by Uwe Johnson
As proof of this intention he would refrain from bringing up bygones with Mrs. Cresspahl. And what kind of bygones might those be, Mr. Fleury? Things like the undermining of friendly trust simply by refusing to accept the use of first-name familiar linguistic forms. That’s true, Mr. Fleury, it was an evening last April, after dinner by candlelight and fireplace, Annie had left to get some ice cream, and you doubtless did mean it as more than just a change in forms of address. Still, you might see such things as a natural rigidity, a stiffness natural to a German, rather than as a rejection. There’s a certain something about you, Mr. Fleury.
In addition, he saw no need to reiterate, even to Annie, what there was to find off-putting in Mrs. Cresspahl. This would include: the deliberate parading of housewifely virtues in a hostess’s own kitchen; behavior that emphasized achievement even in manners and invariably privileged intellectual aspirations over interpersonal relationships; finally, a pedagogical system that had turned Mrs. Cresspahl’s daughter if no one else into a browbeaten automaton. Marie, you robot, go knock him a new one!
He hereby formally withdraws these accusations, along with any others that Mrs. Cresspahl might find unpleasant. Since Annie hasn’t told us anything about them, are we supposed to ask him what the rest might be?
To the matter at hand, the letter goes on. Yes, indeed, Mr. Fleury.
It had been thoughtless of him to doubt Mrs. Cresspahl’s account of Henry Cabot Lodge having suggested, as early as 1965, when he was the US ambassador to Saigon, that America had oil interests in South Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Did I really say that? I can’t be sure anymore. Furthermore he should have believed that the USA was financing seismic tests for future oil drilling in Vietnam via the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East and had bought the results. He had gone and looked it up, and H. C. Lodge actually had made that statement; the ECAFE actually did exist and had carried out the assignments as claimed. Nor was the invocation of David Rockefeller’s name in this context unjust. You see, Mr. Fleury. No, really, never again would he dare to argue with Mrs. Cresspahl on such matters, or refuse her all due respect. Hooray for that, Mr. Fleury.
And yet he did feel compelled to deny that Mrs. Cresspahl had the right to conclude, from the existence of business interests, that the American role in the war was criminal. That would be, if Marxist, vulgar. First of all, the country had properly paid the price asked for its investments in underground South Vietnamese oil and was thus legitimately entitled to defend this investment. This in no way infringed upon the right to self-determination of the Vietnamese people, if anything American participation in the development of a national oil industry promoted it. Anyway, our country had to pursue its own right to self-determination, which naturally included covering its own need for petroleum. There are moral justifications for courses of action besides refusing to go to war. Such as a nation’s drive for self-preservation, for instance, a nation that moreover bears the additional responsibility of being a world power. We don’t know how to answer that one.
Exactly. It will therefore come as no surprise to Mrs. Cresspahl when he once again takes the most vigorous exception to her reference to the role of the CIA. Undoubtedly this organization is technically in a position to embroil the South Vietnamese government in a putsch, which would enable the US to terminate the war on the grounds of breach of treaty obligations. Why wouldn’t what had enabled one invasion after another in South America be just as good a trigger for a withdrawal from Vietnam? By no means, Mrs. Cresspahl. The USA has long since given its word of honor, and it is not a foreigner’s place to pass judgment, out of a misguided sense of world citizenship, on the nation where she is a guest.
One hopes that this brings the discussion to an end. It certainly does, Mr. Fleury.
If he might be permitted a concluding remark. Go ahead, Fleury, don’t be shy. Mrs. Cresspahl is clearly making every effort to lead a life of faithful friendship, political consistency, and complete awareness. I’d have to be crazy, Fleury. He will not be so indelicate as to measure how far Mrs. Cresspahl’s efforts fall short of perfection. Very nice of you, Mr. Fleury. He does, however, feel compelled categorically to insist that all this represents merely her own version of perfection. And yet she derives from it criteria for other people, too—in brief she demands from her friends that they live the way she does. No. No. It’s impossible to live with someone like that, spreading mortification and hurt wherever she goes with her rigid and yet ultimately only pretended exemplary behavior. That’s not me. That’s not me.
But there is someone who might indeed see you that way, Mrs. Cresspahl. When it comes to Annie—
This can’t be his typewriter, Annie. It may use the same font but he didn’t write this letter. He can’t have.
But he called the office, your F. F. Fleury did. Said you should come home. Said the key’s with the neighbors. The bank account has enough in it for six months. He won’t be there and he won’t come here.
Don’t be so scared, Annie, it’s not that. He did volunteer for deployment to Vietnam, but they didn’t take him. Too old, what do I know. He was able to convince a Boston paper to send him to Saigon as a correspondent, only long enough to write a series of articles for the time being. He wants to see how things look from there.
Why should I say what I think of that, Annie! Say what you think! I’m just sitting here reading the newspaper!
The electronic net that the USA has cast over land and sea, the atmosphere and outer space, has acquired a hole. On Monday, North Korean patrol boats seized the USS Pueblo in the Sea of Japan, in its view an armed spy boat, according to the Defense Department a barely armed navy intelligence ship, or maybe “an environmental-research ship.” Sighing, quite as if she had asked D. E. himself for his view, The New York Times adds that in the current art of war, “environment” often means the electronic surroundings, rather than more tangible phenomena, and “research” is directed toward the energy emitted by the enemy’s electronic devices, in the interest of intercepting and blocking enemy radar and other electronic signals. But she can’t understand it. She asks no fewer than five questions: Where was the destroyer escort? Was the Pueblo actually working for the navy or ultimately for the NSA? and other things we never quite learn. She hid the other questions, like Easter eggs, in her clever reports: According to Radio North Korea, the Pueblo was less than twelve miles from the coast, thus within territorial waters. The State Department says: Clearly outside the twelve-mile limit. A rear admiral in Panmunjom: Sixteen nautical miles, more than eighteen statute miles. The Pentagon: Twenty-five miles. Some military sources: Less than twenty-five miles. The game gets boring, and more than eighty men from on board have to wait it out.
Although they might be safer than some of the five thousand marines concentrated as reinforcements at Khesanh, together with four thousand pounds of “body bags”: rubberized, zippered sacks for transporting the dead.
Which Dr. F. F. Fleury wants to see with his own eyes.
January 25, 1968 Thursday
So it wasn’t the Leningrad Philharmonic that the Soviet Union had sent into space in 1961 but a recording by the 110-member Pyatnitsky Choir, to trick their Western counterparts. The Soviets think this such a good joke that they don’t want to keep it to themselves.
The apartment is empty. The Killainen children’s beds have disappeared back into Mr. Robinson’s basement, the TV too. All the furniture is more or less where it was two and a half weeks ago, when the fatherless Fleury family landed. It’s as though they were never here, except for a hint of the perfume that Annie cooled her brow with still hanging in the warm air. What happened, Marie?
Private Robert W. Meares of Fayetteville, N.C., nineteen years old, who had refused to wear his army uniform, was court-martialed, sentenced to four months hard labor, and fined 4 x $68. At that point he volunteered for Vietnam service. The jail sentence was suspended but he still had to pay the fine.
Marie thinks it was like this: Annie no lon
ger wanted to stay with us after she read a letter that wasn’t addressed to her. She can’t face herself because the letter wasn’t even hidden, making the breach of trust that much greater. She can’t bear that G. Cresspahl must now think that Annie talked about her with F. F. Fleury as a difficult person obsessed solely with Vietnam and tormenting children. She is unhappy with herself because she didn’t even want to stay long enough to deny it.
Yesterday the wife of President Johnson was harassed between her limousine and a club entrance by young people with signs reading: WE SUPPORT EARTHA KITT. “The First Lady pulled her mink coat around her, threw her head back and made no response.” She doesn’t speak to such people.
Try again, Marie. That doesn’t make sense. All right: Annie can’t stand that you didn’t admit the letter was from her husband. She knows she has no right to hold it against you, but she does, that you decided behind her back what she should and shouldn’t be allowed to know about you. She holds it against herself that now you’ll think of her as someone who reads other people’s mail, but she didn’t want to accept that she knew that you didn’t know she knew. So I had to go hail a cab on West End Avenue and she and all three children got in and took it downtown, and since West End isn’t a one-way street, maybe she did turn uptown. Understand now?
The State Department in Moscow immediately rejected the US request to intercede with the North Koreans regarding a seized spy ship. Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily V. Kuznetsov did not even accept the American piece of paper, not even as an aide-mémoire.
No. Can you try one more time, Marie? If you insist: She’s offended that by not telling her about the letter you prevented her from reassuring you. She would have been happy to tell you that you’re not the way Fleury describes you. Especially that you’re not perfect and that you have no desire to be anything so horrible. So now she blames herself for putting herself in a position where she can no longer tell you that. She blames you for not even hiding the letter. She blames herself for not being the person you think she is. Now I don’t understand it anymore either.
A young woman mugged by a man with a knife at her mailbox on Seventy-Fifth St. between Fifth and Madison, while a policeman a hundred feet away didn’t hear her repeated screams and the doorman blowing his whistle, sums up the incident with one question: If the police don’t help a citizen here, what do they do in the slums?
Annie probably said some things in Finnish, Marie. No: She was upset from the wait, because I got home from school later than usual, and that’s why I only really understood that she was mad at you for not wanting to give her advice. She blames herself for blaming you even though she knows that after a letter like that you couldn’t discuss going back to Fleury’s house with her. She’s mad that you never even tried to stop her, as if you knew it was already decided. She blames herself for letting you think that she’s going back not only to Fleury’s house but also to his opinions about you. She blames you for not going to Vermont with her, and herself for having used you, for help finding a job and against fear. And if you don’t take this $85 without another word then she never wants to see you again. She likes you, though, and she hopes you do come visit. She thought I wouldn’t understand what she was saying and wouldn’t be able to explain it to you. And so what does it all mean?
And what are we to think of a moralistic Auntie like The New York Times advertising for a studio where you can take photos of naked girls?
January 26, 1968 Friday
Last night, in the crowded bus terminal on Eighth Avenue, a man threw a nineteen-year-old coed to the ground on the landing of a stairwell to the lower level, threatened her with a pistol, and set about raping her in full view of several people, who made no move to interfere. Then along came a man named William Williams who freed the girl.
In April 1938, Wilhelm Brüshaver, the Protestant pastor in Jerichow, heard from his wife that Lisbeth Cresspahl had claimed that there was nowhere in the Bible where suicide was prohibited. Aggie Brüshaver found that hard to believe: Was it really true?
The recollection crossed her mind while her husband was taking off his mud-encrusted boots in the kitchen, after a visit to a sickbed, and she mentioned it in passing while doing the kids’ laundry, so he half forgot it by the time he got to the door. He had his sermon to think about; he wasn’t trying to be surly when he left the room without answering.
By this point, Pastor Brüshaver was writing out his sermons. He would sit by his lamp late into the night on Friday and Saturday, and look gray in the pulpit on Sunday morning, face puffy, and he no longer spoke like someone who had seen something and was simply reporting the truth of it—he looked as if he doubted his memory. It was not only reading from a page that made him stumble; he was in fact reconsidering, before some of the sentences, whether he had hedged enough. There was at least one person in the congregation before him who was listening to these sentences not for himself but to write them down for others. Then one of the friendly gentlemen from the Gestapo in Gneez would turn up, order a coffee as though in a commandeered restaurant, help himself to a cigar as though it had been offered to him, and inquire into the significance of his sermon on Judica Sunday. It was not enough for them that in the Gospel of John, chapter 8, Jesus really did accuse the people of seeking to kill Him because He had told them the truth; they wanted to hear which specific cases of death Brüshaver had had in mind. The fact was, he had half been thinking of Methfessel the butcher, beaten senseless in a camp over a few words, and of the executions in Hamburg he’d read about. He felt uncomfortable excusing himself after the fact by explaining that what was meant was divine truth, not worldly truth, see verses 40–41. He would rather have been brave, stood his ground, but he hadn’t yet gotten over not being allowed to open his son’s coffin. He had not been permitted to have the body taken to the cemetery in Lalendorf where his first wife lay buried. Then burial was not authorized in Jerichow either, it had to be at the Gneez main cemetery, so that the cortege would be smaller, and in the end not only were there strangers in attendance working for the police but a pastor summoned from Berlin and working for the police too. It did Brüshaver no good to remind them that he had sacrificed his son for the fatherland. Not even his having been an officer in the 1914–1918 war raised him above suspicion. Thus the visits from these gentlemen, the reproaches for his having gone to see Alfred Bienmüller who hadn’t wanted to send his son for confirmation. Brüshaver had talked to Bienmüller like someone seeking information, and Bienmüller had politely laid the tongs in the fire and stepped outside of the smithy with him to give his answers. First of all, he didn’t have the money. Second, not for that. Third, the boy’s Hitler Youth troop had told him he wasn’t allowed to. Could Bienmüller have possibly filed a complaint of harassment afterward? Or had Bienmüller told someone about Brüshaver’s visit, and someone had overheard, of whose business it was none, and had turned it into a complaint? On the day after Palm Sunday, Bienmüller was working in Creutz’s greenhouses and had given a rather perfunctory hello over the pastor’s fence but not as if there was any bad blood between them.
The gentlemen had had no compunction about sentencing a pastor, Niemöller, who had been a navy officer and Freikorps paramilitary fighter, voting for the NSDAP in every election since 1924. Brüshaver remembered him well from the days of the Kiel mutiny after the Armistice. On November 30, 1918, Niemöller had pulled into port with the war flag flying. He’d had no intention of letting his ship be handed over to the English. At the time it was forbidden to wear the officer’s dagger in public, but Niemöller wanted to defend the honor of the Kaiser’s uniform by sticking his dagger between the ribs of anyone who jostled it. Brüshaver had not been on the U-boats, or on a destroyer. But he didn’t like that these new gentlemen would sentence a comrade, a Kaiser’s officer, to jail. He hadn’t agreed with all of Niemöller’s statements during the trial. Niemöller’s sending Hitler a telegram of congratulations on Germany’s exit from the League of Nations did look a bit schemi
ng. He might have taken a different stance on the Aryan question in the church—that he found the Jews alien and distasteful was his own business, not the church’s. From Brüshaver’s point of view, Arthur Semig had been a member of his congregation, not a Jew. He had given Semig communion as late as 1934; after that, it was Semig who’d stopped coming. Brüshaver could subscribe most honestly to Niemöller’s opinion that it was not in accord with the Scripture to replace baptism with a family tree. Jesus Himself had appeared in the form of the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. Right. But unfortunately Niemöller had then spoken of “this embarrassing and serious annoyance” that had to be accepted nonetheless because of the Gospels. Idiotic. What was really embarrassing was his story about going to see the Führer. At the end of the visit, the Führer had shaken his hand and said something. Niemöller had said something too. He thought the Führer and he had understood each other. Captatio benevolentiae, on a generous view. But then, on March 2, they had neither set him free nor thrown him back in jail but sent him off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Brüshaver had read out the pulpit declaration: This act was not in accordance with the judgment of the court. It is written that: Justice must prevail, and: Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. Brüshaver had prepared himself for a visit from the Gestapo and was ready promptly to show the gentlemen where it stood written; that time they didn’t come.
Now, for Quasimodogeniti, the Sunday after Easter, it was time for John, chapter 20. He could leave well enough alone with Mary not allowed to touch her son. But there was Thomas, too, who would not believe except that he see and touch the print of the nails in His hands. Writing out the sermon didn’t help either. If two people swore it against him, it would be taken as proven that he’d said what he hadn’t said.
No ban against suicide in the Bible. He was quite prepared to believe that this Lisbeth Cresspahl had read every word of both testaments of the Holy Scripture from cover to cover. But it was a bit ridiculous, wasn’t it, this businessman’s daughter, Cresspahl’s wife, engaged in theological hair-splitting. To be sure, Samson had pulled down the temple not only over the lords of the Philistines but over himself as well. Abimelech had arranged his own death to avoid the shame of being slain by a woman. Ahithophel and Judas had hanged themselves. See also Acts 16:27; Rev. 9:6. Zimri set his house on fire and died, and this was explained as a consequence of his sins against the Lord.