Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Where would Mr. Smith have slept? On the leather sofa in Cresspahl’s office, and Cresspahl next to his wife again. There Mr. Smith would have found Marine Sport brand cigarettes and a bottle of schnapps, thoughtfully opened, so that the guest would be all set until well past midnight. Maybe he would have reflected on marine sports, which in this country too were not generally affordable to the average cigarette smoker.

  On evenings alone with Cresspahl, when Lisbeth did not reemerge from her room, they would have had conversations. Mr. Smith, in his new amazement at German greeting customs, would have recalled that George VI had been dreadfully shocked when the German ambassador had shot out a hand right under the king’s nose. Brickendrop, they called him, because he put his foot in it every time. And George VI had enough problems already, with his stutter. He would have mentioned that there’d been a lot of talk about the persecution of Jews, the jailing of clergy too, but still, it had all remained polite, nothing insulting to the German government. Except for the Daily Worker, but that wasn’t even sold on newsstands, just by volunteers on street corners. And slanderous movies like Professor Mamlock had likewise been banned. And when Ann-Mari, Princess of Bismarck, sent her children swimming in Sandwich wearing bathing suits with unobtrusive swastikas embroidered over the heart, well, self-confidence like that spoke for itself.

  And no: Cresspahl would have said. Hopefully Cresspahl would have talked about the seven pastors from Mecklenburg who were in prison or camps in 1938. Hopefully Cresspahl would have said something about the dog still roaming around the yard, confused and lost, unwilling to settle on any fixed place to sleep. This was King, formerly known as Rex when his job was to guard the house and yard of a Jewish veterinarian in Jerichow—a dog who had lost his masters. If only Cresspahl had told the story from the beginning to where, for now, it ended.

  But still: Mr. Smith might well have answered: the booming economy.

  And no: Cresspahl would have said. He would put the number of skilled manufacturing jobs lost in Germany at over fifty thousand. And with every tradesman now having to pay into a compulsory insurance fund, it seemed that the government wanted to make money from the bankruptcies too. And now you already couldn’t get steel frames for your machines anymore, what with rearmament gobbling everything up; Mr. Smith should just try to picture that, a planer on a wood frame.

  That yes: Mr. Smith might have answered, stowing away what he’d heard behind his low wrinkle-shrouded brow, showing no sign of whether it was now lost forever or just hidden away. He would have smoothed the graying dark hair on the top of his head with eight fingertips, pushed his cheap glasses up his nose, and gone off to bed without Cresspahl being able to keep him. For Mr. Smith knew how to pass off goodbyes as acts of consideration.

  Mr. Smith would not have stayed long in Jerichow. For if it was May 1938 by that time, the Germans would have already marched to the Czechoslovakian frontier, and the ČSR government would have ordered a partial mobilization, and Mr. Smith would have been needed by his company if his government decided to keep its promises to the Czechs and Slovaks.

  Mr. Smith would have once again been visible in a window of the second-class car of the milk train, a short, wizened man who removed his hat to reveal a narrow face so impassive that it might have been concealing distress at leaving or maybe relief that the visit was over.

  And where would Mr. Smith have gotten the money for a dark suit, a hat, new shoes not scuffed in the least? Who might have paid him?

  (It wouldn’t have been Mrs. Trowbridge.)

  And what aim and purpose might Mr. Smith have been hoping to accomplish in Jerichow? What could he have been thinking?

  And yet even he would have seen something.

  January 30, 1968 Tuesday

  Here we have Mr. Weiszand, Dmitri, who has proposed using first names with us so many times so that he could say: Gesine. – Gesine: he says, planting himself so firmly in the middle of the herd of pedestrians starting across to the south side of Ninety-Sixth Street that it’s hard to get around him. – Gesine!: he says, and naturally we would like to take his surprise, his warm smile, for pleasure at seeing us again, but he runs into Mrs. Cresspahl on Broadway quite often, and typically contents himself with three words about the weather and Marie’s school. – Gyezinneé: he says, he will never learn how to cloak his Polish-Russian linguistic heritage with an American overcoat, he will hug Mrs. Cresspahl in front of the shopwindows and passersby if he can, one Slav to another, because to him Mecklenburg is Slavic. Better to invite him into Charlie’s Good Eats for fifteen minutes, for a coffee and whatever else he has on his mind. Hi, Charlie!

  I know, right, Charlie? Such wet weather. Black coffee, from this morning. Call Marie, will you, tell her I’m held up. This is Mr. Weiszand. Professor Weiszand? All right, not professor. And this gentleman in the short-sleeve butcher’s apron, with the quick arms, the theologian’s face under a severe crew cut, this is the Buckwheat Pancake Champion of New York City, Charles, Charlie himself.

  This isn’t what Mr. Weiszand is interested in. He clearly considers it more important to tell Mrs. Cresspahl in confidence that she isn’t looking too good. Not sick, exactly, but tired, overworked, eyes dull. What a way to start a conversation, Mr. Weiszand!

  Lot of work at the office, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  You know, it’s work.

  What kind of work, specifically, it is, is what Mr. Weiszand would now like to know, propping his head so firmly on a supporting hand, looking so faithful, so solicitous, as though he really wants to hear that Employee C. takes the subway for ten minutes from here to Times Square, needs another five to get to Grand Central, and after twelve minutes on foot removes her typewriter cover at just before nine a.m., five days a week too, until five in the afternoon, until this very minute, when she is still unable to go home, Mr. Weiszand. It’s an IBM Selectric, with a type ball, if that’s what you meant.

  It was not.

  And why are you growing a beard from ear to ear, Mr. Weiszand?

  If Mr. Weiszand is to be believed, it is not because he has lost a bet; the mass of red stubble is sprouting due to worry. So as not to hear more about that, we will give him our job to think about: foreign language correspondent. Well?

  German, French, Italian—?

  And American, and English, Mr. Weiszand.

  He fails to see why a bank would fill such a position. He sips a little of Charlie’s black coffee, puts the cup down in bewilderment, adds some sugar, tries it again, puts it down with a shake of the head. He just cannot figure it out.

  The coffee?

  The bank.

  To a French bank Mrs. Cresspahl writes her employer’s wishes in French. To an Italian company in—

  As a courtesy?

  As a service, Mr. Weiszand.

  And the psychological gains actually outweigh the personnel costs—?

  That is not exactly a professional secret, but the one who knows it is he who receives the benefit, not she who does the work. Ask my boss, Mr. Weiszand.

  Vice President de Rosny. Mr. Weiszand brings this out casually, to keep the interrogation rolling, not realizing that he has betrayed having known something.

  Not de Rosny. A vice president and a secretary! No, the department heads for Italy and France, less often for West Germany. Most of them there speak American English pretty well by now.

  And there’s no one to check Mrs. Cresspahl’s formulations?

  There was, Miss Gwendolyn Bates, Vassar class of 1918, saved from the Depression and the marriage market by the bank, so devoted to the bank that she made work for herself when there wasn’t any. Liked to call the translators into her office and draw lines with a long pencil and a raised wrist through the French that had not been spoken like that in her day, not maliciously, just domineering, out of sadness. Then one day at a meeting in Bern she insisted on one of her formulations too stubbornly, all in the firm’s best interests of course, and for her retirement got the President’s Medal in silver,
no banquet. Lives with relatives in Colorado now, writing proud letters steeped in longing. She still hasn’t realized we can get by without her, just as they always managed to do in the Scandinavia and Spain departments. If you ever go to Denver, Mr. Weiszand, take Route 25 toward Pueblo, turn left at Greenland—

  Nor is this what Mr. Weiszand is after. Doesn’t Mrs. Cresspahl speak Russian, too?

  Ah, Mr. Weiszand. Six years of Russian in school, and not a single Russian in the whole town we were allowed to talk to. They were housed behind high green fences, the officers didn’t take public transportation, and when a private climbed over the slats looking for just a bottle of booze—

  Mr. Weiszand knows that. Whenever some fact can be understood or misunderstood as anti-Communist, he forestalls it with a short, snippy nod, pretending agreement and administering a reprimand. And does he want to hear yet again that this New York bank is not eager to do business with the Soviet banks in Europe, but would rather wait until they come to it, whether Vokshod in Zurich, the Moscow Narodny in London, or the Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord in Paris? The firm’s policy in this regard is to be understood as not aggressive, I repeat: not aggressive.

  But surely with respect to Czechoslovakia. Mr. Weiszand sits leaning as comfortably as before, his gaze pleasant, childlike, face shining with goodwill, openness, warmth. He has heard that Mrs. Cresspahl is taking Czech classes with Kreslil, from our Mrs. Ferwalter, oh perfectly innocently, nothing makes him bring it up but sympathy, an interest in the truth, the privilege of friends.

  I’m just taking a private trip to Prague this summer, Mr. Weiszand.

  Mr. Weiszand finds that exceedingly thorough, to learn a whole new language just for a vacation. Even now intrusiveness can’t be proven against him; only, his eyes have become a shade more attentive, almost triumphant.

  If you were not allowed back into your own country, and you had to meet your friends in a foreign one, and wanted to know what was going on around you for those three weeks, what would you do, Mr. Weiszand?

  Mr. Weiszand would learn any language in the world if he could get a friend out of Poland with it. All the same he is taken aback, his guard is down for a moment. The solicitous look has slipped off his face, like someone caught lying, and he needs a little while to reapply it, with a nodding motion, a deep breath, an expression of admiration. He finds it wonderful.

  This not said out loud.

  Mr. Weiszand says he understands completely, wants no less than a handshake, loses himself in compliments in his embarrassment, says he was mistaken, Mrs. Cresspahl in fact looks radiant this evening.—Gyezinneé: he says.

  Here we have Mrs. Cresspahl, tired, with no desire to work, eyes dull, half deaf in the middle of the long-winded detailed conversation between Charlie and his customers, cheerful broad-shouldered men chowing down as thoroughly as if they had just gotten out of bed and were starting their day. The voluptuous skill with which Charlie flips his steaks and burgers on the charcoal grill, the spicy smell of the meat, the cozy warmth—it all feels very far away. The next five minutes are almost unbearable, until Mr. Weiszand steps forth on Broadway into the wet twilight, alone, in his gorgeous trench coat of British manufacture, his high bare brow raised, brooding and annoyed, on his way to his sociological studies, not those of international finance, a man of emotional greetings and farewells, a friend who has become unrecognizable.

  – What did Dmitri want: Marie asks. She had waited in the pool under the Hotel Marseilles, disguised in her tight white swim cap.

  – Not to have a coffee alone.

  – Has he found more Nazis in West Germany?

  – No. This time it was that thirteen cents of every dollar in the federal budget are spent on education and social services but fourteen on the war in Vietnam and forty-three on defense.

  – He’ll be having another demonstration at Columbia soon: Marie says, taking her key off her wrist, throwing it into the pool, and diving after it in one smooth forgetful motion.

  We’re sorry, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  I don’t care about finesse.

  But we do, Gesine. We wouldn’t have started off like that.

  And what if I’m wrong?

  Well then you’re wrong, Gesine.

  January 31, 1968 Wednesday

  The New York Times portrays Senator J. W. Fulbright as a serious, thoughtful man, who knows what he’s asking. Now he wants to call Secretary of Defense McNamara before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, too, to ask him: whether the destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin three and a half years ago weren’t attacked by North Vietnamese ships, if indeed they were at all, because they were crossing in and out of foreign waters on a spy mission. He does not want to get any answer other than that the war could have been avoided then, the war in which today American troops have to attack their own embassy in Saigon because it has been occupied by the Viet Cong.

  Friedrich Jansen, upon the theft of the Sudetenland, called his Führer a statesman of true distinction, and Cresspahl agreed with him.

  My father wasn’t joking. He only pulled the legs of people who would not only notice but also not mind, so they could share in the fun. There would be no point with this regional party leader and mayor, and, moreover, Cresspahl had no desire to show or put himself in such a position. By then, 1938, Friedrich Jansen had been the mayor of Jerichow for five years and Cresspahl had had quite a good look at who he was dealing with. He would have described him as a pig. Not in the derogatory sense of the German word Schwein but based on personal appearance. There was his pinkish height, with whitish hair on top too; the heavy thighs, not sturdy but flabby; the massive arms, impressive at first sight and soft at second; and the delicate quivering fat on his whole body collected over thirty-six years without proper labor. But that wasn’t enough to make Cresspahl call him a Schwein, and maybe he didn’t want to waste a Mecklenburgish word on him. He called him by his full name, with a certain seriousness. That was a bigger insult for the representative of Hitler’s party, and less costly.

  The misuse of this animal’s name common in German would have not fit Party Comrade Jansen badly at all, even if Cresspahl considered only what he personally had to endure and expect from him. There was the goatskin leather notebook Jansen liked to brag about so much that he sometimes flipped through it while out boozing with his buddies; the notes in the section for the letter C had already devoured half of the D section, even though there was only one other last name in Jerichow with the same initial as the Cresspahls’. There were the eager reports to the Gestapo headquarters in Gneez, about which Cresspahl learned not only from requests for further information but also from warnings. There was Jansen’s speech on May 1, 1938, about how Jerichow needed to be cleansed of not only the Jews but also their friends. There were the sanctimonious inquiries into the application for party membership that Cresspahl had requested for an apprentice three years back, and yet still not for himself. There was nothing you could call enmity, only petty little underhanded efforts to trip him up for their own sake, and there were times when Cresspahl was glad he was a head shorter than Jansen. That way he didn’t have to look him in his shifty eyes, pious like a lamb; he could look away from that broad, shapeless, pleasantly blood-reddened face, and at least have the man’s pompous jovial behavior in only his ears. Cresspahl never even stopped to wonder why he found this guy so repellent.

  He did not even give Friedrich Jansen credit for openly proclaiming his beliefs with full force and feeling; Cresspahl regarded that as mere life insurance. If Jansen ever reached the point when he had little to eat for a week and nothing to drink, had to work perhaps with a shovel, his back bent, it would finish him off in a hurry. Now whether or not Jansen suspected that in 1933 he’d been saved from a life of starvation wages or in a house of correction by the skin of his teeth, by this point he could no longer wean himself off his new life of breakfast at almost noon, office hours as he pleased, drives around town, and nights of drinking. He had been unable to p
ut what he learned in civic office to use either. He had no idea how the various parts of the city fit together, how much of its tax revenue it could recoup from the regional authorities and district administration, how much he’d have been able to get out of the Jerichow airfield construction if he’d had a plan in place. The mayor’s office was run by the civil servants Dr. Erdamer had trained, and for the time being it worked out fine for Friedrich Jansen, whose idea was that buddies in a few key positions were enough and all the rest would take care of itself. So far it had. And Cresspahl was sure that the fat lump was scared of the war he so often carried on about. When he came back from voluntary defense exercises, during which he couldn’t simply relax near the front but had to clamber up walls in person, in heavy cumbersome person, he was so nice to people for a few days that it was like he was asking for pity. It had gone that badly for him. There was only one military matter he understood: When he was in the Gneez Woods teaching his Storm Troopers how to scout a terrain, he could plant himself with feet apart and say that this was precisely one meter. I saw him like that myself, legs apart, rear end awkwardly sticking out, leaning forward from the hips, while a subordinate measured the distance between his brown boots with a ruler. It was incontrovertibly exactly one meter, and Jansen could raise his crimson-flushed head up high again.