Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Outside, in an offputtingly undamaged neighborhood of villas and empty sidewalks with only a maid every now and then waking a dog, she was alone with her concern that she had not much helped Prisoner Lockenvitz, and might have harmed NCO Pagenkopf. If this was the price of an official exit to West Germany, she’d rather slip through the bushes when no one was looking.

  Anita found it, that path through the bushes. Did her friend Gesine know the lawyer on Lietzenburg Street who’d paid off debts in installments on behalf of Johnny Schlegel?

  That was how Gesine Cresspahl came into a permit to move to the state of West Berlin; out of turn, too. She was allowed to register as a permanent resident of the Grunewald district of the city at a regular police precinct, not with Section V. Such a person with such a file has the right to a West Berlin personal ID. With a loan of a hundred and twenty West marks (the ticket alone cost over eighty), she flew in the second-to-last week in July as a private person to Frankfurt/Main, in a Douglas Clipper type 3, at night.

  A person can imagine they recognize, under the wings of a DC-10 in transit from New Orleans to New York, while still over the Atlantic, the offshore island, the whitish shelf of land where Mrs. Cresspahl tried to vacation a year before. Marie, looking ahead, not down, sees the island of the Staaten General, Manhattan, Long Island.

  – Welcome home, Gesine!

  August 17, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  Waiting with Eagle-Eye Robinson at Riverside Drive is a single telegram. From Helsinki, of course, with the signature mangled: CANNOT CURRENTLY BE MOVED – ERISINION.

  For breakfast, a telegram from Helsinki: NO NEED TO VISIT – ERISINN.

  With the regular mail, an official-looking letter postmarked from Germany: from the Psychoanalytical Research Institute, Frankfurt am Main. Not counting the time in transit, the answer took less than a month. A professor taking the trouble to write three and a half pages to a bank employee named Cresspahl, on his private stationery! in his free time!

  And he’s never even had the pleasure of making our personal acquaintance. (As he says in all sincerity after reading our letter.) He refuses to attempt a long-distance diagnosis, due to insufficient information and too narrow a basis for judgment—nor had she wanted one. But he is willing to say: If I hear the voices of the dead, of people not present, and they answer me, it may be due to the predisposition of the person having this type of experience. Please take from my inferences only what’s useful to you. There must be a firm bond between such a person and her past; there’s no way she can have put it behind her. She’s on the right track when she assumes that we’re dealing with aftereffects of wounds, of losses; she is wrong when she thinks that it’s about Jakob, or Cresspahl; in fact it started with her mother, who was “de-ranged” out of her place in this world. We’re talking about you, Lisbeth née Papenbrock! Alienation, yes; delusion, no. It’s just that you haven’t dealt with this first rejection by the mother and put behind you (the second rejection, the third rejection). There’s no risk of your passing it on hereditarily. There’s just one thing that isn’t right, Mrs. Cresspahl: your sometimes knowing your child Marie’s answer before she says it. That can be a self-serving move, trying to protect the child and, in her, yourself—but for the child such symbiosis will soon turn dangerous, restricting her independence. You yourself described it in your letter as an illegal activity (“kept under surveillance”), and that gave you away, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  “You need to have the courage—the considerable courage—to reject defense mechanisms, even though doing so cannot help but feel like negligence, given your life experiences. You would save some time if you chose to avail yourself of a, I know the word is on the tip of your tongue: a “headshrinker.” This metaphor really hurts you more than it hurts my American colleagues; it keeps you from making use of a medical service that could help you reach a more appropriate sense of inner security. Why not try it, it’s harmless—you can break it off whenever you want. Kind regards, A. M.”

  What he clearly omitted: any concerns about an inability to work. Based on how I come across in a letter, I am equipped with what I need for a job abroad, in Prague.

  “Dear Professor, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I don’t know how to express my. . .” Serves you right, Gesine Cresspahl. You asked him to do something difficult, now rack your brains over a thank-you letter. It’ll take you three weeks to write it!

  Over breakfast, the news from Bonn in The New York Times: the West Germans have thought long and hard about the treaty that they inherited, dated Sept. 29, 1938, when Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini gave Hitler the Sudetenland. Hitherto this treaty had been regarded as “no longer valid.” Now the people of the ČSSR might get their way and a signature under the wording: “null from the outset.”

  After Marshal Tito, it’s now the president of Rumania paying a visit to Prague. Nicolae Ceauşescu describes how you do it: a small Communist country can totally accept credits in convertible currency as long as it remains in a military alliance such as the Warsaw Pact. If a delegate from a New York bank turns up in the capital of a small Communist country the day after the day after tomorrow, what’s the problem.

  – So now Undergraduate Cresspahl at a West German university: Marie requests as soon as she’s done supervising the casting-off of the ferry. – Lib. Arts Stud. G. C. at a University of . . .what did they call universities in West Germany?

  – One was named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was located in Frankfurt, and was willing to accept this rising second-year student from Halle on the Saale into the English Department. (And do you know why? Because I’d been enrolled at a university. Anita’s Abitur meant nothing in West Berlin—she’d had to retake all her exams.) When I saw the tuition and fees I forgot about that.

  – Your father had Western money! A few thousand pounds at the Surrey Bank of Richmond, with interest accrued since 1938!

  – I’d left Cresspahl’s country, left him, against his will. Just think how much more unreasonable I’ll be when you leave me! He also probably thought his assets there had been confiscated as enemy property.

  – Your father was trying to punish you.

  – That would have meant he was trying to get his daughter back. No, she should have it her own way and live accordingly. As for academia, she’d seen through her illusions.

  – Too bad, if you ask me.

  – “Dr. Gesine Cresspahl”! Can you imagine?

  – “Professor Cresspahl” sounds pretty good.

  – Sure, “Prof. Marie Cresspahl”! You become one.

  – We’ll see, Gesine, won’t we.

  – And what kind of job can you get with a degree in English?

  – Teacher.

  – I’d lost all desire for that career at the Socialist high school in Gneez. Standing in front of a class knowing that you’re hiding something, that the students think you’re lying—no thanks.

  – In a free country you could teach what you wanted.

  – In grammar, poetic meter, form—sure. But I couldn’t analyze the content with the kind of dialectics that made sense to me in 1953! Anyway, all I really wanted was the language.

  – So because of your father . . .

  – If I wanted to get that unraveled by a headshrinker. . . a psychoanalyst headhunter, Marie, then we wouldn’t be able to take any more trips to New York via Frisco and Louisiana. A translation school was enough for me, and if it happened to be located in a river valley on the left bank of the Rhine, then in the morning mist it would look like Flanders after the battle. There you needed the abilities of Hitler’s chief translator at your fingertips no less than you did the proverbs of Solomon. There the students would graduate and leave the nature conservancy park of academic jobs and pensions for life in the wild as working translators. Lots of chip-laden shoulders there. Narrow-gauge academics. Someone pointed out one of them to me who’d been in a translator’s squad for Hitler’s army, a former actor in Leningrad; no hands. Another one, when
in his cups, used to brag about his many seductions; he was why I avoided Russian. Italian, French—yes. At least we learned how to speak; chockchock!: as Emil Knoop would say. Besides, Dr. Kliefoth and two semesters in Halle had hardly been able to fix everything from H.-G. Knick’s classes. Knickei—a real Grade B egg. He’d sent us off with the information: The use of the passive is very common in English. That was that. Lots of remedial teaching.

  – Simultaneous translation?

  – That’s a cinch, I can do that in my sleep. No, consecutive interpreting, at a conference, that’s the pinnacle, the real art—translating a forty-five-minute lecture and saying it as if you’d written it yourself. Here is one of my many professional dreams that never came true: being elected a member of the AIIC, the Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférences. They only accept you after two hundred days of conference work and if five colleagues vouch for you. For that I would’ve had to pay for ten semesters on the Rhine, at Schifferstadt, instead of my six minus two for previous experience.

  – How did you pay for it, Gesine? You show up there with five marks in your pocket. A dollar and twenty-five cents.

  – Probably more like seventy-five cents. Student Cresspahl would’ve been fine working in the institution’s kitchen; but that would have made the rounds among the fifteen hundred students; it wasn’t done. So here’s your version of the American hardworking-dishwasher story: Student Cresspahl standing behind the counter in a cloakroom in Mannheim at night saying Thank you for every dime someone left on her plate. Visitors from the school included Rhine maidens, heiresses from the great houses of Düsseldorf or South America, who even in their third year still thought it was funny to come out with Germanisms like “yes, yes” or “I have it not necessary” instead of “I don’t need it.” They complained to the management: indecorum. At a nightclub the glasses should be washed in public. Next came the night shift in a factory making toys and garden gnomes. And if a lecturer needed something typed or translated, just ask Cresspahl; she charges a bundle but what she turns out is ready to turn in. After that, she was in demand in the northern neighborhood of Frankfurt where the streets are named after writers—from Franz Kafka past Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig to Platen—and the families of the American occupiers lived. They went out at night and left their children in the care of one Miss Cresspahl, paying her German money; she wanted to learn nursery rhymes and fairy tales from the children, and how you say, in American, “On your mark, get set, go!” In her last semester, when she felt sure of a diploma, it seemed justified to pay her for holding conversation classes.

  – You were starving again, Gesine!

  – It was my own fault; I needed a typewriter. I went hungry the scientific way, with yogurt and brown bread every two hours; with practice you can do it.

  – And two cigarettes a day.

  – No more smoking till after 1955.

  – And you were homesick for Jerichow, for Gneez.

  – I’d seen the 1953 May Day parade in Gneez. Armed People’s Police marching past the stage on New Market, swinging their brown-uniformed limbs, wearing expensive boots (and holding tight to their rifle straps, to keep from falling); the comrade from the district office screamed, as if he had a knife to his throat: Today we still say Gee-Dee-Ääh, but next May we will be able to say Uuu-Gee-Dee-Ääh! A belated decoding of Goethe’s remark that was on display at purely academic occasions on the front wall of the auditorium:

  I HAVE NO FEAR THAT GERMANY WILL NOT SOMEDAY BECOME ONE; OUR GOOD ROADS AND FUTURE RAILROADS WILL DO THEIR PART, BUT ABOVE ALL LET IT BE ONE IN OUR HEARTS. . .,

  center-aligned. This was a declaration of civil war. I was supposed to want that? Only armed force would bring about a Unified German Democratic Republic. Student Lockenvitz had already commented on this, quoting what he’d found in Voltaire about the Holy Roman Empire.

  – That it’s neither an empire nor Roman nor holy. I’ve done my homework.

  – Homesick! You don’t get it at all. At Gneez main station, one Alfred Fretwust, prison warden under the Greater German Reich, had gotten lifetime rights to the bicycle stand. So what if he’d turned a pair of soldier’s boots into credit in a Hamburg bank account, even during the war. So what if he’d been in Bützow a couple times. In the time of the New Economic Policy he’d accepted payments for motorcycles in the Industrial Products Government Store on Great Comrade Stalin Street—motorcycles that were never, ever delivered. Now here he was again. When it was still going well, he rented allotment garden sheds on Grosser Werder—to be alone, to meet female friends. Never drank more than a shot of liquor an hour during the day. At home every last plate licked clean as if by a cat; family life in the kitchen; a stupefying naked Venus over the marital bed. Insistently played the good middle-class citizen, which others were willing to believe since he had enough money coming in. An informer. Only when a drunk drunkenly called him a crook did it come to blows. Now here he was again. Had to watch over the bike stand at the station. Thirty cents per bike per day at most. And since he needed his sleep, of course, the wife with all her pride actually did the work. Alfred Fretwust, prison warden, free and clear, denazified at first go-round, unpunished—I’m supposed to feel homesick for him?

  – And yet you did go back, to see Jerichow.

  – I did go north for a visit once, to the Holstein coast in the West, at Whitsun, and in the slowly creeping line of day-trippers from the city I could see the gray sea under an overcast sky, above the shining yellow of the rapeseed in bloom and the rain-deepened green of the meadows, with a remarkably straight line of land at the very end; in the evening, in the harbor, the northernmost stretch of the Mecklenburg coast, blue with white patches, a hand’s breadth, and next to it the sea turning inward at Great Point and Lesser Point, and behind that bay, more or less, was Jerichow. Past the coastal hedge at the edge of the land you could look over the bay, with the west side to the right and across from it, unconnected, the east side under the inky, wind-chased cloudy sky, irregular, with peaks like jutting bluffs, coves like harbors, needle-fine spires like steeples, cracks like lurking guard boats. When I close my eyes I can remember it perfectly. That same that different roaring.

  – When the oak blooms ’ fore the ash, / summer rains come hard and fast. Y’ know that, Gesine. But when the ash the oak precedes, / summer’s warm and dry indeed, like in 1952. This afternoon I saw my big oak trees, they’ll be green soon. The ash is standing there deaf and dumb! On May 1, we used to, now y’ know I’m older than you Gesine, we used to take off our clogs an socks, there weren’t no shoes ’cept on Sundays. We’d go cuttin thistles outta the rye barefoot. Nowadays I’d rather wear gloves. Back then the winter started in October and lasted till February, it did, and snow too! We walked to school on top of the hedgerows and when someone slipped off into the soft snow we were twice as far above him as we were tall. Now winter lasts a lot longer. On First a May the rye should be high enough to hide a crow! Nowadays you can see a mouse runnin through it! No. And we only have one hay harvest. Before, the first one was in early June, the second in early August, you call that the aftermath, we call it the rowen. Who still feeds with hay nowadays. I gotta say, the seasons’ve all shifted. ’Tsall the atomic bomb’s fault. There’s no summer anymore. Didja ever think! . . .Yer not sayin anythin, Gesine.

  – Why do we see so clearly in Mecklenburg?

  –’Ts cause a the humidity in the air. But the people over there, I mean your father, they got our afternoon’s weather this morning.

  The Cresspahl cousin stayed only one night. Being so close when there was nothing I could do—it hurt.

  – Nostalgia is a painful virtue, Gesine. Daughters have human feelings too.

  – Right. I too was expendable. When the Maritime and Merchant City of Wismar wants to celebrate its seven-hundred-and-twenty-fifth birthday in 1954, it can do so just fine without a visitor from Je—, from the Rhine-land near the Main. The commemorative publication reaches her because her f
ather sends one: a thick volume on glossy paper with a lot of corrected history, and notices from the government stores praising the New Courses, and the saying, which they call Mecklenburg folk wisdom, that when an old person is left in the lurch by the housing office his grandchildren will always take him in.

  – In 1954 you turned . . .you became an adult, Gesine.

  – Twenty-one years old. And Johnny Schlegel’s attorney in West Berlin, acting on behalf of Dr. Werner Jansen, attorney at law, Gneez/Meckl., in accord with the last will and testament of Dr. Avenarius Kollmorgen, sent me a sealed package.

  – And woe is you if you don’t tell me what was in it!

  – I’d be happy to.

  – You better.

  – It was two gold rings. “Upon reaching your majority, my dear Miss Cresspahl, the undersigned is permitted to lay at your feet.” “Since, owing to the intervention of untoward circumstances, I myself.” “For any marital connection, so long as it be one you have chosen, I offer my devout.” There was a way of speaking that went to the grave with Kollmorgen.

  – Wedding rings! From the grave!

  – They’re . . . for you. Yours.

  – Like I’m ever going to get married, Gesine!

  – That’s what we said about me too. Don’t forget.

  – So, no plans to return to Jerichow or Halle on the Saale.

  – The radio took care of that. “The Soviet Union has invented penicillin.” One time an announcer said a song title with a sigh: “ ‘An American in Paris’—oh, if only!” So taken with his own agitprop brilliance that he didn’t realize the obvious comeback: how desirable it would be to have only a single Soviet in the East German republic, on vacation in Ahlbeck by the Baltic. It’s as if they hoped to win over the airwaves! As if they thought they could divide the sky.