Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – He hit her.

  – Never. He let her watch him beat me. He didn’t try too hard to soften the blows; he wanted me to remember that water butt once and for all. That was the only way he could protect me from Lisbeth.

  – And she didn’t grab his arm to stop him?

  – Please. Now she had the unjust suffering of her child to offer up to her God too.

  – Did you ever hit me?

  – No. What I found so horrible about the beating wasn’t the injustice but that my father was mad at me. That’s why I spent the whole lunch looking for something I could do to atone, and under the table, too, so I was safe from his looks. Then I saw the cat coming back from a walk outside the house, and going under Cresspahl’s chair, and lying down on his foot and clog. And I said: Daddy, the cat! And he said: It can sit wherever it wants. And he looked at me like he was surprised about the cat with me, and he was back together with me like before.

  – She tried to kill you!

  – She wanted to let me go, Marie.

  – She must’ve hated you.

  – It would have been pretty quick and painless, drowning.

  – But she tried to get rid of you!

  – “He that loveth his child,” Marie. . . . She would have known that her child was safe, far from all guilt past, present, and to come. And she would have made the greatest sacrifice a person can make.

  – You’re trying to say that she loved you.

  – That’s what I’m trying to say.

  – Next time you don’t want to tell me a story, Gesine, don’t tell it.

  – Now you don’t trust me.

  – I trust you. You’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you?

  – Yes, Marie. I am Father’s daughter.

  Lisbeth I’ll kill you

  Kill me Hinrich. Theres no help for me now.

  January 20, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  What does this mean, Gesine. What does this all mean!

  Nuttin. “Nüchs,” as Grete Selenbinder used to say.

  When she didn’t want to answer.

  Just like I don’t.

  But you’re learning Czech.

  Československo je také velmi krásné.

  It’s not for a trip, it’s an assignment from the bank. Every Thursday you get off two hours early, and Mr. Kreslil is paid by the bank too.

  He doesn’t know that.

  The way no one’s supposed to know. Where are you planning to go with this?

  Nowhere. Nothing will come of it. They have never once let a woman work on the floors of the building with wooden floors, practically genuine carpets, practically genuine pictures hanging on the walls. Except as a cleaning lady of course.

  And yet you have the fourth Five-Year Plan of the ČSSR almost memorized.

  De Rosny has gotten an idea into that big head of his. And he seriously thinks the bee was sent bonnet-ward by the Státní Banka Československá.

  You’re doing something you don’t believe in.

  Isn’t it enough that I work for the bank? Do I have to have feelings for it too?

  Employee Cresspahl has been given some extra motivation. A more recalcitrant employee would be marked down for the next time personnel costs need trimming. Is that it?

  That’s it. And if in the end the Czechs and the Slovaks can’t rebuild their Socialism with credit from de Rosny, Employee Cresspahl will still be sitting in the Foreign Sales Department, and the vice president will write off the investment.

  You as an investment.

  As part of the workforce, a cog being preemptively repurposed for another machine. Just so the bank won’t have to feel bad later about not covering all the bases.

  For de Rosny, Employee Cresspahl is a person.

  He treats me like one. He’s keeping the cog oiled and polished. The personal side of it is that de Rosny can write in his annual report to the stockholders: He has taken steps to reach out to Eastern Europe. That’s to his credit even if nothing comes of it.

  Let’s assume that you actually do make it upstairs to the carpets, with the young men in their dark suits, and you have a rosewood desk like them, with a whole country’s business passing across its surface. Maybe your colleagues will let you live, but it’ll only be because they don’t envy your Mission: Impossible.

  A woman bank executive. The seven-headed beast. Now that would be news for The New York Times.

  Never mind that, Gesine. De Rosny believes the show of loyalty to the bank you’re putting on; he thinks it’s lucky you actually lived in an Eastern European country. . . .

  For three and a half years in the GDR. As a teenager.

  Never mind that, Gesine. The Czech lessons, the economics you bought from Columbia University. . . .

  To please you all. Okay, let’s assume all that, weather permitting.

  That’s what the forecast shows.

  That the ČCP actually wants to “ democratize and humanize” itself? I know the words. Real worn-out shoes they are.

  Then why wouldn’t they hide their new boss in a rumor (some mummy past seventy who wants to sacrifice himself), why would they put him in all the nation’s newspapers, Alexander Dubček, forty-six years old, with his complete biography?

  It looks new.

  And that they haven’t passed the law about building new residential housing, and even admit that it wouldn’t do the job?

  Yes, sure. And decentralizing economic decisions. The rentability discussion. That rents which are too low make it impossible to maintain the buildings.

  You see, Gesine. And then the Petschek family’s life history on Czechoslovakian state TV.

  That’s a bit of a stretch. “The Rockefellers of Czechoslovakia.” Shown as oppressors.

  Yes, but with respect too, Gesine. With admiration: they never fell victim to a stock market crash. And when 1938 came to the world and Hitler to Czechoslovakia, the Petscheks sold off most of their mines and pulled out of their banks and emigrated to the USA. You think this Dubček government doesn’t watch its own TV station?

  It permits a story about capitalist cunning.

  No, Gesine. A piece of the truth. As if these were people it was possible to learn something from.

  I didn’t watch it.

  But you know that they even showed the buildings the Petscheks owned. Now serving as the Soviet, Chinese, and American embassies. The Petschek Bank, which was turned into the headquarters of the German Gestapo and then into the Ministry of Foreign Trade. This was a piece of buried national history dusted off and shown how it really was.

  I wouldn’t say that. Next you’ll tell me that Češi a Slováci jsou bratři. Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.

  Start with just one.

  Okay. They’ll be able to fix their economy faster and better with foreign credit.

  And you’d work for that.

  Assuming that Socialism would be left in place. Or put in place for once.

  You’d not only be paid to do work like that, your heart would be in it.

  Yes. Now that’s enough.

  No, Gesine. There’s something else. But here comes Marie, up from the car deck. Není to pěkné dítě?

  Ano, je vskutku velmi pěkné.

  So now if the Czechs and Slovaks united in brotherhood want such a thing, from de Rosny, then where will he set up this person’s office? Where will the employee responsible have to transfer to?

  . . . I didn’t think of that.

  Where would you be if you didn’t have us, Gesine.

  The bank has a branch in London.

  And one in Frankfurt. Which is closer to Prague?

  No. Not Frankfurt. Not again.

  No one’s asking your preference, Gesine. Is there a South Ferry in London? Where is the Frankfurt harbor you can take ferries across?

  Marie.

  Employee Cresspahl takes business trips to Prague and Marie spends her life in the Alcron Hotel.

  She can’t.

  But she’d have to come
with you, and she would go with you.

  She’d lose three years before she learned how to live anywhere but New York.

  And you don’t want to see the scars it’ll leave.

  No.

  You see, Gesine. So now tell us again: What does this all mean?

  The New York Times, this moralistic auntie, refuses to let Eartha Kitt off the hook for having talked back to Mrs. Johnson. The Times speaks of a “rude confrontation.” And of what a credit it is to the first lady that she candidly replied that she could not understand the things and the life Miss Kitt understood. And that we can learn from it. Understand it. After centuries of psychic wounds the accumulated venom of the ages comes pouring out, often rude and irrational, often self-destructive. But it is there and it must be faced with compassionable understanding.

  Clearly it’ll be a while before we’re reconciled with Auntie Times.

  January 21, 1968 Sunday

  The New York Times has once again sold a whole page to herself to inform her readers about her own progress. Since May she has owned the Microfilming Corporation of America, she brags about her niece Hallelujah, she has gotten fatter, but the most important thing to her is no doubt that she is losing the 117-year-old period after the title on the front page. It wasn’t, she says, the $41.28 in annual ink costs for the dot, but the desire to make Auntie easier to read and enjoy.

  Other than that, nothing seems to be missing. Not even that the administration sent a deputy secretary of defense to Senator Fulbright shortly before Christmas. The time had come for the senator to stop having his Foreign Relations Committee ask questions about whether US destroyers had actually been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. The administration had conclusive proof and the three-and-a-half-year-long bombing war was justified. Senator Fulbright remains unconvinced.

  Dr. Semig, him they convinced. In the first week of December, he took a trip.

  Even then, it wasn’t fear that made him do it. He hadn’t been treated any worse in the basement under the courthouse than a thief not yet proven guilty. Dora had been allowed to bring him reading material, and out-of-hours visits had not been refused either. He’d been allowed out in the prison yard for half an hour at a time on many of the days, though alone. He’d been questioned only twice. He’d felt safe the whole time in jail, not only because Dora’s bribes had softened up Alfred Fretwust but because of his certainty that what was happening to him wasn’t possible. Since it wasn’t right it had to be a mistake.

  He did it for his wife.

  When Dora came she told him about the progress she’d made getting their passports stamped. She did not tell him what the authorities promised her if she divorced him. They talked about the Jerichow house, about what she’d sold, about other things that Fretwust could barely understand. She didn’t tell him that Friedrich Jansen had occupied the house for several hours with his gang of thugs, to measure the rooms. One time, she arrived without her coat, in late October, and he forgot to ask her about it. Frieda Klütz had spit on her in the Gneez railway station and she had taken off the sullied coat and placed it neatly in the shrewish old maid’s arms. Arthur saw, though, that she was short of sleep, that she seemed thinner every time he saw her. He saw her large, burning eyes. He did not want to spend many more mornings waking up without her. He gave in. Among his quirks he felt he had to cling to the stubborn insistence that they call it a trip, not an emigration. Even Fretwust could tell that there was no difference, and he wrote in his surveillance notebook: Plans to leave German Reich. Fretwust avoided Arthur’s name whenever he could in his notes, after Dora snapped at him once that anyone speaking of her husband had to use the word “Doctor.” This had confused Fretwust. It was because he had gone to university, and that wasn’t something anyone could take away from him. He had been an officer, and if you called him by his first name he surely remembered that that’s how he’d addressed subordinates in the war. A Jew, yes, but a Jew in addition to that. The veterinarian’s wife still carried herself as one of the people to whom he used to doff his cap. She could stop at a door so abruptly that a court constable of the New Greater German Reich might find himself positively running to open it for her quickly enough. When she gave him instructions about how her husband was to be treated, he tried to grin and couldn’t pull it off; not even from his mother would he have accepted such a strict tone, such unrelenting looks. When it was time for a visit to end, Fretwust would, contrary to regulations, stand and face the wall for a few seconds. And then when he glanced back over his shoulder they would be sitting across from each other the same as before, they may have tried to pass each other something but he couldn’t catch them in an embrace. When Fretwust later, over a beer, told stories about the horny old couple, his conscience would trouble him, but still he was almost sure, when he thought back to the afternoon, that Mrs. Semig put her hand on the Jew’s as if attempting to comfort him for something. That was when she’d brought from Schwerin the suggestion that life in Germany would have been easier for the Semigs if they’d had children.

  Semig wanted to spare his wife, and the people still talking to them in Jerichow, from what he thought was a mistake. It wasn’t his fault but it was, nonetheless, because of him that the police and the Gestapo had paid them visits. He had exposed them to that, which was no way to thank them; thus he now had to leave them. That meant paying two visits.

  First, to go see Cresspahl; only Cresspahl immediately suggested coming to see Semig instead. Once again Lisbeth didn’t feel it necessary to let all of Jerichow know that they were on their way to the Bäk. But she lay in Dora Semig’s arms like a child who’d cried herself out.

  Kollmorgen came to see Semig too. The little man had prepared a speech, and insisted on holding Semig’s hand in both of his as he gave it, with the result that he had to look a bit too steeply up and Semig too steeply down. The oration started well, with the occasion of farewell, but quickly veered off into the weeds, never to return. It was almost precisely four hundred years ago that Jürgen Wullenweber, the mayor of Lübeck, was hanged, and from this date, September 29, 1537, Kollmorgen proceeded directly to December 20, 1712, the day on which the Swedes had won a battle against the Danes near Gadebusch, and even if both dates were somehow tangentially relevant to the topic of surviving in difficult times, in the end even Avenarius himself didn’t venture to draw the connection, and his listeners couldn’t help but notice that this was not what he had wanted to say it. He was very embarrassed, and he stood there afterward with his back to the others whenever possible, trying to look like he was examining the Köster family Biedermeier. His hands clasped behind him, his helplessly intertwining fingers, were thereby clear for everyone to see, he probably didn’t realize that.

  That was the last case Avenarius Kollmorgen, Dr. Jur., ever argued.

  Dr. Semig did not take his leave from the Tannebaums, Jewish clothing merchants in Jerichow. He had never had any dealings with them, not even as a customer.

  Both Dora and Arthur refused to let anyone bring them to the station. They were planning to take the first train to Gneez, the milk train.

  It left at two minutes past seven; at a quarter to seven the Semigs were standing outside Cresspahl’s kitchen window, Dora in the light, Arthur farther back in the dark, by the milk rack. When he came into the kitchen, his face was still the familiar one—the once-happy wrinkles, the slightly pursed lips, the formerly tranquil eyes that had always brightened when he had an amusing thought, even if he refrained from saying it. But it troubled Lisbeth, she had already let his face go. Now Cresspahl had to drive them to the milk train after all, in the car that had once belonged to Semig.

  – What did they forget?: Marie says. She had already asked about the mechanics of the move, interjecting questions about what was done with the used sheets, the china, the house keys. For her, after the goodbyes the night before in Semig’s yard everything had been taken care of.

  – They’d wanted to see the Cresspahl child one last time.
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br />   January 22, 1968 Monday

  And here’s Eartha Kitt in The New York Times yet again. Why won’t this Negro simply accept that her comment about the war in Vietnam was a breach of etiquette because it was addressed to the first lady? But Miss Kitt calmly told radio station WEEI in Boston: “I don’t know why. I am very surprised. I raised my hand and was called on to explain my views. That’s what I did.”

  Eighteen Americans killed, at least twenty-five Vietnamese found dead after attacks on Hill 861 at Khesanh. Twenty-one South Vietnamese wood-cutters were killed in an attack by American artillery and tactical aircraft in Tayninh Province because they were working in a zone where anyone is regarded as a fair target.

  Marie gets mail from there.

  It’s from Dr. Brewster, her first doctor in New York, who was called up for reserve duty last September and is now serving as a doctor in children’s refugee camps in Vietnam. It is a totally unsurprising postcard, with a Japanese postmark, wishes for Christmas and a New Year with Peace on Earth, addressed to “Dear Mary” from her “Wm. Brewster.” There’s a rough spot on the back of the cardboard where it looks like something stuck on has been peeled off, maybe a photograph. For Marie’s correspondence with her prodigal friend goes via Mrs. Brewster in Greenwich, Conn., “the wife,” who may want to keep the exotic stamps for herself or else read what her husband has to say to this patient of his.

  – Military mail is just stamped like that, I think: Marie says with a stubborn scowl. She takes back the card and puts it in her school folder, instead of setting it up behind the bookcase glass. Clearly she doesn’t want to talk about these holiday wishes, or at least not in front of the Killainen family, who have problems of their own with the war. Marie would have rather been left alone with this piece of mail.

  William B. Brewster, MD, was one of the first Americans she let into her life after being forced to accompany her mother to this foreign land in the early summer of 1961. He didn’t have his practice on Park Avenue yet, he was working as a junior doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital and was one of the people that Countess Seydlitz recommended to helpless Europeans who found themselves with a limping child.