by Uwe Johnson
Calling the police! Waste of time.
Not only that. Even if they believe you they ask you about the height and the weight, and you know what’s coming next.
Whether the weight felt nice.
Right! Whether I came.
With me it was: whether he came.
The precinct sent someone to investigate the back stairs where it happened, and he expected me to offer him a whiskey.
Exactly! Then invite him to dinner.
You too?
When they caught mine, they let him go.
Because a man can’t be convicted on the basis of an unconfirmed statement by the victim. Article 130, Penal Code.
By the alleged victim, if you please.
They never even try without a reliable witness.
And since I knew mine from when he used to deliver my groceries from the supermarket, the policeman dropped it then and there. Shut his notebook and forgot about it.
Of course I know the plumber. Who they keep sending.
Plumber, that’s a good one. They’re telegraph messengers too.
Magazine salesmen!
And they really stick to tradition. They use a knife, you never hear about drugs.
Right.
Followed me from the bus to the door of my apartment. Talking to me the whole time, everyone thought we were a normal couple.
That was the wrong thing to do. Keeping quiet is dangerous too.
You have to say as loud as you can: Fuck off!
Then he screams something about a disgusting whore who doesn’t deserve him. Well, I survived.
He slammed me into the wall with one hand on my neck, with the other he pulled down his pants. “Three sizes too small.”
That could have backfired.
It did. Scratches didn’t heal for three weeks.
I always carry a police whistle.
Air pistol. Pepper spray.
Not allowed. It’s illegal to carry a concealed weapon.
Again, not for the man.
Disarm him. Castration.
No.
No.
Change the laws.
I have a friend, she teaches karate, and if anyone wants I can get you a discount price. Karate!
That’s no good either.
You remember the sixteen-year-old abducted and raped by three men in Bushwick last week? One of them was an applicant to join the police force.
In the showers, speaking through the wet curtain of her long black hair, Marjorie, the gentle child, says what she would do to defend herself, and acts it out, by stepping cheerful and naked under the streaming water like a tambourine girl in a parade, her knee delightfully shooting up.
– The things they don’t tell us on TV: she says.
– And what would you do?
– I’d ask for money first.
– Tell me how that goes!
January 3, 1968 Wednesday
In the early-morning darkness today, enemy forces attacked the United States air base at Danang with about thirty rounds of 122 mm rocket fire, wrecking an F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber.
Three other planes were damaged in the eleven-minute attack on the base. Military spokesmen said that three air force personnel and one marine were wounded and about a dozen other servicemen hurt as they ran for cover.
It hadn’t gotten to that point in Jerichow; the airfield was far from finished. Before that happened, Jerichow wanted to get at least one Jew out of the way.
So that’s what they did for Arthur Semig, doctor of veterinary medicine, homeowner, bank account holder.
They didn’t for Oskar Tannebaum, who lived on Short Street in two rooms off a courtyard, the store bell rarely summoning him to make a sale these days. Rubber boots, blue jackets, green caps, you could get all that in Gneez, in Wismar, in Lübeck. Tannebaum paid his taxes like Semig but he didn’t have friends in the better families, he let his children leave the house in clothes that had been mended too many times, his wife was so frugal with her shopping it was like she was scared of being cheated. He used to have rich relatives in the county capital; he had not been presentable enough for these relatives to bring him along to Hamburg or Holland or wherever they’d ended up. Oskar was not from Mecklenburg, and his wife was from the lost eastern territories. Finally, the Tannebaums had only been in Jerichow for ten years at most.
Dr. Arthur Semig, on the other hand, came from western Mecklenburg, you might almost think Ludwigslust and the grand duke’s residence; his wife was a Köster from Schwerin and moreover Protestant by birth. Arthur had opened his practice in Jerichow seventeen years ago, was invited to the coffee tables as well as the stables of the Bülows (the “Upper Bülows”), of Mayor Erdamer—he had belonged, by reason of property, of education, of his confiding little stories, his discretion, his countless rhymes for any and every child who ran past his legs. They couldn’t let anything happen to Arthur. He’d understood something when he’d shaved off his little square mustache; now he had to be made to understand that he needed to leave.
Papenbrock started it. No, this time it was Axel von Rammin who started it. Or maybe it was Avenarius, Avenarius Cold Morning? It was Cresspahl.
They came at him from all sides, ignoring his exasperation, they listened to his excuses so patiently that it was always he who had to say the next word. He couldn’t very well throw a von Rammin, barons for centuries, out of his house when he’d turned up for advice about rebuilding the cow barn and driven his carriage up not through the yard but on the Bäk, hitching the horses right in the middle of the street for all to see. Von Rammin actually sat there for half an hour listening to what Semig had to tell him about the latest in hygienic cattle breeding. Then, without relaxing his craggy face in the least, he turned the conversation to a friend in Austria, Count Naglinsky, known as Nagel, Beatus Nagel. Semig had had occasion to help him once before. Beatus was still grateful for his Weimaraner’s quick and complete recovery with Semig’s medicine. Beatus had ample estates at his disposal, and was, incidentally, above any of this Hitler’s insanities, never even thinking of the German Reich chancellor as a true countryman. And now Naglinsky had had an idea. Along with his dogs he had his dairy cattle, he kept horses, he had suffered losses among his pigs as well as his chickens, and for all of these things he had to send for a doctor from the city. It was thus not a matter of economy, it just made sense, to keep a private veterinarian on-site. He had no objection to this doctor offering his services in the village on the side. He often had professional men over to dine, to stay in apartments in the castle. Baron von Rammin requested that a bill be sent to the estate for the consultation, gave Mrs. Semig his fond regards, and left with an additional personal remark from the heart about the climate in Lower Austria. It was Semig, not the baron, who had to run his hands through his hair as he stood in the doorway watching the man and his unsolicited advice ride off.
Papenbrock wanted no part of it. Papenbrock refused to have the money in Semig’s account transferred into his own as the repayment of a loan; that would be lying, and immoral. Papenbrock balked at buying Semig’s house; he had enough of those in Jerichow, and he needed his cash liquid for a security he’d promised in Lübeck.
Papenbrock was scared. The old man sat there bent over, laid aside his suddenly nauseating cigar, chewed his knuckles, and finally got to the point where he was cursing the Jews, in a shrill, almost nagging voice, with contemptuous waves of the hand, longing desperately for an end to the discussion. He was too embarrassed to look at Cresspahl.
Semig was satisfied where he was. He couldn’t be persuaded that way. He’d grown used to living without the phone ringing. The drives around the countryside, the night work, had been hard for him; now he had time to read. Dora was managing better too, with the regular hours. He had no problem forgoing the games of skat with Dr. Berling; Cresspahl was a better player anyway, and they’d find a third. He was not going to let himself be sent away from Jerichow.
Then Dr. Avenarius Kollmorgen, att
orney at law, came by. He did not walk down the Bäk; he invited Arthur and Dora Semig and Heinrich and Lisbeth Cresspahl over for an evening with red wine and, if it came to that, skat.
Avenarius had troubles. It rubbed him the wrong way to have to condone the humiliations his fellow lawyer Friedrichsen was going through in Güstrow, not only regarding his Judaism but even affecting his social standing. He hadn’t been able to help Friedrichsen, but he found himself still in a position to give a helping hand to a university man in Jerichow.
Friedrichsen, ’s he baptized?
No.
Is it on there?
His sign says “Dr. Jur.”
Put on he’s a Jew.
Kollmorgen gave his maid another evening off and led his guests into the parlor personally, with outstretched hand, and said his piece on his feet, teetering on his heels, his massive head held high atop his short stocky body. He discussed the relevant laws. It came out that he needed a loan, among other reasons to purchase a house on the Bäk “with which we are acquainted,” and also that, since he wasn’t fully up to snuff on the dictates and prohibitions of foreign-currency law, he had left all these matters for lo these many years in the hands of a “trading house” in Bremen, which he recommended. He arched his eyebrows in courtroom fashion, just as in the most famous moments of his cross-examinations, he looked Dora Semig in the eyes almost tenderly, he was really trying. Then he drank, rather too fast, before long was out of commission for skat, staring glassy-eyed at his guests, the corners of his mouth drooping. To Cresspahl, who had come alone, he looked like an overgrown child who can’t swallow a setback.
For Semig refused. He forbade anyone’s interference. His tone drew a rebuke from Dora. He let Dora say her piece, and Dora looked at him, pursed her lips a little tighter, and nodded. She hadn’t even sighed.
Cresspahl offered Semig his balance at the Surrey Bank of Richmond in exchange, and Arthur wouldn’t hear of it. Cresspahl said: We’ll keep it all faithfully for you, not a penny’ll be missing; Semig said: My dear Herr Cresspahl! If I’m not good enough for you. . . .
Axel von Rammin had duly commissioned letters from his friend Beatus and was now insulted that a veterinarian was presuming to hesitate in a matter that after all a person of no ordinary standing had set in motion.
And Avenarius, when he ran into Cresspahl, occasionally forgot to raise his head with a graceful twist and say with mysterious significance: All’s well, Cresspahl? All’s well?
Lisbeth Cresspahl said: Christ was a Jew too. That means we all are. Leave Semig alone.
And Papenbrock said: If you all want to get rid of him and the nice way doesn’t work, try the hard way!
January 4, 1968 Thursday
Back in the spring of 1961, Gesine had found a three-room apartment in New York, with five windows looking out over Riverside Park and the Hudson River. It was such a relief—she felt settled in, accommodated, at peace.
She knew it wasn’t exactly a personal accomplishment; still, she almost convinced herself it was, though she had no one to brag to except perhaps a certain retired English teacher in Jerichow. She was proud of the fact that, beyond her wildest expectations, she was able to rent an apartment on one of the most famous streets in the world, Riverside Drive, noted in guidebooks not only for its beautiful old trees and the view of the coastal cliffs of New Jersey but also for its architecture and monuments—from the house of the worthy Charles M. Schwab, who helped Carnegie betray the government with defective armor plating for its tanks, up to the tomb of the eighteenth president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, who died in misery describing his Civil War victories. She liked that this street was gradually losing its teeth of wealth, unlike Central Park West and West End Avenue with their bastions of affluence, and canopies outside the doors to further protect their tenants, and liveried doormen to whistle for taxis. She preferred to stick it out on her own when it rained, rarely took trips that needed a taxi, and firmly refused to forget that the salary from an office job was enough for Riverside Drive only because the law still protected some rents from the market. If she could stay there, she would act like a guest, left in peace at least at home.
It didn’t take long before Mr. Cooper and Mr. Rider came along and showed her that she’d happened to find a place in a building that itself was worthy of mention in a book. Wasn’t that just perfect?
There is a frieze of snakes and other animals, in sandstone that’s still white, near the bottom of the leather-colored yellow building on Riverside Drive above Ninety-Sixth Street, on the third of its twelve stories. She’d paid it so little attention that even well into late summer she thought it was Egyptian, even though her windows were under, and in fact in, the frieze, and she looked up at them often enough, to make sure they were still there, not smashed in. Now America had caught up to her through the very building where she lived.
For this building is known not only by its number, 243, but by name: Cliff Apartment House, after Arizona’s cliff dwellers. The mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and buffalo skulls are meant to commemorate the forefathers of the Pueblo tribe and in general the Indian people whose country was taken from them—meant as a memorial, as if for the dead.
At first, the double coincidence did seem fitting. Marie was already in school, spending mornings in the Rockefeller’s church, called Riverside Church, and she’d gotten to the fairy tales that were supposed to introduce her not only to the country’s language but also to a period in its history that Gesine didn’t trust the school to handle properly. All the Indians in the stories they read at that school were descendants of a stumpy old man with thick braids of black hair parted in the middle, a forehead covered with pockmark-like nicks, a sharp nose, a lively mouth protruding from the taut flesh of his face, expression completely friendly, eyes dim with memory in their cavernous sockets—exactly the way an Indian from the Pueblo tribe had been depicted in the Papenbrock family encyclopedia on the lower left corner of the page. The red-skinned cliff dwellers prayed to the sun; a new page in Marie’s understanding of religion. They raised livestock and knew now to irrigate their fields; Marie had never imagined a life of that sort of work before. The cliff dwellers’ greatest accomplishment, in Marie’s eyes, was where they lived: high up in caves, set neatly into the steep cliffs of the cañon and hard for the foreign conqueror to reach, or else in fortified villages built from the soaring casas grandes (stone towers) with neither windows nor doors down below, so they could be reached only by ladders, while stairways likewise connected the different families’ spaces in the multileveled interior. Marie recognized these ladders in the rusty thicket of fire escapes on the south side of our building, and was grateful that the ceremonial halls for the Indians’ councils and ritual dances were missing in our case, because otherwise she’d have had to deal with more unfamiliar people than she felt up to at the time. Back then she was sure she knew where the Indians had lived: on the other side of the river, where the sun is still brighter than the dark red it has when it sets for us.
So you wanted to stir up hate in your child against the country she was supposed to live in?
I couldn’t even make inroads against the language.
It started off harmlessly enough. Marie brought home from school the information that the name “cliff dwellers” had been taken from them and was now applied to this country’s tenement dwellers. So not even our building remained a memorial to them.
Then she said, in all seriousness, to reassure me of something: Honest Injun!, meaning a reliable Indian and also suggesting a suspicion that Indians are dumb by nature, if honest. She learned “peace pipe” for occasions of reconciliation, “war paint” as an expression for each new fashion item, and I couldn’t tell her to mistrust the language she now needed for school. Marie gleaned from various passing know-it-alls that the surviving Indians are good for nothing except urban construction projects, since they never feel dizzy; then she doesn’t want to hear that it’s they who are building more buildings
in New York, while she expected to hear that white construction workers drink coffee during their lunch breaks while the Indians fill up with liquor, sold to them under the guise of “firewater.” From there it was just a small step to the view that Indian territories within the borders of the US are rightfully called “reservations”; they’re not really “camps,” since after all Indians can’t live any other way. And then it was too late. She obediently accepted correction but was unable to think differently. Now she recognizes Indians not only by their facial features but also from their insecure manner, their vague, uncertain expressions, their failure to fit in that extends even to their clothes; she calls them, not to be cruel, purely as an observation: Vanishing Americans, as though it were simply the way of the world that those of her own skin color should survive.
As for what she might have said about the Indian leaning senseless on a stairway under Times Square this evening, I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d found himself there, he definitely couldn’t see straight, yet even in his drunkenness he lacked contentment, release from knowledge, the combination of giving up and trusting in others’ help. He was somewhere far away, yet there to be grasped. His eyelids were trembling slightly. The fashionable cut of his coat wasn’t going to protect him—not against the cold, not against the police on the subway. Marie was capable of saying: Sitting Bull, or: Chief Rain-in-Face, and only then, all innocent, would she have felt the nudge in the ribs from me, the warning grip on her shoulder that no longer reaches her where she now lives with her language.
Surely she must understand what you’ve told her about equality and human rights, Gesine.
But she doesn’t believe it. She can’t see it.
You are not raising your child properly, Mrs. Cresspahl.