Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  She pronounced it the English way, with a sharp initial S sound and swaying, dark-brown vowels; anyone who heard her would take her for American. (Today she would say that someone taking her for an American proves the opposite.)

  Anyway, four-year-old Marie knew hardly any graver danger, in dealing with peers, than that of revealing Cydamonoe. – You fly there? David Williams said, that immemorial autumn, truly thunderstruck. He was standing with her in a less crowded corner of the playground, hands behind his back, his face completely frozen with the thought that this foreign child was trying to pull his leg, lead him down the garden path, and everything else he didn’t want her to do. A girl too. She nodded so shyly that he turned on a dime from a victim to an expert, superior because male. – Through the window. . . ? he followed up, still ready to devastate her with laughter. Marie trusted him not to snap her secret in two; a person has to say what’s on her mind sometime; and anyway it was the truth: I can: she revealed. David stared at her, eyes wide. He too had various special powers no one knew about but him. He nodded seriously, and said: Aha. Now that was something worth trusting a friend over. David Williams became a friend of the Cresspahls.

  Not even Marie’s mother learned anything more about Cydamonoe until a certain stormy night when Marie wanted to delay going behind her curtained door as long as she possibly could, and the only means she knew for doing so was telling a story. The words came out of her mouth all rounded with urgency—German, English, however it came out. She didn’t look at me, ashamed of her betrayal as she was, and she would have fallen into stony silence mid-sentence if I’d let my face show the slightest doubt. She held her glass of juice in her plump little hands, wanting to drink, unable to stop talking.

  Cydamonoe was a place you could get to only by air. The voyage there started the second it got dark in the child’s head and she knew her whole body was asleep. The vehicle you flew there in was your head and your body, self-guided, no “Stewardessens” (blending German and English, stewardesses and Stewardessen). The flight lasted as long as it took to realize you were flying. The landing happened in the exact moment when the sun rose behind the earth in an eager leap, like a friendly dog, and it was day.

  Cydamonoe was a colony for children—a Kinder-Garten in the intended meaning of the word, a child’s garden. It was a time that compensated the child for the false day, from waking up until going to sleep.

  As soon as Marie reached that place, surrounded by water, she breksted. In English she told me that “brekst” is what she did and in Cydamonoe language that’s the word for “help yourself.”

  In Cydamonoe children help themselves, to breakfast or to houses. Anyone who needs a house just takes one that’s empty. There was no reason to keep the one you have. And every house is equally nice.

  In Cydamonoe the streets were grassy lanes and it was against the law to misuse them. But there were pedal carts, tricycles, and jump machines standing there ready, the same number as there were children. Not a single one less, not ever. The same as with the houses, the shared toys, the ice-cream cones: no child ever did without.

  In Cydamonoe there were lots and lots of windmills. Presiding in the main mill were Kanga and her husband Kongo and their son Roo. Other than this Ministry of Agriculture there was almost no government or administration.

  Unless you count the guards on the landing field. It’s a position of honor, being the guard; every child serves sometimes, in rotation, unless they have a toothache.

  The guards look at your passport and calculate whether the number of stamps qualifies the new arrival to be a citizen of the Republic of Cydamonoe.

  Then they check the places of departure. It has to be one of these: Rastelkin, Rye, Korkoda, Shremble, Stiple, Roke, Kanover, Rochest, Kribble, Krabble, Idiotland, Ristel, Rastel, Kranedow, Scharry, Rinoty, Exremble, Rimble, Stevel, Stretcher, Sklov, Opay, Orow, Irokrashmonoe, Crestelmonoe, or Wrestelmonoe. There’s no way to get to Cydamonoe from anywhere else.

  There have to be thirteen vaccinations entered in your passport, along with a pill for every week. For Cydamonoe is the only country in the world that’s worth living in.

  As burdensome and unfriendly as this passport control is, all the children agree it must be. For Cydamonoe is a republic of children.

  The grown-ups don’t want to accept that. They’re constantly sending spies in the craziest disguises. No, not dwarfs. Just normal grown-ups who think they know everything and that children never notice anything. And they’re noticed right away, when they climb up out of the river in the morning and go to sleep sunbathing in the grass. The children immediately turn invisible. But they watch the intruder wander around the whole country, take hold of the rain machine the wrong way, bend the stamps in the post office out of shape. Many and many a time have the children debated whether or not to continue granting these unwanted visitors their hospitality since they only ever misuse it.

  When the grown-ups come in a group, some children get so mad that they want to turn visible again. These grown-up groups inevitably adopt the same disguise and unfold their guns and shoot. Then they’re done, but the children have had a bad night. Who wants to stand up in the dream meeting and admit: “In my sleep I too was at the Berlin Wall and I fired with the rest”?

  They’re so clumsy, the grown-ups, that they don’t just damage things, they hurt themselves. One of them thought the toy factory was a bank and broke down the door and stole billions of billions of dollars and marks. ($4,000,000,000,000.00.) One smoked in public, threw aside their match, and put out their cigarette in the swimming pool. And all sorts of other things grown-ups can think up.

  But then they’re arrested, convicted, punishable, and they go to jail! In jail they get nothing but bread and butter and milk! The punishment consists of them having to find the hole to slip out through. No child will tell them where it is. Once they’ve found it, they’re free. All they have to do is swim the three hours across the river surrounding the island.

  Because of them, the children often have to misuse the many narrow passages and tunnels as escape routes. It takes so much to repair them, until they’re good for playing in again!

  Mr. CoffeeCan does that. Yes, there is one grown-up who lives in Cydamonoe. But it’s the man in the moon. One morning there he was on the landing field, mute, fat and brown and round like the cans where the coffee lives, which you can see through the lid in his head. He didn’t have to undergo the examination, he was given his passport and his shots and he promised to take his pills. He isn’t always mute. He knows he needs to hang up a new fire bell every day. There are no fires in Cydamonoe but there are dangerous visitors sometimes.

  Mr. CoffeeCan is a handyman. He takes care of everything. True, the children don’t let him tackle the really tricky stuff, like the island’s propeller. But he knows how to pump out the many swimming pools every day, and he’s great at giving the birds haircuts. Stephen the policeboy even let him turn invisible once.

  Day begins in Cydamonoe once the “entrance of the Stewardessens” fails to occur. Then comes playing, reading, swimming, feeding the animals in the countryside and the trees, and every afternoon at four thirty the class that every child hates: How to say goodbye. One of the games is called, and is:

  Jumping up and down,

  Kanga-Roo’s around the town!

  Because since Kanga has a job she gets time off, and since Roo needs to live with his grown-ups he does too. Kongo never has a day off. How could anyone invent even a game if someone showed up and it was just Kongo! Kongo’s flour is usually multicolored, not white.

  The children in Cydamonoe are alone, or with friends, however they prefer. Leaving a group because you’re sad is not permitted, however. When a child has been alone enough and is done with that, they only need to think of being with the others and they are, quick as a wink, with a soft toot.

  You can also summon children who aren’t citizens of the Republic, just by thinking of them. If you’ve left, let’s say, a Konstanze
or a Manuela back in Europe, you can invite them for a visit. But they won’t know they’ve been to Cydamonoe, and the next morning, when they wake up in Hannover or Düsseldorf, they’ll have forgotten it.

  And if for some reason something is missing in Cydamonoe, you go to the Wunsch und Wille building. Want and Will. It’ll be there.

  Marie doesn’t know how the other children do it when it’s nighttime. And you’re not allowed to ask. As for her, she gets into bed with Tigger and his father a second before it gets dark, sleeps for a long time, and wakes up in the morning somewhere she doesn’t recognize at all. She has to think for a long time. Then she realizes it’s . . . New York City.

  Back then she admitted it. And don’t I still carry with me wherever I go a seven-year-old piece of paper on which the unevenly written letters authorize me explicitly and by name to visit Cydamonoe? – But only come if you don’t know what else you can do! she begged me back then, when the thunderstorm was over and she was willing to try once more to go to bed. How short a four-year-old child is, lying there.

  And now, for the Marie of 1968, none of this is supposed to be true, just because she’s almost eleven. Just because New York is now hers—with every mile of its subway system, all its islands, all its weather, at all times—without a world of Cydamonoe to contrast it with! Because she can meet me at the Seventy-Second Street station for a stroll through Riverside Park, in a meticulously faded T-shirt and artificially aged jeans; because she can both keep an eye on the stairs up from the subway and suggest to the sturdy policemen next to them, with a sidelong look no one could prove against her, that he should think what she thinks: Are you really known as New York’s Finest even though you’ve been caught taking bribes again and again? It used to be that she’d avoid such a massive fellow in uniform, because of his wooden billy club if nothing else; this one turns away from her as if she’s wounded him. Is it possible she ever had such fat baby lips, with the words tumbling out so pudgily, as if covered in fuzzy skin? Her hair is almost as white-blond as it’ll be in August. No stranger will realize that she’s now caught sight of the person she’s wanting to find; no one needs to know who she’s waiting for. That’s between us.

  In any case, an honorary citizen of Cydamonoe has the right to occasionally speak in phrases such as “except for the fire bells of Cydamonoe,” “according to the laws of C.”—but only in code, never in front of witnesses, and no more than twice a year. Why today? Why today without the reprimand of a furrowed brow? Because today is the third of July, and the start of a long weekend, and we wish each other a good one, I her and she me.

  July 4, 1968 Thursday

  In the third summer after the war, Mecklenburg was safer than the city where we live now.

  Yesterday a man in his forties, stocky, black-haired, white undershirt, black pants, dark socks, walked into the women’s section of a public lavatory at Eighty-Fifth Street in Central Park and shot a twenty-four-year-old woman, the bullet passing downward out her throat and into her chest, killing her. He then climbed onto the roof and fired in all directions, calm, capricious. It was near the part of Fifth Avenue where people like Jack Kennedy’s widow live, and more than a hundred policemen stormed into the peaceful area. One of them says he thinks he shot the killer ten times. Apparently the killer had lived in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, and come here with a Greek passport; there were pictures of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels on the walls of his apartment. People on the upper floors of nearby buildings had a bird’s-eye view. “The police were absolutely great,” said Mrs. David Williams of 1035 Fifth Avenue. “It was as thrilling as anything you could see on television.”

  Around Jerichow there were mostly thefts, and dogs on chains enjoyed an unforeseen respect. Stealing food, up to ten pounds of flour, was considered a hunger tax; a bottle of liquor gone missing earned curses at the unknown perpetrator; news of neither tended to reach the police: why call in the upholders of the law to take a look around, you might just as well catch a rabbit by sprinkling salt on its tail. (Not much went missing at the Cresspahls’ place—behind the cemetery, so close to the Kommandatura.) It was seen as a sign of economic recovery when tools or machines were stolen, to work with. You could carve your house number into the shaft of the scythe, but what about the blade? And why would Duvenspeck give up his residence permit in Jerichow when Willi Köpcke came back from the Soviet camps—the director of the gasworks wasn’t running away from just anywhere, and if Mina Köpcke was not to be seen on Town Street for quite some time, and then was seen tired and gentle as a lamb, it must have been some other misdeed that she was getting beaten up for.

  The streets were practically safe, aside from the Soviet MPs and various marauders; a child could take a trip with no need to worry, especially if she was wearing an extra-big sweater and baggy pants that discreetly recalled a checked curtain, and was carrying her things in a net bag, so fellow travelers could see everything inside it, there was no need to grab it. Gesine Cresspahl got off the bus at the Kiel stop on Fischland and walked north on Fulge, quickly, away from the corrosive yellow stench of the wood generator; she’d trusted things three days earlier in Jerichow but not here. She shamelessly bypassed the mayor’s office; a returning native didn’t have to pay the visitor’s fee, surely. Past the Baltic Hôtel, at the corner where Malchen Saatmann’s place was, she turned right onto Norderende Road, as though intending to hire herself out to Niemann the farmer for the harvest, but she stopped in front of a very red cottage with a cane roof, surrounded by hedges and wild bushes and lush trees. This was her house here, and she didn’t go inside. But it’s why she’d come.

  She’d forgotten that Alexander Paepcke had signed the property over to her father; it was hers only because she and Paepcke’s children had come to feel at home here. The slip of paper on the post revealed that total strangers were living at this smallholding now—no one else in Althagen would need a nameplate. Only outsiders would be capable of neglecting to pull all the weeds from the stone embankment around the house. The southwest corner of the thatched roof was ragged—the rain would get in during the fall. Memory refused to supply anything.

  She would probably have walked farther, on the firm sand between the thick hedges, to Kaufmanns Corner, to the Ahrenshoop Post Office bus stop—there was nothing else she was looking for on Fischland; it was only ancient habit that led her to the cottage where the Paepckes used to drop off the keys over the winter. She wasn’t alone, she just felt that way; she greeted the people out for their early-evening stroll—greeted them first, without fail, not because she was younger but strictly according to the English custom, so that several of the men looked surprised. She gave them the slip. Finally she was standing in front of Ille, and each of them was terribly shocked by the other.

  Ille had latched the top half of her door to the wall—a Snackdœr; suddenly she was standing so still that she was like a picture in a frame. She saw the child who’d always come with the Paepcke children, but they were dead, she knew that. Ille was easy to recognize—the same pensive face, the freckles even more pronounced, her brittle reddish hair like a man’s. She was wearing, in the house, a white head scarf, the way people on Fischland do to mourn the dead; she had married her captain after all, at forty-two. The shock lasted the blink of an eye. Then Ille was the elder again, and said, barely reproachful, barely worried: Gesine. Youve run away.

  Gesine had run away from home, and Ille informed her that a note on the kitchen table in Jerichow wasn’t enough for Jakob’s mother. She had to go that very day œwe den pahl, over the fence and the border from Mecklenburg to Pommern, to the post office, with a letter saying she’d come here to visit relatives. Which was true, that more or less was what she’d had in mind. Ille also clarified that the child would be sleeping under the same roof as her, if she didn’t mind. It was a bit strange to want to go to Farmer Niemann for work and bread, just because she’d once been friends with Inge Niemann. Ille herself had things for Gesine to do. It was un
derstood and agreed from the beginning: Gesine was no longer one of the master’s children. She was welcome here, and she would have to work for her bed and board.

  The things for Gesine to do started the next morning in the garden: there were roots to pull, gooseberries and black currants to pick, beds of soil to break up. Carrying water to the kitchen three times a day; the potatoes she had to peel were counted in buckets, the milk canister she had to have Grete Nagel fill every evening held probably eight quarts. All that was missing was for Ille to let her near the stove. When it was precisely to give Gesine a proper respect for cooking that she’d taken her in. Gesine was allowed to make the cucumber salad, butter the bread. Carry the food to the rooms too.

  For Ille had guests, paying visitors from the cities, as in earlier times. Except that a family of refugees was there too, though Ille sent them out into the fields with the farmers; they’d suddenly remembered the work that needed doing on a smallholding, and if these Biedenkopfs from Rostock wanted to stay with Ille over the winter, they’d have to pay in work, not rent. She took money from the temporary guests without a second thought, though. Gesine understood only when she found two piglets one morning in the shed behind the house, which she now had to feed and take care of as well; when a sewing machine was delivered and another time a laundry bucket with almost completely undamaged enamel. What Gesine had been planning to think about on Fischland hardly came into her head even once, she was so busy; she understood the folk wisdom and wanted to tell it to Jakob: her recourse to tangible assets now had a possible goal.

  She had her opinion about the guests, too. They were not often friendly. They were people from the British and Soviet Sectors of Berlin; from Leipzig; from the state capital, Schwerin. One of them called himself a painter, though he hadn’t been seen painting for two weeks. In the old days, something like that would have been reported to the municipal authorities. The others were a doctor and an East Prussian landscape writer who managed various internal affairs of the state of Mecklenburg from Schwerin and didn’t want to say anything more specific about it. They got into lots of arguments and yet stayed together, on the path to the beach, in the water, as though there were something keeping them together above and beyond the room at Ille’s. The artists defended themselves against something they called Production. That’s what functionaries demanded of them. – Just let us process all this sorrow already! the painter groaned. – You’ll see: his colleague in the realm of the Muses proclaimed, vaguely gloomy but trying hard to keep an honest countenance. Gesine saw the gentlemen one more time after that. It’s true their bodies weren’t exactly plump but their suits, hanging loosely around smaller masses as they might be, were made of enviable, well-looked-after fabric. Their faces were smooth, alert, lively. They didn’t look careworn to her. She noticed how intently they dug into Ille’s smoked roasts, how wastefully they tackled a chicken thigh with a single, encompassing bite. In her experience, people in mourning had a different way of eating. If the men were trying to process something here in the fresh air and sun and silence, why did they bring their wives along to fight with, why did they spend every evening in their cramped rooms where there was so little space between the beds? (Gesine didn’t begrudge their children the vacation, that’s how grown-up she felt; she was no longer speaking to the children of the Schweriners, ever since they’d tried to hire her to make their beds.) No, she was being unfair here. If the men were trying to attend to some sorrow, it was probably other people’s.