Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The word slum is also a verb, meaning to stroll around on run-down, dangerous streets, and the New York police has ordered five thousand helmets in advance, for the coming riots.

  The mayor, the Honorable John Vliet Lindsay, is reasonably sure of his ground here. He often mentions the ghettos in his speeches, and one of them, Brownsville in Brooklyn, he calls Bombsville.

  Mrs. Cresspahl and her daughter went slumming this afternoon, and in our slums the children were out on the streets. These included children who needed to use the streets to answer the call of nature, and ones who would prefer a bath but had no water to bathe in. Ones whose clothes have been washed and patched so many times that they don’t dare set foot in school under a teacher’s judging eyes. Ones searching a long since eviscerated car for any sellable part that might have been overlooked. Some ran wild, playing baseball with a broomstick. Others didn’t have a game to play and stood around like unemployed grown-ups—bored and hostile. They had all learned how to recognize a junkie, a homosexual, or a drunk on the street, and to expect them, as everyday parts of the neighborhood; the dog barked at the tottering figure with the bottle, though, and could barely be placated. We saw it. We live here.

  Francine was in none of the places where she usually spent the day. But the man at the counter of the Mediterranean Swimming Club, a curiously soft man in his white T-shirt—one of the men with a mild voice, a tone defensive in all directions—had news for us.

  – Can I see your card again? How do you pronounce that name: Crisspaw?

  – Most people say it like that.

  – Might a Negro girl have been asking about you?

  – Yes. Someone named Francine?

  – Mhmm.

  – Did she leave a message?

  – What message could she have had for you, Mrs. Crisspaw? She wanted to know if you were here in the pool. And it turned out you were. Then she left.

  – I don’t understand, Mr. Welch.

  – Me neither. Usually it’s only the police who ask questions like that and then leave so that you have no idea what they’re up to. She came back again this afternoon. Of course anyone can get the number wrong.

  – Oh, of course, Mr. Welch.

  – So I said by mistake that you and the young lady were here in the pool. This time she wanted to come in.

  – Is she still here?

  – Whatever are you thinking, Mrs. Crisspaw. The wilderness of the streets has swallowed her up.

  – Mr. Welch, if she comes back we’ll pay the daily fee for her. Whether we’re in the club or not.

  – But she’s a black.

  – We know her. She’s a friend.

  – Does that mean you’ll guarantee for her?

  – That’s what it means. Here’s a dollar.

  – A dollar’s a dollar, Mrs. Crisspaw, but I hope you know what you’re doing.

  Since the new Czechoslovak government ended censorship two weeks ago, The New York Times has run into unexpected difficulties in Prague: Is it the government speaking or just him when a television journalist warns on television against hasty purges along the old Stalinist lines? If Alexander Dubček wants to carry out his economic reforms, will he manage without a settling of scores in the bureaucracy? “He is said to be against any vendetta.” These uncertainties, once a Communist stops treating its national television as its private property!

  March 10, 1968 Sunday

  In Prague someone is allowed to say on the radio that the nation’s future must be decided by the entire population, not just the Communists. The Communists are meeting in sixty-six regional and local party conferences and debating among themselves how they can get rid of President Novotný without using Stalin’s means, with which Novotný was so familiar. The Times hears unease among the functionaries of East Germany: over the economic ties with the ČSSR, but not, for instance, because liberalization there has any prospect of changing life in their own sphere of power. In Warsaw, students are acting out for the second day in a row; they are demanding more democracy!, an honest press, and the like.

  We went over to some friends’.

  In the American sense of the word, Jim and Linda are friends. They let you go in with them on renting a house on the Jersey shore, they like having meals with you, they come over at the drop of a hat, they insist on knowing how you’re doing, they tell you relatively intimate details about their children, parents, aunts, and as a result they remain very firmly in our minds even if we haven’t seen them for five months. Maybe our visit was too dependent on a polite reason for it. The O’Driscolls have moved out of the Upper West Side and only now are they firmly enough settled into a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, now the Cresspahls too should come check out their new place. Jim has gotten even heavier—sometimes he can raise himself from his armchair only with a mighty heave—but he painted the walls himself, added woodwork and moldings to the rooms, a whopper of a man, now with a new red mustache hanging sadly under his nose. He still watches Linda with pleasure, and secretly pats himself on the back not only for having found her, five years ago in Greece, but for having brought her back to New York. Linda has acquired his version of English—New York English with a heavy Irish accent—and ideas such as that she and a friend will run their own kindergarten if the public one isn’t good enough. Linda with her peasant braids, dark jealous looks, stunned expression when catching sight of one of her own children, as if her Patrick and Patricia were miracles she had worked. At the O’Driscolls’, the children act like they have to win their parents over every day anew; they come in from the little backyard so often, drape themselves around Jim’s neck, lay their heads in Linda’s lap, so as not to be forgotten. Toys are scattered everywhere because Jim works in an office where he puts his degree in psychology to use inventing ever new sales possibilities for the toy industry. The visit felt comfortable, familiar, welcome, as with friends.

  Mrs. Cresspahl was greeted with the pleasantly anticipatory question: What’s the good word, the good news?—to which one is supposed to answer that Ireland is now free, or that President Johnson has stopped an old lady on the street, obviously a widow, and urgently pressed her to surrender her lamb; it doesn’t come off without a half hug either, without thorough cheek kisses from Linda, and Marie is addressed as the new babysitter who’s been awaited with trepidation for days, and who now turns out to be not an old blunderbuss but an educated young lady to whom one can hand over Pat and Pat with a sigh of relief.

  In the kitchen. Everyone prepares lunch together at the bar-high table. Slices of bread with lox and ham and cheese. Sherry and whiskey, from Ireland, between the salad bowls.

  Conversation. About how America is turning into a police state. Jim is convinced that the government has set up detention camps for the coming Negro riots—prison facilities into which citizens will be sent summarily, strictly on the basis of skin color. Whether the O’Driscolls should go back to Ireland; it was only Jim’s father who’d been the first to come here. A rambling argument about Linda’s Greece, to which she cannot return. About the choice between Nixon, propounding unclear war plans, and Rockefeller, who has no peace plans on offer. About Hans Magnus Enzensberger. About Jim’s father. About mail from the family in Nauplion. Careful noise from the kids in the backyard.

  Maybe it was simply too long since we’d seen the O’Driscolls. In a pause came Jim’s brooding remark: What we did to the Indians is basically what Himmler did to the Jews.

  Now it was no longer “Gee-sign” who was supposed to explain Himmler, it was “the German woman.”

  The awkwardness continued, no matter how many funny stories Jim told from his office, or how much he reported about his physical condition. Ten days ago he came out of a bar on Third Avenue and slipped and fell under a car. Drunkenness was ruled out, it had only been five gin and tonics. It was more like fainting. His heart . . . ? When Jim talks about himself, you get the sense that many things about him are a mystery to him. Even the act of raising his glass to his
mouth seems to amaze him.

  The awkwardness was also enough to discourage taking a walk. Instead the decision was made to go to a film club. So much was said, and in such detail, about the nature of the venue, the donation system instead of tickets, and so on, that Mrs. Cresspahl missed the name of the movie. I missed the title of the movie.

  It was Night and Fog, and another one.

  I left after the first one. It was in Brooklyn.

  The air was as thick as fog between the brownstones. Children behind a screen window were discussing the lone passerby. The end of Second Street seemed to run straight into the port. Foghorns. On Seventh Avenue the Irish bars were full, the delis filled with Sunday customers, children were teasing the sales clerk by reaching their chins up onto the glass counters. Gray-haired drunks were standing helplessly on the corners.

  We’d missed the beginning of the movie. The French narration was disconcertingly insistent on being elegant. The images of hunger, humiliation, death on the electrified fence, the children’s home, the gas chambers, the industrial exploitation of the remains. The footage shot after the war, tinged strongly red from the bricks of the walls. Again the dreaded image with the shiny wide plowshare of the Allies shoving and shoveling the bodies into the grave into the ditch. The fields of bodies. The stacks to be burned.

  Picking up the child from the O’Driscoll apartment. “Didn’t you like the movie?” The auditorium had been rented from a church. In the light, the decorative inscription visible on a crossbeam: The Place Where We Meet to Seek the Highest Is Holy Ground. In the darkness the sweat felt so heavy that it was like the skin couldn’t breathe.

  These are good friends of several years. They look at me and they think of the crimes of the Germans.

  Without meaning any offense. To them it’s obvious, natural. So it goes.

  March 11, 1968 Monday

  The amount of annual aid to Cuba from the Soviet Union exceeds $150,000,000. More than $400,000 a day.

  In the opinion of the NBC television network, the war in Vietnam is lost. In the opinion of Newsweek magazine, President Johnson’s strategy for Vietnam has run into a dead end.

  It looks as if the ČSSR really does want to clean house. In party meetings there are secret ballots. Antonín Novotný is urged to, yes, ask the Czechoslovak people themselves if they trust him. In the trade-union newspaper the rector of Charles University, noted neurologist and psychologist Dr. Oldrich Starý, declared that many people in Czechoslovakia suffered from split personalities caused by fear and by a system in which people were manipulated like cogs in a machine. At the grave of the foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who jumped or was pushed from a window in his official residence twenty years ago, three thousand students were permitted to gather. The president of the Supreme Court is making plans to correct the errors of justice made between 1955 and now. It is stated in public that innocent people are still in jail.

  If Cresspahl had left his child with the Paepckes, she would have long since been dead. If he’d sent her to Aggie Brüshaver, she would have longer since been dead. He thought of Jerichow as a dangerous place, with the airfield so nearby, but decided to bring his child to live there because of Hilde Paepcke’s letters. With her long and detailed descriptions, she’d tried to make him see that Gesine was lacking for nothing in Podejuch; what he took from them was how much he was missing without the child. Maybe he didn’t care that she might die as long as he would be with her.

  He still didn’t think he was up to raising a daughter, and he asked Avenarius Kollmorgen to suggest a woman who could keep the house in order and who understood about girls.

  Avenarius suggested Grandma Klug, Frieda Dade, Grete Selenbinder, and Amalie Creutz. Louise Papenbrock, in her big house on the market square, was happy to hear about every time Cresspahl sent another one away, but she felt insulted before the whole town by Cresspahl not giving the child to her, and Albert didn’t help.

  The first woman to turn up, though, was Käthe Klupsch. Cresspahl hadn’t used the fire insurance money to build anything, he lived humbly in his house and walked in shabby clothes through town to the station where Swenson’s bus departed for Jerichow-North; some in town saw him as a “match”—barely fifty, owner of both property and an insurance payout that rumors put at around a hundred thousand. Cresspahl barely knew Klupsch by sight. He looked indifferently at this old maid, who’d brought a shamefaced Geesche Helms with her as a chaperone. Klupsch was a hefty, bony person who wore her hair up in a plump little nest. Whatever those custom-made clothes were supposed to be, they made her whole body look angular. But everything she said was meant to deprecate and minimize herself. Her tone wasn’t far from whining, the words running into one another, words like “blow of fate” and “test” and “charity,” shot through with little insinuations and rumors. Cresspahl sat at his table, apparently deaf, he was trying so hard to find a pretext to get rid of this churchy old hypocrite. Geesche Helms sat stiffly on the sofa, trying to show that she was sorry she’d offered to help. When Käthe Klupsch wasn’t making use of her big pious upward gaze, she kept looking around—at the floor that hadn’t been swept for some time, at Lisbeth’s open desk, at the three doors, as though taking measurements for her future empire. She mentioned, not without pride, the maids Cresspahl would hire for her. Maybe her voice was the reason why no one had wanted to hire her. Or the la-di-da manners, meant to demonstrate her education and Christianity. Cresspahl never found out. Gesine came in and freed him. She walked in from the yard in a carefree, downright Paepckean way and found herself so forcefully clasped by this suitoress that she tore herself away. – You poor child! Käthe Klupsch had said, but then, in unthinking annoyance, she reprimanded the improper behavior. For quite some time she would say around town that for all her charity she wouldn’t have lasted long in a household as uncultured as that one; she often thought back, though, to Cresspahl’s calm reply: Poor? The child’s not that. Was she supposed to take that in a religious or a financial sense? Jerichow could only laugh.

  Grandma Klug approached life in Cresspahl’s house as a kind of well-earned permanent sinecure. Then Alwin Paap was called up into the army too, and she couldn’t manage the heavy work. She would’ve loved to spend longer on the chair she’d moved into the sun outside Cresspahl’s house, pleasantly numbed by the sunlight. She liked that there were two cats in the house. She told the child fairy tales at night, insistently, with eyes closed. She scared the child too. When they found a wreath in the pillow, she was out. Grandma Klug died in the Gneez hospital in October of ’39.

  Frieda Dade came because an air force soldier had gotten her pregnant and she didn’t think he was going to marry her. She couldn’t go back to her family and now she wanted a place in Cresspahl’s house. Twenty-one years old, home ec degree. Thick bulges of fat beneath narrow eyes. High-handed, out of fear of being criticized; as strict with the child as with an adult. She was the one who got the kitchen back in gear, but after four weeks she was married after all and went back to Dade the barber in Gneez.

  Grete Selenbinder stayed longest. She was a widow with a son in the navy; she had the time and she wanted the money. Around forty, an indefatigable worker, absolutely insistent on obedience, praise, and propriety. Propriety required that she hang out the swastika flag before Cresspahl forgot to again. She was the one who got the whole house back in gear—down to the basement, down to the ground. Cresspahl suspected her of looking through his papers, of having a key to Lisbeth’s desk. Grete Selen-binder wanted to dominate. Whenever she could, she would shut a door someone had left open; she carried a little basket of keys with her wherever she went. When she failed to receive praise, she burst into tears. It wasn’t tactical, like Louise Papenbrock’s crying—she enjoyed it, she brought about occasions for it on purpose. Churchgoer. Obedience was her undoing. At the end of her first year, she’d made porridge for the child, who didn’t want to eat it. – If you haven’t finished every last bite in three minutes . . . !: she said, and left w
ith her little basket of keys. Cresspahl came into the kitchen, saw the child sitting in despair in front of her bowl, gulped down the porridge until the bowl was perfectly clean, then Grete Selenbinder came back in and accused Gesine of having poured it out. Since she called it lying, she had to go.

  The room she’d furnished with a low chest of drawers and big brass bed was then used for the French prisoners who’d been sent to live with them. They were given their meals in the brickyard, as was the guard posted to Cresspahl’s house.

  After that, Amalie Creutz still came by two days a week to clean, but no one cooked at the Cresspahl’s for a long time.

  Cresspahl took care of breakfast and the evening sandwich, and when Gesine left school at noon she took Swenson’s bus to the airfield. She ate there with Cresspahl, in the canteen for the civilian employees, and that was where she did her schoolwork. She was only eight years old but Cresspahl brought her along when he went for a beer at the Beach Hotel in Rande. Sometimes Kliefoth sat with them, and every two weeks there was a stranger there too, someone the child didn’t know at first. Now Cresspahl was raising the child himself.