Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Gesine, your math skills are what pays our bills, never mind fractions!

  – Marie, on the front wall of the classroom in Jerichow there was the line from his book about the German boys who should be as hard as a product made by Krupp, tough as leather, and something something. Even that I didn’t understand. I knew about leather, it wasn’t tough. We used to say “Tore off easy as sheepskin” to mean off like a shot. I had to console myself with being glad I wasn’t a boy. In Gneez, they’d painted in thick brown Gothic script on the wall of the classroom:

  You are the Germany of the future

  and so we want you to be

  the way this Germany of the future

  should and must one day be. —A. H.

  Center-aligned too.

  – So?

  – The thing is, if you have that before your eyes for hours on end, you start thinking about it instead of listening about fractions. Getting your ears boxed didn’t help. I got one slap for having forgotten my math notebook again. That one still makes me mad, and, and, I’ll never forgive Julie Westphal for it. She never thought to explain to me why we weren’t allowed to leave our notebooks home. I had only fear for her, not respect. It wasn’t because she got to come from Jerichow to Gneez only due to the shortage of teachers, not on merit. Cresspahl never slapped me, not even for forgetting things. So I spent the class drilling my pinkie into the cap of my pen and enjoying the smell of dried ink. Back then we had to go to the auditorium a lot, stretch out our right arms, and sing the two national anthems; I didn’t mind, it used up class time. For an essay I didn’t write out what the biology teacher had told us about Felix communis, I wrote what I knew about the Cresspahl cats: what they looked like, how many whiskers they had, their moods, where they put the mice, and “the house-cat has 32 teeth.” F.

  – Stop! I don’t think I like that!

  – I like it.

  – Gesine. Were you punctual at least?

  – Before long some of the teachers would smile when I arrived, partly because of the elaborate excuses I’d worked out thinking it was the polite thing to do. It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t even say the train from Jerichow was late, because Lise Wollenberg was on it too and she’d been on time. I got to Gneez on time exactly once, early in fact. Cresspahl had forgotten to change the clocks for daylight saving time, and I took the train to Gneez with a crowd of sleeping men who got off at Gneez Bridge as though in a dream, for the Arado factory. To me they seemed like a hidden army, and I knew for the rest of my life that they go to work unseen, unknown, and yet governments claim to know them. I was on the rough cobblestones outside the school an hour early and got yelled at anyway, this time by the custodian. I got to the City of Hamburg Hotel on time, where Elise Bock would serve me the daily special (without a ration card). I was on time for the trains back to Jerichow. I was often late getting to the air-raid shelter in the basement under the City of Hamburg Hotel. Since the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 they’d been extra quick with their alarms in Gneez, because of the rocket factory of course, and I ran at personal-best speeds through the streets so that I wouldn’t get shoved into a strange basement, always scared of the Hitler Youth kids behind me, screaming and ordering me to stop. Those kids were dangerous.

  – Gesine, why did you even care whether or not a bomb got you?

  – Out of obedience to Cresspahl. I thought he’d miss me. Forget it, I don’t know. What do you mean with a trick question like that?

  – You were living like a dog, Gesine. Lunch with strangers, no help with homework, getting up at six, you were only ten!

  – That was the life Cresspahl had arranged for me. Had had to arrange for me. And so I didn’t mind. Again I’d been asked to choose. Alexandra Paepcke would have liked to go to the Empress Auguste Viktoria School in Stettin with me, not by herself, because after the big bombardment of Stettin the school had been evacuated to Rügen and turned into a rural boarding school. I would have liked to make Alexandra happy; Alexandra was my favorite of all the kids. Cresspahl read me Hilde’s letter, looked at me, and had me trapped. So I became a commuting student from Jerichow. Lunch with Elise Bock wasn’t as good as at the airfield canteen, but I did like being a guest in a hotel. Cresspahl did ask about my homework, and not in passing, and I could tell he didn’t really like checking over my Latin homework so I’d tell him it was done. That was when he started speaking English with me. To help me. And every morning he sat at the table with the breakfast made, he waited for me, every school day he took me to the station for the 7:08 train, he made my school snack and gave me money too so I could buy a chopped-herring sandwich in Gneez on my own—

  – Gesine, you lived like a dog.

  – I had it good.

  – Gesine, why aren’t there photos of you as a child?

  – Marie, your grandfather was a tradesman! If his wife had lived, she might have picked up photography from Hilde Paepcke. Even the Papenbrocks would bring in a “professional photographist,” Horst Stellmann, and only for special occasions. And Cresspahl didn’t need any pictures to help him remember. He could count on his own recollections. I was the first one to take pictures; I was the first in the family to be afraid of forgetting.

  – The Paepcke photographs. Where are they?

  – They were destroyed when the Paepckes died.

  – Don’t tell me about that.

  – No.

  – Gesine, what were you like as a child?

  – I thought I was fat. I stuck out my lips. That makes you feel fatter. My problems were scraped knees and torn dress pockets; I’d learned how to take care of those on my own. I didn’t look at people in an unfriendly way but I glowered so that they wouldn’t stroke my head and call me poor. I wasn’t poor. I had a secret of my very own, my father.

  – And a D in Latin.

  – An A, actually.

  – Aha, Gesine. All right then.

  March 31, 1968 Sunday

  The light was so clear on the other shore of the Hudson that the buildings stood out sharply, closer, too close. Usually the pollution in the air paints a hazy zone of trees there, as if the river could prevent things from proceeding on that side the way they do in New York.

  When the announcer on station WQXR states his job, he promises: The news—prepared and edited by The New York Times.

  The news as the Times writes and splices it.

  The kind of face Antonín Novotný made when his successor was elected? Stony. Vladislav Hall in Hradčany, in which the election of Ludwík Svoboda took place, had formerly been used for what? Jousting on horseback. Would you care for an impression of Party Secretary Alexander Dubček? He raises his eyebrows in what appears to be a state of perpetual surprise, peers over his horn-rimmed glasses, and reads in a rapid monotone.

  It’s all there: The Polish government shut down eight departments of Warsaw University. The Polish government alleges that Jews formed a ring in the Nazi ghetto, “the Thirteen,” that collaborated with the Gestapo. The Cologne police force has arrested a Cologne police detective, Mr. Theo Lipps, for having played a part in the slaughter of Jews in southern Russia. The American nation now disapproves of President Johnson’s handling of the situation in Vietnam to the tune of sixty-three out of a hundred, if Dr. Gallup is to be believed. Beginning today, you can’t get the Sunday edition of The New York Times for thirty-five cents—it costs fifty, a half-dollar.

  The station announces over and over that it will be carrying President Johnson’s address to the nation tonight, in which he will speak of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Marie refused to believe that the message would be anything but: The war is over. Marie refuses to be sent to bed before she’s heard it. Marie doesn’t like that the Cresspahls don’t own a TV. She would have liked to see the world being put aright with her own eyes.

  It doesn’t start well for Marie. – Good evening, my fellow Americans: the old man says. But tonight Marie, too, wants to be addressed that way, at least this time.

 
The first impressions fit together: The man speaking here is rural, rustic. He seems elderly. Seems a little bit sickly. Speaks awkwardly, sometimes almost stuttering. Here we have someone helpless, abandoned, alone. He can’t do his job well, can’t even avoid making a rustle when he turns his pages.

  Before too many minutes have elapsed, the man has said that tonight he has ordered the nation’s aircraft and naval vessels to make practically no further attacks on North Vietnam. Why wasn’t it this afternoon?

  As far as Marie is concerned a start like that can be followed only by marvelous things. But she can’t imagine what that rest might be.

  If the North Vietnamese government even now does not want to negotiate: the old man threatens: our common resolve is unshakable, our common strength is invincible. It sounds whiny.

  This resolve and strength of yours aren’t the poetic kind, they consist of soldiers and equipment. Now the president’s voice gets stronger. Though he is breathing heavily.

  He will send another 13,500 troops to Vietnam, to join the 525,000 already there, as well as artillery and tank and aircraft and medical units. That will cost an additional $2.5 billion in this fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the next.

  To protect the prosperity of the American people and the strength and stability of the American dollar.

  De Rosny won’t like that. Marie doesn’t like that.

  When the president realizes the volume of his voice has dropped, he overcompensates and makes the speakers rattle. His plaintive tone is meant to tell the idle listener that he is hard at work.

  It is his fervent hope: he says: that North Vietnam will now cease its efforts to achieve a military victory. That sounds like a request. Later whiny.

  He wants to base peace on the 1954 Geneva accords, which his treaty partner, South Vietnam, has neither signed—not the cease-fire, not the commitment to neutrality—nor, of course, followed.

  The president speaks of his thirty-seven years in the political service of our nation; of the state of the nation; of divided factions, parties, regions, religions, races.

  – Whatever that was: Marie says. But you were there when history was being made. Will I ever be again?

  Marie understands as historical only the fact that this man will not run for reelection as president.

  That is how he wants to heal a divided nation. He thanks his listeners for listening. Wishes them good night. And God’s blessing.

  Almost everybody understood it differently. The telephone started ringing as soon as the broadcast was cut off.

  What human grandeur.

  That would never happen with your Communists.

  Robert Kennedy’ll be happy, won’t he.

  Downright philosophical.

  How can you call it a cop-out, have you no respect for an old man!

  McCarthy’ll be happy, won’t he.

  We always hated him, Gesine; as of tonight, we revere him.

  Genius chess move. Genius directing.

  What moral greatness.

  This moralizing, no.

  He’s reached the level of John Kennedy.

  The war can’t be going that badly.

  What they used to call a good paterfamilias.

  Sense of responsibility.

  The greatest personal sacrifice.

  Six months in the White House as a lame duck—you wouldn’t do it.

  We’ve sent him a telegram asking him to take it back.

  He will always be seen as one of our greatest presidents.

  We’ll keep sending telegrams.

  So Fate does exist.

  And not even the telephone system of goddamn New York City is collapsing.

  We’ll remember this president.

  – Gesine: Marie says: sometimes you don’t understand this country, even though we live here.

  – You’re right, I don’t.

  – That scares me.

  – Do you understand it?

  – Not always, when I try to learn it from you. That’s when I’m scared.

  April 1, 1968 Monday

  The New York Times gives the President three big headlines across all eight columns for his sacrifice, as though he’d died. She observed tears in his eyes. And if she must express an opinion, she considers many possibilities: that he was even more determined not to lose at either the convention or the ballot box; that he didn’t entirely mean it and a treaty with North Vietnam could still let him reemerge as the President of Peace; that maybe this move comes too late. What does the Times call the war? “Dreadful, cruel and ugly—the war that nobody wants.”

  In the ČSSR it is now the case that three thousand men and women who were imprisoned, tortured, and ostracized for not being Communists when the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia are able to meet in the heart of Prague. Not only are they allowed to mourn their dead, they are allowed to seek compensation for the living, and with the full consent of the government and the party, too.

  Moscow Radio reported the President’s decision to stop bombing but not his abdication of office. Over there the truth is parceled out like medicine, at Moscow’s discretion.

  At the bottom of the pile of mail is a letter postmarked with the single word “Jerichow,” with very large stamps—two oak trees, each with men holding books—and addressed in unfamiliar handwriting.

  Don’t accept it, Gesine. Return to sender.

  “Jerichow, March 17th inst., Dear Gesine.

  March 1968, for all the headwinds.

  Gesine, you don’t know who this is writing to you. But you know me. You wouldn’t recognize me. I’m old now, fat and pudgy everywhere, with white hair, frayed around the eyes. All that tennis and it didn’t help. Can you picture me now?

  I don’t live where you’re thinking anymore. Not in a house either, just a room on Market Square in Jerichow. I could have gone to Berlin and lived like the maggots, or died in a Schöneberg basement. Now do you know?

  What if you imagine me speaking with a Scottish accent like Mary Hahn’s in Rostock: ‘On the spur of a moment’? The same English Lisbeth had?

  I’m writing you posthaste, since you don’t write me at all, and shouldn’t. They have a watch list in the post office; you probably don’t know what that is. I’m not scared though. If they lock up Gerda Wollenberg for going to Italy with a permit for West Germany—well she should have known better. Why should I be scared of sheep when I’ve got a dog in my pocket? It’s just that I don’t want to be asked why I’m writing you. I think I’m not supposed to.

  Gesine, child, what have you done? Did you write a letter to the Rande municipal council? What was in it? Were you cheeky? You were never cheeky as a child. You didn’t want to take off your dress when I had to sew it back together, and when I pricked you with a pin you stared at me and didn’t say anything. I can still see your look. Those clothes, they were in tatters. You were an easygoing girl, tall for age nine, with a coxcomb of hair on your head, always crooked. It was just that you dealt with grownups as though their being older meant nothing. Except with Cresspahl. And of course Cresspahl’s daughter is what you’ve become.

  I knew Cresspahl too. People say I slept with him. He didn’t want to. There. Now you know who I am.

  If you did write a letter to the authorities in Rande, it must have been hard for the comrades to swallow. It seems you asked about a number, and it probably wasn’t the year of the Founding of the Republic but something from Jansen’s and Swantenius’s Thousand Years. Methfessel won’t say. I knew Methfessel as a boy, and now this boy is thirty-five and won’t answer an old lady, just walks away! Methfessel and the party, that’s the guild and the party, and he was the first who had to take an official interest. Schettlicht’s a schoolteacher in Rande, from Meissen, I’m not going to ask him. Kraczinski is the regional headquarters in Gneez, I’m not going there. Same with the others. Whatever the information was that you asked for, they didn’t like it. They put it on the agenda in the party meeting.

  It’s true. But that was a
bad move, because now they can’t shift all the blame onto one person, they all had to write you and sign it. Methfessel didn’t want to. Went to school with you, after all. Schettlicht dictated the letter, probably wanted to show the comrades from the countryside what you do in his circles when you’re looking the class enemy in the eye.

  What was it, Gesine? Methfessel makes a face as if they’ve marked and branded you a child of imperialism, a warmonger, and whatever else you’re up to in New York! Methfessel says: After getting a letter like that, I wouldn’t show my face in Jerichow again.

  But they want you back. They think you should come to Jerichow, Gesine! All four thousand miles, and then across the border. For a couple of days. And why? I know why, I just don’t believe it.

  They thought: maybe it can all be patched up. Amicably, you understand. They go to see Kliefoth. The watch list in the post office, you understand. They want to know if he’s writing to you.

  You know that already: Kliefoth says.

  So what’s in her letters: they say.

  You know that already: Kliefoth says. They say to tell them again.

  Kliefoth: Do you have a warrant?

  They can’t do much to him, you know. Eighty-two years old. And in good with professors in England. Birmingham, I think.

  Might he help them out in a delicate matter?

  Kliefoth: I’m an old man, the only letters I write these days are about personal matters—you can imagine what he said.

  Kliefoth talks about you like a friend, like an equal, and as if that pleases him very much. Did you know that?

  They came to me too. The rumor about Cresspahl in my bed, right? Sorry, and it’s not true anyway. They wanted to know if I’m writing to you.

  Maybe they think that there’s someone in the post office who forgets about the watch list sometimes.

  They can’t believe that we’re not writing each other, and don’t want to believe it. Because now they have no one who can write to you and say you should forget that letter and they’ll make you a brand-new one!