Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Your wife hears it, gets up out of bed, pulls on a winter coat—

  A blue housecoat. Padded. London label.

  As if you were there, Mr. Cresspahl. She surprises the intruder at the door—

  At which door?

  That’s just it, we have no evidence! Of course we don’t! That Jerichow fire brigade of yours seems to think you open a lock by swinging an ax at it!

  Yes.

  Since they couldn’t put out the fire.

  The fire department couldn’t put out the fire.

  They tried, Mr. Cresspahl. They found the hydrant in the courtyard and hooked up the hoses and rolled them out, all of which took some time, and then the pump wasn’t working. They’d used it to make trouble at the Jews’ place.

  Who had?

  Jansen, Mr. Cresspahl.

  Yes.

  Nothing occurs to you.

  So all the wood in the yard burned too.

  All gone, Mr. Cresspahl. Everything. The machines are nothing but melted scrap. And then the walls collapsed on them too, and the roof. You could say you were lucky not to lose the house.

  Yes.

  The intruder, the arsonist, now takes your wife’s keys, drags her into the workshop, hits her over the head—

  Did my wife have a head wound?

  We don’t know. She has a spot on the back of her head that might be from a sandbag.

  I know who works with sandbags.

  My dear Mr. Cresspahl, I will pretend I didn’t hear that. We’re not the Gestapo here, we are the criminal police, but I advise you not to try to take advantage of that. So the guy takes your wife, unconscious now, and locks her in the fodder room—

  The fodder room has a double bolt. A child could get out of there.

  But there was no key in the door.

  We keep the key in the door on the outside, and never lock it.

  There was no key there, Mr. Cresspahl. Now he can take his time to start the fire, lock the door again, and get away. He may not have had far to go.

  It would have to be someone who didn’t like the work the shop is doing for the Mariengabe air force base. Or was doing.

  Mr. Cresspahl, if you are trying to get someone cleared just so you can take revenge on him personally—well, fine. But that’s no use to me.

  So I can leave now.

  You’re not leaving, Mr. Cresspahl. Will you please take a close look at this rope.

  That’s not a rope. It’s a piece of clothesline.

  Perhaps one of your clotheslines?

  Why not?

  Do you recognize it?

  My wife kept her clotheslines in the house, to keep them dry.

  And what about for the little everyday items of laundry?

  They put up one line, usually, and it’s not always taken down at night. Along the garden fence.

  We found it cut, Mr. Cresspahl. Don’t touch the end, that’s evidence!

  Some folks steal a cow in one place and a rope for it somewhere else.

  He wasn’t stealing a cow, Mr. Cresspahl. But he knew what he wanted. We won’t know whether this piece matches the rest of your clothesline until the report comes back from the lab. But we do know that your wife was tied up with this piece of clothesline.

  It doesn’t look burnt at all.

  But it smells like it’s been hanging in smoke for a year. It was tied around her ankles, and also pulled through a ring in the wall and knotted. There was another piece on the ground next to her, she’d obviously managed to get her wrists out of that one.

  So I’ll be going now.

  One more thing, Mr. Cresspahl. Did Friedrich Jansen actually say, “Your wife’s dead now?”

  “Good morning” and then that.

  Not, for instance, “Your wife has committed suicide”?

  No.

  And so what do you think of the fact that Friedrich Jansen is telling everyone in Jerichow who’ll listen that your wife committed suicide. What do you say to that?

  I say it’s none of his business.

  Mr. Cresspahl. You don’t understand what I’m saying. You are trying to not understand me. You are here at the police station. The criminal police, not the secret police.

  I haven’t forgotten.

  And now I have something about you, too, that I don’t plan to forget, Mr. Cresspahl! You may go now.

  Is my wife at home, Mr. Vick.

  Your wife is not at home. The body has been confiscated due to suspicion of foul play. There will be an autopsy tonight. You may report to the Gneez hospital tomorrow, Mr. Cresspahl. If you want to know what she died of. My sympathies, Mr. Cresspahl.

  Goodbye.

  February 19, 1968 Monday

  This victim is named, Ngo Van Tranh, and yesterday morning in Saigon a South Vietnamese marine suspected him of being a member of the Vietcong. Ngo Van Tranh, already seriously wounded, said that the Vietcong had taken him from his home in Thuduc the previous night and forced him to carry ammunition. He is offered water, he’s clearly trying to drink it; he is lying half under some boards. Then he’s questioned by another marine and threatened with a rifle. Then a third marine knifes him and finally kills him with a rifle burst. Three times the Associated Press takes a photograph, and in the last one he who had once been Ngo Van Tranh is lying in the rubble almost completely under the boards.

  Cresspahl didn’t try to find answers. He found them.

  On Thursday night he’d stayed in Gneez. He went to see Wilhelm Böttcher, the master of the carpenter’s guild in the Gneez district; after he left, Herbert Vick came round to question Böttcher. If Böttcher was to be believed, Cresspahl had bought some of Böttcher’s best wood off him—light oak, aged five years. – You realize, don’t you, that I am here from the police, not the Gestapo: Vick said, in that confrontational way of his that he thought won people over, but Böttcher refused to say whether or not he thought Cresspahl was being a little too businesslike, going around making purchases when his wife wasn’t even in the ground yet. Vick left with a renewed appetite for the next incomprehensible piece of information.

  Vick spent the evening in the dining room of the City of Hamburg Hotel, where Cresspahl had taken a room. Sat there over his official beer—a short fat comfortable man, kneading his plump chin and staring off in the direction of the door whenever his nose wasn’t buried in his thick notebook. Vick didn’t discover what Cresspahl ordered from room service because Alma Witte wouldn’t be cowed. He did better with the hotel employees he waylaid in secret. Cresspahl didn’t go anywhere for quite some time, as if he wanted to stay hidden from everyone, stay where he was. After a while Wegerecht, the district court head judge, invited Vick to join him at his table; Vick felt somewhat exposed sitting there with his beer and chaser but couldn’t bring himself to join the gentlemen in drinking their red wine. Finally, the bellhop peered into the dining room as though looking for someone, and Vick made his way out to the lobby. He stood next to the telephone girl and read the slips of paper on which Cresspahl had written out his telegrams, handing them to her one by one. They were ordinary death notices, to be sent to Timmendorf, Wismar, Wendisch Burg, Neustrelitz, Schwerin, Berlin, Lübeck. He had her translate the one to London. – Mr. Cresspahl requests the recipient’s presence at the funeral of his wife: Elise Bock said pertly, happy to show off her knowledge of foreign languages, indignant about the snooping, and Vick told her, too, that he was from one particular department and not from a certain other particular department. It came out sounding unusually harsh because he was irritated at the certainty with which Cresspahl gave the date of the funeral, as if he knew the body would be returned to him by then. Smith, in Richmond—that sounded a bit suspicious. Meanwhile, the questions from the gentlemen Wegerecht and Rehse made it all too clear that Vick was good enough to sit with them only as long as he kept feeding them tidbits about this latest Jerichow affair. Vick pleaded the late autopsy and left earlier than he would have liked. On the corner of the market square he turned around, but Cresspah
l’s windows were still half open, and dark.

  The next morning, he waylaid the man at the Gneez train station. The man had gone to the hospital at seven a.m. and they hadn’t shown him his wife. As Vick could have told him. – I wouldn’t advise it: Vick said. – Yes: Cresspahl said. – I mean, looking at your wife: Vick said. – Yes: Cresspahl said. He didn’t look too exhausted but his eyes wouldn’t quite focus, and they were redder than they’d been the day before. Vick let him leave on the train to Jerichow and then got in his car, but got stuck behind some very slow trucks on the long narrow climbing country road, and he had no desire to pick a fight with anyone driving vehicles with air force plates. So now Cresspahl was more than half an hour ahead of him.

  The Jerichow fire brigade hadn’t been able to put out the fire completely and had posted a fire watcher by the smoldering ruins. The workshop building had collapsed, except for the eastern outer wall with the stubs of the former stalls still attached, and the almost untouched box of the Pinnows’ fodder room to the south. Where there’d been a machine, you could still sometimes see a little smoke rising out of the rubble. They’d pulled apart the burning woodpile in the yard, and charred black boards and beams lay scattered all the way to the remaining workshop wall. They’d ripped out the barbed-wire fence in the bushes and dragged it across Brickworks Road, like a barrier. The house hadn’t been this visible for a long time—now it was hidden by nothing but the bare walnut trees. Dazzling white window crosses in the clean red walls. The sky, sunless, was a bright white. It was so quiet that it was like no one was there, Cresspahl thought.

  In the kitchen there was a fire under the kettle, like every morning. The door to Lisbeth’s room was closed.

  Her dress lay draped over the foot of the bed. She’d meant to hang it up in the closet and then go to sleep. The blankets were thrown back. She’d sat on the edge of the bed, not for very long. The air here was almost free of smoke.

  In the kitchen she had taken the hurricane lamp off its hook. She had opened the door to the hall very quietly, so that the workmen in the west rooms wouldn’t hear. Walking barefoot.

  Some kerosene had been spilled in the storeroom. She was already hurrying by then. From the back door on, she probably ran.

  She had so little time that instead of untying the clothesline she’d hacked through it with a knife. You should always untie every knot was what she’d always told the Labor Service girls. The pruning knife had been stuck into the top of a fence post, so that someone would notice it and it wouldn’t be ruined.

  Where the path started to slope down by the pump there was an impression in the wet ground, as if she’d fallen there, onto her knee. But there were a lot of footprints overlapping there, and yet no sign of bare feet.

  The south gable of the workshop hung down at an angle. The door was now only the frame. The doorpost had been hacked away with axes. The debris on the ground was black and greasy with smoke. The two panels of the door were still joined in the middle by the lock. Here she’d gained herself a little extra time.

  When she’d entered the workshop on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, it had smelled of cut wood, stain, varnish, machine oil, work. She hadn’t turned on the light because the big bright patch in the night might have woken Alwin Paap. She’d blocked the glow of the lamp with her body and then set it down in the middle of the old barn’s threshing floor under a machine, so that the building would again look dark from the outside.

  Then she faced another choice. She could unhook a ladder from the wall, lean it against one of the crossbeams, climb up, kick the ladder away, tie herself to the beam with the clothesline, and jump. That way she wouldn’t have needed three hours to die. But maybe she didn’t want to be seen with her head dangling sideways from a broken neck, not by anyone. She decided she shouldn’t be found at all.

  Then she dragged the clothesline back and forth across a saw blade and cut it into short pieces, unsuitable for hanging. Now all she needed to do was knock over the lamp. Everything here would burn.

  In five years the Pinnow barn had become a solid, windproof building. It was dry inside, even in winter, and slightly warm on even the coldest days. She didn’t need to do much to help the small fire along. It was enough to lay down a path for it from wall to wall, from one long end of the building to the other. By then the walls were already hot and clothed in bright colors.

  When a flickering sheet of fire came down from the third crossbeam and draped the north door, the fire was already pushing into the room where the oil cans were. Then she was surrounded on all sides, except for one permeable place near the south door where the flames kept parting. She’d have been through it in a single bound.

  She hadn’t been trying to escape. She’d locked herself in the former fodder room so that people wouldn’t find her easily or soon. She’d decided to wait there.

  In jumping through the door she brought hardly any fire with her. She’d shoved the key down into a crack between the floorboards where no one would find it. The fodder room, turned into the workmen’s room, was empty, with no tools she could have used to get the key back out of the floor. The window had iron crossbars set into the wall. There wasn’t even a way for her to let air in—there were also the heavy shutters covering the window and bolted on the outside. Now she was safely locked in.

  The fire hadn’t come up to her from the floor, it came through the wall of the toolroom and down from above. At first the walls just creaked, then the heat charred them black. The floor stayed intact until the end. Then she’d bound her feet, knotting the rope to the ring, so that she couldn’t run away. When she was totally stupefied, she tried to tie her hands. Cresspahl didn’t believe that. When she fell over, maybe she hit the back of her head against a protruding beam; maybe she was dazed from that without realizing it.

  The firefighters hadn’t found her right away because the fire was blazing too high, and roaring too loud, for there to be anyone left inside to save. They’d knocked the first door on the right out of the wall, with its frame, because it was locked. The damp debris lay on the ground. In the debris was a push broom, its handle broken off, otherwise almost clean. Cresspahl, kneeling, brushed off the spot where he conjectured Lisbeth. The chalk outline showed a shape lying on its side, arms stretched out near the body, like a sleeping woman’s.

  They’d been in no rush to get her out.

  They’d put out the fire around the fodder room with bucket after bucket of water from the pump, to secure the evidence.

  The interior walls had already burned thin by that point but they were still standing, and the roof hadn’t yet come down. So they could pick her up and run out the south doorway where they’d broken the door in, down the path between the workshop and the lumber pile, which was just starting to burn.

  Then she’d lain on the ground until she was dead.

  – A complaint from you, Mr. Cresspahl, that’s all I need!: Vick pleaded. He was standing on Brickworks Road as if he’d sprung up out of the ground, but could only look over at Cresspahl, not trusting his short legs to get him through the snarls of brush and wire. He lifted one foot halfway over the barrier, then put it back down. He’d caught up to Cresspahl after all, but now it was of no use.

  February 20, 1968 Tuesday

  – Don’t you want to wake up, Gesine?

  – I can’t.

  – Just a little, Gesine.

  – You’re Marie.

  – Not necessarily, Gesine.

  – But you are.

  – Yes. But I’m not scared.

  – Am I in the hospital?

  – You’re in your room, Gesine.

  – But it’s dark as the grave in here.

  – That’s because we’ve shut all the curtains. You’re not supposed to have any bright light.

  – So I’m only sick?

  – Dr. Rydz wants to check on you.

  – Dr. Rydz?

  – He doesn’t just know about children, Gesine.

  – You have the
flu and a fever, Mrs. Cresspahl. It’s practically an epidemic in the city.

  – So you did make it through after all, Dr. Semig.

  – It’s no trouble at all for me to come see you, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – But you need to register at the Hamburg district court, Herr Semig.

  – Of course, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – If you don’t you might be declared dead, Herr Semig.

  – Everything will be fine, ma’am.

  – No.

  – 39.2.

  – What’s that in Fahrenheit?

  – 102.6, Miss Mary. It’s not dangerous.

  – This morning she was 103.6.

  – 39.8. It won’t get that high again.

  – But she’s not eating.

  – Until tomorrow, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – Don’t forget! The district court, Hamburg!

  – D’y’wanna drink some?

  – You’re not Marie.

  – I don’t get you, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – You are not Marie.

  – Of course not. I’m Francine.

  – Marie.

  – Mary!

  – You can go back to sleep now, Gesine.

  – I have to go into the office.

  – I already called to excuse you.

  – You can’t do that. Nobody can do that.

  – Mr. Kennicott II says you should stay home until Monday. With best wishes.

  – I don’t know him.

  – But he knows you, and even your shoe size. No, sorry, the size of some shoes that aren’t yours.

  – Marie, I have to go to work.

  – You have to sleep, Gesine.

  – And what’ll you live on?

  – I can cook, I can bake—

  – and then tomorrow / the child / I’ll take. And there will be / an end of me.

  – Of him, Gesine. Rumpelstiltskin.

  – What day is it today, Marie?

  – Tuesday.

  – But it must be Friday.

  – On Friday you came home from work with a headache. On Saturday we had a South Ferry day, and I’m sorry. You’ve been in bed since Saturday night, and Dr. Rydz came the first time on Sunday. Since then you’ve been asleep, and talking in your sleep.