by Uwe Johnson
Mrs. Cresspahl goes for a walk, all the way to the Upper West Side. On Forty-Second Street she passes a shop selling Der Spiegel, but she’d rather stay true to the old man on Ninety-Sixth Street. – I’ve kept it aside for you for a long time, sister!: he says. “That just as when you were alive / the clocks still run, the bells still ring . . .”
Waiting at Riverside Drive is de Rosny’s telegram, signed by Kennicott II; starting at seven o’clock, Radio WKCR will be bringing us “Jazz and the Avant-Garde,” with pieces by Eaton, Monk, Tristano, and Taylor, we’ll tape them for D. E. There are some illnesses where music is life-threatening.
– Mrs. Cresspahl, Berlin is on the line.
– Gesine! Say something! Let me hear your voice!
– Your school friend Cresspahl speaking.
– Say the date, the day of the week!
– Anita, why are you crying.
– Say something!
– Wednesday. August 7th.
– It’s really you.
– Unfortunately.
– I’ve been calling all day, every hour, and the exchange keeps saying: This line has been disconnected.
– Construction in the bank.
– I was shaking in my shoes!
– I’m not like my mother, Anita. As long as I have a child I need to take care of, I’ll try to live. I don’t have a husband I can leave the child to either.
– Promise.
– Yes. I promise. Now your advice please.
– Are you still going to Prague, with Marie?
– If it’s up to me.
– It’ll destroy her, like you said. At first I was in favor. But there’s no coffin for her to look at.
– And she’ll hold it against me for ten years that I waited a single day to tell her.
– Try. In Prague, after the 20th, I’ll help you. Do you give me permission to go to Helsinki?
– If I knew why. Nothing’s there.
– That’s what I want to see for myself.
– But only tell me about it when I ask you. Not until Prague.
– Ty znayesh', Gesine. What else are you doing today?
– What’s a double widow who couldn’t go to either funeral supposed to do? I’m listening to music.
– That’s poison, Gesine!
The person scratching at the door is our Eagle-Eye Robinson, with two large, expensively wrapped packages and the business card, the warm greetings, the home address of Mrs. Collins, Astoria, Queens. Yesterday morning I was still alive. And there’s Marie behind Mr. Robinson—enthusiastically looking forward to unwrapping the suitcases. Now the lying starts.
– Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors, Gesine? “Indoors”. . .
– “Im Hause.” There’re workmen in the bank. I banged my eye.
– Did you go to Dr. Rydz?
– No, another doctor. I’m supposed to rest my eyes like this for three days.
– Does it hurt?
– Yes. He gave me pills too.
– I was wondering . . . But are you tired?
– Go ahead and ask. I’m just slow.
– Is today going to be a normal evening?
– Should we do something different?
– I’ll cook, even though it’s your turn. It just dawned on me that something else must have been going on during that August of 1951 when Cresspahl wanted you out of the way in Wendisch Burg.
– In July the Stasi searched Cresspahl’s house. The pretext was that he’d started making a lot of money from his work, more than his pension. The truth was that this state couldn’t get it into its head that it could wrong a person a second time, and a third time, and this Cresspahl would still try to follow the law. But your something else had started earlier.
– Is it anything to do with Jakob?
– With Jakob too. Because it’s reciprocal: the same way I’ve liked a lot of people, one or two have liked me.
– I know one person, who’s flying on Scandinavian—
– On Finnair.
– and looking forward to seeing you.
– And to seeing you. You’re even prettier than I am.
– Gesine! The Papenbrock hair!
– Widow Papenbrock was feeling crabby about the Cresspahls. When the state power, after Albert’s death, confiscated the mansion in town, the warehouse too, the ol lady waited for us to invite her to move in. Cresspahl wouldn’t risk his little finger for that. And it would have meant the Church taking over the house. She left for Lüneberg, where there was still some of Albert’s real estate. We took her to the Hamburg line since we were hoping this would be our last goodbye. She didn’t wish me especially well, but she still said, despite herself: At least you got our hair.
– And your lovely breasts, nice and high.
– Marie! What a thing to notice! Anyway, my breasts were just hypothetical among the young men of 1950. None had seen them bare.
– They wanted to.
– About that I was unaccommodating. Which damaged my reputation, because whenever someone dreamed up an affair with me and it didn’t happen, he just made one up and spread the story around anyway.
– It’s like weeds.
– They never stop growing. One of these boys was a literary type; he slipped a piece of paper with a quote on it into my bag, something like: “Not that Gesine had turned into a highly sensitive woman of delicate feeling all at once. She remained the way she was. Self-confident and timid, voracious and cowardly, longing for all ‘the higher and finer things in life’ that were starting to be shown in the cinematograph theaters.” It took me forever to figure that one out! It was a Gesine in a novel.
– I’m sorry to hear that.
– Go look at our cookbooks—there’s one from 1901, published by Appleton and Company in New York, European and American Cuisine, and written by the proprietress and president of Brooklyn Cooking College, now what was her name?
– Gesine Lemcke. I don’t like that.
– You have the same name as other children too.
– I wish no one but you had your name.
– The reason I was given it was that once upon a time Cresspahl wanted to run away, across land and sea, with Gesine Redebrecht from Malchow. You got yours from Jakob’s mother.
– One part of it’s true. You were self-confident. Are.
– That’s easy when Jakob’s watching over you like a little sister.
– No kisses after dance class?
– I was waiting when it came to that too.
– Are you trying to teach me some kind of lesson here?
– You want me to tell you stories. I also had admirers who were satisfied when I vaguely knew they existed. One was my classmate for almost four years. In 1951 he wrote on the blackboard: “ ‘Effi Briest,’ a very pretty name I feel because it has so many ‘e’s and ‘i’s—those are the two fine, delicate vowels.” Theodor Fontane.
– You knew who that was.
– And since I withheld what he wanted from him too, I think I’ll at least not tell you his name. Actually I should start being vague with names in general from now on. When Cresspahl hustl—arranged some Danish business for Knoop, Gesine was invited aboard a boat, a yacht in Wismar harbor, for the toast. We don’t want to cause trouble for the guy over his unpatriotic dealings with Communist Germany; but I’m grateful to him for a cruise to Denmark.
– Past the East German coast guard.
– They didn’t have a wall floating in the water yet, in 1950. A Danish sailor can do anything, and will even smuggle a girl on board. As long as Cresspahl knew about it, and as long as everything stayed proper between the young lady and the older gentleman (around thirty), no kisses on the cheek, I was happy to learn navigation.
– Gesine, you were on vacation in Denmark when you were seventeen! That’s why you showed me Bornholm!
– It wasn’t a good idea to talk about it, though. What a Mecklenburg sailor can do, and does, is talk in his cups—the devil take
him. So here was another story involving me, it was pure dumb luck that the police didn’t get wind of it.
– There was the boy who lived upstairs from the Jerichow pharmacy.
– No name for him either. But I had a hard time getting him to realize that if he has a crush on someone who sees herself as long since taken, that’s his business. They sometimes act like they have a right to you, boys do.
– Self-confident.
– Sometimes a bit too much. I liked to go dancing, because it meant I got to move—
– And because people like to do what they’re good at.
– not because of the hands on my back. When two boys locked horns over me, I let them settle it between themselves—pretended not to notice. I wasn’t anyone’s property! But now here’s another story about Cresspahl’s daughter. Sometimes people mix up their own desires with other people’s, you know. The truth is: I never led anyone on. I could never stand those anguished looks.
– There were the overnight stays at the Pagenkopfs’.
– And Lockenvitz sometimes came to Jerichow, when he could still show friendship, and stayed until morning. There were nights I was under the same roof as three men.
– Pagenkopf, Lockenvitz, Cresspahl . . .
– And Jakob. You’re right, he’s in a different category. But it was Jakob who tried to defend my good name in Jerichow on Town—on Stalin Street. All I know is that he came home bloodied; the next morning I was put on a train to far-off southeast Mecklenburg, to visit the Niebuhrs. How shocked Klaus was to see me handle the H-Jolle dinghy like a man! Luckily for me, he’d already gotten together with the girl from the teacher-Babendererdes, Ingrid. The other Ingrid, you’re thinking of Ingrid Bøtersen. Four weeks with them on Wendisch Burg’s Upper Lake and Town Lake before Cresspahl sent word. I found out right away what everyone in Cresspahl’s house was trying to keep from me: Jakob had spent eighteen days in the basement under the Gneez district court for assault and battery.
– I had a boy who got into fights for me too once.
– Do you like how it feels?
– When someone insults me I’d rather take care of it myself.
– See? And now Jakob had something that would stay on his criminal record for several years.
– Did he do that a lot, get into fights?
– Don’t worry, Marie. We both learned our lesson that time. I stopped going dancing except at school events. I would have to say that my conduct with men, since 1951, has been practically unimpeachable.
– Is that “pruning,” what you’re doing now?
– That is pruning. Someone once offered me a private lounge car! A West German Railways one!
– What, like Hitler had? You’re lying, Gesine!
– Hitler didn’t come from money. He just stole from the state. No, believe it: a real live millionaire brought me up to the mountaintop, showed me the treasures of the world, and said: All this is yours. The mountain was Platform Three at the Düsseldorf train station and the AllThisIsYours was a thing in which Hitler might have taken his fits for a spin. A kind of converted sleeping car.
– You and a millionaire!
– If you’re a prosperous citizen of the USA on good terms with your government, there’s nothing to keep you from stopping by the woods around Mönchengladbach and checking out how your army is working to defend Western Europe.
– And instead your eye is caught by a secretary with the Papenbrock hair, sitting prim and proper at her desk, knows her way around a typewriter too, has a gellegant Jersey wool sweater on, so you offer her—with her superiors’ permission, of course—a modest railcar that you’re forced to ride through West Germany since the rails are in such bad shape in the US.
– Envy is an unbecoming quality in a bank, Marie. That’s a message from de Rosny himself.
– I’d’ve liked to see it.
– What’s to see? A cramped four-room apartment, cabinets like on a sailboat, train phone, telex.
– Paintings on the wall. Framed. And seven guest rooms.
– One guest room—mostly occupied by the valet, who also does the cooking when the boss hosts a dinner. Other than that: a double bed. After six months gallivanting around that would’ve been the price.
– Would he have married you?
– I could’ve counted on a severance package after two years. He’s still riding the rails from Munich to Hamburg every day, or maybe Hamburg to Munich. On special occasions they’ll pull him through the Ruhr instead of the usual into Frankfurt and back out of Frankfurt. From Wunstorf they can couple him to the express to Regensburg. He forgave me, by the way.
– Can I ask about Taormina?
– I liked traveling with him; you could really talk to him at the table. He also seemed to grasp that I do what I decide to do, not what my hormones or glands tell me to. He made way too much of an overnight trip to Taormina, in separate rooms.
– And then came the man you’d been waiting for the whole time.
– Then came Jakob.
– You were . . . twenty-three.
– And a half. Now since you’re talking about handsomely placed breasts, I should probably warn you that it’s considered a bit ridiculous nowadays for a woman to wait so long. I’m sure you don’t want people laughing at your mother.
– Please, dear lady, I ask you. Everything we tell each other is in strictest confidence! And would you be so kind as to make yourself at home, though I am retiring to bed. You can play the variations for Goldberg as late as you want, and the quodlibet twice.
I’ve never read a newspaper at midnight before. In East Germany, the press and the TV have suddenly stopped hurling their trash at the Czechoslovakians. They do suppress that the custodian was booed in Bratislava, even told Damoi! go home! The official report is: “Passers-by waved and called out friendly greetings again and again.”
Last night a radar system for the flight paths around New York failed. Planes circled in the air above JFK for more than a hundred minutes, unable to land.
We’re flying soon too. And actually we’ve read the paper after midnight plenty of times! On Eastern European time. After we’ve come home.
– What kind of a caller are you? Can’t you dial the number for the time first?
– Sorry, Gesine. It’s just me. Anita.
– Okay.
– I was off by an hour with the time difference. Are you—
– I’m okay, as they say here; in German it’d be different. At the moment, the worst thing is that D. E. knew about Jakob. Knew that Jakob was the only man I wanted to live with, to have near me. Men do like to be the one and only, and if possible the first.
– Maybe he wasn’t stupid. Maybe he was what your friend Anita calls a good person.
– He was. But that he knew—
– He was very happy he got to spend six years with you. Put that on the balance sheet too.
– Anita, I need you to keep telling me things like that. For a while yet.
– Ty znayesh'.
August 8, 1968 Thursday
Delivering a death announcement.
The buses threatened on D. E.’s stretch of road to New Jersey are now running: the whole lower deck is higher than the driver’s seat; no smoking. The windows are tinted so dark blue that the landscape is barely visible. And so, memories. – Oh, you can’t buy memories!: Esther once said. And you can’t get rid of them either.
The bus comes out of the tunnel south of Hoboken. That’s where, years ago, D. E. took the child and me to an apple-juice shop at the marina where the men were eating mussels from stoneware bowls and tossing the shells into the sawdust on the floor. Marie was studying him seriously, her friend and host. Back then she was still a child who might take a candy from a lady stranger on a bus but would then, after she ate it, hand back the wrapper—to keep our city clean. She was so delighted when he demonstrated the flick of the wrist she could use to send her shells whacking into the wood paneling. – Chock!: D. E. said. I g
uess he did have fun with us.
South Newark. He invited us to Newark with a topography: On Sunday mornings Newark consists of a church respectable citizens emerge from with calm expressions on their faces. Also worth mentioning is a statue behind the station, immortalizing in white and treacly fashion the first and to date only American citizen to have been sainted: Frances Xavier Cabrini. The main street is called Broad Street, located four hundred steps away, comporting itself like the local idea of downtown! (sing that word)—the setting for a parade caricaturing Polish peasant costumes. It’s called the PATH, as you probably know. Van Cortlandt Straat, then left. Yours, truly, D. E.
We went there to meet D. E. in rattling icy weather, under the Hudson, to a scabby landscape piled high with never-decomposing garbage at the edge of a putrescent river. D. E. had his Polish parade to show us in Newark, with its dark-skinned participants marching like clockwork; then a cellar in which you could eat pea soup with pieces of ham à la Mecklenburg. Herr Professor Dr. Erichson was so happy when we ordered seconds! He was amused to see that a mother knows the precise moment when a frozen child’s nose will start to run once she’s inside and warm; Marie trustingly stuck out her face right into the napkin being held at the ready. D. E. enjoyed being with us, there’s that too.
It’s a surly Mrs. Erichson who opens one wing of the double door to D. E.’s stately farmhouse. Her expression is stiff, smooth white hair is stiffly sticking out from under her black riding cap. Jacket, pants, boots, and bow at the collar of her blouse are black. She’s already had one visit today, from a pair of gentlemen in sports jackets who pulled something out of their pockets on a chain and quickly tucked it away again, as if they’d actually showed it to her. They wanted to take a look at D. E.’s study, maybe rummage around a bit too; she showed them the door. Now she’s in a bad mood, and a little anxious. In a foreign country you need to show deference to people sent by the authorities, don’t you think, Gesine?