Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Since the beginning, when she moved to Riverside Drive four years ago, she’s insisted on us being more than just neighbors: friends. Marcia was in the same class as Marie then. Soon Marie was going over to the Carpenters’ alone. She wanted to see for herself what exactly that is: a stepmother. Ginny put on a fake deep voice and accused herself of being an evil stepmother out of a fairy tale to anyone who would listen; the child listened in amazement, since this woman then quietly did whatever the child wanted anyway. (They could become partners in crime all the more easily since Mrs. Carpenter had no children of her own. Didn’t want to have kids for now.) Marie went over, ostensibly to watch television; she also wanted to find out what it was like to live with a father. When Mr. Carpenter comes home from his chambers, that’s when work really starts: here, beatified anew each evening, stands a young wife at the door, slightly red in the face from housewifely zeal; the furniture is waiting, comfortable, clean, more extravagant than he’d exactly wanted for a third marriage; fresh highballs at his preferred temperature are waiting by the window overlooking the Hudson. Now it’s his turn. Stories from the office. How Elman was today. Whether Burns via Elman is going to foist the real estate case against the National Guard off on him. Carpenter, a colonel in the reserve, is now buried under household incidents and others that The New York Times has already told him about. The caresses all come off in a form it doesn’t harm children to witness. He can escape as long as she hasn’t planned a party, fifteen people, right before dinner, attention to be paid to acquaintances passing through town or intellectuals from Europe; but just then is when he’s supposed to realize how lucky he is, for the liveliest voice is his wife’s—a sound well aware of its loveliness. Indefatigably cheerful, she spins the guests around one another, speeding them up with delicate deliveries of excellent drinks, then transforms back into the ardent student she once was: philosophy major, sociology minor, cocooned in a private one-on-one conversation by the fireside, now immersed in an erudite discussion of an article in International Affairs, a magazine that in this living room lies out no better or worse than Cosmopolitan, Newsweek, or Saturday Review. The Playboy is not out. The household is run along strict yet generous lines—the guests reassure one another of that once they’re back out on the sidewalk—but we’d never go there to borrow a pinch of salt. The Carpenters’ maid, Isobel, from a village in the Alleghenies, looks a bit like the lady of the house after only two years, and not just because of her youth. A polished girl, she wants to stay not particularly for the half-orphan Marcia—she keeps Marcia rather at arm’s length. Tessie, who used to help us, would never set foot in this apartment. Tessie is a subject of Her Royal Majesty the Queen of Great Britain; she likes living in the Bronx, she doesn’t need to care what conclusions Mrs. Carpenter pronounces about the dark-skinned race as such.

  Ginny Carpenter is without question a major power in our neighborhood, a pillar of our community. If it occurs to Governor Rockefeller that this Riverside Park is utterly useless and would suit him much better as an eight-lane highway for trucks only, Ginny will have ruined the spring of her phone dial within three days, by using it as you’re supposed to for once in human history, and presto, here’s is a rock-solid committee, fiercely named from the acronym for Save Our Riverside Park, and now Rocky is quaking in his wingtips. She serves as a member of almost every group concerned with the external beauty of our neighborhood, whether with respect to the large-tooth aspen on 119th Street or a trampled trash can on the river promenade. For a passably honest lawyer could hardly pay the expenses of such a wife on the East Side, a location befitting her social status, and so Mrs. Carpenter lives here among us, because of the housing and tree stock, the sunsets over the Hudson, and, not least, the incomparable mix of people here, whose sense of community she could hardly expect among the soulless apartment towers east of Fifth Avenue. – Never!: she says, stamping a little with her long foot. In fact, when she spots us walking on Riverside Drive, she backs up her Cabriolet ($6,780.00) especially for us and entertains us during the ride with the swanky sensitivities of a car like this, stopping without a trace of shame in front of our gray-painted front steps, where there’s not even a carpet. – After all, we’re neighbors!: she cries, beaming, a good-natured child, sincerely happy at all times.

  She is certainly honest. It didn’t take long before she noticed something. We don’t live in a building you enter under a manned baldachin; we have just three rooms, with a view of the park from beneath the tops of the trees; no liveried doorman keeps watch over us. Our incomes are incommensurate, we can hardly repay invitations like hers in kind, so a pleasant neighborly relationship is preferable to a friendship in which one party feels bad. In circles too elevated for us, Mrs. Carpenter might express admiration for single working mothers supporting self and child year after year, like Mrs. Cresspahl for instance, she wishes she were a woman like that—if only she could get rid of the sneaking suspicion that this Mrs. Cresspahl is leading such a life for the sake of a half-baked feminist ideology, not because she wants to. She is willing to grant us our European origins—although her Europe consists of France, Spain, and Monaco; our neck of the Continent is more dubious even than Yugoslavia. No, she doesn’t insist on being friends. Neighbors is just fine.

  Today Mrs. Cresspahl is supposed to pick up her daughter from a birthday party at Pamela’s. Marie insists on such formalities sometimes; she wants to show off her mother in her best clothes and a brooch at the neck, please. So it’s change after work, out to Riverside Drive, elevator to the twelfth floor. And there was Ginny, through the half-open door to the Blumenroths’ living room, doing four things nearly simultaneously.

  She was savoring what she’d just strewn across the room: Utterly charming, no, dazzling; You look like a June day in the flesh; etc.

  She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, eating cookies, hand cupped under her chin to protect her red silk from Lord & Taylor, her taut brow evincing a certain contemplation of how marvelously tolerant she was to be paying such an extensive visit to Jews (admittedly, rich ones); now, to whom could she say that, and from whom better keep it; finally, a gobbling curiosity: are these kosher cookies she’s eating?

  She was giving a lecture: In twenty years the blacks will have been driven out of Manhattan. We’ll be living on a lily-white island surrounded by the black boroughs—the Bronx, Queens, Kings. Richmond County, no, that’s not clear yet. It’s very simple—economic factors. Our charming four-story brownstones, expensive sandstone on numbered streets, what could be their fate if not a return to being luxury houses for one family each?

  She was fingering Marie’s blouse, the concealed placket, the double-stitched seam along the button-down collar: it seemed un-American to her; suddenly she pulled the napkin from the child’s neck, reached for the label, and spelled it out, aghast: from Geneva.

  Mrs. Cresspahl doesn’t recall how she waved her child out of there.

  Mrs. Cresspahl will need to apologize to her surprised hostess for how she whisked past her. When the elevator doors slid shut before her, she started laughing. Twelve stories down she fell, laughing, seriously disconcerting Marie, and as soon as they got out to the sidewalk the child demanded an explanation, to keep her mother from laughing any more, in public like that. It’s not so simple.

  Listen, Comrade Writer. I’ve got something to say to you.

  You laughed, Mrs. Cresspahl. Gesine. You did.

  Maybe I did. But not just this once.

  That may be true, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  I gave you a year. That was our agreement. Describe the year.

  And what came before the year.

  No tricks!

  How you got to this year.

  And during this year we’ve agreed on, beginning August 20, 1967, I’ve seen Ginny Carpenter at Jones Beach, twice. Three times at the Philharmonic. For a meal in the city once. She loaned me her car—no, that didn’t work out.

  Renting a car cost less than owing her anything.

>   (I don’t know about that.) She’s a part of my daily life.

  Not on Broadway: she has her meat delivered from Shustek’s. Not in the subway: she’s never ridden the subway in her life. When the Italian delegation invites you to the UN, you don’t bring her along. You’re afraid she’ll say something embarrassing.

  Gimme a break. It’s like the thing last Thursday. When you want to show something about shopping you can’t help making a drunk Negro assault me in the store and vent his sexual fantasies. I see Ginny Carpenter twice a week and you give her her moment in the spotlight exactly once in ten months: one striking, conspicuous moment.

  An important moment.

  I laugh every time I see her. Marie just has to mention her. It’s not unfriendly laughter, there’s no mockery in it at all, usually. It’s just funny that someone like that exists. Almost never mocking. I’m glad she exists.

  That America can be like that too.

  Exactly. So write that down.

  You want this to turn into a diary after all?

  No. Never. I’m keeping up my end of the bargain. So write about her more often.

  If I did, what was important about today’s laugh might get lost.

  There you go again with your quantity and quality! Add more of one if you want the other!

  By accumulating more Mrs. Carpenter, all I’d get is Mrs. Carpenter. I was trying to show that you’re preparing for your departure. Reassuring yourself that not everything you’re leaving behind is essential. For instance, Mrs. Carpenter. You want to make it easier for yourself to leave, at least to leave this one person in New York.

  My departure? For three weeks in Prague?

  Business travel of this sort has a way of being extended, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  I’m afraid of losing New York but I just can’t say it?

  Go ahead and say it, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  I create my own psychology, Comrade Writer. You need to take it as you find it.

  So, you’ve never laughed like that about Ginny Carpenter.

  Agreed. You can write that. I’ve never laughed like that.

  Mrs. Cresspahl had never laughed like that about Mrs. Carpenter. Like that? Never.

  June 27, 1968 Thursday

  In fall 1946, the Cresspahl child moved many of her things from Jerichow to the county seat of the area, Gneez. She lived in Jerichow, she was on the official lists in the registration and housing offices there, she got her ration cards there (Group IV), it was there that she and her father had arranged to meet again, in case he came back from the Soviet prison or wherever else he might be from which return was conceivable. But she went to school in Gneez, and the railway management often combined the afternoon train to Jerichow with the evening one, and when there was no coal even for that one she would stay until the next school day with Alma Witte, in the room from which Slata had disappeared. She went back to Jerichow in the dark, as if into the dark.

  Gneez was a big city. For a child born in Jerichow—who ever since then thought of such enlarged one-street villages as the way the world was supposed to be, if not the only possible world—Gneez is a city that only makes you think of bigger ones.

  Back then the train needed an hour to cover the Jerichow–Gneez branch line—nineteen tariff kilometers, four regular stops and one flag stop, forty-one minutes according to the timetable. The train consisted of three third-class cars, the kind where compartments lining the corridor have a door on the left or the right alternately, plus two or three freight cars, delivering the potatoes, beets, and sacks of wheat collected in Jerichow to supply the needs of the city of Gneez. These cars drove back empty at night, as a rule, and as soon as the train got out of sight of the Soviet control officer in the engine routing center, the People’s Police swung out of the empty boxcars and tumbled back along the long running boards to the passenger cars, where they might stay warm at least with card games. In the mornings, though, in rain or in frost, they would crouch along the edges of the boxcars next to their products of the country, 98k Karabiner rifles propped at an angle, implacable enemies of snipers, thieves, and black marketeers. If the district administration in Gneez had been able to meet its need for trucks by confiscations from the coast, this largely single-track rail line, too, would have been unscrewed and sent off to the Soviet Union, like all the second tracks in the Soviet occupation zone. As it was, the line was used, three times a day according to the timetable, and the Cresspahl child took it to her secondary school in Gneez, as the Educational Reform Law mandated.

  The dairy train from the coast approaches Gneez along a wide bulging arc to the west, letting viewers build up a semicircular picture of the thin sharp spires of Lübeck, as in a peep box; at the Gneez Bridge station, then closed, the line heads south-southwest and the rising sun paints the windows; at Gneez station the Jerichow train rests on an almost precisely east-west line, and with only a little shunting it could be dispatched to Hamburg or Stettin, the two cities on the classic line, but now that they’re both cut off by borders no train can get there from platform 4. Gneez had four platforms.

  Outside the station was a plaza that took up more space than the whole market square in Jerichow, and it was surrounded by buildings like a market square too. To the right were the steel gates, more than six feet tall, to the freight loading area; next to them City Hall, in three red-brick stories, flying the Red Army flag; straight ahead the prince’s mansion, converted into Knoop’s storage and haulage firm, crossed hammers on the frosted-glass windows; to the left, alongside the track running onward to Bad Kleinen, were bicycle sheds and the bay in the sidewalk that country buses used to pull into. In the middle of this incredible expanse they had laid out a genuine park, a square of grass now admittedly trampled black with bare trees here and there. The path running straight across the plaza, though, led to the showpiece of one’s first impression: a four-story gray stucco building, its continuous columns and fluting rising clear up to the elegantly rounded hipped roof—a palace, the Archduke Hotel, built in 1912 and designed by an architect who’d believed in a future for Gneez as a major metropolis. Not only did the building jut into the rose garden with a restaurant and a three-story wing of rooms, it bulged out into the street in front half again as much, its ground floor enlarged into a café beneath graceful stucco garlands, a mighty portal to the reception halls, and another, more subdued one leading to the Renaissance Cinema. Only then, fifty-six yards down Railroad Street, did this colossus yield the frontage to midgets—bourgeois houses of few stories, painted white, with stores and bars at their feet. This was Railroad Street, which had been named after an Austrian for a few years and now bore the name of the place to which it led, from which it came. The name “Archduke” was still on the hotel’s roof, attached to a wire frame in proud Roman letters, and just as the place had once scared off the less impressive traveling salesmen, nowadays it was kept for the better sort with a red-and-yellow tin sign on the bulging semicircular reception desk, illegible to most Germans, presumably to be translated as Officers’ House but meaning only the officers who could read Cyrillic. This was Station Square in Gneez—what a rich country town had once resolved to create as a lasting monument, not ostentatiously, just humbly presenting what the city had to hand. The citizens of the new century had no desire to boast of more than that; their solidity was only to be made visible. This had been the site of political rallies since the 1914 war, and here was where the Red Army had established its civil government.

  The square was guarded by a ring of streetlights, it didn’t matter that they weren’t on—maybe the panes of glass had been shattered by rocks or bullets—anyway, they stood so tall, making sweeping gestures, in stiff pairs, they were still candelabras, lacquered black. And between the pair, almost every one, a pole had been set up flying a red flag, or else a sheet was stretched, bearing words from the Red Army to the locals in their own language, German black-letter.

  Anyone who found the Dom Ofitserov too threateningly grand might take a narrow path s
traight ahead, past Knoop’s edifice of hereditary ownership, and might genuinely be shocked by the difference between the doorless side of the prince’s mansion facing the station and the south facade with its generous balconies, statues in niches, and serenely sweeping outdoor staircase commanding the southern prospect. There had once been a park there, which had gradually been devoured by a neighborhood of new buildings that had burned down once every century since the fifteenth until the 1925 SPD planned to put up a middle-income public housing project there, with reduced-cost lots, credit assistance, and a salutary dislike of rushing things. As a result six units were finished only in 1934 and 1935, and as a result Gneez-Neustadt was depicted in photo books from then on as an example of Mecklenburg’s flourishing under National Socialism. It was hardly what you’d call the city. It was a field of scattered red villas, each with its own fenced-in garden plot, organized in groups of six with frugal paved paths under the patronage of the Musicians Guild. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s name could not, it turned out, be restored on the customary enamel sign, but it could be recarved into two oak signs. This was “the new good part of town,” assigned to employees of the administration and the parties, the imported brain trust, and now thickly settled with refugees, children’s homes, and Soviet private quarters. Only after you’d wandered through this pattern of boxes, turning left and then left again, would you find yourself at the tail end of Station Street, at a modest square that had once held the widened city walls, the Lübeck Gate, the guardhouses Lisch the local historian had failed to mention, and a humorous image in bronze of the animal to which Gneez owed its nickname. Now all the square had to offer was the bridge over the city moat, a low-lying, nearly stagnant body of water as wide as a man is tall. Here was the start of Old Gneez.