Anniversaries Read online

  He knows this customer: she comes walking up Ninety-Sixth Street at ten past eight every workday, she always has exact change, and she tries to read the New York Times headlines while she’s slipping the paper out from under its paperweight. She usually goes to work empty-handed; she goes down into the subway station with the paper under her arm, always catching the same train (which he hears through the grating in the middle of Broadway, arriving right after she goes down the stairs). She says Good morning as though she had learned it at a school up north, but she was not born in this country. The vendor also knows this customer’s child, from Saturdays, when they walk down the street together with their shopping cart; the child, a ten-year-old girl with a round head like her mother’s but sandy-blond foreign braids, says Good morning as though she had learned it at P.S. 75, a block away, and she comes in secret on Sunday mornings to get a paper consisting solely and entirely of comic strips. The customer knows nothing about that, nor the fact that the child rarely has to pay for it. The customer never buys any paper but The New York Times.

  You won’t say Good morning tomorrow, lady. All this fuss.

  Gesine Cresspahl buys The New York Times at the stand on weekdays; home delivery might not make it before she has to leave. On the platform she folds the pages lengthwise and then again, so that she can keep hold of the paper during the crush through the subway doors and can read the first page of the eight-column wand from top to bottom, squeezed between the elbows and shoulders, swept along underground for fifteen minutes until she is able to proceed on foot. When she travels to Europe, she asks her neighbor to keep his issues, and when she returns she spends whole weekends catching up from the foot-high piles on the New York time she has missed. On her lunch break she clears off her desk and reads around in the pages behind the front page, her elbows planted on the edge of the desk, European-style. Once, on a visit to Chicago, she walked two miles down a snowy, windswept street of boarded-up apartment buildings until she found a New York City edition, not from that date, in a pro-Chinese bookstore, as though only what was printed out of town could be believed. On her way home from work, the three lengthwise folds have been so strongly carved into the paper that the columns submissively fall open, fold down to the right, swivel over to the left, under the fingers of one hand, like the keys of a musical instrument; she uses her other hand to hold the strap in the crowded, swaying subway car. Once, after midnight, she walked cautiously down the hot side streets, keeping her eyes straight ahead, past groups of whispering people and a brawl around a drunk or unconscious woman, to Broadway, filled at that hour with policemen, prostitutes, and drug addicts, and bought the earliest edition of The New York Times and opened it under the acetylene lamp on the gable of the kiosk and found the news that was now truer than the sensational headline she had not been able to believe from the afternoon paper (namely that in Berlin Mrs. Enzensberger had tried to finish off the vice president with bombs made of custard powder). She keeps the crumpled, floppy paper under her arm until she has passed through her apartment door and then reads the financial pages again over dinner—this time for work. If spending a day at the beach has made her miss getting the paper, then that evening she keeps her eye on the subway floor and every garbage can she passes, in search of a thrown-out, torn-up, stained New York Times from that day, as though it alone were proof of the day having existed. The New York Times accompanies her and stays home with her like a person, and when she studies the large gray bundle she gets the feeling of someone’s presence, of a conversation with someone, whom she listens to and politely answers, with the concealed skepticism, the repressed grimace, the forgiving smile, and all the other gestures she would nowadays make to an aunt, not a relative but a universal, imagined Auntie: her idea of an aunt.

  August 23, 1967 Wednesday

  The air force flew 132 missions over North Vietnam yesterday. Under a picture of the wreckage of an airplane in Hanoi, the newspaper writes that the Communists say that the picture shows a US plane that has been shot down. The photo was important enough for the front page, but only on the sixth page, set below news from Jerusalem, do we find the official death tally: forty soldiers, with only the dead from the New York area listed by name, fifteen lines of local news.

  Last night, five hundred police patrolled the Negro neighborhoods in New Haven, stopping and searching cars, shining floodlights into windows, arresting one hundred. And if she had been at Foley Square yesterday afternoon instead of walking down West Ninety-Fifth Street toward the park—still wetly blurred, with the river in the middle of the picture—she could have heard a leader of the radical African Americans shout that they were at war with the whites and they better get themselves some guns. She imagines she would have watched the policemen’s faces, one of which is visible under the raised black fist in the newspaper with a skeptical expression, almost that of a wise elder, still with an aftertaste of the beatings that had just taken place.

  In August 1931, Cresspahl was sitting on a shady lawn in Travemünde with his back to the Baltic, reading a five-day-old English newspaper.

  He was in his forties then, big-boned, broad-shouldered, with a firm stomach above his belt. In his gray-green corduroy suit with knickerbockers he looked more rustic than the other spa guests around him; he carried himself carefully, his hands were massive, but the waiter saw when he raised one and soon put a beer down next to it, not without a comment or two. Cresspahl answered with a soft, inattentive grunt. He looked over the top of his crumpled newspaper at a table in the sunny middle of the lawn, where a family from Mecklenburg was sitting, but in an absentminded way, as though he’d had enough of his out-of-date news. He was chubby in the face then, with dry, already tough skin. His long face was narrower at the brow. His hair was still blond, cut short, unruly. He had an observant look, hard to interpret, and his lips were slightly protruding, as in the picture in his passport that I stole from him twenty years later.

  He had left England five days before. In Mecklenburg he had married his sister off to Martin Niebuhr, a foreman for the Department of Waterways. He’d paid for the dinner at the Waren Ratskeller. He’d looked Niebuhr over for two long days before giving him a thousand marks, as a loan. He’d paid the fees for the next twenty years for his father’s grave in the Malchow cemetery. He’d set up an annuity for his mother. He’d bought his way free, had he not? He’d spent one day visiting a cousin in Holstein and helping him bring in the grain crop. He’d renewed his passport for five years, as required by the naturalization regulations. He still had twenty-five pounds in his pocket and did not want to spend much of it before he was back in Richmond, with his workshop full of expensive equipment, with a reliable clientele, with his two rooms on Manor Grove in a house he had made an offer on. He’d revisited during this trip the places where he had been a child, where he had learned his trade, where he had been called up into the war, where the Kapp putschists had locked him in a potato cellar, where now the Nazis and the Communists were beating one another up. He was not planning to come back to Germany again.

  The air was dry and moved swiftly. Warm shadows fluttered. The sea breeze pushed scraps of the spa concert into the lawn. It was peacetime. The picture is chamois-colored, yellowing slightly. What did Cresspahl see in my mother?

  In 1931 my mother was twenty-five years old, the second-youngest of the Papenbrock daughters. In family photos she stands in the back, hands clasped, head tilted slightly to one side, unsmiling. You could tell by looking at her that she’d never had to work. She was the same medium height as me and wore her hair, our hair, in a chignon—dark hair, falling loosely, framing her small, submissive, faintly yellowish face. At that particular moment she looked worried. She seldom raised her eyes from the tablecloth and was kneading her fingers as though she were practically helpless. She alone had noticed that the man watching her, steadily, without a nod, had followed them from the Priwall ferry to the nearest free table on the lawn. Old Papenbrock leaned back in his chair with his whole weight and
grouched with the waiter, or else with his wife when the waiter was busy at another table. My grandmother, the sheep, said as though in church: Yes, Albert. Of course, Albert. The waiter stood next to Cresspahl and said: Not that I know of. For the weekend. A lot of people come up from the country. Good families. Yes, sir.

  I was pretty, Gesine.

  But he looked like a workman.

  That’s what we liked, Gesine.

  Cresspahl was waiting for the ferry to Priwall when the Papenbrocks came and stood in the front row; on the ferry he leaned against the barrier, his back to them. On the other side, he let them walk past him to Albert’s delivery truck and was soon lost among the people strolling beneath leafy trees through the streets of mansions. That evening, Cresspahl drove in a rented car back to Mecklenburg, via Priwall, along the Pötenitzer Wiek, along the coast, to Jerichow. My father, when his boat to England sailed from Hamburg, took a room at the Lübeck Court in Jerichow.

  Gesine Cresspahl is invited out for lunch sometimes, to an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue. There is a garden in back, between ivy-covered brick walls. The tables beneath the brightly colored umbrellas are covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, the street noise comes over the roof muffled, and the conversation is about the Chinese. What are the Chinese doing?

  The Chinese are setting fire to the British diplomatic compound in Peking and beating up the British envoy. That’s what the Chinese are doing.

  August 24, 1967 Thursday

  Five American warplanes have been shot down in North Vietnam. Seventeen military personnel were killed in combat in South Vietnam, among them Anthony M. Galeno of the Bronx.

  Police in the Bronx have discovered a cache of weapons: submachine guns, an antitank gun, dynamite, ammunition, hand grenades, rifles, shotguns, pistols, detonators. The four collectors—private citizens, patriots, members of the John Birch Society—had planned to kill the Communist Herbert Aptheker first, then protect the nation from its other enemies.

  When Gesine Cresspahl came to this city in the spring of 1961, it was supposed to be for two years. The porter had put the child on his luggage cart and dashed her exuberantly around the somewhat run-down French Line terminal; when he doffed his cap and tried to shake hands, the child put both of hers behind her back. Marie was almost four years old. After six days at sea she’d lost heart and no longer expected the new country to have the Rhine, her Düsseldorf kindergarten, her grandmother. Gesine still always thought of Marie as “the child,” and the child was of course powerless to stop her. Gesine was worried—this child, squinting darkly, shyly into the grimy light of West Forty-Eighth Street from under a white bonnet, could thwart the move.

  She had twenty days to find an apartment, and the child resisted New York on every last one of them. The hotel found her a German-speaking babysitter, an elderly, stiff-necked woman from the Black Forest in a tar-black dress, all ruffles and buttons. She could sing lieder by Uhland in a thin soprano voice, but she had retained more of her local dialect than she did the High German spoken in Freudenstadt twenty-five years ago; the child didn’t answer her. The child marched through the city with Gesine, refusing to let go of her hand, pressing against her in buses and subways, watchful to the point of suspicion, and letting herself be tricked into sleep by the monotonous movements of some vehicle only late in the afternoon. She hunched her head between her shoulders when Gesine read to her from the apartment listings in The New York Times: she couldn’t care less about doorman buildings or air-conditioning; she asked about ocean liners. She looked around with a kind of satisfaction in the apartments Gesine could afford, with their stingily chopped-up, shabbily furnished rooms, three windows looking out on a courtyard black as night and one on the bleak hard opposite facade, expensive only because it was free of Negro neighbors; these windows were nothing compared to the garden ones in Düsseldorf, she didn’t have to stand for these. The child did not take in one single English word, letting the shouts and hellos and compliments in hotel lobbies in buses in coffee shops pass over her as though she had gone entirely deaf. She answered only with a delayed furious shake of the head, eyelids lowered. She was so silently bent on going back that people called her well brought up again and again. She started to refuse her food, because the bread, the fruit, the meat tasted different. Gesine let herself resort to bribery and told her she could watch cartoons on TV; the child turned away from the screen, and not defiantly. The child stood at the window and looked down at the street, dark between the high buildings, where everything was different: the packs of taxis in blazing color, the whistling uniformed porters under their baldachins, the American flag on the Harvard Club, the policemen playing with their nightsticks, the white steam coming out of the central system vents, glowing in the strange and foreign night. She asked about airplanes. Gesine was relieved when the child, after days of observation, asked why some of the people here had dark skin, or why old women from the Black Forest were Jews. Most of their conversation was wordless, conducted in looks, in thoughts:

  can’t you just forget the whole thing, for me?

  Give me these two years. Then we’ll go back to West Germany for as long as you want.

  So you might change your mind

  On the twelfth day, for the child’s sake, Gesine stopped looking in Manhattan and tried one of the nicer residential parts of Queens. The train clambered out of the tunnel under the East River onto the tall stilts opposite the United Nations, and the child, dispirited and bossy, looked at the jagged, superhumanly high skyline of the other shore and then at the low squalid boxes, the single-story wasteland (as a writer once said) on either side of the tracks. In Flushing, though, they found wide park boulevards between grassy slopes in the shade of old trees, loosely ringed by white wooden houses keeping their distance from one another, rustic-style slate roofs, and Gesine was no longer secretly apologizing to the child. The child said: Shouldn’t we look near the water instead?

  The broker on the main street was a staid man with a soft voice, over fifty, white. When he took off his glasses, he looked experienced. Age made him seem reliable. He had some furnished apartments in the wooded areas, with steps down to the gardens, swimming pools around the corner. Gesine could afford to live here. The man smiled at the child, now stiff with anger that the move seemed to have really happened. He talked about the area, called it respectable and Jewish, and said: Don’t worry, we keep the shwartzes out. Gesine snatched the child from the chair and her bag from the table in one motion and was out on the sidewalk, making sure to slam the glass door with a bang behind her, too.

  That evening they sat in a restaurant at Idlewild Airport and watched the planes taxi out onto the runways and start across the ocean against a swarthy sky. She tried to explain to the child that the broker had thought she was Jewish, and thought she was a better person than a Negro. The child wanted to know what You bastard of a Jew meant, and realized that miracles do exist. She saw the suitcase with her toys being wheeled out of the hotel, felt herself on the plane already, back home tomorrow. Gesine was ready to give up. You can’t live among such people.

  The West German government wants to completely eliminate the statute of limitations for any murder and genocide committed during the Nazi regime, maybe.

  Light artillery can be ordered by mail, but a license is required for a handgun, and she doesn’t want to go to the police.

  August 25, 1967 Friday

  Rain has been falling in the city since last night, the thudding sound of the cars on the Hudson River parkway muffled to a low whoosh. This morning, the slurping sound of the tires on the dripping-wet pavement under her window wakes her up. The rainy light has hung darkness between the office buildings on Third Avenue. The small stores tucked into the base of the skyscrapers cast meager, small-town light out into the wetness. When she switched on the overhead fluorescent light in her office, its glow hemmed in by the darkness painted a picture of homeyness in her boxy cell, for a moment. The child comes back from summer camp
today.

  In the evening, the bank building’s brow, not far above her floor, is draped in fog. Seen from the street, the executives’ windows give a watery twinkle. Sinking ships.

  Later that evening, she’s waiting for the child at the snack counter of the George Washington Bridge bus station, smoking and chatting lazily with the waitress, newspaper under her arm. The paper is folded along the same crease as when she fished it out from under the canopy of the newspaper stand; she’s saved it for the hour she has to wait. She gives herself permission not to start on the front page and instead choose articles from the table of contents.

  A federal court has indicted twenty-five persons in connection with the $407,000 in travel checks that disappeared from J. F. Kennedy Airport last summer. They’ve tracked down the man who resold the checks for a quarter of their face value, as well as the man who disposed of them at half their value, and also the people who cashed them, but have yet to find whoever actually knocked the package of checks off the luggage truck. The man who presumably squealed the information was found on July 11, shot dead in a ditch outside of Monticello. A little message from the Mafia.

  The child had sent her a postcard with her arrival time: on the front is a photo showing her in a rowboat with other children. Marie has one leg trailing in the water and a wide dark bandage around her shin. She looks quiet and fearless amid the others’ grimaces. She’d banged her shin against her water-ski binding. She is not one meter forty-seven: she is four foot ten. Her handwriting has the curves and loops of the American model. When she multiplies, she writes the multiplicator under, not next to, the multiplicand. She thinks in Fahrenheit, gallons, miles. Her English is better than Gesine’s, better in articulation, intonation, accent. German is for her a foreign language, which she uses with her mother to be polite, in a flat tone, pronouncing her vowels the American way, often hunting for the right word. When she speaks English the way she does naturally, Gesine doesn’t always understand her. She wants to be baptized when she turns fifteen, and she has managed to make the nuns in the private school farther uptown on Riverside Drive call her M’ri instead of Mary. She was supposed to be expelled from that school anyway, for refusing to take off her GET OUT OF VIETNAM button in class. She changes out of her blue school uniform with the crest over the heart as soon as she gets home; she likes to wear sneakers and tight pants made of white poplin, whose hems she’s cut off with a kitchen knife. She has lost almost none of the friends she’s made during her six years here, and she still talks about Edmondo from Spanish Harlem, who even in kindergarten could express his feelings only with his fists and who was institutionalized for life in 1963. She has slept over in many apartments on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. She is in demand as a babysitter for small children, but she is strict with them, occasionally rough. She knows Manhattan’s subway system by heart—she could work at an information booth. What she types in her room she keeps in a portfolio tied with knots that cannot be reproduced. She secretly looks in Gesine’s box of photographs, and she used her own pocket money to make a copy of a picture that shows Jakob and Jöche outside the train conductor’s school in Güstrow. She has forgotten her Düsseldorf friends. She knows West Berlin from the newspapers. A lot of businesses on Broadway are obliged to pay her tribute—Maxie’s with peaches, Schustek’s with slices of bologna, the liquor store with chewing gum. When she slips up and says that after all Negroes are just Negroes, she bobs up and down and makes a gesture with her outturned palms as though pushing back against Gesine and says: Okay! Okay!