Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – The CIA has a computerized index with every American of African descent. . . .

  – Computers can’t do that.

  – You don’t know Hoover.

  – Anyway, New York will just be transplanted across the Hudson. The camps’ll have the same names they do here: Harlem, Brownsville. . . .

  – I’m writing a book about the CIA.

  – Finally, something new. Not another book about the Kennedys.

  – About how the CIA killed Kennedy.

  – Shares in Swedish steel.

  – Since I’ve started investigating I’ve been followed everywhere I go. . . .

  – You didn’t know? Call MUrray Hill 6-5517.

  – I don’t take planes anymore, or taxis. If there was a subway to Dallas. . . .

  – Who is our hostess, actually? Seydlitz, Albert—?

  – What we did to the Indians is basically what the Germans did to the Jews.

  The New York Times has written de Rosny a letter. De Rosny is one of the bankers who was trying to get President Johnson to promise he will send no more troops to Vietnam, so that the dollar will make up its recent losses. But de Rosny is out of town—he went to Washington yesterday for a meeting with Europe’s leading central bankers. They want the valuation of the dollar against an ounce of gold changed.

  – I’m still on Zurich time.

  – You must be exhausted, Mr. Kristlein.

  – What do you give a man like that?

  – What is a “Bloody Mary,” actually?

  – Tomato juice, vodka, pepper—

  – Pepper? That’s very unhealthy. Damages the kidneys! You mustn’t take another sip!

  – Born Blœrstadt, I think. Related to the Karstadts.

  – No, to the Brenninkmeyers.

  – Oh do come to Vassar too, Mr. Kristlein! We are dying to hear you speak!

  – It is the nightingale, and not the lark: No, Shakespeare didn’t write that, I did.

  – What do you give a man like that?

  The other person Cresspahl knew was Dr. Weiszand. He had managed to express his amazement at encountering her here, in this apotheosis of a rotting society. After she’d listened at the edge of the group around him for a while, she left the apartment, went out onto the street, back home.

  – Socialism is invincible.

  – Do you mean that statistically?

  – I’m not against it. I just think it’s unseemly.

  – These are my students!

  – But you can’t go around with a hat collecting money for the Vietcong. It’s just not done.

  – You should tell our hostess, whoever she is.

  – Take the example of Czechoslovakia. There they’ve fired an interior minister and an attorney general because they didn’t support rehabilitation forcefully enough!

  – You can’t bring back the dead, can you?

  – These Stalinist purges after the end of the war—they really happened, you know.

  – We’re a cozy little family here. Come join us.

  – Your glass needs refilling.

  – Do you want to bet that your Czechoslovakian thing, or whatever it is, doesn’t work out? Should we bet? Right here in front of witnesses?

  – I know him. He always looks exhausted like that.

  – Socialism purifies itself.

  – It used to be that it was only at night you couldn’t walk in Central Park. Did you hear about the forty-seven children who were almost drowned today, in the middle of Central Park?

  – The Soviet Union has other things to worry about.

  – We believe it.

  – That would suit you perfectly—for the Soviet Union to end the war in Vietnam for you!

  – Is this your first time in New York? For God’s sake, don’t ever take the subway!

  – I’d like another Bloody Mary after all.

  – Bravo, Herr Kristlein!

  – New York isn’t what it used to be.

  – Take Le Pavillon.

  – Take Manny Wolf’s Steakhouse.

  – Take the Waldorf restaurant.

  It couldn’t be helped, Gesine.

  Couldn’t be helped.

  If you’re going to go at all, why do you stick by the walls the whole time?

  So I can see better.

  You should open your mouth, Gesine!

  March 17, 1968 Sunday

  President Johnson has decided against the bankers. True, he isn’t sending to Vietnam the 206,000 soldiers that his general, Westmoreland, requested, but still, he’s sending 35,000 or 50,000.

  In Prague, for the first time since the Communists seized power, former soldiers who served in the Spanish Civil War or on the Allies’ side have been allowed to gather in public. For twenty years, what had mattered about them was not their service against the Fascists but the fact that as a result they had international connections.

  In Poland, the Communist Party explained itself to the workers thusly: They, the party, had “very often” made “difficult and unpopular decisions,” but “we are not a party for the weak.” And is it conceivable that students decide of their own accord to demonstrate in Poland? Not for the party, which has decided there must be Jews lurking behind it, set on handing Poland over to West Germany and Israel.

  When Alexander Paepcke traveled, he always prepared for his trip. He sought out the shortest travel time and best connections, and from the moment they went out the front door, his family had to follow no timetable but his. When he went to Fischland, in the wet June of 1942, the train to Stralsund didn’t follow Alexander’s timetable—it arrived there later than the train to Ribnitz could wait. Alexander was miffed at the two-hour delay. By that point he was serving the war effort in the civilian management of the occupied French territories, but he didn’t recognize the war in the form of a late train, because the train that had done this to him was a German one.

  That was why the Cresspahl child spent such a long time in the Ribnitz train station, standing under the poster advertising Schachenmayr Wool, refusing to believe that Alexander could leave her in the lurch like this. She roused herself to look for the way to the harbor almost too late. They were just pulling up the gangplank on the Fischland steamboat ferry. The boat was sitting there like a fat black duck in a hurry. She sat down facing the stern. Her father had sent her away even though the school year wasn’t over in Mecklenburg. Behind the steamship there was still the Ribnitz church tower, then that of Körkwitz, then the Neuhaus dune. She might never find Jerichow again.

  She spent half the afternoon standing in the Althagen harbor, a nine-year-old child in a dress that was too long for her and had been washed too many times, her cockscomb of hair awry. She had no ticket for the ferry or train back. Her pocket money for the trip had almost all gone to the ferry ride here. She had nothing to prove that she was from Jerichow. She was afraid she might not be able to find the Paepcke summer house after three years. She stood on the right side of the bay, which even then was a little overgrown with reeds. The ship’s propeller had torn up plants in the water.

  Then Paepcke arrived on the steamer bringing workers back from Ribnitz. He was decisive and happy now. Straslund had turned out to be a good place for toy stores; he’d bought presents. He was back in Mecklenburg, not pissing on the corner in Stettin. Paepcke was wearing white pants, a white hat. He thought the child Gesine must be consoled because he’d apologized to her with a present, but the pocketknife he gave her was exactly like the one she had already, except for one little scratch.

  Paepcke asked about Jerichow, about Methfessel, about Gesine’s French, about Aggie Brüshaver. And the Brüshaver kids, with their mellifluous names: Martin and Mathias and Marlene Dietrich. Gesine said: They’re dead.

  Alexander didn’t understand. How could such little children suddenly be dead!

  They had lived in Rostock, on the street alongside St. Jakobi Church. On April 25, when the Royal Air Force came to Rostock, Aggie had night duty at the hospital and her
children were home alone when they burned to death.

  Paepcke, somewhat embarrassed, made Gesine promise not to tell his children. She didn’t understand why not. They hadn’t even known Marlene.

  Village Road was shady. When light came through the courtyard entrances, it was white. The houses were sheltered from the wind by high hedgerows. When the two village boys with their wheelbarrows stopped by a gap in the thick bushes, Gesine recognized the house. It was a long brick cottage under a cane roof, the west wall painted white and then yellow. There was a semicircular dormer window in the roof (not two). The way in went down from the hedge so steeply, onto a floor lower than the doorstep, that you felt like you were sliding into the house.

  The garden was totally overgrown. Painstakingly laid out, with one terrace for flowers and another, lower one for vegetables, it was now a tangle of grass, weeds, and surviving flowers surrounded by bushes. A gate opening onto a likewise surrounded field led east to the lagoon; the Maypole was still intact. When three children grabbed the ropes dangling from the top and started running, they would soon be flying in a circle high above the bushes. That was when the vacation truly started: when all the children came down safe, none banging into the iron pole.

  The rooms had names. Hilde and Alexander slept upstairs, in the Lagoon Room. The Prince Room, the great-uncle’s domain, stayed locked. The children’s beds were in the Atteljé. When they woke up, a regular dull sound could be heard through the windows—it came from the coastal artillery batteries, shooting down at the sea from the Shoreline Cliff for practice. Alexander’s voice rang through the house. He cursed the military for being here too, the dirty pigs.

  A great-uncle of Alexander’s had bought the house back around 1902, from a painter who had added a studio onto the cottage. There was the mandatory tiled kitchen in the basement, and a dumbwaiter, and a pump for the kitchen. But the Paepckes preferred to get their water from the well in the yard with a rope and bucket. I’ve never seen such clear water since.

  From the East Room upstairs, you could look sharply down at the lagoon, white in the morning light, and at the grasslands that spent weeks on end underwater. The water came up to your knees. It was nice walking there, for the splashing feeling under your feet, and also spooky, because it was like the marshes in books, the bogs, the moors. There were often fishing boats, local Zeesenboote, floating motionless out near the thin horizon, without their brown sails after their night’s labors.

  To the west, where the sea was, the land rose sharply. Even today, when a path climbs sharply I expect to find the Baltic that the child of that time would suddenly be looking down on.

  A west wind blew in our faces, as usual. To the left of the path were the Nagels’ fields; to the right was a single house, bundled up tight against the sea with thorny brambles. This house had a sundial. Since the ram had slept in this first morning, or was busy somewhere else, we got to the edge of the cliffs unchallenged and clambered down to the water. The ground broke off under our feet. By then Hilde was far behind, we couldn’t hear her calling because of the constant wind blowing in from the sea. We were reprimanded severely, first because Hilde had been scared and second because we’d damaged the Shoreline Cliff. “Dumb as a vacationer!” was a phrase that summer, and so it has long remained. The swallows dug enough holes in the crumbly shoreline cliffs.

  Paepcke was determined to be on vacation. No newspapers. Forget the radio! He swam way out and when he came back, puffing with pleasure, Hilde said his name several times, accusingly, as though she had only just now started calling it. Alexander taught the children how to swim, partly by convincing them that they already knew. He said there was a “sandbank” ten feet out from the beach, and once he got the children that far they would keep swimming after him.

  The beach was dotted with canopied wicker beach chairs. It was quiet, for not many of the Althagen cottagers rented out, plus Althagen was seen as a village while Ahrenshoop, the next town over, in Pomerian, in Prussia, was a “resort.” Althagen had one lone hotel, named after the Baltic, which was just across the street from it. It spelled its name with a circumflex accent on the “o,” and Paepcke wanted to explain that to Gesine, but unfortunately she already knew all about it from “her” Frenchmen in Jerichow, so he had to think up something else on the spot for the other children so that their feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  By then yet another child had joined them: Klaus Niebuhr, from Friedenau in Berlin. He was very proud of having come all this away (“into the flat country”) alone, but Eberhardt Junior, who’d spent too long with three girls, had adopted a new worldview—rather than taking the male side, he pointed out that Gesine had come by herself too. Klaus the man was hurt, and at being outstripped by a girl too, but now at last she had the chance to give away the pocketknife.

  Alexander could have sat with his buddies in the Baltic Hôtel, but they didn’t like the beer there. At the Kurhaus spa resort in Ahrenshoop, the clientele was too high-society. Paepcke saw himself as society, high too. He sometimes went to the Sea Mark with Reynard Fox, but expressed his suspicion of the place by calling it Setzeichen, “Placemat Mark,” instead of Seezeichen. Their favorite establishment was Malchen Saatmann’s pastry shop. A place for locals in the winter, it was an outdoor café in the summer. Malchen was a tidy woman, solid, brisk; I can’t remember a thing about her face and would recognize her at once. Malchen never said one word too many, not even to children, but even children felt they were being treated fairly.

  Nowhere did the cooking smell as good as it did at Malchen Saatmann’s. Fischland was poor in smells—there’s the smell of salt water, of fish, of rotting seaweed. After the war, I never found the old smell again at Malchen Saatmann’s. The children’s favorite thing to buy were Schnecken, the snail-shell-shaped morning buns. When they were sent to get bread after hours, they were allowed to walk in through the gate in the back part of the building. It was vacation, with special events every day.

  When it rained, Alexander played with “his” children the game known in German as Now Don’t Get Mad, but he called it Pakesi, which was how Cresspahl had brought it from London, named after the Hindi word for twenty-five, pachisi, and because it was something British it was played with its own special rules: that two pieces of the same color could be on the same space, forming a blockade; that a piece on any color’s exit space is safe (“Home Rule”); that three sixes in a row is too much luck and means a trip back to Start. Alexandra couldn’t stand seeing her pieces sent back to Start: the flush shot through her whole face, and then she’d have that to be embarrassed about too. No one busy losing would look too closely at why their luck suddenly took a turn for the better. But Paepcke’s good nature was harder to keep up; by the end he’d be staring, wordless and angry, at his lost game—he’d become Someone Who Got Mad.

  The house hadn’t stayed as regal as Alexander’s great-uncle had planned it to be, with antique furniture and bare walls. Alexander had hauled in discarded pieces from his earlier households, half broken, with torn upholstery—perfect for children. There were flowers in every room. A child could be alone in any room. There, on a wobbly sofa with gently rearing sidearms, I read my way into the Orient, strode down marble steps into the water where huge fish had moored, and was Harun al-Rashid.

  Alexander had spent his vacations in Althagen since he was six years old, spoke Fischland Plattdeutsch like a Fischländer, and was on a first-name basis with everyone in the village—now everyone insisted that his children not act like foreigners. The villager who eventually married her captain stood outside her door and brought us in to her dinner. Where the hallway widened she had her kitchen, the old kind, with a stone oven on which things in many pots were sizzling: people were going in and out, taking a sip of water from the bucket with the ladle, sitting down to eat, being served a drink, only dropping by to have a word. She wasn’t offended when we didn’t want the bacon, she spread tea sausage on bread for us, and then, when there was still a look of suspicion
on our faces, she sent us home with the sandwiches and Alexander took pity on us and ate them all. It had put a dent in his Mecklenburg reputation, though.

  In the evenings, coming back from the sea, we would run into children our age herding cows home. Nights on Fischland were too harsh for milk cows. Alexandra stared wide-eyed at Inge Niemann, whose cows were walking so calmly ahead of her stick, and Paepcke asked Inge to let his child have the cow and the stick for a bit. He was forgetful that evening and kept walking. All the other cows kept walking too, while Alexandra’s stayed where she was. She took the liberty, too, of nibbling a little from the side of the road. Alexandra looked at me but I didn’t want to suggest that she hit the animal. In desperation, Alexandra gave the beast a friendly shove, and the cow looked back in amazement, straight into our eyes. Alexander, having had a moment while walking when he remembered the children after all, saved us from this unfortunate situation.

  And never to bed bareheaded.

  Be wise then, children, while you may,

  For swiftly time is flying.

  The thoughtless man, who laughs to-day,

  To-morrow will be dying.

  Cresspahl, who’d said he would not be coming, came in late July. Alexander looked forward to a whole week’s evenings and said: Y’r a good man, Hinrich!

  One time, Paepcke did have something he needed to take care of at the post office in Ahrenshoop, so he took a couple of his children with him and went for a walk on the embankment by the lagoon, past the Dornenhaus, to the windmill that’s not there anymore, to the old fort. On Ahrenshoop Street he saw Cresspahl walking with a man one had no choice but to classify as a spa-resort type, high-society. He looked like Berlin, civil service, party insignia. Paepcke noticed the party lapel pin when he caught up to them, and he heard that Cresspahl was in a hurry somewhere with the other man. “Fritz,” Cresspahl called him. Cresspahl arrived at the post office right after Paepcke. – ’E took me fer a vacationer: he said, without being asked, and Paepcke decided to believe him. But it didn’t seem like Cresspahl, letting a stranger take him for a spa visitor and then going for a walk with him too, in conversation, hands comfortably clasped behind his back.