Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Luckily for all of us, she did this outdoors, one evening on the Gneez ice rink. So Lockenvitz could do a few figure eights alone for a few minutes, then curve back into our circle and show us how he’d now learned to think. The ice was gray in the evening darkness, you had to keep your eyes fixed on the track. Sometimes there was the sound of a blade grating; the night surrounding us and Lockenvitz’s hard, even, almost adult voice kept getting bigger and bigger:

  – It used to be that when the commanding prince fell in open battle, this damaged the troops’ morale. Today it would only lead to needing to close ranks. The result is always uncertain; the successor may be even more aggressive. You have to guess what strategy he has in mind, whereas before, you knew what you were dealing with. Any individual is surely expendable, even if they hold power; unless he has charisma, and the abilities that go with it, which is rarely the case. Not counting our dear friends in Moscow, needless to say. Conclusion: The machine is running and it will keep on running. Second: Even now, war is not a free-for-all with no rules, where every side is allowed to do whatever it can. People in the highest circles invoke such rules or norms precisely because they are occasionally (secretly) broken. One such tacit norm rules out murdering the opposing leader, other than in open battle. If such excellent rules were rashly, consciously violated, then trust in the validity of all the agreements that limit behavior would wither. The consequence might be a counterstrike with nerve gas against the capital of the offending state. Conclusion: Fear of negative effects rebounding on the perpetrator of a major violation of norms. And that’s why everything stays the way it is.

  – Grammarian: he’d said a year earlier when the current 11-A-IIs had been asked to state their choice of profession. – What do you want to be now, Youth Friend Lockenvitz? A historian?

  – A Latin teacher: Lockenvitz said grimly.

  That was the January when, in Western Germany, the Allied High Commission met with the chancellor, his assistant, and two generals at the Hotel Petersberg to discuss whether Germans should once again be rearmed.

  That was the January when the East German Volkspolizei sent recruiters into high schools, wearing blue shirts under their uniform jackets, to talk to the boys of 11-A-II, one Youth Friend to another. They promised training in devices that rolled, swam, and flew. Lockenvitz made an appointment with Dr. Schürenberg, specified to the minute; in the hall of the villa on what they called Quack Lane in Gneez, he performed twelve knee-bends, repeating the exercise in front of the doctor’s desk; he was given a piece of paper certifying “vegetative dystonia.”

  To make the school administration believe it too, he applied for exemption from gym class. From then on he would leave the schoolhouse when the Phys. Ed. beanpole hounded us onto the pommel horse or spun us around the high bar; he’d go for walks by himself. At handball or soccer games he would crouch behind the goal, elbows propped on his knees, chin on his folded hands, watching, coming back down to earth when a girl asked him what the score was.

  At the start of the 1951–52 school year, nominated for a second term as organization secretary, he declined the candidacy, giving as his reason: Academic demands. (Still, there wasn’t that much he had to do: convene us for marches, campaigns against bandit potato-bugs, and assemblies; report once a month to the central council of the FDJ, on preprinted questionnaires, that we had done this or that in the cause of peace, and that so-and-so many members of the school’s chapter had subscribed, for money, to the organization’s newspaper, Young World.) He was a solid A student in Latin, English, German, and Contemporary Studies, with Bs in the other classes, except for a C in chemistry, which really rankled.

  For Christmas of 1951 he found a bag hanging on his mother’s door, filled with pfeffernuesse, walnuts, a pad of ink-proof linen-stock paper, and a pair of knitted gloves not made by a machine. It was a freshly washed gym bag, with a drawstring, the kind girls used. Lockenvitz came to see and thank Gesine Cresspahl.

  She was dissatisfied with herself, for not having had the idea first; she assured him she was innocent.

  (If only you knew that it was from Annette Dühr, 10-A-II. She was so good-looking, so pretty with her hazel eyes, dark-brown braids, a face that invited trust. Later she became a stewardess for the East German Lufthansa; she was allowed to go through training with Pan American, and when she got back her picture was on the cover of Berliner Neuen Illustrierten. She liked you, she wanted you to like her. You could have found her so easily—all you needed to do was walk back and forth across the schoolyard with her gym bag visible in your hand. Annette reached out to you, in secret but still; she had every right to think you were conceited for having other things on your mind besides girls. But it would have been better for you if you’d wanted to find her.)

  Lockenvitz would now come join our work collective at the appointed times and leave as soon as the math or chemistry homework was done. Pius asked me, once and only once, to pose the question of how Lockenvitz imagined these tasks fitting with a woman’s talents; I refused, I was scared of Lockenvitz’s mother and had no desire to hear her say he was in unrequited love with anyone. Lockenvitz probably meant it as an apology for his guarded manner, as a gift, when he brought us a note explaining what was keeping him aloof from us:

  People insert between events and the free apprehension of those events a number of concepts and aims, then demand that what happens conform to them.

  We urged him to fob this off on Selbich as evidence of the nature of the field of contemporary studies under an imperialist regime, especially since she would never in her life figure out who’d written it (G. W. F. Hegel, 1802). He shook the locks from his brow with an exasperated laugh—as though he were done playing games with Bettinikin.

  Pius and I kept our mouths strictly shut when we saw him one November afternoon coming out of the building where Bettina S. had been rewarded for her loyal endurance with an apartment.

  We were mad at Zaychik for half a year. He wanted to start a correspondence with some socialistically inclined English girls, along with a school-mate. Lockenvitz did him the favor, even wrote something to Wolverhampton for the sake of peace and the mail censors. Then he found out that Zaychik had included in the envelope, by way of introduction, a photograph of Pius instead, because he thought Pius was more attractive to a young girl’s eye (in fact the girls of 11-A-II considered Pius merely “striking,” while Lockenvitz was “our handsome young man”). Hopefully it did him some good to hear that we took his side in such a momentous thing.

  Lockenvitz was the first person in our school to wear plastic-framed glasses, which he could prove he had bought on Stalin Street. (Opticians were a protected species all across Mecklenburg, safe from in-depth tax audits; they allowed themselves practically metropolitan window displays—almost never was an optician brought before the court in Mecklenburg.)

  He owned no Canadian-style jacket.

  During vacations we each went our own fine way—Pius, Cresspahl’s daughter, and Lockenvitz too.

  He had been careless about one factor in his calculations, if indeed they were calculations. Vegetative dystonia doesn’t exactly go with long-distance bicycle riding.

  He rode like a healthy person, twenty-five miles an hour was nothing. He could’ve been in Jerichow in half an hour! But he took his two-wheeled trips in the other direction on weekends. We could only hope that no one would notice.

  Matthew 16:26. Yeah. Shit.

  My dear Marie, this is everything I think I know about Dieter Lockenvitz.

  August 6, 1968 Tuesday

  If we want to get through today in one go, we’ll need numbers.

  I.

  A New Yorker who has their apartment broken into can wait till they’re blue and yellow in the face for the insurance payment to come, but if they’ve paid their premiums into a plan that de Rosny has dreamed up, they can send in a list of missing items on Tuesday, certified by the Twenty-Third Precinct, and get a cashier’s check in the mail precisely one week l
ater—good money, legal tender from Manhattan to Leningrad.

  Just as de Rosny’s bank wants its cut from the insurance underwriters for the people he calls “my colleagues,” so too an in-house travel agency should make its profit from the money that these colleagues can afford to put into vacations. And anyone who enters this room on the eighteenth floor without the financial institution’s five-line symbol above her heart, without a nametag, in a white linen suit like a passerby off the street, will have it pointed out to her that this business is not open to the public.

  – I am aware of that: Mrs. Cresspahl replies, content. Here for once she is not known as “our” German, “our” Dane. The girl behind the counter with a beehive of blond hair keeps her lips tightly pressed; her morning is not going well. We wish we could show her the cartoon from the latest New Yorker that we kept for D. E.’s amusement: Under a sign that says SERVICE WITH A SMILE stands a butcher in an apron, handing a customer the bag with her purchases; he looks a little baffled, questioning, serious. The lady shoots her nose into the air with irritation; her mouth is creased with indignation. The caption below says what she’s asking: Well? (Where’s that smile?)

  Here things go very differently from the usual sales transactions—we’re asked questions, short and snippy: Bank ID? Social security number? Department? Supervisor’s extension?

  Employee vs. Employee. We’re going to whip this girl into shape though. There are mornings when we too find it hard to force that grimace of fake friendliness onto our face, but it’s from the explicit demands of people like her that we learned to. We’ll show her the lay of the land, particularly the path that leads to the telephone of the ostensibly admired Mr. de Rosny, without speaking his name. And here you have it, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, step right up, free of charge: the chance to see an employee’s face ring the changes from shamefaced to scared to meek to submissive, and finally to heartfelt. – I am ever so sorry, ma’am! My apologies—!

  Now we both felt a little ashamed and settled down into a perfectly normal discussion of how you can cancel a reservation for two to Frankfurt/ Main on the evening of August 19, plus a car rental, the convertible in which we’d planned to drive to the border crossing at Waidhaus in the Upper Palatinate Mountains, hello there Czechs and soldiers! The date and time can stay the same but we now want to fly on Scandinavian Airlines, Pan American is fine too if you can arrive in København in the morning. That’s how our friend Anita wants it; you probably don’t know her. There must be a hotel on the beach somewhere near Kastrup Airport, where people can check in early in the morning and stay until, say, early afternoon. To catch up on our sleep, you ask? Yes, that’s just what we were thinking; now we understand each other, don’t we. If the hotel dining room is usually crowded we would also like a reservation for a table for four. Even though we are only two travelers? That’s right, thank you for being so thoughtful. The thing is: we don’t want to share the table. Then a reservation for a flight to Ruzyně at around four p.m. Really, even an American travel agency should know the names of the airports in Communist countries! Ruzyně, in Prague. Prag. Praha. We’d have to stop in Schönefeld, outside of Berlin? Passing through East Berlin doesn’t especially bother us. And now what about that car rental, have we forgotten? The circumstances have changed, we don’t think we’ll be able to manage that. Impossible, but thanks anyway, as the actress said to the bishop. What’s that, you want to send a telegram to a Communist country so that at eight p.m. on the 20th there’ll be a car waiting for us from the people who try harder? The same way you’re trying? You know what, we are going to send you a postcard. Do we have our visa? We do. International driver’s license? Yup. The bill goes to the bank? It does. Linen too hot to wear when it’s 75° out? You’d be amazed how cool it keeps you. Try Bloomingdales. No, thank you!

  II.

  A good hour before the Fifth Avenue department stores are overrun with people on their lunch breaks, Mrs. Cresspahl is to be found as a customer in a luggage department. It was supposed to have been Abercrombie & Fitch but someone from Czechoslovakia shot himself there on Friday the week before last. We would have recognized the door as the elevator went past. About this store, we’d say: It’s maybe 3 percent cheaper here.

  Is it the linen suit, the crocodile leather handbag, the footwear from Switzerland? Can you tell from her hairdo that a Signor Boccaletti has taken this customer into his care? Whatever the reason, the manager approaches to serve this client in person. So much for the commission for the younger salesladies. Good morning, she wishes us; gorgeous weather, she calls the shining dirt outside the windows; what can she do for us, she asks.

  Hello too. We’d like two large suitcases, here’s the size. They should look as shabby as possible, please.

  What? You want low-quality merchandise in a store like this?

  Like they’re made from a worn-out carpet. But solid, and each with two wraparound straps, and locks that even at first sight can clearly be opened with bare hands.

  I think I’m beginning to see what you mean.

  These might be all right. But only if this distinguished establishment also carries two aluminum shells that can fit perfectly into them.

  I see I see!

  That’s what we want. We’ve seen how a gentleman by the name of Professor Erichson prepares for his travels, and we liked it. We’re adopting this D. E.’s practices, you might say.

  When the customer requests delivery to Riverside Drive, a less respectable address, the full-figured woman betrays a certain hesitation at the sight of the checkbook we’ve opened. Decision time, my good woman. We look her right in the eye; she’s facing the choice between more than two hundred dollars in revenue and not trusting us. The bank that the check is drawn on is two blocks away. If the lady decides she wants to call that bank, we’ll have to allow it. She has the right to request our employer’s address; the right to ask Mrs. Lazar if we’re creditworthy; we could be mired knee-deep in suspicion of fraud. At this precise moment in our negotiations, she decides to smile. Is it dramaturgically justified? It clearly is, because now she tells us: I can see it in your face, you’d rather break a leg than cheat an old woman! Believe me, I can judge people . . .

  And since it’s true, we would, we give her a good look when she comes marching into the store’s restaurant—every inch the supervisor who can set her own lunch breaks, but then turning into a kind and friendly woman, somewhat harried, telling us about her insomnia, no pills help. Her name is Mrs. Collins, she lives in Astoria, Queens. What a coincidence! There was something else she wanted to say: it was a week ago today that a man came into the store, in one of those South American hats, he bought suitcases like you, Mrs. Cresspahl. You understand, forty years helping people choose suitcases, you wouldn’t believe what . . . I certainly do believe it. Six hundred dollars, paid in cash. And the next day he came back, asked for me especially, said he liked the service he’d been given . . . Not as much as I did, Mrs. Collins! And introduced himself as the impresario of a ballet troupe—such people do exist! Of course they do. He wanted a present for every ballerina, a reward, a bonus, I don’t know; came to $2,000 altogether. That’s a sale you like to make! You’re perfectly happy to accept a credit card! We don’t carry more than three tens around on the streets of New York either, Mrs. Collins. And the next day it bounced. A stolen card. A two-thousand-dollar loss! We don’t like to have to go to the management either. There, you see, Mrs. Cresspahl? I just wanted to tell you that after we gave each other that look before, will you forgive me?

  III.

  The New York Times has taken a look into people’s wallets in New York and northeastern New Jersey. A factory worker in that area, assuming an average hourly wage of $3.02, has to slave away for one hour and forty-four minutes for a rib steak in a restaurant.

  The Bratislava conference has swept into the mists all the daily fare that’s been coming from the Moscow press—the suspected counterrevolution, anti-Communist plots, etc. What does Pravda s
uggest? That none but the imperialist “enemies of Socialism” are to blame for the fact that such a debate has arisen at all.

  At LaGuardia Airport they’ve opened a STOL runway—Short Take-Off and Landing. Want to bet D. E.’s going to take us for a look at the thing next Saturday?

  IV.

  When Mrs. Collins came running back into the restaurant, she had a message. Would we be so kind as to call New York, such-and-such number? Thanks, Mrs. Collins.

  But actually Employee Cresspahl was angry. She hadn’t told anyone at the bank where she was going to buy luggage this Tuesday morning; for a moment she had the intolerable idea that someone was following her. That she might be under surveillance!

  There’s a remedy for that. What are all the things the Czech word hrozný means? Terrible, horrible, frightful, appalling, dreadful, gruesome, harrowing. And what personal name does hrozný remind you of? Hrozná doba, time of terror. Hrozná bída, unspeakable misery. Hrozná zima, terrible cold. Hrozná počasí, frightful weather.