Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  It’s infection by mass hysteria.

  You’re not infected, Gesine. You’re not hysterical.

  Because I’ve been divided from my own child for three days.

  You’ll get her back, Gesine.

  Because maybe she got her sentimentality from me.

  You think so? Don’t you realize you’re not sentimental. She’s fallen into being a bit American.

  I am not raising that child right.

  Jakob wouldn’t have minded. I wouldn’t.

  You could say it now, D. E., if you want. But not out of pity.

  Just believe me when I say it.

  I believe you.

  By evening, faithful to the four-hour delay, TV has arrived in Washington too. The coffin’s location is indicated by the flashbulbs the spectators are firing at it; the darkness is all-powerful. The family’s stage manager has decided that the dead man should pass every Senate building in which he’d had offices. Welcoming cheers that die away shyly. Sharpshooters on the roofs, plainclothes police everywhere. The body has to spend four minutes saying goodbye to the softly lit figure of Abraham Lincoln—to the two of them next to each other on their two chairs, the TV picture is so distorted. And again: the Battle Hymn. President Johnson in the first car behind his felled opponent, with Secret Service scurrying all around him. The moon draws veils over the milling crowd, it cannot brighten the Potomac’s dark waters. At the unloading, one of the dead man’s sons insists on helping to carry the coffin and so has to hold it by the head end. The bearers move off in the wrong direction at first, walking more or less toward the eternal flame, and have to veer off at an angle over the rise. After the final service, John Glenn folds the flag into snappy sharp corners and hands it to the new head of the Kennedys. A state limousine has brought a cocker spaniel from the dead man’s home—it’s Freckles, in person. The widow once again feels the need to assert herself against the senator’s: she makes a point of laying small wreaths, and having her children lay wreaths, on her own nearby grave sites. The other relatives kiss the new coffin, leaving it standing on the lawn. Again and again strangers kneel by the African mahogany, brush their lips against it, pray. Marie sits on the bench with her legs drawn up, holding her hand over her mouth, merely surprised at a ceremony that her mother has described as taking place differently in Europe.

  The radio says nothing about relatives not staying for the interment here. Clearly one of her nephews has taken The New York Times aside at some point during the day to point out the unseemliness of her behavior, as well as the possible consequences for future business; now she reassures her customers of her good taste with lugubrious classical music and announcers reading the news in properly subdued voices. A station next to hers on the dial ends its broadcast with an ad about the dangers of smoking.

  The television department moves to views of the ocean, accompanied by saccharine singing, and then to a photographic portrait, presented as now the only thing left to us. The eleven o’clock news is sponsored by Savarin Coffee. Their ad shows the expert surrounded by coffee plantation workers anxiously awaiting his reaction to the drink. He approves, and anthropological joy spreads across the Indians’ faces. The expert then rides off in his genuine South American railroad train. Also helping to pay for the news is the roach spray Black Flag, Kill & Clean. If it were up to Marie, we would not buy these products, for a while. Now music is being played at the moment it’s performed, continuously, interrupted by a photo of the dead man that seems to be hung slightly crooked. He has his hand on his chin, conversationally, and looks younger than he did three days ago.

  At one a.m.: THE GREAT GREAT SHOW, tonight with a fable from prewar Hungary: The Baroness and the Butler. . . Can’t alienate the viewers.

  D. E. has stuck it out the whole time on the chair next to Marie, having roasted about two and a half ounces of tobacco in his pipe and cracked the third bottle of red wine. It’s not going to be him who gives up. Almost as soon as Marie realizes they’ve switched over to normal programming, she asks for permission to turn off the set. She rolls it over to the apartment door, its cord wound around it, ready for the rental company to take it away.

  – D. E.: she says. What do we have to do to get you to spend tomorrow with us?

  – Drive with me right now across the Hudson and all the way to the New Jersey woods where my log cabin is.

  – Okay: Marie says, looking at him affectionately, amused, in anticipation. She leans against his chair, arranges his gray hair this way and that. He has earned her thanks.

  In D. E.’s car, before entering the tunnel to New Jersey, she turns to the back. It’s dark enough there, her mother won’t be able to see her face.

  – Thank you for letting me have this: she says.

  – Who, me? Mrs. Cresspahl is startled out of her doze, she almost thinks there’s someone else sitting next to her.

  – Yes. You. For letting me watch TV. That’s what I’m thanking you for.

  June 9, 1968 Sunday

  is the nation’s official day of mourning, just as the City of New York decreed one yesterday. Marie wasn’t interested in a trip to Arlington National Cemetery, to test the TV’s representations against the fresh grave; what she wanted was an outing to Culver’s Lake and Lake Owassa, to the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania border, and across Little Swartswood Lake to the country seat that D. E. calls his log cabin. They may be marching with flowers for RFK in Arlington; we saw people like ourselves out for a Sunday drive, people at the side of the road selling eggs and cherries from farms and forest paths, flaneurs strolling around the small towns, crowded coffee shops, children lining up at jingling ice-cream trucks, shores lined with people in colorful swimsuits. Marie watches us without the least disdain as we spend the whole early evening in D. E.’s shady yard, chatting idly, carefree in the green twilight; she appears more by chance than anything at the bay window of the kitchen, where she is advising Mrs. Erichson about preparing dinner, her occasional glances in our direction meant merely to reassure that she isn’t going to bother us. She speaks German with D. E.’s mother, although with an American “Granny” slipping naturally over her lips. – Why are we making such a big dinner, Granny?

  – How far have you gotten, Gesine?

  – Yes, I need your advice. 1947. I can’t get Cresspahl away from the Soviets.

  – You should tell Marie more about them.

  – She’ll take it the wrong way, D. E.

  – She gets today’s Russians all wrong too.

  – She’s a stalwart anti-Communist. On that topic she believes what they tell her in school.

  – A clueless anti-Communist, you mean. She’s put a poem in her collection reprinted from the June 7 Pravda, by that guy, what’s his name—

  – Him. I know him.

  – You know the one.

  – I read all about him in The New York Times. In November of ’66 he paid a visit to RFK . . .

  – Gee, I just can’t get enough of that name Kennedy.

  – . . . to the living RFK. It’s a historical event. When they were voting on a civilian complaint review board for the New York police.

  – The vote of fear.

  – No sooner had Senator Kennedy cast his vote than who should ring the bell of his apartment on the fourteenth floor of the UN Plaza building? It’s a visiting Soviet poet, he lolls around on a cream-colored sofa high above New York City and talks with this representative of American imperialism, and what do they put out as a communiqué? The poet: “I have faith only in politicians who understand the importance of poetry.”

  – The senator from New York: “I like poets who like politicians.”

  – And the poet, comforted, set off for home, reduced to a scarecrow but breast swelling with pride.

  – Oh, I’ve just thought of the name. Eugene.

  – Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Right.

  – He’s struck again. Maybe he meant it as an act of friendship for the dead man, not even Marie’s quite sure.


  – Tell me.

  – “The price of revolver lubricant rises.”

  – You anti-Communist!

  – That’s what it says. And:

  Perhaps the only help is shame.

  History cannot be cleansed in a laundry.

  There are no such washing machines.

  Blood can never be washed away!

  And:

  Lincoln basks in his marble chair,

  wounded.

  But what does Abe like to do in the evening? Wasn’t he at a play? Listen to the Yevtushenkos’ Eugene:

  But without wiping the splashes of blood from your forehead

  You, Statue of Liberty, have raised up

  Your green, drowned woman’s face,

  Appealing to the heavens against being trodden underfoot.

  – Do you believe that?

  – Marie even wonders if he believes it himself.

  – I’m telling her things that don’t fit her views, D. E. Things about the Twins, who ruled in Jerichow longer than any other Soviet commandants before or after them. They acted like gentleman: aristocratic. Refined. Superfine. They would have made perfect von Plessens. Estate owners from the nobility, and running Jerichow the way the von Plessens once had. Breakfast together, not before nine, each with his own server to wait on him, white linen, silver, punishment for the slightest spot of dirt. Departure for Town Hall at ten, to rule. They kept the mayor in a filing room where he was allowed to sign things; they were in his room, together even behind the desk, and the Germans had to keep a distance of three paces, the same as the hirelings from the nobility back in the day. Even tempered, never got mad, never drank, never went a single step in the town on foot. They weren’t brothers—that was the one and only private fact about them the Jerichowers knew; they didn’t even look alike—and rumor gnawed away at their nickname and could never figure it out. When they caught a subordinate fraternizing with Germans they’d have him hauled off like a mass murderer, and the beating would start only behind the fence. Terrible beatings. If a German came to them with a complaint, say Mina Ahlreep, and she didn’t know the first name and patronymic of the Russian who’d shot the fake clock off her gable, the slanderer would find herself in the basement under Town Hall for the night, without trial, to give her time to remember the Soviet man’s name, and no one would bother to explain this to her, and she’d be let out onto the street the next morning without a word. That was how disgusted the Twins were by Germans. Their arrival put an end to the all-night parties in Louise’s front parlor, and while she did request compensation for her broken furniture and ruined parquet floor she didn’t know Mr. Wassergahn’s serial number. Pontiy had sometimes kept bonbons in his pocket for the devushki, these two didn’t even say idi syuda, they shooed children away like chickens. They’d had the fence around the Kommandatura raised by two feet and even though they received no visitors in the villa they had a triumphal arch built in front of it, on which Loerbrocks the painter had to paint fresh slogans for Soviet holidays and anniversaries of great military victories. And if Loerbrocks isn’t dead yet he can still crank out a portrait of Josif Vissarionovič Stalin from memory, although only in three colors and in size DIN A2 per German Industrial Standards, this being how he had to repaint him every Christmas. Stalin got his place at the top of the arch; the army and the army alone was the constant topic of the changing slogans below him, which meant that I knew the four case endings for Krasnaya Armiya better than for any other words. After work, still in unwrinkled uniforms and crisply ironed caps, the two Wendennych gentlemen would go riding out to the Rehberge Hill, now without adjutants. From ten to eleven we could hear their phonograph records: Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Glinka, Brahms. These are not the Soviets Marie learns about in school, and she doesn’t like it.

  – Cresspahl wasn’t kept in Fünfeichen forever.

  – She pictures it like a cell in Sing Sing.

  – If she had a more precise picture she wouldn’t let you go to Prague.

  – That reason has only existed for six months.

  – Still, it’s a reason.

  – You, on the other hand, never once told a lie, even as a boy.

  – But whenever I could since then. And liked doing it too.

  – Marie should see the Russians of today.

  – Who were eighteen in 1947.

  – I am not going to help her school! Didn’t I tell Marie how the Soviets got their hands on Cresspahl? That was bad enough. If I tell her the food they got in Fünfeichen, never mind anything else, she’ll never trust Socialism for the rest of her life.

  – You wouldn’t be backing up Sister Magdalena, you’d be preparing Marie better.

  – She’s too young for that!

  – She already knows all about the rapes in New York.

  – That’s what we get for letting you study physics and chemistry. You think truth has absolute value.

  – Marie would know more about you too. She’d understand why you want to take one more trip to the other side. No, not that. But she might have some idea.

  – I know what’s in fashion in things aside from ladies’ clothes, D. E. It’s not chic to disparage the Soviets. But those aren’t my reasons.

  – So approximately when is Marie supposed to get this lesson?

  – I don’t know, at fifteen . . .

  – In that case she’ll hear about 1953 when she’s an adult. We’ll be allowed to tell her about your death when she’s on her own deathbed.

  – Fine. Cresspahl concedes. Erichson wins on points. Your solicitude for the little miss is just ridiculous!

  – I owe her that much. She’s about to get me a beer. The stories you know!

  – You tell her about the camps. You’d somehow do it so that all she gets is justice, the rule of law, and humane treatment.

  – Then you do it.

  – School in 1947. Josif Vissarionovič was hanging on the walls of the seventh-grade rooms by then, much higher than the Austrian’s pictures used to. Which made a faded rectangle very noticeable. But no one could expect the new leader to be short. His title had been expanded too: Wise Leader of the Peoples, Benevolent Father of the Nations, Generalissimo, Preserver of World Peace, Creator of Socialism, Guardian of Justice, “There Is Still Light in the Kremlin,” Guarantor of a Truly Humane Future. Something’s wrong with that last one, “Guarantor,” we’d heard that word a bit too often.

  – All correct.

  – I have never once seen a portrait of him looking straight at the viewer, he’s always squinting down to one side, as if someone there had stepped out of line, or sneezed. We were never allowed to talk about him that way at school—as having a physiognomy, as being human in any way. Someone ratted on Lise Wollenberg, who couldn’t help laughing at the parting the Vozhd? had put in his plump mustache: the scare was punishment enough, plus she got an F in Russian and an F in conduct. She had reason to watch out. Schoolgirl Cresspahl also wanted the followers of this Leader of Peoples to give her her father back—that made two strikes against her. Was she just being scatterbrained? She dutifully learned the new history of technological inventions, a bit like how Marie learns what they teach her in religion: knowledge to regurgitate when needed. It hadn’t been that feudalist jerk Karl Drais, Baron von Sauerbronn, who’d thought up the velocipede after seeing some Chinese drawings—it was a Russian serf, freed for biking from the Urals to Moscow, fifteen hundred miles. Russian feudal lords were more benevolent too, apparently. It wasn’t Marconi who’d been the first to send wireless signals, we had a Russian to thank for that too. The demise of the Kunze-Knorr compressed-air brake at the hands of a Russian was taught in literary style: As the venerable Moscow scholar demonstrates braking tests to his German colleagues in a tunnel, and his system gently and firmly brings the train to a halt, one of the foreign bumblers lets out a groan: Awwf, Kunze-Knorr, eet iss feenished! The first car drove in Russia, the party didn’t invent the airplane but a tailor from Minsk or Tula did, the pharmacy was R
ussian in origin, and the crane, and your caran d’ache, and the telephone, and every part of the railway, from stantsiya to passazhirskiy and pochtoviy cars. But if you learned all this you were allowed to take English classes with Mrs. Weidling, who wasn’t arrested until the following fall.

  – You forgot penicillin.

  – An obedient little student like that writes an essay for school, “I look out my window. . . ,” and describes what she sees—the green Russian fence topped with barbed wire, the roof of the commandant’s villa above it, and an American truck with a bulletproof grille over the headlights parked inside the open gate—and if she leans awkwardly far out the window she can see around the corner of the brickworks to the east, where the sun rises, as krasniy as the Red Army. She really liked that ending, Schoolgirl Cresspahl did; she was genuinely out to please and flatter. Mrs. Beese gave the essay back unmarked and kept her after school, and it had to be rewritten looking out the window at the schoolyard, where there was nothing at all to see. Mrs. Beese didn’t tell Cresspahl the lesson she was meant to learn here, she had to find it out for herself, and two months later the girl handed in a plot summary of a Russian novel that mentioned in passing “the Russians’ wild nature,” “the wild nature of the Russians,” thinking only about the part of the story where a Russian nobleman keeps a wild bear in a room and locks unsuspecting visitors in with it—she’d worked so hard on her summary and it got her sent to the principal. A Social Democrat, a teacher since 1925 and again since 1945, so furious at the oblivious child that he couldn’t even explain her sin. He personally went to the school secretary and borrowed some nail scissors and cut out the four or six words and gave back her notebook. “This really won’t do, child.” Whether the slip of paper she should now stick over the hole should have corrected text or be virgin white—that decision exceeded his powers, it overwhelmed him, he flailed around like someone busy drowning and now you’re asking him the time.