Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  No. No. Not that.

  I’m talking about you. We’d want to do this thing with you.

  Because you liked my duck.

  Enough already!

  Okay.

  Be honest, du. I still remember that from high school, in German you can call someone by their first name but you have to not think the second-person singularis pronoun, it also goes with the second . . . the third pluralis. Thou . . . be honest, you!

  I think of you in the second singularis. “Du,” and “Naomi.”

  Now you two have to tell me everything.

  See!

  The housewife. Amanda, you start.

  We’ll need a schedule. Like on a bulletin board.

  Like in the office. But we’re trying to get away from the office!

  I think work schedules are appropriate.

  Okay, make us one, Amanda. But yesterday she wanted to watch something other than channel seven. You didn’t care what McCarthy and Kennedy had to say, you just stayed to be polite.

  Still, we agreed about Kennedy.

  Still, we’ll need a second TV. If you know what I mean. Gesine.

  I’m trying to keep Marie off TV.

  And that will be fully respected. No, I mean for what you don’t like.

  We’ve known each other since, what, 1963, 1964? If I were—

  Gesine, don’t be so . . . Okay. I saw you. And this morning you set the table again, I’m sorry. The milk in the carton would have been good enough for me but you wanted it in a little pitcher, and not a plastic one, porcelain. Am I right?

  Well, if we have pitchers.

  We’ll have them. What else?

  What about vacations.

  Here it’ll be vacation every night, every weekend!

  She means vacations from us.

  No! Amanda! It’s just, I need to go to Europe in August.

  Yeah, well, relatives.

  Maybe you’d rather stay with us than visit them.

  No, it’s not that. A tourist trip, to Czechoslovakia.

  You have to. . .?

  She can’t get around it.

  You don’t need to explain.

  You won’t have to pay your household fee and Marie will stay with us.

  If you convince her to.

  You don’t want her to, do you, Gesine.

  On the contrary, this trip—

  Something’s going on here. If you don’t trust us, get a separate lawyer. Are you afraid we’ll steal your guy from Nebr—your guy from your bed? Or have you lost your mind after all, just because you’re a few stories higher up than us now? You think you’re better than us?

  Amanda. It was supposed to be a game. Leave her alone.

  If anyone’s ruining this game, it’s her!

  Do you want to leave New York, Gesine?

  No. No.

  You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen come fall, right?

  Right.

  You know that, Amanda.

  Right. And we’ll need a room to cry in too.

  until all three of us were sitting around the table as if we’d lost our language, moved to tears in the corners of our eyes by friendship, goaded into rage by disappointment. We were rescued by the children, who’d had enough of East Side Kids on TV—the merry adventures of gangsters back in the thirties, which Marie wasn’t supposed to be watching though. She hesitated in the doorway, as if walking into an awkward mood like a headwind. The adults were duly ashamed of themselves, and so that Clarissa wouldn’t get upset too we silently finished the big cleanup and took the village taxi to the 1:50 train from Stamford, although we actually could’ve stayed till tomorrow morning. Since then we haven’t really spoken.

  The New York Times describes again what we saw last night on channel 7: Robert F. Kennedy’s right-handed gestures quoting his brother, his striped tie, his indefatigable smile. The Times reveals that he’d refused a public debate against McCarthy for many weeks, until he was too upset by the latter’s win in the Oregon primary. The Times has heard Kennedy’s wife say that she can’t ever think of him except as having won, and the Times also prints as tentative ellipses what we didn’t understand in the broadcast either, for the sake of accuracy. And what does she have to report from the home country?

  In one Germany, the Communists blew up the Leipzig University church on Thursday, at four in the morning our time. First-semester student Cresspahl had been struck by the building for not being made of brick and for having been built to stand between other buildings, the Augusteum and the town house containing Café Felsche that had been totally bombed away. Completed in 1518, consecrated by Martin Luther in 1545, used since 1945 by both Catholics and Protestants—the child from elsewhere had learned these things about Leipzig, too, she was planning to stay awhile. Stud. phil. Cresspahl (first semester) was inside the church only once, for a concert, in a space divided into neither galleries nor naves, a bourgeois, almost domestic space from which the piety had been removed, and very bright, even though the rounded dormer windows scurrying all around the roof let in no light that made it down to the ground level. And now it hadn’t been enough to, say, remove the ridge turret from the roof, or the top of the globe with the cross on it, the Wendish Cross; some students had to be arrested, other people protesting behind police cordons threatened with arrest if they “whipped up emotions against the authorities.” That sounds like a bad translation. There were architects who sought to preserve the Leipzig church and include it in the university building project, but the “East German leader” said something about old teeth that had to be extracted by Socialism. Mr. U. is a native of Leipzig. Even a tiny piece of common sense like this has to be taught to people against their will; they need to be made—by threats, with force—to revise the picture they want their city to show the world. “Citizens, disperse or else you will be arrested”: that’s probably more like what the loudspeaker cars actually hurled at the people.

  On the same page, p. 7, adjacent as if related, we are told something about the other Germany’s lower house, no, Bundestag: 384 representatives cast their votes for the Seventeenth Amendment to the German Constitution. Now anywhere the government detects a state of emergency it can snoop into people’s letters, packages, and telephone conversations, force them to do government work, at gunpoint too—all achievements that aren’t exactly making West Germany less like East Germany. Then the Social Democrats promise not to permit any misuse of the law, as if there were guaranteed to be a Social Democratic Party for all eternity and as long as this state exists. The workers have understood that strikes under such states of emergency can be broken by armed forces; the middle-class citizens seem not to have realized that a state of emergency can confiscate their cars. The government wants gratitude—they claim they’ve extracted a little more West German sovereignty from the General Treaty between Germany and the Allied victors; the Allies have given up some of their dirty deals, a couple of ungrateful brushes with West German nationals, but in their barracks they remain rulers under their own laws, and it is they who decide about Berlin and about Germany as a whole, even if the Soviet Union has a word or two to say about it. This is what the Federal Republic calls sovereignty.

  Explain this to us, please, Mrs. Cresspahl. You’re German too. Explain to us what the Germans are doing.

  And now it’s homework time. On May 4 the Czechoslovakian defense minister announced a visit from Warsaw Pact troops for maneuvers. This General Dzúr let people believe that the maneuvers would come in, maybe, the fall. Last week he corrected himself and stated the time as June. And it was still just May 31 when the Soviet troops moved in anyway, across this most casual of borders.

  Others wanting to join in the fun are expected from Hungary and Poland. But the East German Communists aren’t sending their troops yet, for now they’re just mad at their Prague comrades.

  As the train pulls into the tunnel under the East River, Mrs. Cresspahl has disappeared from her taciturn group. As the light above the bare factory
roofs of Queens returns to the train car she does too, unsuspiciously, from the buffet car, for in her hands she is holding three paper cups full of a brownish fluid. What’s surprising about this tea is only that there are ice cubes floating in it. At this point Marie turns around after all and takes her mother’s measure with a cool, instructional look. Because if a lady goes off to get double bourbons, however demurely disguised, Marie is sure that she could’ve learned such behavior only from long-lasting contact with Soviet military personnel.

  What’s left of the rain is sitting on the flat roofs outside. Again the train needs to duck into the ground and under the river, and then we’ll be home.

  – Have some tea: Mrs. Cresspahl says, and the friends accept their portions. Amanda W. can do so only by raising her head a little too impetuously, still ready to take offense. Naomi smiles a little off to one side and closes her eyes for a moment, as if wanting to indicate a secret that Amanda is now excluded from. The other passengers miss what they’ve been waiting for, because they have to stand up long before it’s time and pull together their coats, bags, umbrellas, newspapers. The three women sit next to one another, comfortably unhurried, and one says once that this is some good tea, and another one answers, not bad as tea goes.

  Then, in Pennsylvania Station, the other two don’t want to take the subway with the Cresspahls, they go upstairs to Seventh Avenue with the disappointed screaming Clarissa to hunt down a taxi. What will the driver talk about? The murder of his colleague Leroy Wright, the demonstration crossing Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall, joined by no police presence except a new taxi partition made of bulletproof glass . . .

  Outside the Ninety-Sixth Street station exit the air is heavy with humidity. Those who can sweat release pearls of it from their foreheads as involuntarily as breathing—Marie, on the other hand, promptly turns very red in the face. As soon as she can, right inside the Riverside Drive door, she’s going to ask. She will say she approves of what happened: even a secret with de Rosny needs to be kept, Indian-style. She will say she doesn’t approve of what happened, because someone who starts an extended family on Long Island Sound lives only an hour from New York, not nine with transfers on the other side of the Atlantic. She’ll say: This dialectic of yours, Gesine, you could’ve left it behind in Europe you know!

  June 3, 1968 Monday

  Yesterday the mayor of Saigon went to inspect the main battle line in his city, along with other friends of Vice President Ky’s, mainly police officers but also relatives. They entered a school, now converted to a command center. At which point the house was blown to bits, as if by a missile from an American military copter. Now the army says it wasn’t using any helicopters in that area. Before, the US embassy prematurely apologized to the South Vietnamese government, and the victims’ families, “with deepest regrets and condolences.” His Excellency, President Nguyen Van Thieu, friends with still other Americans, suddenly has seven sinecures available for his underlings, and if he ever writes his memoirs in the West he will have a thing or two to teach us about the nature of the home front.

  The new Communists in Prague both do and don’t want to take the old ones to court over the murders they committed for Stalin. Removal from office, yes; investigative committees, definitely; “settling accounts within the party in public,” no. Alexander Dubček is less eager to have a reputation for vindictiveness than his predecessors were, and is urging his comrades to protect their friends by not exposing Soviet involvement in the crimes of the 1950s, and his comrades are complying. As for those outside the party, what business is it of theirs, even if they do demand public probity? They are not being governed against their will, not yet, but this wish is refused to them. They were just bystanders, you might say, on the inside but not inside the party.

  Hanna Ohlerich had wanted to wait until Easter 1946. By that time Cresspahl should have been released and back in the workshop and she an apprentice in his trade. She took his release for granted, and afterward had to find something else to do. She started writing letters—not even secretly, Jakob’s mother was supposed to see even though she didn’t let her read them.

  She had turned to Mrs. Abs right away, but only as a mother-like person from whom she expected comfort, help. (You could more or less tell what kind of parents the Ohlerichs had been. The father dealt with whatever came their way; any outward steps to be taken were decided by him. The mother was allowed to run the kitchen, the cellar, and the home, albeit under his supervision. He had the last word, interpreted by his will alone, right up to the rope he gave her and the other one he took for himself. Strict, also affectionate, easy for a child to look up to. Just as Hanna’s father had exerted authority in the home, he’d been a bulwark against the outside world.) She pinned her faith on Cresspahl for all this, not on a woman.

  She still counted on Jakob and on many evenings followed him out into the yard so that he’d postpone his business deals and go off to the marsh with her, two leisurely saunterers in the damp May twilight, strolling along like a long-established and permanent couple (on which occasions Cresspahl’s child didn’t want to be seen as abandoned, bereft of the appropriate companionship she deserved, so she withdrew to the walnut tree, making very sure not to look west where the pair could just be made out in the haze with the setting sun behind it). Jakob was allowed to read the letters, which in fact were intended more for him than their addressees, the Warnemünde relatives. To him they seemed pleading, desperate, as if Hanna needed to be saved from a den of thieves growing more and more dangerous by the day. Cresspahl didn’t return. “Get me out,” she’d written. Jakob acted the big brother and merely explained the difference between Hanna’s actual situation and her description of it; he talked her out of her mistrust for the Warnemünders and into a mistrust of Erwin Plath; eventually she pretended she’d only wanted reassurance. He was not satisfied with himself as head of the household.

  He told Gesine she needed to be more considerate of her friend. Gesine wasn’t aware that anyone had been inconsiderate to Hanna! They shared everything, didn’t they? They shared a bed, neither wanting to go to sleep without the other; they did their homework together at Cresspahl’s desk; they waited in the long line for soggy Papenbrock bread, in silent solidarity; people not from town thought they were sisters. Whenever Gesine asked Jakob for some money over and above her weekly allowance, she held out her hand again for Hanna’s share and they went to the market together, to buy a packet of grass seed each from Wollenberg, just to buy something, because Wollenberg wanted to make a sale for once, and then they watered each other’s test plots. She treated her friend like a welcome guest, didn’t she? Took Lisbeth’s box camera, which Jakob had bought back from Vassarion and given her for her birthday, and gave Hanna a half share in it? She paid the forty-pfennig fee for Hanna’s ration card herself, that was only right, and she didn’t mind doing it. They shared their hunger, their pimples, once even a CARE package. Jakob knew that, what could he be thinking?

  The package wasn’t full by the time it reached them, it was just a lump of American lard, two cans of American corned beef, a pair of stockings, and a Waterman fountain pen, all packed together in an old flour sack and dropped off by a man from Berlin (“West Berlin”) on a motorcycle, who also left behind an uneaten sandwich on unbelievably white bread as though it were nothing. Gesine couldn’t think who might have sent it; only later did she realize that the photograph of three strapping German shepherds was news from Grunewald, from Dr. Semig’s dog Rex. Anyway, it came for Cresspahl’s daughter, but after contributing the foodstuffs to the pantry they cut the sandwich neatly in half and ate it together, and Hanna could choose whether she wanted the pen or the nylon stockings that suggested shimmering shadows of night on her legs. Hanna was free to give Jakob the stockings after trying them on, and Gesine couldn’t think of anything more worth doing with the Waterman—were they not united?

  Didn’t they see, hear, think the same things? We witnessed the liberation of Leslie Danzmann’s b
oots in such unity that ten years later she could still tell the story in detail and I could still recall every single still or moving picture of it. It was in early June 1946, Hanna had come to the Gneez train with me that day, and a procession caught up to us on Station Street. In the front strode Leslie, chin held stiffly high, eyes pointed straight ahead, which didn’t help her on the cobblestones. She had worn out her presentable shoes during the war, and her one pair of “indestructible” shoes from 1937 may have survived her walks to the mayor’s office but not her arrest by the Russians, so now she’d brought her husband Fritz’s lace-up boots up from her hiding place, padded them, and was wearing them to work hidden under long pants. Would’ve said something about self-respect. Since she’d been arrested the Gneez Labor Office hadn’t taken her back, but she had found a job in the Housing Office department whose mission was to protect the resettlers from the wrath of the locals, and she wanted to look like a properly dressed civil servant there—Hanna and Gesine saw this as vanity. Now this lissom lady having trouble walking was being followed by a young Red Army man, excited by the unfeminine heels he’d glimpsed under the masculine cuffs, and he was offering her a trade, making himself perfectly well understood despite using only personal pronouns and nouns, and doing so relentlessly, so that a pack of jeering children was running along after them, little brats who’d just reached school age, eager to see how the show would turn out. Leslie Danzmann made a beeline through the station and clambered up into the train, hand over hand, as if into a lifeboat, and thought she was safe. Her business partner in uniform was so merrily drunk that morning that the door hit him when it swung shut, he fell flat on his face, into the train car, not discouraged in the least, for now he had an even better view of the object of his quest. Both hands fervently clinging to Leslie’s legs, he crawled on his belly like a crab back down the footboard onto firm ground. Our Leslie, stunned by the exclusively blank looks she was getting from the other passengers, slipped and landed on the floor of the train car, unladylike, legs sticking straight out, boots exposed. By that point the Soviet had unhooked the crisscrossed laces, neatly and not unskillfully, under a barrage of pleading remarks too. The Cresspahl and Ohlerich girls had had plenty of chances to squeal with pain at the gravel sticking into their own bare feet but they stayed in the shadows of the rotted bicycle stand, watching wordlessly. The man in the army uniform dyed to another color stayed where he was at the window of the station shop (which was the post he’d been assigned); he was not as out of view as he might have liked, and, with a gun in his holster, he was the very image of the “Volkspolizei” as depicted in the new newspaper, New Germany, that both Gesine’s and Hanna’s schools had gone over in detail. We saw the stationmaster in the train engine, far enough away from the scene; we heard him swear about the train car’s door that was still open, in which we could see that Leslie Danzmann had sat up, her mouth in a tortured smile. We saw the Russian carefully wrap his foot bindings back around his feet and pull the former Danzmann boots up over them, not without difficulty, and as the departure whistle blew he pushed the door open wider, into Leslie’s legs (knocking her over), threw his own felt rags in after her (in faithful observance of their agreement), and marched in elation over to the station exit with the band of little children timidly, excitedly dancing around him. That day we both cut school, fully understanding one another from the tiny wink that slipped from our eyes and tugged at the corners of our mouths—we were united. United against the adults, united in our pitiless suspicion of them (with Cresspahl secretly and Jakob’s mother more vaguely excluded). Is that not unity?