Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  January 5, 1968 Friday

  The weekly summary of casualties listed 185 Americans, 227 South Vietnamese, and 37 other allied servicemen killed in action last week.

  . . . . American and other non-Vietnamese forces reported killing a total of 623 enemy soldiers; the total reported killed by the South Vietnamese was 815.

  American losses through Dec. 30 brought the death toll for 1967 to 9,353 and the total killed in the war to 15,997.

  “Six members of a 25th Infantry Division unit were killed and 13 wounded yesterday in a 90-minute skirmish only 14 miles from Saigon. A few hours later 4 other Americans were killed and 21 wounded when their positions were mistakenly bombed by American and Vietnamese planes.

  The 25th Division again raised, to 382, the enemy death toll from its battle Monday 60 miles north of Saigon. Troops searching the jungle near the artillery base that elements of the Vietcong 271st and 272d Regiments tried to overrun also found 75 automatic rifles, 11 light machine guns and 18 rocket launchers.”

  © The New York Times

  “The Defense Department will continue selling great quantities of arms abroad to fight the gold drain. Pentagon sources said that sales were expected to reach a combined total of at least $4.5 billion to $4.6 billion over this and the next two fiscal years. (See page 1, column 4.)”

  © The New York Times

  “Newark, Jan. 4.—LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro writer, was sentenced today to two and a half to three years in the New Jersey State Penitentiary and fined $1,000 for illegal possession of two revolvers during the Newark riots last summer.

  The sentence was virtually the maximum—it could have been three years—and allows no probation.

  It was handed down by Essex County Judge Leon W. Kapp after he said one could suspect that the 34-year-old poet and playwright was ‘a participant in formulating a plot’ to burn Newark on the night he was arrested.

  The riots, in which 28 persons died, lasted five days.

  . . . .The judge indicated that he based the severity of Jones’s punishment to a large extent on a poem published last month in Evergreen Review, a monthly magazine. He read the poem in the courtroom this morning, substituting the word ‘blank’ for what he termed ‘obscenities.’

  Addressed to the ‘Black People!’ the poem, as read by the judge, listed the merchandise in some of the city’s larger department stores and in the ‘smaller joosh enterprises’ and continued in part:

  All the stores will open if

  you will say the magic words.

  The magic words are: Up

  against the wall mother blank

  this is a stickup! Or: Smash

  the window at night (these are

  magic actions) smash the windows

  daytime, anytime, together,

  let’s smash the windows drag

  the blank from in there. No

  money down. No time to pay. Run

  up and down Broad Street

  niggers, take the blank you

  want. Take their lives if

  need be, but get what you

  want what you need.

  Dressed in a striped African tunic and wearing a small red cap at the back of his head, Jones stood with his hands behind his back and laughed frequently while Judge Kapp read the poem.

  Several times, however, he interrupted the sentencing statement.

  When the judge said, ‘You are sick and require medical attention,’ Jones replied: ‘Not as sick as you are.’

  And when the judge noted that the prisoner, who has been free on $25,000 bail, had failed to appear several times for recommended examinations by the county psychiatrist, the writer interrupted: ‘Who needs treatment himself.’

  After Irvin B. Booker, Jones’s lawyer, had appealed for a probationary sentence and a nominal fine, the playwright was permitted to make a statement. He rose and told the judge:

  ‘You are not a righteous person, and you don’t represent Almighty God. You represent a crumbling structure . . .’

  ‘Sit down!’ shouted the judge, loudly rapping his gavel.

  At one point, after the sentences had been pronounced, a tall, slender Negro teen-ager among the spectators rose to protest. When he failed to respond quickly enough to an order to sit down, he was ushered out of court by several attendants.

  ‘They’re going to beat him,’ cried Mrs. Sylvia Jones, the writer’s wife. Mrs. Jones, who was holding their 7-month-old baby, was taken from the room.

  As Jones was being led from the courtroom, he called back over his shoulder, ‘The black people will judge me.’

  . . . .would be filed.”

  © The New York Times

  January 6, 1968 Saturday

  Senator Kennedy deplores the poor education of the Indians and the Viet Cong are said to have killed 3,820 civilians last year and President de Gaulle didn’t mean to insult the Jews with the expression “an elite people” and there was a fire in the Alamac Hotel on Broadway and the Christian Democratic Party of West Germany is attacking the Social Democratic Party for their appeal to the United States to end its bombing in North Vietnam and

  Antonín Novotný is no longer General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, he had to step down in favor of Alexander Dubček, a Slovak even, after a thousand years of Bohemian-Moravian domination, The New York Times did the math.

  In Jerichow, a persistent rumor held that it was old Papenbrock who would free the town from the Jew Semig after all; another one had it that Papenbrock would acknowledge his found-again son, Robert, as his own only as long as Reich Governor Hildebrandt had a say in the state of Mecklenburg, not a day longer. That he wasn’t him.

  Not even the family could swear to who exactly the Robert Papenbrock of 1935 or 1937 was. He had come to Jerichow exactly once, maybe only because Horst insisted; he stayed Saturday and left for the regional headquarters in the state capital that Sunday and sent a postcard from Berlin and since he hadn’t married the woman he had in his Schwerin villa he couldn’t send an announcement. He was hard to visit, because if he didn’t have visitors already then he was away, doing a job that required travel. First-class, sleeping car.

  He might be him. The Robert who’d run off from Parchim in May 1914 had looked to be turning into a lanky sort of guy; this one was tall, heavy-set, fat in the face. He was the right age—Robert would be a little over forty now. The Robert who’d grown up in Vietsen and Waren had been quick and sharp; this one was mellow, sedentary, not a fast talker. It was really quite odd that he’d never even asked about the child he’d fathered with the French teacher’s daughter. The Robert the Papenbrocks remembered had had no qualms about scattering debts all over the town of Parchim; this one had come to an agreement with the estate owner whose two horses he had borrowed, in a manner that even today counted as theft, instead of delivering to Schwerin: maybe the aggrieved party had lodged a complaint against Robert with his party. Robert acted puzzled about the whole business and had obviously expected Papenbrock to be honored to pay for these horses on top of everything else. He tended to pussyfoot in talking about the old days. Who knew you could unlearn Plattdeutsch to such an extent in a mere twenty years. A Mecklenburg child? Well, maybe foreign languages have something corrosive in em. What Louise Papenbrock had the hardest time accepting was his bald head, not even the old man had such a rounded forehead. When she thought back to Robbie’s childhood hair, those wayward tufts he used to have . . .well, overseas there were diseases worse than anything they had in Mecklenburg. That’s it. Just tell me, Robbie, why didnt you ever write?

  Robert spoke in his easygoing new way about the pride one had, and Louise on the sofa suddenly couldn’t remember whether she’d enclosed eternal curses with the two hundred goldmarks she’d sent the “poor boy” in the rough-and-tumble alley district of Hamburg. In the ad she’d placed in Hamburg’s Fremdenblatt she’d expressed herself differently: “Come home, all is forgiven, Your mother née U. from G——w.” Papenbrock had parked himself i
n his chair so that his belly sat comfortably on top and he could give all his attention to the big lethargic man squirming his mouth around a wooden toothpick. Papenbrock was thinking about a pride that hadn’t been enough to bring a German back home when his country was at war against half the world. Cresspahl sat at the table next to Horst and tried to catch his expression other than from the side, but Horst stayed leaning too far forward, looking at his hands, as if he had to get through something unpleasant. Cresspahl kept his eyes on Lisbeth, who was searching the newcomer’s face, her chin propped on folded hands, benevolent but even more taken aback, and in no way the erstwhile little sister; what mattered to Cresspahl was how much he liked her, and how their child wandered around the table, now stopping next to him, now next to her mother, in a serious game. Sometimes everyone would glance quickly and secretly at Horst, and all he gave back was a nod that seemed to confirm something more to himself than to the others. Horst was probably regretting the loss of his inheritance to the firstborn, and in the end Horst hadn’t been around at the time, had he.

  All right. Robert had had his pride. But really, he’d bought false papers and shipped out, working his way to Montevideo on an American boat? That’s what happened in too many books. And always upholding the honor of the German nation, our glorious Kaiser, proud Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and if anyone had something to say about it he’d been quick to say You wanna piece of this? Let’s step outside. In German, not Platt, what do you think.

  It was because Robert was passing himself off as a Norwegian, then as a US citizen, then as someone with a Mexican passport. That was why his brother’d had such a hard time finding him. Much later, Horst repeated this first afternoon of stories from his perspective, but not to his parents, and only when no one could accuse him of resenting the hit to his inheritance anymore.

  The family knew about Montevideo from a former comrade of Papenbrock’s from the regiment, since fallen, whom Robert had hit up for money. No word of Robert in Montevideo itself. In Porto Alegre, Paranaguá, Santos, Rio de Janeiro, there were lots of people passing through who maybe could’ve looked like the kid in the photograph once. By that point Horst’s Portuguese was up to the task of fending off the greediest offers of information, and since he handed out Papenbrock’s money not a little defiantly, his hotel addresses recommended him to the German communities. Robert had kept his distance from the Germans.

  Robert had been an inspector on the hacienda of a family of German origin. Five-hour drive from Salvador, also known as Bahia.

  In Vietsen Robert had learned no more about agriculture than you could pick up by watching other people work. That Robert didn’t know how to drive.

  Five hours with a chauffeur was what he meant. Ditto when he managed a factory in Colón. On the Panama Canal. Where he first learned English.

  Learned Spanish as a taxi driver in Mexico. Mexico City. The ups and downs of life.

  At this point, around four in the afternoon, Robert asked for a schnapps, and Lisbeth took the child by the hand and went off to do the household chores that she’d thought up for this time of day.

  Canal Street in New Orleans—if you haven’t seen that! The surging yellow waters of the Mississippi. The noble Indians of Arizona.

  How Robert had helped build the Golden Gate Bridge. Wheeling a barrow of stones across a narrow plank. The sneaky Negro who bumped him. A Mecklenburg boy, how could he go down like that, in the San Francisco Bay?

  And always saving his money. In a pouch across his chest when he rode the freight cars east. A hobo. The others lying on the roof with him, their resentful looks. Some tramps used to go rolling off the edge, and if the rails were running along a mile-high cliff, so much the better. And all that time, never dishonoring the image . . . the memory. . . the faith of our dear mama. The main thing was to survive.

  Bought up a trucking business in Hoboken with the capital. Three employees. Lost it all in the Depression. Then, with the overpowering might of Manhattan constantly before his eyes, there had to be a way. Longshoreman in the port, and even so a down payment on a house in Long Island City. Part ownership of a restaurant with an old member of the Schwerin rowing team, on Broadway in the Nineties. Then Germany’s rise from the ashes of democracy. By the time Horst found him he’d already applied for his passport. Practically. Horst just had to swear on the spot he was a Mecklenburger. Just a technicality. You know.

  Jewed and niggered top to bottom, the Americans are. This war we’ll win.

  Learned to stand on his own two feet. Not be a burden to the family. Give his all for the victory of National Socialism in the rest of the world.

  On the postcard with the New Reich Chancellery on the front, he’d written: They were putting him through the wringer in Berlin, but they’d definitely take him.

  In September 1936 he was already giving a speech in Erlangen, at the Reich conference for NSDAP organizations abroad, “in front of 5,000 Germans from every corner of the world.”

  In Jerichow, though, they were talking about how Pastor Brüshaver’s sermon the morning after Robert’s arrival made no mention of the happy turn of events; the Papenbrocks could have requested it. It was said that Avenarius Kollmorgen would have to know if Papenbrock had changed his will, but that whenever the Erlanger speech came up, Avenarius always only mentioned his time in Erlangen and what used to count as proper in those days. It made sense that Papenbrock wouldn’t try to show him off, this Robert. Always been a clever one, the old man. They never called on his services, and even though Robert had been back almost two years by now people almost never thought of him in connection with the Papenbrocks. What difference did it make if it was him or not.

  Lisbeth hadn’t liked that the stranger had wanted to hug her after more than twenty years as if she wasn’t his sister. But Lisbeth had had a thing about being hugged for a while now.

  January 7, 1968 Sunday

  The underpass beneath Henry Hudson’s parkway was stuffed so full of sparkling light that Marie expected the river to be a frozen, smooth mirror for the sun. But under the cloudless illuminated sky the enormous current was on its powerful way to the Atlantic, glittering with countless ice floes, no longer Hudson’s river, so poisoned by industrial wastewater that the fish have already died far to the north—the memory of a river. Across the deep plain it cut into the land, a wind raced faster than a car would be allowed to in residential neighborhoods, and the ten below zero Celsius had so infused the railings of the promenade that the iron held fingertips fast. Marie happily stomped ahead through the slippery snow, melted and refrozen many times over, towards the sun feigning warmth more or less over Hoboken. She gave the promenaders coming toward us such a cheerful look that she seemed half inclined to share with them some of the fun she was carrying around with her. When she talked, the wind sometimes let little clouds of breath hang in front of her face for a moment, before the cold whipped them away. – Hoboken!: she said, and literally looked up as though trying to see the wool she wouldn’t let anyone pull over her eyes.

  – A trucking company in Hoboken, four salaries to pay, what else? City councilman at least!: she said, playing indignant in her amusement at the idea that Robert Papenbrock could have attained a middle-class income and status in our part of the world, just across the Hudson. She calls him “your uncle,” as though inoculated against any family connection herself.

  – In the twenties the transcontinental steamers still docked in Hoboken, Marie. There was trucking to do.

  – I’ll give you that. It’s not a bad story he came up with.

  – What makes it seem like a story to you?

  – His excuses are too perfect.

  – Still, it’s possible.

  – As possible as the restaurant “on Broadway in the Nineties”! In 1930! In the Depression! When he’d have been lucky if the guy he knew from Schwerin let him wash dishes, and if he didn’t have to wipe the scraps away first with his hand!

  – You don’t believe him because you only see hi
m from a distance. You don’t like him.

  – That’s how you told it.

  – I was only trying to say how it was. How it might have been.

  – It sounded like you thought he was disgusting.

  – Cresspahl did, at least.

  – And you’re on your father’s side.

  – No. Whenever I do understand him it shows.

  – Second piece of evidence, Mrs. Cresspahl: Mrs. Cresspahl doesn’t like that her whole family signed on with the people in power in Mecklenburg at the time (and in Germany, yes, I know). This “Robert Papenbrock,” or his killer, didn’t even start at the bottom with them, he parachuted in at the top!

  – You don’t believe for a second that he’s the real him?

  – Should I?

  – I only said how it seemed at the time.

  – Why not how it was?

  – Because whether his story was true or not only came out years later. Should I tell you the story out of chronological order?

  – No. Although I don’t keep track of this Jerichow of yours chronologically.

  – How do you?

  – By your people. What I know about them. What I’m supposed to think of them.

  – Okay. Go.

  – Okay. He wasn’t at first, but now Albert Papenbrock is almost my favorite. First of all he’s my great-grandfather, not many people know theirs, at least in my class. Maybe because I feel sorry for him. The Nazis won’t let him be king anymore, not in the town and not in his own house. Let him brag about supporting his family in high style; at least he wants to take care of them. That’s a different feeling, and it’s not nice to lose it.

  – Did you learn that from your dealings with Francine? “The exemplary fashion in which Schoolgirl Cresspahl gives a helping hand to a black classmate, disadvantaged by race and family circumstances”?

  – I don’t brag about it, but thank you for the apologies, Gesine. Anyway, I can recognize Albert’s situation.

  – Okay. Now Louweesing.

  – Who? Louise, Albert Papenbrock’s wife? No comment.