by Uwe Johnson
When the commander of the main unit stepped forward, the crowd fell silent, like students in a classroom not daring to try on a school inspector what they do with a bumbling teacher. The lieutenant colonel spoke in a normal tone of voice, calm, relaxed, practically civilian. He introduced himself by name. He looked around, so that many people had the feeling he had looked straight at them. He thanked the crowd for their welcome; as he should. The troops would make every effort to earn their right to live in this community; he knew the rules of hospitality. This day made him very happy; no weightier words were needed. When the Catholics tolled their bell, he composed his face and bent his head forward slightly; he showed respect for the church. He spoke with a Hanover accent, like a neighbor. The way he paused, with his mouth hanging good-naturedly open, he might have been from the region. Long bones, thoroughly developed muscles, left shoulder jutting from a wound. When he ordered the men to present arms for the playing of both national anthems, his syllables were clear and distinct; it sounded incongruous, and uncomfortably peremptory. You couldn’t figure this man out, and for the time being the people of Jerichow saw that as a point in his favor.
Among the photographs of the ensuing events that Horst Stellmann developed, Cresspahl is no longer to be found—not at the handing over of the keys outside the guardhouse, not at the laying of the wreath at the cenotaph honoring the dead from the First World War, not at the outdoor air force and SA concert on Market Square. Cresspahl stayed on his property, tidied up the workshop, and did his books, uncommonly irritated by the squadron of airplanes flattering the town’s residents with their loud circling overhead. He did leave the house and look up at the line of aircraft. He stood in front of his barn and observed the flag hanging down over the path from the north gable. He wandered all over the property, chin in hand, through the empty rooms, and through Lisbeth’s.
It’s all my fault, Cresspahl.
Now it’s my fault too, Lisbeth.
That night there were celebratory balls in the Lübeck Court, in the pub, in the Rifle Club, in the Forest Lodge. The Cresspahls went to the one in the Rifle Club. For two and a half hours Our Lisbeth sat out not a single dance. She was so cheerful, laughing, relaxed, totally different from the way people described her. When she did sit down, it was always next to Cresspahl, with a hand on his shoulder as if absentmindedly, but firm.
I wanted to sleep with you again, Heinrich. Before it’s all over, I mean.
February 11, 1968 Sunday
Since yesterday afternoon, a black girl has been living with the Cresspahls, and not everyone thinks it’s all right.
We took the girl, Francine, out of a chaos of police cars and ambulances and strewn garbage on 103rd Street, away from a knife fight and battle for authority involving police, welfare workers, and supers, took her away from the indifferent bystanders around her bleeding mother and the screaming baby. The ambulance drivers took the baby; the police sergeant wasn’t happy about letting Francine go with white people.
– Are you sure you know whatcher doing, lady?: he said.
Mr. Robinson, who once again had to bring a bed up from his secret vaults, was not as happy with the new lodger as he’d been when the Fleurys came. He set up the bed, placing it neatly in Marie’s room the way she wanted, but during the goodbyes he remained standing in the doorway, puzzled, not feeling his crisp waves of hair with his fingertips as he usually does during moments of doubt but with head hanging, genuinely scratching it in puzzlement. That way his eyes were hidden. – Oh, well: he said at last, now unhappy with himself too. – I guess you know what you’re doing, Mrs. Cresspahl.
How does Francine feel about it? She called us. She’s known Marie for almost six months, from school, she knows the apartment from having come over to play. During her visits, when she was alone with Marie, she seemed confident, cheerful, virtually on equal footing. Yesterday afternoon, almost as soon as we’d shut the door behind her, she was as shy with Marie as she’d been all along with Mrs. Cresspahl—and she used to literally run past her to avoid any look or word. She sat down only when asked to, and then as far away as possible, her long spindly legs pressed tight together, hands clenched on her knees, looking at the floor. When giving thanks for a mug of hot chocolate, she spoke to the teaspoon too: – Thank you: softly, hopelessly, as if even this wouldn’t mitigate the danger. One time, when Marie was talking about D. E. and Francine thought no one was watching, she ventured an incredulous look that she just as abruptly aimed elsewhere. She had come with what she had on when misfortune struck—a shabby lumberjack coat—and it was a long time before she was willing to take it off, as though she didn’t want her visit to turn into a stay.
It probably wasn’t because of her mother. When we finally reached a nurse on the phone, Francine didn’t want to take the receiver. When she was told her mother would fully recover from the stabbing, she nodded without relief, more out of politeness than anything. She nodded at the news that her other siblings were still missing, and that the youngest was now in a children’s home, as if there was no reason to remember this information. And then there was one more thing, a message Francine’s mother wanted passed along to Mrs. Cresspahl: God bless you. We can’t possibly feel all right about that.
It was a mistake to try to distract the black child with a game—Francine didn’t know how to play pick-up sticks, obediently learned it, and was so unhappy at her clumsiness that she accidentally broke a stick in two and was then inconsolable. – Now we’ll always think of you, when we’re missing this stick: Marie said, but Francine heard this as anger, not friendship. It was a mistake to serve a dinner not eaten with the fingers, and it didn’t help that Marie casually laid her knife aside and went at the cutlet with the side of her fork like Francine. It was not a good idea to send Francine to take a shower—she inferred suspicion of dirt and vermin. – We take one every night: Marie said; Francine heard not information but an order. Maybe it was a good idea to give her a pair of Marie’s pajamas and a complete set of clothes for the next day; it was not a good idea to put all her things straight into the laundry basket as if they couldn’t be worn another day. Francine was very relieved when it was bedtime, now she no longer had to face the dangers of this strange household, and she pulled the covers up over the tightly wound braids sticking out from the top of her head; she lay there stiffly, took a long time to fall asleep, on the lookout for some other danger she hadn’t anticipated.
Rebecca Ferwalter didn’t like that her friend had taken in a black girl, and from a street, a building, she had been explicitly warned to avoid. Rebecca, the smartly dressed little Jewish girl in a jacket dress made from a reduced-size pattern for adults, Rebecca of the ladylike manners and masklike doll’s face, felt as if someone had sprung a trap on her, and during a truly awkward conversation she made up an order from Mrs. Ferwalter according to which she could stay at our apartment for no more than ten minutes. Rebecca hears what is all right with her mother several times a day, and, even more often, what isn’t.
It was not all right with Francine that we assumed a mother with stab wounds in the chest and shoulder would of course be visited by at least one of her children. Every time we asked for information, at the hospital entrance and in the corridors, she stood to one side, so seemingly uninvolved that people at first thought it was the Cresspahls who were visiting a black woman. Francine did not go in to her mother happily, and she opened the door to the ward for us after only a very few minutes, at which point she started acting as if she had even less of a connection than we did to this woman lying there awkwardly bundled away under money-saving green blankets, wrapped in an extravagant bandage, half unconscious with medication, her fat gray face covered in feverish sweat. – She’s a good chile: she said with effort, and perhaps from conviction, not as a request, and Francine suddenly stared off past her, stubborn, downright hostile. And the fact that we couldn’t stick it out for long amid the beds set so close together, the smell of poverty more than illness, the guarded l
ooks from the black neighbors—that was not all right with us. Francine stayed at the door until Marie turned around. Now she had a cowardly, mocking look on her face, very much up at us from below, and Marie innocently asked what was wrong. Francine didn’t answer, her defiant look unchanged, as if it were Marie who had something she needed to own up to. Maybe it was a good idea to take her shoulder and steer her out of the way of the other visitors, but Francine hadn’t expected that she would be brought back to Riverside Drive again.
Now you’ve seen it, Marie.
I didn’t see anything. A woman in a hospital.
Now you’re lying, whitey.
My lies are none of your business.
This one is.
You won’t get me to talk about it, Francine.
I’ll come with you two, but I don’t believe you.
Being left alone with a pile of comic books was all right with Francine, and she pushed one of Marie’s double doors shut as if by accident, to be shielded from sight. She took pretense to the point of pretending to be asleep when Pamela Blumenroth came to get Marie for a trip to the Mediterranean Swimming Pool. But then she did fall asleep, and her little black face came out from behind the door looking very scared, eyes black with shock surrounded by huge whites pointed at the strange woman blocking the exit in a strange apartment. Then, waking up, trying for an obliging meekness, she said eagerly: Should I take your newspaper down to the street for you, Mrs. Cresspahl?
Then she didn’t understand that people in a building like this can leave their trash in bags by the freight elevator at night, instead of sneaking it out to the city trash cans on the corner. She took in, as yet another unbelievable thing, the information that Mr. Robinson goes through the building at ten at night, floor by floor, and takes the trash to the incinerator, and then I had to explain the incinerator to her too.
It was impossible to explain to her why Marie had circled in red one of the photographs on the front page of The New York Times: a wounded marine in Danang and next to him a military chaplain in fatigues, with a cross on his helmet cover, staring upward, on the lookout for God and evacuation helicopters.
– Vietnam: Francine said, unmoved, incurious, as if about something totally unconnected to her. As if about the moon.
It will be less all right with Marie as soon as tomorrow morning. She didn’t mind in the least that she could go swimming without Francine, who might have been the only black person there and hard to defend. Tomorrow, when she and Francine arrive at school together, she will run over to her white friends, with relief.
It would not have been all right with one of our great German poets. He described a similar refuge in a book, and challenged his readers not to put down the book even so.
I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every night during the winter months
And finds shelter for the homeless gathering there
By appealing to passers-by.
. . .
Don’t put down the book, fellow man who reads this.
Now a few fellow men have beds for the night
The wind will be kept from them for a night
The snow meant for them falls onto the street
But this won’t change the world
It will not improve relations among men
It will not make the age of exploitation any shorter.
And there is one person it is impossible to tell whether Francine’s stay is all right with: D. E., who arrives from Kennedy Airport around six in the evening, just back from Europe, bringing two dresses from Copenhagen for Marie, now one of them for Francine, since
– I know all about it: he says, and Francine believes him;
– though I am a stranger here myself: he says, and Francine laughs, naturally, spontaneously;
– which I undertook solely to help keep New York clean: he says; and Francine looks at this white man with shining eyes, eager to hear him talk about such mysterious things as a “Magasin du Nord” on a “Kongens Nytorv” in “København,” and jealous in advance of the moment when she will have to share him with Marie.
D. E.—he would accept being a father even to a black child. But again, only on one condition.
February 12, 1968 Monday
These were the movies shown in Lübeck in late October 1938:
A Night in May, with Marika Rökk
The Day After the Divorce, with Luise Ullrich and Hans Söhnker
Code LB 17, with Willy Birgel
Cargo from Baltimore, with Hilde Weissner
Premiere, with Zarah Leander
Red Orchids, with Olga Chekhova
Between Love and Hate (His Brother’s Wife), with Barbara Stanwyck (USA, adults only)
What kind of movies were these?
“Red orchids are the favorite flower of a great singer played by Olga Chekhova. Red orchids play a role in the plot of the film, which is about industrial espionage and uncovering the real criminal, because they are the hiding place of a secret code that Nica, an engineer, is desperate to find. With this document, he can prove that he and his friend and comrade are innocent. He has already been sentenced to death for treason. He succeeds after many difficulties. The singer remains at his side, even if, at a moment when her belief in Nica wavers, she almost ruins everything. . . . Camilla Horn plays a dangerous spy and Ursula Herking is striking as always.” (Lübecker General-Anzeiger)
Fog in London.
Cresspahl had stopped earning money from the airfield construction. Klein the butcher supplied meat for the garrison, Papenbrock baked the bread, the restaurants had business from the soldiers on weekends. The hotels in Rande, long since mothballed by this time in past years, were packed: training courses, wives, National Socialist film nights. Pahl the tailor placed his ads in The Gneez Daily News, in a different spot every day, and waited for them to catch an officer’s eye; he had his fabric ready. Jerichow’s merchants had gone in together on an ad welcoming the arrival of the troops. The church sold one plot of land after another around Jerichow. Köpcke the architect had orders for vacation homes on the bluffs, he could hardly keep up with them; the carpentry work went to Böttcher in Gneez. Cresspahl now had only Alwin Paap and one assistant working with him; Kliefoth hadn’t looked to Wismar for his new bookshelf after all. The other contracts were for piddling little jobs.
Cresspahl had time to go for walks. In the evenings, he and Our Lisbeth were sometimes seen on the seaside promenade in Rande—walking in silence, keeping their faces turned toward the rummaging sea. This was not held against them as citified airs, it was thought to be nostalgia for 1931 when they’d walked there in secret, as people in love, about whom not many reports reached Louise Papenbrock.
The Japanese had captured and occupied Hankou.
The sea wind had long since plucked the trees bare, not only along the coast but in Jerichow as well. Sometimes old Creutz would be there leaning against his fence when the Cresspahls returned to the light in their house. Had they taken their dahlias down to the cellar yet: he asked. The Cresspahls had almost completely finished preparing their garden for the winter: they said. October always has to have twelve nice days, just like March: Creutz said. Hadn’t March had only eleven this year: Lisbeth Cresspahl said, and Creutz heard her quiet laugh. He could barely see the two of them in the darkness, but he stayed where he was, unconcerned. They would wait until he was ready. The Cresspahls had always been agreeable neighbors.
In August, the Jews had been banned from working as brokers or traveling salesmen. Arthur Semig no longer had to get worked up about that. Now they were to be forbidden from working as lawyers, and their medical licenses revoked. Arthur Semig had been spared that.
It was perfectly all right with Warning that his shovels kept breaking, as if naturally, without a trace of having been sawed. What difference did that make, when his fence was almost more gaps than pickets at this point; a piece of wood like that can always be put to g
ood use, burns well. The latest, though, was that the leather O-ring had been nicked from his pump. Not even his guard dog would do anything for him these days. Jailbirds. What he’d said about Arthur Semig, only jailbirds did things like that.
Your leather should not just shine, it should live. Erdal extends the life, and the beauty, of your shoes. Lordy lordy. The leather should live.
Bums who don’t want to work get sent to the house of correction. That’s how it is.
The good things the airfield did for Jerichow. Some of them came out only later. Of the sixty-four children Brüshaver had baptized so far this year, thirteen were illegitimate. But better to pay taxes for that than for—hey, sommuns comin. Oh, ’sjust Cresspahl. Tanglepicker Cresspahl. Brings is wife along when he goes out fer a beer. Next thing yknow your own wife will wanna come. These English ways. Well you cant talk to him about illegitimate kids and whatnot. Wont do fer our Lisbeth.