Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  There is a message for you, Mrs. Cresspahl. Gesine, it’s for you. Your daughter called. She said you looked so run-down we should send you home.

  Fattish drops of rain, it should be snow, coming down into the evening crush on Third and Forty-Second, the people are crowding into the subway entrance, wind is jabbing the backs of their necks, and a chipper voice addresses them from the left, where a man is standing at his newspaper stand, hurling emphases into the air while swallowing the less important words: GOOD EVEning! It’s a PERfect EVEning! It’s a PERfect EVEning for a NEWSpaper! We have the LATEST NEWSpaper in NEW YORK here! He can still be heard on the descent into the cavern of the Flushing line. No one’s strangled him yet. He’s not from around here, this guy in a good mood. They’ll kill him.

  In the produce shop, the seller (from Galicia, spent four weeks in Berlin in 1923, Berlin has the best ice cream in the world): Nice stuff you’ve bought today. Because the bill comes to $3.85.

  Amsterdam, the city proud,

  Is built on posts of wood.

  If it ever comes falling down,

  Who will make it good?

  Now it really is snow, a thin watery substance that doesn’t stick to the sidewalk. Ninety-Sixth Street looks like water has been poured down it. But the ground in the park is almost completely covered in white.

  Marie was upset that her disobedient mother stayed at the bank until the workday was over instead of coming home. She has politely left her kinderglut present on the table: a record by some people from Liverpool with questions to ask of life. But the note says she won’t be back till nine. So she’s out for kinderglut after all. The apartment is empty.

  It’s a PERfect EVEning to be FEVERish.

  December 28, 1967 Thursday

  In Prague The New York Times can’t hear which way the wind’s blowing. She has to learn via Frankfurt that Antonín Novotný addressed his party’s Central Committee last week and leveled criticisms against Antonín Novotný, no longer considering him worthy to head the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The New York Times gives this Czechoslovak wind only twenty-seven lines, albeit on page 5; she must consider it a mild one.

  Later, Cresspahl thought that Lisbeth’s life with him had been known to the people of Jerichow like a story whose opening they’d been there for, whose developments they’d seen, whose every step they could predict in advance, whose twists they’d bet on, which they might be able to deflect but couldn’t stop, which was no longer any of their business, which they knew good and well the end of, long before he did, Cresspahl, the person living it.

  The idea of anyone trying to talk to him about his marriage would have so dumbfounded him that he would have forgotten to listen. Later, he understood that it was thus due to him if people brought it up so casually, so cautiously, in the break-time conversations of the master carpenters at the airfield, in halting exchanges of words keeping such a distance from one another that the answer came as a surprise when it did come and a storyteller had to face suspicious looks however sure he might be that his memories were welcome. Cresspahl hadn’t lived in the area long enough, he couldn’t join in the stories, only sit and listen; there was no reason he would realize that they contained information he might find useful. There was one about a horse trade in Gadebusch, then the story wandered off to a turnip cutter in Rehna, lingered for a while at a courtyard in Gneez, a man who’d tried to set fire to a home-wrecker’s woodpile, and finally ended up back on the horse to Jerichow, took a glance at our Lisbeth, and wandered reluctantly off into the Countess Woods when lunch break was over. They didn’t say yer Lisbeth, not even his Lisbeth, which meant he had to keep quiet and listen like someone being told things he’d never heard before.

  The tantrums Papenbrock’s Lisbeth had as a child!

  And all because of a horse someone’d beaten too hard.

  Her eyes would get so dark with anger!

  And always: “I,” not: “My father.”

  She wanted to show em on her own.

  Yes; but she did seem a bit crazy.

  Yah, always was a bit churchy.

  This was new to Cresspahl; he also thought he heard a warning in it sometimes, an apology. And yet they were all things he knew, just seen from another angle, new from new seeing. He had already known most of what Dr. Berling had relayed from Lisbeth’s feverish talk in the hospital, too, only said differently, put together differently; now this too was unclear, ungraspable, unexpressed.

  It was Dr. Berling’s comments more than anything that made him brood darkly, throw himself into monotonous work as though possessed. He didn’t want to accept everything Berling said. And as for strange talk, Berling should just listen to himself. He called every halfway sturdy guy “old Swede,” long before the Nazis gave him reason to dig up his relatives in Scania. Clearly he had read local-history tracts before moving to Jerichow, and too much about a certain Oxenstierna, under whom the Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War had literally laid waste to the region. Another old Swede. He’d started in with his dark hints at “cancers in the heart of the nation” only after his wife left him and went to live in Schwerin with another man, and one in a peacocky uniform, an interpreter between Reich Governor Hildebrandt and the army. Berling probably should have picked another time to badmouth the Nazis, or at least another reason. Now he spent his evenings at home alone with the Rhine wine he had delivered by the case and trundled from the station straight into his cellar; he had too many drunken evenings behind him to mentally arrange Lisbeth’s words for Cresspahl’s use. That was eight weeks ago now, and what did he call Cresspahl? “You old heartbreaker”: that was it, though he also said: “So, old Swede.” In this neck of the woods, what was strange didn’t come across as strange. The part of Mecklenburg Cresspahl knew best was Malchow, and things were different there.

  Really it was only that Lisbeth took church too seriously, and that in the long run no one could live with both the teachings of the church and the demands of the Nazis. She’d learned it as a child, and in a house like Papenbrock’s a child could grow up for years thinking like that.

  He asked her once about the chaplain Louise kept when they had the estate near Crivitz, and later in Vietsen. He approached the subject casually, asking as if about something that had slipped his mind. Did she remember him? And Lisbeth, Lisbeth laughed, she half turned away from the stove and took a half step back too, until she could reach him and stroke his brow and cheeks like a child who needed comforting. If you believed her, she didn’t even remember that clerical candidate’s name. She laughed quite naturally, looked him in the eyes, happy, openly, and also as if she had secretly guessed something he didn’t even know if he’d hidden. They still had such moments of understanding, even around other people sometimes. In such moments he was so glad to at least be living with her that he didn’t need to be happy himself too.

  He sat in the kitchen at night and got himself drunk until all he felt was tired. Didn’t even have to go looking in the pantry, the bottle of Richtenberg stood right at the front of the counter, as though set out for him.

  So it was Louise Papenbrock, whose blind pious child-rearing had prevailed with none of her children except this one. He couldn’t make Lisbeth stop seeing her mother.

  He could force Lisbeth to leave Jerichow, maybe not go all the way across the water but at least to Holland. But she hadn’t managed with the foreign church in Richmond. The Dutch one would hardly be any different. And he didn’t want to force her.

  He blamed himself too and by 1937 was finally willing to admit that he should never have married a girl with an elite education and culture, when all he could offer was what he’d learned in grade school, in his craft, and on the streets. He could hear Lisbeth’s voice from 1931: I don’t want to quiz you, I want to live with you, with you and the children, four kids. You take care of your business and I’ll keep up my end.

  Sometimes he was almost at the point of knocking on Pastor Brüshaver’s door in the middle of the night to wake him up
and confront him over this Paul who’d apparently believed it was good for people not to touch women. Brüshaver with his three young children. What was left from these impulses during the day meant that he drove right past Brüshaver as though he didn’t see him, only sometimes touching a finger to his cap, at the last moment, grouchily; on Sundays he sat in the pew next to Lisbeth with his arms crossed, marveling at this strong, not even narrow-minded man who decided to earn his living expounding a book that prescribed such rules for man and woman. Cresspahl had looked it up, this Paul had written it in an open letter.

  And often there were times when he could almost forget Lisbeth’s idiosyncrasies. Mornings when she woke him up, not inattentively, in a dull voice, but cheerfully, with jokes, from their time in England no less; days she made it through with regular work, totally normal behavior, even up for a little joking and teasing, so that the group sitting around the dinner table, suspicious at first, would feel easier and lighten up almost to the point of hilarity. It could last months.

  There was something about her he didn’t quite trust in these moods, however much he wanted her that way. He had told her, back in Richmond, about one Mrs. Elizabeth Trowbridge; Lisbeth hadn’t asked for a full confession, just listened calmly and nodded afterward, as if she’d expected as much, as if she were satisfied. In Germany he’d had to add something: an admission that some of the money saved up in England would go every month for a boy that Mrs. Elizabeth Trowbridge had brought into the world without his knowledge. He had been waiting a long time for the chance to tell her, deciding only after dinner whether it was a “good” day. On such evenings, work done, house and child taken care of, they talked to each other as though they had grown up together—fast, almost carefree, always on guard for the other’s teasing, never at a loss for a comeback, in half sentences the other person answered before they’d finished, enjoying each other, not looking past the other person for hours at a time. For Cresspahl these were memories of the early years, when she hadn’t yet known about guilt and the parts of the Bible impossible to live with; they were also a performance, an act, because the end was always the same, she went to bed first, and alone.

  She had wanted to know the other child’s date of birth. May 1932. She didn’t seem to mind. Then she’d said: Heinrich, they should live here; not too close to Jerichow but not too far. You could live with her, and with me too.

  And no matter how often he kept track and cross-referenced and took mental note of how her moods shifted, he never figured out what set her off, or whether or not it was him. The episodes appeared from one day to the next, and by nighttime she was praying at the child’s bedside over the war he’d predicted something about at lunch. He knew by this point that anything he said now would have no effect on her, and that she would reemerge from her isolation only when she could, and could show it.

  Pray, child, pray!

  Tomorrow is the day

  That the Swede is coming,

  Oxenstern’s coming,

  Tomorrow’s the morn

  You’ll be speared on his horn.

  December 29, 1967 Friday

  Today at Maxie’s produce store we spent:

  Potatoes 5 lb. $0.39

  Beans 1 lb. 0.35

  Cucumbers 2 0.25

  Chicory 1 lb. 0.69

  Rhubarb 1 lb. 0.39

  Apples 2 lb. 0.29

  Oranges 5 0.35

  Turnips 1 lb. 0.10

  Onions 1 lb. 0.15

  Lettuce 1 head 0.29

  Celery 1 bunch 0.29

  At Sloan’s or Daitch supermarket:

  Coffee 1 lb. 0.81

  Apple juice 1 qt. 0.41

  Butter 8 oz. 0.46

  Milk 2 qt. 0.56

  Bread 1 lb. 0.33

  Ital. oil 16 fl. oz. 0.85

  Peeled tomatoes 8 oz. 0.27

  Eggs 6 0.27

  Buttermilk 1 qt. 0.29

  Matches 10 bxs. 0.10

  Detergent 3 lb. 0.78

  Mayonnaise 8 fl. oz. 0.29

  Tomato puree 1 lb. 0.25

  Bottled water 2 qt. 0.41

  Aluminum foil 25 ft. 0.25

  Sweet cream 1 pt. 0.69

  Beans, dried 1 lb. 0.24

  Bitter lemon 6 bottles 1.15

  At Schustek the butcher’s:

  Pot roast, beef 3 lb. 4.95

  1 chicken 40 oz. 1.55

  Teewurst 8 oz. 0.74

  Imported cervelat 8 oz. 1.00

  And a snowstorm. The sun came out only around noon.

  December 30, 1967 Saturday

  The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare of the People’s Republic of Poland has thanked the Jewish aid organization Joint for its generosity in the support and vocational training of Polish Jews, and for the pensions paid to Polish Roman Catholic families whose members helped save Jews from the Nazis. “The letter said that such aid was no longer needed now that Poland had sufficiently recovered from the Nazi devastation during World War II, which among other things reduced the Jewish population in Poland from 3.5 million people to perhaps 30,000 today.”

  In 1937, Cresspahl was still not sure who he was in the little town of Jerichow, what he represented for the other inhabitants, who by that point numbered two thousand four hundred and ninety.

  He was not seen as Jew-friendly, even though he still associated with Semig the veterinarian, a Jew, as if no one had filled him in on the events of April 1, 1933. It could be taken as stubbornness that Cresspahl stopped outside Dr. Semig’s stately villa on the Bäk in Jerichow several times a week and carried something inside in baskets, but then stayed in the house much longer than was needed to simply drop off fruit or game. Possibly he did it for Dora Semig, born a Köster, who was no more “non-Aryan” than he was. And, when you think about it, Arthur Semig was just one Jew. Maybe that was something people learned in England, how to treat Jews as if they were friends too.

  In Jerichow Cresspahl was called “the Englishman.”

  That was fine with him, it was as much as to say they didn’t begrudge him Lisbeth and forgave him for Lisbeth’s family too. He wouldn’t have wanted to answer for the Papenbrocks. For one thing, they’d been in Jerichow only fifteen years, and hadn’t started out properly. Papenbrock set up house in the villa that had belonged to the von Lassewitzes as if he bore their name too, and acted all chummy with the nobility of the region, who had not only the countryside but the town in their grip, with rentals, leases, interest payments, mortgages. But if he wanted to be the secret King of Jerichow then it was time he stood up and made himself known, not let someone like Friedrich Jansen be mayor; the town hadn’t done much to be proud of, but they didn’t deserve that guy. Papenbrock would rather rake it in quietly. Shrewdness counted for something in Jerichow, but that wasn’t enough. Meanwhile Papenbrock’s Louise acted like she owned the town and like St. Peter’s Church couldn’t keep its spire up in the air without her either. His girls were fine, at least while they were girls. They’d given away clothes as presents, toys too. And their Plattdeutsch, maybe it had a southern ring to it but it was their first language, learned from poultry girls and farm boys. Our Hilde’d sometimes been a bit too big for her britches, not all the way but you could still feel it. Our Lisbeth, gentle as a lamb to excess from church, was the best of the lot. Lisbeth, when she took a child with her to play in Papenbrock’s garden, never asked whether it was the mayor’s or a cobbler’s. Papenbrock had brought up both of his daughters almost as an example for what children (in Jerichow) should be given and permitted and what not. You could hardly envy children, even if yours didn’t have what Papenbrock’s did. Once the old man had married them off, it yet again became clear that he wanted to secure his property by dividing it up. Hilde’s Alexander Paepcke didn’t stay the busted lawyer in Krakow am See for long, Papenbrock got him the lease to the Jerichow brickworks. In a way it was almost fitting that things went wrong for him there, Paepcke’d managed to end up in the red even with an insatiable demand secured for bricks for the Jerichow-North
airfield, for another year at least—red spots in his books, red oceans actually—and with his tail between his legs moved to the easternmost tip of Military District II, into the Stettin Military Ordnance Department, and Papenbrock in his rage may have secretly slipped Hilde some housekeeping money but Alexander knew only about the strict wage he brought home. Podejuch. What kind of a name was that for a place. If it even existed, if it wasn’t another “Rio de Janeiro.”

  And from the very beginning Cresspahl had no desire at all to answer for Papenbrock’s Sonny Boy, Horst. Where the old man had tried to hold him back, he had tried to throw his weight around with that Storm Trooper group of his. Past thirty, and driving a truck around the countryside, barking at the trees along the country road with his comrades, because he’d sworn something to a foreigner by the name of Adolf Hitler. Tried to wear his shit-brown uniform to church for Cresspahl and Lisbeth’s wedding. Well, he was keeping pretty quiet since he got back from his overseas trip. The Jerichow SA had to positively remind him he’d been their leader. Since then he joined drills and marches now and then, but he hadn’t insisted on being rewarded with promotions and medals for his part in the Nazi victory. They’d been handed out while he was gone. He’d relearned how to work in his father’s yard and granary, ruined his brown boots doing it. He’d been away for more than a year, came back broader in the shoulders, not so much the eager beaver, now when he held his head high it was relaxed, not stiff. Maybe he’d turn out a Papenbrock like his father wanted after all. Maybe he couldn’t accept that his Hitler had had half the SA leadership gunned down like rabid dogs. Maybe he’d seen something in America. When he insisted on marrying that Elisabeth Lieplow, Papenbrock suddenly agreed, and he couldn’t even hold against him that he spent half the week in Kröpelin; Horst had done himself out of his inheritance in Jerichow.

  What he now refused to give the Nazis they got from Robert Papenbrock, the alleged long-lost brother Horst had gone looking for in “Rio de Janeiro.” Robert had gotten himself found, and by this point he had a job in a confiscated villa in the state capital. Rumor had it that along with his brown “officeholder” uniform he had another one, in SS black. Another in-law.