by Uwe Johnson
Now, Anita, you’re thinking: That’s the way a person feels only about someone they. . . .
Yes. And when I crossed Broadway with my shopping cart (a “granny cart” they call it here), I missed him. For at the end of my rounds I stopped by Charlie’s Good Eats to reward myself with an iced tea, and there I read what The New York Times had to say today about the difference between kosher caviar (from fish with scales) and caviar from lumpfish (merely spiny skin, not allowed). Third book of Moses, 11:9 and 10. Just to make sure I never forget what kind of city this is that we’re trying to make our way in. As a further reminder, my gaze slips from the edge of the paper to the man sitting next to me, someone I know by sight. An old man, a looker-away-er, a stepper-aside-er, always holding his neck as if it’s just been hit. One of the people they. . . . I thought: A victim. Unfortunately there is also the term: to victimize. His stare from the corner practically sliced off a piece of me, his attention drawn to my hand, to the Times, to my nose, what do I know; I promptly stood up from the stool and put on a show of suddenly not feeling well, for Charlie’s hospitality’s benefit. That was how things were, how desperately I wished I had someone with me walking down the steep street. Ninety-Sixth near us, you know, can look deserted on a hot early afternoon, with the only living thing left the TV set broadcasting the movements of tennis players from some basement.
At home I caught the first phone call. Marie had a win on points to report. The South Ferry, heading south, has Governors Island to port, and Marie was informing D. E. about the dirty rotten US Navy there.
ERICHSON (baffled): I thought it was just the Coast Guard stationed there.
CRESSPAHL (Socratically): And who does that gang report to?
ERICHSON (confident): The navy, and the president. But only in wartime.
CRESSPAHL (gently, not rubbing it in): Think about it. Vietnam. US Navy. Ships. Ship guns.
ERICHSON (embarrassed): This round goes to you, madam.
Second phone call: Marie has taken this gentleman—quite elderly, after all, almost forty; secretly afflicted with the time difference between Berlin and this Eastern Seaboard—she’s taken this exhausted man along a pedestrian path away from the ferry terminal down Bay Street. Riverside Drive in the shade is 75 degrees Fahrenheit; there it must be almost ninety. The proposition is an honor, Marie rarely suggests it to me; will he know to appreciate it? Bay Street is a three-hour-long strip of dust with the brackish smell of the water between the piers and the warehouses wafting over it, lined with weather-beaten wooden structures—sheds, gas stations, decaying industry, and the little shacks promising beer in snaky blue or red neon. If you ask me, she’s looking for an America that existed when my father was young. But it’s true, when there’s a wind there it comes in strong after a long sweep across the bay, and in the hazy distance there’s a hint of the towers of the bridge over the Verrazano Narrows, a span of almost 4,300 feet, growing larger as you look.
Sir Doctor, in a walk with you / There’s honor and instruction too: Marie sounds almost giddy in her latest location report. What happened was that D. E., near Stapleton, requested his companion make a short detour, just up Chestnut, and she granted him that privilege, since he’d invented some professional reasons for it. What they found there, though, on the corner of Tompkins Avenue, was the house in which Giuseppe Garibaldi waited from 1851 to 1853 for the chance to return to the Italian revolution, working for the time being as a candlemaker and famous only because of his housemate Antonio Meucci, who claimed to have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell, a device like the one by means of which Marie casts a line of words across to the island of Manhattan. The only Garibaldi she’d known until then was the one poised in Washington Square in his verdigris . . .what’s that in German? his green patina, with his saber firmly sheathed in its scabbard; Marie hasn’t even been told that he draws and raises it every time a virgin walks past his feet; now you figure out how many times a day that’d be, Anita.
(In a city like this one, Anita, I’ve had to tell the ten-year-old child what else men want from women, as a precaution against one of them trying to force Marie to. She looked at me, glowering, disbelieving; held off asking questions until I was done, and then, with a kind of outrage, wanted me to confirm: You and D. E., you guys . . .you guys too? She didn’t have the word for the deed; I’m planning to keep it from her for eight more years. Now how am I going to do that in New York City.) I got this far in my letter and
The earth had turned enough toward the sun that it received the false stains and colors and veils, beaming with poison, that show us each day the planet’s end; at six thirty I received a dinner invitation. Can you guess what I asked in return when I accepted? That’s right. What dress I should wear.
Now, Anita, you’ll say: That’s what you do for someone you want to. . . .
You got it. I was to wear the “yellow-and-blue raw silk” one, and I was to go find them so deep in old Brooklyn that I needed to search the city map and the subway map too. Way down in the BMT zone, let me tell you. There I found the two of them with Chinese people, in what was more like a private lounge than a restaurant, and D. E. seemed to have known them quite a bit longer than a day or two. (Since I keep various secrets to myself, how can I deny him his?) And as always happens when he’s the host, the proprietors fuss around with “che bella signorina,” “carina,” all with exclamation marks, this time in Chinese of course, if you’d care to translate it for yourself. And I received a hand on my hand, and a hand on my cheek, because what was I wearing over my “yellow-and-blue raw silk” dress? A men’s jacket from Dublin with a tie folded in the breast pocket. And what lost items did I have with me in my briefcase? I’m sure you’ve already guessed, my sympathetic friend of the house.
You’re saying: When a man, I mean, if he sees that kind of thing. . . .
And hears, Anita. Here’s how it went:
– We chickened out. We took the bus from South Beach to Bay Ridge.
– Great weather for ironing.
– You’d rather be roaming around the desolate wasteland of Staten Island.
– Do you know what a fig tree on Staten Island shows? You’re probably thinking: the time of year.
– On Ninety-Sixth and Broadway? At Charlie’s? But he lives up in the Hundreds.
– Chopsticks for me. Are you gonna try to use chopsticks?
– Did the Germans . . . take care of him?
– It was a German woman.
– People live there who remember Italian grandparents!
– He’s just hanging on more than living. Used to be German.
– God knows why.
– But he won’t tell, will he?
– His name’s de Catt.
– Tell us, tell us!
– You tell such good lies.
All the while the proprietors were sitting at the next table doing the same as we were. Passing a bowl or a spoon to someone—they or we, it made no difference. We felt at home there. A ten-year-old boy was standing watch over us through the crack of the kitchen door, with military severity, making sure that we treated his parents with the proper respect. Marie wanted to talk to him, but alas he let his dignity keep him from noticing her existence. D. E. would’ve loved to stay with the Chinese late into the night (if only to get the boy to join us at the table), but we invoked Mrs. Erichson so that he’d recall, along with his filial obligations, the mail sitting in New Jersey waiting to eat up his time. We did it out of concern for him. And when we said goodbye, outside the three garages under our building on Riverside Drive, one of the mechanics, the middle one, Ron the blabbermouth, let slip to D. E. that he could drive his car anywhere now, not to worry, it’d make it to San Francisco and, hell, kill two birds with one stone, Tokyo—for it seems that a lady came by the garage that afternoon and reminded them specially of the needed servicing and checkup. That’s right. This very lady right here with the gentleman, if he wasn’t mistaken, yes that seemed to be the one.
/> But the one who laughed last was D. E., heading west in his swanky Bentley. A silent laugh alone in the night. Because he knows what time I get into bed and what’s waiting for me under the sheets. It is Král’s Guidebook Through the Čechoslovak Republic, 1928. So that I can find my around there now, if the mood ever strikes me, duly noted, Anita. I’d get by with the help of J. Král, associate professor of geography at Charles University, Prague, because D. E. arranged it for me.
Dear Anita. That’s how things are with us. Less than more than different between what I wanted at fifteen before I knew better. I’m thirty-five though.
July 14, 1968 Sunday
Auntie Times provides an editorial for anyone who can’t avoid taking a trip abroad. Remember the neediest!
“Flowery July.
May is violets and June is roses, but offhand we don’t think of July as a floral month at all. But it is, and perhaps we tend to forget because there are so many roadside blossoms.
The mints come to blossom now, from inconspicuous bugle-weed to royal bee balm that is such a lure for hummingbirds and bumblebees. Jewel-weed opens its pouchy yellow flowers and the spotted species is a favorite nectary for hummingbirds momentarily sated with bergamot. Hawkweed flourishes in unkempt pastures, deep orange and pale yellow, and black-eyed Susans add vivid accents to every patch of daisies.
Tall spires of great mullein open little yellow blossoms a few at a time, deliberate in bloom as they are in growth. Butter-and-eggs, the little wild snapdragons, are deep orange and clear yellow, and their big cousins, the turtle-heads, open grotesque mouths, white and pink and cream-pale yellow. The deep blue of harebells and great lobelia fade to lavender in tiny spiked lobelia and Indian tobacco.
July is so full of blossoms that the days can’t hold them all. Evening primroses have to wait for late afternoon to open their brilliant yellow flowers.”
© The New York Times
In memory, July of 1948, that summer, is Schoolgirl Cresspahl’s last vacation, even though she did go to work in Johnny Schlegel’s fields, which were parceled into giant rooms by hedges of hazel and hornbeam, blackthorn and hawthorn, dog rose, elder, and brambleberry. As we plowed at 250 feet above sea level, the rows of thorn blossoms tumbled down to the Baltic like waterfalls, later joined by the unambiguous black of the elderberries, the red of the rosehips, the blue-black of blackthorn and brambleberry. It was a joyless vacation, for she was supposed to leave—leave Cresspahl and Jakob and Jerichow and Mecklenburg—but was supposed to like it. Could she live alone: that was what she was brooding on as she lay atop a cartload and looked down at the shining Lübeck Bay, over the hedgerows at the spires and chimneys of the city behind the haze of exhaust from Schlutup furnace works, at the boxy white dice-like buildings of Travemünde, at the contours of the Holstein coast to the north, the barber-poled lighthouse on the corner of Dahmeshöved, at the British zone, the West, the other side. She was anxious and happy to let Johnny distract her with his lecturing voice rising up from the depths—the Lobelia inflata in the pond in the yard also thrived on the Mississippi, was officinal, and its real name was Indian tobacco. He was trying to whet my appetite so that I’d say: Yes, send me away from you all.
Johnny was embarrassed around me too, as were almost all the adults on the farm. His cooperative now had a stud stallion and in late July a mare had been brought for mating, and Cresspahl’s daughter had watched, unnoticed by Johnny, who would surely have diverted her attention away from the proceedings. That night, when he thought I was off at the children’s home, I heard him raging like he wanted to rip the nose off Axel Ohr’s face; but Axel had an alibi, at the children’s home. “The child! How could you let the child!” But it didn’t do me any harm at all. I did think it was too bad that people treated the two horses like such animals. Before the mare’s hind legs staggered under the stallion’s leap she turned her head to us for a moment, as if asking us if she could leave. And I’d have wanted to leave the two animals with each other, instead of immediately leading the distraught timid mare away. Now I was supposed to be forbidden to look. Even a year ago no one had cared when I reported that one of the black pied cattle was in heat. Now I was a child. But supposed to make a decision like an adult.
– But you’re a big girl now: they said encouragingly. And I was! And I only laughed at Hanna’s package from Neustadt, which included along with the tea and tobacco not a single piece of girl’s clothing, though it did have a shirt that fit Jakob like it was tailored. Because I thought I knew how love worked better than her now, ever since I’d seen the engagement notice from Anne-Dörte in Holstein standing on the radio, done in style, on card stock, with a count’s crown. My heart was pounding in my throat as I asked Inge Schlegel why the card hadn’t been forwarded to Jakob. – She’s gonna have to write to him by hand: she said, turning away, and that was good, because blood had surged into my face. So that was why Jakob didn’t come even once that summer to the farm where Anne-Dörte had been. Thus love was a misfortune. The one you want isn’t enough for you, the one who should come prefers to stay away, and anyone who’s seen the course of it calls it cause for mourning. As for me, I was supposed to do without Jakob completely. And on top of that, I was prevented from telling anyone my secret.
It was because of the threat of war. Here too I wasn’t a child, when they came to me with talk of the Soviet blockade against the Western Berlin sectors and the assurance that the divided Allies were in conflict elsewhere too about the final distribution of their war booty, just look at the Greek civil war, Gesine! There’s the Bulgarian and Albanian attacks, the Truman Doctrine, containment—it’s you who need to splain that to us, Gesine. And the Soviet Union doesn’t have any atom bombs, get that through your head, Gesine. But she refused to see why she in particular should be taken out of it just because she could be. And there were so many times that she heard, in a grown-up tone of voice, unspoken: A child can hardly be expected to understand that; then she balked.
There were moments when I was convinced. One July morning we were standing on a hill behind the Countess Woods, Johnny with a watch in his hand, because it was going to happen at six o’clock sharp. The Red Army had posted notices asking the Jerichowers to open all their windows, including the ones facing south, and that applied to Rande too; Johnny’s farm was behind a high furrow in the land, protected from the shock wave. We were about 250 feet above sea level and we could see Wohlenberg Cove, behind which the St. Mary’s Church spire hinted how deeply Wismar Bay penetrated into the mainland; the spire at the end of Kirchsee on Poel Island was clearly visible; behind it the land rose up in arches of forested domes and hills into the pure brisk sunlight. All this I was supposed to give up. Since we’d lost sight of Jerichow, I thought, at a heartbeat after six, that it wasn’t going to happen, then the first blast went off. The force of the succeeding explosions may have fooled me but I was sure that the earth had shaken and would knock us off our feet at the next blast. But everyone thought they’d felt the tremors. The first cloud of smoke appeared in the long silence—a cauliflower trailing a stem as it rose into the sky. As the whitish mushroom started upending its edges, the next one rose alongside it, and by the time the first had been gouged by the sea wind, there were four. It was in the middle of the harvest but that afternoon Johnny took me with him to what had once been Mariengabe Airfield. It was fenced off with a hundred-meter buffer, but even from a distance we could tell that the whole facility was gone, the buildings flattened, the runways chains of holes. It wouldn’t be easy to rebuild that.
And it wasn’t rebuilt—German forced laborers chopped it up by hand, the pieces were picked up and driven off, and Johnny showed me: the airfield had been located too close to the “future front line,” the border between the Soviet and Western zones; it would have been in artillery range. And now that the British were starting to supply West Berlin by air, why would the Soviets leave them such a superb emergency landing place? Then it was me who was clever, and I countered with how p
opular the Soviets could have made themselves among the refugees if they’d given them the barracks as living space. He had an easy time disposing of that one: if they’d risked angering the Germans over it, just think how compelling their military reasons must have been! No, seriously, the Russian is seriously underestimated when it comes to tactics, even more so about strategy. I tried one more time with the Border Police Department that the Soviets had set up in June. For Johnny that was one more piece of evidence in his favor. “The Russian” was preparing for a war: he was arming his German allies. I should get out of here.
And things would be different than they were in “the villa.” This was the vacation home that back in the Kaiser’s time a Hamburg real-estate agent had had built on the cliff behind Schlegel’s copse of trees—a shrunken miniature castle with too many windows and an actual tower. It had been allocated to the Protestant Homeland Mission as a children’s home, which Cresspahl’s daughter used to visit, for Axel Ohr’s sake, so he could come too without it looking like he was in love with a certain Elisabeth from Güstrow, he, Axel Ohr! The children had a strict time of it there. What the churchly caregiver ladies demanded in terms of proper behavior at the table and at recess was enough to totally spoil anyone’s appetite and the fun. Though anyone sick was treated with a certain tenderness. Almost every day these children ate soup made from pigweed, with noodles added, but it agreed with them, and by the end of those four weeks almost all had gained weight. Earlier Johnny had augmented their fare with groats and meat, as his business dealings and delivery targets allowed; the new lady in charge of the home had taken offense at a “blasphemous” remark of Johnny’s, and Johnny had taken offense at that in turn. That’s how Johnny was—if someone talked nonsense at him they were dead to him, whether or not children got hurt in the process. (Anyway, they’d be getting CARE packages, his conscience was clear.) Many of these children hadn’t ever been to look at the sea, and on the last day of their stay they collected beach sand for the mothers who wanted to be able to scour again. And all this constant praying and the devotional hours! Johnny admitted it: There would probably be religion and religious practices to spare in England. But if I clenched my teeth, pulled myself together, was a big girl. . . .