Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Because she didn’t practice what she preached?

  – No comment!

  – Any comments on Lisbeth?

  – She’s your mother. So I’ve almost always made excuses for her when you tell me things. Now she’s sick, and no one will help her. In a country like ours, in New York, she’d have gone to a shrink a long time ago and been cured. She wouldn’t be trapped in her church, she’d be able to see it from the outside. And she’s going to be the next one to die. Even you’re going easy on her.

  – Next?

  – See what I mean? The tradesmen—Böttcher the carpenter, Köpcke the mason, Pahl the tailor—I don’t hold it against them. They didn’t understand the first war, what else should they do but work toward the next one. The guy who sawed my planks for your house, in the Nineties, he was in Korea. Wounded too. You should have heard him talk about Vietnam! Your educated men, though, Dr. Hauschildt, Dr. Semig, Dr. Avenarius Kollmorgen, Pastor Brüshaver, Dr. Kliefoth, Dr. Berling, Dr. Erdamer—

  – Hi, Mr. Faure. Mrs. Faure.

  – Oh certainly. It’s a perfect winter day.

  – Take care on the steps.

  – You can take Brüshaver off the list. He got the son from his first marriage back from Spain in a sealed casket.

  – Sorry. Still, an accident. With Semig, I try to keep in mind that he couldn’t have believed it was possible, what we now know was possible. But the others, with their university diplomas, those professionals, just talking out their ass!

  – Nice language, Miss Cresspahl.

  – I’m not even bothering to insult them!

  – Cresspahl.

  – Him I’d despise if he weren’t your father. I’m sorry. Sorry! I didn’t mean it. I take it back. And I did mean it.

  – Your own grandfather?

  – Yes, him. He was the only one with his eyes wide open, he’d learned his lesson from the first German war—doing what, actually?

  – Bayonet charge in honor of the Kaiser’s birthday on the western front. He’d learned you can stab people and like it. And that gas attack at Lange-marck.

  – Right. If he’d at least tried the Netherlands, they didn’t look like they were going to be in for a war. Trying that would have entered him into my good books forever, how do you say that in German? And he had a child, a Gesine, and he let her stay where he was expecting bombs to start falling. I think it’s horrible, a lot of the time, how you can think all these people in Jerichow made you who you are, it’s horrible that you think you’re the way you are today because they were the way they were!

  – If Cresspahl hadn’t accepted the house from Papenbrock the Cresspahls would have been in England in 1945, maybe behind bars, but still, and Jakob would have looked for a place to stay with some other family. If Dr. Berling had understood anyone else’s moods besides his own. . . .

  – Okay. So that’s why we’re in New York?

  – That’s why.

  – And it was all decided back there, thirty years ago you were programmed to prefer the feel of a dime in your hand over a half-dollar?

  – Yes. Maybe because there are Dutch coins that feel like dimes.

  – I can’t think like that. And you think that’s true for me too?

  – It does happen. Oh, we forgot one. Horst.

  – I pretty much get him. Don’t laugh. He’d made a mistake. Then he realized something. Because whoever it was he found, at least he’d been in New York.

  She walked comfortably next to me in the cutting wind, cozily bundled up in her heavy coat from London, in her hat with earflaps, in herself. We had the sun at our backs, and she tried with every step to step on her shadow. In the winter, when the buildings on the cliffs of the Jersey shore are hidden in the snow and the blinding reflected light, Henry Hudson might have recognized his river after all from the mottled white cliffs. Marie thinks it’s possible. And she knows for certain that someone in this city of hers, even way downtown where Broadway starts and not on Park Avenue where the West Germans cluster nowadays—she is convinced that anyone who comes to New York thereby comes to his senses.

  The things she believed as a child, someone ought to write them down for her.

  January 8, 1968 Monday

  You can count on The New York Times, even we haven’t escaped her notice: “And residents of Riverside Drive found the Hudson River glutted with more ice floes than they had seen in many years at this time of the winter.” As though she’d seen us, asked us.

  There is a quantity of family occupying the Cresspahl apartment that it would be too small for even without us. Marie decided that we were good enough friends with Annie Fleury and her children to live with them, just the way they were, showing up out of the blue, of the far north, of Vermont, of the Greyhound bus. Marie explained the subway route from the bus station to our Ninety-Sixth Street station so clearly over the phone that even though they’d arrived not long before the bank closed they’d been in the apartment a long time already, the three children all in Marie’s room behind closed doors and Annie on the sofa, anxious, an uninvited guest, hurriedly standing up and already out the door to a hotel. You won’t rush off to the Marseilles, Annie. You’re so agitated, Annie, why are you sitting there with your knees clamped so tight together, what’s making you lean forward so uncomfortably, kneading your hands! If you’re not laughing, we won’t try to make you. We’d rather see you here the way you used to be, with your coloring of wind and woods some help to you, your farmer’s-daughter brow smooth, fun sparkling in your eyes, but we’ll take you the way you are. Don’t look around the room as if no one could help you. We can help you. We’ll get Mr. Robinson, from the elevator, Mr. Robinson will bring up cots from his inexhaustible storage area in the basement, we’ll bring the suitcase in from the hall to where you’ll be sleeping.

  You’re here now, Annie.

  Because I had no one else I could trust, Gesine.

  None of your suitors from only five years ago, just because one of them would have something soothing to say about the news, and another would still try to get you to move in with him in his official residence at the Finnish consulate? Not F. F. Fleury, who wanted to live with you as in Thoreau’s time? It’ll hit him hard, having to stay alone in a house cracking with the cold in the snow in the mountains, abandoned by his Annie, who spent more than four years working to create a life in the country, with three children and venerable splintery floorboards, his transcriber, his secretary, the admirer of his genius as a translator from the French, finally run off one early morning to the Plymouth Union bus station, three children in tow.

  How should we start, Annie? With tears, with division of property, with wailing and lamentation? We don’t want to start at all. We can see that we have a serious problem on our hands, and that we should share it to the extent we can; not in front of the children. We and Mr. Robinson, we can get a TV set from his hideaway, for the kids, for Frederic F. Junior, for Annina the apple girl, for Francis R. too, aged two and a half, if they wouldn’t be happy without one? We won’t tell the children that you’re not just taking a trip to the city. Should we hide you too? Not say over the phone where you are? Happy to do it for you, Annie. You’re not here. No. You’re not here.

  Because I knew you wouldn’t pressure me.

  The things you’re saying, Annie, think for a second. You’re in New York, ships are sailing past on your right, the subway’s running on your left, the 1, 2, and 3 trains, behind you your children are tired from the trip, sleeping like freight, Marie is sitting in front of you, a child of not yet eleven, and you want her to hear it? All right, tell her along with me, if you think it’s educational. So Marie should hear that Annie Killainen wants to flee her marriage with F. F. Fleury because of Vietnam? Because of Vietnam. You’re both over twenty-five and each reciting your scripted lines—his on the theory of the domino effect, China’s greed, the honor of the USA in Southeast Asia, the continuation of the French legacy in Indochina, human freedom, and peace on earth; yo
urs on the Seventh Commandment, re: foreign markets, the honor of the USA, the right to self-determination of even the smaller nations, human freedom, and peace on earth. How did you do it? Over breakfast? Whenever the children weren’t there. Which was often. Or in French. Annie, it was like that forty years ago in Mecklenburg, you can’t go back to that! And now F. F. doesn’t want a wife who signs antiwar petitions, who’s a member of antiwar groups, he doesn’t want to drive to the store and see his wife standing there with a hand-painted antiwar sign; he wants his wife at home, with the kids, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. He says you’re disgracing the Fleury name. And where you insert a pause in your story, Marie’s not supposed to not know something is possible but I’m supposed to imagine it. I know, Annie.

  Because I knew you’d understand, Gesine.

  Yes. No. Annie, stay here. Stay a week, stay two weeks, make him sweat. Spend a day in our apartment and it’ll be so spick-and-span I won’t even recognize it. It’ll be great for me. We’ll go to the opera, to movies, to concerts; Mr. McIntyre at the Hotel Marseilles bar will marvel at us. Marie also knows the fairy tales of your, our Baltic that your children expect at bedtime; she’ll take them to the park, to the zoo in the Bronx, to see Broadway. It’ll be fun. Three weeks, if you want. And then talk to him, to F. F. He’ll be taken down to size, short even with a hat, Annie. He’s always lived with someone to take care of him; he can’t cook, he doesn’t know what to do with a washing machine, by now he’s forgotten how to get a typescript ready for print. He won’t only realize he wants you, he’ll realize he needs you. I’ll explain the Vietnam thing to him if you insist. But go back. The children. Five years together. I think you should let him ask; that’ll be harder for him than if you do. But then let him come get you. It doesn’t matter to me either way; you matter to me.

  You live in a marriage part-time, when you feel like it, like putting on a play, Gesine. You don’t know what it’s like to be really married.

  Fine, Annie. We’ll find you an apartment in New York, and won’t push Riverside Drive. We’ll find you a job in New York; I won’t recommend too strongly the bank that has me. Or go back to the United Nations, they still only take the pretty girls there. Don’t do that, take a ship to Liverpool and Hamburg and Stockholm and Helsinki and Kaskinen, or Kaskö. What kind of Finnish is that your kids are speaking. Francis R., his is the best, Annina can get by. But F. F. Junior, you can hardly get the English out of his mouth with a crowbar. Don’t write to your parents yet. Stick around for a while. All right. Five days. If at the end of the week you’re still talking like you are now I’ll go with you to buy the steamer tickets.

  Because you’re my best friend, Gesine. Didn’t you know that?

  No. Sorry: I did. I meant: Yes.

  January 9, 1968 Tuesday

  Last week in the freezing-cold city 165 persons died of pneumonia, 70 more than expected, and there is a shortage of blood for operations. Charles Gellman, executive director of Jewish Memorial Hospital: “The Vietnam war doesn’t help either, because there is a lot of blood sent there.”

  The playground by Pier 52, bounded by Hudson, Gansevoort, West Fourth, and Horatio Streets, is now, since yesterday, named after John A. Seravalli. He used to play basketball there as a teenager. On May 26, 1966, the army drafted him. On February 28, 1967, twenty-one years old, he was killed on patrol near Souida.

  In the summer of 1937, Horst Papenbrock wanted to enlist in the army voluntarily.

  When he went to tell Lisbeth, he found her polishing the silverware. She had laid out towels on the kitchen table and the work seemed to fly through her hands as she swiftly turned three knives between her fingers, dabbed the cork in the water and then in the emery powder in the opened drawer, rubbed the blades clean, and put them in the basin to rinse off later. It was a warm afternoon in late July. The garden light, divided in rectangles by the window, was already slanting. Nearby, the starlings were on the hunt and above the ripe cherry trees. From a distance, Paap could be heard restacking boards. It was Saturday, the work week felt over already. Horst didn’t want to start in right away so Lisbeth thought it was a normal visit and started telling him about the trip she’d had to take to the military construction office in Gneez that morning, and about the conversations on the train. She was thinking to herself about how her hair needed washing and was annoyed that now Horst too was an eyewitness to what people were saying around Jerichow—that she wasn’t taking care of herself. Horst was thinking about his imminent departure, and he looked at his sister more closely than usual, probably did notice the loose, unkempt braids, but he still thought of her as the girl, the younger sister, whose reputation for prettiness he had often prided himself on. Then he told her, ever the big brother with his mysterious and amazing decisions, and saw her start as though she’d cut herself and was trying to choke back the pain behind pursed lips. Then he forgot what he’d seen once she started acting as he’d expected. He heard the innocent girl asking how far the garrison was from Jerichow, the little sister who felt bad for him over the blowup Albert Papenbrock was going to have. – You dummy: she added, the way she used to when they were kids, except the mutual understanding that used to underlie the teasing was gone. Horst must have noticed that the silverware was flying to the side a little harder now, but he thought she was in a hurry, and saw that Lisbeth was now wearing gloves because of the black from the silverware polish, and that it was the Güstrow family silver she was putting dents in. Horst was surprised when the child snuck away from the table and finally trotted off down the back hall. Lisbeth probably wanted to endure in silence the fact that her family was once again helping Cresspahl hang guilt around her neck, but she wasn’t patient enough to do it.

  You told him to, Cresspahl!

  Come on, Lisbeth. The boy wants somewhere to hide. The armys not a bad place to hide.

  For now. What if theres war?

  I never tell your brother anything, Lisbeth. No friendly advice, no unfriendly advice. Besides they wont take him anyway.

  Heinrich.

  Papenbrock didn’t bring off his blowup. He had the necessary fury at his disposal when Horst announced after the meal that he was leaving the family business, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He had already sent the boy after the eldest; now he couldn’t make him work for an inheritance he would not get most of. He hadn’t made an effort to bring this Elisabeth Lieplow from Kröpelin into his house, even though she was now a Papenbrock; could he hold it against Horst that he was living with his own wife? He had raised his son with the precept that a real man was a soldier; what the boy was doing now might even be obedience. Albert was hit—bull’s-eye. Words failed him. Earlier he would have had recourse to blows. He started several times: “You . . .you—,” but Horst just waited calmly to see whether the old man would call him an oaf, and shrugged his shoulders more with regret than anything else when his father walked over to the door as though wanting to slap it, then slipped out muttering something indistinct. Horst hadn’t even shown defiance. He was now as old as his thirty-six years. Papenbrock lashed out blindly the next day in his helpless rage. He summoned the Schwerin son to Jerichow, who thought nothing of driving up in a big chauffeured car in the middle of the harvest; he summoned Avenarius Kollmorgen, who walked in with shocking submissiveness, briefcase held importantly in hand, brows furrowed significantly but helplessly; he summoned Cresspahl as a witness. Who didn’t come. Who probably realized that the old man could ease his conscience more readily if Cresspahl was willing to help carry the burden—he didn’t have that much compassion. Dr. Berling was willing enough to come. After he’d draped the limp ribbon of subsequent letters onto his stolid B, the group in Papenbrock’s office didn’t know what to say to one another; even Avenarius admitted to himself that drinking Mosel like this didn’t usually make him tired. But no suitable remark occurred to him, the moist dark cave of Market Square outside the windows did not lure him out of the house, and before he managed to take his leave just to be safe,
he heard Horst say before witnesses what Lisbeth Cresspahl had overheard last Saturday on the train, at the Wehrlich station, from the conversation between Hagemeister the forest ranger and Warning the farmworker, something about the dealings between a certain highly placed party member and a certain Jewish veterinarian before the Nazi takeover. Horst hadn’t meant to do anything but fill in a gap in the conversation, and the brother from the Americas contented himself with a bored shake of the head, as if he’d had enough of this stupid gossip in or between small towns. In addition, this Robert had acted amazed and embarrassed, and when the time came to shake hands his emotional look hadn’t come off or rather had, practically slipping off his face.

  In late August, Horst and his wife, Elisabeth, had moved to Güstrow. Sure enough, the army hadn’t taken him. They could have appointed him a lieutenant in the reserve, since he’d come out of the war in 1919 as an NCO, but at nearly thirty-seven he would have been a bit old for a lieutenant. Horst may have suspected his father’s fat fingers of pulling the strings behind his rejection; he did not come back to Jerichow. The settlement of his inheritance had been enough for his Lisbeth to set up a respectable apartment in Güstrow, not far from the new housing for the Reich Farm Bureau where he soon had a job managing the allocation of seeding material in accord with National Socialist principles. Alexander Paepcke had gotten him the job, through various Leonia fraternity brothers, so Papenbrock hadn’t been able to prevent it. The old man actually had to look for a new warehouse manager, just as he’d wanted in March 1933, and couldn’t speak his mind about the one he found, Waldemar Kägebein, who knew things by heart out of Aereboe’s Handbook of Agriculture that Papenbrock had to look up. Robert Papenbrock, meanwhile, was serving the fatherland by means of a work trip abroad, this time not to Rio de Janeiro but to Chicago, Illinois. At least that’s what the postmarks said.