by Uwe Johnson
– That was my mistake, the swim cap: Lisbeth said the next morning, lying in bed almost comfortably she was so tired, with a playful, absentminded smile that quickly disappeared behind lips taut with anger.
– It was vanity. And I was punished for it: she said.
Dont ever do that again, Lisbeth!
I wont, Cresspahl, I wont do it again. Not like that.
January 12, 1968 Friday
Annie Killainen and her three children in the Cresspahl apartment, they are easy to live with. The rooms aren’t big, and the middle one with its four doors lacks privacy, and still the little Fleurys aren’t whining for their lost cavernous halls in Vermont, even on the fifth day, and Francis R., Knock-knees, has already set up places where he can be alone—at the Dane’s desk, in the mirrored armoire. Maybe at home they had to be even more quiet than they are voluntarily here. Marie gets along with the big family too, because we’ve set things up so that she’s voluntarily offered her room to the visiting children, and also because she is often treated as the household’s governing body, regularly asked “how your mother does it.” It hasn’t yet struck her that Annie goes out with the children—to the freezing cold park, to go shopping, to the Hotel Marseilles swimming pool—whenever she gets home with homework to do. She has noticed that I am treated as a breadwinner, with breakfast served hot almost as soon as I get out of the bathroom, WQXR turned on punctually for the morning news, my coat and scarf held ready for me, as though Mrs. Cresspahl were a man, a father. I hope she won’t insist on copying that later. In the building, too, Annie has made her usual good impression: Mr. Robinson knows her children’s names and can tell them apart; Jason has hinted to her that an apartment like ours might be opening up on the twelfth floor. A stranger would have to drape one green piece of paper after another onto the palm of his hand for that. What Annie imposes of her housekeeping is inconspicuous; suddenly the metal window frames have been scoured to a shine with steel wool, the bookcase gleams as if fresh from the restorer; she doesn’t draw attention to it, it’s not a reproach, not even compensation. It would never occur to her to meddle with presents for the silverware drawer or linen closet; all she has added is an extravagant stockpile of candles, because “New York can get so dark.” Said while drawing her head down into her shoulders in mock alarm at her prejudice, until everyone’s about to laugh, and then she laughs. The tape player’s counter remains staunchly at the number from the night before, no letters are looked through; she may wipe away dust, or polish the drawers’ strike plates. A lot of what it meant for Annie to be here we’ll notice only when she’s gone. But of course we don’t want her to go.
You cannot stand living with her, can you, Gesine?
I like it fine.
It’s almost unbearable?
I see her and hear her, and it’s fine.
But when you’re sitting in the bank thinking about her?
Then it’s not so good.
Admit it, Gesine.
These interrogations all the time! Just because you’re over and done with everything!
We have an assignment for you, Gesine.
Yes, okay.
Think it through more carefully. Don’t spare yourself so much.
I couldn’t do it.
There you go trying to dodge again, Gesine. That’s not what we were asking for.
Like it’s nothing! Running away after five years living with someone, and no letter, no forwarding address, three children in hand! If I had five years of habits could I give them up? So easily?
You’re twisting things around, Gesine. You’re exploiting your own objections to marriage.
All right, you start.
You can’t stand it. You don’t even want to imagine it. Annie marching with her antiwar sign in a ridiculous little procession on a small town’s main street, the bank president stares at her and the mayor’s grandmother and the soda jerk, and suddenly she’s no longer the respectable Mrs. Fleury but a foreign Communist hussy.
I chose not to enter a prison I would want to break out of.
But the real prison, where Annie spent the night next to the town drunk and the local shoplifter?
What she shoplifted, she must have needed, or else advertising made her do it. How does spending a night in jail next to her promote peace in Vietnam?
Gesine. Annie did something.
With no results.
She didn’t do nothing.
I’m a guest in this country.
Annie wasn’t born here either, if it’s about that.
I’ve gone marching with signs in the cold too, back and forth, back and forth, outside Cardinal Spellman’s mansion because he’d blessed US soldiers in Vietnam.
You did it out of curiosity, and only once.
I didn’t do it again because I don’t want to be kicked out of the country.
How can you want to live in a country like this, Gesine?
Because it’s Marie’s life now.
The child, the child. Your emergency parachute, your inviolable excuse.
I want her to have what I never had.
And not what the children in Vietnam get.
Prove it to me! Prove it! Show me how I could actually know I was helping one single person! Go ahead!
If you don’t start small then in five years you’ll still be at war.
And if I don’t just use words, if I go for a walk in Riverside Park with a sign and wave a Vietcong flag around in the bank and send checks to Students for Peace?
Better.
You guarantee peace in five years?
You know the answer. That’s impossible.
You’re impossible!
This is how we like you, Gesine, all worked up. So this isn’t your everyday marital conflict after all.
I wouldn’t like this kind either.
You wouldn’t like it, you wouldn’t let yourself be slapped in the face at a birthday party in front of your guests, at the table laid with the family silver, in the candlelight, and all because you called the president’s policies toward Vietnam murderous?
I wouldn’t let any F. F. Fleury from Boston slap me in the face.
You’re jealous, Gesine.
Embarrassed, sure.
Well that’s something.
If she wants to fight her husband she doesn’t have to use that as a reason. She can disguise it.
Stop it, Gesine. You’re accusing Annie Killainen of not fighting her fight at its source . . .
She’s been in New York for five days and she still hasn’t gone to where the students are collecting money to end the war, or where the fliers are being printed, or where they’re being distributed.
. . . but there’s never any doubt with us! “Papenbrock didn’t want to help the Jew Semig get out of the country, it was enough for him to have a low opinion of himself too.” Period. Not a word about the rest.
Isn’t that how it was?
Even if it was, you’re still making it up!
I straighten things up to make them comprehensible.
And you we’re supposed to believe. But a living person, an Annie Killainen, you don’t believe.
I’d be very happy if I didn’t have to feel that.
But you do, because you know yourself.
It’s not because I’ve caught myself in unintended lies. It’s because I don’t trust my own beliefs.
And now Annie’s supposed to finish what she’s started just so she can meet your criteria for logical behavior? She’s supposed to act out the consistency you lack?
I’m not telling her what to do.
Yet you sit there in your empty apartment and something feels wrong and you’re just waiting for her to come back without having done anything against the war?
Yes.
And all she has to do is open the door, pushing children before her like a mother hen her chicks, with lovely pink cheeks from the cold and from her memories of the Finnish countryside, bubbling over with the encounters she’s had on the street,
which in her all turn into friendly stories, occasions for laughter—you’re not jealous?
That’s when I’ll remember why she and I get along so well.
And yet you resent getting sucked into her mood, her games, her stories, the fun of the big shared meal, as though you have no choice?
It makes me uncomfortable.
We feel sorry for you, Gesine.
You won’t make me feel sorry for myself.
You’ll regret that, Gesine.
January 13, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
It’s South Ferry day once Marie announces over lunch their departure for the Battery.
Marie wanted to show off her New York City to the children from Vermont; she also wanted to share her possession with them, including the ferry to Staten Island. She didn’t invite Rebecca Ferwalter,
– How many times do I have to tell you she’s Jewish, Gesine?
– A ferry across the harbor isn’t travel, Marie.
– Like you know more about Orthodox Jews than me! Ferwalters!
but she did invite Pamela Blumenroth, also a child of Jewish parents, but parents who would travel on the Sabbath without a second thought, although preferably on Israel’s airline, if they didn’t keep their planes grounded on Saturdays. Pamela and Marie ordered the grown-ups out of the apartment with them, and Annie was more than happy to spend a while away from the phone over which we are supposed to tell the now quite meek Dr. Fleury that she’s not here.
From that point on, Pamela and Marie were the tour guides leading the out-of-town children from the zigzag subway platforms under the ferry terminal up to the escalators, both looking very tall in the middle of their charges, holding the little ones’ hands, looking around, paying attention, real parents. In Pamela, all of eleven, you can often catch a glimpse of how she’ll be at nineteen: solicitous to the point of tenderness, proud of what she’s been entrusted with. She will one day push her own children through and under the turnstile as strictly and kindly as she now does Annina S., so that they’ll learn after one time. F. F. Junior was mad that the rules said he was supposed to duck under the turnstile, and he stood bitterly off to one side for so long that Marie gave him five cents so he could go back out and come back into the waiting area standing tall, pushing hard against the truncheon, as if he were a big kid, and now he’s really unhappy.
– Just like his father: Annie said, surprised, as if unwillingly, and pleased.
– You’ll talk to him soon.
– Oh, Gesine. I wrote to him yesterday, just not the address.
The Fleury children were given thorough instruction, Francis R. Knock-knees too, who took turns sitting on Pamela’s and Marie’s laps. They were not spared the cars driving onto the lower deck, nor the search for the shoeshine man in the smoking room, nor the gruesome pointing out of life jackets in the ceiling—only then came rewards from the snack bar. They mustn’t miss Ellis Island; they were presented more indifferently with the Statue of Liberty, who looked rather bored holding her torch away from her body, its flame gone out. Pamela stressed quite firmly that you could tell the ferries apart by their captains, some bring their boat into dock imperceptibly and others battering-ram style. The water was calm, the air temperature around freezing, the gulls had survived. The water towers, warehouses, piers, and chimneys of Jersey City and Bayonne look so innocent in the snow it’s as if they had nothing to do with the region that hangs a curtain of rusty smoke before the sunset during the summer. That’s how clear the air was.
It’s even colder where I come from. The New York Times has had the snow on the Mecklenburg coast of the Baltic measured and reports drifts piled up 2.13 to 2.74 meters (“seven to nine feet”), cut-off villages and townships. This was news, in her view, only because four Soviet tanks, three as steamrollers, brought a pregnant woman from “Beidersdorf” to the hospital in Wismar, where she gave birth to a healthy boy. “Macklenburg,” says The New York Times, the scatterbrained old lady. And this Beidersdorf is the town of Beidendorf, pop. ca. 800, located between Mühlen Eichsen and Wismar, where the land heaps up some 90 m. (300 ft.) above sea level. Had she paid a visit there in person, this trusting Auntie Times, the world would now know about Beidendorf Pond and its distance from Gneez, and Jerichow.
– You’re leaving something out, Gesine.
– Maybe we should leave Mecklenburg alone while Annie is staying with us.
– No, there’s something you don’t want to tell me.
– What do you think I’m leaving out?
– On Thursday night you stopped when Semig was taken to Gneez under armed guard, with his Iron Cross on his jacket.
– Sergeant Fretwust took it away from him and gave him a receipt.
– But there was one of Lisbeth’s stories that you didn’t finish.
– Lisbeth tried to. . .She. . .
– Wait, here come the others.
Then we pulled into St. George Terminal and the children led us through the corridors of the ferry building to the turnstiles to Manhattan and we took the next boat back.
This is the coldest winter since 1917: an old man assured the children as they leaned into the wind. He said it not as someone who remembered it personally, more like a short-tempered schoolteacher—eyes flashing, hands gesturing severely at the surroundings, white mustache wet with zeal. Ships froze in the ice in the middle of the harbor, by the Brooklyn piers! Massive ice all through Long Island Sound! And in the first year of the war against Germany! New York had no coal, the ships couldn’t bring soldiers or weapons to the European front! F. F. Jr. came over and asked us what kind of monsters exactly these “Huns” were. Annie hesitated, snuck a look at the German standing next to her, who was amused and wondering only about which lying technique would be employed, and said: They were so strong that the Great Wall of China was built to stop them. And Mrs. Cresspahl said: Once upon a time in a country called Germany there was an emperor, Wilhelm the Second, and he wanted his soldiers in China to take no prisoners and to make a name for themselves that would last a thousand years. You should see yourself looking at us. You look like a tennis umpire!
Then we pulled into the dock on Whitehall Street in Manhattan and the children conducted us down the ramp and back into the terminal and onto the next ship to Staten Island.
– That, over there, Mrs. Killainen, is an ordnance warehouse for the god-dinged US Marines: Marie said.
– Aha: Annie said. She hadn’t really looked, and maybe she didn’t realize what she was answering.
Then we arrived at St. George and walked through the gate to the boat back to Manhattan, and F. F. Jr. had managed his fourth little doggie, hot, and Annina had orange juice not just around her mouth but on her ear, and still Pamela and Marie did everything the little ones could think of, whether pacing off the length of the ship, or playing catch, or betting who could stand the wind the longest. If Francis Knock-knees hadn’t fallen asleep we might have taken the round trip yet again. It was like—
– yes: Annie said.
– when I was a child and learned how to dive. I couldn’t stop doing another one.
– when I ordered a steak in Italy, and then another, and then a third!
– For me it was a potato-and-bacon omelet after a walk with—
– Near Beidendorf.
– Don’t laugh! Not far from Beidendorf, yes, Annie!
– We were very tired,
– we were very merry,
– we had gone back and forth
– all night on the ferry.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay!
– Edna St. Vincent Millay.
January 14, 1968 Sunday
Gaetano Gargiulo has a store on Farmers Boulevard in Queens. A young man, Nellice Cox, tried to hold it up and pointed a pistol at Gargiulo’s son. Gargiulo ducked out the back door, borrowed a pistol from a nearby hardware-store owner, confronted the holdup man, and fired once. Nellice Cox won’t be going back home to number 109-82 on 203rd Street in Hollis, and Gaetan
o Gargiulo is in custody for violating the weapons law.
– Listen, Gesine: Marie says. – Here’s the last thing you said on Thursday night:
– “But Fretwust didn’t include Semig’s Iron Cross in the list of personal effects. He didn’t think the Jew would be getting his medals back. Fretwust hadn’t been a constable for long; by all rights he should have been vacuuming out sludge from the Gneez pumping station. And Fretwust wasn’t embarrassed about his name, on the contrary, he was proud of it.”
– Okay. That’s not an ending?
– Not to the other story, Gesine. That’s what I’m trying to show you. At 266 on the tape counter you said:
– “Even if the maids hadn’t yet learned how to shop for proper meat, Lisbeth would rather see people at her table chewing and gnawing than show herself on Town Street in Jerichow.”
– That’s the start of the story, Gesine!
– Can I play?
– Annie, you wouldn’t understand.
– Mrs. Fleury, we can’t explain this to you. You’d never understand.
– I’m from a small town too, you know.
– Okay. What do you think about a veterinarian arrested in 1937 for having allegedly broken a law before 1933?
– Isn’t that past the statute of limitations?
– Exactly, Mrs. Fleury.
– He was taken into custody as a witness, Annie.
– That makes sense. Risk of collusion, or whatever you call it.
– We don’t call it anything. His wife had parents in Schwerin, a mother with friends in the ducal family, a father with close colleagues from his time in DEPO, the Mecklenburg Deposit and Exchange Bank. That’s who the Kösters were. The Kösters made sure that their son-in-law was taken into custody.
– Prudish crowd.
– They did it for their daughter’s sake, because it wasn’t the criminal police conducting the investigation.
– Aha. The secret police.
– The Gestapo in Gneez probably didn’t even know, at first, whether they wanted to clear the Reich Labor Service leader Griem from any suspicion of having accrued illegal pecuniary gain with the help of a Jewish professional man, or pin it on him.