by Uwe Johnson
Forgive me for asking a favor of you, but could you please go to the cemetery and see if the Creutzes have covered my three graves for the winter? It’s not that I care so much about the custom of tending to graves, it’s that even if Erich Creutz decides he wants to do something for my money, Emmy Creutz tries to stop him, and I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of putting one over on the daughter when she couldn’t put one over on old Cresspahl.
My dear Herr Kliefoth, I wish you a happy New Year, your eighty-second, and an otium cum dignitate. Yours very sincerely, G. C.
December 24, 1967 Sunday
Right under the dateline on the first page, The New York Times publishes two pictures, as though they go together, are neighbors or family: President Johnson pinning medals on American soldiers yesterday at Camranh Bay, a huge base in South Vietnam: left. President Johnson with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican yesterday, glancing past the gesturing pontiff, his face in jovial laugh lines: right.
Because it’s Christmas?
As the quotation of the day, she offers: “We are ready at any moment to substitute the word and the vote for the knife and the grenade in bringing honorable peace to Vietnam.”
Because it’s Christmas?
On Christmas in 1936 my mother wasn’t dead yet. Even in 1937 she was still alive for Christmas.
Our Lisbeth. “Fröln Papenbrock” the Jerichowers called her to her face, later “Fru Cresspahl,” but among themselves they talked about “Lisbeth,” even if Lübeck folks have a different idea of what counts as showing respect. Respect for the family, that was something for Rostock, not Jerichow, where it was Our Lisbeth ever since old man Papenbrock (“Albert”) spent the 1922 summer holidays there with his family. Not in the fancy hotels on the Rande beach but in Jerichow, in the Lübeck Court, they didn’t go swimming too much but took lots of vacation-y carriage rides on the nobility’s estates in the area, surveyor-y walks through town, and paid pointedly casual visits to the mansion off Market Square that the von Lassewitzes kept as their town house once they no longer had estates to spare. Papenbrock was thought to be someone looking to replace, in Jerichow, the estate lease he’d given up in Vietsen by Lake Müritz. No one thought his stay with his wife and son and daughters would give the entry in the Mecklenburg guidebooks the second line that Stoffregen the teacher thought St. Peter’s Church and the Lindemann stable yards deserved. Still, these out-oftowners were something to behold, even if Papenbrock clearly thought he was the cat’s pajamas. Ex-officer. Well, ex-captain. Big guy. Belly sometimes hung out past the curve of fabric he’d had tailored in Schwerin, well that’s what holidays are for, right? He had a familiar way of setting his eyes on narrow, of shifting his teeth in the corner of his mouth—lots of people did that nowadays, even if he’d seen a few more of his marks make their escape into dollars. Albert. Next to him in the carriage, equally impressive, sat his wife, Louise, but there was something fretful and complaining in the tone she was using to try to keep the two girls sitting across from her under a thumb that hadn’t been given her. Sonny Boy, Horst, was crabby mostly because he had to sit on the box next to the coachman, forced to be polite. Not much chance of him turning out to be a Papenbrock like his father. Hilde, the older girl, was a little condescending, when she asked for something at the table or was told she had to answer a local’s question; she clearly thought the Papenbrock name was magnificent. Lisbeth moved and sat among them calmly, didn’t grumble at the long family marches, nodded to the Jerichow children, plus she was her father’s darling and didn’t need to win him over. Maybe it was because she was the best rider of all three of them, constantly fearlessly jumping the paddock fences. She wasn’t even of age yet—just sixteen. We’ll call er Lisbeth if we want to, and to her face too, at the time.
All this noticed for future reference, and then in the summer of 1923 the Papenbrocks didn’t come back. Someone left. The von Lassewitzes packed up in the spring, the way they always did when the time came for their trip to Cans or however you say that French word, and if the nicer furniture was put into storage in Schwerin this time that must have meant it was finally time to redo the house. The house did need work. The sea wind had eaten away much of the flower work from the plaster garlands above the double row of front windows, the cats could apparently no longer handle the mice in the attic, and the parquet floor, people said it was like walking on the frozen Baltic. Calls for bids were put out, for repairs, even renovations; not by the family, instead by Dr. Avenarius Kollmorgen, who hadn’t been their lawyer before. It was misleading that Dr. Kollmorgen (“Avenarius”) was somewhat short; he didn’t answer questions, he just pursed his lips and brandished mysterious looks left and right and offered up sayings like the one about time eventually telling. He was probably keeping up with inflation. Still, he did assign contracts and paid in advance, not with the galloping German mark but in kind—in oil, in Finnish wood, in fertilizer, to be picked up at the harbors in Wismar or Lübeck. This was someone who wanted the work done fast but not shoddily. Avenarius had no complaints about the Jerichow workmen, except Zoll the carpenter in one instance, and in December 1923 the von Lassewitz furniture came back from Schwerin, sent not by a storage warehouse but by a restorer. Two days later there it was, the empty von Lassewitz mansion in pomp and splendor like a fairy-tale grand hotel, and up they came—the Papenbrock family by car, their servants by train, the household goods in a furniture truck from Waren on Lake Müritz. Lights on till late at night in all the windows. It was a good start. Albert had certainly diverted whole flocks of the post-inflation rentenmarks into his pockets, but what he hadn’t paid for in rentenmarks were the properties, and more Jerichowers than usual availed themselves of their right as citizens to examine the entries in the land registry office. Not the von Lassewitz place: there was another quarter block on the south end of Station Street, and the adjoining garden and house belonging to E. P. F. Prange, along with his business, now folded, selling fertilizer. There was Schwenn’s Bakery on the other side of the house, on Town Street, with the whole plot behind it, and a barn that everyone had forgotten all about, and this Papenbrock had the barn converted into a stable and granary. More than twice what anyone had expected, all in all. But it wasn’t a great start. Papenbrock had kept the von Lassewitz coat of arms on the gable—out of modesty: some said; others said: theres another word for it now isnt there. But anyone who wanted to meet Louise Papenbrock, considered a grand personage, could just walk into Schwenn’s Bakery any time it was open; it might belong to her, but still she stood behind the counter and cut the three-pound loaves in front of her breast so cleanly in half that weighing on a scale couldn’t do it any better. She knew how to work! And Sonny Boy, the kid, Horst, his dad shooed him into the granary yard to take care of the horses, like he was destined to grow up to be a coachman. The nobility could order their fertilizer from E. P. F. Prange’s shop, as always, although Prange himself had slunk off to his sons in Lauenburg. They only gradually started talking about how a different owner’s name was printed under Prange’s on the receipts. That was fine for the elder daughter’s wedding, some time around 1928, and the von Maltzahns came to the wedding too, even though Hilde’s husband was not from the nobility and not a doctor of law, which he was still studying. Alexander Paepcke. And by 1928 it was no secret that the German Railroad was sending its cars for wheat and sugar beets to the Jerichow station not on orders from the Lübeck or Bremen dealers but on account of Albert Papenbrock, Captain, ret., or maybe in the end he’d made it to Major, ret.? What else could explain it? It must have been before 1928! The railroad had already laid a track to Papenbrock’s granary in 1926, so he could negotiate his purchases deliberately, not on the spot. Clearly Albert’d made more money with his warehousing than you could tell by looking at him. And none of these princely manners! He got rid of his car, sold it to Knoop in Gneez, and drove the family around in the bakery delivery truck, and not too often neither. It was certainly safe to say that Papenbrock acted nice as could be wh
en someone went to him to borrow some money. It wasn’t him personally who came to the meeting when the interest hadn’t been paid for the third time, it was the state bank. Papenbrock couldn’t do anything about how the bank chose to act. And never in living memory opposed to a little schnapps, not in the office, not in the woodsmen’s pub where the benches were neither covered nor wiped. One, sure.
He didn’t feel Jerichow was good enough for the girls, not even Gneez was. Sent Hilde to a girls’ school in Lübeck. Lisbeth had to learn science in Rostock, and home ec too. She came back home for good only in June 1928, not even twenty-two years old, and she planned Hilde’s wedding and the social gatherings that the Papenbrock house was more inclined to indulge in than before, and she wasn’t the same Lisbeth as the one known round Jerichow.
Rich men’s daughters and poor men’s calves soon find a man, and Lisbeth was meant to marry into Lübeck, and she wanted to wait. Papenbrock let her. How could Papenbrock go against his favorite daughter in anything?
And he gives her to a carpenter from Malchow and lets her go with him to Richmond, in England, in 1931, to get her out of the bad times. Brings her back so she can have her baby, Gesine, in Jerichow, keeps the husband here with a workshop in the country, 1933, times don’t seem so bad anymore. And he watches for three years with his daughter living in the same town as him like an invalid, and he can stand it?
She doesn’t look thirty. If you didn’t know her you’d add five years on.
Always been pious, but now, when the kids come home from her Sunday school classes, they’re bringing a conscience that there’s no way you can use in everyday life.
Papenbrock has talks with the husband, Cresspahl, but on good terms, not as if he holds him responsible. Likes him better than his own sons.
Always such an open book. Now you don’t want to look at her.
Pinched. Pissed. No, not pissed—like she’s cooped up. As a girl, when she prayed at the mirror, she knew why she was doing it. Her eyes so big now, that’s what you recognize her from. Not her look—she looks at you like you wasnt there, like shes in the middle of having a bad dream.
Papenbrock stands with her outside church after Christmas service and wants to tell her something and can’t and crumples with such a sigh and walks off bent over like he just doesn’t know anymore.
How can Papenbrock not know?
Can it be that Papenbrock went about it wrong with Our Lisbeth?
December 25, 1967 Monday
Christmas. Still a day to be celebrated, and not even The New York Times can count on more than forty-four pages worth of attention.
On the first day of the Christmas celebration in 1936, Lisbeth Cresspahl was taken from her house to the county hospital. It came as such a surprise to Cresspahl that only later that day did he realize it was intentional.
He’d seen her for the last time early that morning, sleeping next to her long outstretched arms, her breathing shallow, her brows fiercely furrowed as if she had to defend the beneficent numbing of sleep and dream. She looked like herself, as she often did when she wasn’t awake. He still thought of her as the woman he’d married five years ago, young for him, happy to be alive for herself as well as for him. He even overlaid her words from back then onto her silences now. On many mornings he’d had the feeling that she was only pretending to be asleep; by this point he no longer wanted to ask her.
My father was in the kitchen, lighting the stove for the child sitting enthroned in a pile of pillows and blankets on the high chair from Vietsen, watching him in anticipation, happy, trusting. She had often had breakfast with him. The kitchen had kept the warmth of the previous evening, the big south-facing window was like a mirror before the morning-dark sky. The glow from the hanging lamp sat low over the table and made the Dutch tiles shine. When Dr. Berling arrived, it was barely light out.
Dr. Berling may not have realized that Cresspahl didn’t know about his wife’s phone call. He walked in through the front door, announced his presence by stomping up the stairs, was in the kitchen, walked right past the father with an aggravated greeting as he was spooning warm milk into his child’s mouth, clearly unalarmed; he pulled the bedroom door shut behind him, and closed it again when Cresspahl tried to follow him. Came back, suddenly solicitous and gentle, moving quickly for all his bulk, and sent Cresspahl scurrying with one instruction after another: get blankets, prepare hot-water bottles, pack a set of clothes, call ahead to the Gneez county hospital but don’t ask for an ambulance, get something waterproof for the bleeding, go on, go on. The child only started screaming when she was left alone in the kitchen, and Cresspahl carried his wife across the snowy yard to Berling’s car, a limp and awkward bundle. Her head hung back, it looked painful, but he couldn’t manage to jut his elbow out any farther while carrying her. With pupils so rolled back she couldn’t see a thing, much less him.
The Berling who took his leave from Cresspahl that morning was no longer the one from 1933 who used to clap people on the shoulder “as a preventative measure,” the one with the playful turns of phrase, who infected patients with his health, who cut short complaints almost as if insulted. Today’s looked at you just as closely but not with the same vehement encouragement, listened more patiently, even nodded, his fat fleshy face impassive, even gloomy on occasion. He no longer drank where someone might overhear him; he spent his evenings at home. So many capillaries had burst in his cheeks that he was nicknamed “the blue devil.” A big man, six and a half feet, two and a quarter hundredweight, sturdy like a butcher, grown sad over the years that were supposed to have been his best. And Jerichow didn’t hear from Berling that young Mrs. Cresspahl had just lost a child, only what he’d recommended and decreed to Cresspahl with a last nod before driving off: Se hett wat ætn. She ate something. Something you shouldn’t.
For a while, Cresspahl thought it was an accident; he was also glad that the accident hadn’t come at a bad time. It was the quiet season, between the holidays. The workers had gone home; he had no one to take care of but the child. And after all, Lisbeth’s last strength, for the call to Berling, could have been what she’d had left, not what she’d saved on purpose. He didn’t even have to tell the Papenbrocks anything right away if he didn’t want to, or the Paepckes across the street. They were still asleep, Jerichow was still asleep. Later he didn’t understand everything Berling tried to explain to him from Lisbeth’s feverish talking: the carpentry work was in gear again; Lisbeth was long since keeping the household running again, tired, unyielding, and, yes, pale in the face like someone who’d been poisoned by something she’d eaten.
Dr. Berling said:
My mother had wanted to lose her own life along with the second child, to escape her guilt.
She knew many kinds of guilt, on that drive through the snow and during the operation, and some weren’t hers at all, and yet were, in the end, part of hers.
She was guilty of going to England in 1931 with my father, secretly knowing that though she did want to live with him she didn’t want it to be abroad. My father, of course, was guilty of having believed her. So much belief and trust is more than a person can bear.
She had wanted to flee this guilt and she came back to Mecklenburg for the birth. But a Christian should not flee from guilt, and Cresspahl was guilty of letting that happen.
Her guilt had then acquired numerous offshoots and relations. Not only had she returned to the manifold guilt of her father, who loaned money to poor people and demanded their houses in repayment, so that now they worked for him. (She might have meant Zoll the master carpenter, whom Papenbrock had “bought out”; but who else?) She had then wanted to stay in a country whose new government was oppressing the church, with a family who certainly could be accused of profiting from the new regime, with a brother who was accused of Voss’s murder in Rande. Cresspahl, for his part, was guilty of not putting a stop to the increase in hers. He had given in to her about the move. But the husband should decide. As the Bible says. He had decided, wrong
ly, as she wanted.
Cresspahl was guilty of her guilt not being enough for him. He wanted to bring a share of it into the world, not only for the one child, Gesine, but three more. As she had promised him. But doesn’t the New Testament say you should forgive the poor sinner his debts? Cresspahl was also guilty of not explicitly releasing her from her promise, while of course it was hers that she couldn’t express her need for him to do so. But he made her feel her guilt, by spending the evenings writing and drawing over a bottle of Richtenberg kümmel until he could forget her promise.
She was guilty of not living with him the way she had vowed to do in church, hand on the Bible. But didn’t the Bible also say: men should “crucify the flesh with the affections and lusts”? Galatians 5:24. Cresspahl was guilty of being unwilling to accept this from her; she remained guilty of doubting the words of the Holy Scripture.
So as not to retain so much guilt, nor multiply it, she had tried to commit a greater sin: protecting an unborn child from guilt, yes, but giving away her own life. It’s true, God doesn’t make deals. Still, it would have represented a kind of repaying of something. For Cresspahl’s guilt too.
Which, fundamentally, remained hers: for she hadn’t wanted to let herself be saved. She had not obeyed her husband. Back in early 1935, when he had wanted to go away and leave the Germans’ new war. Why hadn’t she taken it as an order?