qualifies as misconduct, as misdemeanor, and as felony, and what the letter of the law permits you vis-à-vis the police. Say that at only twenty-eight I was giving age its due—that may have been true: No. 4,230, Lincoln’s assassination, seems to me worthy of respect, due to tradition; as does today’s: No. 40,148 in Vol. CXVII; but don’t say I respected tradition unthinkingly. It wasn’t: to hold up a new authority to replace the one I had lost. If that were true, I’d have had to think of the paper as a father; but I think of the Times as an aunt.
That might be admiration. The mirror of daily events, fogged over in only a few and often unavoidable places. The thoroughness of many of the articles. The scoops, the accomplishments: in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, the ten pages (out of only thirty-eight) on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as early as August 7, 1945. Here I may be deferring to the Times’s praise of itself more than it deserves. Perhaps I am giving her credit for things that only I think are worthy: calling Barry Goldwater’s candidacy a “catastrophe,” explicitly; bringing news of the killing of John Kennedy to the people in headlines across all its eight columns, three or four days running. But I have also been in the lobby of the Times Building with you and I know the motto on the wall above the bust of the owner who made the Times, Adolph Ochs, and if it’s common currency in our home, it’s hardly used with a straight face.
“TO GIVE THE NEWS IMPARTIALLY,
WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOR,
REGARDLESS OF ANY PARTY,
SECT OR INTEREST INVOLVED”
These are the flags that the city of New York flew at half-mast when this most loyal nephew of the Times was carried to his grave in 1935; this is her self-understanding as an “honorable human institution.” During work hours, though, the aunt still does have a business to run, involving the procuring of news reports and their dissemination by means of sales; this was made clear to me, if it wasn’t already, by the strikes of 1962 and 1965. With a one percent share of New York Times stocks, we would be sitting pretty in the Social Register of New York, Marie!
What struck me as auntlike (as soon as I could read her) was her inability to do something good without also discussing it. When the Times—never one to support a particular political party—supported a politician, it was expressly because she felt his party’s position was correct, not that, say, Kennedy felt that. The conscience of the USA one would want: she was its caretaker. How insulted she was by Robert Kennedy right after he was elected senator, and how dreadfully she retaliated, accusing him of not writing his own book! If she described a people’s representative’s candidacy step by step, and had a friend of the candidate do it, it was not to support him but to instruct the public in the nature of the political process; a murder in the Daily News may be sheer pandering, but in her own paper any such item is sociology. The epitome of auntliness is her indomitable need to instruct: countless is the number of times she again and again mentions the fare on the South Ferry as an amazing five cents, which the locals as locals already know as a wonder of the world, and the tourists know from guidebooks. Eventually even I noticed the careless repetitions, came to mistrust the old-fashioned turns of phrase, mentally sought out more exact expressions that were by no means vulgar. (If I hadn’t learned American English from the News too, I would hardly get by on Broadway.) These were signs of age and as such not worthy of laughter, or of contempt. It was if anything rather touching how shocked she was at the death of the Herald Tribune, what a body blow the swallowing of three papers at once by a competitress was, and how she tried to wiggle her way out of the dilemma of trying to educate and entertain her readers at the same time! How bravely, chin raised, she took a historical explanation of an event and wrung present-day functional relevance from it, like it was nothing!
We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.
Who, at her age, undergoes rejuvenation treatments like this? No longer merely sending her people to stake out the mouseholes of the police, the government authorities, the embassies, the wire services, the maternity wards and crematoria, waiting in comfort and dignity for her peop
le to lay out their catch so she can conscientiously inspect it and then, aware of her responsibility, describe it! No, instead she takes a seat, crosses one leg over the over, sips her tea spiked with rum, chews on her world-famous cigarillo, and thinks it over. Now she’s got it. Before, she had by and large given precise reports from around the world, small towns, large metropolises, down to the last dapple: what happened, who did it, in what weather, and what happened next. But there was something more, something missing, wasn’t there. . . ? Right! What people were talking about in these cities and towns! And there in a flash it is, for the taking—The number one topic of conversation in Hanover. . .or: in Moscow . . . , to give the forty airmail subscriptions a day sent there an entirely unexpected relevance. In addition, from now on she’ll have at the ready: The Man in the News. His biography, main occupation, sidelines, hobbies, goals, enemies. And as if that were not enough, she goes in search of things she presumes her readers have insufficient knowledge of, in their own city! And then lectures tersely, briskly, but still charmingly: on the life habits of various disadvantaged groups, Upper West Side, Lower East Side; the mixture of structural and real-estate problems in White Plains, “Stranger, come to White Plains . . .”; the emotional bonds among members of the non-white ethnic groups in the ghettos, not only in Harlem but also in Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, now that’s interesting—and she sits up straight and gives this news that is not really news the status of news! It’s not so much that she’s perfectly willing and able to prove the facts, it’s about how it was old Auntie Times who found them in the first place. You always think that the time has come at last for the youth of today to stop trying to shirk their duties and responsibilities, but no, you have to do everything! Granted, she had her reputation to consider, and she put all this not right on the front page but near the top of the second—perhaps with a hint of apology—but the moral exemplarity was indisputable. Once again she has done the right thing and pointed out in the most delicate tone of voice that no one else would bring themselves to do it: suddenly, what we hear about the police is not only their arrests, releases, corruption, and preferments but how at the bottom of their hearts they feel about it all, about who has to faithfully obey whom in what circumstances, what rights those suspected by them actually have, and that at least 800,000 readers of the Times are most kindly requested to elect politicians who truly intend to subordinate the police to civilian oversight commissions, promise.
That one didn’t work out, maybe because the other seven million inhabitants of the city think in a language that The New York Times refuses to countenance, live their lives with things that a lady of the world will not permit her customers to encounter even in the words of her ads: nudity, homosexual, carnal lust, naked, nothing on, panties, perverse. . . . Don’t you see that there’s no other way she could fulfill her role as aunt, Marie?
She spares me astrological nonsense, Marie. She’s not entirely stuck at the level of enlightenment handed down to her in 1896 in a Geneva finishing school.
No comic strips for you, I’m sorry to say. Do you expect her to live like an ordinary citizen of the USA, with parents instead of ancestors, letting things happen in his home, and even enjoying them, which. . . .
The old-fashioned, indispensable fairness that leads her to renounce political cartoons, because a cartoon can only say: On the one hand. Never: On the other hand.
Marie, your mother was someone who read the Times of New York.
With respect. Without respect. You figure out the synthesis. (I’ll give you a hint: Defenseless.)
I leave it to you to prove that my upbringing forced me, via the Lübeck Gazette, the Nazi People’s Observer, the Soviet Union’s Daily Review, the New World and New Germany, via the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Rheinische Post, to spend an hour a day chatting with an old aunt.
For when the Free State of Bavaria sees itself as a bridgehead to Eastern Europe, she’ll pass that along. She’ll remind me that as of January 7 the post office will demand more postage for our letters. Irrespective of whether or not I believe it she’ll tell me what she heard an American soldier say in Vietnam: “Christmas and war are a contradiction in terms.” Finally, she doesn’t even keep from me that President Johnson’s family had “a wonderful, wonderful day” yesterday.
And when I’m done with her I go wash my hands.
December 27, 1967 Wednesday kinderglut
It is the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year, known in New York as the kinderglut. Marie has never seen this word in writing, only heard it and said it, so she has no suspicion of any relationship to the German word pronounced “gloot,” blaze or glow. She does, though, know the rights of a New York City child on this day: to no school, to Wednesday matinees, to run wild in the city, through the stores, through the subway, a right to have fun wherever she can find it. She will find it, among elsewhere, in a present for me, so small that it’ll be as if it were stolen. Marie has kinderglut, the thing—she has no need to understand the word. I should, and don’t want to.
I feel like I’m sick. I don’t want to know.
The park is black and cold. A year ago, the New Jersey shore was white, bundled up high behind the bright icy blue river, and it brought back a winter morning on Lake Constance, the memory of snow-covered gardens, children on the railway embankment with their hoods up, the church-tower tuber on the water, foreland and mountain range rising up through the headlights there, along the water here, and the Säntis massif imaginable as hidden behind the new snow in the air. The moment of recall, the fact of bringing it into the present, corrodes both at once: past memory and present view.
Wet wind against the windows.
The New York Times has tracked down the inventor of napalm. (The New York Times explains what napalm is.) The inventor is a professor emeritus from Harvard University, Dr. Louis Frederick Fieser, pronounced the German way, “(Feeser).” In the fall of 1941 he received the contract from the National Defense Research Committee. By mid-1942 he’d finished. What he says is:
– You don’t know what’s coming. – You can’t blame the outfit that put out the rifle that killed the president. – I don’t know enough about the situation in Vietnam. – Just because I played a role in the technological development of napalm doesn’t make me one iota more qualified to comment on the moral aspects of it.
Is there such a thing as anti-Fascist napalm?
The door to the back staircase, our fire stairs, is held open with a string tied around a heating pipe. A sign on the door is still clearly readable: THIS DOOR COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE IN CASE OF FIRE. IT MUST BE KEPT CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.
Marie plays Taking My Mother to the Subway. The metal steps of the coiled staircase sound xylophonically under her jumps. On the streets she walks at a downright polite distance behind me, hands comfortably stuffed into the pockets of her London coat, telling me all about her plans for kinderglut: she could go get her ice skates sharpened, she might take the subway to Queens Plaza again, could stop by Macy’s to see the new arrivals from Lesney of Britain, Limited. . . . She’s being tricky: what she’s actually going to do is go back to our apartment and work some more on the “secret” she’s promised me for New Year’s. She walks on my right and so scares off the old man waiting at the entrance steps down to Mr. Fang Liu’s laundry, a former gentleman whose current disarray is for now visible only in the frayed legs of his pants. He retreated as soon as he saw Marie.
He’s tried it before. He’s not practiced at it, he always has to start by saying “please,” with an echo of his former days, then breaking off: Please. Ma’am. I’m sorry to bother you, You’re very kind, ma’am, Thank you ma’am: Thank you. This morning he has to doff his hat and say hello, because he’s ashamed in front of the child.
– Twelve more years and then I’ll go to work for you: Marie says, suddenly dejected. She’s embarrassed to be hugged on the street, even if it’s just for a second, cheek to cheek. Today she wanted to.
In
the rattling, racing, camphor-scented subway, The New York Times reports in her composed, ladylike voice that on Sept. 26, 1967, Mr. Gostev of the Moscow KGB posed the following question to the physicist Pavel M. Litvinov: Could you think under any possible circumstances that now, in the fiftieth year of Soviet power, a Soviet court could make a wrong decision?
Can you imagine it?
The Christmas decor and advertisements have disappeared from the parts of the bank open to the public, the wreaths from the halls, the cards from the desks. The teletype clacks as if it had never fallen silent. Employee Cresspahl has until eleven to prepare two letters to the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, one to the Bank of the Holy Spirit in Turin, one to Giovanni Agnelli’s private office. A draft of an Italian/French contract is expected at noon, she has an appointment with the vice president at twelve thirty. And in the afternoon she’s supposed to help the South America Department get through the backlog of credit letters, if she can, as a favor. I’d be delighted, Guarani. The vice president is sorry to have to cancel our meeting, he’s off to Mexico. No, on a hunting trip in Canada. Actually, no, he’s helping buy Xerox today.
Blind with repetition. In one shop your name is Antipasto, in another Gauloise, in another Coffee-Large-Black. Sitting comfortably at a child-size table in the Thousand Deli, continually jostled by the hurrying line of lunchers, were two men, Italian looking, who’d just agreed to something and were toasting each other with beer in paper cups, with rather loving smiles, trustingly. Because shooting, not poisoning, shooting is the custom of the country.
Dear Sirs: We hereby establish our IRREVOCABLE credit in your favor, available by your drafts drawn at 90 (ninety) days sight for any sums not exceeding a total of about US$80,000.00 accompanied by commercial invoice describing the merchandise as indicated below. . . . Dear Sirs.
And now you’ve learned something new, Gesine.