Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Meanwhile Cresspahl had had to post Order No. 2 from the military commandant of the town of Jerichow: All residents were to turn in their radios, batteries, typewriters, telephones, microphones, cameras, “etc.” at Papenbrock’s granary within three days. That night, Cresspahl explained what “etc.” meant: guns, explosives, rifles, and firearms of all kinds; the following day, K. A. Pontiy’s Order No. 4 demanded that all gold, silver, or platinum coins or bars, and all foreign currency, be handed in at the credit union, as well as documents pertaining to foreign assets, and again Cresspahl was seen as the Soviets’ accomplice. For the townsfolk saw him going to Town Hall that morning with his telephone under his arm, and another time with two army Karabiner rifles someone had thrown onto his property overnight, even though the collection of People’s Receivers and “etc.” in Papenbrock’s granary didn’t amount to much. Then Cresspahl showed his fellow citizens that he hadn’t lived among them for twelve years for nothing. He posted a reminder at Town Hall that the post office had a list of former owners of radios and telephones. Some people from that list turned up, but they were planning to throw their devices at that Russia-lover Cresspahl’s feet, and they had to wait a long time at the granary gate because the mayor kept announcing every two hours that he was on his way, and never came. Finally, the commandant threatened with arrest the owner of any home where requisitioned property was found, and now the locals forced the refugees to go in and hand over what they had while they themselves burned what they didn’t bury, including the genuine Russian rubles from prisoners of war that they’d saved to do business with after the British forces returned (or the Swedish ones arrived). At least they could still blame Cresspahl for their losses; it was his fault and they had the receipts to prove it.

  Jerichow could see just how dishonorable a Soviet lackey Cresspahl was from his actions toward the Papenbrocks. He kept sending more and more homeless refugees into his very own in-laws’ house, to the point where they had to spend their old age camping out in Albert’s office. He’d done nothing to stop the Red Army from removing the von Lassewitzes’ furniture from the Papenbrocks’ house, carrying it onto Market Square, spraying it with Lysol for all to see, then driving it off to the Kommandatura. Papenbrock’s yard and granary were confiscated, all the grain in them too, and they became the Red Army’s supply depot, and Cresspahl could just go on living his life after robbing his own family of their property. Even if he lived to be ninety, how could he make up for such guilt?

  The Soviets themselves didn’t respect him. The British had had him chauffeured around in a jeep from morning till night; the Soviets let him walk, from Brickworks Road to Town Hall, from the hospital to the gasworks, from one end of Jerichow to the other, without even an escort—defenseless, alone.

  – But now they weren’t spitting on him anymore: Marie says.

  – No. Not even shouting things after him.

  – Did they take it out on young Gesine?

  – It was meant for my father, wasn’t it. Young Gesine didn’t care.

  – When you were sent to go shopping—

  – Yes.

  – and they shoved you out of the line. Accidentally stepped on your feet. There were parents who wouldn’t let their kids play with you—

  – It wasn’t like that, Marie.

  – They didn’t see you?

  – They didn’t see me.

  – And now I’m supposed to think about a Francine, a black girl in a white school, and in the morning when she comes over to me and says hello—

  – Don’t make that comparison. The child I was—

  – Fine, Gesine. I dig you. You were trying to tell me a story, not teach me a lesson. Still, I can think something out for myself.

  – There’s no comparison, you can’t think that.

  – I can think what I want.

  – Whatever you want, Marie.

  We got home late, and heavy rain hung a flapping gray curtain of mist in front of the river and land beyond the park. Behind that curtain the world stops.

  April 25, 1968 Thursday

  The new prime minister of Czechoslovakia, Mr. Černík, has praised his Czechs and Slovaks for their good work since 1948, as is only proper at the start of a new economic program on the set list, and then proceeded to tell them what that good work has achieved: a per capita national income up to 40 percent lower than that of “advanced capitalist countries,” delivery of manufactured goods to customers often taking three times longer, transport and housing and retailing in similarly poor shape, and he actually mentions the $400 million foreign trade deficit with capitalist countries, calling it relatively small but “very unpleasant and inconvenient” because it involves short-term loans. Employee Cresspahl has already been calculating and summarizing all that herself, since December, for the bank files; she has been useful to the company and has no reason to fear being fired on the spot when she’s ordered to report to the management’s floor in the middle of the workday; she can look down on two sections of Third and Lexington Avenues without too much to worry about. From such a height the people down there look not just foreshortened but distorted.

  Twelve years ago the bank hadn’t been here and would have been rather nervous about handling a piddling $400 million. As for a female assistant to a vice president, that was unthinkable.

  It was a family bank, not only in terms of who owned it but of what it did. Its name still reveals its beginnings in small Midwestern towns, giving loans against wheat on the stalk, bribing the sheriff, and taking a man’s word the same way it took a promissory note. The name—with its country ring, smacking of forefathers and filial piety—has remained.

  There exists a photograph, in the brownish detail of around 1880, that purports to show a village branch of the bank in North Carolina: outside the big window with its garland of golden letters stand the justice of the peace with the blacksmith and the shopkeeper, all chatting, all befrockcoated, and the bank manager is leaning in the doorway, dressed as if for church, eyes under his hat brim ingenuous and miscalculated, and every performer in the scene is really and truly bisected by the wooden railing that actual cowboys used to tie their horses to back in those days. The picture refuses to stay fixed in the second during which the photographer ninety years ago told everyone to hold their breath; it wants to keep moving, to the rattling stagecoach pulling up in a cloud of dust, the relief driver on the box seat shot through the eye, the horses frisky, the townsfolk pouring out of the neighboring buildings, ladies looking down from the top windows of the hotel, the strongbox hanging by its last strap, brutally pried open, and a shot rings out, and fresh horses are brought over, to chase the robbers—will they be bandits or Indians?—until finally, with a booming echo, the picture fades out and zooms in to the sign at the bank entrance: CLOSED FOR FUNERAL.

  Not a few people in the company insist that the photo is retouched, or that all it shows is a movie set from a Western. Some claim to have seen the movie and swear they remember the scene. Anyone who dares to suggest the opposite—that maybe the film set was based on this photograph—is immediately suspected of being un-American, of mockery even. Mrs. Cresspahl doesn’t say this anymore.

  Around the turn of the century the bank made it to Chicago, to a little mansion inside the Loop it could call its own—narrow but noble of chest—and after 1945 it was practically rich. But the family in charge wanted to preserve its gains and increase them too, its cake should be kept in the pantry while nonetheless being eaten, a bearish attitude toward life. And so the family council believed the rumor of 1947, about the imminent death of New York City, and kept primly distant from that infamous region known to devour both men and money. They came to New York in 1951, too late. They wanted to move into the right neighborhood and found a old building five hundred yards from the Wall Street subway station; their decision to cloak it in marble and inscribe it in gold only diminished it further. And not only its appearance refused to gain in stature. They’d missed the Bretton Woods Confere
nce, they tackled the stock market with less than stirring boldness, they couldn’t find Chad on a map, probably thought it was a detergent. Headquarters was still on Lake Michigan, watching the sick child on the Atlantic with anger and defiance, yet continuing to send the little cripple ever more money. In 1961, when Gesine Cresspahl came to New York well acquainted with empires like Morgan Guaranty Trust, she barely knew this bank’s name—she might have innocently called it a brokerage house or financial firm. And now she’s standing high above ground level at a window in its new building, barely visible from the sidewalk, waiting for de Rosny to have a free moment—deputy chairman of the board, deputy CEO, deputy omnipotence: de Rosny.

  De Rosny, too, once laughed at the idea that he might join his good name to that of this financial institution.

  In the mid-1950s, more often than chance alone could explain, news came sailing out of the Bay with the Golden Gate: de Rosny was looking for something back east. Reason: the California climate no longer agreed with his wife.

  It was a typical de Rosny reason, and if it made his partners smile for a moment, taking this for a familiar leg-pull, then what were lesser mortals, whose names probably struck him as belonging to harmless characters from the great American book of fairy tales, supposed to think? Not many offers came de Rosny’s way, and the few that did weren’t from that building near Wall Street. De Rosny didn’t need them. If he felt like moving back east he could pick up the phone and ten days later everything in his house would have been rolled across the continent and set back up on Long Island Sound in a family property, precisely the same as he’d left it in San Francisco, give or take six inches. De Rosny hadn’t worked or fought his way up into money, nor had he married money—he’d been born into money, his parents had given it to him and him alone, and he’d breathed through the aromatic, nourishing, protective shell of money ever since he’d known his own name, long before he’d started to learn the banking business in Singapore, because he was bored. So the word was: de Rosny wasn’t available. Sitting behind phones on the fog-covered hills, he was paid whatever he wanted over and above what others were paid, simply because of his kinship with money, his descent from money, because he and money were one. De Rosny wouldn’t waste his time on such a negligible problem, even if it could be rectified on the East Coast. De Rosny was considered unpredictable. He was prepared to risk a rift with Howard Hughes and publicly criticize Howie’s business (not private) investments in Hollywood; de Rosny’s vacations weren’t spent there, they were spent with the aristocracy in Great Britain. And he had more than enough business with airplane manufacturers already, he didn’t need Howie’s inventions, particularly since they didn’t stay in the air long enough. Others called him unserious. They didn’t mean how he handled money. No, it was that he didn’t know how to live. Evening meals—the blissful reward for a day of hard-fought meetings—bored him, and visibly. De Rosny didn’t drink hard liquor, and he could have offered religious reasons as an excuse but instead he admitted just not being interested. Shared confidences? Ha! Does anyone even know his first name? He once got a friendly slap on the shoulder and sent his suit out for dry cleaning! He invited almost no one into his home, and certainly not friends, and they left with no stories to tell. At home de Rosny served imported white wines from some unremarkable region in France where there’s a hill—weak stuff, hardly loosened the tongue at all. While other people were happy to have their picture in the paper at a restaurant with Eleanor Roosevelt, de Rosny was sitting at Franklin Delano’s fireside ages ago, and not having himself photographed, and F. D. had gone so far as to disguise the business nature of these chats with exchanges of boarding school memories. In the middle of the war against the Huns. No, de Rosny was given too much, too easily, it wasn’t fair. He probably knows God’s address and doesn’t even bother to send Him a thank-you note. And this crafty rogue, this all-too-flexible fifty-year-old, his whole body trained by something other than tennis—you think anyone’s going to discuss some trivial matter in New York with him, just because he wants to move back east? (Because his wife was not doing well in the sunny Pacific climate.)

  De Rosny passed through Chicago, staying not in the city’s luxury hotel but at the Windermere, and unfamiliar visitors graced the Windermere’s conference room, and five firms in the distant south were narrowed down to two, and two to one, and suddenly New Orleans appeared on the market with a product that sold with childish ease, and a child could have thought of it, and is that what Matthew 18 meant? (Ask those Gideons.) (And the Windermere was practically buried in reservations for the next six months.) But de Rosny did deign to listen to some little eastern thing, and was annoyingly familiar with the matter already, and pointed out the considerable cost of solving it. In Chicago they thought he meant his salary, and they were wrong. De Rosny let himself be seen in New York, ostensibly back from inspecting his mansion in Connecticut, and the visitors he received at the Waldorf Towers included some who’d had to invite themselves. De Rosny brought no notebook listing his conditions, no secretary to relay them; apparently he wanted the time this little bagatelle was costing him to be made up in amusement.

  Apparently his conditions were: That the board of directors would never try to make him president.

  The compensation he felt was appropriate for a Vice President de Rosny, and the percentage by which it would increase annually—those are numbers that someone like Employee Cresspahl will never learn.

  Then the horrible thing with his wife happened. All the better that he was moving back east, even if he had to pay for it out of his own pocket. Which he didn’t. Chicago had preemptively taken care of these costs, and once again he’d made out better than he deserved.

  Except for his wife. It was only four years later that her story came out, and even then as such a vague rumor that it’s simply not worth telling.

  De Rosny moved into the unfortunate shack on Wall Street, and for quite a long time nothing further was seen of him. Clearly the whole thing was some kind of practical joke on de Rosny’s part. He even left the problem child’s rustic name unchanged, although the marketing department had welcomed him with a chic, slimmed-down pseudonym. De Rosny insisted on reinstating the old-fashioned font, and replacing the comma with an & in the style of a year before yesteryear. He may have realized that he needed something to show, so he opened a branch office in California with his friends. (De Rosny loans de Rosny the following sum on the following terms . . .) The financial world found the part of his behavior they knew about disappointing, old hat even; de Rosny held internal meetings, not press conferences. Internally word was getting out about what all that talk of costs in Chicago had meant. It was an enormous sum. An outrage. This time no de Rosny was offering to contribute anything. His people in San Francisco had suddenly gone deaf too. They put it to a vote in Chicago. De Rosny would have been a very, very expensive ex–vice president; his only condition had a nasty catch to it, predictably enough. It was a challenge. They didn’t mind picturing de Rosny picking up his hat; they couldn’t bear imagining how the scene would continue: with him putting that hat on his head, turning in the door being held open for him, and saying goodbye to all the cowards. So de Rosny stayed in the boardroom, in his deputy’s chair; in northern California the air force bought a bigger rocky plateau. In New York the talk persisted of a de Rosny failure.

  In those years, although the elevated rail no longer hurtled by on its stilts above Third Avenue, that artery between Fortieth and Sixtieth was still mostly lined with low, four-story brick buildings, each one a box much like the others, built for classy renting and poor living. While scholarship was busy envisioning the death of New York City, the El generated more businesses on Third, the commuters walked on roundabout paths from Grand Central to Park and Madison, and the foot traffic called forth more street-level stores—bars, tailors, hair salons, little hideaways too—and on the upper floors many of the buildings were sealed off by dirt on the windows or blinds, with only a few monuments to pr
osperity hulking sheepishly between them. A gang of brokers swooped down onto one such block between Lexington and Third, bidding and underbidding, and no one could put a name to the purchaser, unless it was some superbroker. When a homeowner hesitated, the wrecking balls went to work next door and the plot of land was without form and void. One owner of a corner property still had a case moving through the courts while the steel frame of a new building was going up over his head, like a child’s idea absurdly enlarged, and since the scaffolding was lit up at night, all the way up to the top, The New York Times remarked on it and backed its opinion up with a photo. You could look in at the construction site through generous ovals in the fences, even Gesine Cresspahl walked innocently by it, and stopped, and marveled that bricks were actually being stuck into the steel girders as a testament to tradition, from top to bottom as it turned out, leaving them hanging naked and exposed. The man on the corner kept tirelessly going from court to court, complaining to the construction firm, and the world, that General Lexington (or was it Washington?) had once spent the night at his establishment, which was why he alone from the whole block had let the wood from yesteryear remain, and painted it green and white, and de Rosny relented. It wasn’t literally de Rosny, but he may have leased that part of the building from the construction company and apparently it was up to him to decide to keep the historic little building on the corner, under an umbrella of concrete, and again a venerable, ambitious bank from Chicago and Wall Street snagged forty-three lines and a photograph in The New York Times. Two gigantic towers went up, one on each end of the block, wrapped in blue glass, and even the part connecting them was fifteen stories high, and the workmen hadn’t been shy about how deep they’d dug the foundations. The construction firm’s name hung above the entrances in large, if removable letters, and the bank’s ground-floor windows looked for the time being like a branch office, temporarily rented. De Rosny had a lease for the whole monstrosity and he sublet it out, to lawyers, to UN delegations who’d been waiting all this time not three blocks away for office space. In the end it got to the point where the bank was paying rent to itself, and now it was time to record the building in the land registry and The New York Times. The bank by no means wants to occupy its whole premises on its own, but it can evict at will and when needed, to make more room for itself, and the old-fashioned agricultural name with its & counts this milestone of uncompromising architecture as its property. Still, even this name isn’t chiseled into the marble, it too is removable. For what de Rosny is truly proud of is that this building was built to be torn down at any time, within thirty days, and the empty lot sold to the next sucker at a tidy profit.