Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  About him Cresspahl said: Dont know him, none of our business, I thought he was dead.

  It wasn’t necessary. On the day of Horst’s wedding in Kröpelin, Cresspahl was putting in windows in Jerichow-North. You never saw Cresspahl in the Lübeck Court where the nobility went, or in the station pub where the Nazis went boozing, at most you might see him in Peter Wulff’s pub, which Regional Group Leader Jansen called a Social Democrat rat’s nest. He got all the work he needed on his own, didn’t want and wouldn’t take anything from old Papenbrock. Bit quiet, he is. Middle of a conversation he’ll be staring off into space, not there anymore. Englishman.

  They knew full well that he’d worked in Holland only since 1922, and in England after that; that he’d been born in a village on Lake Müritz and made a master carpenter in Malchow am See, the same cloth-making town that Kliefoth the schoolteacher came from, and Kliefoth had moved to Jerichow more recently than Cresspahl. Him they called Klattenpüker, tangle-picker, after the tangles the Malchowers had to pick out of their sheep’s wool before they could start making their cloth. Cresspahl was the guy from England—not in a bad way, sometimes as a joke, occasionally in confidence. (He knew all about the English. In case the English won the war.)

  You had to admit that he usually knew about English things from the same Lübeck Gazette that they subscribed to. Guess he spent more time reading it.

  It was true he’d been known to let rip with a kind of contempt, if not rage, about the cowardice of the English who’d let the German army occupy the Rhineland. Probably ashamed of these English.

  You couldn’t deny that he dismissed the visits of the Lord Privy Seal Lord Londonderry, of Lloyd George, of the Marquess of Lothian as childishness. Clearly he wanted something more, or something different, from the English than that they cross the Atlantic on their Queen Mary in four days for a blue ribbon. Couldn’t hold that against him.

  It was a fact that the Law Concerning the Reconstruction of the Reich had invalidated his Weimar Republic passport. That he’d had two years to go to the state offices in Gneez and request another one, with a swastika. And that he hadn’t done it yet.

  And along with that, that he wouldn’t leave the Jew Semig in peace until he’d gone to Gneez and come back with a passport for himself and his wife.

  It may be that Cresspahl would rather they called him something else.

  Well, Klattenpüker?

  December 31, 1967 Sunday

  Pot roast. Lay strips of bacon around the meat of a well-aged rump (beef), rub in salt and allspice. . . .

  Married life, Marie won’t learn it from me.

  She gets to see it playacted, but not even realistically. These performances are the visits from D. E., aka Dieter Erichson, Professor of Physics & Chemistry, adviser to the US Air Force on matters of radar technology, guest and host of this Cresspahl family for five and half years, and by no means the man of the house that the neighbors think he is when they see him coming with elaborately wrapped presents, with a suitcase from a trip, with longstanding stock phrases he uses as long as he’s in the open doorway.

  Once through the door, he may act completely at home, know the layout of the apartment almost without looking, offer casual passing signs of affection that Marie barely notices. Still, he won’t entirely unpack his suitcase today either, and before he puts it off to one side in the south bedroom, he makes sure with a glance that he’s permitted to enter. He won’t stay long, not past tomorrow night, even if Marie asks him to. Which she might.

  And she likes it like this. She likes how he sits at the table between the two windows, like a guest, and asks her how school is going because he genuinely wants to know, not because he’s responsible for her. They have all sorts of little private codes, whether skeptical sidelong glances up from below, or trying to lie with a straight face, or sometimes having to say: Which I undertook solely to help keep New York clean, or whatever it is these days. She would like to live with him for good, in his house, and yet it would have to be on her terms. It never occurs to her to compare D. E. to the husbands who pay her friends visits in the evenings as fathers; for her he’s a friend, her mother’s but more clearly her own. She’s the one who gave him the name D. E., from his initials, although it might also mean Dear Erichson, she shows her affection not with his first name but with the other name, the one everyone uses. – Well, D. E.? she says. – How’s business in your business?

  So that he’ll tell her, cheerfully, patiently, about the US Air Force’s Greenland radar installations, about the ritual phrases people are saying nowadays at the start of a meal in Thule, with stubborn reversions to the history of the Goths, which Marie doesn’t always recognize, even though she’s been hanging on his every word like a bloodhound. Kneeling on her chair, rocking back and forth on her elbows, not taking her eyes off him, his carefree expression, his playful lip movements, his skin taut from the cold, his gray hair at forty, his sober callous look, the Mecklenburger who’s become an American. With their easy English, their suppressed laughter, they were acting happy.

  Meanwhile the housewife stands at the stove and tends to her tasks: Coat it in flour, brown it in butter, slowly pour in simmering water until it’s two-thirds. . . .

  He is never entirely happy. In his elegant winter coat from Dublin he sits on our chairs as though we hadn’t bought them years ago from the Salvation Army; he would be only too glad to buy us others, whether named after Thonet or Morris. We still haven’t gone to live with him in his house in New Jersey; he wishes he could at least do something for us in ours. He doesn’t permit himself suggestions, but when he mentions the reputation of a “police lock,” a metal bar propped into a hole in the floor and against the door, he has just voiced his opinion that our lock and small chain do not provide sufficient security. If it were up to him, we would have a leaking radiator removed and replaced by the building management and who knows what else; it’s not up to him. These are gifts I can’t accept. At first, while drinking, he would come out with cost estimates; in recent years, Marie has teased him over his ways of running a household, and mentioned the Plaza Hotel, not entirely to be nasty; we haven’t discussed it for a long time.

  I don’t need to live in higher style, D. E.

  I just wish I could do something for you two.

  You do enough, D. E. And anyway, what do you really mean?

  I just wish I could show you. . . .

  We know.

  . . . add a couple stale bread crusts, some roots (i.e., carrots), 1 onion, 1 bay leaf, some peppercorns, and simmer together 2 1/2 hours; while D. E., like a paterfamilias from the old days, has taken the child out for a walk in the already dark evening, in the wet snow in Riverside Park, to work up an appetite. Married life, Marie won’t learn it from me. An exception for a holiday, once, not always. When we have something to celebrate.

  – What do we have to celebrate?

  – The date, Gesine. Even if it’s not entirely accurate from an astronomical point of view.

  – Yes. That the year’s over. That we survived it.

  – October went by too fast for me.

  – Everyone says why they’re celebrating, Marie.

  – Okay. Because this year Senator Kennedy caught up to the president. Because he’s going to end the war in Vietnam.

  – Bugs Bunny? Against the will of more than half the population, who want the war continued? Bugs Bunny?

  – Senator Robert Francis Kennedy.

  – I stand corrected, Marie Cresspahl.

  – Marie Henriette Cresspahl, at that.

  – Sorry, M. H.

  – The astronauts who burned to death in January. The Soviet astronaut who crashed in April.

  – Your summer dress, the yellow one with the tortoiseshell buttons.

  – The Negro riots this summer in more than a hundred cities; the Ford strike; the New York school strike.

  – The dress with the collar that’s . . . how do you say it, nackenfern or halsfern?

 
; – It’s yours.

  – Another 203 days and I’ll be eleven.

  – That we have that to look forward to.

  – That none other than brothers from the CIA saved a comrade of Che Guevara’s from death by shooting.

  – That Che Guevara might have lived if he hadn’t slapped a Bolivian officer during an interrogation.

  – And long live our dear old Auntie Times!

  – Now the New Year’s resolutions. I resolve to keep my A average with Sister Magdalena, even if the monster never once gives me credit! Now you.

  – To stay in New York, and that we can make it here.

  – That’s not a resolution, Gesine, that’s a wish! You’re only allowed to say something you have control over.

  – To not turn out like my mother.

  – You have a fever, Gesine.

  – Fever or not, now I want to hear how Professor Erichson plans to improve in the New Year.

  – By getting you two to marry me in the New Year.

  – Wrong! Another wish.

  – For me it’s a resolution, Mary Mary quite contrary.

  – Which I undertook solely to help keep New York City clean.

  – Right. Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, there was a woman who had everything, she was young and healthy . . . .

  – So now she hangs in St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck and is tiny as a mouse and every year she moves a little bit more.

  – She wished for eternal life, Marie.

  – What a stupid thing to wish!

  – Happy New Year to you, D. E.

  – Godet Niejår, Gesine.

  – Happy New Year! Happy New Year!

  January 1, 1968 Monday

  Three inches of snow. Twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, smeared onto the windows by a wind that’s even colder.

  Marie manages to hold out all the way through breakfast. She lets D. E. distract her; he’s trying to make her believe that her picture is in The New York Times. The Times has in fact printed an elaborately narrative image of two people, one smaller, the larger one at least similar in stature to D. E., both under umbrellas, walking down some stairs into snow with patches of slush and spindly park branches. She has to grant him the umbrellas, but she no longer believes herself to be the smaller person to his right, and now there’s no point in keeping his thumb over the caption “Central Park,” she knew right away that there weren’t any such stairs in Riverside Park, even if she did take some similar ones last night, with a lamppost on the right, too, but never these.

  – You’ll never fool me with New York: she says, confident and certain and contemptuous.

  For the new year, the Protestant Church of the City of New York informs us that it thinks there is no doubt that religion will be a failure in 1968 as it was in 1967. “There are so many things it doesn’t do that it should do. . . .”

  But then Marie can no longer contain herself, she has to reveal her present for me, her little New Year’s gift. I don’t know what it is. For more than six weeks her room has been off-limits; the only clues have been the sounds of sawing, hammers, and drills, much of which she’s masked with the record player. In early December I saw her coming out from one of the side streets in the Hundreds onto Broadway, carrying slats and boards with holes sawed out; maybe the present is made of wood. She said it would satisfy a wish I didn’t know I had. D. E., dressed first thing in the morning and on a holiday the same as for his restaurants and conferences, is leaning against the wall by the window, a comfortable observer, arms crossed, talking about his day. Back in his day, he says, children who did fretwork projects sometimes produced a light fixture for the hallway.

  And watch yourself, Gesine. She’s nervous.

  If Marie’s nervous, I’m the one who should be nervous.

  The gift, set up under a sheet between the wings of the double door to Marie’s room, is as big as a dog, bigger than the chow chow that used to live under Dr. Berling’s desk. But a white sheet is draped on the dead, on what is written off, what will never come back.

  – It’s our house, Marie.

  – It’s not trying to be your house, only what I’ve heard about it!: she says, while pacing restlessly back and forth next to me, as if to force me farther away from the model.

  It is the house that Albert Papenbrock signed over to his granddaughter in the spring of 1933 so that Heinrich Cresspahl would do what Lisbeth wanted and come back to Jerichow from England. It is a squat structure, a weather-beaten red under a low-hanging mossy red roof, complete with the sloping eaves on both sides. There are the three white crosses of the window frames to the left of the front door, one to the right. She got the door right, set into its beveled frame, with mitered corners, a wood bottom panel and the top half glass. Both halves are on hinges; each has a knob and a latch.

  – It’s not my fault, in our only photo the walnut trees hide the front of the house and half the door!

  – You even remembered the doorstep.

  The entryway had red tiles, like this one. Anyone who came in this way would head through the door to the left, leading to the room that the farmers before Cresspahl had used as a front parlor. Cresspahl had gone for something similar, with a table that could almost seat eight, which he’d brought back from Richmond and set up in the middle of the house as a table for special occasions. By the time the house was finished, the yard and garden redone, they were no longer celebrating any special occasions. So the table was placed crossways, head next to the window. It was where he kept his tax records, order books, drawings, folding rulers. Lisbeth’s desk from Papenbrock’s trousseau stood at the other window, with her books in the hutch. But Lisbeth never came here to read, and she no longer had letters to write. Cresspahl had cleared out the chairs and the dresser and put them in the workmen’s rooms. Because he was sleeping in this room now, on a leather sofa against the wall, it was bare enough.

  In the next room, not as big, warmed by an extension of the tiled stove, slept the child.

  – Did the child’s room really have only one door, to Cresspahl’s office?

  – You never mentioned any other.

  So it was Cresspahl who used to check on the child at night. Without Marie I would have forgotten that.

  He could go from his desk through the door at the end of the long wall, into the room with the large bed that he’d made to Lisbeth’s specifications, in which she now wanted to sleep alone. From there straight into the kitchen. But when Cresspahl went to breakfast he took the long way, through the entryway and the back hall into the kitchen, to avoid seeing Lisbeth asleep. Meals were served here, at the long tile table, even on Sundays now.

  – It’s your fault if the other half of the house isn’t right: Marie says, still a little anxious about whether she should really have tried to reconstruct the past.

  – Because I never told you about it.

  Why not? Why didn’t I say anything about Paap, Alwin Paap, who had the front room to the right of the door? He lived there until 1939, the foreman. That was why he went into his room via the detour through the back hall, punctilious as he was about his position. Marie has divided the rest of that half into two rooms, the way it really was. The first, across from the kitchen, they still used as a large pantry. The second was fixed up for two workmen in 1935. They stayed till the start of the war. Then came the French, the prisoners of war. In three years they’ll be sleeping there in bunk beds.

  – A carpenter’s daughter, Marie.

  – Granddaughter, at that.

  – Granddaughter. And the proportions are right.

  – Really? Right? That’s how it was?

  – That’s how it still is. It’s still there in Jerichow, you’ll inherit it.

  – I don’t want it. I was only trying to see what you were talking about. How it looks.

  – You did a good job, Marie.

  – In that case I’ll do the loft conversion. For what’s coming next.

  January 2, 1968 Tuesday

>   On December 8, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, once again helped out Comrade Novotný, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the ČSSR, one leader to another, and saved his position. Now Antonín Novotný is making promises and not mentioning that he may be making them in his successor’s name. It struck him over New Year’s that the overall economic development of the Slovakian region must be fundamentally of equal importance to that of the Czech lands, and that he would now permit any progressive ideas as long as they proved useful, even in culture and art, even if originating in the West. The New York Times would not want to withhold credit where credit is due, and she shows him to us photographed as a well-meaning man full of understanding for the plight of others.

  The temperature is still stuck at minus four Celsius; in the subway hacking coughs were at one point louder than the train, runny noses and red eyes are a clear enough weather report, and yet this is not the conversation topic of greatest interest to the ladies of the sauna of the Hotel Marseilles. Sweating and sniffling, gasping and grunting, they crouch and lie in the dry smoky air, in the half dark, and they are talking about the rapes that are a part of life on the Upper West Side of New York. The tone is businesslike, sometimes outraged, generally unashamed, even though almost none of the naked women know Mrs. Cresspahl even by sight from shopping on Broadway, only Mrs. Blumenroth and a girl named Marjorie are acquaintances. Maybe it’s enough that this side of the pool is rigorously barred to men. Many of the women are around forty, have two or three kids swimming in the adjacent pool, frenetic voices or gentle voices, belly fat or waistlines that haven’t melted away. Only Marjorie is seventeen, tall, she alone still has a perfect body, and people think she’s older than she is. When Mrs. Cresspahl stoops to enter into the uncertain light, the talk has just turned to the police.