Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  How many lakes has her mother swum, taken in, racked up. What’s the number.

  Here in America, where people are starved for restrained, attentive, and well-behaved children, they call her a European child. Marie stood politely at the edge of the lake, still misty with the dawn, and patiently followed her into the bone-chilling water—Marie’s mother, her partner for better or for worse ever since she was born, not yet dispensable. And she acts properly, as she’s learned to from the nuns who teach at her school, carrying on a conversation during the swim. Much as she’d prefer to go underwater, she keeps her head up and tries for an interested expression on her determined, shiny wet face.

  How many lakes in thirty-five years?

  Gneez Lake: Fritz Reuter High School gym class after the war; the public beach on the Gneez side, where Gesine Cresspahl the child was supposed to be training for competitions. Gneez Lake again, again with others, on the south side, the kids’ swimming hole in tenth grade, class A-2, eleventh grade A-1, twelfth grade A-1. At home, in the military facility’s pool, forgotten by the German Air Force and the Red Army, with Lise Wollenberg, Inge Heitmann, and the boy from the Jerichow pharmacy. Never in Dassow Lake, less than eight miles from my father’s back door and utterly inaccessible, its shore being the line of demarcation, the national border—the water was in the British zone, the Federal Republic of Germany, the West. With Pius Pagenkopf: in Cramon Lake, between Drieberg and Cramon, an hour’s bike ride from the town where I went to school, in 1951. Alone, from Jerichow in northwest Mecklenburg to Wendisch Burg in southeast Mecklenburg: in Schwerin Lake to the island of Lieps, in Goldberg Lake, in Lake Plau, in Lake Müritz. With Klaus Niebuhr, Günter Niebuhr, Ingrid Babendererde, and Eva Mau in all seven lakes around Wendisch Burg, until 1952. In Leipzig, in Halle: lifesaving courses in indoor pools, through May 1953. The last time in Gneez Lake: end of May 1953, and Jakob held my impaled foot high off the ground like I was a young horse and the way he moved it sent a shiver up through my body with no pain at all.

  Never with Jakob. Jakob would still be working in Cresspahl’s house, in the villages, when we left Jerichow in the evening for six laps in the Mili, the military swimming facility that we all stubbornly called the Mili (Mariengabe air base now had a new name too: it would never be known as anything but Jerichow-North). Jakob left town to work for the railroad; a photograph was taken of him once on the Pastor’s Pond ferry, in Schwerin (in the company of Sabine Beedejahn, Prot., twenty-four, married). Jakob used to go lake fishing with friends, coming back from the Mecklenburg lakes with buckets of live crabs, and I didn’t know those lakes, and he went without me, with fishermen, with girls, with work friends, and I hardly knew him.

  After leaving behind the East German authorities: almost every day for two weeks with Anita in Wannsee, West Berlin, as far as you could get from the border. In West Germany: public pools in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Düren. In Geneva. In America: Lake Winnipesaukee, Lake Chippewa, Lake Travis, Lake Hopatcong. Again with Anita in the Vosges, in France.

  – Eighteen valid, four don’t count, one unclear, and bonus for Lake Travis, Texas!: Marie says.

  But the landing is now just a quarter mile away, and she immediately puts her head sideways into the water, so sure is she that the challenge to a race has been understood and accepted, and after kicking underwater for a long time she comes up into a crawl, strokes sharp and precise and almost silent. She wants to get back to the borrowed expensive house, all glass and mahogany beams, where there’s a phone and news on TV and possibly The New York Times from the village store, and soon, as early as tomorrow afternoon, the return home to Manhattan, New York City, Riverside Drive and Broadway, the corner of Ninety-Sixth Street.

  This lake is called Patton Lake, named in honorable memory of a general from this country. Here heavy tanks practiced until 1944 for the last assault on Germany, until the thick old trees were stumps and the ground so churned up by caterpillar treads that the area had to be turned into an artificial lake, with trees having nowhere else to go and high yields from vacation rentals. From here came the Sherman tanks that measured out the market squares of Mecklenburg, too.

  – And you came swimming all the way from Mecklenburg!

  Marie has been standing on the deck for a while; hand on heart she salutes the flag that’s raised to honor the victor in stadiums, then welcomes the loser swimming up beneath her. She speaks the words with delight, because she can assume a teasing tone, and from the heart, because at last she has a chance to say something in English, the language of her own country, not the German she speaks so clumsily now.

  Vacation in the country. Somewhere in upstate New York, but no more than three hours’ drive from the city, and on the long leash of the telephone line the bank can tug at will to summon Employee Cresspahl back to work from her two-day break.

  – I did, I swam the whole way here from Mecklenburg: I say in German.

  – And did the nineteenth lake in your life!: Marie says in English.

  Lots of heavy black Patton water for the afternoon.

  April 21, 1968 Sunday

  Vacation in the country. This time it’s a chore for Marie.

  – You need your New York Times: she said the moment we were out of the water, thereby claiming the right to the mile’s walk to the country store, the right to alone time in the woods. Our borrowed summer house was a model home, full of not only Finnish furniture but all the latest gadgets; in the afternoon Marie left again, for the two lemons we could have managed dinner without. There was still a long time before we had to go back but she’d packed up the car already, then she had something else to do outside, for a map of the area she was making as a gift for the owner. She announced her walks as if suggesting them; she took on the shopping duties voluntarily; she always found a way to get out; she wanted to be alone, once in a while.

  For almost eleven years we’ve had only each other to depend on, and she’s struggled to build her defenses. In 1957, for twenty-four-year-old Gesine Cresspahl, baby Marie had been part of her—for a long time Marie had to accept that. She met her grandmother, Jakob’s mother, but Mrs. Abs wanted to live alone, didn’t want to die near us; if any memory of a grandmother remains, Marie never mentions it. She had to deal with the brisk forceful women at the Düsseldorf day care center, but it was always entirely up to her sole legal guardian whether she would be handed over to them or saved from them. Cresspahl made one last visit to the Rhine—“to the West”—and wheeled the child around the Hofgarten, but he was wearing his black overcoat dating from 1932, kept slipping back into Plattdeutsch with Marie, and a grandfather like that might well have scared her. And then Cresspahl went back to Jerichow. Marie spent her early years waiting among strangers for the one and only familiar person to come back at last from these incomprehensible separations—work. In the morning she tried to ask if she had to share the day with this invincible “work” or if she and Gesine could stay together until the day’s last bedtime—she had a hard time making herself understood. She was given her birthday breakfast with two candles, then stayed quiet. Gesine had plans for her child, parental intentions as inadvisable as they were stubborn. First, that there be no detours on the way to standard High German. It felt funny in her throat, and approximations were accepted gladly, but still the only way to produce true maternal rejoicing would be successfully combining letters into a single word, say M and i and l and ch into Milch, “milk”—which might in turn be a disguise for another word, named Dust, “thuhsty,” to which a superfluous r had to be added in some baffling place. Durst, “thirsty.” Marie was eager to please this person; at first, she resorted to watching her, pointing to this or taking that. But she had no desire to start a conversation or even try to. Because she was also supposed to deliver these words in an order she was rarely free to choose. And, if she’d understood aright, this woman was also trying to turn her into someone who deliberately refused to say anything about a dry feeling in the throat: whether in fun, from ta
ct, or out of stubbornness; three proposed mimicries, three possible agreements, all reached through no intermediary but her own face. Admittedly, this was also the start of their shared secret: that Marie spoke to this woman in a way she never spoke to anyone else—not the teachers, not the babysitters, certainly not the cohort of others learning the job of being a child in their own ways. No one else even noticed the wordless understanding between her and this woman. And there was no one else around to make things easier, to whom it was even worth running—just this one partner, both there to help and no help at all.

  Not having a living father, she for a long time lacked a word for fathers, lacked even the idea of one. At two and a half she didn’t understand questions about mothers either. She didn’t have a mother, she spent her life with someone named Ina, Zina, G’sina, a tolerable enough protector but way too clever a peer.

  This person didn’t insist on being obeyed; you didn’t have to carry out her wishes on the spot. You could get her to change your bedtime, could have your way about destinations for outings, and after you’d asked her to take away a tree with lit candles on it you could count on her to hide how flame bursts out of a match too. And she so insisted on pushback that you had to think things over, try to remember things that would have been much nicer if they’d stayed passing feelings or sights you could simply forget. The only thing you were helpless against was the part of this woman called “Work” (an ally? an enemy?). “Work” required a plane trip to West Berlin, “Work” required staying in strange houses with people speaking an even more mysterious language; obedience wasn’t enough, but curiosity came in handy, since there was nothing to be done without this woman or against her. The child could be reconciled to a trip abroad with the promise of return after a countable number of days, so she innocently came along on a trip to France and boarded a ship to America, but after a week at sea it turned out this woman had outsmarted her. The trip was a move—this friend or foe named “Work” blocked their return to Europe, and now the habit of morning separations turned without warning into an arrangement involving a preschool on the Hudson in an entirely new language. After two years in New York Marie could still describe the room by the Rhine she’d left behind. She had long since been getting around in German as if in a first second language, but still she would point to privileges left elsewhere, to a sense of injustice. She’d accepted New York as a gift and she defended her new-won city as a right.

  Even before starting school she began catching up with this woman, faster than a child on the other side of the Atlantic would have. This woman’s English hadn’t actually been all it was cracked up to be. Didn’t the child master the swallowed vowel sounds quicker, the imperceptible onsets of aspirants, the set melodies of the sentences here? It was the woman who listened to her and had her repeat certain words as though trying to learn them from her, wasn’t it? And who was the one who made the Cresspahls respected customers in Maxie’s grocery store, or in Schustek’s, if not the child, tasting the products first, nodding to authorize purchase? Who was the first to realize that Rebecca Ferwalter was not just any child but one who called Saturday the Sabbath? Who made sure we walked on the north side of Ninety-Fifth Street, not past the Puerto Ricans and their reason for picking a fight that the child had already noticed while the woman kept going on about “happy homes”? In the subway, which of them knew how to say the names of the lines in American English, and it was the child who could find the quickest route to the Atlantic, was it not? The fact that in this country citizens had to call their policeman “sir,” no matter how urgent the accident or fire—who’d had to explain that to her elder? The younger Cresspahl, the one in the lead.

  Victories. And yet, in this terrain of competition, struggle, trials of strength, how slow it was in coming—the separation, the independence. How long it took for Marie to establish her standing in the eyes of this other person, always in control! By now this woman had become, for school purposes, “my mother”—said objectively or in self-defense. My mother is from a small town on the Baltic. But her father was a rich man. Mrs. Cresspahl’s child was expected to address her mother by first name, or jokingly as “Geesign,” and was allowed to give her, also jokingly, motherly advice. Mrs. Cresspahl’s child didn’t know many other kids in school whose mothers made their own money with their own jobs, and Marie decided to be proud of that. Little Cresspahl had a mother whose topmost accent sounded foreign, if British. During the 1964–65 school year, little Cresspahl read till her eyes were sore and her fingers cramped, not as a striving teacher’s pet but because she had a mother who might take a child with unsatisfactory grades back to Europe. Mary Cresspahl, fourth grade, might take it upon herself to insist that her name was pronounced “M’rie”; her braids might have been her own decision too; she didn’t snitch; she’d mastered school slang—but it was from her mother that she’d gotten her attitudes toward religion, and the Jews, and promises. European values, perhaps, but foreign. In the beginning Marie had met plenty of children who would innocently say they hated their parents; maybe Marie just wouldn’t let herself say it out loud.

  “Life with my mother wasn’t easy”: Marie might well think such a sentence, even if disguised in English and stored up for a future listener whom she hasn’t found yet. This mother had brought ideas from her Europe that she wanted the child to apply here. All people were endowed, or were to be provided with, equal rights. Now what was Marie supposed to do with that? She could show her mother how she gives up her bus seat for a black woman with the same alacrity as for a pink one, she could go down to our basement and console Jason for the long long hours remaining until sunset, but to take the one black girl in her class, Francine, under her European wing—how would that work out with her light-skinned friends? She had to leave things out when she talked about this at home, and the worst of it was that her mother simply wouldn’t stop believing that a truth would emerge through this lie, and through other undertakings for Francine’s benefit that Marie would really have rather avoided. This mother tried to teach her that there was a difference between just and unjust wars—but how is a child supposed to connect events from the year 1811 (Shawnee uprising under Tecumseh) to the American war in Vietnam when her very first attempt cost her friendships and almost got her expelled? She could speak out against today’s war in private, at home, nothing binding—perhaps hoping her mother would assume that she was equally opinionated at school. But this was a vague hope, there was a lie inherent in the answer, and the question, and the silence, and it was precisely this lie that her mother was determined to ban. Didn’t she get that her code of ethics was acceptable but was valid only in the other language, untranslatable into thought or deed? Anyway, she wasn’t honest herself—she pretended to prefer the Socialist cause while working in a capitalist country, for a bank! While the child can’t very well suggest that if that’s what her mother wants she should move to a Socialist country to be consistent, because then that child would lose the whole city of New York, and all her friends and the subway and the South Ferry and Mayor Lindsay, so she has to make do with dishonesty, which she’s told shouldn’t exist. And then, if her mother does follow through—unopposed by her child—and leave New York for the Socialist cause, possibly as early as this summer, young Cresspahl really will be in the soup, which she’s helped to stir herself. What Marie will say someday about her mother, Gesine Cresspahl (Mrs.), is: life with her was not an easy alliance.

  Two days’ vacation in the country. Variable cloudiness, occasional flashes of sun on the sluggish water.

  Marie has lots of things to do near school, uptown on Riverside Drive, or around Broadway on the Upper West Side—and nothing to do at Patton Lake. In the city she only has to be with her mother for a few hours—by Patton Lake she sometimes perched on the landing so askew, looking like such a wreck, that it was as if she were waiting in the desert for some army helicopter to land and save her from the uninterrupted togetherness, and from the awareness of it.

 
– No: she said: Not an army copter. But I’d take one from Radio Boston. (And then loyally upholding good manners she said it was her own fault she was bored.)

  She read the bundles of newspaper she’d brought back. In Brooklyn they shot and killed Charlie LoCicero, a Mafia elder, in his corner luncheonette as he sipped a strawberry malted. Eleventh Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street—Marie would have liked to go see the crime scene, and tomorrow it’ll be too late. On the Hudson, five NATO warships dropped anchor at Pier 86, and New Yorkers will line up to see the destroyers, and Marie would have enjoyed walking around them too, with a fat black marker, leaving behind a Was Here doodle or Peace sign (– A Peace sign: she says). People from the rich suburbs have paid a visit to the city’s northern slums to do a little sweeping, painting, and cementing up cracks there, while leaving the insides of the buildings, with the roaches and the rats, untouched. (– It’s so their conscience’ll be clearer when they drive through: Marie says.) Nevertheless, she too would have happily watched these visitors from prosperity, and been in New York, not on Patton Lake.

  Now and then it was international news she brought outside to her mother, not without turning her mother’s deck chair a little toward the sun and tucking her blanket in tighter. She actually does act like she’s dealing with an invalid, the way she passes along the scraps. In the process you can leave your hand on the other person’s shoulder a little longer than strictly necessary, without seeming needy, much less affectionate.

  Yesterday morning in Bonn the air force marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Baron von Richthofen, the “Red Baron,” who shot down eighty French and British planes. In Cologne’s Klingelpütz prison, apparently, mentally ill inmates were regularly beaten to death. Marie takes the page back in silence, returns her mother’s nod, withdraws into the house in silence.