Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – That’s not true.

  – You see? And yet I’m supposed to tell Marie.

  – Did that really happen?

  – His name was Dr. Vollbrecht. The one who almost wasn’t made principal. In his inaugural address he was supposed to welcome the Red Army as the bringer of true culture and humanity, and his wife had been raped at gunpoint by twenty-one Red soldiers. They kept him in the Gneez courthouse for three days, and he talked around town about a visit he’d made for family reasons, then eventually admitted he’d been arrested but only “by mistake.” Then he gave the speech.

  – No. You’re pulling my leg. I’d do the same thing. The New Schools repudiating Pushkin? I don’t believe it.

  – You see. Marie would love to believe it. And she’d have another advantage over you.

  – That it’s true?

  – That it really happened and I was there.

  – The shoe comes out the way the leather is.

  – Right, and what can you do about it?

  – Erichson concedes. Cresspahl wins, and not just on points.

  – Write to young Vollbrecht! Go ahead! He’s a lawyer in Stade, the post office there can find him.

  – Gesine. I wouldn’t dare.

  And so why the big dinner? D. E. stood up after the meat course, stuffed a napkin between his collar and neck the way all the best people do, and gave a speech for Marie. He’d originally been hoping to marry the Cresspahl family on this day too, but work had prevented him, and now he promised not to bring up the tiresome topic again until September. As a substitute might he offer an amateur theatrical production, rehearsed for two hours, with several parts, the cast of characters including a prince by the name of Dubrovsky, one bear (guaranteed untamed), . . .

  – Does September work for us? Marie asked.

  June 10, 1968 Monday

  Marie was going back high above the Hudson, on George and Martha Washington’s bridge; her mother was riding under the river, from Hoboken to Manhattan on the PATH train; Marie emerged from an unmistakable Bentley at the school entrance; Mrs. Cresspahl arrived under Times Square at almost precisely the usual minute, and already it was no longer her, she was cut off from her day of free time in the country, slotted into the way to work, already transformed, already an integral part of the day that’s not hers, that’s hired out. A drowning man is more reasonable—at least he struggles.

  In the second of the three light boxes with which a cosmetics company frames the departures board in Grand Central Station, a photograph of the assassinated senator is still hanging, trimmed with black and purple ribbons. Clearly the arrangement had simply been forgotten.

  De Rosny has hired someone to read The New York Times to him. And today again a confidential message is tucked in it for him. From London comes the portent that Soviet exercises on Czechoslovak soil were not meant to exert “a certain intimidation.” Who would dream of such a thing. The military maneuvers had been scheduled for six months ago, i.e., an opportune January—they’d just been postponed. The Novosti press agency personally vouches that the leaders of Czechoslovakia have time and again confirmed their loyalty to the Warsaw Pact defense system. Another visitor is coming tomorrow, today—a high-level delegation for economic discussions—and they will definitely be discussing de Rosny, i.e., loans in hard currency. The usual calculations won’t, of course, apply. For officials concede that the ČSSR sends to the Soviet Union manufactured goods that fall short of world market quality and are not favorable for convertible currencies, and doesn’t look too deeply into why that is. In the other direction, the Soviet Union sends raw materials that are everything they should be. The equivalence between them is thus tantamount to a Soviet hard-currency credit for Czechoslovakia. This may not enlighten mathematicians or give much more than basic information for economists, but no one is trying to speak to such circles anyway.

  Meanwhile, Employee Cresspahl doesn’t touch a typewriter all morning, or anything else that might make noise in the office. The noise of the outside world is muffled, kept at a distance already. Without a word, almost assiduous from the silence, she is calculating numbers for a diagram based on the Czechoslovakian Five-Year Plan; behind her, lulled by the even breaths of the air conditioner, a visitor is lying on the sofa, asleep.

  Amanda Williams, if she’d been at our school in Gneez, would have been given a nickname like Black Beauty. In high school. Or maybe Our Fine Filly, and not because of her curvy body but because a child like her moves quickly, stepping gracefully but nonetheless with a surge of power, whether coming out of a reverse-flip dive and plunging straight into the water or stepping on a teacher’s foot; devoted without fail to her girlfriends, innocently out for her own advantage, surprised by some of her successes, in short far advanced in her training as woman and without much realization of the fact. A girl that the boys in the class are still proud of even if she’s rejected them twice. And yet this whirlwind of a person can be found in a strangely tame state, crying and for the time being inconsolable over a lost ring, bungled homework, an avoided glance—still strong in her sobbing, defenseless against unhappy reality, like the shyest dolt in the rearmost row. This other Amanda crept, yes, slunk into Mrs. Cresspahl’s office and before she could guess whether it was a sleepless night or alcohol the shirker’s tears indicated another misfortune. Now nothing will come of our house on Long Island Sound, our man-free commune. Amanda needs forgiveness for this, as though it were the worst thing that could happen. She was one of the hundred and fifty million viewers who followed the massive coverage of the Kennedy ceremonies, and sounding just like The New York Times she calls herself emotionally exhausted but ready to make one more mistake. One that she again can’t discuss with Naomi. She has reconciled with Mr. Williams, psychological counselor to New York’s police; she is quite sure she’s pregnant. She slept till noon, in the bank where she belonged but sheltered in an office that not even our vice president sets foot in without announcing himself first. She lay on the three-seat visitor’s sofa for a very long time, her back trustingly to the wall, hands cupped and folded over her eyes, an overgrown child.

  Strangers noticed nothing as they went down to lunch, even though she could check her makeup in no other mirror but Mrs. Cresspahl’s eyes; she was talking in her usual galloping, easily overheard way too, and the other customers in Gustafsson’s sandwich shop might well have taken the sharp rage in her voice for mimicry, for clever exaggeration:

  – You don’t watch TV, Gesine. You don’t know this country. We used to have a TV show here, very popular, showing terrible accidents, you know. The mother of the sweet little boy who lost his arm in a garbage disposal sitting in front of the camera, the father of a hemophiliac son, the parents of a deformed child, and they’d all tell you everything, with photos, and the invited audience voted on the various diseases and travails, awarding third, second, first prize. The studio had a phone line where viewers across the country could donate money for the sufferers, or a wheelchair from up in the attic, or a brand-new garbage disposal, do you even have a pig at home?!

  said Amanda; in Berlin she’d have been called a flotter Dampfer, a sassy girl; she has long since taken in the horrified and lustful looks of the men at Gustafsson’s, through her skin, through her temples; she doesn’t turn her bitter gleeful face away:

  – Here’s a series that would be a real hit, I’d call it Fantastic Funerals, copyright by me. An hour a week is probably enough. Your host: the ravishing Amanda Williams. I’d show the different rituals—the Catholic one, I have no idea how that goes, oh never mind I do since two days ago; the Jewish customs, Protestant, can’t forget Voodoo, the white tears, the black tears. That’d be a real contribution to national education, don’t you think? Knowledge and Sympathy—that’s the slogan, to bring in the viewers. I’d interview the bereaved, show the bodies, have a group of judges for the flower arrangements. The funeral parlors, can’t forget those. It is a cold April morning, our melancholy coast guard cutter chugs thr
ough the biting wind out to Potter’s Island, its cargo a heavy one, that no one wants to . . . whaddaya think? What percent do you think the advertisers’ sales will go up by? You could get everything into a show like that! Grass seed, weed killers, all kinds of makeup, insurance, US Steel, umbrellas of course . . . Whaddaya think? You know what that is, that’s a million-dollar idea. Six months and I’ll be rich! Do you think I’ll still talk to the likes of you?

  – You’re thinking about money again. Just go play the lottery.

  – You think I don’t? I’ll hold my press conference in the Hotel St. Moritz, out on the lawn. I’ll tell the reporter from the Daily News “I’m not talking to you,” so that the Post reports on it and the Times gives the whole thing a veneer of seriousness. What else am I supposed to think about if not money, Geesign?

  We were together for half the trip home, to the destination boards in Grand Central. The bottles still shone on the frosted glass, not entirely unlike a penis. – A woman belongs in bed, the men in the ads! Amanda said.

  She doesn’t want to borrow money for an abortion. Not from Mrs. Cresspahl. No best friend could do more for a person than Mrs. Cresspahl.

  If only she understood what she’s done. The fact is, she was entirely elsewhere all day, since this morning.

  June 11, 1968 Tuesday

  – I won’t give you a Spiegel: the old man at our newsstand says, hardly as friendly and forthcoming as last week, and someone coming home from work with dulled senses is especially taken in by his grumpiness. In fact he’s protected his stacks of paper from the dripping rain with transparent sheets of plastic, they’re items to display more than to sell. Maybe he feels like keeping everything for himself today. He scrapes a smile onto his stubble and smugly says: Your daughter’s already gotten herself one!

  Bringing something special home for Marie is harder to do. She’d rather get her toy cars from Herald Square than Upper Broadway, and anyway she’s enjoyed her collection less and less as it’s approached completion. She has two Bentleys. A men’s outfitter on Lexington Avenue promises to print anything you want on T-shirts, and of course they had size 12Y in stock, I just couldn’t think of the text, Marie doesn’t feel the need to share her first name, PARTLY SUNNY TOMORROW is not something she’d want to promise the world too often, it would be a burdensome present. An extra pork chop, a kosher bundt cake, European chocolate—if she’s in the mood for any of that she’ll have it at home; she’s in charge of the groceries. The lively Puerto Rican who’s sometimes on Ninety-Seventh and West End Avenue hawking the tastiest hottest dogs and sauerest kraut in a one-mile radius is one last possibility—but today he’s moved somewhere else, whether because of the policemen collecting their money or the nasty humidity in the air. So as I finish my walk to the apartment door all I’m bringing home is the wish that I were bringing something home, and saying something stupid like: Hey. Marie. The East German government is sending condolences to Ethel Kennedy too.

  When Marie is startled, you can see it most easily in the eyes. She can’t help the lurch of her pupils, she would have liked to keep her lids from snapping down, when she manages a mask of patience it’s too late. At age four she still pursed her lips at unreasonable requests—protruding them resentfully at the ice-cream man speaking a foreign language, for instance—but this person will keep her face stiff at the oblivious adult, while thinking over and over that she has to accept it, especially from this one, has to behave herself with this adult who’ll just never learn. Embarrassed for her mother she shifts her shoulders back and forth, she even stands up from an inner conflict between answering sharply and being considerate. She politely says: If you could at least stop repeating the name, Gesine.

  – It was for your essay: her mother lies, submissive, and prepared well enough for the admonition that not every essay is meant for the eyes of the child’s legal guardian. But Marie puts the news from Germany down on the table, with the cover folded back—it must show that Kennedy in front of colors of mourning—she sees that one of these evenings when we sit trapped, as if in a snowed-in post office with no horses, is soon underway, and we talk politely to each other, like strangers, and she says:

  If it’s no trouble.

  If you’re not too tired.

  For at least a week, okay?

  And:

  Here’s your weekly rations.

  How are the East Germans consoling Martin Luther King’s widow?

  How was work?

  And:

  There was a Versammlung against the Notstandsgesetze in West Germany. Translate that for me?

  What does this poet, Enzensberger, mean by “backrooms”?

  What kind of workers does he want to go out onto the streets with, exactly?

  What are these French conditions he wants?

  And:

  Dmitri Weiszand wants to know whether I’m going to Prague.

  Can I learn Czech too?

  I’m not arguing with you! Not at all.

  June 12, 1968 Wednesday

  Rain. Rain. Rain.

  The Soviet Union is having trouble with its Socialist brothers and sisters in Czechoslovakia. Among them it had an erstwhile confidant, a major general, who last December attempted a military putsch against the scorners of Saint Novotný, though in vain. His employers may have forgiven him his lapse, and also that he then crossed the wrong border. They will hardly hate their former friend now that it turns out he’s a big thief ($20,000 worth of clover and alfalfa seed). But the fact that he got his diplomatic passport from a Soviet general! That’s serious. If it were only the Times from New York telling the tale that might be all right—let the world know. But for people in Prague to hear about it through a reprint in the newspaper Lidova Demokracie, that is just too much, and the ambassador in Moscow gets a sorrowful letter. It would really be a shame about those amicable international relations you’ve got there. If the appropriate authorities of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic fail to take immediate action against their own news organs then look out! Alfalfa and clover seed, hmph. It may be true, but does that mean you have to put it in the papers?

  – Your Soviets weren’t so funny: Marie says. I’m supposed to tell her what they were like, she’s been promised, and reconciliation depends on it. It’s our Professor Erichson who’s promised her—he feels that there’s no such thing as an abstract truth, truth is always concrete. Why was Mrs. Cresspahl so relieved at every postponement? Why did she want to table the whole thing, at least until fall, preferably for a whole year?

  – “My” Soviets.

  – In your Soviet Mee-klen-burg. You were there with them, in the same place. You met each other. You know them.

  – At age twelve. I turned thirteen in 1946.

  – Gesine, tell me there’s one child in Mecklenburg who doesn’t know about my country.

  – You can have a whole grade of schoolkids in Gneez.

  – Couldn’t I tell them how things are in New York, from Harlem to the Hudson?

  – It would be just what you’ve seen. What you know. Just your truth.

  – My truth.

  – They’d never believe you, not from the word go.

  – Gesine, I want to believe you.

  – You think I have an ax to grind but you say you want to believe me. How is that going to work!

  – I have an ax to grind too, Gesine. Oh yes. I do too.

  – All right, I admit that things were bad for Cresspahl in Soviet prison. Sometimes. Worse than I want to tell you about.

  – Starvation?

  – Starvation too.

  – Physical abuse?

  – Injuries of all kinds.

  – It happened to him because of a mistake, Gesine.

  – It happened to him.

  – The Soviets had won. They were soldiers, foreign ones. Why couldn’t a clerical error have crept in somewhere? Maybe they’d misunderstood the foreign language, a lot sometimes.

  – Some of the interpreters had learned their Germ
an from Nazi occupations and had to get to Russian through Polish.

  – Gesine, am I being a bad granddaughter and daughter if I don’t want to hear all the details about Cresspahl?

  – It’s not exactly a water-butt story.

  – Okay, Gesine: He wasn’t there for a while.

  – He wasn’t there. So he couldn’t help me for a while, while I’d taken in all my earlier whiles with him. With his words, but more through the information that passed through moods, glances, shifts in facial expressions. I had Jakob’s mother, but she was a stranger in Jerichow and couldn’t bring home much more than the hospital and its neighborhood. With Jakob there was yet another way to share things, and just like he didn’t bring children along on his business deals, he didn’t tell us about them either. For the other families still in Jerichow I was the daughter of the mayor who’d been arrested—they were more likely to talk to Hanna. In Gneez there was truly no one who wanted me to count on them. What I can tell you now is nothing but what a thirteen-year-old happened to be there for, along with all the confusion that later knowledge imposes. Is that all right with you?

  – What else haven’t you told me about?

  – Slata’s disappearance.

  – I’d almost forgotten about her! You were avoiding her on purpose!

  – Slata opened the door to the first Soviets to walk into Papenbrock’s foyer as if she wanted them to take her away from that house, that family. The Gneez military commander kept her as an assistant, not just a translator; he would have let her visit the Papenbrocks. She never got around to it. Louise had treated her like a maid for too long, Albert had merely watched without helping. So in Gneez hardly anyone knew that a Nazi “special unit” commander had hauled her off to Mecklenburg as a bride, with a child, to in-laws themselves linked to the air force and the Nazi Party by profitable business dealings. Instead they knew her as “the Angel of Gneez.” She’d been in the country since fall 1942, it was impossible to lie to her in standard German, fancy German, or Plattdeutsch either, and there were a lot of people who credited her with their having made it out of a Soviet interrogation in one piece, their innocence more or less proven. Still, she was a stranger, there was no one who could count on special treatment except sick women, starving children, or a refugee who’d stolen potatoes not to sell them but because he needed them. She was nastily scrupulous in helping her boss, J. J. Jenudkidse, “Triple-J,” keep tabs on the Gneez business world: the mighty Johannes Knoop had had to hand over his cart for transporting wood, never mind any “import-export.” In these higher circles, her former future relatives were kept in reserve as a moral failing, a snare to be used down the line if needed, but not for now, in deference to their good Jerichow business partner, Albert. When they got mad they called her a slut and, can you believe it, a traitor. But the Angel of Gneez didn’t live in the military housing on Barbara Street, protected from the Germans by an eight-foot fence; she left her son Fedya with Mrs. Witte during the day, in the requisitioned City of Hamburg Hotel, and slept there on the top floor, still furnished as Alma’s private apartment, behind two doors not counting the hotel’s main entrance. She spent some evenings downstairs in the former dining room with various officers from the Kommandatura and functionaries of the German Communists. There Slata understood almost no German, and especially not one young man’s repeated attempts to strike up a conversation; he stood five paces away, kept his scornfully baffled eyes on her, with a deliberately gloomy expression, as if he weren’t the future district councilman of Gneez. No. Not even Cresspahl’s requests, with which he tried to circumvent K. A. Pontiy with even-higher-ups, passed through Slata’s typewriter any faster than the rest, even though he’d talked with her under the Nazis about more than just the time of day, for example about Hilde Paepcke, who used to wear her hair in a scarf just like she did—clearly a woman he liked, too. In a twelve-year-old girl’s eyes the district councilman was a stupid boy, but she wouldn’t have minded turning out like Slata someday.