Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  For Mrs. Erichson, the days in New York were not a chore but a vacation in the city; she liked giving the children instruction

  If ten’re milkin then one has to stand by the bench an rattle the buckets or it wont work

  and was soon quite taken with the little black girl, who might say, so like a maidservant: Yes, ma’am; Of course, ma’am; but who wasn’t timid and often looked her right in the eyes in a spirited way that might have been provoking to the old woman, but a Mrs. Erichson does not let herself be provoked, that’s what all her sayings are for—From little scuffles grow big fights. When she left for New Jersey again, she was almost on the point of inviting this Francine to come visit with Marie—she didn’t say so out loud this time. Mrs. Erichson saw this household up and running without her help, and wanted to get back to her own; when the patient no longer required her services, she got in her car and by now is far past Bayonne. The fever came down around noon, and it’s stayed down.

  Before dinner, Francine and Marie sat at the table in the big room and tried to catch up on as much of the schoolwork they’d missed as they’d been able to phone around for. They were half visible from bed—the fair head next to the dark one, Francine’s back a bit more hunched, Marie leaning far back in her chair as she does when she’s thinking about something, chin high, a pencil in her mouth, looking at the ceiling. Then the bell rang, and the door to the patient’s room was quietly pushed closed, but in their hurry they left it open a little. The patient was supposed to sleep more, and now she woke all the way up.

  The visitor’s voice was that of a young man, sluggish, with a tenor’s sharp vowels, around twenty-five years old. This stranger might have a university education but he switched easily into slang, and when he did the words sounded quoted, and his cautious, suspicious, roundabout approach sounded well practiced. At first the conversation was between him and Marie; even later, Francine didn’t say much.

  – If this is the Cresspahl apartment then I’d sure like to come in.

  – Is this how you always do it?

  – It is.

  – Then you can leave now. Don’t think we’re here alone.

  – I’m from the city, little girl.

  – You can go look for your little girl somewhere else. I suppose you have an ID.

  – You’re really something else, kid.

  – From Welfare?

  – So, you can read!

  – We have nothing to do with Welfare. My mother has a job.

  – And so how does she make sure the family is supported?

  – She works for a bank in midtown.

  – That must be Chemical Bank?

  – It’s not Chemical.

  – Do guests get offered a chair around here?

  – Well, since you’re a gentleman.

  – Children, children, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You try running around all day in buildings without elevators.

  – You do it for free?

  – All right, so you want to talk business. I am looking for a girl named Francine, eleven years old, colored. I have a picture of her.

  – Well?

  – That’s her.

  – And if she is?

  – Then I’ve come to the right place.

  – It’s completely legal that she’s living here with us. The police know about it, Francine’s mother has the address too.

  – Who else would I have gotten it from.

  – Do you understand what this is about, Francine?

  – I’m supposed to say hello from your mother, Francine.

  – We were going to visit the hospital again tomorrow.

  – Francine’s mother isn’t in the hospital anymore.

  – We’d know that.

  – Apparently you don’t. Otherwise you’d figure out that because of the cold spell there’s an even bigger shortage of beds than usual. She’s been discharged.

  – I just need to pack my things.

  – You can’t just send Francine’s mother back into a pit like the one on 103rd Street, after an injury like that!

  – It wasn’t me. What’s your name, anyway?

  – M’rie.

  – Well then, dear Mary. (Okay, you’re not my “dear Mary,” now I know.) I am handling this case. I heard the story during a routine visit. And I made a decision: If she does come back, then it won’t be to that pit. As you so accurately put it.

  – That is extraordinarily nice of you, Mr. Feldman.

  – I’ve moved this case into a hotel.

  – One of the ones where the city pays the rent?

  – You’ve got to admit, it’s better that way.

  – That hotel probably is a little better than 103rd Street.

  – Now the mother is there all alone with her baby. The older daughter has run away from the juvenile center, they can’t find her.

  – And the older brother’s gone too.

  – That’s the kind of family it is.

  – I don’t think it’s their fault.

  – My dear Mary (Okay! I know!), if I started thinking about it that way I’d never get anything done.

  – And now you’re taking Francine with you.

  – If she doesn’t want to come, I can also have her picked up.

  – So that’s how it is.

  – Mary, don’t you think a family should live together?

  – Yes. And Francine should take her mother’s place watching the baby so that she. . . . Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. Never mind.

  – Maybe her injuries aren’t entirely healed yet. Francine’s mother says she wants her there.

  – Why doesn’t she call us?

  – That I don’t know. But obviously she doesn’t want to. Can’t bring herself to. Something along those lines.

  – And you’ve got a letter from her.

  – I can leave it here for you. And anyway, it’s for the best.

  – For whose best?

  – Mary, if your Francine has known for two days that she’s supposed to go back to her mother, and known the new address too—

  – I don’t believe it.

  – Francine, do you know a Mrs. Lippincott? She lives in your old building.

  – Yes, mister.

  – Didn’t you run into her on Broadway the other day?

  – Yes, mister.

  – Did she tell you where your mother is and that your mother wants you to come back?

  – Yes, mister.

  – Francine.

  – It’s true, Marie.

  – Francine!

  – So. Now when does this Mrs. Cresspahl get home from the bank that isn’t Chemical?

  – She’s here. She’s sick.

  – Bloody Jesus, you’re a weird generation. Now I have to go through everything with her all over again.

  – No you don’t.

  – Maybe I should introduce myself to her.

  – You can’t go in there. If Francine wants to say goodbye.

  – No, Marie. I don’t want to tell her.

  – You see.

  – Even you didn’t understand. It wasn’t a lie.

  – So now you’re going.

  – We can go now, mister.

  February 24, 1968 Saturday

  Public Notice. Louis Levinson, age seventy-five, brother of Sam, Isidore, Tillie, and Pearl Levinson, wants to be contacted by some member of family. Tel. IN1–6565.

  When my mother was a child, a doctor said: The child’s got a weak heart. And have her walk with her stick more often.

  Children used to have to walk with a stick across their backs, held in the crooks of their arms. To learn good posture.

  My mother had narrow hips. When she was sixteen, she was still called “weak.” She always walked slightly stooped, with sloping shoulders. She tired quickly, even after a half-hour walk. Then she learned to ride horses.

  When she passed a mirror, it was: I cant help it, I think Im pretty. She was teased about it her whole life. (Because one time, when she wa
s ten, she’d spent so long combing her hair that she was fifteen minutes late.) Dont you think youre a little too pretty? If I may say so myself.

  At eighteen she was the chives on everyone’s soup.

  As a child, she’d said: I know a girl who doesn’t believe in God.

  God, who invented the atomic bomb, also shoots at sparrows so they shall fall on the ground from the bush.

  She walked so softly her shoes never wore out.

  Her dresses all stopped at the knee when she was supposed to marry the man from Lübeck.

  Papenbrock to Cresspahl, in 1931: I am sure that you’ll be able to make my daughter happy. I say this man to man.

  A sentence written in secret, in English, in Richmond, in August 1932: You know, I have secrets in my head, but I do not know them. Only my head can get at them.

  Had a manic sense of responsibility, even for the birds in the garden.

  When the doctors found out what she’d died of, they washed her hair.

  Outside the north portal of St. Peter’s Church there was a lectern, with a page for the funeralgoers to inscribe their names. Pauli Bastian usually stood beside it and asked: Viewing? Viewing? This time he couldn’t say that. This time people asked him: What! No viewing? No viewing?

  A Protestant. “Protestants decide for themselves what is most important.”

  The noise of the beach stones scoured by receding waves. She could tilt her head listening to that for a long time. She liked it best in the fog.

  When she took out stove rings, she sometimes forgot that she had them on a hook in her hand, she would be so lost staring into the fire.

  She always marveled at her long neck. As a child she’d had almost no neck at all.

  She was gone so suddenly; she wasn’t spoken about.

  Invisible.

  February 25, 1968 Sunday

  Many senators on the Foreign Relations Committee do not want to hear another word about this Tonkin business from the government, and the chairman, Fulbright, calls Secretary of Defense McNamara negligent in his duties, for having failed to give the committee important information. Calls him “derelict.”

  Derelict: wouldn’t that word apply to Mrs. Cresspahl’s English, too, despite her trying to make a living in an English-speaking country? As it does to a ship adrift without captain or crew. It’s not enough that derelict makes her think of her Latin classes, seventeen years ago in Gneez: of linquere and depart, of relinquere and relinquish, of relictus, relic, abandoned thing, plus the prefix de- meaning not “down” but “down to the bottom”—thoroughly, completely, finally. De-relict: the country its inhabitants flee, the land the housebuilder rejects, the alluvium the sea leaves behind, the silted water, the abandoned wreck, the house beyond redemption, the ownerless property, the article willfully cast away, and just when the meaning seems contained behind a fence of knowledge it’s already slipped away, and her next step onto what she thought was safe ground meets thin air. For Cresspahl studied English English, not American English; and for a hundred years American English has been wont to transfer the sense from the passive Relikt (relic) and derelict, via dereliction, neglect, to a person who does (doesn’t) actively perform their duties: the delinquent, the culprit, a liar, as well as people whom both the police and the Times take as not merely down-and-out but willfully turning their backs on society, now standing on the Bowery unshaven, in rags, swaying with hunger and alcohol, beggars, bums, tramps, derelicts.

  Mr. Fulbright told Mr. McNamara what he thinks of him; Mrs. Cresspahl has listened carefully to what the gentlemen had to say. Were she asked to explain on the spot what she took it to mean, she would hesitate. Maybe she owes her image of McNamara on the Bowery to the subhead in which The New York Times prints the word “Derelict” in bold. It’s not so much that she’d be embarrassed to admit a mistake—she’d be worried about the consequences of not being fully able to do what she’s paid to do.

  This will not do, Cresspahl. If one were not to call Comrade Stalin’s English classical, one would have to say it’s as simple as can be. C minus, Cresspahl. Sit down. Baumgärtner, your turn.

  After the war, Dr. Kliefoth served as the principal of Gneez High School with little time to teach English. Frau Dr. Weidling took his place until Soviet counterintelligence found out that her husband had been a captain not in a tank division but in intelligence and sabotage, and that she owed her mastery of the language to the trips abroad that Capt. Weidling had taken her on with him. Kliefoth was soon removed from his post, as teacher too. Then English through twelfth grade was taught by a young man with the first name Hans-Gerhard. He had never been to England, and explained to the silent class that his professors at the University of Greifswald had accepted certain deviations in pronunciation from him when he couldn’t exactly copy the British language LPs. His justification had been: he heard it differently. This was his first teaching position, and his first mistake. He then made reference to his youth and asked the students if he could address them by first name, despite their having reached the age where last names are customary; he mentioned the New Spirit of the New Schools. Lise Wollenberg spoke up. – Of course, Hans-Gerhard: she said. Heinz Wollenberg was still considered a pillar of society at that point, and Lise got an apology from the young man for his fit of rage. After this third mistake, he no longer called his students by their first names. “The Gold-Bug” by Edgar Allan Poe was not read in his class, instead he went through “Is War Inevitable?” by Josif Stalin. Cresspahl, the student in the center block, front row, on the aisle, didn’t get a good grade for that one. There was no prospect of private lessons with Kliefoth, since he would have accepted neither money nor favors in return for them. H.-G. Knick moved his lips as though chewing when he switched into a foreign language, his voice changed too, and several times a month he had to hear from his students that they “heard it differently,” even though his vowel sounds probably came out as close to British as he was capable of making them. Cresspahl got an A in English on her Abitur exams, and her bumpy essay on the prospects of a Communist Party in a parliamentary democracy was enough to get her admitted to the University of Halle. The Saxons too were taken with the New Spirit of the New Schools, but they didn’t leave it up to the students to decide how they heard it. Professor Ertzenberger would have liked to use her for demonstration purposes in his seminar. He was delighted to have such an example.

  Miss Cresspahl, please pronounce a cluster of k and l.

  Tackle. Shackle.

  And now in a German word.

  Mecklenburg.

  Do you hear it?

  No, professor.

  Please say: “Wesel.”

  Wesl.

  Your articulation is Make-len-burgish to the bone, Miss Cresspahl! You can’t separate the l! “M, e, ckl, e, nburg.” That has got to go.

  She started talking. During her second semester, she understood the passenger on the Leipzig–Rostock express who’d spoken to her in English after noticing the English paperback in her hand, though only after he repeated himself. Anyway, Englishmen on the East German railway were not the rule in those days. In Frankfurt, when she was studying translation, she still couldn’t manage the English of the children she had to babysit at night in the American quarter, and at the US Army radio station in West Berlin she still wasn’t at the point of pronouncing “either” with an ee sound or “fast” with a short a or the word for Künste like the one for Herz, “arts” as “hearts.” In New York, people think she has a New England accent, in New England it’s thought to be a New York mishmash. Now after almost seven years in New York she can call a dollar a buck (deer, Bock), but she hears the British pronunciation in her mind and uses the idea that a deer is something you can own, sight, hunt, and bring in to help her remember. Speaking Italian or French, on the other hand, is a perfectly harmless activity, fully planned and always conscious; in American English, she no longer has to plan out the grammar on all sides, but then occasionally falls into a confused pause as if from a
great height.

  Called McNamara derelict.

  Where other offices have family photos and flowerpots, she has put up a thin slip of paper (not enough by way of “personal items” for the Puerto Rican mover). On it is written: THE CUSTARD APPLE IS THE FRUIT O’ THE SWEET-SOP. Which means nothing more than DIE FLASCHENBAUMFRUCHT IST DIE FRUCHT DES FLASCHENBAUMS. The bottle-tree fruit is the fruit of the bottle tree, you might say, but don’t. She cannot understand it. For the CUSTARD she sees on the poster at the Times Square subway station twice every workday has nothing to do with bottle trees, it is an egg pudding. The fruits of American bottle trees are egg-shaped, there’s that. Then again, whipped egg whites aren’t Eierschnee, egg snow, but named from a French word for a pastry. The bottle tree, named thus after the shape of its trunk, is in any case called sweet-soaked, sweet-sop, and another name for its fruit is sugar apple. She cannot understand what these words know about one another, and the slightly nose-diving dizziness she feels whenever she sees this sentence warns her away from the thought that she will ever be able to live on the English side of language.

  That thought is what she needs to go in to work with, tomorrow.

  February 26, 1968 Monday

  – They called it Reichskristallnacht?: Marie says.

  – Yes.

  – Like “Washington’s Birthday”?

  – Yes.

  – Okay, Gesine, start.

  – Because among other things the Jews had their windows broken or their crystal smashed or stolen.

  – You told me that Jews lost their lives, their businesses, their homes. A billion-mark fine. Expelled from schools. Their pensions gone. Their insurance canceled. And the government called these measures harsh but fair.

  – Yes, Marie.

  – And “Kristallnacht,” this was a government word?

  – No. It came from the governed.

  – I’m trying to believe you. Explain it to me again.