Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  There were 746 murders in New York City last year, most on weekends, the fewest on Wednesdays. The most common reasons were domestic disputes and insulting comments. Always be polite!

  If de Rosny doesn’t want it to happen then there’s no Thursday afternoon, Professor Kreslil won’t get his check, and Employee Cresspahl is invited out to a ball game at Shea Stadium. The employee’s child’s presence is requested as well. De Rosny wants to be seen in female company.

  It’s a work occasion, because on Long Island, halfway onto Grand Central Parkway, de Rosny tells his driver that during the game he needs to go fetch a deity named Rutherford from the Regency Hotel and bring him for a meeting in the stadium. Arthur swallows his anticipation and affably replies: The things I won’t do for you, Chief. De Rosny can’t stand being around anyone not in a good mood—it might dampen his own—so he says: I’ll make it up to you with box seats in June, just for you, all right, Arthur? Arthur knows that now he has to give a deep sigh and say, as though dismissing the whole thing: That’s all right, sir.

  De Rosny passes the time by inventing a dialogue between a teaching robot and a student, with Marie. Clearly he’s not interested in buying Xerox after all; he’s getting to know computers. As the car drives up to the stadium, a giant enormous three-layer bowl with an eighth of it cut out, de Rosny finishes the game by saying as the robot, in a slow robotic voice: You did re-al good.

  And Marie says, once again in the role of the courted lady, not just the robot’s schoolchild: You mean “well,” don’t you? and they are proud together at having made and corrected a mistake together. He lets Marie walk in ahead of him.

  The ushers give him the royal treatment and pull cloths from their back pockets to wipe down the yellow box seats one more time for his benefit. Each compartment is labeled with a plastic sign bearing the name of the season ticketholder. Here is that of the only lord and master above de Rosny—the bank president himself—and de Rosny settles, makes his guests comfortable with affable, careless gestures. They have to change seats twice, so that they’ll be sure to think their desires are being catered to, and to let him have his fun.

  The flag is still at half-mast.

  The crowd is excited, yelling, hooting, celebrating, in their mighty rows of seats, the top ones light green, middle ones bluish, the lowest ones orange. Fifty thousand people want to have a good time.

  Finally the words of the national anthem are projected on the scoreboard. Enthusiastic screams at the end. This anthem ends with a question mark.

  De Rosny gives appreciative explanations: That ball goes ninety-five miles an hour. If it hits you, you can’t complain, Marie! Read your ticket.

  Most of the players walk like they’ve shit in their pants. Sometimes one of them charges a catcher like a tank gone berserk. When someone’s injured, the music immediately changes to something more soothing.

  – It’s a gentleman’s game! No violence!: de Rosny shouts excitedly. I guess it looked different from where he was sitting.

  Every two minutes, airplanes take off from LaGuardia, thundering. When it’s quiet, sellers cry: Peanuts here! Getcher beer here!

  De Rosny enjoys not only the game but the opportunity to explain it to Marie. She knows the rules of baseball; she listens to him with wide, obedient eyes, following his pointing finger with them. He describes the home run, where the hitter can run around all the bases at once. De Rosny twirls his finger, brings out various comparisons with ballet too.

  What, we don’t know why there’s a green shield hanging behind the flag? It’s so the catcher isn’t blinded by the sun when he looks at the pitcher.

  Then, as he talks about Willie Mays, de Rosny is transformed from a man of the world into a little boy staring intently straight ahead. He’s watched Mays since he was a child, his heart pounding every time. At nineteen, Willie Mays still used to go back to Harlem after the game. The self-same man, Willie himself, who wrapped in holy sanctity is swinging his bat down there on the diamond! Used to play ball with the Harlem kids, with a broomstick. Stickball.

  Where the boss lives they don’t know that radical Negroes see Willie Mays as a traitor. He refused to support the black athletes’ boycott of the Olympic Games.

  De Rosny has never spoken to Willie, only seen him from up close, and yet he talks about him like a friend, as if he shares his suffering, and always looks up to him, because in baseball de Rosny can’t do what Willie Mays is famous for. So he says Willie has grown quieter now, but also sadder. A word that doesn’t exist in the world encompassed by de Rosny’s orders, but does applies to the black idol with the bat.

  After hinting at Willie’s somber marital history, de Rosny decides something. It brings in no profit, it betrays certain feelings, and yet it shall be. Firmly, defiantly, de Rosny promises his distant, bat-wielding, furiously running friend: Someday, when he can’t do it anymore . . . he’ll have a job waiting for him in our San Francisco branch!

  The airlines tirelessly stamp their logos onto the minds of the people suffering from the noise, especially TWA and Braniff with its Easter egg colors. Next to the 727s, the lower-flying propeller planes seem antiquated.

  In the outfield, Willie catches balls with his hands in front of his belly, that’s his trademark: de Rosny earnestly explains to Marie, and she registers the information with a nod. Eager to learn. Can’t she see that this soul mate of de Rosny’s has just caught a ball with his hands much higher? Is all that counts of reality what de Rosny wants?

  – Line! Someone’s trying to throw across the line and can’t do it. – That happens once in fifty years! You’re getting everything today.

  The batter comes up to the plate; the man on third can steal home. Mrs. Cresspahl is not the only person who wishes she weren’t here. Two girls are sitting in front holding up one or another of their homemade signs, listlessly.

  Something historic transpires. The coaches substitutes a pitcher, not trusting him with the bases loaded. The new pitcher is ceremoniously driven up to the plate in an open car, his cape taken from him like a gladiator.

  At the top of the seventh inning, people stand for their team, de Rosny for the San Francisco Giants, so Mrs. Cresspahl for San Francisco too, not knowing why. Baseball with the boss. People all around them are still sitting.

  – Bring ’em all home, Willie!

  Near the end of the seventh inning, the fans of New York stand up. About thirty thousand of them, they’re not surrounded by people still sitting, and de Rosny raises his chin slightly.

  Then Arthur arrives with the deity, Rutherford, an upright white-haired old man without a glance to spare for the field. Golfer. The people sitting in this stadium don’t read the financial section of The New York Times and fail to realize that a prince in the kingdom of the dollar—practically an archduke—is tarrying among them. The two men withdraw into an empty box toward the back, don’t even look up at the resplendent diamond. Both put on glasses and read from little slips of paper for about twenty minutes. De Rosny raises his arm and Arthur is ordered to take the high personage to catch his flight to LA. But the discussion was apparently satisfactory, because now de Rosny doesn’t want to watch the rest of the game, he’s happy to hear it over the radio in the taxi. The whole thing was very profitable, for Arthur gets promised a second time that he can bring his whole family to the bank’s baseball box “sometime this summer.”

  – Wasn’t that a great afternoon, Mrs. Cresspahl?: de Rosny demands.

  – Oh, yes, definitely: Employee Cresspahl says.

  Don’t you like this country, Gesine? Afternoons out like this?

  I’m sure you want me to say I do.

  Don’t like this country? Go find another one.

  April 19, 1968 Friday

  “The New York Mets gave Willie Mays another chance with the bases loaded yesterday”: The New York Times says: “and that was a mistake.” You got that right. Five to three. Mistake.

  Much obliged, Auntie Times.

  No, not
homesick.

  But there is a waking up in the night, with a shock in the nerves, not wanting to recognize the thick gray light outside the windowpanes and looking for another window; even the April colors don’t look right, the morning blue of the Palisades, the river dimmed by clouds, the hard trunks of the plane trees in the faint green of the park. Until what’s been seen a hundred times finally slides into place above the expectation.

  There are mornings when the glittering sun on the East River disappears in the shadow of the blinds, and Long Island becomes a different island. The smog turns the crush of houses in Queens into a soft rolling landscape, forest meadows, vistas of a church tower like a bishop’s miter, the way I saw it once from the sea as the boat jibbed, obscured by furrows in the ground, eventually reachable not far past the shoreline cliff.

  I don’t want to go back there. I have lived in Jerichow, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin. The places are still there, not the dead, not Cresspahl, Jakob, Marie Abs. Not she who I was.

  Nine more hours, one more day in front of the humming hacking typewriter, in a wedge of light slanting into the room that wraps the others’ voices and the machine noises and my voice into a gray twilight that by noon will have many layers.

  Then Marie will be standing on Broadway and 108th Street, next to the car she has picked out for the trip “to America.” She has insisted on one condition: that it not be a Mustang.

  Then we’ll say hello to each other like strangers, and she’ll scan my face for traces of work, follow me with her eyes—circumspect, concerned, secretly cheerful. As if she can’t let her charge out of her sight.

  She calls it: I’m keeping an eye on you.

  – Ick häud: that’s how Cresspahl would say ich hüte, I’m minding you, when asked about such things. I was still a child. I would stay a child for a long time yet, and someone else would say the same thing too—Jakob.

  APPENDIX TO PART TWO

  THROUGH CRESSPAHL’S EYES

  Information given in the circumstances of 1949. In answer to a sixteen-year-old girl’s questions. He was sixty-one.

  Why did he, as a German—

  He does not see himself “as a German.” He’s on the side of the Mecklenburgers, who talk about “Prussians”; even before he lived in Holland and Great Britain, he thought of “de Dütschen,” the Germans, as the others. He has no desire to be held responsible for them—not their world wars, not their image in the world. Never once did any German ask his opinion about the laws they were imposing on him. What they said in his name cannot even be expressed in Low German. Or Dutch. He always paid his share for life in Germany, paid it punctually, from taxes to garbage-collection fees; even for that it doesn’t especially seem to him he got his money’s worth. And so he felt both obligated to and free to decide for and about himself, as the occasion demanded.

  All right then, as a Mecklenburger.

  For a while. As the son of a cabinetmaker on an estate in Müritz, Mecklenburg. As a cattleman’s boy, and then an apprentice carpenter after all, in Malchow, Mecklenburg. But not anymore by the time he was in the Holstein Twenty-Fourth Artillery Regiment (Second Battery), in Güstrow; an NCO on the eastern front in 1917; definitely not by 1920, in the Workers and Soldiers Council, at Waren on the Müritz, Mecklenburg, because at that point the Mecklenburgish qualities of the estate owners didn’t matter, only the degree to which they had helped, or not, the Kapp and Lüttwitz putsch. After that, in the Netherlands, in England, seen from the outside: a German, or: a Low German, or: Cresspahl.

  Why had he gone to live abroad. The Netherlands—

  The reason for that was a person, wearing a skirt. Or: He had once practiced the art of woodworking, even if among the Germans he’d had to work for a long time with a hatchet.

  To Amsterdam for a girl; to England:

  for a girl. It was 1925. Elizabeth. War widow. Very young. Possibly wealthy. MRS. ELIZABETH TROWBRIDGE. Neither of them wanted to get married, they just wanted to come together voluntarily, occasionally, at prearranged times. She helped him financially, with a loan; he paid it back punctually. Unfortunately, the payment date coincided with his decision to marry another woman, from the Müritz region after all; he was willing to live with her suspicions. It had been Elizabeth who insisted on their each having the right to separate, no questions asked; she kept from him her desire for a little less independence, and also her pregnancy. He says he only learned about the child, born in May 1932, a year later, and against her will. HENRY TROWBRIDGE. Died with his mother on November 14, 1940, in a German air raid on the British Midlands. This might be a false report, but he’s had to consider it true for too long by this point to want it any different. This would be what Mrs. Trowbridge would have wanted.

  Doesn’t he want to go back to England?

  Not now, not ever.

  Because of the German bombings?

  That’s the second reason. The first: memories. Even picturing a walk through Richmond in London brings back his situation between 1926 and 1933, too much familiar recognition to bear along with the renewed consciousness of his losses. Incidentally, he was familiar with such feelings from the winter of 1932, when he could still have hopes of staying in Richmond—there was nothing new for him to learn there.

  His situation in Richmond upon Thames before 1933.

  It had a different name then: Richmond, Surrey. Pascal & Son, Master Woodworkers, Renovation, Restoration (also new work) had their house and workshop near North Sheen station. The firm was already fifty years old, with long-term customers from the middle class and the aristocracy, but REGGIE PASCAL was the last, he had no son, and he wanted to leave the business to the Richmond guild. An old man, with curious ideas maybe, but determined to keep the inheritance out of the hands of his nephew, Albert A. Gosling. Buried at North Sheen cemetery. This workshop was, under pressure from Dr. Arthur Salomon of the law firm Burse, Dunaway & Salomon, against his partners’ better judgment, given to a master carpenter of German origin to manage in trust.

  ARTHUR SALOMON.

  Jewish. He’d been stationed on the other side of the western front, as had many a long-suffering reserve lieutenant on the German side. You could compare landscape sketches from the war with him. Arthur Salomon had felt like a foreigner at university, in the army, and still now as a partner of Dunaway and Burse; maybe he wanted to give this German from “Michelinberg” a chance. He also helped by prohibiting Reggie’s nephew from setting foot in the workshop, and taking on the headache of managing all business dealings with this Albert A. Gosling, Esq. By 1931 he’d long been a trusted friend, who sometimes came over to visit or for dinner to see Mrs. Cresspahl. He handled Cresspahl’s personal business until his death in 1946, in particular the Trowbridge matter, despite his client again being one of the enemy.

  Friends in Richmond?

  MR. SMITH. First name not known. Carpenter, merchant marine, ship’s cook, petty officer first class in the Royal Navy during the war, hard drinker. If he’d mustered up the patience to get his master’s qualification, Pascal’s workshop wouldn’t have been too much for him to handle. A gifted woodworker. Helped Cresspahl run the business until November 1933. Then visited Germany once before the second war. The only person in England Cresspahl would have liked to see after 1945, without any fear it would be awkward. Killed, coincidentally, in Mecklenburgh Square in London, by German bombs, probably the first time in his life he’d set foot in it. Buried in North Sheen, on September 18, 1940.

  ALBERT A. GOSLING.

  Part owner of a fabric shop in Uxbridge, now able to have a much easier life off the income from Reggie Pascal’s inheritance. At first he even wanted to sell the workshop; went along with Salomon’s lessons in economic theory, more just to see than from any insight. Hence mistrust of Cresspahl’s statements; thus spreading rumors against “the German” in the pubs of Richmond. The income sufficed for a real capitalist’s wardrobe, though, and also an attempt at corresponding behavior. The little lord. Grey
hounds, young friends. When Cresspahl gave due notice of his termination of trusteeship, Gosling felt justified in his earlier suspicions, bookkeeping-wise as well as economics-theoretically, especially after the German’s representative refused to continue to run the workshop under his own sovereignty. It was Gosling who discovered Mrs. Trowbridge and her child, and also that Dr. Salomon’s law firm was sending her regular sums from Cresspahl’s English account. In 1938, he uncovered the fact that she’d been returning the money for the past five years, and that Cresspahl thus possessed a sum in a foreign bank large enough to convict him under the German foreign currency laws. Gosling filed charges against Cresspahl, also hoping for a reward, and the British Defense Department, Air Force Division, forced Salomon to hand over the incriminating material. Gosling is once again part owner of a fabric shop in Uxbridge, London.

  Why C. didn’t try to marry Mrs. Trowbridge.

  He doesn’t have to answer that.

  LISBETH PAPENBROCK.

  A girl who took the ferry from Priwall to Travemünde in August 1931. They could have seen each other seventeen years earlier in Malchow, eleven years earlier in Waren, eight years earlier in Amsterdam, ten days earlier at the Schwerin train station. In the end, the Trave River brought them together.

  Joining in matrimony: reasons against.

  Age difference—she was born in 1906. Her acquaintance with art and higher education. Her addiction to Protestant Christianity. The Papenbrock family.

  Reasons for.

  The future. As he followed her from the ferry landing to the linen store to the garden restaurant on the mouth of the river, he knew for certain that she would come to England with him, for him; that whatever her background he would live with her, for her. They were of one mind about that, before they’d said it. He is not going to give a sixteen-year-old girl marriage instruction.