Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  (I don’t consciously intend any deception toward you, with you.)

  What the observer feels he can stand is not, in any case, the idea of a consciousness—he likes a look, he considers it pure, sees no ulterior motives, finds it ‘beautiful.’ And so he rewards the bearer of that face: considers possession as service.

  It’s the same with me as it is with you, only I have my doubts about what that ‘it’ is.

  Maybe you haven’t drawn up one of your lists of pros and cons for me; maybe you’ve made a map, though. You’re going to have to change it. Because I want the freedom to live like you: not vulnerable, while attentive to others’ vulnerabilities. Untouchable, unreachable by childish dreams of twenty years ago that I’d unlearn if I were smart, or at least not naive. With nothing left for me but what you call waiting.

  And you were exaggerating: I don’t know anything about any cat named Shitface, ‘and the other one was named Peter.’ Marie’s sleeping and I can’t ask her. Have I really told any stories about that?

  My dear D. E., maybe they haven’t hustled you off to Stockholm at all and they’ll forward this to you somewhere else. But if you are in Finland, have dinner for me in Kaskinen and tell me when you get back about the Killainens, who’ve lost a daughter to America.

  The Czechoslovakian Socialist thing, against your predictions, seems to be going smoothly. Since the East Germans have started to see ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ in the ČSSR, and are issuing express warnings against ‘spontaneous democratization’ and calls for ‘sociopolitical changes.’ Let me see it through to the end.

  Live with you. . . . On Scandinavian Airlines too? So that you can come home not to my apartment but to ‘ours’?

  And when you do come back I hope to get a lecture, the seventh, about the defensive nature of your line of work. I recently read something about simulated flight patterns that counterfeit airspace infringements to still-not-yet-enemy radar systems, so that the resulting radio alarm transmissions can reveal something about frequencies? I know you think it’s of purely psychological importance how close a person is to the war machine, and I know my place in this system as well; even so, I do prefer a certain distance, even if it’s just optical.

  When two thieves fight, the honest man gets his cow back.

  This letter is written by someone like our Mecklenburg Hein Fink, so stubborn he was supposed to go to the gallows and didn’t want to.

  D. E., I mean it the way Marie does.

  Sincerely yours.”

  March 15, 1968 Friday

  The deputy defense minister of Czechoslovakia, one General Vladimir Janko, shot and killed himself today. According to one story: in the staff car bringing him in for questioning about his role in the military plot supporting Antonín Novotný. According to the other: in his apartment after he heard that the cabinet had discussed his involvement.

  In Bentre, the city in the Mekong delta destroyed by the Americans “in order to save it” during the Vietcong offensive, the South Vietnamese government has provided not one brick, not one sack of cement for rebuilding. Twenty-five hundred families are homeless. Four hundred and fifty-six civilians were killed, and two hundred additional applications for death certificates are still being checked.

  Cresspahl came back from Wendisch Burg to Jerichow on Sunday evening, in time to make it to his meeting at the Beach Hotel in Rande; he waited there one and a half hours, twice as long as planned and permitted. Afterwards, he decided that maybe his courier hadn’t lived in Berlin after all but was in Lübeck with his radio the whole time, until the English bombing caught him there. The man had remained so vague to him that he couldn’t even quite imagine him dead. What with the man’s forbidding manner, his abrupt dismissiveness as a university graduate, and his constantly roving eyes, Cresspahl could sometimes barely believe he’d heard and memorized all the names and numbers Cresspahl gave him. The party medal on his lapel sometimes seemed crafty, other times creepy. In Rande people seemed to know him, they called him Fritz. Fritz sounded too boyish, too easygoing for this upright fifty-year-old, and too familiar for Cresspahl’s taste as well, but those were the terms they were on, Fritz and Heinrich. Whenever anyone walked past the table, Fritz would be in the middle of a long disquisition on birds or wild animals; maybe he’d been a teacher. Cresspahl would have liked to ask him why he was working for the English; the man avoided such discussions with a formality bordering on arrogance.

  On the following day, March 30, 1942, the Polish POWs from throughout the Jerichow area were taken to the airfield to clear the rubble that had once been the hangar. All the panels of the walls had fallen out, the roof fallen in, but the steel frame was still standing, even if on bent, jaggedly broken stilts at one end, like a dog holding its hurt leg off the ground. The parachute mine had shattered windows in a wide radius, and Cresspahl helped Freese with the glazing. Freese’s stock on hand wasn’t enough for all the windows, and he was disgruntled at having to put up cardboard. The tradesmen barely mentioned what had happened to Lübeck between eleven forty five on Saturday night and three thirty on Sunday morning; Lübeck wasn’t many miles away, and that accidentally dropped bomb could’ve just as easily hit Jerichow itself. In the canteen, Gesine told stories from school in answer to Freese’s questions. Head Teacher Stoffregen had cast it as a villainous trick of the English to choose a brightly lit full-moon night for the attack. – What don’t they teach kids in school nowadays . . . !: Freese said with an embarrassed shake of the head and an inviting look at Cresspahl. But Cresspahl had his head bent over his plate, as the child had for some time.

  That evening, Mayor Tamms came to see Cresspahl. Jansen had resigned, “due to overwork,” and had turned the brickyard over to a Lübeck manufacturer just to pay his bills, and the regional party headquarters was now located in Oskar Tannebaum’s old store. In three weeks, Ed Tamms had cleared out Jansen’s legacy from Town Hall and proceeded to make himself welcome on his own merits. Favors were no longer handed out from Town Hall, permits were issued strictly according to need, and under Tamms no one could convert building repairs into a new building. Now that Ete Helms knew he had someone like Mayor Tamms behind him, it wasn’t so easy to intimidate him with a party badge, and if someone didn’t pay a fine, Tamms was prepared to follow up with a summons. Maybe it hurt, but it was the old way of doing things. The large swastika flag on Town Hall stayed; Tamms flung out his hand when greeting someone; Tamms was considered a “National Socialist true believer” but rarely talked about it. Late thirties, studied national economy at the university, no degree, married, three children. In conversation calm, not slow, no evasions. It bothered some people that he didn’t take the time for the usual Mecklenburg circuitousnesses; still, they felt like he was saving them time, not just sparing his own. He was from Mecklenburg, from “Olden Mochum,” so called for the formerly numerous Jews in Alt-Strelitz. Witticisms like this did not go over well with Tamms: he would give the speaker a cold look, obliging him to hurry if he still wanted to get to his original business. He was more than capable of holding the door open for a visitor.

  On this day, Tamms had confiscated the unused bedrooms in Jerichow—politely, inflexibly, without any talk of community spirit, deaf to complaints. The resistance was halfhearted once he’d spared neither Papenbrock nor Avenarius Kollmorgen, although he had contacted them first and remained in contact afterward. Louise Papenbrock hadn’t wanted to prepare ten rooms at once for total strangers; Tamms had said: The Führer expects from us . . . ; from Jansen it would have sounded like a threat. Tamms simply presented it as a fact, and since Louise secretly saw him as a gentleman, she agreed to set up her laundry room as a first aid station too, in the interests of a public reputation for Papenbrock charitableness, and Tamms thanked her just the way she wanted: surprised, a little touched, and yet for something that of course she would do.

  Tamms came around the back of Cresspahl’s house and met him in the kitchen, where he and the child were not alone but in the co
mpany of two of the French prisoners, who preferred not to eat their cold meals while crouching on their bed frames. It was forbidden to sit at the same table as POWs during their sentence; Tamms didn’t bring up the infringement, and while it’s true he didn’t shake hands with the Frenchmen, he did wish them good day, in their language. The house was full, and Tamms accepted what Cresspahl said even though Cresspahl had offered to show him. By then there were prisoners even in Lisbeth’s old bedroom. During the war a lot of people moved in and out of Cresspahl’s house. Tamms was at the end of a workday; he took a seat once the Frenchmen had taken their leave. Monsieur le Maire didn’t curse the English. He talked about Germans (not: “our national comrades”) looting in the Lübeck ruins or selling food at inflated prices. He talked about people sentenced to death in a sullen accepting tone. Tamms said: It’s war.

  On March 31, a Tuesday, The Lübeck Gazette came to Jerichow again, with three pictures of the destruction of the city. The main headline said: “Rash U.S. Efforts to Secure Position”; the subheadline, “Outcry Against British Desecrators of Culture.”

  On April 2, there was no more Lübeck Gazette—Charles Coleman Publishers had been “coordinated” with the Wullenwever NSDAP Press, which the Nazis had stolen from the Social Democrats. It was called The Lübeck News now, and so sure were they of victory that it was announced for seven issues a week.

  Train tickets to Lübeck required presenting an authorization from the police, the authorities, and the party, and anyone who didn’t buy a return ticket was liable to end up held in the city. Cresspahl was told to look at the news in the paper. The merchants quarter below St. Mary’s Church was almost completely destroyed. The spires of St. Mary’s Church were still standing, burned out. St. Peter’s was a ruin. Two-thirds of the old town was destroyed as the fire spread. The bombed-out people had arrived in Jerichow on Tuesday morning. Louise Papenbrock couldn’t understand that she wouldn’t be able to get them to work, or even talk. It was up to her to make sure the children were washed, the food was prepared, and she liked being so busy, running all around the house; she did it in a pious, lamenting way, and it wasn’t easy to be grateful to her for it.

  On April 5, Wallschläger preached in a church with almost every pew full, about the desecration of Palm Sunday by the unconscionable, heathen-ish English people, sworn to the side of the Antichrist.

  On April 5, the first notice of a mass grave appeared in The Lübeck News. Cresspahl noticed in private the way the survivors explained the events to themselves and their readers:

  We still cannot grasp the misfortune that. . . .

  The British attack, in violation of international law. . . .

  An inexorable fate has snatched from us. . . .

  On the fatal night of March 28–29, fate decreed that. . . .

  In the barbaric British attack. . . .

  In the treacherous enemy attack I too lost. . . .

  In the enemy action. . . .

  In a tragic twist of fate. . . .

  At the airfield, Cresspahl gathered:

  That the antiaircraft defense hadn’t managed to shoot down a single plane. On top of their rage at now having to look on helpless as new waves of bombers continued to swarm through the sky, the teams in Jerichow-North felt angry that The Lübeck News described twelve lost British planes, knew about a captured crew, and called the bunglers in Lübeck heroes.

  That Lübeck itself was to blame. Lübeck had never gotten over its incorporation into Prussia in 1937 and hadn’t wanted to be in the vanguard of the Reich in air defense measures either. With its crowded city center, too, under wooden beam roofs. An untrained populace had run for it, enabling the fires to spread. Among the officers, additional outrage at Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, whose ranting about the desecration of culture had failed to prepare the population for the attacks that were still to come.

  Aggie Brüshaver wrote from Rostock describing high schoolers jealous that Lübeck had come first yet again, not Rostock.

  On April 6, The Lübeck News gave the official death toll at 280. On April 11, the number of victims reported was 295.

  You were responsible, Cresspahl.

  I was responsible for Coventry too.

  And you could stand it?

  It was on November 14, 1940, that they’d attacked Coventry. The Germans. Four hundred fifty bombers. There was a cathedral there too. From November 19 to 22, they flew over Birmingham three times, more than eight hundred people bombed to death there.

  And that offsets it?

  No, Gesine. But the Germans did start it. They made a word out of it: coventrieren, “to coventry a place.” What they do is against international law only when the other side does it.

  You didn’t like the Germans anymore, did you.

  Not those ones.

  Not the ones in Lübeck either.

  Gesine, think about Rostock, think about Wismar. Lübeck could now sleep easy every night. The Red Cross set up its transshipment point there, and no more bombs fell.

  They showed their gratitude, Cresspahl.

  They handed out another one of their honorary citizenships, this time to the head of the Red Cross. What they were celebrating may not have exactly pleased the other cities.

  Or that Churchill went to the mass grave of Birmingham, and Hitler didn’t go to the one in Lübeck.

  That was Churchill’s duty, Gesine.

  What if Tamms had put refugees from Lübeck in your house?

  Our house was under the same sky as Lübeck, Gesine.

  And what if the refugees had lost children in the fire? Or a wife lost a husband?

  I’d already lost a wife, Gesine.

  Now you really are saying one thing offsets another.

  No, Gesine. I was past that. I was somewhere with no comparing, no accounting. No one understood me back then n you dont now.

  I do, Cresspahl.

  Lettit go, Gesine. We’re past that. You don’t need to lie anymore, Gesine.

  March 16, 1968 Saturday

  is the third Saturday of the month, and Countess Seydlitz is throwing a party.

  We met Mrs. Albert Seydlitz as an old woman feeding the pigeons in Riverside Park in the exact spot where the city, by means of a cute little plaque, states that it is forbidden to do so. This was six years ago, across from our building, and Marie stared at her in such bewilderment that the woman started talking to her. But who Countess Seydlitz is—that we do not know. She’s an older lady, gaunt of face like an eighty-year-old, with a student’s center part in her white hair as was the fashion sixty years ago; she has lived in New York for forty years, and tends to call people around thirty “Child.” Her manners aren’t those of a countess—she’s more careless, like someone who’s had to invent her manners herself. She was once a German, is disconcertingly knowledgeable about the estates around Schwerin and may well have come into the world there, but it wasn’t on Jungfernstieg in Schwerin itself. She has ice-gray eyes, thin lips, like a man. Nothing is known about any Count Seydlitz. Some say she was born Emma Borsfeld, others give Erna Bloemdorf as her maiden name. This old lady explained to Marie that the laws of the city don’t apply to everyone, and after we’d taken strict instruction from her several times without once pushing back, the invitation to come by on the third Saturday of every month (except in the summer, which she spends in Cannes) was extended to us as well.

  Countess Seydlitz’s apartment sits on the roof of a building off Riverside Park, in the Eighties. It has two floors, built around a main hall with a skylight, and a roof deck facing west with a panoramic view of New Jersey’s skyscrapers. Whoever it was who consoled her for matrimonial disappointments with a noblewoman’s title also left her money, now long gone. The furniture is a hundred years old, built for a prosperous family in Mecklenburg—Empire, Biedermeier, highly polished pieces upholstered in austere striped patterns—and Countess Seydlitz has maids working for her who make sure no traces of ashes, rings of glasses, or drops of alcohol are left behind afte
r her parties. Both students and professors of the more aesthetic departments are received here, along with art dealers, Communists, employees in diplomatic service, German émigrés; emissaries from the Kennedys are said to have come. Jews, while invited, remain a minority, don’t stay long, and tend not to come back. Countess Seydlitz inevitably addresses her as “Child.” Tonight Countess Seydlitz is wearing an ankle-length dress with gypsy fringes and a chain of brightly colored wood around her gaunt neck: a flower girl amid all the painstaking suits and formal black and white. At nine p.m. the parquet is packed, and the din of conversation bounces back down from the night-dark glass of the skylight like heavy surf. – You know everyone, yes?: Mrs. Albert Seydlitz says, and as usual Mrs. Cresspahl knows barely two guests, one of them only by sight.

  – It’s too stupid, Georgie Brown resigning like that. What are we supposed to do in England now?

  – I don’t know. Give Madame de Gaulle a kiss. . . .

  – Herr Kristlein, this is Norman Podhoretz. Norman, meet Anselm.

  – Just between you and me: Who’s our hostess? I know the Seydlitzes.

  – I couldn’t tell you.

  – Did you come by plane or by boat?

  – How do you like America?

  – Never ever take the subway in New York. These ritual murders, you know. . . .

  – Kennedy’s running. He’ll split the party in two.

  – The Irish are mad though. They should have gone to Fifth Avenue this morning!

  – Quiet.

  A dark-skinned man, addressed by most of the people there as Joseph, though that isn’t his name, is handing out drinks. Rumor has it he’d been a boxer, Countess Seydlitz’s lover, a platoon leader in the marines, a bartender. He tends bar at these parties, holds his taciturn thoughtful face high above his broad shoulders, wears the requisite white jacket like an elegant thing, and does his work with such confident, expert hands that you could probably blindfold him without causing any problems. Guests often try to recruit him for their own events; none has ever succeeded. He answers friendly remarks with a precisely calculated smile, which remains in memory like the Cheshire Cat’s. Ever since Mrs. Cresspahl observed him a bit too thoughtfully once, he has handed her her glass first, even if she’s in the very back of the crowd around his table. His expression as he does so may be mocking, or it may be loyal. Even for the half wasted he mixes the drinks precisely, down to the drop—it won’t be he who neglects the proper forms.