Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Why do we even want to understand the students supporting McCarthy? Is it because we secretly want to be one of them, not just in our opinions but also in age?

  They first went over to him for giving long-enough speeches in a dry tone, professorial, with no tricks or appeals to emotions. Maybe they went over to him first because they were students, and only then because they agreed with him. They might have liked that here was someone demanding hard work from them, not a circus. But why do they now put on his severe, restrained airs and sobriety themselves, shutting the persistently bearded boys up in the back rooms to seal envelopes or lick stamps, wearing pencil skirts instead of minis on the streets where voters walk, forgoing men’s jewelry, turning up clean-shaven, avoiding any impression of eccentricity, ringing the doorbell like a bank teller, in jacket and tie? And the press can report that they’re sleeping chastely segregated by sexes, the boys in gyms, the girls in private quarters. McCarthy likes it that way, the voters like it that way, but this is the discipline and ethos of an earlier time, and one of these days the merely faked image is going to turn into the reality of “law and order,” isn’t it?

  Eugene McCarthy drags his family into the campaign with him like everyone else, wife Abigail, Ellen Mary Michael Margaret, for touching appearances and intimate details; twelve-year-old Margaret, in seventh grade, is his “secret weapon”—aren’t the students embarrassed? Don’t they notice any problem with this national custom? Are we allowed to be embarrassed?

  Are they with him because he’s surrounded by stars? John Kenneth Galbraith, professor of economics at Harvard, has brought every one of his Americans for Democratic Action around to McCarthy. The poet Robert Lowell said for McCarthy that the Republicans cannot sink and they will not swim, whatever that means; McCarthy writes poetry himself. And then came Paul Newman, no less, the giant broad-boned actor oozing decorum and decency, who in his recent films plays the selfless, noble detective, or the advocate for the Indians guarding the bag of their money until he’s killed, his heavy head with his blond hair tipping to one side, it’s all over. Is it the people like this surrounding him? And they won in New Hampshire in March, with 42.2 percent of the Democratic vote against LBJ’s 49.4,

  Hey, hey, L. B. Jay!

  How many kids did you kill today?

  and the students said that if he’d gotten 10 percent they’d leave the country, with 20 they’d burn their draft cards, with 30 they’d go back to school, but with 40 they’d come along to the next primary in Wisconsin, and some were still with him yesterday in Indiana, though now deployed against Robert Kennedy, whom they’d earlier supported. Because of Kennedy, maybe.

  Robert Francis Kennedy, Democratic senator from New York, stood up as recently as January 30 and promised his friends and supporters that he would not run against Lyndon Johnson “under any foreseeable circumstances.” For the sake of party unity. Sat back and watched McCarthy proceed from state to state as the only antiwar candidate and didn’t help him—inconsiderate, gutless. Then he saw the number of people in New Hampshire who were sick of the president, and Robert Francis wasn’t there with them. How did he go back on his word? By suggesting that the president declare himself incapable of managing affairs involving Vietnam; the president declined to do so; the next day, Kennedy announced he was running against the president, “not out of any personal enmity or lack of respect for the president,” or so he said. Stood up in the Senate Caucus Room in the old Senate office building on Capitol Hill, where his brother John had announced his candidacy eight years earlier. His tie clip a model of the PT 109 patrol torpedo boat his brother John had commanded with honor, on film, in World War II. His words were those of his brother John. With his wife, Ethel, and nine children he announced his candidacy as John’s brother, to take votes away from Eugene McCarthy, for whom he’d done nothing—like a hungry dog who considers another’s bone his own legitimate property. Paul Newman grumbled at the shame of Kennedy choosing to take a free ride on someone else’s back; others said he was endangering the young people’s new trust in democratic process, or called him a claim jumper, and one student for McCarthy concluded: Hawks are bad enough, we don’t need chickens; finally, Kennedy was compared to the cowbird, which sits on grazing cattle, scans them for parasites, and lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. Undaunted, three hours and twenty minutes after pulling the lever in the voting booth, Kennedy marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York with a green flower in his buttonhole, an Irishman among Irishmen, and that afternoon he declared his candidacy in Boston (“because America can do better”), the next day in Kansas. A choice between McCarthy and him would be one between fairness and underhanded tricks. So would we choose McCarthy, and why exactly?

  He hasn’t said what he’d do with the soldiers in Vietnam. It’s possible he would handle agriculture and finance and housing construction differently from his predecessor, who now doesn’t want to keep going; won’t he have to accommodate himself to the Four Hundred Families, and everything they need for their money and power and more money? Why vote for this guy instead of for someone else? Why vote at all in this country?

  Now there’s one question we’d like to ask, concerning our personal circumstances. Two weeks ago McCarthy criticized the current administration for failing to realize that the dollar was a more important factor in world stability than military power. We have a boss, de Rosny, who understands what this means; it wasn’t quite clear enough for us. Are we going to lose our job? And if it keeps us, where will it send us?

  So what do we do with this young man ringing our doorbell at eight at night, holding a clipboard, asking us whether we are a registered member of the Democratic Party, and whether he could tell us a few words about McCarthy. Will we understand him?

  May 9, 1968 Thursday

  is the day we take Czech lessons, and at two o’clock on the dot Professor Kreslil ducks into Cresspahl’s office, carefully pulls the door shut behind him, and only then adopts a more relaxed manner. Maybe the long walk through the tall building makes him uncomfortable—past the doormen, next to countless strangers—or maybe it’s the opulent decor on this floor, the sixteenth, that intimidates him, and it only just now occurs to Cresspahl that she should wait for the old man on the sidewalk every week and escort him in. But there’s no way she can apologize and suggest this, he would implacably refuse the help even though he wants it. Čeština je těžká.

  Hellos, goodbyes, asking how it’s going—all of this has long taken place in the foreign language; the lessons have dissolved into conversations, but the small stock of things they have in common has quickly been exhausted, and when it comes to their mutual friend Mrs. Ferwalter they can only pass on a greeting, not discuss, for instance, the source of her health problems. After that, the conversation has to be restarted using occasions that lead away from personal matters, usually stories from the day’s Times, and once again there is not only a division into teacher and student but into a Czech Jew and a German daughter of German parents—Mr. Kreslil would, of course, deny this with his implacable politeness, were it ever to be expressed. So, the task is to retell the stories in our own words. It’s just that Mr. Kreslil no longer likes hearing the latest news from Prague, ever since the police roundups that swept the country in the fifties now threaten to return, or other acts of cooperation with the USSR, we can’t ask him about this part of his life story.

  Truman’s eighty-fourth birthday doesn’t yield much. The street fighting between Parisian students and the police is unclear from where we sit. We’ve all but forgotten the reports from Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese district, as if the war news weren’t new every day. The jobless rate for the darkskinned being more than double the rate for the pink-skinned—that too is a repetition. An ad on the front page announces Wanted: Former Professional Bank Robber to give advice on new film, call Thomas Crown, CIrcle 5-6000, ext. 514. In principle yes. But no.

  So let’s take the Times poll on the protests at Columbia University. It says tha
t fifty-five out of one hundred adults in greater New York blame the students. Even more do in the suburbs, among those over forty, and among the non-college-educated. Fully eighty-three supported the decision to call in the police, and fifty-eight found the degree of force they used to have been absolutely correct. It’s a hard article to paraphrase, full of numbers and more numbers and the temptation to duplicate phrases, and here come the first hesitations. They are what spoil the almost entirely correct sentence: there was no breakdown on whether the persons polled were Negro or white, because the polling organization presumed that most were white. “Simply because of the economic factor of having a telephone.”

  The sentence wasn’t exactly prizewinning anyway. The student realized too late that Professor Kreslil can’t afford a phone, for economic reasons and also because, in the part of the city where he lives, a phone in the apartment is often a tool for burglars. I’m still making mistakes. Ještě dělám chyby, pane Kreslil.

  – To nevadí. Ano, mluvíte poněkud pomalu: says the old gentleman, for whom politeness to women takes precedence over reproach, and once again he looks at Cresspahl in a charitable if baffled way, as though wanting to put the Czech language into her mouth and brain and yet not understanding how he came to be here in this room with her, or what she wants that language for. And suddenly we’re not sure either. He holds his sallow skull still, attentive; he lets nothing show in his blank face; he can’t exactly be enjoying how we’re trampling around in his language. That’s not something you can make up for by repeatedly thanking him for his efforts, or even by bringing him out of the building onto the street. Today it didn’t go well.

  That was a warning, but this Cresspahl wants to try her luck again. She gives herself the afternoon off, starting that moment on Lexington Avenue—she doesn’t even tell Mrs. Lazar she’s leaving, she can pretend the absence is for work reasons. There’s a Czech film playing at the Baronet, subtitled, not dubbed. She’s been studying the language for six months, she wants to take a test.

  In the Baronet, on Fifty-Ninth Street, across from Alexander’s department store, in one of the three new cinemas on a New York corner persistently written off as dead, they’re showing The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, “made in ČSSR,” it starts at four o’clock, the people behind the counter are not ashamed to take two dollars per ticket, there’s a seat free on the aisle in the smoking section so I can leave early if needed, all right, test me.

  CARLO PONTI PRESENTS:

  In Prague under the German occupation, a guy is dropped off at a Jewish lawyer’s apartment. He’s wounded and the Germans mustn’t find him. Dr. Braun arrives in the attic room of a dusty, run-down apartment building, the prognosis is not good, he probably won’t make it. He not only has this wounded man to worry about now, he also works in the bare (stripped bare) office of the Department of Confiscation of Jewish Property, where he has to say into the phone: Ano. Yes. Bravely, reliably, hopelessly. Everything drains out of his face as he listens to the other end of the line. Mrs. Cresspahl can occasionally understand clearly the specific things he says, but she doesn’t always grasp the whole, so her gaze keeps slipping down to the annoyingly helpful subtitles. Now she’s distracted by the differences between the original and the translation. Braun goes looking around the city for a place that’ll take in the wounded man. The screen keeps showing furniture trucks with German on them: KIRCHENBERGER—why does the audience eventually laugh at that? Then there’s the bar, the Desperation Bar, copious drinking in party clothes and dancing to pathetic jazz, probably drug use. There are Jews there too but they can’t help. One shot begins with ordinary-looking shower nozzles that suddenly transport the audience to the ones in Auschwitz, the ones that the gas came out of. These ones are for water after all, because when the Nazi army operates a brothel with Jewish women it wants them clean first. They haven’t been whores for long, they used to be the daughters of the middle class, the bon ton of Prague. The alternative is being sent to the gas. Another alternative is a quick slit to an artery, Dr. Braun sees someone there bent over a dead woman. Is it not just the wounded man in hiding, does he want to buy morphine for other reasons? Missed that. The crosscutting with the scenes of present-day Prague, what are they supposed to remind us of? of how locals acted under the Nazis? of forgetting? Some things stick in the mind, when there’s no dialogue to hinder them: the boy on the bicycle in the suburban street who sees the Germans’ car outside the door of his house. The start of the sequence at a similar point, the expectation set up for the audience and then disappointed. But is that in the original dialogue? that it’s the lawyer suddenly breaking off his phone call which brings the police to search the building on the second day of the story? Does Mr. Fanta really say in the nightclub scene: “I did it, it was my duty”? Groveling Mr. Fanta with his stack of Schulungsbrief Nazi magazines. The caretaker protecting her bunny rabbit—of course she’s hard of hearing too. The music teacher talking to the pictures on her wall, she’s not very plausible. A butcher’s wife who never stops humming. And then there’s an ambiguous hero on the stairs with a dark, decisive look in his eye. If the German police in Prague can trace an anonymous call to a specific building, why can’t they tell which apartment it’s from? On the second morning, the wounded man has been removed from the attic room, by whom? At the end of the movie, there is talk of an approaching “confrontation.” The subtitle says “a little talk.” The long circular staircase, the tenants filing past looking at the corpse. So is the wounded man still hidden in the attic, just somewhere else, and Dr. Braun is trying to distract the police from this possibility by killing himself? Done. The End. Konec.

  Test failed.

  Cresspahl is sitting in the bar at the Hotel Marseilles, a regular for years, a member of the Mediterranean Swimming Club, a lady Mr. McIntyre will serve even without a companion. A conversation about the weather, so cloudy! in May!, wouldn’t bother him a bit. But this Mrs. Cresspahl is sitting there dazed, as if something incomprehensible has happened to her, customers like that you just leave alone. And turn on the six o’clock news.

  NBC’s Sixth Hour News shows refugees in a storeroom. The sounds of gunfire. Stretchers being hauled down a hospital corridor. The bundles on them no longer look human. “The exact number of casualties is not known, since doctors are unable to reach most of them.” Now Cresspahl puts down her glass, more sensitive than she usually is, and goes straight home, which she’d been trying to avoid doing.

  She gets a glimpse of her second defeat when she’s still on Ninety-Seventh Street, during the few steps it takes to get to overcast Riverside Drive. “The fifth horseman is fear”—what is that supposed to mean. The fifth knight, the fifth mounted soldier, fear. Aren’t there four, for carriages, with the fifth coachman running alongside them? The declaration sounds like something from the people who wrote under the name of Shakespeare, but she doesn’t recognize the quote. She had to buy her English from a translation school; there wasn’t money for a university. But she’s read her Shakespeare anyway, all twelve volumes! She may not have read her Bacon as well, or Longfellow, she doesn’t even have him on her bookshelf. It’s not good to be an autodidact, it always comes out eventually. She doesn’t push the apartment door shut, she leaves her fate to chance, she goes straight to the books. Here’s the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, seventh rev. ed., 1959. Under “Horseman”: one single entry, Calverley’s ode to tobacco. Under “Fear,” almost two columns, a gaze passing swiftly over them is held up not even the third time through, there’s nothing to do with horseback riders or fifths. She is so confused that she swallows her pride and looks under that too. Nothing.

  She’s been living in New York City since 1961. There they are showing a Czech film titled The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, a phrase that is apparently so familiar in English, in American English, that Oxford’s book of quotations doesn’t even need to include it. Everyone knows it, except Cresspahl. She’s not only failed in Czech, she’s flunked English too.

  Then out
from the elevator comes a child with schoolbooks under her arm. She closes the door behind her, slightly surprised, and says, in her unthinking, unhesitatingly fluent English: Hey, Gesine! How was the movie?

  May 10, 1968 Friday

  The East German government never interferes in other countries’ domestic affairs, and tomorrow it’s sending a special train to Bonn on its German Reich Railway, with eight hundred seats for West Berliners wanting to protest the German Emergency Acts—round trips for foreigners costing less than standard rates. It never interferes in the internal affairs of independent states, and it publishes in the newspaper that American and West German troops are entering Czechoslovakia to take part in a war film; the embassy on Schönhauser Allee immediately denies the report, but there it was in black and white in the Berliner Zeitung. Now, true, it was only “informed sources” who’d heard the GDR’s custodian tell his Soviet friends that this act of West German aggression demands a strengthening of the Warsaw Pact forces on the western border of Czechoslovakia. With East Germans among these new troops. Still, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him interfere in it.

  Meanwhile, for the twenty-third-annual time, the Communists in Prague are thanking the Red Army for liberating them from the Germans and once again promising friendship to the Soviet Union. Those who liberated the western part of Czechoslovakia got their wreath too, placed on the site of the destroyed monument to American soldiers in Pilsen. Plzeň. And the Soviet troop movements along the Czechoslovakian borders in Poland and East Germany, these really are supposed to be just training exercises. If you ask the Foreign Office in London, reports that they are meant to bring pressure on Czechoslovakia are “hard to believe.”

  The military commander of the town of Jerichow, K. A. Pontiy, had given his Jerichowers a new cemetery, and now he wanted one for his army.