Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  These people showed what they thought of one another in other ways, too. Sure, Johannes Schmidt’s heirs in Jerichow eventually let the SED use its loudspeakers free of charge for election campaigns; Wauwi Schröder, likewise in the musical and electronic field, but in Gneez, had two display windows and in one of them hung, through February 1947, a calligraphed sign in a gold frame:

  We consider it an honor,

  now and in the future,

  to put our loudspeakers at the disposal

  of the Red Army and the party allied to it

  in service of the anti-Fascist cause,

  free and without charge,

  with the addendum:

  The microphone that was apparently forgotten about on September 19 we consider a token of our goodwill.

  Plus two medium-sized azalea pots. After the next large rally, held in connection with the Moscow meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers on April 24, Wauwi disconnected his microphone along with the remaining cables and also replaced the document in the display window with the latest dictum of the ranking functionary: The SED would continue, as ever, to oppose any change to the borders. These people would have been more than happy to let the refugees return to their territory beyond the Oder and Neisse—anything to have Mecklenburg to themselves again.

  They found one another in the realm they considered their ancestral birthright: that of cultural functions. Proper table manners, nuanced forms of address, status-appropriate clothing—all self-explanatory. But how could one accuse a paint dealer of narrow-minded money-grubbing if he almost never missed a meeting of the Cultural League (for a Democratic Renewal of Germany), even the meetings devoted to interpreting a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin or some such? The old families of Gneez had collected Mecklenburgana, not just Lisch’s five volumes or the Yearbook but glassware, silhouettes, chests, portraits of old-fashioned mayors, and views of the cathedral before the inexplicable incident from the summer of 1659. They had almost pulled together enough money at one point to give a commission to the sculptor Ernst Barlach—a bronze rendition of their embarrassing heraldic animal in as dignified a form as possible; nothing came of it after all, what with his disputes with the Güstrow and Berlin Nazis. Gneez was no Güstrow. They just put the Barlach books that the Nazis didn’t like toward the back of their display cases; first of all, such poems had been the dernier cri around 1928, simply indispensable for one’s self-respect; secondly, their eventual monetary value was perhaps only suffering a temporary setback. And Gneez had a writer of its own!—born as the son of a day laborer on the Old Demwies estate, true, but claimed by the good city of Gneez in Mecklenburg ever since being shipped on to the Cathedral School on a municipal scholarship in his eleventh year. He’d managed to publish a volume of poems and two novels before he had to flee the country because of the Nazis; even under the British occupation, the city council had requested to rename Wilhelm Gustloff Street after Joachim de Catt; to Triple-J, too, de Catt’s emigration was credential enough. Nu vot, unusual legislation calls for unusual legislation. Pochemu nyet? Mozhno. Imeyem vozmozhnost'. Admittedly, “our poet” hadn’t yet found his way back to his proud hometown, neither in person nor by letter. Were he to return from his transatlantic climes, Gneez would gladly forgive whatever had been a bit irksome in the likeness he’d captured of a Mecklenburg small town in 1931, Gneez was hardly petty; he should get his celebration, and for now Mr. Jenudkidse had already approved the second poetry recital in honor of J. de Catt. They found one another there too, not just in the lectures given by Mrs. Lindsetter, the wife of the chief justice of the district court, who publicly communicated her memories of the wartime-shortage recipes of 1916. The church was part of it—religion was clearly a component of proper decorum; the cathedral was more crowded during evening organ concerts than during religious services. Dean Marjahn’s sermons were certainly edifying and innocuous; if he went on a titch too long on a major holiday, his ears were bound to be set ringing afterward by the tongue-lashings of conscientious ladies who’d been forced to take their goose out of the oven too late, apron tied over their Sunday dress, or found themselves behind on their carp. In the 1946 Hunger Winter too. Those ladies were still there. If Dr. Kliefoth had had his apartment cleaned out, that was just his bad luck. Anyway, in 1932 he’d gone and picked that backwater Jerichow to live in, not the upstanding city of Gneez, which could boast no fewer than two town chronicles over the centuries. Still, happy about it or not, one would probably have to take him back into the old fellowship—PhD, senior instructor, lieutenant colonel in the army, oddly respected by the Soviet authorities; he didn’t come. Ah never mind. Murrjahn was a stubborn dog but in the end he hadta give in.

  Cresspahl’s child, though a commuter student from Jerichow and a bit of an awkward case given her father’s arrest, was felt to belong—the elite families welcomed her with pleasure. The British, after all, not the Soviets had made this Cresspahl the mayor. What a chic black coat she wore. She took pride in her appearance; she didn’t have refugees do her tailoring, she went to Helene Rawehn on the market square. And, just as propriety demanded at her age, she was taking dancing lessons.

  They called their commandant “Mr. Jenudkidse,” even to his face. They weren’t going to be found lacking in proper manners. He liked it too, unfortunately. But they thought they could get him to commit to being polite as a result.

  There were exceptions, characterized with the saying about the traces left on a person who’s touched the devil. Leslie Danzmann, for instance: the Knoops, the Marjahns, the Lindsetters predicted a dim future for her when she too got involved with the new powers that be. Leslie Danzmann—old Mecklenburg family, English grandmother, navy lieutenant’s widow, a lady. Turned up near Gneez right around the middle of the war, rented one of the most modern villas by the sea, lived absolutely comme il faut as the housekeeper of a gentleman who had something to do with the Reich Aviation Ministry in Berlin. No false moves. Classy. Then the people who still played tennis had attracted attention in Gneez; Leslie Danzmann, also, was made to work, drafted into the labor office. Force majeure. But did she have to go to the Russians and look for work in their administration? The fact that someone owns nothing but a lapsed pension and has never learned how to do any kind of respectable job—give piano lessons, be married to a doctor—what kind of excuse is that! Now she too had been arrested for a bit, part of the Cresspahl business, strange don’t you think?, but did she take that as a warning? No, our fine Danzmann has gone and offered her services to the Soviets again. You tell children: Don’t get too close to that. Now she’s fallen right in—let go from the housing office, had to go to the fish cannery. Didn’t she realize that Comrade Director of the Housing Office was inviting her to join the SED? Couldn’t she think of any other answer besides: But what will the neighbors think of me, Mr. Yendretzky! She was pretty much right about that, in terms of the neighbors, but to go and blurt it out. As if you didn’t teach children: Hold your tongue. Now she went to work early every day, on foot from the coast, on the dairy train to Gneez, standing at a stinking table all day cleaning flounder, boiling fish stew. No, she didn’t complain. She’s still one of us to that extent. How cannery women talk, a housewife with some experience of the world can easily imagine it. You know their word for a woman’s private parts. A cultured woman won’t put it into words. What happens when a woman, a married woman, when she voluntarily lays down with a man, they talk about that as ——. Well, working-class women, what do you expect? What a hideous word too. Speaking of which, when you think about it its maybe not so far off really. Such a word will never cross my lips, Frau Schürenberg! Leslie Danzmann had it coming to her. If a girl gets herself brought up all nice and proper and wants to live like that and have everything come to her just the way she likes then she shouldn’t go somewhere she can be kicked out of into a cannery! And did she show any neighborly feeling, this Leslie Danzmann? She was right next to all that fish, couldn’t she ever bring some by? Just as a courtesy
? Not once. If she talked about her work at all it was to praise the proletarian women. So good-natured, supposedly. Always helped her, she said. There was one, Wieme Wohl from the Danish Quarter, known all around town, who’d said more than once at the end of the day, before the bag inspection: Hey, Danzmann, cmere, here’s an eel. Tie it round your waist. If yer too squeamish I’ll do it for you. ’S just for ten minutes, Danzmann! Don’ be so proud. . . . Danzmann had stayed firm. It wasn’t pride, she said. – It’s just that it’s not mine, girls! It doesn’t belong to me! The women persuaded her. In the end Leslie was willing to believe that fish, especially eel, never made it to the stores, only to the private Red Army and party distributors; she had no problem with that, she could see that. But then she’d insisted: the eel wasn’t hers. That’s what happens to someone who lets herself drop out of morality and respect for property!

  Cresspahl’s child didn’t like going to dancing class. She did it because Mrs. Abs told her to.

  She spent those afternoons in Gneez with Lise Wollenberg. In dancing class they were known to boys from elsewhere as the blond and brunette from Jerichow. The dancing master was Franz Knaak, from a Hamburg family whose members, with a single exception, had all been dancing masters since 1847. This one was fat and liked to speak French, emphasizing the nasals; he was so proud of his mechanical gestures that he was able to console himself for his ample corporeality with languid, brown-eyed glances. First he taught them the old German dances—the Rhinelander, the Kegel—all with references to the heritage of our fathers. Instead of something Soviet. He let himself be talked into teaching the slow dance only after universal, almost deafening requests; he showed how the movements looked in such an oily, filthy way that we would be filled with disgust for them all the rest of our lives, at least that’s what he hoped. He wore something resembling a frock coat, soapy at the neck, and held up the hem on each side with two fingers, demonstrating the single steps of the mazurka with a feeble spring in his step. What an unbelievable monkey: Gesine Cresspahl thought to herself. But she saw the absorbed smile on beautiful, merry, long-legged Lise’s face as she followed Herr Knaak’s leaps and hops; Lise knew so much about everything. – How’ll you ever get a man if you don’t learn to dance! she’d said, and all down the long end of the room the mothers were draped on worn plush chairs, Mrs. Wollenberg among them, dabbing their eyes. That wasn’t how the Cresspahl girl saw it. She didn’t want to get a man that way. She already knew one, and he went dancing with someone else.

  She’d decided her coat should be black because she wanted to wear it in mourning for her father, not because he was probably dead but just in memory of him. That was only proper. She knew it. But it was something inappropriate to talk about.

  On the evenings after dancing class she almost always ran into Leslie Danzmann on the train platform. She greeted her, stood far away from her as they waited for the train, and never got into the same compartment as her. Leslie Danzmann may have imagined another humiliation, this time due to the smell coming off her. But it wasn’t that. Cresspahl’s child rather liked the smell, if anything. She wanted to punish this Danzmann woman. She’d been let free, her father hadn’t. She hadn’t brought any news from him. She might even have betrayed him.

  July 1, 1968 Monday

  Sometimes I think: That’s not her. What does that mean here, “she,” “me”? It can be thought; but it is unthinkable. If she were alone, I would have to think: That’s Gesine Cresspahl (Mrs.), a woman around thirty-five, not a lady, in the very best posture for elegant occasions—chin high, back straight and far from the back of her chair, gaze so mobile that it can shift from moment to moment between surveying the room and an indissoluble bond with only one object, only one person; from a distance I could tell it was her from her short hair in what the stylist intended as a feathered cut, but the overlapping close layers of a bird’s wing now look too loose, too ragged over the forehead. Close up there is no mistaking her for anyone else, what with the cautious movements of her overly narrow lips, whether chewing or speaking; the shallow hollows below her cheekbones, skin sometimes stretched tight over them, straining to mimic the right behavior; the little wrinkles that have hardened in the corners of her eyes, the involuntarily narrowed pupils: the first thing I’d think is that she’s scared, and hiding it, skillfully. She’s on her guard, she’s going to defend herself—but she wants to seem polite, friendly, ladylike. It would take a lover to observe specifically how she takes a deftly apportioned bite of fish from the end of her fork and dismantles it with barely visible chewing, so that her mouth is empty again at once, ready to smile or give an answer—we don’t notice anything in particular. But, she is not alone.

  She is just one of many people in a long, spacious dining room with very white vertical bands of cloth blocking the sun coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls; she is sitting surrounded by men at one of the north tables and an empty, dirty sky is behind her, with the shy tops of skyscrapers, silhouetted like cutouts, reaching up into it—airplanes there would be less unexpected. She may know how to act in restaurants, be familiar with the comportment demanded by the damask tablecloth and silver place settings with a knife rest and three drinking glasses; her nod to the waiter over her shoulder is irreproachable as he bends down to let her examine the plate with the next course—she will have learned all these things. But this is the restaurant high in the East Tower of the bank, closed to the public, to ordinary people, even to employees. The head manager for office supplies is honored to be invited up into this circle of heaven, permitted to read the menu with its French formulations that he approves every day when it comes out of the in-house printshop. While Mrs. Cresspahl is not only lower in rank—that in itself would suffice to make the waiters slightly standoffish with her—she is also the only woman there today. Oh, women are brought here sometimes, it does happen. Only then they’re part of the family, one of the bank’s owners; they’re wives, invited along when a vice president is promoted or shoved off into retirement and his nearly paid-off house on the better or worse side of Long Island Sound; ladies sometimes come on business from allied firms, after a contract has been signed, a scam’s been pulled off; when the National Bank of the People’s Republic of Poland dispatches for negotiations not a man but a Mrs. Paula Ford, a meal in these well-protected heights to honor her is indispensable. Less than a year ago Mrs. Cresspahl was still a secretary for foreign languages: she used to work down on the lower floors, in a big group office, with cassette players, and the voices speaking from them didn’t belong to people she needed to be introduced to; she started even farther downstairs, at an adding machine in the Finance Department; what is she doing here? And she’s not at just any table—she’s at the one reserved for de Rosny, the true monarch of this bank, the Vice President of all Vice Presidents, deputy chairman of the board of directors. He receives state visits from the competition here, he conducts his seminars for the heads of the foreign departments, and at noon today he turned up with Mrs. Cresspahl. Maybe she’s on a secret assignment for him, something statistical probably; still, she’s one of the dispensable ones, owed two weeks’ notice and then basta; yet everyone summoned to the table, with nod or call across the room, has had to say hello to this Mrs. Cresspahl following all due formalities, while some of them have run into her earlier in the day, with nothing more than a normal Hi. Hi. Now, though, what’s called for is: It’s a pleasure. . . . ; now she’s sitting at de Rosny’s right hand, as if hosting the gentlemen with their grave responsibilities along with him. But it’s just a woman! De Rosny can do whatever he has planned, but this isn’t what he should be doing. What does she want here!

  She wishes she were somewhere else. She likes to go downstairs for lunch, out of the building. It may be hot downstairs, the forecast is 95 degrees, but she could have crossed Lexington and Madison Avenues to Fifth to buy blouses like the other “coworkers” with no time for department stores after work; she could sit in Gustafsson’s fish shop on S
econd, leaning back, with Amanda Williams, with Mr. Shuldiner, with friends, in conversations where she doesn’t have to watch out like a hawk the whole time. She’d be more than happy to give up the arctic chill that the appliances here fabricate for the bosses in exchange for the relaxed hour she’s guaranteed by contract. She knows it won’t be forever. She’s one of the other class of people in the city, who can neither buy nor pay to operate such an air conditioner. Tonight, when she gets back to the Upper West Side, there won’t be many of these expensive boxes overhead sticking out of the buildings; people will be sitting on the stoops, hoping for the protection provided by the naturally occurring shadows and nothing more, all they can do is push open the windows and hope for a breeze from the air rushing down the channels of the streets. Marie will keep the apartment door open to try to get a cross-breeze between the Hudson and the stairwell, to hell with burglars. The electricity can be turned off, the gas pressure lowered, the faucets left thirsty. The firefighters will once again have neglected to outfit their hydrants with spray caps, so children will have to use force before they can hop around in the spraying streams intended for use against fires. Anyone driving by of an evening, in a sealed and air-conditioned car, will see classic New York local color and not suspect a shortage of working showers on the poor streets. After the high-pressure system that’s been moving so laboriously from the Gulf of Mexico over New York since yesterday, others will come to pay a visit, and someone like Mrs. Cresspahl will never officially own a doubly and triply guaranteed air conditioner—this single hour in the climate-controlled fortress of the bank may be hazardous to her ability to survive in New York. Since de Rosny wants her to, she is sitting in the cold with her back to the north while the breeze from the blades behind her caresses her back. Her shivers often turn into shudders.