Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  In short, nine places, which Brüshaver noted down on a slip of paper instead of continuing to work on his sermon for April 24. He fell asleep over his work, and when Aggie came to bring him to bed, after midnight, he had forgotten what he had learned in seminary: that suicide was not wicked in the eyes of man or for moral reasons; it was a falling away from God.

  If Lisbeth had heard that there was this fence, she might have not thought to cross over it.

  When someone does what he’s going to do

  Then there’s nothing he can do but what he does.

  January 27, 1968 Saturday

  Vigorous lady approaching the end of her 117th year, well-off, dignified appearance, seeks. . . .

  The New York Times is looking for sympathy.

  It is worth all of page 14 to her, despite the several department stores that would have liked to display there what’s available for purchase today until 5 p.m. The New York Times has her priorities straight and shows us, on one of her factory floors, a few of the people who work for her: twenty-nine of its seventy-five copy editors, two of them women, sixteen with glasses, eighteen in short sleeves, two or three with beards, all respectfully or cheerfully polite, and no Negro man, no Negro woman among them.

  You see here: The New York Times says, and we can just hear her surprisingly elastic old-woman voice, can just see the severe jabs of the pointer with which she indicates one face after another in the two crooked rows, the industrious disorder, the tables between the people, the boxes of index cards pulled closer in the back-left corner, the half-blocked fire extinguisher, the ancient TV set, the old-fashioned typewriter, the issue of The Statesman in a generous trash can:

  You see here a curious assortment of people. Curious not in the funny sense. Nosey. They ask questions. Sometimes they drive reporters crazy with questions. But because they do, they make The New York Times just about the most useful newspaper you can read.

  So that’s who they are. And not only are they all wearing ties, each tie is knotted precisely under the collar button. Their training has been assiduous; they neglect no proper formalities. What kind of questions?

  Questions such as: Is this name spelled right? Is that figure correct? Is this the right date? Shouldn’t there be a phrase here explaining this fact? Is the meaning of this statement clear? Wasn’t someone else involved?

  Only the best for The New York Times. Such technique, such dramatic flair, what other department can compete? Any other kinds of question?

  This kind: These people crouching there on the edges of the tables, daintily or distressed, willingly or hemmed in, they are oftentimes a little batty. Trying to get all the facts sorted out, all the questions answered. They do this because they have the funny idea that they’re not copy editors at all. They think that they’re us, the readers. They’re asking the questions they imagine we’d ask. But they ask them before we even think of them, so that we won’t even think of them.

  Will these seasoned men, and the two women, be happy to see their employer describe them in public as a little batty? Or that they’re portrayed in a frame of mind that “batty” does not even suffice to cover? We’ll find out.

  Questions such as: When they’ve got the answers to every question they figure you might ask, and maybe even some sneaky ones they think up themselves, then . . . they write a headline for the story. Then. . . . Questions. Answers. That’s what a copy editor’s life is all about. No bylines to gloat over. No public glory to bask in. Only an inner satisfaction to soothe the ulcer. The satisfaction that when we’ve read the story in The New York Times, our every question will have been answered.

  As Countess Seydlitz says: Auntie Times is sure she knows us.

  Do we have any questions?: the Times asks.

  As a matter of fact we do. Why do they tuck away the fact that, according to the Fulbright Commission’s report, the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was not enough to justify the Vietnam War in its current scope? That the American ships involved had been spying that August 1964, and at least once had violated the territorial waters of North Vietnam? Unlike what the government and Defense Department claim? Why does that get just thirty-one lines buried on a page far from the front one?

  That’s the wrong question. Any others?

  One more. Why do the twenty-two official war dead from today only get a tiny scrap of thirteen lines. Why are eighteen of them not given any names, and only Roland A. Galante from Ridgewood, Queens, Ernest P. Palcic of Staten Island, Peter L. Lovett from the Bronx, and Frederick A. Pine from Trenton appear in the paper for the last time by name. Does someone have to come from the New York metropolitan area for his death in Vietnam to be recorded individually in the most useful newspaper he could have read?

  That’s not the right way to look at it. Any other questions?

  Any questions?

  Fit to print?

  January 28, 1968 Sunday

  John Ramaglia, of 211 N. Sixth St. in Newark, announces via the Times that he needs an attorney, in a matter of life or death. His phone is tapped. Then he gives his number: (201) HU5–6291.

  In the Jerichow post office, a watch list was pinned up on the sorting cabinet, over the repeated objections of Knever, the senior postal clerk, who had continued to cite the professional honor of a German postal official until Edgar Lichtwark had to hint at removal from service and loss of pension. When Knever gave in, the personnel department punished him with a demotion, and he was no longer deemed worthy even of telephone communications or registered mail—he now had to sit in the back stamping the outgoing mail and checking both it and the incoming mail for the senders’ and recipients’ names. His official phone calls now consisted solely of reports to the Gneez Gestapo, whenever mail to or from someone under observation turned up. Berthold Knever put up very faint resistance these days. For instance, he listened to Party Comrade Lichtwark with an attentiveness meant to express scorn at having to take orders from someone he saw as a good-for-nothing senior letter carrier from Berlin-Lichtenberg. Knever wrinkled his nose so much that he looked like a parrot with its plumes sticking up, and so received for his pains not the promotion he was five years overdue for but a nickname. Besides, for him it was a matter of principle, professional dignity, he would never withhold any letter due to be submitted for opening out of consideration for the recipient, especially when he felt he was being watched by one of the two apprentices whom he now had to teach how to hold the stamp hammer—loosely, subtly—so that the Jerichow postmark would land right on Hitler’s skull. Monitoring the mail was a professional secret, in Knever’s eyes, and that was how he brushed off Papenbrock, who was trying to ask him why some letters now took two days to get to Hamburg.

  Papenbrock was not on the list. Cresspahl was not on the list. Semig was, as a sender, and only at the instigation of Friedrich Jansen, whom the Gestapo had to reward for his willingness to help. The first letters from Dora had made Jansen’s blood boil. This Jew was supposed to go down, and now he and his wife were sitting pretty somewhere in Lower Austria where Jansen would never in his life get to go, even for a vacation. They were living in a castle, permitted to take their meals at a count’s table. And the letters betrayed nothing. Not a word thanking Lisbeth Cresspahl for any favors—so once again nothing to prove against the Cresspahls. And Friedrich Jansen would have so loved to know where the Semigs had left their money. He didn’t believe they had crossed the border with ten marks each in their respective pockets. They must have owned more than just a house and a stable and a practice! When Jansen tried to occupy the house, he found himself faced with a furniture truck, and the movers showed him documents stamped in Schwerin, according to which that disgustingly clever Jew had signed over the property with all its furnishings and chattel to his wife’s parents. Friedrich Jansen had made a rental offer to these up-pity Kösters and received a two-line answer: The house had been rented to the air force, ten-year lease. He couldn’t prove that Kollmorgen the lawyer hadn’t in fact found a young veterinaria
n in Erlangen who wanted Semig’s equipment. Every opening Jansen thought he found was walled up; he practically felt under surveillance. Dora Semig wrote about deer in the snow, snowy peaks, soil conditions, Alpine streams tossing out “gravel and pebbles,” shopping trips to Vienna! Pebbles. And the non-Aryan left it to his wife to send their greetings, so Jansen couldn’t even charge the Cresspahls with associating with Jews. The letter he was waiting to see after March 12, 1938, didn’t turn up.

  The letter bore a Greater German stamp, under a postmark from Pirna, with the now obsolete added message “Your Vote for the Führer!”: not the foreign stamps Knever was required to look out for. It’s possible, though, that Knever had deliberately not paid attention this time, since the sender had given her name as Dora née Köster, living on Ad.-Hitler-St., Radebeul. Lisbeth didn’t open this letter when it came but left it lying on the table for Cresspahl. He, not she, was to read it aloud, even though it was addressed to her, no longer to the both of them.

  It turned out that only the first three weeks with Count Naglinsky had gone well. Then Dora no longer felt safe in the village, and ventured on walks only in the forests that Beatus had barred to outsiders. In the village, Arthur had been given work only twice, then he was recognized as a Jew, and his wife too. “Which is true enough.” People had spat on her. “In Austria they smell it.” Naglinksy had pretended not to notice, and the evenings with gramophone music and conversations about people such as Galsworthy had become unbearable. In the first week of March, Arthur gave up the position that wasn’t one, and Naglinsky, in his relief, gave them their money even though he hadn’t yet gotten the equivalent of any of it from Germany (from “Raminsky,” which maybe meant from Baron von Rammin—that was just a guess). In Vienna they had lost almost too much time, because “my husband” couldn’t make up his mind to go to France and there were dangerous rumors going around about the customs officers at the Swiss border. On March 10 she had finally managed to get him to Bratislava. Arthur had put his faith to the end in the Austrian plebiscite and the Treaty of Saint-Germain. The Czechs had let them into the country, but “in an Austrian way.” All the reports from Vienna were true: the enthusiasm about the annexation, the looting of Jewish businesses. The Jews forced to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes—there were photographs of that, of course. Prague was a more reasonable city than Vienna, she said. Dora could do sewing jobs for the richer émigrés, Arthur had found a position as an orderly in a veterinary clinic. “We don’t need help.” The only problem was finding a place to stay; one hotel room after another slipped out of their grasp, maybe because “we are Jews,” maybe because they had to save money. Arthur didn’t want to learn Czech. The letter was dated the end of March and had taken more than four weeks to get to Jerichow.

  Lisbeth spoke of the guilt Dora Semig was trying to saddle her with.

  Cresspahl had a talk with Kollmorgen, but even with two pairs of eyes they couldn’t find any address hidden in the letter.

  The Kösters in Schwerin, both in their late eighties, whatever the letter to them might have said, killed themselves with sleeping pills.

  They were cremated by the police, in secret, no witnesses permitted. In Jerichow it was said that the two coffins had been tiny. In years past, Privy Councilor Köster had spent vacations by the sea near Jerichow.

  January 29, 1968 Monday

  In the Twentieth Precinct, between Sixty-Sixth and Eighty-Sixth Streets on Manhattan’s west side, in ten months, residents have reported: 14 murders, 37 rapes, 552 robberies, 447 felonious assaults, 2,200 burglaries, 1,875 grand larcenies, and 371 car thefts. These are false numbers. The true numbers of rapes, burglaries, and assaults are more like two to three times higher, because many victims do not report the crimes to the police, perhaps out of fear, of lack of trust.

  Would a foreign visitor coming to see Cresspahl in May 1938 have been able to tell that the country was in the hands of criminals?

  Would Mr. Smith have noticed anything?

  When Cresspahl thought about the workshop in Richmond, with the elm tree, his mind went back to both England and a time when Lisbeth still took pleasure in her own life and in one with others; he thought too about Mr. Smith, his small taciturn face with sawdust lodged in its rough wrinkles, this thin quick man who got through his days in order to get to his evening’s drinking—thought about him if not as a friend then at least as someone he could count on across the Channel, without it going so far as to require Christmas cards or letters. If he decided he wanted Mr. Smith to pay him a visit, it wasn’t for any particular reason, just so that someone might see what life was like these days in Jerichow, in Mecklenburg, in Germany. It wouldn’t have been for the conversations.

  Mr. Smith as a tourist abroad?

  Mr. Smith in a dark suit, with a hat on his head instead of a cap, as a subject of His British Royal Majesty, on holiday: he wouldn’t have looked poor or out of place. Mr. Smith could keep his gaze as impassive as you’d like, the five-and-dime glasses could have been just a whim. The rough skin on his face, that might be from the sea air. Surrounded by a foreign language he would have been even more close-mouthed than usual, and the customs officers at the Hamburg port would have taken him to be if anything rather dignified. He would have heard in their use of English continued courtesy and respect for his nation. And since Mr. Smith was capable of paying attention to people other than himself, he would have noticed that these officials were treating his German travel companions, who had still been treated as equals on board, rudely and suspiciously, like escaped prisoners turning themselves back in to their wardens and not exactly with a light heart.

  Mr. Smith would have said nothing about this in Jerichow; he would more likely have come out with the question: What’s all this about dogs? Was it a good idea to travel with a dog in Germany, if you wanted to be met with goodwill and good service? A foreigner, interested in the native customs.

  Cresspahl would have said, cheerfully and easily, in response to such an opening remark: Quite, Mr. Smith. Oh, quite.

  Mr. Smith would nevertheless have suspected a garden path up which Cresspahl too did not wish to lead him and, on the boardwalk in Rande, as well as in Jerichow, would have kept an eye out for passersby with dogs, to see whether they incarnated the kind of German that one could not detect in Cresspahl in England.

  Cresspahl did by this point have a dog, but he would have introduced it to Mr. Smith even more passingly than the feline members of the family sleeping in the shavings from the night’s work. He would have said: I’m just looking after this dog for someone.

  What would Mr. Smith have brought with him for Cresspahl’s child? Something to use. Not quite a pocketknife, but a sailor’s cap.

  The child would have imperceptibly gotten used to him, because he wouldn’t have been tiresome with questions or attempts to play games with her, his presence would have been only noticeable as a cautiously observant gaze, quickly hidden away again, as though this foreigner were embarrassed.

  Lisbeth would have wanted to hear all about George V’s Jubilee procession through the streets of London on June 14, 1935—the outriders in their red livery, the heralds in their yellow uniforms with their trumpet, and finally the king in his red field marshal’s uniform, with his graying goatee, raising and lowering his hand in military salute like an overworked machine, busy preparing, in the height of summer and the midst of cheering crowds, for his death. At first Mr. Smith would have taken her detailed questions to mean that Mrs. Cresspahl missed life in London. He would have made an effort to get past her halting English, and so would have failed to notice that in places where she was unsure she occasionally used phrases one can find in the King James Bible.

  Cresspahl as tourist guide?

  He wouldn’t have been allowed to bring Mr. Smith to see the Jerichow-North zone; he could have talked about it. The number of inhabitants in Jerichow had fallen by at least four hundred once the air force construction battalion had withdrawn and the cleaning and st
raightening up of the construction site had been left to the local workmen. Mr. Smith would have easily deduced from the description of the barracks and the number of buildings meant to house civilian employees the existence of an airfield to be used for more than just meteorological observations. He would not have indicated to his former employer that he preferred Cresspahl’s work in England, when he was still handling wood piece by piece instead of, as now, assembling it with powerful machines and a team of assistants; Mr. Smith would have decided to leave earlier than expected.

  Mr. Smith would have raised his hand to an SA troop and their flag with the same gesture he saw Cresspahl make, and every time he would have glanced back over his shoulder to see whether everyone was laughing at him for it.

  Then again, he would have compared the flag that Cresspahl sometimes hung on the barn door with the one flown outside the villa across the street from the property—a kitchen towel versus a bedsheet.

  The evenings with these Cresspahls would definitely have left a sour taste in Mr. Smith’s mouth. Some were bearable. On them, Mrs. Cresspahl would have sewing work out at the table, Cresspahl his cold coffee, and there would be more than water for the guest. In May the sun didn’t set until after eight, and it stayed light out much longer. The mistress of the house looked more like her thirty-two years in the lamplight than during the day, when she toiled her way through the housework as though driven, knowledgeable and experienced in everything she did, nervous and jumpy when a visit or a delivery came out of sequence. Mr. Smith’s initial shock at her appearance would have faded when he saw how the couple treated each other, heard their patient, often teasing tone. In Mr. Smith’s presence they would have managed to bring it off once more. Mr. Smith would have grown used to his corner of the kitchen table and would already have been almost safely under way to sleep and to dream, what with the alternating “kümmel” and “Kniesenack,” and would have crashed painfully out of this gentle flight when Lisbeth again brought up George V’s death in January 1936, at Sandringham, and was suddenly out the door, in tears. Mr. Smith would not have understood that. Then he would have decided to feign fatigue.