Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – He was having his fun with the bourgeoisie.

  – All you can do with the bourgeoisie is laugh at them. They’re playing hide-and-seek with you and you’re playing it with them. They think they’re so smart when they can fill the post of building monitor with one of their own people, after the old one moves away or dies, and you just turn him, the second step is to warn him, the third is to reward him, and now the party knows everything it needs to know about what’s going on in that building, or at least as much as they did before. When the elections for block monitor come up, the bourgeoisie get nowhere. Some people compare the new building monitors with the Nazi building wardens but you just don’t get it, you weren’t here then, those days are over; the question you maybe ask back is who they think should collect the fees for the ration cards? They think their meetings are secret; you’re in stitches laughing at Stoffregen, this local historian who tallies up all the things about the new administration that are Mecklenburgish, i.e., conducive to Mecklenburg sovereignty and eventually unification with Denmark. In Rostock a Dr. Kaltenborn turns up trying to prevent the demolition of the Ernst Heinkel AG factory with the argument that the British don’t consider Heinkel a war criminal; in Bützow, after a liquid-oxygen plant in the Peenemünde Center has been demolished and is being rebuilt, the owners come from the West and offer their services on the condition that you don’t bother them with a second demolition later—after a while you can only shake your head at the ingenuity of these people who can’t even figure out where they are. Let them think you’ve been Russified, that you’re a helpless babe in the woods of German culture: one day you too notice how often the party slogans are inscribed centered on walls, and you put a stop to that nonsense, not mad, with a burst of laughter that takes you entirely by surprise, that expands your rib cage, they like that. Someday they’ll like you too.

  – The one thing he can’t forgive Triple-J for. Slata?

  – Yes, well, you are twenty-three . . .

  – In that case I don’t want to be that after all. She goes out with a German and he defects to the Soviets. Maybe at the same time.

  – If Triple-J didn’t mind, why should you?

  – It’s a dirty trick.

  – Maybe Slata told a clean story. She hadn’t run away with the British, she’d waited for her own people. What do I know?

  – Exactly. What do you know.

  – Now you need to take the insult with the injury. There’s talk going around your own party that you’d have taken Slata if she’d have brought you Triple-J. You know what that’s called: careerism. Their ideas of you don’t match your idea of yourself. But you want them to.

  – You have no way to know that.

  – He had a photograph hanging in his room. It showed Triple-J, Jenudkidse’s adjutant, his political adviser, and a random young woman standing behind the three of them, blond, sporty, the only one not smiling.

  – Alma Witte. She shouldn’t have showed you that.

  – She did it to show me he was a brave young man. So that I wouldn’t make any dumb comments when he walked past us. She too wanted to bring me up right. I was supposed to realize that even someone like that can have cares and sorrows like a normal person.

  – That’s why he stayed in the City of Hamburg Hotel.

  – Almost directly under Slata’s room.

  – But he had power?

  – Never before had a Gneez district councilman had so much power. It grew and grew every week, too, the more other people thought that he had all the power. He liked it.

  June 19, 1968 Wednesday

  This morning the blind beggar on Lexington Avenue (my days are darker than your nights) set up a yellow bucket of tasty-looking clear water for his dog. This evening the rim of the bowl is smeared and the water silted with dirt. Especially civilized passersby tossed their charity of coins into the water.

  In the main hall of Grand Central Station, amid the monstrous blend of noise, footsteps, and tangles of voices, there is another, smaller sound, much better known, getting quite unreasonably louder in the ramps to the commuter trains. It comes from a man collecting the subway tokens from the turnstiles. The tokens rattle against the gray metal and the bucket scrapes against the floor when the man moves on. A wide squat bucket, the kind we had for horses to drink from.

  At night, a storm stays over the river, not moving. Lightning flashes turn the park into silhouettes; sometimes, their bright white shaded, they light up only the opposite shore. Some, the very short, barely perceivable ones, etch sharp furrows into the brain.

  As children, in haystacks, caught in a storm, we thought: Someone can see us. We are all seen.

  PART FOUR

  June 1968–August 1968

  June 20, 1968 Thursday

  WOKEN by a flat cracking sound in the park, like gunshots. People standing at the bus stop across the street, unafraid. Behind them, children playing war.

  Our newsstand at Ninety-Sixth Street is covered. No papers today, due to a death. The old man could have at least written whether the death was his. The weeklies are covered, too, with a weathered plastic sheet. The customers come up as usual, stop a few paces from the grave-mound-like bundles, and peel off in an embarrassed arc. No one tries to steal anything. A customer still groggy with sleep expects the handwritten cardboard sign to say: Closed out of respect for . . . who?

  In the tunnel under the subway platforms a boy in a yarmulke walks past a whiskey poster on which someone has added, in cursive, twice: Fuck The Jew Pigs. The boy holds his head as if he doesn’t see it.

  In Grand Central Station there was one New York Times left. Weather: partly sunny, partly cool. Kept: the photo of Adolf Heinz Beckerle, former German ambassador to Bulgaria, on trial for complicity in the 1943 deportation of eleven thousand Jews to the Treblinka death camp. Since he suffers from sciatica he is lying dressed in business clothes on a stretcher, between the blanket and pillow, and two Frankfurt policeman are carefully carrying him up the courthouse steps. Frankfurt am Main.

  Sometimes the final stage of waking up happens only at the fountain outside the passage to the Graybar Building. Today two men are clinging to its sides, alternately bending down and raising their heads high like chickens, numbing their hangovers.

  Today the beggar outside the bank has a red bucket for his dog.

  Approximately thirty people can attest that Mrs. Cresspahl entered her office at 8:55 and did not leave until 4:05!

  Four fifteen during this deferred lunch hour was the only appointment that Boccaletti the hair stylist could find all week for his customer Mrs. Cresspahl. The other regulars are sitting in the waiting room, including the two ladies who enjoy addressing each other with tender solicitude, each happily certain that the other is a lot worse off than she is herself. There were signs a long time ago, back when we were fleeing, in Marseilles, you remember. Mrs. Cresspahl would have liked to hear more of this spoken German but Signor Boccaletti summons her over in more of a hurry than usual. He’s not trying to gain a few extra moments for the next customer, he’s wanting to complain about how very very far away Bari is, where they do things differently. He flings two hands covered in lather into the air and only then can he cry: Signora, uccidere per due dollari? Ma!

  (Giogrio Boccaletti, Madison Avenue, is requested to write to The New York Times advice column—discretion guaranteed—and say how much money would make it worth it.)

  Delays on the West Side line’s express track. The loudspeaker promises, in a growl that gets gruffer with each repetition: The local will be stopping at all express stations. It’s impossible to imagine a human being behind that distorted voice, and anyway, local trains always stop at express stops! I didn’t make it on till the third train, where there was not enough air to breathe.

  For ten minutes I stood in front of a poster exhorting us to SUPPORT OUR SERVICEMEN. Below the words was an SOS in Morse code, and below that a photograph of a white soldier giving a blood transfusion to a black soldier. Su
pport our servicemen. On the left, under a red cross: HELP US HELP. According to Amanda Williams’s reliable information, this poster secretly means: The Americans are in dire peril in Vietnam.

  Then two Negro women executed an almost simultaneous rotation of their bodies around their respective central axes, and moved their neighbors along with them, so I could stand facing away from the poster.

  On Broadway another Negro, perhaps drunk, staggered into a deli and greeted the proprietor with a word I don’t know. – And if you don’t want to hear that then get lost! he shouts. He stumbles on between the glass cases and gives a revolutionary speech that no one understands a word of. The proprietor, in a slight crouch, hands on the counter by the cash register, watches the enemy from under his brows, not at all upset.

  At home Marie has flowers. There were originally a dozen peonies, for six dollars, and – Then there was a Puerto Rican woman there with her little kid, nine years old, and the girl wanted some too and the mother kept saying: But they don’t last, child! So I waited for the girl outside the door and gave her six of mine. Is that okay, Gesine? Hey, talk to me!

  – I approve, Marie. But why were you getting flowers at all?

  – It’s Karsch’s birthday today! Do they take out your memory too, at the bank? It’s Karsch’s birthday!

  In the mail there’s a letter from Europe, in which someone appeals to Mrs. Cresspahl’s acquaintance with him and wants her to put that connection in writing, for a festschrift. A testimonial of friendship, made to order.

  June 21, 1968 Friday

  Military exercises on Czechoslovak soil involving the Soviet, Hungarian, East German, and Polish armies along with the Czechoslovaks officially began yesterday. According to Ivan I. Yakubovsky, marshal of the Soviet Union, only command staff and signal, transport, and auxiliary units would be involved. There was no indication of how long the exercises would last.

  – Okay, Marie, what’s needed to hold free and open elections?

  – They had elections in Mecklenburg too? Well they could just use whatever was there, couldn’t they.

  – They could if they had to, Marie. So what would that be?

  – First you need parties. You had those. Second, the people in the parties have to invite in people who aren’t in the parties. They have to promise them something more or something different than the other parties. A party that’s not in power has to have the same rights as the party that is in power. If the parties can’t include all the people who aren’t in parties, they have to persuade the rest with newspapers, fliers, posters. Third, when it’s time to vote, they need arbiters or referees, who only care about the rules—people voting voluntarily, in secret, the votes being counted properly—and don’t give a hoot about the parties. Then you need people who aren’t sick of it all and actually want to vote. There are some people I know who don’t even care anymore.

  – But the borders had been closed since June 30, 1946. The Soviets had done that in their own interest, but still in the Control Council with the Western Allies. They’d also wanted everyone in Mecklenburg to stay in Mecklenburg and face the demands of the day there. The municipal elections were on the Mecklenburg calendar for September 15. Mina Köpcke, to her dying day, couldn’t have said what she had in her hands except when it was Duvenspeck’s soft neck; all the same, she too said: Why should we let anything slip out of them?

  – I know who won. This is getting boring.

  – It wasn’t boring for the Socialist Unity Party’s campaign manager in the Gneez district. It was dicey, downright unpleasant. In the weeks before the election he often had the creepy feeling that someone was standing behind him in the dark. He couldn’t figure out who it was. It turned out splendidly for him and his friends; he would say: It’s all nice and cozy! He wasn’t stupid, he’d learned something from January’s municipal elections in Hesse, when the Socialists had gotten eight times as many votes as his own party; the Gneez district was one of the first where the Social Democrats gave up on their party and joined him in the new one; eventually the Central Committee had no choice but to believe and obey the call for unification rising up from below. He’d talked himself blue in the face! He’d had to promise the Socialists so much: clean procedures for organizing the economy, which they were weirdly insistent on; not transposing every last thing Lenin said and wrote into the German situation; fundamentally honoring the particular German path of democracy, if only for as long as the capitalist class remained on the soil of democracy, and then, unfortunately, the path of revolution, which the Socialists seemed to see as opposed to democracy. Everything promised, signed, sealed, and transcribed. That suited him fine—he stuck to what the comrades from Kröpelin had done, having the resolution to unify the parties signed by the mayor and assistant mayor and the chief of police too. They started calling Kröpelin their sister city, in Platt. Oh yes, he’d learned. He’d run into Social Democrats who called unified meetings with him only when the local Soviet commandants ordered them to. Some of them didn’t get it until they were ordered to resign early. There’d been a lot of evenings that were pleasant enough, even fun: he had signatures in his collection which plainly showed the exuberant zest of the vodka. These were the rogues he was sharing his party with now; it was for them that they’d abandoned the title “German People’s Daily” in favor of Neues Deutschland, “New Germany”; more than half the members of the Unity Party were former Socialists; but it was also true that the votes people cast for them wouldn’t be going to them alone. That reassured him. So why did he have that flickering feeling in his wrists whenever the municipal elections so much as flitted through his mind, not even settling into conscious awareness?

  – He feared for his good name, this Gerd Schumann.

  – You shouldn’t say it like that, Marie. He didn’t like hearing “Gerd,” it had a falsely young ring to it, childish even. And just one syllable. When Triple-J said it there was almost nothing left. Slata had always called him “Comrade Gär-kha’t” when he was there, though always as if he weren’t. And she was truly speaking to him, he felt. As for “Schumann,” what was memorable about that? It practically invited you to forget him. He felt detached from such a stillborn name himself. “Comrade District Councilman” was better—it at least reminded him of what he had to do. (How happy he’d have been to hear his nickname, “Redhead,” if only he’d ever caught wind of it!)

  – Maybe this Comrade District Councilman of yours was scared they wouldn’t pick him!

  – That would be enough to wake you up in the middle of the night, in sweat-soaked sheets? In August? In a building as cool, its walls as thick, as the City of Hamburg Hotel, in a room with a breeze from the west? Worries like that can ruin your sleep?

  – Gesine, I was just saying. In case the voters saw Comrade District Councilman and his party as tools of the Soviets.

  – Don’t tell him that. You’d make his heavy eyes widen and darken with surges of blood; you’d have done much more than insult him a little. You’d have wounded him, truly ambushed him, his shoulders would crumple. You’d feel bad—a handsome young guy like that, reddish-gray stubble on his red face, innocent lips now bitterly pinched together. Almost desperately, practically paralyzed, he would ask you who, if not he and his party, was working in the national interest. No! For someone to see him, him of all people, as a stooge!

  – All right then, sorry bout that. He’s just friends with the Soviets.