Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  A day trip in West Germany. At midnight we were on the ferry to Bornholm. Marie denied she felt scared for one single second. Now we’re in Connecticut across from Long Island.

  June 1, 1968 Saturday

  Marie was on an expedition, and she found no spare New York Times in the woods around the house, she would have had to steal one from the marina. It was lying open in a cockpit as if posed for a photo shoot. (Marie thought it was pretentious; since the day before yesterday she’s wanted her own boat.) What she did find was a plump little duck in the general store. Since no one wanted to cook it—not Naomi, not Amanda Williams—it was time for Mrs. Cresspahl to show off her kitchen skills. The last time Naomi’s father got a new stove was in 1937, a sturdy smoky thing where you have to guess the temperature. The task is to cook for five in a strange oven, and the two other women are warming up their appetites on the beach in the evening sun. There was once a girl in Cresspahl’s kitchen standing next to Jakob’s mother taking lessons: chop the liver, heart, and stomach very fine with an onion and mix in one egg, a pinch of pepper, salt, and a piece of white bread softened in broth. There’s no broth. Luckily there’s a girl standing in Mr. Gehrig’s kitchen, watching the work: Then stitch the stuffed body closed at the top and bottom openings, melt two ounces of butter . . .

  – You didn’t have any duck to eat in 1946, Gesine.

  – In 1946 we went hungry, strictly following the recipe.

  – What were you like as a child at the New School, Gesine?

  – It wasn’t anywhere near finished. Even in spring we were the class from the old Girls High School. It’s true, Eike Swantenius was dead, a Brit had shot her, driving by. Even Wegerecht’s daughter came to class sometimes. The commuter students from Jerichow were still Wollenberg and Cresspahl, same as before, and they still didn’t sit next to each other. There was a quota of refugee children assigned to us, and they had to fit into our curriculum irrespective of theirs. Since we’d already started Latin, we and they had to continue it. The law said I wasn’t supposed to leave Jerichow until I was done with eighth grade. One new thing were rye rolls in the break after second period.

  – Couldn’t you get your revenge on Julie Westphal now? Slapping you for forgetting your notebook, she’d been a real fascist!

  – Julie Westphal had retreated before the wrath of Schoolgirl Cresspahl. She didn’t even report for work at the beginning, under the Soviet occupation; since July she’d been second deputy chair of the Cultural Association in Gneez. There she held musical evenings, with seventeenth-century aphorisms; she apparently melted at the grand piano, neck held high like a gulping chicken, and because she was an artist she received the rations of a heavy laborer.

  – What did they say when you transferred in Gneez?

  – The same as here: Please keep clear of the platform edge. We had old ladies for teachers: Charlotte Pagels, with her sister, and Frau Dr. phil. Beese. Mrs. Beese had been given early retirement in 1938, Lottie and Fifi Pagels as the civil service law required, they all considered themselves victims of Nazi despotism and they held out their grievances to us like badly mended clothing. They felt they were doing us a favor by bothering with us, and hadn’t tried to learn anything about how to deal with twelve-year-olds. What they wanted was a salon of well-behaved children, rather like Louise Papenbrock when she’d take the fine porcelain out of the glass cabinet but only to look at, not to touch. Fifi would sometimes throw up her hands in the middle of math and cry: You bad, bad children! She’d turned fragile and vulnerable under Lottie’s lash, now a sketch of her in the dirt from the rain on the windowpane was more than she could take. Beese stuck to a strategy of contempt: silently averting her head when your handwriting slipped below the line, smushing her lips together and gravely stepping backward to the safest place, the lectern, the bridge of the ship.

  – And Stalin on the wall behind her.

  – No Stalin, no Marx. We were given objective lessons in the subjects we hadn’t had to turn in our books from. The Soviet Union could never come up, so no geography. The rule of three in cross-multiplication, the ablative, Friedrich Schiller—we covered those. Not biology. The new textbooks weren’t invented yet. Lottie, who we also called Charlie, learned each day’s Russian lesson in advance from one Mr. Krijgerstam, in private lessons, not by taking his Cultural Association course.

  – What could you get with an A in Russian?

  – Nothing from these ladies. Anyone who could recite Goethe’s “How gloriously gleams / all Nature upon me!” well, which meant in sparkling fashion, would get Lottie’s nature gleaming upon her. Brigitte Wegerecht was taken out of school with typhus on January 3 and came back on March 6 with a cap on her head. (She was teased for her half-bald head, and Schoolgirl Cresspahl and she made plans to sit next to each other the following year.) Brigitte got a D in Russian, since she’d missed it—no crime at all in the Pagelses’ eyes. Getting a D in needlework, on the other hand, was considered absolutely positively unforgivable. We were being brought up for a bourgeois household.

  – Not in an anti-Fascist way?

  – Not in a pro-Soviet way. One of our assignments was to research our name. This was the worst possible invitation for nicknames. Schoolgirl Cresspahl didn’t want to be pegged as “cress on a pole,” but she’d also prefer if the name didn’t come from “Christ.” Maybe from chrest in Wendish. When it was her turn, she said her name was put together from North German kross and Plattdeutsch Pall.

  – “Pawl”?

  – Yes. A sailor’s term. The ratchet brace in a geared wheel that prevents it from slipping back when you turn it, and a big, crude, crass one too.

  – Just like the bread rolls in Germany.

  – Exactly. Mrs. Beese said: Nothing doing! Cress, from the Greek grastis, “green fodder,” Old High German kresso, plus falen, as in “Ostfalen,” Eastphalia. And now I had my nickname. Greenfodder.

  – Did you put jumping jacks on her chair, or a needle, or a wet sponge . . .

  – Jumping jacks! We didn’t have those. A needle was a valuable property. Anyway, she herself got rid of the name for me. To help the local children and the refugee children get to know one another, we all had to share a little of our life story—

  – There, you see?

  – No, she still didn’t have a handle on the children from Stargard, Insterburg, Breslau—the East. For her it was about their father’s job. And here’s where you get your anti-Fascism: Wegerecht’s father was held against her as though he were her fault personally. Beese, with her graduate degree, had been free to do nothing. Wegerecht had stayed head district court judge until 1940; in 1942 he was shot and killed by partisans in Greece. Brigitte felt that was punishment enough for her father, plus it seemed to her that he had made her, she hadn’t made him. She looked at me, afraid I’d go back on our plan for next year, and I nodded, especially now. Mrs. Beese cried: You’ve got it coming to you, Cresspahl!

  – Did you pour ink on her hair from an upstairs landing? You could’ve done that at least.

  – We didn’t have any ink to spare. Anyway other people started in on Frau Dr. Beese. Lottie Pagels felt it just wasn’t right that Cresspahl’s own father had been dragged off by the Russians. Fifi at her sister’s side, letting her lower lip droop with grievous disapproval. From that moment on I was a favored child, nobody cared anymore about a flaw in the needlework or a crossed-out number on my math homework. No one calls a kid like that Greenfodder, they look kindly and forgivingly at her. I never forgave her.

  – Wasn’t that as good as an apology?

  – Now the whole class knew what had happened to my father, and what might happen. Would you have liked that? I always thought about him anyway, it’s not like I needed particular occasions to think of him. The thought of him thought me. Now I’d be reminded of him in school all the time, by strangers. All that was missing was for them to ask me about him every week.

  – Someone must have seen him—in Gneez, in Schwerin, somewhere.


  – Marie, when the Soviets arrested someone he really and truly disappeared. Jakob didn’t know the countryside and even Cresspahl’s friends from Neustrelitz to Wendisch Burg to Neustadt-Glewe couldn’t tell him anything. Jakob kept his Russian business partners as secret as he could—I wasn’t supposed to notice anything at all about Krijgerstam’s or Vassarion’s visits. I knew he was looking. They were nice to him, but questions about Cresspahl made their faces go stiff. Too dangerous. Contagious. They didn’t want to end up arrested by the Red Army. Comfort was one thing, pity was fine. Where he was stayed a secret. As if he was dead.

  – You recently told me your Easter water story. You heard his voice. But he wasn’t there, Gesine.

  – He’d told me I wasn’t allowed to leave the house in a dress. But if I wanted to get some Easter water and wash in it to make myself beautiful I had to go out in my best dress, the green velvet one. When I got back I heard his prohibition again. He wasn’t there, and he was speaking as though through the door.

  – In your head.

  – Now you’ll think your mother’s crazy.

  – I hear voices too, Gesine. Now don’t you have to sprinkle some water on this nice bird here?

  – You can take off his string.

  – And may I stay up late to watch the battle between McCarthy and Robert Kennedy?

  – You usually don’t even ask.

  – Naomi! Clarissa! Mrs. Williams! It’s ready!

  June 2, 1968 Sunday

  We must have looked like a crumbling chunk of family, rough around the edges, on the Stamford platform—two children shivering from the rain, three aunts or mothers, with luggage as though snatched up in a quick getaway. Whether the adults in the group were relatives or trapped in some other kind of fight with one another, the passengers already on board the train made room in the nearby seats—maybe they were curious, maybe it was just because the new arrivals were dry, but they were rewarded with neither a continuation of the argument nor a reconciliation. They could see Naomi’s thin face, pinched into the shape of a lovely svelte owl mask, pointed severely and joylessly at the wet scenery outside. The train swung back and forth, she remained stiffly at the window, even when the Sound disappeared in the fog, or behind the backs of houses. Amanda, our Amanda Williams, the delight and eye candy and terror of men traveling alone, still hid behind dark reflective sunglasses after it was half-dark in the train, brooding over what hadn’t been said, lips pouting, as if imitating a sulking child. The children took no part in this game their elders were playing, withdrawing to a double seat at the far end of the car with their backs to them. The girl with the braids held up a newspaper page with comics for the smaller one, explaining to her some of the final acts. She didn’t really take much pleasure in the latest news of Bugs Bunny or Li’l Abner, she clearly had trouble getting the point, and Clarissa kept her impish face impassive and mad, like in school, no resemblance now to the hopping olive from earlier today. And it wasn’t only from the rain still hanging in her curly hair. Mrs. Cresspahl read, in many sections of The New York Times, what she’d missed on vacation, but her ears too were still ringing with the sound of three voices—Amanda’s aggressive alto, Naomi’s careful girl’s voice, and the flat tones that had sounded so halfhearted in the bones of her own skull. It had been a painful session, over the rest of their breakfasts, cozily tucked away from the heavy country rain that pelted the roof and the lush greenery outside the windows. It was supposed to be a game. How all three of us could live in this house by the sea,

  your Marie with Clarissa, Amanda, yours truly Naomi, and you, Geesign.

  For the children?

  Us too, we’ve never had such a fun weekend in the country. Couldn’t we have a piece of vacation every day?

  Would there be room for us?

  One room for each of us, and for the girls. And one common room.

  And we’ll pack the husbands away in the bunkbeds in the garage.

  Mr. Prince is banned from the house. I’ll go by Gehrig again.

  Mr. Williams can go jump in a lake, and not one near here either. Yeah, it’s been in the air for a while.

  Anyway, we’ll need the garage for our cars.

  Gesine, don’t you have someone? Wouldn’t he come?

  He’d be glad to, Naomi. Just the man for you, Amanda.

  The guy from Nebraska?

  Not exactly . . . German, at least he used to be.

  You won’t have to tell us what he’s like in bed. We know you don’t like that sort of thing.

  Okay, that helps.

  Right. So that we wouldn’t be a family, more like a club.

  All the laundry together, all the dishes in one dishwasher, making one meal a day instead of three.

  And someone to watch the children during the day.

  And after work you drive to the station and pick us up from the New York train.

  So who’d be the head of household?

  You, Naomi, and the former Mrs. Williams.

  Who’d be the housewife?

  Whoever wants to. Do you want to, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  She can’t. She has something going on with de Rosny, she doesn’t have to say what it is. You, Naomi.

  I’d try it, for two months to start—if your Marie agrees to it.

  You’d be perfect, Miss Gehrig.

  Yeah but you know I could never make duck like you did.

  So the kids would go to school here.

  Where I went to school. Half the way runs through the woods, then on Main Street to the golf course.

  Tell us more. Traditions. Curriculum.

  Gesine, I’m another one of those children who was supposed to have it better. Your Marie will lack for nothing. Educationally speaking it’s almost New England. With a ticket to Vassar College included.

  What do you pay for Marie in New York?

  $890 for tuition, 200 for meals, 150 for school uniforms, 300 for after-school activities. It comes to $1,600.00 a year.

  You see. You see?

  Now it’s also true that Marie wants her own boat.

  I can teach her to sail.

  She knows how to sail.

  You see. You see?

  It’s just, she won’t give up the apartment in New York.

  So keep it. We’ll have a pied-à-terre. You’ll have a pied-à-terre.

  How long’ll we do it for?

  We’ll try it and see. As long as it works out.

  And the cost?

  What do you mean the cost.

  We’ll open a pot. We’ll set up a budget. We’ll sign a contract.

  The house.

  I’ll get the house, Gehrig Sr. would rather give it to me before he dies anyway. I’ll contribute the house.

  And if your father wants to come back, or when he comes for a visit, we’ll stick him in a hotel?

  Oh, Gesine!

  We’ll have to tell him.

  Okay, Amanda, Cresspahl’s right. We’ll tell him.

  Because of the neighbors.

  They’ve known me since before I could walk.

  I meant buying.

  What do you mean, buying?

  He’ll give it to you. But we’re not his daughters.

  I wouldn’t take advantage of him!

  Okay. We buy it. If he puts the money in his will, I’ll get even more.

  Naomi, we’re not going to talk about your inheritance. You started with the house.

  Let him sell us his house. He’ll have one more story to tell. I have six thousand. Your turn, Gesine.

  We could get our hands on four. Amanda?

  Does it matter if . . . I don’t really want to take anything from Mr. Williams . . . two thousand, to start. My folks in Minnesota . . .

  Twelve thousand in cash, that’s enough. Henry’ll get us the rest. Yeah, the guy from Thursday, who couldn’t take his eyes off a certain Mrs. Cresspahl! His father runs the First National branch in the village.

  In the village. In the village . . .


  You see. You see?

  Okay, how many shares. Five?

  Three, Gesine.

  But what about Amanda? She’d have to pay more than she should for just one person.

  Amanda, say something!

  It won’t happen.

  Because of money, Amanda? Mrs. Williams! Either you’re over him or you’re not ready to do business.

  It’s over. I’m done with him. Just, sorry.

  Amanda pays one part, you pay one and a half, I pay two.

  You pay two? Marie’s not even twelve. I want to pay two if you do.

  For the price of the house? For the household expenses? For the sailboat? For the two cars?

  Stop it. Don’t be so German, Gesine.

  Should we stop talking about it?

  What a ditz you are, Naomi.

  That’s right, I’m an idiot. A real pig. A . . . Can I stop now if I say sorry?

  Okay. Forget it.

  You two would have to keep things a bit cleaner. How else are we supposed to live here.

  Fair enough. Look, Gesine, I’m not Jewish. My grandparents were, and not all of them either. In my father the Austrian side is much more pronounced than the tribe of Israel. I’m no more related to the Jewish ones than I am to the other ones, Gesine. I don’t have any personal thing against the Germans. And if your father was in a Nazi camp, on the wrong side—