Anniversaries Read online

  UWE JOHNSON (1934–1984) grew up in the small town of Anklam in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. At the end of World War II, his father, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1940, disappeared into a Soviet camp; he was declared dead in 1948. Johnson and his mother remained in Communist East Germany until his mother left for the West in 1956, after which Johnson was barred from regular employment. In 1959, shortly before the publication of his first novel, Speculations About Jakob, in West Germany, he emigrated to West Berlin by streetcar, leaving the East behind for good. Other novels, The Third Book About Achim, An Absence, and Two Views, followed in quick succession. A member of the legendary Gruppe 47, Johnson lived from 1966 until 1968 with his wife and daughter in New York, compiling a high-school anthology of postwar German literature. On Tuesday, April 18, 1967, at 5:30 p.m., as he later recounted the story, he saw Gesine Cresspahl, a character from his earlier works, walking on the south side of Forty-Second Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue alongside Bryant Park; he asked what she was doing in New York and eventually convinced her to let him write his next novel about a year in her life. Anniversaries was published in four installments—in 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1983—and was quickly recognized in Germany as one of the great novels of the century. In 1974, Johnson left Germany for the isolation of Sheerness-on-Sea, England, where he struggled through health and personal problems to finish his magnum opus. He died at age forty-nine, shortly after it was published.

  DAMION SEARLS grew up on Riverside Drive in New York City, three blocks away from Gesine Cresspahl’s apartment. He is the author of three books and has translated more than thirty, including six for NYRB Classics.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Volume One copyright © 1970, 1971 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt

  Volume Two copyright © 1973, 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Damion Searls

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustrations by Joanna Neborsky

  Cover designs by Katy Homans

  Photograph of Uwe Johnson taking notes on the New York City subway by Klaus Podak, 1983

  Originally published in German as Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl.

  Publishing rights reserved and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

  Portions of articles that originally appeared in The New York Times during 1967 and 1968 are copyright The New York Times and are used here by permission.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from Goethe-Institut using funds provided by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  The translator and publisher wish to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Uwe Johnson Society’s Peter Suhrkamp Stipend for their generous support.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Johnson, Uwe, 1934–1984 author. | Searls, Damion translator.

  Title: Anniversaries : from a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl / by Uwe Johnson ; translated by Damion Searls.

  Other titles: Jahrestage. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010220 (print) | LCCN 2018012166 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372044 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372037 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PT2670.O36 (ebook) | LCC PT2670.O36 J313 2018 (print) | DDC 833/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010220

  ISBN 978-1-68137-204-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  August 1967–December 1967

  PART TWO

  December 1967–April 1968

  Appendix to Part Two

  Through Cresspahl’s Eyes

  PART THREE

  April 1968–June 1968

  PART FOUR

  June 1968–August 1968

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  With thanks to

  Peter Suhrkamp

  Helen Wolff

  ANNIVERSARIES

  From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl

  Volume One

  UWE JOHNSON

  Translated from the German by

  DAMION SEARLS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  PART ONE

  August 1967–December 1967

  LONG WAVES beat diagonally against the beach, bulge hunchbacked with cords of muscle, raise quivering ridges that tip over at their very greenest. Crests stretched tight, already welted white, wrap round a cavity of air crushed by the clear mass like a secret made and then broken. The crashing swells knock children off their feet, spin them round, drag them flat across the pebbly ground. Past the breakers, the waves pull the swimmer across their backs by her outstretched hands. The wind is fluttery; in low-pressure wind like this, the Baltic Sea used to peter out into a burble. The word for the short waves on the Baltic was: scrabbly.

  The town is on a narrow spit of the Jersey shore, two hours south of New York by train. They’ve fenced off the wide sandy beach and sell tickets to out-of-towners for forty dollars a season; retirees in uniforms slump at the entrances and keep an eye out for the badges on the visitors’ clothes that grant admission. The Atlantic is free for those who live in the beach houses, which sit sedately on the stone embankment above the hurricane line, with their verandas, two-story galleries, colorful awnings, under complicatedly slanting roofs. The dark-skinned help who live here fill their own church, but Negroes are not supposed to buy houses or rent apartments or lie on the coarse white sand. Jews, too, are not welcome here. She is not sure whether Jews were still allowed to rent houses in the fishing village near Jerichow before 1933; she cannot remember any signs prohibiting it from the years that followed. Here, she has borrowed a bungalow on the bay side for ten days, from friends. The people in the house next door receive the mail and read the postcards that the child writes to “Dear Miss C.” from summer camp, but they insist on calling her “Mrs. Cresspahl,” and seem to want to see her too as a Catholic of Irish descent.

  Guh-ZEE-neh CRESS-påll

  Kick er heel n make er fåll

  The sky has been bright for a long time, blue with white clouds, the horizon line hazy. The light presses her eyelids shut. Much of the sand between the expensive deck chairs and the blankets is unoccupied. Words from nearby conversations penetrate her sleep as though from a past. The sand is still heavy with yesterday’s rain and can be pushed and shoved into firm soft pillows. Tiny airplanes pull banners across the sky praising drinks and stores and restaurants. Farther out, over the crowded mass of sport-fishermen’s boats, two jet fighters practice getting their bearings. The waves crash with the impact of heavy artillery and spray apart with the same thundering sounds as in the war movies that the village movie house plays at night. A few drops of rain wake her up and again she sees the bluish field of a sloping roof’s shingles in the darkening light as a furry thatched roof in a part of Mecklenburg, on another shore.

  To the municipal council of Rande, near Jerichow: As a former citizen of Jerichow, and a formerly regular visitor to Rande, may I politely request the following information: How many summer guests of the Jewish faith were recorded in Rande before 1933? Thank you for your assist
ance.

  In the evening the beach is hard from the wetness, drilled with pores, and it presses the fragments of mussel shells more sharply against her soles. The waves surging back out to sea hit her ankles so hard that she often stumbles. When she stands still, the water digs the ground out from under her feet in two streams, washes it away. After rains like this, the Baltic washed a delicate, almost even foam onto the land. There was a game played while running along the Baltic shore, where a child would give a sudden knock to the side of the foot of the child in front, the child who she was, at just the moment when she’d lifted that leg to move it forward, and this would hook her foot behind the heel of the leg her weight was on. The first time she fell she had no idea what had happened. She heads toward the lighthouse whose recurring flash cuts larger and larger segments out of the blue shadows. Every few steps, she tries to let the waves push her off her feet, but she cannot recapture that feeling somewhere between stumbling and hitting the ground.

  Can you teach me the trick, Miss C.? It might not be known in this country.

  Shooting has resumed on the Israeli-Jordanian front. In New Haven, citizens of African descent are said to be breaking shopwindows, throwing Molotov cocktails.

  The next morning, the earliest coast train to New York, a decrepit thing with mortgage plates mounted on the sides under the railroad company’s name, has pulled up to the open field by the bay. Jakob wouldn’t have let such neglected train cars leave the siding. The streaky windows frame pictures of whitewashed wooden houses in gray light, private docks in the marinas, breakfast terraces half awake under thick leafy shadows, mouths of rivers, last glimpses of the sea past the harbors, views of vacations in years past. Were they vacations? In the summer of 1942, in Gneez, Cresspahl put her on a train to Ribnitz and explained how to get from the station to the harbor. The separation upset her so much that she didn’t think to be scared of the trip. To her, the Fischland steamboat ferry in the Ribnitz port had looked like a fat black duck. Setting out on the Saal lagoon, she had kept her eyes on the Ribnitz church tower, and the Körkwitz tower, then memorized the Neuhaus dune, facing backward the whole way to Althagen. She didn’t want to get lost on the way back to the railroad, to Jerichow, later. In the summer of 1942, Cresspahl wanted his child out of town. In 1951 he’d sent her away to southeast Mecklenburg, five hours from Jerichow. The Wendisch Burg train station was at a higher elevation than the city and from the end of the blue sand platform you could see the eastern edge of Bottom Lake, dull in the afternoon light. Only when she reached the barrier did she notice that Klaus Niebuhr had been watching her stand there indecisively—he’d been there the whole time, not saying a word, leaning comfortably on the railing, nine years older than the child that she was remembering. He had brought a girl named Babendererde with him. She was one those girls with a carefree smile, and Gesine nodded cautiously when Klaus said her name. She was also afraid he knew why Cresspahl didn’t want her in Jerichow for the time being. Those were hardly vacations. The train rolls unhurriedly into small-town squares, commuters in suits step out of the early-morning half-light under the shelters, each one alone with his briefcase, and go to sleep in reclined seats on the train. Now the sun is darting out over the rooftops, hurling fistfuls of light across low-lying fields. The branch line from Gneez to Jerichow ran in large detours around the villages; the stations were toy red-brick buildings with gabled tar roofs and a few people with shopping bags waiting in front. The students taking the train to school lined up on the platforms in such a way that by Gneez they would all be gathered in the third and fourth compartments behind the luggage car. Jakob learned the railroad along this line. Jakob, in his black work smock, looked down from his brakeman’s cab at the group of high-school students with such tolerant impassivity that it was as though he didn’t want to acknowledge Cresspahl’s daughter. At nineteen he might have still categorized people by their social class. From New Jersey’s blighted rusty morasses the train tottered over spindly bridges up into the Palisades and down into the tunnel under the Hudson to New York, and she has been standing in the center aisle, in the line of weekenders and day-trippers, for a while now, occasionally moving six inches forward, ready to run for the train door, the escalator, the maze of construction fences in Penn Station, to the West Side subway line, the train to Flushing, up the escalator from the blue dome on the corner of Forty-Second Street at Grand Central Terminal. She is not allowed to get to her desk more than an hour late, and that hour late is permitted only today, after her vacation.

  August 21, 1967 Monday

  Clearing weather in North Vietnam permitted air attacks north of Hanoi. The navy bombed coastal targets from the air and fired eight-inch guns into the demilitarized zone. Four helicopters were shot down in South Vietnam. The racial disorders in New Haven continued yesterday with fires, shattered store windows, and looting; another 112 people arrested.

  Next to the pile of newspapers sits a small, cast-iron bowl. The merchant’s hand darts out, curled into a scoop, even before she has had a chance to toss her coin in. He seems hostile—his money has been snatched up one too many times by people walking past on the open street.

  I got my neck shot up for this, lady.

  Yesterday afternoon, the body of the American who failed to return to his hotel in Prague last Wednesday night was found in the Vltava River. Mr. Jordan, fifty-nine years old, had worked for the Joint, a Jewish relief organization. He had gone out to buy a newspaper.

  The canyon floor of Lexington Avenue is still in shadow. She remembers the taxis jostling on the street in the morning, stopped mid-turn by a traffic light whose red the pedestrians can exploit to cross the eastbound oneway street and during whose green they are permitted to obstruct the waiting cars. She did not hesitate to walk toward its warning words. She has been coming here a long time, elbows tucked in, attentive to the rhythm of the people alongside her. She avoids the blind beggar clinking his out-held cup and grunting angrily. She didn’t understand him this time either. She is walking too slow, her gaze wanders, she is still in the process of returning to the city. The wail of sirens—swelling, dwindling, erupting fiercely again behind faraway blocks—has hung in the air between the tall towers of windows ever since she left. Hot backlight blasts down at an angle from the side street. She walks with her eyes on the dazzling concrete, next to a black marble facade whose mirror tints the faces, painted sheet metal, canopies, shirts, shopwindows, and dresses darker. She turns off into a white-lit passage from which the smell of ammonia detaches itself bite by bite from the narrow spring-loaded door and wafts into the air. Only employees know about this entrance.

  She is thirty-four years old now. Her daughter is almost ten. She has lived in New York for six years. She has worked in this bank since 1964.

  I imagine: The tiny grooves under her eyes were lighter than the tanned skin of her face. Her hair, almost black, cut short on all sides, has gotten lighter. She looked sleepy. She hasn’t had a real conversation with anyone for a while. She took off her sunglasses only after she was behind the door’s flashing panes of glass. She never wears sunglasses pushed up into her hair.

  She took barely any pleasure in the rage of the drivers defeated, day after day, by a traffic light on Lexington Avenue. She came to New York with a car, a Swedish convertible, that spent two years being eaten away by de-icing salt at the base of Ninety-Sixth Street, across from the three garages. She has always taken the subway to work.

  I imagine: During her lunch break she rereads that a man was rowing on the Vltava in Prague until he reached the May First Bridge. There he saw a New York Jew who had left his hotel to buy a newspaper, hanging on a water barrier. (She’s heard that in Prague English-language newspapers are sold only in hotels.)

  Until five years ago, all she knew of Prague were the nighttime streets a taxi takes to get from the main train station to the Střed station.

  You American? Hlavní nádraží dříve, this station, earlier, Wilsonovo nádraží. Sta-shun. Woodro
w Wilson!

  She would have had to say yes because she was carrying an American passport in her pocket. She’s forgotten the name on the passport. This was in 1962.

  I imagine: In the evening, under a sky already grown cloudy, she comes up out of the Ninety-Sixth Street subway station onto Broadway and sees, in the opening of the bridge under Riverside Drive, a green glade—sees past the fringes of foliage in the park the flat river whose hidden banks guide its flow into an inland lake in an August forest in dry, scorched silence.

  She lives on Riverside Drive, in a three-room apartment below the tops of the trees. The light inside is tinged green. To the south, next to thick clouds of leaves, she can see the lights on the bridge, and behind them the lights on the parkway. The fading light makes the streetlights brighter. The sound of the motors blends together and beats against the window in regular, even waves, not unlike the surf at the sea. From Jerichow to the shore was an hour on foot, along the marsh and then between the fields.

  August 22, 1967 Tuesday

  Two US Navy jets were shot down yesterday over mainland China. The Department of Defense identified 32 men as killed in action in Vietnam. US Marines counted 109 North Vietnamese killed. The gang in the South promises completely honest and impartial elections.

  Yesterday in New Haven, shopwindows were broken and fires set once again. The policemen, wearing blue helmets and carrying rifles, fired tear gas. Arrests brought the total to 284, nearly all Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

  The newspaper stand on the southwest corner of Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street is a green tent built around a core of aluminum boxes. The local magazines are laid out in overlapping rows on the left; the piles of daily newspapers are on the right, at the front; outside, on the right, are the European imports, secured with crusted-over weights. The stand gives advance notice of the day’s weather to the people who live around the corner: when it adds on more roof, with bars and cloth, rain is on the way. The old man with the greasy visored cap who works the morning shift feels entitled to his moods. His right hand is deformed but he insists on having clients put their money between his crooked fingers, and every morning he practices digging coins out of the pit of his crippled hand with his fat thumb. This morning he doesn’t return her greeting.