Anniversaries
Page 95
Today Mrs. Cresspahl was where the men of America live.
It was one of the bars D. E. calls “his,” this one on Third Avenue, Irish by name and by nature, and a sign had recently been hung in the window expressly inviting ladies to visit the establishment. It was hanging on a dainty little chain, written in black and gold, elegant and old-fashioned, and it means that business from male clients tails off at around seven o’clock and has to be pepped up by admitting prostitutes; unaccompanied women are welcome as well. That’s why D. E. said, the moment we sat down: You know my wife, Wes.
Can you forgive my letter to Stockholm, D. E.?
Let’s not talk about it, Gesine.
It was self-defense, but I was just lashing out blind.
All is forgiven. Let’s pretend we’re married for Wes.
– What a pleasure Professor to meet your wife as well congratulations:
Wes said in one breath, carelessly, without even bothering to look at her. He is the boss of two bartenders behind the forty-foot bar, the man of the house with a householder’s rights, but he does all the work himself—serves the ten or more customers sitting in front of him, each one waiting for his very own personal conversation with Wes. His diplomatic talents also extend to pouring and refilling the right drink for his silent customers, unasked; never failing to hear a goodbye; and, lastly, keeping spaces free for friends who are stuck in another zone with strangers until Wes summons them over with a significantly raised finger. In addition, he is a private bank—cashing customers’ checks, guaranteeing personal loans, holding on to money won in bets, all without a fee. Wes is a registration office who knows that a missing person is staying in Galway or Lisbon and who gives or withholds information following his own unerring judgment, just as he imperturbably says into the telephone perpetually shrieking for attention: Your husband’s not here—but not before having held out the receiver to the hunted spouse and waiting for his desperate shake of the head. Once Wes has walked his beat between the customers and the seventy bottles twice, he has woven a thick net of handshakes, looks, and conversations. Today, he scrutinized the lady next to D. E., sometimes openly, before finally deciding to assume that the professor wasn’t pulling his leg.
Wes is a big strong man of around fifty with an almost expressionless firm mouth and gray eyes. All his looks are silent examinations, and the secret to his enormous revenue might be that a man may want to lose his wife’s respect but doesn’t want to lose Wes’s. Wes doesn’t show much of his face, keeping his eyes on his work with the glasses, bottles, strainers, sinks, and when he has to combine two substances by shaking, he stands off to the side so that he can be seen in profile, a serious man carrying out a fixed ritual. His hair is in tight curls, like Cresspahl’s, only strawberry blond instead of gray, and thanks to his distant way of holding his head, his fixated listening, the image of my father in memory has now lost a little bit more of its sharpness.
Wes filled D. E.’s glass and solemnly informed him, so as to do what must be done: I like your wife, Ericksen. Looked at the lady out of the corner of his eye, to see if she was insulted or anything, and accepted, serious and satisfied, D. E.’s answer: So do I, Wes.
And now D. E. got his very own personal conversation with Wes for the evening. During it, Wes prepared drinks for other people, took one customer’s money, put coins back down on the bar in front of him, wiped the counter, stacked glasses in an artful construction next to the cash register, but it was D. E.’s moment and the other customers pretended they weren’t listening.
– I like your wife, Ericksen.
– So do I, Wes.
– The Aer Lingus thing is on again.
– I could use a ticket in August. For one giant, same as usual?
– One giant, no extra charge. Not that I want you to think I don’t like your wife.
– You know what you’re doing, and thinking, and feeling.
– It’s a free country.
– Once you pay for it. See you later, alligator.
– In a while, crocodile.
D. E. didn’t talk much. He greeted people he knew with a measured raise of his glass, looked around, patiently took auricular confession from a drunk next to him, made sure with occasional glances that I was appreciating his enjoyment, and invited me to enjoy myself too.
In this home away from home, men and women aren’t judged by the color of their skin. If someone doesn’t bother the people next to him, if he’s looking for a little relaxation from the drink and not to get wasted, has money to pay with and maybe a little inside information about the horse races too—that’s enough. In that case he is an ordinary guy, and welcome. Here a man’s a man: a white rowdy will be thrown out onto the street while a calm black devotee of firewater will be addressed respectfully as: Sir.
One of the men thought I was one of the women here to earn money.
– Are you a stewardess, or something? he said. – I mean, because of that, that winged wheel on your pack of cigarettes. That was why, I thought: he said, then caught Wes’s disgusted headshake, felt bitterly reprimanded, took his money, and tamely departed.
The men here treat each other with consideration, thoughtfully, even affectionately. One is having problems with his eyeglasses. Can’t see well. Wes goes over and hands him a napkin. Makes a wiping movement of the hand. He doesn’t want to get involved in another man’s private business, of course. The man wipes his glasses, gratefully. Gives the napkin back, exhaling. If it weren’t for you, Wes.
Another customer has just gotten a refill of his Canadian stuff. There’s a bottle of soda water next to his glass. He could pour it in himself. – Mix it? Wes says. He who is heavy laden should be spared at least that labor.
One fat little double-chinned ventriloquist’s dummy answers the question of how it’s going with: I feel like I’m going nuts. Wes answers, carefully tipping the full measuring glass over the rocks: You look that way too. This is what the sad fat man wanted. At least there’s one person in the world who understands him. He repeats: I’m bout ready for the funny farm, that place in Nutville where they grind down all the rough edges. Now he really does look like a hurt child, overwhelmed, about to start crying. Wes has just leaned forward with a sympathetic look on his face but now he barks at him, callous and rational: Be sure to leave me your address, then, in case I ever want to visit. Because Wes has things to do: now he has to extricate a tiny onion from a narrow jar with the point of a little knife (– Oh just use your fingers: says the customer, who couldn’t care less); now he suddenly has to pick up an ice cube and throw it bull’s-eye into the cash register of the western zone twenty feet away, and George is astounded, and the customers entertained; Wes is busy. Someone has knocked over a soda bottle by accident. Wes picks up the half-full bottle, holds it high above the bar, and calmly pours the rest out. – Is that how you wanted it? Now the sad little man feels better. – You know what, maybe I’ll get a round-trip ticket after all: he says.
Quiet conversations, relaxed. Not a word about the war. A warm bustling night on the street outside the windows. As if we were at peace.
I come here every so often to enjoy myself, Gesine. You should try it sometime.
I am trying. I am trying.
March 24, 1968 Sunday
The East German Communists have twice refused an invitation from Prague, as though that would help soothe their concerns that democratization in Czechoslovakia might play into the hands of West German capitalism. Alexander Dubček didn’t act like a stubborn child; he boarded a train to Dresden and tried to explain things to his comrades. They have already reached the point of confiscating newspapers from their Socialist brotherland.
In the fall of 1942,
the von Bobziens near Jerichow no longer had any trouble keeping unauthorized walkers out of the Countess Woods. Two men had hanged themselves on trees there, with money in their pockets.
the Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called the wartime Winter Relief effort
a “unique ledger of German Socialism,” but The Lübeck News was full of an unusual number of for-sale and trade-wanted ads. Böhnhase the tobacconist was picked up in Jerichow and taken in because he’d sold products for payment in kind. Seven years prison.
almost every villa behind the Rande embankment was expropriated, confiscated, a third of them rebuilt. “Air force residential needs war-critical.” Now the officers were trying to burn in their stoves the driftwood they had so zealously collected on the beach that summer. The wood stank, refused to burn, went smokily out. The officers, who prided themselves on their country know-how, had neglected to let the rain wash the salt out of the wood.
The Reich governor of Mecklenburg, in a public proclamation, warned against spreading rumors about events that took place during the bombardment of “a” Mecklenburg city. And so the carousel of stories about looting and corpse-robbing went around faster.
Leslie Danzmann was now living in one of the villas on the Rande embankment, as a “housekeeper.” She was left almost completely alone, since the owner had his own phone to attend to in the Air Force Research Office in Berlin and traveled to the Mecklenburg Baltic coast only now and then, on weekends. Cresspahl was a guest at the villa on these occasions, and not a guest of Leslie Danzmann’s. He brought the child along, and Danzmann darned the child’s clothes back into shape while Cresspahl sat and drank with her employer, Fritz, in the study. She saw nothing but the bottles left late at night after the meetings were over.
The serial novel in The Lübeck News was called G.P.U., after the Soviet secret police—
Grauen (horror)
Panik (panic)
Untergang (downfall)—
and the double eagle atop of the front page was now even more stylized, perched to the left of the lettering in its new blocky typeface, and carrying the same shield but now it bore a swastika in place of the old coat of arms.
Leslie Danzmann’s Fritz might be unassailable in Berlin, but he couldn’t help her in Mecklenburg. Since she had a high-school diploma she was conscripted into the Gneez Labor Office, not the munitions factory. It took almost an hour to get from the Baltic to Gneez, along with the women from the countryside working in the arms industry. And they still had children, the house, and the barn to take care of at night after work; she could take her shoes off and put her feet up. Yet this was the most lethargic and exhausted period of her life. She was not used to working.
The newsreels were offering a new service. If someone recognized their fallen son in the reports from the front, they could order a still, as perhaps the last photograph of the soldier in question. All they had to do was precisely describe the scene from the film, or even the scenes before and after it. This service applied only for the dead. Horst Papenbrock, fallen near Stalingrad, had not been seen in any newsreels.
His brother, Robert, was stationed in the Soviet Union as a so-called Sonderführer, a “special unit commander.” From there he’d sent a girl to the Papenbrocks—twenty-two, blond, and tall—for his parents to look after for him in Jerichow. Louise treated her like a maid. (“On August 12, the birthday of the mother of our Führer, the Medal of German Mothers will be bestowed.” That was how Edith had been forced to get married. Edith was gone from the Papenbrock house.) The Russian girl was named Slata. She spoke enough German to do the shopping in Jerichow. She didn’t act like a prisoner of war, and no one could tell what the Papenbrocks were up to this time, so people were polite to her, even friendly. The annoying thing was that she accepted this as her due.
Cresspahl was approached on the subject of this future Russian sister-in-law. She reminded him of Hilde Paepcke, and not only because she wore her hair in a head scarf the same way, albeit a white one, and he tried to speak in her favor. But more often he talked about how a Sonderführer might mean this or it might mean that, but if you went by the Dutch word, zonder, it meant just: “without” or: “ain’t nothin.”
On Monday, November 2, 1942, the clocks had to be turned back an hour.
Dr. Kliefoth was waylaid while walking to the Jerichow train station. District Leader Swantenius found it improper that a certain someone was not in the party and that in the end it was he, Swantenius, who would be held responsible. The vague and scanty news from Stalingrad was depressing him, and he mentioned the eastern front reproachfully.
What, you were on the eastern front?
It’s just that I no longer have a full set of teeth in my head, otherwise I’d be doing my bit in Italy now.
Hmm. All right then. Well if someone like you doesn’t want to join the party.
No time.
All we’ve got joining the party are the riffraff.
In those days, in the place for “War Decorations” on questionnaires, Kliefoth would write: Iron Cross 1st Cl. & 2nd Cl., WWI; Iron Cross 1st Cl. & 2nd Cl., WWII; “etc.,” because he’d run out of space. “The things you pick up in two wars.”
Leslie Danzmann in the Gneez Labor Office was supposed to advise the foreign forced-labor women, and she was scared of the Black Deffil. This “Black Devil” was a Yugoslavian woman who owed her nickname to her wild dark eyes and her dangerously insistent criticisms of the Mecklenburgers. The men were more afraid of her than the women. This Dunya didn’t see why she had to live abroad and work there too. She stayed in a job for four weeks, sometimes six, but didn’t let anyone talk sharply to her or restrict what she ate, and if a request was expressed to her as an order, she would dash whatever she was holding onto the floor. Then Leslie would have to find her a new position, and she was good-natured enough to be scared of Dunya’s idle threats to have her friends beat Leslie up. She had such thoroughgoing contempt for the Germans that she didn’t even try to learn their language.
Leslie Danzmann occasionally managed to get the head of the Labor Office to give her travel permits, not filled out. She wondered why Cresspahl wanted to travel by train on so many weekends. Still, Leslie liked to do her friends favors.
In the death notices from the front it didn’t always say that a young man “gave his life in faithful performance of his duty to the Führer and the Reich”; sometimes it was that he lost it, or at least “found a hero’s death in the highest fulfillment of a soldier’s duty”—found it, like something he was looking for.
The air force had had Cresspahl build a new workshop at the airfield, pitiful compared to the one he had lost but enough to assemble the “dispatch boxes” from knotless pine and the beechwood ammo boxes, 25 mm thick minimum. Since Cresspahl had the stamp of the airfield commander on his applications, the Hamburg-Altona district guild office occasionally granted him an iron permit. Iron permits authorized the bearer to order frames for machines. By that point a lot of the carpenters in Gneez had to make do with wooden frames. When he could do it without attracting attention, Cresspahl would pass along an iron permit to Böttcher. He had gotten a metal saw for making box and case linings and a disk sander.
The head of the Gneez Gestapo branch, he doesn’t need a name, claimed to have gotten home one night and found his wife murdered with an ax, and he started a panicky investigation—targeting himself, Herbert Vick thought. Sergeant Vick, of the criminal police (not the Gestapo), drove around the Gneez countryside questioning people in his menacing way, in Jerichow too. (“National Socialism must remain pure!”) Had anyone seen a girl at around two a.m. on the night of the crime, standing in the alley, wailing? Had anyone seen, through a gap in the curtain (charges already being prepared for violating the blackout law), two men and a lady talking at the window table in Café Heidebrecht? Did anyone have any information about the motorcycle found totaled the next morning outside the police station? Who had invited a member of the air force into a car at the approach of a police patrol and driven him off without turning on the headlights? Here Herbert Vick did manage to purify his National Socialism. The head of the Gneez Gestapo branch shot himself in the head two and a half years earlier than his colleagues.
Article One of the Mecklenburg Constitut
ion used to go like this: Everythin stays the way it is.
March 25, 1968 Monday
How many more times.
What the member nations of the Warsaw Pact expressed to one another in Dresden was their shared belief that the proletariat and the working people of Czechoslovakia “would ensure further progress of Socialist construction in the country.”
How many more times will hope lay foundations of strictly rational stone before erecting with irrational walls the room where disappointment will later live so comfortably. Why doesn’t repetition make it fireproof.
Children like repetition, precisely because it’s not perfect. The new is not yet the same.
They are urgently expected, and they desperately want, to learn sameness: how to manage a spoon, a face, a life, the way grown-ups do, who laugh at the child’s deviations, which promise the existence of possibilities besides repetition.
The woman who puts the kettle on the stove in the morning is Papenbrock’s daughter, not me. The person straightening up an apartment in New York at night is Cresspahl from thirty years past, and not him either but the discipline of grandfathers across the centuries, and not them either but the social arrangements forced upon them.
Deviations feel refreshing, almost precious: someone’s apparent independence or idiosyncrasy; the gentle shock when an elevator in Copenhagen needs to be operated differently than the elevators in New York; the first year in a foreign language.
March 25, 1968, is a day in spring—in spring since 1938.
Cresspahl, in a quotation of his English employers, had his child do things: in less than no time! Marie is told, with the help of a quotation from British employers: You’ve done this, forgotten that, in less than no time. And the norm is repeated.