Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  DE ROSNY. First name unknown.

  The scene: A descending elevator, rear shaft. It’s a normal elevator, not reserved for senior executives. Time: an hour after the close of business. The vice president is alone in the elevator with Mrs. Cresspahl. He is performing for her benefit the conversation he had with ROCHE-FAUBOURG, alternately as himself and as the young heir.

  DE ROSNY: So what did you have in mind here?

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Yes, well, my father left the decision up to me.

  DE ROSNY: He seems to have turned into an American father. He used to be fine.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: My father is in excellent health, thank you for asking.

  DE ROSNY: I guess I’m about to behave like a German father—

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Pardon?

  DE ROSNY: Because there’s something I want to tell you. You need to finish your studies.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Yes, I was planning to get an MBA.

  DE ROSNY: An MBA! Please! You’ll learn business administration when you take over your father’s business, and if you turn out to be a dud at it, you can assign the job to someone else. And all the other jobs too.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: I thought—

  DE ROSNY: Your life is set in stone, isn’t it? In a few years you’re going to take over your father’s business.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: I flatter myself that—

  DE ROSNY: So what you need to do is enjoy the free time you have left. Beforehand!

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: This American idea of enjoyment—

  DE ROSNY: If you really want to, you can work here for a year. A forced march through every department.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Maybe for six months.

  DE ROSNY: For that, of course, you would need to be interested in the condition of American workers.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Now that—

  DE ROSNY: You could read a few books. But what you need to do now is live a little. How old are you?

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Twenty-one.

  DE ROSNY: You need to learn how to live a little. Get a sports car in June and drive around the country for two months. Go to a meeting of the Communist Party. Cresspahl will tell you everything you need to know about New York.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: A couple of weeks ago she gave me the impression, in the most charming way—

  DE ROSNY: There, you see? Just don’t take up too much of her time, she’s working for me.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Might I perhaps occasionally—

  DE ROSNY: An MBA, what nonsense. That’s all right for someone to study if they haven’t got anything to take over. You are taking over the firm, aren’t you?

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: If my brother—

  DE ROSNY: When the year’s up, you’re to present yourself to me and I’ll give you a test. Have a good morning.

  ROCHE-FAUBOURG: Goodbye.

  The vice president repeated parts of the scene as he walked, to the amusement of other subordinates walking quickly past him and trying to make their haste look like tact. The vice president is in a different kind of hurry—he has no train to miss, his black, air-conditioned limo is waiting for him. Still he keeps fidgeting with a cigarette between his fingers without ever managing to bring it to his lips, because his lips are busy saying: You have to picture it, me standing there in front of this young man, no one has ever talked to him like that in his life, and he came within a whisker of missing it. And people always think German fathers are tyrants, dictators really, and I as an American had to tell a French child: Here’s your job, such and such. Get an education . . .

  – Marx won’t be of much help to him now, Mr. de Rosny.

  – Ah, there I go again, forgetting that you have a German father. Can you forgive me, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  – No. I’ll never forgive you.

  – You’re all right, young lady. If only everyone who worked for me was like you. If only they were all like you.

  May 7, 1968 Tuesday

  So, what has Alexander Dubček brought back from occupation headquarters in Moscow? “Understanding” of the process of democratization he has initiated in his country, “full respect of mutual rights,” and a loan, almost, of hard currency from the leading treasury. He said he’d been happy to explain his Socialism to the Soviet comrades.

  And the city of Cologne has gotten back the Cranach painting it had been forced to give Hermann Göring’s daughter for her baptism in 1938. Edda G. wanted to keep it, not as her own personal property but to give it to the Free State of Bavaria, but now Bavaria has also decided to relinquish its claims.

  In Jerichow’s eyes Papenbrock got off easy almost when the Soviets came to get him. Maybe it wasn’t exactly fair but you’d have to call it square, after all the money Albert made from Göring’s air force. Now the former business king of Jerichow was going to have to pay back taxes.

  That’s what it looked like. One Sunday evening in mid-July the victors drove into Market Square in a two-ton truck, with no sign of K. A. Pontiy, so that it looked like orders from his superior. Three men strode into the house, all officers, not with weapons drawn but still like an arrest party. If they spent half an hour in there, they must have been searching Albert’s office for his earthly gains, and the fact that they did so silently only made the ambush more ominous, that and the recollection that Albert was far from the only one whose friendly dealings with Göring’s air force might rub the Soviets the wrong way. Only one person sent for Cresspahl, Bergie Quade, but her husband, Otto, was back on Town Street much quicker than the mayor; he came walking up so slowly that he seemed to be saying he couldn’t do anything to help, especially not such close relatives. Papenbrock was already being brought out of his house, in a work shirt and worn-out regular pants, shoulders bent, eyes on the ground, arms hanging emptily at his sides. It was retold many times: how the old man tried to step up onto the tailgate, slipped, raised his lame foot again, and it scraped back down the side of the truck, this time banging his other shin hard, and how the officers had watched him like a sick animal there’s no point in helping. Then Louise came running out of the house, wailing and wildly swinging a bulging travel bag as if wanting to hurt herself or one of the officers. Finally a Russian gave Papenbrock a gentle push, not exactly as though wanting to hurt him, and Albert stumbled and fell onto the truck’s loading bed, the officers climbed in after him and latched the tailgate shut, the truck turned around and drove back south, maybe to headquarters in Schwerin, possibly an even bigger prison. They had taken the travel bag from Louise, but they hadn’t handed it to her husband, they gave it to the driver, and even if Albert had a bit longer to live in custody it didn’t look like he’d be coming back.

  There hadn’t been many onlookers, so the stories about what happened didn’t end up fragmentary. The onlookers there were had kept a proper distance, so as not to be taken along on Albert’s trip by mistake, but every one of them claimed to feel a shudder when Louise, still a big woman, tugged with both hands at the front door, which was sticking—clearly she was weakened by her sobbing—until she had it back in its frame and could bolt it from the inside. That spared the witnesses the expected expressions of sympathy, but when they stepped back and turned around they found themselves face-to-face with Cresspahl, the one they called the Russian lackey, the traitor. But from this close up no one wanted to tell him that now he’d let his father-in-law get arrested. They felt trapped in his silent, challenging gaze. Cresspahl had enjoyed the Russians’ flight from Louise’s tearful entrance, and so he seemed almost relaxed, head tilted toward the evening sun, checking the time. – ’Ts nahyin: he said, reminding them of the approaching curfew, that Soviet lickspittle, instead of staggering under the misfortune befalling his family. They left him alone and he walked off down Town Street. He hadn’t even given them any information. But anyway, it was nine o’clock. Suddenly you could smell the time—sweet, unwholesome, slightly greasy—from the scent of the linden blossoms.

  If you think of Jerichow as the center of a clock (where the Hydrographical Institute puts
its compass rose on its maps of Lübeck Bay), the village and seaside resort of Rande would be at approximately one o’clock. In the eight o’clock direction, but far past the edge of the clock face, was the Old Demwies estate, still southwest of Gneez, in the former Principality of Ratzeburg, far enough from Jerichow. Even if you’d hidden your telephone instead of handing it in you still couldn’t get through to another number, the post office still had nothing to deliver, and the travel ban took care of the rest; and so, for some time, Albert Papenbrock was thought to have vanished without a trace. Only around the end of 1945 did people start talking in Jerichow about someone in far-off Old Demwies, managing the estate for the Soviets, by the name of Papenbrock. If you believed the reports, he wasn’t acting like an old man of seventy-seven, he was bossing the farmworkers around like an old-time overseer, talking to his Soviet superiors like someone who’d never gotten his hands dirty with the Nazis. He sure wasn’t shy. And if someone’s only described to you in words, can you recognize him right off? He’d supposedly made his way there from the Müritz area, maybe he wasn’t the Jerichow Papenbrock. You couldn’t ask Cresspahl. Papenbrock’s wife said she didn’t know anything. Yeah it’s not him. When Soviet counterintelligence came to Jerichow the translators almost always got back the same, plausibly indignant answer: You all arrested him a while back! Doncha even keep a list of who you put away?

  In early August, returning from Lübeck to Jerichow, Jakob took an inordinate detour through Old Demwies so that he could tell Gesine something about her grandfather. She’d have trouble recognizing him. He now wore mended-up clothes all week long, a torn shirt, patched pants, and a black straw hat he never took off so people wouldn’t know he was bald. The commandants of Old Demwies, known as the Twins, hadn’t understood his name and called him the Pope; he didn’t correct them. In the village they called him the Pastor, because he spoke so gentle and mild when assigning work in the mornings, and raged so furiously when they hadn’t made their quotas in the evenings. As far as Jakob could tell the farm was running on textbook lines—they’d already brought in their wheat from the fields and had started threshing. The farmworkers respected the P. for it—he took care of them with extra allowances and right of residence just like the former masters who’d fled; they wanted him to be even more on their side. He avoided getting into fights with the Twins like any other employee. At night the Soviet men would go for a stroll through the farmhands’ cottages shining their flashlights at the beds, looking for grown girls, but all they found there were small children—you could complain to this overseer and he’d actually send someone to the commandants, those two young guys never seen apart, but they just laughed at the nightly disturbance. One time, the soldiers had suddenly been moved by the sight of all those sleeping children right up next to one another and they stood there a long time, shining their flashlights on them, amazed at the little tykes lying there like peas, sleeping like little peas in a pod; this family was offered a room in the manor house, because the Twins decided to interpret the story as meaning a lack of space, while the Pastor could have told them otherwise. The Pope had convinced the Twins to station some Red Army soldiers to guard the farm, so that he could get the work done; at night he locked himself inside and didn’t hear anyone knocking no matter how loud it was. The Soviets had put him in the foreman’s cottage—the whole house, where the former Nazi regional group leader had lived with his wife and children before hanging himself and them. The Pope didn’t want the privilege or the honor and took in two refugee families, putting them into the narrow rooms, as if he preferred not to be alone at night. Jakob had seen the old man only from afar; he’d seemed jittery, and Jakob didn’t want to shock him with a visitor from Jerichow. Plus Cresspahl hadn’t given him any message to take to the old man.

  Papenbrock had hardly bristled at the deal. He was sure he could explain to any Soviet court, even a military one, what he had been doing during the past twelve years, but given that starting in 1935 he’d trusted Cresspahl more than either of his own sons and had done so all the more ever since Lisbeth’s death, he was as good as submissive when in June 1945 he realized that he was no longer up to making a decision of his own, whether it was to hole up in Jerichow or flee to the British across the demarcation line. Louise had wanted to keep the house, and if not the whole business then at least the bakery. Papenbrock hadn’t stayed for that reason, or for her sake at all, it was just that he lacked the self-confidence to drag his Louise away by force. Then Cresspahl came and told them that the Soviets were looking for the father of Robert Papenbrock, who’d become well known for executing hostages in Ukraine. So, the old man let himself get sent somewhere right by the border. So, K. A. Pontiy could request certain deliveries from the administrators of the Old Demwies estate—he’d sent them an extremely skilled estate manager.

  We’ll be gettin this back, said the farmer, giving his pig some bacon.

  May 8, 1968 Wednesday

  The city government is armed and ready for racial violence this summer, and city officials can better estimate the numbers now, after the arrests at Columbia University. There are 196 detention pens in present court buildings and a special pen on Rikers Island that holds 1,600 prisoners. Altogether the police can arrest 10,000 disobedient persons a day, and if there’re more they’ll probably be able to handle it.

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy has cleared his first hurdle on the way to the White House, winning the Indiana primary—not with as many votes as he wanted, just 42 percent. Eugene McCarthy received 27 percent and he can barely give his staff pocket money. Still, according to a poll of college students, McCarthy is a good twenty-five points ahead of Kennedy, who mentions his own money and his right to spend it on whatever he wants, such as a win in Indiana.

  A young man is standing in the Cresspahls’ doorway, with short hair and, fervently devoted to tradition, a button-down shirt tucked into his pants, blinding white thick-waled socks in shoes polished to a military shine. Without being pushy he takes a friendly look at the set table, at the peaceful family life by the evening windows, the darkening green park; he doesn’t insist on being invited in, he can say his piece just fine while standing . . .

  If only we understood this country where we want to live! After seven years. We heard news of the 1960 election as anecdotes that reached Germany—Nixon’s heavy stubble that hurt him on-screen against John Kennedy in a once famous debate, this one not about kitchen technology; we arrived to find President Kennedy and at first wanted to give him credit for abolishing the line on the questionnaire where we had to say if we were planning to assassinate him. Then we learned. We learned what a party precinct is and what a county committee can do, how someone becomes a favorite son and how much a TV ad costs per minute until it’s broadcast for free as news—the whole local folklore of capitalist parliamentarianism. Without much hope, just to know where we’d be and what we’d support if we trusted and believed in who we were for.

  This time it’s supposed to be Eugene McCarthy, if we listen to the new generation, now not flower children but ballot children. There hasn’t been such an upswelling of student support since the 1964 civil rights march in Mississippi—the democratic process counted for nothing against the executive branch’s arrangements with the Four Hundred Families—and then came the New Left, you could escape into the psychedelic embellishments and desolations of consciousness, into personal excuses, whether working for the Peace Corps in South America or another antiwar protest outside City Hall or the Pentagon, still we kept hearing the word frustration, the disgust at empty gestures that accomplished nothing but venting feelings so they no longer bothered you. Then, unexpectedly, in March 1968 they were back, from the posh schools and the poor schools on the East Coast—from Harvard, Radcliffe, Yale, Smith, Barnard, Columbia, as well as Dunbarton and Rivier—and a campaign following all the rules to the letter started for one Senator Eugene McCarthy. Why?

  Fifty-two years old, born in the hamlet of Watkins, Minnesota, pop. 744. Is t
hat why? Because he has Irish ancestors like Kennedy, is Catholic like Kennedy, but more reliably so on both counts? That’s a reason he himself supposedly gave. Fine, they no longer set store in the fear that the pope might control the children of America, they are thinking more like Stalin, admittedly not bringing up the size of the pope’s army right off; but this prejudice is so powerful around the country that even we’ve heard about it. What else do they like about him? That he zipped through middle and high school in six years instead of eight, with straight A’s except for in trigonometry, a hero on the hockey rink and baseball diamond? That helps a man’s reputation hereabouts. Yes. He was one of the few to pick a fight over the radio with the other McCarthy, the sniffer-out of Communists, maybe they credit him with bravery for that. Still, five terms in the Senate as a Democrat and not one law bearing his name. Is it because he embraced the nickname he was given, the Maverick—the animal that doesn’t run with the herd (qv. Texas rancher Samuel A. Maverick, 1803–1870)? But he worked with his party in 1960, supporting in vain one Adlai Stevenson just because he didn’t like Lyndon Johnson and saw nothing but reckless spending and ruthless actions when he looked at Kennedy? In 1964 he went back to the well with LBJ after all, hoping for the vice presidency, and as a reward got mightily dunked. Is it because he was one of the first senators to come out in favor of pulling back in the war against the people of Vietnam? He hadn’t said anything until January 1966. All right, well, he’s more or less antiwar. He’s picked fights with L. B. Johnson over everything, whether the crisis in the cities or that in agriculture. Both these things are true of Robert Kennedy too. Are they more true of McCarthy?