Anniversaries 1 by Uwe Johnson, translated by Damion Searls
If only the mind could contain the past in the same receptacles we use for categorizing present reality! But the brain, in recalling the past, does not use the same many-layered grid of terrestrial time and causality and chronology and logic that it uses for thinking. (The concepts of thinking do not even apply here. And this is what we’re supposed to live our life with!) The repository of the mind is not organized to provide copies, in fact it resists retrieving things that have happened. When triggered, even by mere partial congruence, or at random, out of the blue, it spontaneously volunteers facts and figures, foreign words, isolated gestures. Give it an odor that combines tar, rot, and a sea breeze, the sidelong smell from Gustafsson’s famous fish salad, and ask it to fill with content the emptiness that was once reality, action, the feeling of being alive—it will refuse to comply. The blockade lets scraps, splinters, shards, and shavings get through, merely so that they can be scattered senselessly across the emptied-out, spaceless image, obliterating all traces of the scene we were in search of, leaving us blind with our eyes open. The piece of the past that is ours, because we were there, remains concealed in a mystery, sealed shut against Ali Baba’s magic words, hostile, inapproachable, mute and alluring like a huge gray cat behind a windowpane seen from far below as though with a child’s eyes. (September 8, 1967 Friday, p. 53)
The car horns are tuned to a single note, but one modulated as the sound ricochets down brick and concrete channels, sideways, under bridges, upwards.The police sirens are almost an element of the air, adjustable from a polite whimper to the howl of berserkers. They are followed by the cars with beds for the dead.
Desperate shrieking of rails under Park Avenue in the Forties. The approach to Grand Central is the neck of the bottle that the police often use to describe traffic. Who wants to keep seeing all those trains under their feet? Are they anything more than a monument?
In the elevator, the buttons, soft receptacles for pressure, yield with a secret click when touched, as though in response to a good deed, and express their thanks with a yellow glow.
When the thermostats mandate a pause in the blowing of the air conditioners, everybody dies a little, because something they’re used to is gone and they can’t quite put their finger on what it was. Yet for a little while the ribs of the machine spew out absolutely no more cold air. As though someone would never breathe again.
The coins dance happily in the head of the coin counter that keeps bus drivers from one kind of dishonesty. And the nickels that the driver releases as change from a quarter sound fatter since the fare hike; now I can hear the silver in the dimes I used to get back.
The hospitable clatter of cheap silverware on the dining counters, the slapping down of the bill with what is almost a blow of the fist, and the plate placed with neatly sisterly attentiveness: There you go, darling.
And again the machine contentedly gulping subway token after subway token on behalf of the Transit Authority, down throats grinding with pleasure that the riders set chewing inside the three-armed turnstiles up to five times per minute, maybe six times a minute, that would be some sixteen hundred an hour in the four lanes, that’s too many, and yet there are more than that. And again the heavy rumbling noise, audible through all the sways and jolts and braking processes, which betrays the excessive weight of the payload and reflects it in the base of the skull as a feeling of almost dangerous pressure.
In the bar the man behind the counter puts down your glass with an uneven sound, and the other half of the base of the glass follows quick as an afterthought. Hesitantly perhaps he scoops up the coins placed on the counter and lets the prepared selection of three coins skip between two fingers against the countertop before ringing them up, after three inaudible steps to the register, by pressing on three keys, which snap into place and echo for some customers with the violence of thunderclaps, and like fate itself is the rough blow of the side of the hand slapping shut the drawer that has sprung out from the base. Sir.
“Off so soon, Mrs. Cresspahl?”
“Oh, here you are, Gesine.”
Late at night, the half-raised window. A defenseless ear to which cars driving by at liberal speeds patiently and yet again explain the Doppler effect, or into which sudden noises blast with no subtleties at all, buses starting up, creating the sonic world anew and carrying off the merely remembered one. Highway traffic noise, filtered through branches as thin as hairs, tests wind strengths of four to six, transmits groundswells and receding breakers, suspends pauses of wind, hurls waves like water—and now the comparison with the Baltic shuts the traffic out of this perception, replacing it with nothing.
In Queens not long ago, four blocks blew up with a noise one would expect from a gas main explosion, and the loved ones the residents the citizens of Queens told the paper: It was like something from outer space, like a cataclysm, somehow inhuman.
This is the sound I now hear from the apartment next door, from Vietnam. Like something from outer space, it is cataclysmic like flak shrapnel just before the sudden, dull, earthshaking impact of the bombs, it is human. Sir. (October 30, 1967 Monday, pp. 207-09)
[D.E.] wants “to live with us.” We are not even from the same place anymore. His past, the people, the country, Schusting Brand the cobbler, Wendisch Burg—he in no way regards them as real. He’s converted his memory into knowledge. His life with other people in Mecklenburg, only fourteen years ago after all, has been tucked away as though into an archive, where he continues the biographies of people and cities down to the present, or else closes the file in case of death. Yes, everything’s still there, and he can call it up at will, only it’s not alive. He no longer lives with it. He’d been in the States only a few years before he started using four dots to indicate rations in his lectures instead of the German two, a diagonal line for division instead of a horizontal one, as though that was what he’d been taught to do in Wendisch Burg: when he wrote on the blackboard his letters came out the way they do here, fluent, anonymous characters. . . .
. . . . He doesn’t presume to know me. When I do something he thinks of as particular to me, he smiles in recognition, but openly, not taking observations and secretly tucking them away for later use. If he does have a mental picture of me, it is of little more than my needs (as he understands them). He reveals a lot—all of it acceptable, much of it delightful. He doesn’t discuss Marie’s father with her, or even with me, but he knows everything about Jakob’s life that you can learn from letters to and from friends in Mecklenburg. He spends $70.00 a month on alcohol, damn right, and if you don’t like it you can lump it, and when he drinks alone he punishes himself by serving his Beaujolais chilled. He too has his quirks and prejudices that he offers up as careful observations or unquestionable facts: for example, he calls the DC-8 the most efficient plane in the world, when all he knows about flying is what you need to get a license to fly a single-engine propeller plane. He plays the game you’re supposed to play here, of showing off your money: he shows off a house, a Bentley, but he’s paying for the house in installments and the car is used and he does his flying in borrowed planes. He likes keeping his real assets secret from his neighbors. His behavior is steady and consistent; he doesn’t fly into rages. He has arrogated no habitual rights from his visits to us; he comes as a guest, every time. He’s not jealous: it’s only what goes on in my thoughts that he wants to be the only one, or at least the first, to know. There are many things he is the only one to know. What else does he want? Can’t he rest on the laurels of his famous affairs, and conveniently acquire a family that already has a child, one who already understands him too? He says: No. Am I supposed to do at my leisure, financed by him, what he can’t do: live for one person alone? He would say: If it were up to me. He would even spare me the endless acting of “social life.” He doesn’t even want children from me. If I ended up in a cage with him, at least it would be a cage made to my measure and furnished according to my requirements, down to whatever discretionary bank accounts and credit cards I wanted. The only thing is, why does he need someone in his life? (November 22, 1967 Wednesday, pp. 293-96)
— I never promised truth.
— Of course not. Only your truth.
— Come on, Gesine, there are some things you know.
— Friedrich Jansen’s leg-span meter. But I don’t know why my memory preserved that. Why not another view of him, or a more meaningful conversation?
— Memory the Cat, as you put it.
— Right. Independent, incorruptible, intractable. And yet a pleasant and beneficent companion, when it does show its face, even if it stays out of reach. (February 2, 1968 Friday, p. 579)
