by Uwe Johnson
Lisbeth said: Friedrich, as if speaking of a child who never learns and is always getting in a mess; or sometimes: Friederich, after the incurably horrid character in Struwwelpeter. The lines about the brute—“That Friederich! that Friederich! A naughty, wicked brute was he!”—were ones the Cresspahl child knew by heart, although she wasn’t afraid of him. When Lisbeth recited them, she meant a kid who gave himself airs but none of whose threats and wriggling came to anything.
When the Semigs left the country, Friedrich Jansen had wanted to buy the dog the Jews used to keep in their yard. There he stood, outside Cresspahl’s gate, sweating in the brisk sea wind, innocent as can be. When he refused to accept that Cresspahl was looking after the dog, Cresspahl whistled for King. Out he came running from behind the house across the yard, he took his place next to Cresspahl and looked up at him, not yet blindly devoted but friendly and obedient enough. He was six years old, his whole body taut, fast and strong, with nice shiny white teeth. – Well now, Rex?: Jansen said from the other side of the fence, all but squeaking with bonhomie. The dog opened his mouth just enough to let a warning growl escape and kept a close eye on this stranger. – Rex!: Jansen said reproachfully, and again his voice was too high, the vowel frying. Since Cresspahl didn’t move, the dog snarled again in his booming bass but stayed sitting. Now more than ever Jansen wanted to own this deviant dog, who had betrayed the Aryan race to the Jews, and Cresspahl had to sell him sooner than the child would have liked to an engineer in Berlin who had also taken a liking to him. After the dog was long since safely away and living in a garden in Grunewald, Jansen came by again and demanded to at least see his pedigree, and Cresspahl told him again that he had only been looking after the dog. So many different questions raced into Jansen’s head at once that all he could manage to say was: I thought—
He didn’t want to start cursing outright. By that point he was Cresspahl’s neighbor. He had no more acquired the Jew’s house than he had the Jew’s dog; he’d had to spend five years renting Dr. Erdamer’s house on the Rande road and now he was finally living in the brickworks villa, one of the most desirable addresses in town, because it had been built by a Schwerin banker as nothing but a residence, before the turn of the century—a spacious building, not at all blocky, with generous windows, high garden gates, an immaculate brick roof, in a watertight white oilskin. In front Friedrich Jansen now flew the flag with the Hindu symbol of good luck. With the villa came the brickworks, and the von Zelcks had given up possession only so they could reunite a feuding group of heirs under a single roof of cold hard cash. That was what they said. In the years since Paepcke’s lease, orders had declined since by that point almost every building in the area that the Greater German Reich needed for the war had its high brick walls, and the rest of the construction was due to be done in concrete. This they did not tell Friedrich Jansen. As for the villa, Jansen gained possession of not much more than the bill of sale, the mortgages took up so much room, and to acquire the brickworks he’d had to go in together with various party comrades, for as much he would have liked to use his office to pocket a fortune he wasn’t clever enough. Now he sat up late at night over the numbers his trustee extracted from the books, and he found them depressing and thought anxiously about his party friends. In 1933 Jansen Senior, a lawyer in Gneez, had accepted Friedrich’s contempt over his mistrust of the new regime and suchlike sonly rigidities, and now he refused to speak to the regional party leader in Jerichow, never mind answer any appeal for help. But a party at the height of the summer harvest, with festive lights and crowded picnic tables on the respectable lawn, with singing and shooting contests and toasts until after midnight, there had to be one of those. The von Bobziens (the same ones who refused to let the SA use their Countess Woods for maneuvers) owned a breeding bull by the name of Frederick the Great: Friedrich der Grosse. That was how he appeared in the official stud-book list, and since the regional breeding office hadn’t objected to the name, Friedrich the Jansen couldn’t either. The Bobziens liked showing him off even to guests who hadn’t brought a cow in heat at the end of a rope. It was a huge beast, lazy, spiteful, with a kind of stupid look in its eyes. “That’s how bulls are.” The sense of the German word Bullen that I learned just before Christmas as the English word pigs.
This Jansen remembered the two film reviews he had been permitted to submit during his student years, just as a test, and he spoke of “brilliant direction” as he listed off the stages of the Czech crisis in his fussy high-pitched voice. For him, the Henlein putsch of September 12 was more “Nordic cunning.” He had repeated his leaders’ phrases so often that he no longer thought about them and sometimes forgot a previous sentence by the time he got to the next one. He would try to fill up the resulting pauses with quick question debris: “Hmm? Well?” In Jansen’s view, Hitler’s September 26 speech in the Sportpalast was “genius” and other similarly adolescent words—precisely because it announced that he would soon break his word. For if “the Führer” wasn’t thinking about territorial demands, then why did he talk about them, even if to deny making them? – The world has been warned: Friedrich Jansen said darkly. He had caught up to Cresspahl on Brickworks Road and circled around him at once to keep him from walking away. He sounded scared sometimes, as though he himself were in danger if his listener refused to believe him. A tall pink fellow swinging his arms; an awkward dancer. So it was no loss that the Poles had been allowed to occupy the Teschen area and the strip of Slovakian borderlands from the Sudetenland haul, you had to chalk it up as a gain, psychologically speaking. Use a sprat to catch a mackerel. At this point Cresspahl looked at him. He came across like a drunken child, but his breath didn’t smell of liquor. By signing the Munich Agreement on September 29, the British had made themselves look foolish to all parties (a complete disgrace, to be honest). Cresspahl nodded again, several times, sincerely, and Jansen started to think that maybe he’d been wrong about this guy. Maybe there were special reasons the air force had for protecting him all the time. It was on the evening of October 1, when Hitler’s troops had marched into Czechoslovakia and Jansen was delightedly holding forth about the haul of forty thousand square kilometers, that’s four million hectares! four hundred million ares! Convert that to English measures, Cresspahl! All the border fortifications! A third of all the businesses! It was at this point that Jansen proclaimed his commander a statesman of true distinction, and for Cresspahl that was someone he had no connection with, who robbed him blind, who never thought of his gain but always the good of the state, a sheer enemy. And so he said, to Friedrich Jansen’s delight: No one can deny that, even if they wanted to.
Then he walked on, turned around after a few steps, and already he had Jansen at the point where Jansen would not only reemerge from his front yard but literally come running after him. Cresspahl had one more question, a philosophical one. Included with the territorial gains were human beings, yes?, upward of five million of them? Jansen spoke of a liberated borderland people and suchlike, at great length, even though he was already on his way to his hair of the dog. Cresspahl wouldn’t let himself be put off. There were other countries with German-speaking citizens, no?, what about Brazil? or Switzerland? How were they to become part of Greater Germany.
– Switzerland: Friedrich Jansen said: We’ve got our eye on that too!
February 1, 1968 Thursday
Yesterday, Mrs. Anne Deirdre Curtis, a slender young woman, five foot one, was seen by a neighbor at around four p.m. when she was coming home from shopping with her thirteen-week-old baby. When her husband, a twenty-seven-year-old medical student, returned to their apartment at 297 Lenox Road in Brooklyn at five thirty, he found his wife sprawled across the bed, covered in blood and clad only in a blouse and bra. The towel she’d been strangled with was wrapped around her neck. Her wrists bore marks indicating that she’d been tied up. Bits of broken glass and a broken clock lay scattered around the body. This suggested to the police that Mrs. Curtis had put up a struggle before being
raped and killed. The baby was lying unharmed in his carriage. The bag of groceries was in the baby carriage too.
February 2, 1968 Friday Groundhog Day
The day that the Mecklenburg Fox and Hare Almanac called Candlemas. The almanac said: In Candlemas week if the badger sees sun / He’ll go back to his hole for the four weeks to come. Here they have the Waldmurmeltier or Erdferkel, a groundhog, and if he comes out in Punxsutawney or Quarryville and sees his shadow and retreats back into hibernation then winter will last another six weeks; if he doesn’t see his shadow, spring is coming. What we have here, though, is fog and steady rain, and the doorman comes out onto West End Avenue under the baldachin of an umbrella.
Plenty of new arrivals to the Hotel Marseilles must be shocked when they get to the elevator and it takes them and their suitcases down to the basement, not up to their rooms, merely because one of the passengers is someone the man at the lever wants to drop off first, and to whom moreover he says goodbye in a well-practiced manner. He calls her Mrs. Cresspahl, he mentions a child in the water, and only then does he shut the door and the scissor gate and start the journey up to the floors above ground level.
A dry hallway carpeted in green felt leads from the window of the Mediterranean Swimming Club past magnificently varnished benches to the “Women’s Area.” The door shuts tight, and behind it damp air sheathes the bather like a second skin. A lot of noise is trapped in here—the sound of flowing and swashing water, children’s screams from the pool, casual conversations between cabins, the murmuring behind the hot walls of the sauna. Was it like this in Germany too? Did they walk around naked in the changing room, so uninhibited—schoolgirls, matrons, old women—eyeing one another at leisure under the spattering showers, with occasional compliments for a bosom or sympathy for a scar still red from an operation? The memory is gone. Forgotten. How was it then?
– Whatever you don’t know you’ll leave out, and I won’t know the difference: Marie says quietly. She is squatting on the stone bench under the clock, knees pulled up under her chin, pleasantly tired and so a bit preoccupied. She’s already been swimming for half an hour. Still, she keeps slipping out of her crouch into a run-up and a lizard-like dive from the edge of the pool whenever a lane is free for eight yards in front of her; she turns around when she surfaces and keeps the lane free for her mother to dive. She comes right back to the bench, and every time the conversation continues as if there’d been no interruption. The bench is safely out of earshot of the other swimmers, and Marie deigns to speak German.
– Whatever you don’t know when you’re telling the story you fill in with other stuff, and I believe it: she says.
– I never promised the truth.
– Of course not. Only your truth.
– How I think it was.
– 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.
– In September 1938 you were . . . five and a half.
– And by the time I was eighteen I’d forgotten things I never wanted to lose and kept things I don’t need. How Cresspahl used to clear his throat, and not what he said.
– Doesn’t what Cresspahl did in 1951 have to fit the Cresspahl from 1938?
– More or less, Marie.
– Who knows that better than you?
– Let’s go in the pool.
– I don’t mind that the only thing you know for sure is how Friedrich Jansen stood in the Gneez Woods, and that the rest of the story grew up around that later. I just want to know how you’re putting it together.
– Even though Jansen’s story is only possible?
– It’s the possibility that no one but you can get to. Whatever you think about your own past, that’s a truth too.
– You’re the one setting the assignment here, Marie.
– Right. How do you do it?
– Water butt—
– Murder attempt.
– Rex the dog, and what Cresspahl said about Dr. Semig after the war—
– The Semigs’ emigration.
– Books, you know.
– Old movies. The exhibit at the Jewish Museum.
– Letters from Kliefoth.
– Yes. But are you stealing things from this year too?
– No.
– The rain in January 1968, you didn’t use that. All the fires in Harlem—
– If I need a burning building for 1938, I don’t need to go looking for one in New York, Marie.
– But the plane with the H-bomb that the air force lost eleven days ago, near Greenland? That same day, you told me about the plane crashes near Podejuch, the gigantic craters.
– That was a family story, Marie. It got locked into place after the rocket testing in Peenemünde, later.
– But the way Cresspahl’s child pulled herself around the kitchen table with her arms up, hand over hand, until she learned to walk—you got that from a different child.
– From a child I know personally, and quite well.
– What else from now?
– Things I couldn’t see then. Things I didn’t learn and have to make up for. Take today’s pictures from Saigon in The New York Times—
– Don’t start that again!
– Don’t worry, I’m not trying to pester you with the war. I’m just trying to answer you.
– Which pictures? The one of the officer carrying out of the building his child who’s been shot?
– No. The series.
– The shooting.
– (The murder. I don’t want to argue about it.) I mean the three-part event. In the first picture, a marine is marching a young man somewhere. The man’s hands are behind his back, maybe tied. He looks like someone out enjoying himself, because of his checked shirt, and because he’s wearing it untucked. His mouth is open, as though talking earnestly, but not angrily, to the soldier who has his face turned toward him in a friendly way, even if it’s in the shadow of his helmet. The American seems to be leading him by the arm, not forcing him anywhere. The caption says this is a Vietcong officer, and he’d been carrying a pistol when captured. Part One.
– Two.
– Title: “Execution.” On the left stands a man seen in profile from behind, wearing an obviously non-civilian vest, sleeves rolled up. This is Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, and he is holding his right arm out with a revolver a hand’s-breadth away from the prisoner’s head. The prisoner is still standing, but his head is rather sharply tilted toward his left shoulder, eyes half shut, mouth gaping like a wound. Otherwise the head seems intact. Hands behind his back, surely they’re tied. “The prisoner’s face shows the impact of the bullet.” That’s Part Two.
– Three.
– The victim is lying in the street, his bare legs at unnatural angles. The brigadier general is holding the holster on his waistband open with his left hand, putting the gun away with his right, looking not at the dead man but down in front of him, as if mentally reviewing what he’s done. In the background are storefronts and, unexpectedly, a man in an American uniform, wearing sunglasses, stopped mid-stride and turning slightly but not as though he wanted to interfere. After all, the man had been handed over to the brigadier general.
– I know, Gesine, I know that already.
– No. I’ve never seen anyone being shot. The second picture shows the moment of the prisoner’s death.
– So now if someone gets shot in your story, you don’t have to describe it to me, Gesine.
– There are other ways it can go, Marie.
– But if you have someone in your story get shot, I’ll know what you’re thinking about and I’ll think about
it too. Is that what you wanted?
– Partly.
– Okay. Now will you show me the dolphin dive again?
– Now I’ll show you a dolphin dive again.
February 3, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
– What did Cresspahl look like in September 1938?
– Fifty years old. One meter ninety centimeters tall. (Six foot two.) Erect posture when seen from afar, slumped shoulders when seen from up close—from work or dejection. Longish face, a full head of hair: coarse, stone-gray, curly. His face when he’s not talking: so impassive that the impression of attentiveness can cover any other expression. When talking, when working: attending to the matter at hand, severe, searching, sharp. Eye color: light blue to gray to green. Lips no longer slightly protruding as in the early thirties, now pressed tight, making them look thinner. Deep, jagged wrinkles at both corners of his mouth. Expression of the mouth: no more hopes and expectations, only vigilance and slight disgust. But unsuspecting. Clothes: usually blue work overalls, clogs in the workshop. These used to be called the best years of a man’s life.
– Gesine, I mean what he looked like!
February 4, 1968 Sunday
Senator Fulbright’s committee has now discovered that the destroyer Maddox was encountering technical difficulties with its sonar, too, before it reported a torpedo attack and gave the government a reason to escalate the war against North Vietnam. In the new offensive, 376 Americans and 14,997 of their foes have died so far; 4,156 people have been detained as suspected Vietcong. The soldier who delivered a victim to Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was incorrectly identified as an American; he was in fact a soldier of the ARVN. The dead man is famous, and his name is not known.