Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  On October 15, 1938, a Saturday, Herbie Schäning, Jerichow’s mailman, brought the Cresspahls the Lübeck Gazette (Lübeck Advertisements, Lübeck’s Latest News & Business Daily, Local Paper for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck and Western Mecklenburg), volume 57, number 242, 15 pfennigs on weekdays, 20 on Sundays, subscriptions 1.90 marks per month plus 30 pfennig delivery fee. And also a death notice, postmarked Bad Schwartau.

  Lisbeth would have been glad to go along to the funeral, even though it was to take place on Tuesday, in the middle of the work week, and the household could hardly spare Cresspahl. She was so animated, talking about the black dress Aggie Brüshaver would lend her and an old pair of stockings that was good for nothing but dyeing black—to Cresspahl it seemed like excitement. Then she saw in the printed matter accompanying the notice that it was not going to be a church ceremony, and she put the notice next to Cresspahl’s cup. – Oh: she said, as though she should have known that this too would defeat her wishes, never mind the lost time. But Cresspahl could see that she was disappointed. She had taken to giving off a kind of sigh that came out very high-pitched, like her breath was being squeezed out. Secretly he was relieved. He hadn’t known quite what to tell her about who exactly this deceased Anna Niederdahl was. He could only guess. Erwin Plath’s name was on the envelope as the sender, but he lived in Lübeck, not Bad Schwartau.

  – These Englishmen are utter scoundrels!: he said, for there was an article saying that the London Times had come out strongly against the proposition that the newly drawn northern border of Czechoslovakia far exceeded the terms laid down in the Munich Agreement, and to Germany’s benefit; and Lisbeth said, not in an I-told-you-so way, but satisfied: Y’see, Heinrich?

  In the paper, which flew into the woodbox next to the stove, there was also talk of two traitors, from Trier and Ratibor, who’d been hanged in Berlin. One was supposed to have been a “dangerous spy.” Sold himself to a foreign intelligence service.

  Then came Sunday with its morning haze and fog, steady winds, and during the sunny afternoon the Hitler Youth was collecting money for the Winter Relief Program, and got from Papenbrock not the five-mark coin from earlier days but a single penny, and Franco’s troops bombed the Tarragona train station, and talk returned again and again to the mysterious dead woman retrieved from Preetzer Lake—who she might be, why the newspaper didn’t mention her—and on Monday she was mentioned in the paper after all; y’see, Heinrich?

  On Tuesday morning, Cresspahl walked down Town Street carrying the wreath old Creutz had had to make for him, medium-sized, nothing too extravagant, and between the wreath and the suit and black coat he was wearing no one stopped him, especially with little Gesine walking at his side holding his free hand, a subdued child in wooden clogs who remained on the platform long after the train had moved off behind the brickworks. Now the child wished she were standing at the crossing gates, so she could see her father one more time.

  Come to me when you get back?

  Even if midnight’s hour has struck?

  You needn’t bring anything with, but come?

  I’ll come, Gesine, I’ll come.

  Anna Niederdahl was the old woman whose parlor Cresspahl had spent an afternoon waiting in a few years back. In death she looked more severe than the friendly fussy person who’d scolded him in a worried, solicitous way when he tried to leave, and because she’d reminded him of Berta Cresspahl he’d taken her by the shoulders, which didn’t entirely displease her. Now she lay there displeased, chin stuck up high, making her look stubborn. Cresspahl did not go outside to wait for the others; he took a seat near the open coffin.

  The mourners gathered around the grave were busy with matters other than what the occasion seemed to demand. Five men and a woman in obviously borrowed mourning clothes who seemed to be the only relative—around forty, tired, and even more exhausted by the night trip from Breslau. Cresspahl didn’t know her. Of the others, he knew only Erwin Plath. The eulogist, a retired schoolteacher who handled such tasks professionally, tried to tell the story of Anna Niederdahl’s life. A fisherman’s daughter from Niendorf. A fisherman’s wife in Niendorf. Husband discharged from the navy, crippled, supporting his wife with a vegetable garden in Lübeck. One son who remained at sea, one daughter gone missing in Hamburg, the other daughter exposed “to the persecutions of fate.” At this the woman from Breslau raised her head with a look of outrage, and as soon as the hired speaker had gotten through the first sentence about immortality Erwin Plath stepped forward. When Lisbeth had wanted to come along, maybe what she was looking forward to were the two minutes during which the guests looked down on the coffin in silence. Then Erwin said, lightly, conversationally: Auntie Anna. We wont forget. Not you and not what you did. We want to thank you, Auntie Anna.

  Now the woman from Breslau was crying. She clung to Cresspahl’s arm as she stepped to the graveside and threw her three handfuls of sand at Anna Niederdahl’s foot end. Then Cresspahl pulled off his glove and grabbed the moist dirt and thanked the dead woman for an afternoon and a plaice cooked in very little butter.

  The gravedigger didn’t mind letting the mourners shovel the dirt into the grave themselves—he’d already gotten his money. Only after they’d all left did he realize that they hadn’t been very careful with the Niederdahl husband’s mound. The boxwood border had been thoroughly trampled.

  The wake was to take place at Plath’s house, since the dead woman’s two rooms had already been emptied out. But the house was full of men in dark suits, at least eight of whom hadn’t been at the cemetery, while the woman from Breslau was not at the table. The meat and beer and schnapps that Gerda Plath served was consumed very slowly indeed. The meal seemed more like an obligation. Out of the eight people who’d been waiting here, Cresspahl knew two. He’d met them five-and-a-half years before, in an apartment on Kronsforder Allee. The man who had led the discussion back then, staggering under the blow of unconditional demands, was not here: the Nazis had beaten in his bald skull in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. The man in charge today was a reckless youngster, barely over twenty, who knew how to be implacable and amusing at the same time. Every now and then he ran his hand over his short hair, as though there used to be an unruly sandy mane there to push back out of his eyes. He knew Plattdeutsch and his High German had a Danish accent. They were discussing whether to support the Social Democratic Emigration Committee, which had moved from Prague to Paris early that summer. The Stockholm group insisted that now was the time for unified action with the Communists. The Paris executive committee had rejected their proposal again in August, and yet again in September. Then it was time to read their September 14 appeal “to the German people.” Cresspahl listened, but paid more attention to the behavior of the people in the meeting—they were all in agreement, they were practically friendly. He felt at home here.

  – We as comrades: someone said in the discussion, and caught Cresspahl’s eye. – Yes well not you: the speaker said: You not as a comrade, you as Cresspahl!—and it felt right to Cresspahl that his dispute with the party was acknowledged but had been downgraded from something harmful to something you could bring up almost jokingly. The way these things are brought up among friends. Cresspahl helped himself to a beer after all, even though it was only late afternoon.

  The group decided to give its agreement to the Paris committee, reject cooperation with the Communists, and await the downfall of the Hitler regime only after a war and the help of the Western powers. Cresspahl kept his hand down, since he had turned in his party membership book, and they said: Hinrich now cmon.

  When it was his turn, they first listened to what he had to say about Jerichow-North and the airfield. It meant the war he’d been predicting since 1935; and yet he couldn’t get rid of a slight sense of unease, maybe because they had counted his vote with the others’. He offered money without hesitation. They asked him whether it was possible to take people in, and he indicated with his finger on the tablecloth how his property was located next
to the brickworks and across the street from Friedrich Jansen’s place of work and residence. So that wouldn’t work. Would he be willing to travel to Denmark? Cresspahl was more than willing to travel to Denmark. In that case he needed to break off contact with Peter Wulff, preferably via a loud argument with witnesses present, and Bienmüller had to get what he needed. Through it all Cresspahl was relaxed, even cracking jokes, and the others decided that marrying rich Papenbrock’s daughter hadn’t done him any harm after all. On the contrary. There was something cheerful and friendly about the man now, thanks to her. You could see it in his face.

  Before the mourning party went their separate ways that evening, in small groups, only a few of them out Erwin Plath’s door and the rest through the courtyard and the other buildings’ exits, the woman from Breslau came in once more, and the gathering thanked her for lending them the death of her mother.

  Cresspahl had promised the child to come look in on her in bed. But he spent the night in Lübeck and was back in Jerichow only the next morning. The tracing paper he’d brought with him as a present was not enough to console her.

  February 5, 1968 Monday

  Once, when the city lay covered in snow, de Rosny was showing two Western European visitors around two floors of the bank and stopped outside Employee Cresspahl’s office, and said: All we need now are a couple of wolves and it’ll be just like your homeland!

  Employee Cresspahl had stayed sitting, since she was only being shown to the visitors, not introduced, and she’d made up some lie about foxes and the henhouses way out in Beidendorf, and was amused all the way until lunchtime by the ideas a vice president had about Communist countries in general, and about Mecklenburg in general.

  Today he offered Employee Cresspahl his sympathy because he’d seen a photograph of West Ninety-Seventh St. in yesterday’s paper: full garbage cans and mounds of garbage bags piled on top, the result of the sanitation workers’ strike. He doesn’t know that in our neighborhood, alongside the neglected buildings, there still remain ones whose management takes care of the trash disposal; he is driven into the city on cordoned-off highways and knows at most an eighth of it. This exhilarating skepticism about a senior superior’s omniscience, however great a relief it may be in private, must not be expressed or revealed, of course. Employee Cresspahl has been summoned to give a report.

  In de Rosny’s office you feel like you’re in an apartment building, not above hangars of typewriters surrounded by closely set work spaces where people are shut in with their tasks. For himself, de Rosny has furnished a salon in the bank: Scandinavian sofa next to captain’s desk from the age of sailing ships, intimate lighting from gold-and-green lamps, heavy royal-blue curtains with a patio outside. De Rosny moves among these things like a hotel guest, lounging around in a basically alien environment, on call, alert, with unshakable faith in his own orders. He likes to mask his orders, even if only behind a delicate hesitation. His lined, weather-beaten face relaxed and comfortable, his blue-eyed gaze kept lazy: this is how he performs invitation and welcome, discussing not only the effects of the sanitation workers’ strike on the Upper West Side but also the war in Vietnam, to make his subordinate think he has taken an interest in what he regards as one of her quirks.

  On TV de Rosny saw Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoot a suspect whose hands were tied and now he declares himself won over to Mrs. Cresspahl’s view. (Mrs. Cresspahl has not expressed a view.) The fundamental brutality of war. And when you could see for yourself what the Vietcong were doing, right there on screen: de Rosny says: and hear Washington calling their offensive a failure, it hardly narrows the credibility gap.

  Definitely, Mr. de Rosny. That’s just what The New York Times says, in a TV review. Now about my assigned duties—

  At the end of the day, the Times is actually against continuing the war: de Rosny says. He is not inclined to give up a topic of conversation once he’s settled on it; he lingers for some time over his disbelieving headshake, and anyone wishing to venture a guess might conclude that he was deciding Employee Cresspahl really was concerned with the events in Vietnam. Enough to find a similar remark on the second-to-last page of seventy, by morning. Now what was Mrs. Cresspahl about to say?

  In regard to the ČSSR, it seems that at least the tail of the cat is out of the bag: someone by the name of Dmitri Weiszand may have been trying to catch that cat, Mr. Vice President.

  – Aha: de Rosny said, with relish, as though gratified by a plan that had worked. All of a sudden he was no longer the suave host but a hunter, eyes narrowed, selecting his next snare with cunning furrows of brow. – Thank you: he said earnestly, and then said it again, with something like emotion, but he remained lost in thought, massaging his temples with his knuckles. The secretary who brought in the coffee hurried to hand out the spoons and milk and sugar and was back out the door so fast that it was like she was fleeing an unseemly scene.

  And then de Rosny said:

  – You’ll never guess, D. E.

  – That he knew, Gesine.

  – Right. Squirmed in his seat, it was a bit awkward for him, and then he thanked me—

  – For telling him voluntarily.

  – I let him think so, but—

  – first Employee Cresspahl stood up to him, insofar as one can while sitting down, and gave him quite the lecture: She refuses to be spied on! At the very least she needs to be told; she has a right; she has half a mind to; et cetera.

  – I managed just fine sitting down, D. E.

  – And he was duly entertained.

  – How’d you guess!

  – It’s not a guess, Gesine. I’ve been in the working world for quite a few years myself; I have to live with bosses just like you.

  – Now you want to show off how you’re better at that too.

  – When did Weiszand try to see the cat, Gesine?

  – Tuesday. Six days ago.

  – From what you’ve told me about de Rosny, I’d have thought he’d be quicker than that.

  – Why don’t you ever want to meet the men I tell you about, D. E.? F. F. Fleury, D. W. Weiszand, de Rosny?

  – You’d feel watched, Gesine.

  – No.

  – No?

  – The long, long leash, D. E.

  – Does de Rosny believe it?

  – Do you believe it?

  – You yourself called the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the RGW, Comecon—you called it a kindergarten, Gesine. Will the kindergarten teacher like it if one of her children suddenly wants to keep a cat? Won’t Moscow’s International Bank for Economic Cooperation at least want to know whether the ČSSR is secretly trying to get an American loan?

  – Yes. But that can’t happen to me.

  – What happened to you when you were in Mönchengladbach with NATO, then?

  – That was personal, D. E.!

  – And how did you get that job?

  – Through an ad in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, D. E.

  – In 1955?

  – In 1955, D. E. And now we’re here in New York, and it’s 1968.

  – Exactly.

  – This Weiszand’s a sociologist, D. E.!

  – So what, Gesine?

  – A Pole, a Jew, the Soviets made him sit on the back bench in school before they handed him back to the Germans to put in their camps, why would he lift a finger for the Soviet Union?

  – He may not want to.

  – And so now we get to the psychology of the traitor, Herr Professor.

  – No. To the hypothesis that personal misfortune means nothing compared to the victory of Socialism.

  – Dmitri Weiszand wouldn’t betray me.

  – He wouldn’t call it betrayal. Maybe he’s trying to help you.

  – “Anyone who organizes antiwar demonstrations is an agent of Soviet corporate espionage”? Your equations were more elegant than that, D. E.

  – I didn’t know anything about his connection to Vietnam, Gesine.

  – You
think it’s possible?

  – Based on what you’ve told me, Gesine.

  – That de Rosny is having me watched.

  – He would say it’s about protection, and he would mean protecting his investment, not you.

  – Oh no. Not again.

  – Quit. Take the child and come live with me.

  – I’d like to see that. You’ll eat every last word, D. E.

  – What would de Rosny say if you quit?

  – I can’t quit now, D. E.

  – He’s invited you to dinner.

  – At the Brussels.

  – Brown damask on the walls, soft lighting, waterzooi de volaille à la Gantoise. But bankers don’t go there.

  – Selle d’agneau rôti à la sarladaise, D. E.

  – You must have looked quite the couple. So now D. W. Weiszand can see that you’re being promoted too, on a trial basis, two floors up, to a new desk, it won’t be called “ČSSR Department” but “General Contacts,” with a telephone number not listed in the staff directory. Mrs. Cresspahl as a protégée.

  – But you’d loan me out, Erichson.

  – You’d loan yourself out, Gesine.

  – Would that be so bad? This time it’d be a Socialist system that I was helping.

  – No it wouldn’t.

  – Well then.

  – And it won’t work, Gesine.

  – That’s what I’d like to wait and see.

  – It’s a deal. And if it doesn’t work out, and you escape in one piece, you’ll marry me.

  – Is this a bet?

  – An agreement.

  – If this doesn’t work out either, then I give up, D. E.

  – That’s not what I want.

  – Gotta take me as I am.

  – No winter’s cold enough to kill the weeds.

  – Good night, D. E.

  – I mean it that way too.

  February 6, 1968 Tuesday

  In West Germany there is a millionaire who was a member of the West German Free Democratic Party and the East German Communist Party simultaneously; according to news reports, he “wanted to keep a hole in the wall dividing Germany” by supplying intelligence through it. The New York Times also reports that the East German military intelligence service tipped off the West because the man would work only for a rival agency, the East German State Security Service.