Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – It was your plan, at least the general outline. Crédit Lyonnais or some firm in Milan would’ve been all the same to me. I wanted to get out of that country for a while. In 1959, in Cologne—just around the corner—a synagogue had been defaced with swastikas and slogans: GERMANS WANT JEWS OUT. Dora Semig had put in an application concerning her husband and they ordered him to report to the Hamburg municipal court by September 2, 1960; if he failed to do so he would be declared dead. That was one thing.

  – That would’ve been enough for me.

  – The other thing was the career of a certain West German politician. This is going to be boring, Marie.

  – Well, just so I can never say you haven’t told me, on board a South Ferry in fact, in New York Harbor, afternoon, direction Manhattan.

  – All right, grin and bear it. As a young man he was in the Nazi student organization. When he was twenty-two he applied to their Motor Corps, fulfilling the prerequisite: politically reliable and prepared to burrow ever deeper into the National Socialist mindset. In the war he was an “Officer for Militaristically Inspired Leadership” at an antiaircraft school in Bavaria; prerequisite: National Socialist activism. After the war he said he was in the resistance; he was in charge of the denazification proceedings in Schongau, where he was the district commissioner. At a public gathering in 1949, he shouted: “Anyone still willing to take gun in hand, let his hand wither!” Starting in 1957 he denied he ever said that. By then he was the West German Minister of Defense. In April 1957, when eighteen scientists from Göttingen University warned against equipping the German Army with nuclear weapons, he called one of them an “ivory-tower professor”; he himself is a high-school graduate. In the capital’s press club he described the Professor of Physics and Nobel Prize Winner Otto Hahn as “an old fool who can’t hold back tears and can’t sleep at night when he thinks about Hiroshima.” In June 1957, fifteen recruits drowned in the Iller at a training exercise that they hadn’t been properly prepared for; the minister responsible, rather than resigning, celebrated his wedding the next day, ordering up a platoon of MPs—practically wartime-strength, with steel helmets and white leather gear—as an escort. Didn’t go to the ceremony for the victims. That same year, he came out with this pronouncement: he was not a conscientious objector, but nevertheless was no coward. The following year, he provided the West German republic with a national hero: On April 29, 1958, a traffic cop named Siegfried Hahlbohm was on duty at an intersection outside the federal chancellery in Bonn when the minister’s vehicle of state crossed it, ignoring the policeman’s hand signal and forcing a streetcar to brake abruptly. Hahlbohm reported the minister’s driver (who already had five previous offenses) for four traffic violations and two criminal infractions: Causing a Traffic Hazard. The minister vows to remove this officer from the intersection; when his efforts become public, he calls it “a betrayal of state secrets.” In October 1959 there was a meeting of “organized bearers of the Knight’s Cross” in Regensburg; the minister sends along three army officers with salutes and music and his regards. In 1961 he smeared a political opponent, who’d had to emigrate during the war, by saying: “But there is one question we can surely ask of you: What did you do during the twelve years on the outside? The same way people ask us: What did you do during the twelve years on the inside?” I read that when I was already in New York, relieved to be out of Mr. Minister’s reach. The next year, he provides his officers with a “full dress suit” featuring an ornamental lanyard, known in Hitler’s time as a “monkey swing”; he prescribes for the other ranks a belt with a buckle that says: Unity and Law and Freedom. After that, he tried to destroy—with denunciations, with lies—a West German news magazine whose editors had conscientiously investigated his financial dealings and official conduct. He knowingly lies to the West German Bundestag: “This was not revenge on my part. I had nothing to do with the whole affair. In the truest sense of the word: not one thing!” After that, he had to step down from the government for a bit; in 1966 a West German government again found him good enough to be a Minister of Finance. He can’t get a hunting license without shenanigans and dirty tricks. He wants to be chancellor of West Germany with his finger on the nuclear button; what they say about him in the Bundestag is that: Anyone who talks like the Federal Minister of Defense would shoot, too.

  – That’s just rude, Gesine.

  – If I were ever tempted to feel homesick for West German politics, I’d just hang up a picture of him.

  – He doesn’t get a name?

  – He deserves the name he’s made for himself.

  – And so now we’re in March 1961, on our way to NYC. New, York, City!

  – Since Employee Cresspahl showed herself to be duly compliant, she got four weeks’ vacation first. We spent it in Berlin with Anita.

  – Where you have to watch what you say! If you try to buy a superlong sausage, they’ll ask you if you’re feeding a big family. I was so proud of my mother when she shot back: Nope, I’m founding a hermitage! Berlin, city of airplanes.

  – Airplanes above the rattling skylight. Fitting into the gaps left by ruins, skimming roofs, adding to the church tower, skyscraper, rain. In parks, stadiums, gardens, on streets and balconies, everywhere there were planes looking down, veering off, sending in others. Invisibly high but far-seeing, the jet fighters of the Red Army, the Beautiful Army, the Krasnaya Armiya squeezed through the sound barrier and threw off that punching, booming, breath-stopping blast of sound. When we took off for Paris, we saw Anita down on her abandoned balcony, waving.

  – And now, all aboard the France, for New York!

  – Still, I know a certain child who for a long time could draw how the furniture was arranged by the garden windows in Düsseldorf. Who was almost in tears when she thought back to a birthday party where everyone sang in chorus: Now you are three! Now you are three!

  – But I turned four in New York. We’ve finally gotten to what I remember. Welcome home!

  August 18, 1968 Sunday

  Cresspahl’s daughter was living in New York when Cresspahl died in the fall of 1962. America is too far away for me to imagine. Sevenny-four years’s long enough.

  He tried to fall asleep on his back. He wanted to be found close enough to morning; he wanted to spare them any trouble with a stiff corpse that hadn’t lain down in bed the way it would lie in the coffin. They used to break bones in such cases, before. But he turned to the side, even if only his head, as he went to sleep. In the morning, as the night thinned out in his brain, his head turned his nose straight up. He already felt himself being carried out, tipped over slightly in the narrow door to the room, then finally out in the cool winter sunlight striped by the bare hedgerows. The jolting on the pavement sent gentle waves of blood surging up behind his brow as he heard Prüss the medical officer say: In cases like this it’s hard to say how long you have to live.

  This morning the sleeping daughter once again saw herself stand up, swing hand over hand out the window and onto Riverside Drive, down the green-patinaed pier of the bridge to the street below. Following doctor’s orders she was wearing only a coat over her nightgown. Pulled the car door shut behind her, quiet as a thief; let the wheels roll eastward to the entrance to the passageway under Broadway that in waking hours the subway crosses. By now she was escorted by black-lacquered carriages—trapped. The trip went as if on rails; all she had to do was press the dead man’s switch. When she arrived under the cemeteries she found a circular, concrete-lined cave hollowed out for her and divided by hospital doors. Behind the first of these doors was the clothes closet; she was supposed to change here for the operation. The doors reappeared along the inner arc of the hallway; these were labeled Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, Blood. At the last door she was handed a small package: the remains of the autopsy.

  Let’s start the day over.

  At five a.m., the radio station WNBC plays popular works by Mozart and Haydn. At six, WNYC follows with Brahms’s Requiem and Schubert.

 
A weekend day. No work. Marie wants to throw a children’s party, to say goodbye.

  August 19, 1968 Monday

  The New York Times, number 40,385.

  News from Bogotá, Jerusalem, Iraq, Cairo, La Paz, Peking, Biafra, London. Who would question its comprehensiveness? Yesterday morning, gunshots were fired at a Long Island Rail Road commuter train; one young man dead, another wounded.

  Pravda has hinted at what it wants readers in Moscow to accept as the truth: If workers in Prague have beseeched the Soviet troops to stay longer in their country, that is because they are being subjected to “moral terror.” On every Prague street corner there are agitators and gathering demonstrators, all “subversive activities by anti-Socialist forces.” Just to clarify things, yes?

  About the chancellor of West Germany, that mild-mannered usherette the Times today sees fit to report that: he went boating on Starnberg Lake and saved a dachshund from drowning.

  In South Vietnam, northern forces and their guerrilla allies attacked in nineteen places. American forces, under machine-gun fire, allegedly lost only ten men, ascribing five hundred casualties to the other side. These round numbers.

  Tonight at six, radio station WNRV brings us “Just Jazz” with Ed Beach. We’d wanted to record it, but we’ve already missed it.

  When we were on our way to the U.S. of A., it’d been just five years in April since a staff sergeant of the marines (one beer and three shots of booze in his belly) had led a party of inexperienced recruits into the tidal wetlands of South Carolina where six were drowned. MPs stood guard over the flag-draped coffins as if the men had died for their country.

  That’s why Marie, just last year, thought we had a duty to buy every single record by Pete Seeger: because he’d sung about the incident: “But the big fool said to push on!”

  When we got here America had fewer than a thousand advisers in South Vietnam. The new president, J. F. Kennedy, increased their number to three thousand in 1961, ten thousand in 1962. Always these round numbers. In 1964 the commanding officers of the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy claimed to have come under fire from the coast of North Vietnam while in the Gulf of Tonkin; they could report no damage; in August the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was given free hand by Congress. The Marines landed in 1965, without a declaration of war but bringing the number of Americans in Vietnam to a hundred and forty-eight thousand. Local guerrillas killed eight Americans on February 7, 1965; the bombing of North Vietnam began and, starting in April 1966, was carried out by eight-engine B-52 bombers. The Soviets didn’t move. 1967 saw the start of the chemical defoliation of Vietnam’s forests. All the better to bomb you with. One air force general whom the Americans number among their allies calls Adolf Hitler his political role model. After the Communists’ Tet Offensive in March 1968, an American president acknowledged his mistakes; LBJ announced he would not run for reelection. His successor might be Nixon, a Tricky Dickie, nix on him; he announced as his 1968 slogan that instead of negotiating for an American defeat we should be negotiating “how we can push even harder for a victory.” The awareness of being implicated, not far from guilt, that weighed on our shoulders through the dirty Algerian War of the French, 1954 to 1962, is back—it’s just a different war this time.

  What was the first piece of foreign policy the USA offered its guests the Cresspahls? They’d only been here two weeks when troops, with President Kennedy’s approval, attacked Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.

  That summer, the party that is always right walled in the city of Berlin and put up a fence around its citizens. The initial fear: had there been deaths. – None on the first day: Anita said into the phone: maybe in the next few years.

  In December, Employee Cresspahl, dragged at high-speed under Manhattan and the East River for two half-hours a day, lost her job in Brooklyn. She had happened to be walking by the branch’s information counter and tried to be nice and help an elderly customer—a woman who was trying to look American and who spoke with a German accent. Saxony. East.

  German bonds issued in dollars? We do have those.

  Could it be something from Saxony?

  We have municipal bonds from Dresden and Leipzig, from 1925 and 1926, each paying 7 percent, maturing in 1945 and 1947.

  I got a tip that you can get those for a song.

  You have been informed correctly, ma’am. That’s because they’re excluded from the 1952 London Agreement on German External Debts. It’s by no means certain when they might be guaranteed.

  So you’d advise me against it, Miss . . . Crespel?

  Whoever gave you that tip is not exactly your friend, ma’am.

  The reproof from management: Miss Cresspahl, we pay you to sell securities! Here’s your notice. If you’re so good at giving investment advice, go open your own broker’s office, don’t screw us out of a commission!

  Starting in January, the unemployed Miss Cresspahl, with a four-year-old child as an adviser, blew through her savings traveling from the Atlantic Coast to the brown beaches of Oregon and had no one to discuss her troubles with but the talking road:

  Stay on the Sidewalk

  Prepare to Stop

  Slow Traffic: Keep Right

  Be Patient: Passing Lane Just Ahead

  Center Lane for Left Turns Only

  No Passing

  No Parking

  CORVALLIS, pop. 38,400

  Please Drive Carefully (We Need Everybody)

  This Lane for Passing Only

  Railroad Crossing

  R x R

  NO XING

  Falling Rocks

  Trucks Entering

  Right Lane Must Exit

  Soft Shoulder

  Thank You

  Thank You

  and she often felt like the pigtailed girl on the sign who’s leading a smaller child by the hand across an implied road with zebra stripes. Children, children!

  Then Anita turned up with her illegal propositions. Anita paid the expenses. Gesine was a tourist with an American passport, in Prague, asking the way to Wilson station, long since renamed Střed. A tourist with French papers trying to exchange Czech crowns at Berlin-East station.

  Now that our widely revered Vice President de Rosny has entrusted his subordinate Cresspahl with the transfer of a few million into the Czechoslovakian national budget, he’s admitted to her why he gave her a job despite her prior record: because she admitted her offense. Or because of the nature of it.

  A job in data entry. Nobody heard one word more from this “coworker” than was necessary to be polite. Employed and under observation since 1962. Found suitable in 1967.

  In 1962 one Prof. Dr. Dr. D. Erichson found us and proposed marriage after he’d gotten to know Marie; was given, for the time being, the name D. E. because Marie liked the tiny hiccup between the American D and E sounds. Dee-ee. Later she realized she’d meant: Dear Erichson.

  In 1963 I was still from somewhere else. Capable of a laugh when I saw an office building, steel and glass and concrete, and its name was inscribed on it in lavish aluminum and that name was U.S. Plywood Building. And if my translation of a gold phrase on a green delivery van was correct, it said: Theatrical Moves—Our Specialty. My throat still tickling with laughter, I stepped into an elevator with thirteen men and saw them all doff their hats. Such things happen in the beginning—or what I thought of as the beginning.

  I felt secure: I’d been to the Social Security Administration. Down on Broadway, between restaurants and stores, a startlingly businesslike entrance with two brass door handles. On the second floor a room as large as a baseball diamond, with no partitions. Closest to the elevators, little groups of chairs to wait on. Then a desk, ceaselessly asking via posted notice: May I help you? On a pillar, the photograph of the president, framed in black as if he were dead; matted under the photo in the same frame, the signature that the Soviet prime minister respects. Along the wall, writing surfaces as narrow as the ones in German post offices. The file card wanted to know the name the applicant “goe
s by,” as well as the one acquired at birth. I hereby declare under oath that I have never applied for a social security number before. Necessity is the mother of deception.

  When the old-fashioned printed card came from Jerichow, Meckl., in the fall of 1962, I lingered in the bar of the Hotel Marseilles. The ladies there were all in tweed and adorned with the accessories recommended on the women’s pages of the news magazines, but they were waiting for the husbands who paid for that lifestyle, while I was waiting for Marie and paying for myself. The men were smiling. One, with his glasses pushed up on his nasal cartilage, busy with the paper, with the stock market pages, like it was a Book of the Times—this absentminded professor asked about George.

  – They nabbed him in Brooklyn.

  – But he lives in the Bronx.

  – For knowing all sorts of inside information about the “weather.” What’ll it be?

  – The same. Nah, probably not. Something similar.

  – What I gave you?

  – You’re the better doctor.

  – Here’s your Ballantine’s. Came here all the way from New Jersey. That was like a permission to watch other people living, even if it seemed impossible to go on with one’s own life. Then a parched-looking beanpole stepped up to the bar with frantic gestures and needed to know:

  – Where can I get some water!?

  – If you can’t find it anywhere else, then right here. Sir.

  – Gimme a glass of water.

  – Free of charge: Mr. McIntyre said, indicating with a private pursing of the lips that there are some rude dirty dogs too old to learn new tricks. McIntyre, shaking the last drops from a bottle into a customer’s glass like a sacrifice, a gift, a holy offering. McIntyre, whom they’d recently unexpectedly sent to an island, dressed in easily visible clothes, so that he couldn’t tell stories from behind the shelter of a bar for a while—things that only the FBI claims the right to know.

  In 1963, D. E. for the first time ventured to suggest: that I try to enjoy life. I went along. And I found it hard to break the habit of Mr. McIntyre’s company. These were conversations that were worth it: McIntyre took on a teacher’s responsibilities, always with an apology, and told me how English words were pronounced in America, that here a “public holiday” meant a legal one and a “proposition” was just a suggestion, not, as in England, a suggestion and a deal and a case and a consideration and an alternative and a plan and a sentence and a declaration. All this among taciturn men who’d likewise found the day’s events unsatisfactory and who expressed their wishes so monosyllabically that Mr. McIntyre assumed an air of mock defensiveness. One of them, annoyed by the ice cube in his glass, dropped it into McIntyre’s hand like a tip; he said: Just what I’ve always wanted. And I told myself that I was enjoying life, because in ten minutes the kindergarten bus was due to arrive and the bellboy would announce Marie’s name and she’d walk into the bar, looking at us with a serious and friendly look like Jakob, but speaking a natural American English that by this point a certain someone would ask Marie to produce for her. Then we would walk hand in hand down the sloping street to Riverside Park, and I thought that just being alive was enough.