Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  No military presence. The coffin without a flag of the Red Army or the NPA. A brass plate on the coffin with his full name. His address for eternity.

  Among the mourners I noticed. The wreath ribbons read. This Gesine from New York could surely have come up with something more appropriate than Rœbbing sin Gesin. Oh, it can be a dative in Platt? “To Robbie from Gesine,” not “Robbie’s Gesine”? You dont say. An elaborate Mecklenburg lunch, conversation with the priest.

  Delivering two death announcements.

  As for our work, we’re right there in The New York Times, page 1, column 3: Czechoslovakia wants $400 million to $500 million in hard-currency loans to buy industrial equipment. De Rosny: At your service!

  A sad and upset child is waiting on Riverside Drive, wanting to commiserate: A telegram came, and unfortunately I opened it. It’s from D. E. in Finland. He’s had an accident. Forgets to put his address, the scatterbrain! Now we can’t write back! Signed: Eritzen.

  Now that is Anita’s handwriting. Make sure you give it its due, Comrade Writer!

  Handwriting of Student Gantlik comma Anita: No deformations; excellent; especially in telegrams.

  – And is your eye feeling better, Gesine?

  August 9, 1968 Friday

  We’d learned it once and for all—the way to get to LaGuardia Airport is to take the West Side line to Times Square, the Flushing line to Forty-Second Street at Third Avenue, the airport shuttle to Long Island. Amid all the rubble of abandoned factories, the private houses built too small, the actual garbage, the cemeteries living on after their death—in the middle of all this an airport shows what’s possible, with a glass semicircular two-story building of enormous halls for the processing of waiting, with generous coffeehouses and stores (containing nothing but products of a folklore gone to seed), with marble and other genuine stone, with clean floors and no muzak and a Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia incompletely hewn from a block of granite, as an artwork that has its place here. From the upper level you can look out at the air traffic; it’s quite elegant how the countless planes use the space around the two ramps, quickly, in orderly fashion, rolling up to the gates and deigning to receive a little help at departure from the small bullish (yellow) tractors, until they can safely unleash their strength. The airfield’s location on the water makes it easier to see in all this merely a well-established, reasonable sport when the beasts start racing—slow, controlled—until they lift their nose, retract the nose wheel, gracefully rise up into and over the dirt while augmenting it with their viscid exhaust. We stand there for a few minutes and then another plane aims at the runway from the north, seems to spread its wings, sits politely, gingerly down; it will come taxiing right up like a polite taxi. That’s the one meant for us.

  And who are the Cresspahls this morning? Merely travel companions, or an escort, a guard detail, for Annie and her children, the capitulating remnants of the Killainen family?

  When Annie called us last night, she categorically refused to come over to the Cresspahl apartment. We had to go find her (because you’re my friend, Gesine) in a hotel at Lincoln Center, where included in the cost of the night’s room is the youth of the building, its proximity to the workshops of art, the wall-to-wall carpeting, hygienically sealed toilets, interchangeable furniture, leather intimacy your hand sticks to. Annie wanted to show us that she’s brought money with her—a kind of independence. From a friend. We were going to go to a restaurant, two adults with four children in total, until Marie offered to supervise as F. F. Junior, Francis R., and Annina S. Fleury tried the room service. Thanks, Marie.

  Annie née Killainen insisted on the restaurant, a velvety cave hollowed out of East Midtown, lit by blood-colored candles (how striking that one woman there looks, the one with the sunglasses), tended by supercilious waiters whose snooty French you could rip off their faces with a single complete sentence in that language. Annie orders, Annie lays her purse on the edge of the table—she’s paying; what she has in mind is putting on a show of security.

  It turned out to be not so easy for her to play the carefree lady with three kids in a Finnish small town, who’d run away from her American husband, the Romance Language specialist F. F. Fleury, over an argument about Vietnam. Especially since the specialist in question did, as promised, get himself sent to southeast Asia by a Boston newspaper and has since confessed and reported the error of his ways, to Annie too, in patient, shamefaced articles; in fact, the paper fired him over his coverage of the body bags that an American helicopter team brings along as a precaution on its missions against the enemy that the emissaries of Western culture refer to as “goons”—his coverage of the filling and transport of these bloodtight bags. Pleading letters. But if Annie needs someone at her side for her return to her husband, that seems like a warning sign: Cresspahl wants to suggest. And in so doing she would eat once more the bitter bread of responsibility, she would offer herself up as the scapegoat for future rifts in the Fleury marriage; she refrains. F. F. Fleury, he’s really humbled now, bowing and scraping with remorse, scraping hard?

  Annie nods, a bit ashamed of herself, forces herself to be honest and admits: En jaksa enää.

  She can’t do it anymore—life without a husband is too much for her. So what else can we do? We call the Mohawks and reserve six seats in a very small plane that hangs low from its wings—it calls itself a Vista Jet even though it has visible propellers (maybe it has hidden turbines) and it rises stubbornly into the air at always the same steep angle. Annie’s two elder children stick to their defiance, their exaggerated obedience; Francis R. Knock-knees Fleury is three now and looks down at the unfamiliar landscape completely confused—a hilly country of thick woods in which highways, gas stations, and bulk-purchase stores have heedlessly cleared openings. Admittedly there was also something Norwegian about it, with the white and red painted slate, scattered hamlets or isolated jewelry boxes located high on hilltops with barely visible roads leading to them. We’ll be flying somewhere soon too. Anyone sitting under the wings can see a leg being extended until all the joints are straight enough for it to stand. The airport doesn’t seem built for bigger planes—it consists of just one narrow wooden barrack. The lone aircraft marshaller walks up to the taxiing Mohawk until it obeys him and comes to a stop. Then he puts down the brake chocks, takes off his earmuffs, and fetches the cart for the luggage that the passengers are allowed to retrieve under the open sky, as if theft were very rarely a concern in Vermont. The Cresspahls turn away from Mrs. Fleury right away; they want to confirm their reservations for the next flight to New York/LaGuardia; they feel they don’t need to witness the scene where Annie sinks sobbing onto the chest of her lawfully wedded husband—a limp overgrown child with her tailored suit askew. The Cresspahls, too, must have their hands shaken, he insists on that; in silence, as if someone’s died.

  Then a drive down Main Street, past the stores with their adamantly understated airs. The bakery calls itself Bakery and poshly disdains to advertise Super-8 bread or suchlike big-city substitutes for the real thing; the other rural stores show similar restraint. Then a walk. The proximity, the presence of the university causes the glass doors of the shops to bear requests such as: No bare feet. The clothes look respectable; buyers can as a rule leave the souvenirs alone without disgrace; the windows seem washed daily. The hotel on the corner is wrapped in a porch on which new swing chairs in traditional style are resting all alone with their boredom. Annie’s future world. The house, built by a gentleman farmer around 1840, out of stone, and with an oxblood-colored barn added, at first sight sheltered by old maples and bushes but at second hearing revealed to be closely surrounded by neighbors in prefab houses and the streets they drive wildly down. The inside badly cleaned, violently straightened up—Annie’s future life. The hotel sent lunch; the guest is offered a slice of toast by the chastened, dejected couple. Here Mrs. Cresspahl said, without believing it, the line from Martje Flohr’s toast that one says in such situations, ever after etc. How happy Mrs
. Cresspahl is, how relieved Marie, late that afternoon when they get back to the airport and the dispatcher looks at them like familiar faces! He’d already tinkled the brass cowbell once, which here announced a takeoff.

  The New York Times is handed out. Marie busies herself with Svetlana Stalina Alliluyevna and her latest howling. She wants to tell the world: she’s planning to buy a car, the best there is in America! she has thrown her Soviet passport, the most desirable in the world, into the fire!

  But they really have pondered and planned it, the East Germans. In mid-July they ordered a partial mobilization of the 650,000 men in the National People’s Army reserve for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Three weeks ago it almost happened.

  This was an excursion. And how can we take one to Mecklenburg? Anita does it for us.

  She went there on Ascension Day / in the very merry month of May, and from her train window she observed with concern the stones clearly visible amid the low growth, how they’d grown since 1964, some of them now larger than children’s heads, hardheads. She thought back to the times when the day laborers would have been out with buckets collecting them, the farmers behind them even madder. The estate owners used to take care, since fields without stones saved machines from damage. Apparently there was no slot for clearing the end moraine in the work units of the AyPeeSees. Agricultural Production Cooperatives, that is.

  When an Anita wants to partake in the Gneez station restaurant, then it may well say right there on the door that it’s closed but a waitress will see that the waiting room, with its loud group of construction workers over their beer and schnapps, is no place for such a lady; she’ll open up early. Neat and tidy fresh tablecloths. Flowered wallpaper, chairs upholstered in plastic, bamboo stands holding leafy plants, next to current newspapers on awkward racks; delicate tulip-shaped lights (electr.) on the walls. Then an Anita will wrinkle her nose, as if something smelled sour. The waitress will notice and immediately apologize for the just ten grams of butter for the bread roll—if the customer orders another roll she’s allowed to set out ten more grams. Today: this young citizen of Gneez says: used to be a holiday, now theyve taken that away.

  We don’t permit ourselves any provocations.

  Service to Jerichow is canceled due to work on the line: it says in the ticket window, which only opens twenty minutes before the train is due to depart. Behind it sits a public official—about sixty, punctilious uniform, white shirt and tie; on the phone. Passenger at the wrong window: better teach her a lesson. After ten minutes he honors her silent waiting and tells her the departure times for the railway replacement bus. Anita takes a taxi to Jerichow. It’s an exception, she feels, that nowadays all you have to do to catch a cab is walk out of the Gneez mail train station, and in forty minutes one appears.

  The driver’s a disappointment, a Mecklenburger, a yakker. So, the lady’s visiting relatives I suppose? But Anita saw a horse waiting indulgently for his farmer who was standing on the corner, chatting away; that’s just how people are. There are actually people out picking where the road crosses the rails; maybe they’re maintaining the line to Jerichow. The new construction in Gneez: factories in exposed concrete, barracks as temporary storage for fuel, fertilizer, farm machines. The industrialization of the north. Communal Administrative Association (Casket Warehouse—Woodworkers).

  Windmills with no sails, wooded sections, a thirty-foot rise and the first glimpse of the gray line under the sky: the sea. This used to be Anita’s route to school; she speaks of “your” Mecklenburg. She had to spend five years there.

  Because of the stones, she asked. They must break the harvest equipment, no? – Auh: the man said: we jus’ set the combine t’ two feet!

  He was eager to hear her address in Jerichow so that he’d have something to report. Then Anita—he’d already noticed something foreign in her accent—held out a box with some papyrossi sticking out, filterless, the way only the Russians smoke them daily. Now there was silence. – To the train station: Anita said.

  At that very place she was met by a weather-beaten plywood sign on the monument to the fallen: Learn, Ye Who Have Been Warned. To the Victims of the Imperialist Wars.

  Jerichow’s Town, Ad.-Hitler-, Stalin-, Street of Peace.

  Buildings in various conditions. Some of the mostly one-story buildings have been cleaned recently, with wider windows added, some new doors. Others, if they bear the mark “CHA”—Communal Housing Administration, the sign of ownership by the state—may have bare stone showing, uncovered and gnawed by decades of sea wind, and outside window frames scoured gray by the rain. Dangerous-looking bulges in the timber framing. The finest paintwork on the interiors, though; flowerpots; irreproachable, tightly drawn curtains made of Dederon, the miracle synthetic fabric of the East.

  Blessed are those who withdraw / From the world without hate . . . (Goethe)

  An antenna on almost every roof, for receiving TV signals, pointing in a westerly direction.

  What felt weird to Anita: the scarcity of visual advertising. About eight flags along Town Street. Empty mounts on almost every front door.

  The Karstadt department store was Magnet. (Because it attracts, Gesine—“Karstadt: Quality Attracts.”) A table saw could be sold only to someone with an Essential Non-Private Purchaser ID. Electronics reserved for repair work. Schuko plugs and sockets only upon presenting a Specialist Worker Letter. Refrigerators were free.

  A private business was selling radishes, turnips, apples. Potatoes. They were out of tomatoes. Outside butcher Klein’s shop window there was a line of people equipped as though planning to stay there until closing time.

  There are no picture postcards of Jerichow.

  How startled Anita was to be greeted on the street, by an old woman in a headscarf and nylon coat! From that point on she said to anyone who looked five years older than her: H’lo.

  There is no building on Jerichow’s Town Street with the inscription: Do what’s right and fear no man! nor a building with a carved, green-painted hedgehog on both wings of its double door! unless maybe it was next to the collection point for used glass. That was where there was one knocked out of the row and down into the cellar, an extracted tooth.

  Peacefully alongside each other: boxes with announcements under glass, this one public, that one private:

  It’s up to you, your word and your deed. The Military Police Cabinet is open from to. Youths and maidens, live and act like the revolutionaries of today! Fanfare Corps rehearsals starting now.

  German Shepherd Breeders Club invites you. Rabbit Breeders Club, Pigeon Breeders Club. A trophy is being awarded for the first time—who will be the proud winner? We’ll find out in August! The shooting competition will be held on.

  The display case outside the evangelical parsonage contains an illustration of the naked man that the Soviet Union donated on November 4, 1959, as a gift and monument for United Nations Plaza in New York. A work by Yevgeny Vuchetich; pendant piece at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The male nude has bent a sword so far that it looks like a plowshare at the other end; hammer held out in his right hand. WE SHALL BEAT OUR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES (Isaiah 2:4). Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more!

  The roof of St. Peter’s Church is half dismantled, the other half already covered in new bricks, biting red but that’ll fade in the sea wind. The construction scaffolding, the ladders look long unused, unclimbed; the piles of rubble at their feet have dwindled. As happens every couple of centuries.

  At the cemetery office, they shake the hands of even out-of-town visitors. It’s called Department of Landscape Gardening, Funerary Facilities Branch. Although the graves of the house of Cresspahl would be hard to miss. They’ve smudged the letters of your father’s gravestone by removing the rust. The planting looks as if the state had to pay the municipality for the selection: lily of the valley. Your mother’s cross is falling apart: the cast iron is flaking, you can stick two fingers right through it. Jakob’s slab is
standing upright like a price tag; the 1964 rosebush is growing nicely. Your place is still empty, Gesine.

  The house on Brickworks Road—your house—has been divided. The smaller half belongs to the People’s Solidarity Veterans Club, closed unfortunately. The other half may turn into a kindergarten later. So far there’s only a future kindergarten: Off-Limits to Children Not Attending This Kindergarten; Parents Are Responsible for Their Children. Much later. It’s so dilapidated tradesmen would need weeks to fix it. The roof covered in Eternit. That doesn’t bother any storks.

  On the Bäk, Anita talked over the fence with older people, complimented the hyacinths. Yah, the roots on em are from the West! In some front yards are car tires, painted white and filled with earth, as flower bowls—a new Mecklenburg folk custom? Teams of horses pulling panel wagons; sullen boys on dirty tractors.

  On the Bäk, a group of children, eight years old, in civilian shirts, shouting in chorus: We demand that the Volkspolizei be permitted to search this house! The inhabitant of that house standing there with a laugh on her face, agreeing. Kids, righ’? Most of the children are wearing genuine blue jeans and have Bowie knives too.

  An RFT column (large loudspeaker) outside Emma Senkpiel’s store; silent for now. In Emma’s store Anita was given, against regulations, a glass of milk. Gesine, there’s no one in Jerichow who’d recognize you.

  The phone booth on Market Square has been repaired. You can tell because the pavement around it went missing during the repairs. Now the door opens onto the street instead of the sidewalk. When the Gneez Taxi Cooperative then refuses to send a car to Jerichow in good faith, as an indefensible burden on the People’s national economy, a person can really feel stranded in Jerichow, abandoned on Öland Island. The railway replacement bus was scheduled for much later, five o’clock; the conductors certainly don’t take the timetable too literally (helpful warning from a policeman in a green uniform).