Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  And in Jerichow it was taken as proven fact yet again that no one could put one over on the Papenbrocks. Because the local SA was stuck with its suspicions, no one would try to go chasing after Horst anywhere firearms were being used in earnest. And Horst having a job at the District Farm Bureau wouldn’t exactly hurt the family business.

  It was too bad, of course, that the old man was now acting so unlike himself—gloomy, quiet, hardly ever with time for the cunning, circuitous, clever conversations he used to be so good at. But bars and pubs weren’t safe in times like this anyway.

  In September, Lisbeth née Papenbrock, 3-4 Brickworks Road, Jerichow, received a summons to the Gneez district court as a witness in the Warning/Hagemeister trial. The accusations included, among other things, defamation of a National Socialist officeholder by suggesting that he had derived unlawful profit from his dealings with a Jewish fellow citizen.

  The summons was delivered to the Cresspahls on the day for which the Mecklenburg Christian Family Almanac recommended paying heed to verses 1 to 5 of the fifth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

  Lisbeth could not be talked out of the fact that she’d heard it. She had heard: Hagemeister saying: Just look at Griem and his lot. Then Warning had said: He and Semig used to be thick as thieves, you couldn’t even stir the pot. Now Griem is head sergeant or whatever with the Reich Labor Service.

  Dr. Semig said: What kind of profit could a veterinarian have procured for a townsman-farmer! And Griem of all people! My dear Herr Cresspahl—!

  Griem was surveying the Great Friedländer Meadow for land improvement, and it looked like he wasn’t receiving his mail.

  Robert Papenbrock, who had brought the charge, was not expected back from the States before early 1938.

  Avenarius Kollmorgen was prepared to remember nothing. Papenbrock was more than happy to say he’d been seriously drunk. But Dr. Berling still hadn’t gotten over the man his wife had run off with, and all August long he was busy spreading the story among his patients, whom he credited with understanding the “moral cancers” in government and party leadership.

  Lisbeth heard it all right.

  Our Lisbeth, under oath, before the judge—what would happen then?

  January 10, 1968 Wednesday

  Mr. James R. Shuldiner has decided to get married.

  Mrs. Cresspahl would not have thought James Shuldiner capable of opening a conversation this way. She has known him since he’d paid a visit to someone in the office next door to hers in the bank, then from chance meetings on the way to the subway, eventually from hurried lunches in restaurants in the Forties; it was always he who called her, Mrs. Cresspahl paid for her own meal every time, and never did the talk turn to what he might have hoped for or gotten from these half hours. Perhaps he wanted to add a German to his circle of acquaintances; maybe others didn’t lend the ear he wanted to his concerns about statesmen’s behavior; possibly he keeps coming back due to the early-summer afternoon when he ran into us at a concert in Central Park and Marie respectfully asked him to explain certain mathematical calculations to her. Marie has long since forgotten that she didn’t count him among her friends for long, and Mrs. Cresspahl should have thought a bit more carefully about what being sociable might lead to. For if today was like usual, the topics of conversation would have been that the Pentagon is once again trying to cover for the president with its statements about August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, or that de Gaulle really was trying to compliment the Jews when he called them an elite people, “sure of itself and domineering.” But no, we’re now supposed to turn our attention to Mr. Shuldiner’s nuptials, and he’s in such a hurry about something that he can’t wait until tomorrow at lunch, he has actually come to meet us in the Hotel Marseilles bar. Sits there with his body a bit twisted, elbow on the railing above the swimming pool, pleasure involuntarily shining in his eyes, yet by no means a radiant bridegroom: his brow is still tense, as if weighed down by some burden.

  Mr. Shuldiner is asking us for a favor, as a friend. His wife would like to live in this neighborhood, and could we help? Another Bloody Mary, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  No thank you, and sorry, no. Mrs. Cresspahl is not in a position to do that. For her the Upper West Side as a neighborhood has disintegrated into more and more particular sights and scenes the more she’s gotten to know it over almost seven years—she cannot give an overall judgment. Mentioning her address has usually drawn a vague nod, an unseeing look fading into incomprehension. Greenwich Village to the south is well known in the city, at least as a myth; Riverdale in the Bronx instantly calls up a mix of recollection and fearful fantasy. What surrounds the Upper West Side is familiar, but it itself isn’t. To the north, Morningside Heights peers over at Harlem, from a safe distance; Columbia University snatches building after building, street after street, and pulls them under its venerable cloak; there’s the Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished and the church of Rockefeller, called Riverside, and then St. Luke’s Hospital, where New Yorkers by no means on their last legs go too. The neighborhood south of ours makes it onto the culture pages of even European papers, with its opera and philharmonic, the subway there stops in an actually new station, the buildings there are not only renovated but genuinely renewed. So the fringes of the area are famous, but what lies between them, the Upper West Side, is a gap, an unknown hole, a different kettle of the most indigestible fish. Anything can happen there, Mr. Shuldiner. Why don’t you and your girl stay in New Jersey.

  That’s just it. She doesn’t want to live near the Orthodox relatives.

  But does the girl want to fall in with heathens and Christians, Mr. Shuldiner? First of all, this is a white neighborhood, with at most thirty thousand Jews among twice that many Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Irish and Italian Catholics, and the two nondenominational Germans on Riverside Drive. There are some Jews who do their laundry on the Sabbath and some who are their rabbis’ pride and joy; you should see Mrs. Ferwalter. And they’re not, like the future Mrs. Shuldiner, from Rapid City, they are from Western Europe, from the Slavic countries. Will a young bride from South Dakota be able to cope? And what about the other fifty thousand, the Puerto Ricans, the blacks, and the pinch of Japanese and Chinese? The other, unknown ethnicities? They may all be Americans, but each group clings to its own language, they don’t like to mix; the confusing, highly variegated blend is not even constant, the people here move so unexpectedly. Wouldn’t your wife prefer an area where the people are more like one another and have reasons to get along?

  Still, Mr. Shuldiner could offer his wife something special here. The metropolis does come at a price, after all.

  Of course, Mr. Shuldiner. Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive—fiercely defended, substantial, old-fashioned heirlooms—still offer a life of comfort. Central Park West will probably look out for some time yet over the extravagant artificial landscape, manmade lakes, reflected clouds, rolling snow-covered meadows; at the leisurely winding paths; through the open sky toward the even haughtier addresses on Fifth Avenue crouching confidently under their water towers that are lit by sunlight delivered every evening, their subscriptions are paid up. Or, closer to the Hudson, take West End Avenue, that dark ravine between brick monsters but the cages in the windows are not for birds, they’re for air conditioners you have to pay for yourself. Maybe there, between all the old age homes, you’ll find a place for a young woman used to open country. Or in one of the numbered side streets, where single-family houses are still kept polished like precious gemstones. There, as on Riverside Drive, the sidewalks are swept clean, heavy vehicle traffic is prohibited, it seems desirable to live there. In this neighborhood it is easy to find a building built before February 1, 1947, in which the rents are frozen; there is not much new construction in the area. You’d only have to pay fifteen percent more than the old rent; Mr. Shuldiner can afford that. Of course.

  Right. And he would know that his wife was safe.

  Hardly, Mr. Shuldiner. The opposite is just as
true here too. There are slums on many of the side streets. Where the poorest of the poor have to live, the fire department is even less strict about its regulations; why wouldn’t those streets start burning the way Harlem is already? Why wouldn’t the sidewalks collapse there, like in Harlem? There are plenty of buildings there where the people, whole families in a single room, have to bang on the pipes because the landlord is trying to save money on heat. The ones who complain to the city with a phone call every two minutes, they live here too. Why shouldn’t they snatch your wife’s purse, hold a knife to her throat? And don’t believe Mrs. Cresspahl. She spent a whole year thinking that two apartment buildings on Ninety-Fifth Street were pleasant places, due to the movement in the hallways and windows, due to the Spanish greetings and singing she heard, the life on the sidewalks she saw; she hadn’t understood why her child always wanted to walk on the other side of the street. The child had recognized the buildings as poor, as bad; only later did Mrs. Cresspahl see the evidence, such as the pots and bowls that these citizens have to put on their windowsills in cold weather because they can’t keep their food safely inside.

  Give it to me straight, Mrs. Cresspahl. You live here.

  We can recite the statistics for you like a geography textbook, Mr. Shuldiner: You are located on the northwest part of the island of Manhattan, between 70th and 110th Streets, between Central Park to the east and, to the west, the river that Henry Hudson managed to discover before his crew abandoned him to starve. Avenues run north-south, such as Riverside Drive, it’s easy to get that wrong. You should see it from the air, Mr. Shuldiner. An irregular conglomeration of towers and shacks, hemmed in by high-rises. Almost a thousand persons per block, few of them singly in apartments, too many of them crowded together more closely than the law allows. The Upper West Side doesn’t even have a name. The Dutch once founded a village here and named it Bloemendaal, Bloomingdale, but it never did turn into a valley of flowers. When the locals discuss the neighborhood among themselves, they call it “the area,” as if it’s nothing but an arbitrary grouping of buildings, a senseless juxtaposition of people and not a community, a neighborhood. You will sometimes have to enter the area through the park on Broadway where Verdi stands with pigeons on his skull, now known as Needle Park, after the syringes, Mr. Shuldiner. If you go up Amsterdam Avenue, you will see the resemblance to the bombed-out streets from the World War. . . .

  – And I admired you so much, Mrs. Cresspahl: Mr. Shuldiner says. He’s been sitting bent nearly double for quite some time, elbows on the table, shoulders hunched, turning his glass around as if an answer were written in the sloshing mirror inside.

  – I don’t know my way around here, Mr. Shuldiner.

  – That’s not what I wanted. I was hoping you’d be able to help my wife.

  – Give her information?

  – And the other little things one does for a friend, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  Later that night, Annie née Killainen said: Your second client in only three days. I can see why. You must’ve been that way in school too.

  And then she wouldn’t believe Mrs. Cresspahl’s protests to the contrary.

  You’re responsible for what people see in you: Annie says.

  January 11, 1968 Thursday

  Deep down on the front page, next to the continued news of deaths due to the cold in the city (so that we believe it), The New York Times brings us a photograph from the harbor, a stubby tugboat, tiny amid the densely packed chunks of ice floating down the Hudson yesterday afternoon. The water is so full of poison that a person can die from just swallowing a little too much of it, the cold isn’t necessary.

  When Cresspahl acquired the yard behind the Jerichow church, it was almost entirely open onto Brickworks Road. Now it was long since closed.

  The farmers who came before him had put an entrance in the middle, to get to the open carriage house to the left and the cesspool, manure heap, and stable doors to the right. Cresspahl had dug it up and planted fast-growing bushes, filling in the gaps in the elderberry hedge with lilac all the way from the maple on the corner to the side driveway, which he’d built up like a road. You could see through it, but the way was blocked by a slatted wooden gate, even if it only latched shut, and anyone who tried to go through the bushes would find a chicken-wire fence, pointy ends up, in the middle of the leaves and branches. He had let it all grow wild, and anyone who didn’t know about the house in back would think the path ended there, since beyond the brickworks it petered out in the sand to just fields. It was no longer a property from which a small child could stray onto a motor road; no chickens got out either. It wasn’t until Cresspahl added a lock to the gate, in the summer of 1937, and Lisbeth hardly ever set foot in town anymore, that the people in Jerichow started talking about a prison he was keeping his wife in. Even though the gate was locked only at night. You could move the latch during the day, but it unhooked with such a loud bang that it scared you. He’d thought of everything! And even when it was loud in the workshop, the uninvited guest could only get as far as the third door, and there was Paap coming out of the fourth, or Cresspahl, or some other sturdy guy who didn’t need a dog. Just try and explain that you were only wanting to get into the workshop, and why you didn’t go through the barn door with the sign outside. There was no way to get to the house door, and no point in trying, since now it was always locked. Anyone Cresspahl let through to see Lisbeth was taken inside by Heine Klaproth; anyone else had to stay there with Cresspahl, with nothing to look at but the curtained windows, the empty yard, the little grassy lawn for the child, until the smell of the freshly cut wood made you dizzy. This Englishman, Cresspahl, would stand there so deceptively, like some harmless craftsman, sweaty, in dusty work clothes, neck bent, and then suddenly raise his head and aim his suddenly hard eyes right at you with unexpected precision, you’d remembered them as being just a watery blue. And if you preferred to leave the yard, you wouldn’t even get a story to tell.

  It wasn’t only Warning’s and Hagemeister’s relatives who came, trying to talk Lisbeth into having a conscience. Avenarius Kollmorgen turned up too, and rapped his walking stick against the workshop door, and wouldn’t stop brushing imagined lint from his broad shoulders while he proclaimed amid the running machines that whether or not a person named as a witness chose to testify was entirely at his or her discretion. Him Cresspahl brought into the house, to his desk, and when Avenarius said his goodbyes at the gate half an hour later, he beat so intemperately at the dusty hedge-row with his walking stick that the chickens came bursting out of their sandpits. Papenbrock was let in to see his daughter alone, and on the way back he preferred not to show his face in the workshop. Cresspahl came out to the driveway anyway, and the old man looked baffled. He’d tried out on his favorite daughter what always worked with Louise, and Lisbeth hadn’t stood for it. She’d never been screamed at like that, and so what if he was her father, he’d better watch out for Cresspahl! Papenbrock couldn’t fathom how someone wouldn’t scream at his wife, but all the good advice went out of him when he saw his son-in-law’s sidelong look, attentive, almost friendly. Others came too, like Brüshaver. Cresspahl poked some fun at him before letting him into the house, asking him about the Christian significance of an oath, and as a result Brüshaver started out less forcefully with Lisbeth than he’d planned, phrasing as a request what he’d intended as instruction. He got Lisbeth to the point of agreeing to lie if her mother said she could. Old Mrs. Papenbrock had more or less grasped what her husband and Cresspahl told her, but then felt too self-important in the affair and caught a wrong train of thought that only stopped at Romans 5:1–5. When Lisbeth told the story back home, she sat leaning to one side as limp as she’d been at her mother’s, hands feebly in her lap, nodding so submissively that a chair back broke under Cresspahl’s hands. Couldn’t glue it back on later either. Warning’s wife promised Cresspahl that God would visit twice the punishment upon Lisbeth’s head. Hagemeister came in person, made no attempt to leave the workshop, a
sked rather casually about the trees in the garden, talked about shearing sheep in Rande, and appeared to have nothing else he wished to discuss. When Cresspahl let him go, it looked from the workshop like he was promising him something. He’d sent word to Warning that he had no time for people running their mouth off about Shitbrowns in a public train, in broad daylight, in this particular year. Criminal stupidity, if you ask him. A sheep had more brains than that. And a sheep didn’t know enough to drink up a bucket of water in a whole year.

  Then Arthur Semig, Dr. Vet. Med., practicing veterinarian, who had fought in the First World War and been awarded an Iron Cross, was arrested in Jerichow and taken through the streets to the station and held in the basement under the Gneez courthouse.

  It was late September, off-peak season but good weather for swimming, when Lisbeth Cresspahl dropped her child off with Aggie Brüshaver. To her, as to Cresspahl, she said something about a trip to the dentist. She did go to the bus stop on Station Street, but got on the bus to Rande.

  When the sun was down behind the land and the Baltic Sea water was cold and looked it, too, a fisherman heading out to sea noticed a bathing cap far from shore. Two and a half miles out in Lübeck Bay, far past the fifty-foot line. The water was seventy-five and eighty feet deep there. She was already too weak to defend herself when Stahlbom and his son dragged her onboard.

  Stahlbom headed back to shore, because she was shivering so hard and not even three blankets got her warm again. He was thinking about the missed catch more than anything, because back in August 1931 a young woman, kindergarten teacher, had already swum a mile and a half out, although in that case it was because the dreadnought Hannover was lying at anchor there and she had already turned back. When Cresspahl arrived in Rande that night to fetch his wife, he asked on the spot how much he owed Stahlbom to make up for the day’s take, and Stahlbom would probably have forgotten the whole thing if he hadn’t been asked to.