Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  If we take the variety and energy of the relationships between the characters to be the mainspring of the narrative, then what happens if we place Aunt Marguerite at the center?

  As the New School curriculum expected of Mr. Weserich, he paid due attention to the social critical element. Two classes worth of discussion of the concept of honor, the attitude towards it; dishonorable actions. Make sense? A passing ideological government inspector could sit in on our class without anything to worry about, or any need to question us in Weserich’s absence—no harm would come to his career as a result. Fontane had supplied the novella with salt on which the Regiment Gensdarmes organized a summer sleigh ride on Unter den Linden; when asked what the lords intended to do with the soiled but expensive condiment afterwards, the nobility, in full consciousness of their omnipotence, replied: As long as it doesn’t rain. It’ll still be good enough pour les domestiques.

  – Et pour la canaille: someone says; for the people, known as the mob. Weserich impressed upon us that the idea had come from the youngest cornet; we thought we knew everything we needed to know about seventeen-year-olds.

  Time passed. The Israelites went out into the land. Marlene Timm, inevitably nicknamed “Tiny Tim” despite her average height, received official permission to go visit relatives (aunts) in Denmark—this was much marveled at, she was merely a guest among us; Axel Ohr was taken care of, five years’ hard labor; Jakob hadn’t been given the chance to drive more than a couple of engines, it’s true, and was transferred to signal stations between Gneez and Ludwigslust for disciplinary reasons, meanwhile earning credits at the Transportation Technical College in Dresden, which might as well have accepted him as a full-time student; in March, Jakob’s mother was refused permission to travel to West Germany; Heinrich Cresspahl, Brickworks Road, Jerichow, had his pension reduced when he’d faithfully reported his income from repairing chests and sideboards; his daughter actually did go to West Berlin to get him whittling knives, the kind with retractable blades; Oskar Tannebaum sent a “petticoat” from Paddington, which according to Cresspahl was a railroad station in London; in November of 1950, in the city hall of Richmond, Cresspahl’s intended home town, the second version of Picasso’s dove of peace was on view; the Americans got a punch on the nose in Korea; the seasons took their course; and still we were reading Schach. Schach!

  We had discovered that he remained invisible throughout the hundred and thirty pages; intentionally, we were willing to assume for Fontane’s benefit. Almost everyone called him “handsome”; therefore vain: opines Josephine de Carayon. Von Bülow mocks him as His Majesty, Captain von Schach. Victoire sees “something of the solemnity of a church councilman about him.” He is occasionally knowable through his actions: when he poses as the conscience of his regiment and then denies it; when he gives a needlessly nasty report about Victoire at the prince’s; when he cravenly hides from his mamma on the stairs and from his duty in Wuthenow; in short, behaves in such a way that Josephine de Carayon is moved to weigh her own family against his made-up Obotrite nobility. All of us thought his chickening out was obvious and inexplicable; Anita had the last word. She stuttered at first, stumbled over a word; we took it to be nervousness, common enough among seventeen-year-olds. – Getting her pr-pr-pregnant: Anita said: she could accept that. What were we to think it was but an ordinary linguistic mishap? Anita could pursue a train of thought while speaking as resolutely as if she were alone. – But to not even try (and to need to be ordered by his king, and by his queen) to be a good person!

  It had slipped out of her involuntarily, unwillingly; she braced herself for our laughter over this old-fashioned term. We were embarrassed for her; we were proud of her. Who knows, if it had been Eva Matschinsky we might have laughed; because it was Anita we all stared straight ahead, I even saw some nods of agreement; and no one outside of that class ever heard Anita say what her conception of a person’s honor was.

  – The Gensdarmes Regiment was also abolished two years later in the army reforms: Zaychik said, to break the silence. He had learned to eat crow, our Dagobert with his ol’ story.

  A full hour’s deliberation on the beauté du diable, coquette, triviale, celeste, and fifth and finally the beauté, qui inspire seul du vrai sentiment. (The only girl embarrassed by this: Lise.) On who Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was named after, and what a member of the nobility can do with a pock-marked girl once his prince and gracious lord has transfigured her for him so that he can see a beauté du diable in her.

  And does von Bülow’s pronouncement at the end reflect the author’s judgment? He’s just a blockhead. (Would the class please be so kind as to enlighten its teacher about “blockheads”?) Because of his logic-chopping. We’ve had this already: the omniscient narrator. Here it was Lise Wollenberg who found an argument for why we had to consider von Bülow as separate from his creator: because of the finest white clothes, “something at which Bülow in no way excelled.”

  We are nearing the end. We know because Weserich, with a ceremonial air, takes us back to the beginning: the title. We were categorically prohibited from consulting Fontane’s letters (– Declarations of intent say nothing about the work itself); he quoted one to us, the letter from November 5, 1882, which explores various possible titles for the novella: “1806; Outside Jena; Et dissipate sunt; Numbered, Weighed, and Given Away; Before the End (Fall, Downfall).” What could class 11-A-II in April of 1951 adduce to Mr. Weserich as reasons for the final choice of title?

  – Because a person’s name is always the most honest declaration: Lockenvitz (he got that from Th. Mann).

  – Because the others almost all imply a judgment, forestalling the reader’s own. Fontane wants his readers to decide for themselves!: Weserich now taught us, and now we were to start in on the delight and pleasure of reading a novella by Th. Fontane about the year 1806 again, afresh.

  But we ruined it for ourselves. It was Lockenvitz who blew it. We were responsible too. Lockenvitz, now a member of the Pagenkopf/Cresspahl collective, asked us in passing if we thought Mr. Weserich himself would pass a test. It’s true, we gave him permission; we predicted only that this student would complain about Fontane again—the first sentence, for instance, the hiccup that the present participle there could give rise to.

  What Lockenvitz presented, though, right after the Easter lambs, was a journal from the half-capital, in a colorful jacket band—called Form, or maybe Sinn, in any case East German national culture’s emissary to the rest of the world. In it (vol. 2, pp. 44–93), the reigning expert on Socialist literary theory wrote, about Fontane’s Schach von Wuthenow, that the novella was a “lucky accident.” The critique of Prussian culture it contained was “unintentional,” was “unconscious,” Georg Lukács wrote.

  Lockenvitz had requested permission to read this out loud toward the end of class time, to spare Mr. Weserich any possible embarrassment in front of the students. Weserich listened, his mouth forming a rectangle, as though listening to a terrible pain. He thanked his student, asked to borrow the valuable printed journal, and stalked out of the room on his one leg. (Whenever the stump of the other aigrir’ed him he’d always recited the start of the poem about the knee that wanders lonely through the world / It’s just a knee, no more.)

  He was out for a week. Student teachers do sometimes need to travel on professional business, just like other teachers: thought 11-A-II. The one who came back, though, loathed us.

  Schach was canceled. For the rest of May and June he rushed through Fontane’s novel Frau Jenny Treibel; we had two weeks left over at the end of the school year. He still listened to what we said when we interrupted his speaking with our own; he nodded, as if at something he’d expected. He refused to allow any of what he called “jokes.” The stove was out, the egg was broken, the dish was eaten.

  Lockenvitz was ashamed, sheepish, crushed. Whether or not he’d actually hoped for a duel between a high-school class in Mecklenburg and a grand dialectician, it had all gone wrong. He tried, he asked fo
r permission to add something about Count Mirabeau, after whom Victoire de Carayon called herself Mirabelle: evidence had been found after this French revolutionary’s death that payments had been made to him from the French royal exchequer; the removal of the besmirched ashes from the Panthéon surely must have been known in 1806? – Your Herwegh’s like that too: Weserich said drily and dismissively. (Herwegh receives somewhat merciless treatment at Treibel’s hospitable table.) – Acts all grand at the head of the 1849 worker’s rebellion in Baden, but when things went wrong he fled across the French border, disguised as a day laborer!

  The informal pronoun—your Herwegh—didn’t gratify Lockenvitz, it choked him. This child of conflict and dissent, we saw him gulp. He lowered his eyes. He sat down without a word.

  Lockenvitz wrote a twenty-page essay about Schach von Wuthenow, without asking for help and without being asked to write it at all, and mailed it to Weserich the German instructor during the summer; only years later could he again feel proud of having discovered that Fontane never grants Schach a first name—a custom of the nobility, to be sure, but also a comment on the person. Our Weserich resumed his studies at the University of Leipzig; he didn’t have time to correspond with a schoolboy in Mecklenburg. Mathias Weserich’s dissertation on Schach von Wuthenow was printed in Göttingen, across the border.

  We knew he was using us the way a biologist uses guinea pigs, and we weren’t mad. We’d also raced against him swimming, 100 meters, by stopwatch, not cheating him by swimming slower on purpose. It was clear from his shirts that he didn’t have a woman to look after them. And maybe grown-ups were like that: after they’ve been shot in the mouth once, they take steps to avoid a second bullet. He’d owned one single suit (gray summer fabric) that he wore every day with a handkerchief in the breast pocket and a tie—as if he owed us respectable attire. And he had taught us how to read.

  August 3, 1968 Saturday

  The New York Times still has not been able to prove that Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubček had lunch together, but thanks to the time difference across the Atlantic she can at least tell us this much: This morning the two men embraced at the Bratislava train station. The way Auntie hears it, Brezhnev’s feeling friendly, having received written appeals from the leaders of three Communist parties: the Yugoslavian, the Italian, and the French.

  But the way the East German leaders are threatening the Czechs and Slovaks with lip-smacking references to the Soviet Union’s overwhelming military might—we have to look away.

  Helicopters are again allowed to fly to the city’s airports from the tower above Grand Central Station. A Douglas Commercial, type 8 has crashed near Milan—fifteen dead. We’re flying soon too.

  Charlie in his Good Eats Diner, after two hours of frying and cooking, certainly doesn’t look like he’s been playing genteel leisure sports. Would they let you into a club with such messy, unevenly cut blond (yellow) hair? His customers wear their shirts untucked, loud lumberjack plaid, a bit stained too. This morning the men were razzing one another about their golf handicaps, though, and not as a joke.

  This is something about America we’ll miss: Marie ordered a patty on a bun with onion, and what does Charlie shout back toward the hot grill? – Burger takes slice! Do it special for my special lady, now! and Marie looks down, blushing, as she should. And proud, because she belongs.

  A special message in the entrance down into the subway:

  And, as if no one would ever burgle an apartment whose inhabitants were two hours by car out of town, we spent today, from morning to early afternoon, at Jones Beach, thanks to the Blumenroths since this state park is accessible only to people with cars. Mr. Blumenroth, burned red under his thin frizzy hair, may have given the Cresspahl household a new catch-phrase: There’s a reason for everything!

  He expressed this harebrained wisdom after deciding that his supervision of Pamela’s games on and under her inflatable raft was sufficient. After she’d drifted some seventy feet out to sea, Mrs. Cresspahl went with him to the rescue. (Once, in the Baltic, she swam for three hours chasing a ball, out of stubbornness. The ball put wave after wave between itself and her before drifting off toward Denmark.) Pamela took a long time to come to terms with the confiscation of her plaything as a grown-up measure; her father spent a long time looking stupefied with reasonableness, he’d endured such a fright. Only after a while did he start up again with the sidelong glances meant to remind us of our meetings at the Hotel Marseilles bar; Mrs. Blumenroth had her hands full with the job of overlooking her husband’s goings-on. To keep him from saying it, she said it herself: That’s a bust you can be proud of, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – Thanks very much: she replied, in the American way of accepting, not denying, a compliment, which this time she found tiresome for a change.

  What do we know about Mrs. Blumenroth?

  Born in 1929. “I’m from the Carpathians.” Yes, the Germans came and got her. She wasn’t allowed to take anything with her. Except her clothes.

  Arrival in New York: 1947. Marriage: 1948. Fear of having been made infertile. Pamela: 1957.

  A harsh Hungarian accent in her tinny voice. She knows that her voice was softer and gentler as a child, hence her preference for whispering.

  She admits to one flaw: an inability to lie, unless she consciously intends to, which hasn’t yet happened.

  Her black hair is maybe dyed. Cut very short, in heart-shaped curls; one sharp point drapes her brow. A face with few wrinkles, its expression more fearful than approachable. When she wants to laugh, what comes out is invariably: Ha!

  “I’m fussy, nervous.” A younger parent would be more patient with children.

  One time, she almost laughed. Her husband had put together a new bed and now the guest was to test it, sit on it. Mrs. Cresspahl’s verdict: Quality merchandise. Mrs. Blumenroth: Ha! Ha!

  Unusually tidy home. Everything always put away promptly.

  What she found hard to take after the war was how a woman from a good background, with a sense of what’s proper, could slip so easily into a false, uncertain position.

  Stubbornly working hard to keep a well-groomed appearance; always afraid that the roof is going to fall in.

  “At my age, my back can’t help hurting.”

  She would take in a German child as a foster daughter.

  And now Pamela, a possible companion for Marie’s later life.

  She stands with her chest flung out, her head thrown back atop its short neck. Opens her mouth wide—everything is pulled back and down, as if her head had grown straight out of her rib cage. Her whole face laughs. Marie beams when she sees her friend.

  Marie carries out plans, pursues things; gets excited. Pamela behaves like a second child. A “girl” in the European sense.

  She’ll turn into a practical, nice woman. Not especially intelligent, but unshakably proper. We want to see it all. We want to go to Pamela’s wedding.

  On the beach there were a lot of head shapes and physiognomies like those of people in Germany, as one often sees on the streets of New York—doppelgangers, especially of the poet Günter Eich, sit in great number on the benches and at shop counters and bars. You never run across an Ingeborg Bachmann. But there are also people whom you’re glad to find are false alarms—certain stately blonds, for instance. Memory awaits an illuminating flash of similarity with Mathias Weserich, with Wm. Brewster (in his younger years).

  In the afternoon, at the playground in Riverside Park, various members of the public are relaxing; someone who recognizes Mr. Anselm Kristlein there will have been fooled for a while before realizing it’s him. Maybe because she knows he’s in town. In secret, incognito—but if that’s how he wants it, he shouldn’t have called Ginny Carpenter. She called him back that night, at his hotel on Central Park South; Kristlein always avails himself of the most expensive option, since cheap purchases have cost him dearly before. Ginny told the story giggling with delight at his cautious questions over the phone: – Yes . . . ? Always wa
ry over the phone. One knows so many ladies in this city, one might turn around and want something from him. Better not to name any names for the time being. The tête-à-tête, the souper à deux with the wife of reserve officer Carpenter—the usual for Anselm. Ginny’s words. He’s had himself examined at the Mayo Clinic: he says. Golden words. He’s come to New York to collect donations for antiwar events in Europe; this nimble gentleman invites Ginny to come advise him while shopping on Fifth and Madison Avenues. He inquires circuitously, casually into any recent pregnancies that might have emerged in Ginny’s circle; when she tells him one, he flicks the fingers of one hand as if burned. Mrs. Carpenter has promised him a check from her husband’s hand—he doesn’t have an American bank account to deposit it into. What is someone like Anselm Kristlein looking for on Manhattan’s West Side, in this neighborhood whose shabbiness Ginny so complains of? He couldn’t be looking for her?

  Anselm Kristlein in our park was recognizable from the insistent looks he was casting over the top of the real estate section of the London Times at a young woman sitting two benches away and keeping an eye on a three-year-old girl’s path from the sandboxes to the fountains; he could barely tear his gaze away from her bright red blouse of rough material, the reddish hair sitting on her neck, wound up in a knot with apparent casualness and consummate skill, from her dry but unwrinkled brow, lightly freckled, from her lips, from her monstrously blue sunglasses that shielded this face from him. So that’s what he likes? Then he better do something.