Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The child won’t be taken from you—that’s a promise. Anyway, she will never be mine, she will always be your Marie.

  If we meet again someday, then maybe we should be together.

  I’ve written you this because I’m being loaded into a Scandinavian Airlines plane again. And because I wanted to write it. The undersigned prefers not to talk about it. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, and if Herodotus still counts as one of the pillars of society then the courier should reach your door with this letter at around eight o’clock on Sunday. Otherwise, we will have the inscription chiseled off the brow of your central post office.

  Sincerely yours, D. E. A child who was not in your class.”

  March 4, 1968 Monday

  If we do convict four citizens on charges of expressing views other than those of the Soviet government: says the Soviet government, via Pravda: that will be equally justified as the purges in the 1930s. So now the state itself has confirmed that the thousands of dead from that era enjoyed a good name for a period of only twelve years, now ended.

  Sometimes it seems possible. Yesterday, in fact, The New York Times mentioned Czech hopes for long-term West German credits. The price would be “recognition of West Germany.” De Rosny could get it for them cheaper than that.

  Sometimes it seems impossible.

  Maybe de Rosny hasn’t found the right employee after all and was badly advised. Not only must Mrs. Cresspahl tilt her head back even farther now to see the glass of her cell in the tower of the bank, and she rarely finds the right corner; she must also fight off a shyness that she hadn’t expected in herself. She often presses the elevator button for the eleventh floor, as though afraid of the higher one, and only then the “16.” Then the cabin might stop at the old place and the doors slide elaborately open and no one steps out, unless maybe someone invisible. In the higher realms the elevators are less crowded, and even if the occupants don’t observe one another more closely as a result, it still seems that way. Since Employee Cresspahl prefers to keep her eyes pointing upward for the time being, at the panel above the door that shows the floors, she has also found herself greeted in fatherly fashion by a gentleman whose face she couldn’t remember, Mr. Kennicott II, and he said: Settled in nicely, Mrs. Cresspahl? She said, beaming, helpless: Thanks very much, sir.

  What’s proceeding nicely are the lies, not what the head of the Personnel Department calls “settling in.” It starts with the extravagant furnishings in the corridors. There are carpets. The neon tubes are not covered with simple glass but contained in expensively patterned plastic boxes, and they illuminate not bare walls but printed posters in gallery frames. Down in Foreign Sales the doors were of green-painted steel; here they’re substantial mahogany slabs moved by brass knobs the size of a child’s head. Downstairs she could sometimes skip the large trial smile at the entrance to the department; here Mrs. Lazar is sitting or, if she’s away from her post for the moment, a deputy is. No visitor passes without signing in, unlike downstairs where there’s less to hide. Mrs. Lazar, an older lady who carries herself like a rector, invariably stares at the new woman stiffly and encouragingly, and along with the time of day she offers a broadly unfurled smile, as if, along with the question of how it’s going, she is being given a daily birthday present. Employee Cresspahl moves rapidly on, past the expensive desks in the spacious, salon-like hall, as though wanting no one to disturb her; what she wants is to avoid talking to anyone.

  It’s not fear of her new department—she misses knowing how she stands in relation to other people. When de Rosny presented her to his subordinates, the introductions went off with downright delighted looks from the men, and she has gradually learned their names, which she didn’t catch at the time, from the triangular bars that each has placed before him: Wilbur N. Wendell, Anthony Milo, James C. Carmody, Henri Gelliston. . . . The nameplates on the eleventh floor didn’t include first names. The name “Cresspahl” is still missing from next to the door of the new office—this nameplate clearly won’t have the addition of “Miss.” Anyone permitted to work up here has the right to be addressed as a married woman. She would love to know what people thought of her in these splendid dungeons. Does Mrs. Lazar see her as one of de Rosny’s whims? Do the irreproachable encounters with colleagues in the open room not actually conceal skepticism about the newcomer’s knowledge, or outrage at having a woman stationed at their side? Not even conversations about work are allowed; Mrs. Cresspahl has her own sphere, as do the others, and she is asked no questions about it. Now and then she feels glad not to have to sit in the open room; she has a door to sit behind. These doors are allowed to be closed. And yet she’s more uncomfortable now than she used to be with her door open, because a knock would be more startling.

  No one knocks. How to manage writing her memos is left to Mrs. Cresspahl’s discretion; she could lie on the sofa for a long time if she had something she needed to read. These strange new surroundings, the distance from the others, ties her more unforgivingly to her work—suddenly she can’t even decide to take a break. Downstairs, when putting off a tricky passage, she could bring a coffee or cigarette over to Naomi, Jocelyn, or Amanda Williams, and spend fifteen minutes chatting; it looked properly official and left her refreshed for the next hours of work. Here the rules are less strict; for all intents and purposes she can decide for herself when between nine and ten she’ll arrive, whether to take an hour for lunch or an hour and a half, as long as she’s still to be found in her place until five o’clock. She has not yet had the chance to learn such freedoms.

  She often finds herself sitting in the middle of her new work, surrounded by maps, diagrams, journals, books, without having had a thought in her head for minutes at a time, leaned far back in her swivel chair, arms hanging down, mute blind deaf and tired. And yet she can deliver a file folder to Mrs. Lazar almost every four days, and every time Mrs. Lazar takes a new courier envelope, addresses it to de Rosny, and staples it shut, since clearly the usual closure with a string around a button will not suffice.

  But compliments are obligatory. After nine days, Mr. Milo has come up with a new one. An Italian man who no longer speaks the language of his mother—brown-eyed, brooding, with forgetful lips, dry brittle tufts of hair—today he stops Mrs. Cresspahl in the hall as if he had something urgent to tell her, something he hadn’t managed to say two days ago: You type better than I’ve learned to in ten years! At least then there was a conversation about the keystroke storage capacity of the IBM Selectric 72.

  No one comes by. Amanda did once, to supervise the move and the new arrangements, called the new office glorious, and didn’t come back. Everyone still says hello to her in the elevator, asks how it’s going, smiles as though glad to see her, but they do so from a distance. On Friday afternoon Mrs. Cresspahl dropped by Foreign Sales and wanted to use Amanda Williams’s calculator to compute some numbers for her 1967 taxes, and everyone was dumbfounded at the visit, like it was indecent. As though what they’d had in common was gone now and they were no longer working on the same plane. Mrs. Cresspahl’s temporary successor is a writer from Switzerland who wants to make money in the city for a few more months, and because he mentioned difficulties with his Italian, Mrs. Cresspahl promised him she’d help out. He will ask Amanda what he should do, and will send Mrs. Cresspahl nothing. If the phone ever rings it’s a wrong number or, once in a blue moon, de Rosny, handing out praise and good wishes the way you give sugar cubes to a horse.

  It’s so quiet. When the workday has ended, what she misses most is a soft click. That was Amanda, downstairs, outside the open door, wrapping up her coffee cup for the night and placing it gently on a shelf of her metal cabinet. That click was the start of the free rest of the day.

  It’s so quiet that one day Employee Cresspahl didn’t leave work till half an hour after the end of the day. She had lost track of time. She didn’t like that, and the smile of recognition from Mr
. Kennicott II in the elevator didn’t help either. Downstairs people used to look out for each other, help each other to some extent; up here everyone has to take care of themselves.

  Sometimes it seems impossible. And have a good trip home, Mrs. Cresspahl, take care of yourself. Take care.

  March 5, 1968 Tuesday

  When people in the bank talk about the joint next door collapsing, it sounds hopeful, delighted. Today what they’re saying is that it could just as easily have happened here before it did at Chase Manhattan Bank—namely, that a small group of conspirators used an accomplice in the wire department to request precisely $11,870,924 from a Swiss bank with a fraudulent cable authorization. One single word had saved Chase Manhattan. The gangsters requested the transfer in dollars instead of Swiss francs; that was the only reason why the Swiss bank cabled Chase for confirmation. It could have happened here.

  And yesterday when the vice president decided he needed to take his dictation machine apart, he found a nest of cockroaches in it. Why does he have to keep a fridge in his suite? The little monsters smell food twenty floors away. This place is clearly falling apart.

  If the city does collapse, the roaches will survive.

  We got our apartment from a Danish woman and a Swiss woman, and at first we couldn’t believe it. In the mornings, brown husks of wings on the floor as if shed by tiny bugs. Brown creepy-crawlies gathered in the dark sink, running off when the light’s turned on, trying only to get away. They looked so single-minded. In Jerichow, a Schabe was a tool—a scraper; in New York, a Schabe is a roach. I thought it was some kind of mistake and stomped at the first roach I saw on the floor, with shoes on. It was no use—it disappeared into a crack invisible to the naked eye. And it was dangerous to try: they can cause all sorts of allergies, from asthma to eczema, even death, and even throwing away the shoes and socks I’d been wearing wouldn’t have helped. Anyway, they are too fast to die like that. The air current caused by the moving foot is picked up by the roach’s tiny hairs, the message is transmitted to its powerful back legs (without any stopover in the brain), and before the shoe reaches the floor the beast has scooted away. They were everywhere—in the spines of books, in seat cushions, in lamp sockets—each with five eyes, six legs, two highly sensitive antennae, and this time I applaud the supermarket for selling spray cans of poison without making you ask for them specially.

  Mrs. Cresspahl was so ashamed that once, when Marie asked, she told her a roach on the wall was a fly. Why shouldn’t a fly be half an inch long. Marie wasn’t yet four and accepted it; she had already found various other things bigger in this country than she was used to.

  Then, in the broad daylight of 1961, Marie was sitting on the floor and watching something next to her, discreetly, practically like a friend.

  It was a female cockroach on the floor, heavy with pregnancy. Maybe she was too weak to hide, or else her self-protective instincts were no longer paramount. Marie could describe it later: the sacklike vessel sitting on the lower body from the waist down, packed firm like a feather pillow, long and narrow, releasing a quick succession of little white threads from an opening in the side, almost like quickly unspooling snippets of ribbon, and the maggot-like nymphs emerged, unfolded, swelled, acquired a gray shimmer, and were recognizable as bodies, all in tiny clear blocks of time, countless numbers per second, and while the mother still lay on her side producing babies, the first ones were already running off, complete adults in miniature except for the wings, and Marie asked. Since the word children came up in the course of the explanation, she offered money as rent for these new additions to the human race, and watched with horror as they were swept into the bags that the super incinerates in the night. Mrs. Cresspahl was so ashamed that she told the child not to ever talk about the scene again, even in the German that other people couldn’t understand.

  Then, during that summer of 1961, on benches in Riverside Park, the newcomer from Germany was given her first lessons in the science of cockroaches. She already didn’t count for much there, because she was only a “part-time” mother, since she worked, and because she was therefore unable to keep up in the precise cataloging of bowel evacuations (quantity, coloring), loose kneecaps, and ingrown toenails, and also because she didn’t have any knitting with her. But she was permitted to sit and listen, and so she learned that it’s always the Year of the Roach in New York.

  The most common kind is the German roach.

  It was discussed as a completely normal, ordinary, respectable topic, and if a housewife tried to deny that there were roaches in her apartment, she gave up soon enough, under pitying or mocking and always disbelieving looks. The roach was spoken of with respect, hate, comic despair, systematic expertise, and absolutely, unquestionably as something invincible. For they eat everything, from dry furniture glue to the inflammable tips of matches; if a poison does manage to get rid of them for a while, they develop a resistance to it within a few years and what’s supposed to kill them turns into their dessert. When one of the older matrons brings up the happy year of 1940, when chlordane still worked against cockroaches, it was heard not as folklore but as a piece of American history. Theses were put forth, such as the theory of cyclical waves, or that the critters survive because reproduction is their first priority, not, as with, say, rats, third. This latter theory was discussed more eagerly and at greater length than the one about cycles. Horror stories were told, like the one about the dignified old lady who was sitting in a darkened room in a Mexican hotel, watching an old home movie in which she was fingering a brooch on her chest. “Suddenly I realized I hadn’t worn a brooch.” The New York Times heard that one, too; indeed, this January the Times was willing to devote a practically academic article to the cockroach, with facts such as that its escape mechanism functions within 0.003 seconds, a world record. Such a respectable topic the cockroach was and is in New York.

  When the German started describing her own first experiences—full of embarrassment, ready to beat a rapid retreat—she had given the ladies on the benches a pleasant thrill. Now the whole story of roaches could be told to her again. This time the fact that cockroaches probably came to America on German ships was casually dismissed. There are Americans among the creatures, and Orientals. A long list of spray poisons was written out for the newcomer, passing rather swiftly back and forth as each housewife championed her own favorite. Then came the advice: Always wear a mask over your mouth and nose when you spray, because even if the chemicals don’t do anything to the roaches, they’re harmful to people. Don’t wipe up with water too often—that’s what the Oriental roaches like. Shake out clothes after every time you wear them, and before you wear them. Turn everything you buy around and around, carefully, before you put it in the refrigerator. Triple these security measures whenever your neighbors are painting their apartment, because the roaches will come over to your place. Then came more horror stories: How one desperate woman put a whole pan of roaches into the oven and blasted it at 300 degrees for three hours, and afterward they all cheerfully got up and went their way, except for one, which wasn’t dead, only stunned.

  It remains in memory as a pleasant hour, full of good cheer and helpfulness. Still, Mrs. Cresspahl would not want to admit to a visitor from Denmark or Germany that roaches are hallmarks of this city, much less give them a talk like this one.

  The topic of roaches does have its horrifying aspects. They are the oldest winged insect still extant in the world, 250 million years old—it was their Age, really, not the carboniferous Coal Age, and still is. They are useful to science, for their powers of resistance and terrifying fertility. They can starve for months and then, once they’ve understood that no food is forthcoming, go about their business. They can understand, they are intelligent, they can learn. What science can’t understand is why they bother to live for five months since their only goal seems to be to reproduce. But there they are. They live with the poor and the rich alike, and now Francine believes it; they live in airplanes, on the South Ferr
y, in the tallest glass skyscrapers; they are the lowest common denominator of New York; it is highly possible that they will have walked on the moon before people. They’re a cunning bunch.

  For three whole months we cherished the belief that our apartment was almost free of them, and we made do with the strip of powder that the super’s exterminator laid down outside the apartment door every month to secure the borders. Then the heating went down over the weekend, and on Monday when the heat suddenly came back on they decided to try out a new tactic for such eventualities, daring to go out entirely in the open, stinking with fear when attacked. The kinds of comment about societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals that pass our lips during these few days are strictly emergency measures. When Marie is reminded that she once wanted to pay rent for these creatures, she lashes out against the monsters all the harder, all the more bitterly with her spray can, cursing unchallenged.

  De Rosny quietly cleaned out his office, without putting up a fight or punishing someone else whose fault it was. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not in the bank, not anywhere. De Rosny knows when he’s beaten. This time he’s given up.