by Uwe Johnson
– And that, if you please, was the dividing of East and West Germany, Gesine! Marie says. It’s not that she’s homesick for one Germany. No, in the middle of West End Avenue, outside the entrance to the Mediterranean Swimming Club, what she cared about were the infamous Communists in Germany. – Now you couldn’t get mad at the Soviets anymore! she says.
– It was the Western Allies who started it with currency conversion, you know.
– War was around the corner!
– In early July the Soviet authorities ordered the deployment of German troops under the new name KVP, the Barracked People’s Police.
– Well, you had permission to go to high school.
– War was something I thought I could handle, Marie. I’d already been through one. No one had taken Mecklenburg away from me. I had gotten something else too.
– Did it last, Gesine? Did it last?
– Until September. When I came back from Johnny Schlegel’s wheat.
– You see, Gesine?
– You mean, that it didn’t last?
– Yes. Or are you trying to teach me the lesson that happiness lasts?
July 12, 1968 Friday
Freitag. Friday. Thirty-nine days to go. Not even six weeks.
Read the business section, Gesine! It’s nine oh three—the workday has started. Consider the state of the pound sterling. Daydream about the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, not The New York Times!
There’s statistics too. The annual tally of major crimes has risen hereabouts, and those are only the reported ones. Car thefts are listed as plus 64.3 percent, robberies at plus 59.7 percent, murders were reported 20.3 percent more, rape sagged 6 percent. Yesterday a man in a black hat and dark glasses walked into the Woodbury branch of the Chemical Bank on Jericho Turnpike carrying a small vial of acid. . . .
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union responds yet again, with the voice of its Truth, to the two thousand Czechoslovakian words. As though anyone’d asked them. They claim to have no quarrel with the true objectives of the new crowd in Prague; Novotný may have committed errors and may have shortcomings, but like this, with “subversive activities from right-wing and anti-socialist forces,” it is not pleased. The new crowd are trying, in Pravda’s view, “to blacken” their sister Communist Party “and discredit” it. That’s happened before, too, they say—twelve years ago, in Hungary. Is it not the case that the party has squandered some of its credit? Is it true that the party has kept its hands clean since 1948, innocent and pure as the driven snow for all these years?
Whatever Employee Cresspahl does, August 20 will come. She may go to the Atlantic shore again, open the windows another thirty times, buy Marie her fall and winter things, go to bed with D. E. whenever she feels like it—she will use another two tapes “for when you’re dead,” Marie needs to get her crayfish soup, maybe one more dream will stay with her past the point of waking up; she will be thoroughly and completely caught in the illusion of being alive. The truth is that she’s sliding on the slippery ice of time toward the appointment de Rosny has made for her with Obchodný Banka. If she’s allowed to go by boat she’ll leave New York on August 12, by plane it’ll be August 19. She has to start on Wednesday in Prague. There’ll be someone to meet her at the airport. Pravda mentions Hungary. That sounds like tanks, doesn’t it. What if they go in by air?
It is almost silent in Cresspahl’s office. The telephone has been asleep since work started. The sound of Henri Gelliston’s adding machine occasionally sloshes through the door. From immeasurably far below comes the yowl of a truck, now gossamer-thin. Alarm system damaged. Pedestrians will be approaching the source of the noise with apprehension, leaving it behind with indifference. Up here someone is writing a private letter—and you’re going to regret it.
Dear Professor, it says, I hope you don’t mind my writing to you, a friend gave me your address, and since I don’t trust New York psychoanalysis, because of the proverbial label of headshrinker if nothing else, and since I’m aware that any diagnosis at a distance is necessarily a misdiagnosis, so don’t even bother, she would still really like to know if she should consider herself psychologically disturbed, since she is facing a change in her life circumstances for professional reasons, all-encompassing enough to prompt her to draw up a will and take precautions in case her psychological condition proves dangerous, life story attached, what a lot you’re handing over to someone else!
The handwriting alone. You’re making large unbroken round shapes with long sharp descenders—what someone once called “tulip writing.” If you look closer, you’ll see that the letters may be fluid in their middle sections but the loops often aren’t entirely completed according to specifications: hence, “open.” The upstrokes as well as downstrokes are impoverished (simplified), especially the latter are little more than vertical slashes. Still, if one does think in terms of tulips, these are short ones, standing upright. It’s a pronounced handwriting (not spoken pronunciation of course: distinct, inked, marked). What will someone else see in it, though? And what will he make of the fact that you’re using black ink?
“. . . as for absurd actions in my life I’m only aware of the usual ones, including my reaction to the death of the man who was the father of my daughter. Fundamentally I think of myself as normal. The exception: I hear voices.
. . . don’t know when it started. I assume: in my thirty-second year but I don’t remember a particular reason it would have started. I don’t want to. But it takes me back (sometimes almost completely) into past situations and I talk to the people from back then as I did back then. It takes place in my head without my directing it. Dead people, too, talk to me as if they’re in the present. For instance criticizing me about how I’m raising my daughter (b. 1957). The dead don’t persecute me—we can usually reach some kind of common ground in these imagined conversations. But are they imagined? Are they illusions? I also talk to dead people I know only by sight, who spoke only enough words to the child me when they were alive as were needed to say hello or give me some candy. Now they draw me into situations I wasn’t there for, which I in no way could have grasped with an eight-year-old’s or fourteen-year-old’s mind. In other words, I hear myself speaking not only from the subjectively real (past) position but also from the position of a thirty-five-year-old subject today. Occasionally, when I hear them, my situation from back then as a fourteen-year-old child changes into that of the interlocutor of today, which I could hardly have occupied then. Many of these imaginary conversations (which seem real to me) are generated from insignificant triggers: a tone of voice, a characteristic emphasis, a hoarseness, an English word with the same roots as the Mecklenburg one. These scraps are enough to create the presence in my consciousness of a person from the past, their speech, and thus circumstances from long before I was born, such as March 1920 on my grandfather’s leased estate when my mother was a child. I can hear my mother and the other people in the room not merely as an eavesdropper but with the knowledge that it all was intended for me—everything that, by the end of the imagined (?) scene, proves to have been bequeathed by the people of the past to me, the me of today.
With living people, present or absent, this tendency (?) of my consciousness can also be misused, I mean as a special ability. For example, I can reconstitute my daughter’s thoughts from muscular particulars, even if she’s not saying anything, and then respond to them (in my mind), even during our worst fights, although I have no proof that the ‘transmission’ reaches her. As a result, the child is rarely safe from me—she’s kept under almost total surveillance. My only excuse is that I do this involuntarily.
It’s not only with the child—in everyday conversations, in the office, on the subway, with coworkers or strangers, a second strand runs alongside whatever is actually said, in which the unsaid becomes perceptible, I mean what the other person doesn’t say or just thinks. The volume of this second, imagined strand sometimes pushes to the periphery of my attention what I’m actually hearing in
the moment, but it never totally drowns it out. Again I feel suspicious of this word ‘imagination’ here, because even though I absolutely don’t count on the authenticity of what I hear only in my mind, it does often enough turn out to be correct, to be something I knew. It’s possible that I’m foisting this second acoustic strand onto the person speaking just to give my own opinion an advantage, to corroborate myself—this doesn’t seem likely, since I sometimes ‘hear’ the most horrible things from people whose sympathy I’m always desperate for. I do concede that as a general rule such sympathy may always contain its own negation, but I cannot concretely apply this rule to friends or even acquaintances.
It doesn’t cause problems. The second audio reel doesn’t paralyze the first, especially not when talking to anyone where there might be professional consequences if I opened myself up to criticism. When I try to tell my daughter about her grandfathers in Mecklenburg and Pommern, it sometimes happens that the interruptions of the dead make me pause, but no longer than the triangle a thorn might rip in a dress. (Or else the child, especially considerate for her not-yet-eleven years, conceals her shock and fear at these moments, allowing herself no physical, gestural reaction.) Such automatic interpositions of conversation do bring about a slightly distracted state, but I can get out of that state at will, considerably faster if the child calls me (but not when a car horn honks outside the window or something like that)—but when she does it’s instant, immediate.
Is this a mental illness? Should I adjust my professional obligations accordingly? Does the child need to be protected from me?”
“They talk to me.” You snitched.
You! Wherve you been?
Were you waiting?
Well, you dead are usually . . . .
Pretty chatty?
Usually there.
We’ve been busy.
Tell me.
We have nothing to say.
You never once told me: Here we all are! And now no one even wants to talk to me.
What business of ours is the future?
What. . . . (This isn’t for me, Marie asked it:) What . . . lasts?
We do.
July 13, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
Dear Anita Red Pigtails,
First off, hello. Since you asked, I am writing to you yet again about our dealings with the man we call D. E., who paid you a visit the day before yesterday as Mr. Erichson, fringed asters in hand, just as we’d told him to.
If this is a life together, then it’s one involving a certain distance: he on the flatter land beyond the Hudson, we on Riverside in New York City; a life together at intervals, each visiting the other for a day and a half at a time. Visits make for plenty of goodbyes, though, and entertaining hellos. Still, he’s cautious and avoids springing surprises on us; even after we’ve made plans he’ll call from the airport to check that we still want to see him after ten whole days. We reply that we’re looking forward to it, and to news too. Because when this guy goes on a trip, he comes back having found something.
You’re thinking: presents. Those too; and we’ve liked almost everything D. E.’s brought back from his trips. For Marie there was the ingenious revolving sphere showing the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, the air pressure in millibars and millimeters, and the relative humidity too—she’s been keeping a record of her observations since June and doesn’t need The New York Times for her weather. Only during the first year with him did we suspect him of trying to get into our good graces with filthy lucre; now we have, both of us, come to know and like his overly casual, worried look as he tries to assure himself that he’s thought about us accurately enough during his absence. (Since after all one of us assesses the air in the American manner, the other one stuck in her European habits.) Presents.
We’re more interested in the other things. The moment of pleasure when the car from the air force of this country, dressed in civvies, drops him off outside our short yellow stump of a building exactly when he said it would, within five minutes. (He champions a kind of axiom whereby a person can manufacture punctuality. This doubly amuses us: first, because he manages to do it; second, that we’re allowed to make fun of him for it.) What we’ve been waiting for is the phase right after the hug and the handshake, which I initiate by inviting, practically begging him: Tell us, tell us! And Marie has already clapped her hands and spoken in Mecklenburg Platt and shouted: You tell such good lies!
News. Where he was. What he’s seen, what’s happened to him. For instance, the Irishman in London whom the city government has stuck in the ground, alongside a lever in an elevator in the Underground, singing in his eternal night of a Johnny, I hardly knew ye, too slow but believably mournful, with pauses in which he inserts warnings to his middle-class cargo to please stand clear of the sliding doors. In D. E.’s report he’s right here with us, with his curly mustache and undersized bass voice—we can hear him and want to go see him. Or the furious old hag in Berlin who screeched at him to leave the country for the peaks of the Urals because he was crossing a totally empty street in her country at a red light, the way one does in America, and he did look a little like a student, with his long hair. (Are people really like that in West Berlin, Anita?) We also believe his insatiability for news from us, about school, about the city. Did we put one over on Sister Magdalena with our skills in the imparfait of connaître, so that against her will and nature she had to write in the book the letter that points upward? What’s new with Mrs. Agnolo, what did Eileen O’Brady tell us, has James Shuldiner been hounding us again with his pronouncements on the narrow benches at Gustafsson’s? And then too: the dress you were wearing, the vegetables Anita has growing on her balcony, do you still see us next to the pot in which a certain Anita is boiling up displeasure at American policies in Southeast Asia? From the top, back to front, stem to stern, no ulterior motives. As though each of us, in our various locations, had lived a bit for the other, stored it up, and brought it back, in the interest of reciprocal delight.
You’ll say that that’s how things are only between people who. . . .
Yes. (There’s one exception. We do leave one thing out. Just as I wish he worked for somebody else, he’d be happy to see me not take on an assignment that’s looming before me. [Version for the mail censors.] It’s not much help to know that he’s sworn an oath, or for that matter that my obligation too comes from without, rather than being a project of my own devising the way it’s supposed to work in the fairy tale of an unalienated life. We have to settle this with each other by listening right up to the border where advice would turn into instruction. We manage. Is there any reason for me to say out loud that civilian flights from Europe arrive in the evening, not the morning? He knows that I know. He could recite exactly what I don’t like about these trips and I’d have to agree on the spot and confirm it and sign it too.)
So, I admit to having reservations. But I can’t think of one that makes me unwilling to trust him.
He was in London (aside from the other business) to go to Moorfields Eye Hospital and complain about the fringed veils that, to his eye, street-lights have lately been wearing. At our breakfast table he threw a napkin over his shoulder as a white coat and turned himself into a British specialist and aristocrat, lisping with senile glee and salaried compassion as he tells us: It is to be feared, Mr. Erichson, sir, that this condition is a sign of advancing age. . . .
I can hear you say: If someone goes and admits to a strike against him, a physical ailment no less, instead of sticking to his strong suits. . . .
That’s the way it is, Anita. He’s not afraid to trust us with anything. We all laughed.
Here we have someone who refuses to try to change us. True, he’d be glad to abolish in our case this country’s rule that employees get only two weeks’ vacation in a whole year and not a single day for housekeeping; D. E. would offer me machines that clean the laundry and dry it and put it on the table crisply ironed. But since this household does get by with the communal device in t
he basement of number 243, and moreover wants to see in person the fish and fruit it’s spending its money on, D. E. can have only one of us this Saturday. When the other of us then suggests that he take the measure once more, by ferry, of all the water between the island of Manhattan and that of the Staaten General, she can take his careful nod as deliberate assent, no mere favor.
You see, Anita: I let him have the child. (With one limitation: only once were they allowed to fly on the plane without me—a superstition of mine. Which he respects.) The child goes with him. If Marie is inviting him then maybe she wants a chance to discuss with a man what seems incomprehensible and irrational about her mother; and I don’t mind, I think she should, I’m not afraid. Their latest shared routine is one where the first person says (confident, despondent, pleading): God knows. And the other (gloating, or reassuring, or giving information, or saying “next, please”): But he won’t tell. Optional addendum (portentously): “Will he??”
With him, you’d be playing this game too after a while. (It was Marie who brought this funny business home with her, from her strict religious school.) Here’s what he had to say about you: Yeah, she’s someone I’d go steal a horse with.
Marie has been known to forget the condition that she call home every two hours from wherever she is in the Greater New York area. When she’s with D. E. the ring of the phone comes tinkling in on the dot, cf. axiom above. (Whatever could you be thinking, Anita? That they don’t have pay phones on the harbor ferries?)
In the basement Mr. Shaks (many thanks for your postage stamps!) insisted on helping with the old-fashioned washing machine, and on a conversation. We were well equipped for one of those, between the terrible humidity in the air and, especially, Mrs. Bouton. What, you’ve never heard of Thelma Bouton? Works at a jewelry store on Forty-Second Street, corner of Fifth Avenue. Man comes in yesterday morning with a shoe box, locks the door behind him. She asks what he wants. He shows her his bread knife. Armed beggary. She whacks him over the head with her broom. Man, did the guy beat it! The whole time I was nervous, fidgety. When I got back to the apartment I knew why. It’s no weather to be wearing jackets with pockets, D. E. left the house in a shirt and pants, and there, abandoned on the table, were two pipes, a tobacco pouch, and the poking implement. I truly felt sorry for him.