by Uwe Johnson
It seems that some of the people who’d set fire to the Gneez synagogue might have been in Jerichow too, in Oskar Tannebaum’s shop, and if so she might have recognized them. The Jerichow police didn’t have enough officers to cordon off the street, which was why Friedrich Jansen—sentry, mayor, police chief—was there too, revolver drawn. The SA, dressed up for the occasion, took their time with Tannebaum’s shop. It was such a tiny opportunity, they had to draw out their pleasure as much as they could. It was like amateur theater. Prasemann the innkeeper held a finger to his lips, and only when the narrow street had fallen almost silent did he raise his ax and break the glass in the shop door with it. Then they recuperated with suppressed laughter. Oskar Tannebaum still didn’t turn on the lights. Next they painstakingly hacked the door to pieces. The onlookers in Jerichow were more excited than the ones in Gneez, commenting on the spectacle, praising or deprecating the various blows. – Here e goes there e goes, here e goes there e goes: quoting Reuter in Plattdeutsch, or: Well at least this doesn cost any money, said the farmer, as he beat his son. Pahl said that one, for whom the Jew had been poor competition. It was meant not so much maliciously as pedagogically—it was time for this Jew to learn his lesson once and for all. When the SA were in Tannebaum’s store, they discovered that they’d forgotten the shopwindow, and threw chairs and shelves through the panes from the inside. There’s not much that’s hard in a fabric store but they managed with the cash register, which sprang open when it hit the sidewalk. There was money lying on the street, not many bills, a few coins. – Its not right: a woman’s voice said, clearly spoken by an old lady, distressed and appalled. – And now we’re off, said the mouse, as the cat ran across the floor with it: said Böhnhase when Oskar Tannebaum was thrown out onto the street. He fell on his knees but stood up again at once. Demmler didn’t like that (Hansi Demmler, Jerichow housing development), he’d liked it better seeing him on his knees. Tannebaum had to gather up the money on his knees and bring it to Friedrich Jansen. Friedrich Jansen waved over Ete Helms, and Ete Helms stood at attention before him but refused to take the money. Jansen, bright red in the face, threatened him with punishment for refusing an order, and Ete clicked his heels together and didn’t take the money. For Jansen then to have tucked the money into his own jacket pocket would have been as bad for his reputation as what he did do, which was throw it on the ground and stomp on it. Only Peter Wulff, standing quietly off to one side until then, heard the first shot. Now he called for calm, in a businesslike military way, totally ignoring the representatives of state power. Then came the second shot. Friedrich Jansen ordered the street cleared for the fire brigade, and the old-fashioned vehicle was pushed up to the jagged hole in the building, even though there was no fire. Then Frieda Tannebaum came out of the building, slowly, without anyone pushing her from behind. She was carrying her eldest child in her arms. She stopped and stood, like Oskar, with her back to the wall. They looked at each other across the child. The child was Marie Tannebaum, eight years old, a wild, secretive little girl, who used to ramble around in the Countess Woods ever since Stoffregen hadn’t let her come to his school anymore. She had long black braids that now hung almost down to the sidewalk. When she got too heavy for her mother, her mother slid down to the ground with the child in her arms, still obediently keeping her back against the wall, and collapsed on top of her. She was still holding her child as if the child were just asleep and mustn’t be woken up.
Apparently Lisbeth Cresspahl arrived when Friedrich Jansen was stomping on the money. She had slowly pushed her way forward through the crowd and had just reached the front when the second shot was fired. After that she’d stood still, silent like everyone else. Only when Mrs. Tannebaum slid to the ground did she step forward, around Friedrich Jansen, so that the first slap in the face surprised him. But she hit him several more times, even though she couldn’t seriously hurt the big heavy man. She lashed out at him the way a child does, clumsily, like she hadn’t learned how. Friedrich Jansen simply grabbed her wrists.
Ete Helms pulled her back into the crowd, and because he had his hand on her shoulder Friedrich Jansen probably assumed she’d been arrested. Friedrich Jansen now took command of the fire department, and the fire department now had to shoot water into the building for half an hour, even though it was not on fire, because Jansen was standing behind the pump with his gun.
Ete Helms had let Cresspahl’s wife go as soon as they were out of sight of the crowd. It was outside Papenbrock’s house, and he put his hand to his cap in parting. Helms remembered her as going into the house, but he didn’t actually see her do it.
– Is this another story you don’t want to tell me?: Marie says. – Would Francine not understand it?
– She wouldn’t.
– Like the rain-barrel story?
– Something like that.
– Don’t tell me, Gesine.
February 15, 1968 Thursday
The question was a broad one. Would the use of nuclear weapons be considered in Vietnam. General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answered it narrowly: Not in Khesanh.
There is also news about the people who consider me one of their own. Three East German girls were expelled from the Winter Olympics in Grenoble for warming the runners of their luges (sleds). But they said it was the West Germans’ fault.
And once again The New York Times gives the mayor, the Honorable John Vliet Lindsay, a good hiding. Does he seriously think he should lease out the subway loudspeakers to carry commercials? A sample: “Times Square. Change for the BMT and IND. And stop at Nedick’s for an orange drink and a hot dog.” To a captive audience! On top of the cacophony of clank, screech, and grind under the ground! – It’s incredible!: cries The New York Times, and down rain the blows on the mayor draped across her knee. An unpleasant sight, an excruciating sound.
Cresspahl traveled south with his child, through Blankenberg and Sternberg and Goldberg, the last leg from Karow to Malchow on a line that no longer existed after the war. The child learned: Blankenberg am See, “on the Lake,” and Sternberg am See, and Goldberg am See, and Malchow am See, and to this day the name Karow exists in her memory as a dry place. There was nothing there but the station and a street and the Habben Inn. They had lunch on the train though, sandwiches that Lisbeth had packed and that her husband cut against his thumb into more manageable strips for the child. When he held the Mahn & Ohlerich beer bottle up to her face and let her open the flip top, she made a face but then did try a wary sip of the burning bitter stuff. They looked like old hands at traveling together. One time, somebody asked Cresspahl where he was going with “the little girl,” and he gave the girl a long look and then said, sadly: She doesn wanna say, and silly Gesine thought that here too he was respecting her pride. Cresspahl wasn’t asked often.
At the Malchow cemetery, the graves of Heinrich Sr. and Berta Cresspahl were as neat and tidy as any paying customer could possibly want, and he didn’t bother checking in with the caretaker first. The couple shared a gravestone, and Berta had had her name and date of birth chiseled into it at the time of her husband’s death, so the year of her death stood out gleaming in the dim light.
Thats my dad and mum.
Cant they come out?
Theyre shut up in there for all time, Gesine.
Mommy says the dead come back.
Not here, Gesine. Not in our world.
Im never gonna be dead.
Thats right, Gesine. Dont be.
Gesine Redebrecht had the name Zabel now. Her father had fallen in the war, in 1916, her grandfather hadn’t been able to get the woodworking business through the inflation. By 1924, neither building nor property was left from her inheritance, and she’d married a man who didn’t take long to drink up the rest. Now Gesine Zabel was a maid in a hotel on Malchow Lake; Cresspahl took a room there because he didn’t know that. (Three marks, child’s bed one mark extra.) Cresspahl left the dining room as soon as the child got tired and sat with
his pipe by the open window, near the black water, smeared now and then with the remains of the full moon. Other than that, not much light pitched and tossed on the water. Gesine Zabel didn’t come out until just before midnight. She was now forty-nine years old. Her long thick blond hair had gotten thin, and sandy, and was too short for braids. She’d had to work hard for eighteen years now and hadn’t been brought up for that kind of life. Countless frightened looks had left crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes. While serving the food she’d seemed harried, defenseless, annoyed, her expression preemptively apologetic. She was too tired after her day to be able to spend more than half an hour outdoors. In the morning, a plate with an apple and a knife was sitting on the windowsill, her excuse for visiting a guest’s room.
Youre drinking, Hinrich.
Im drinkin, Gesine.
Peter Zabel wasnt bad.
Never heard anyone say he was.
Its not like I couldve married you.
We were just kids.
Why didnt you just stay in England, Hinrich!
My wife wanted it this way
Is she a good woman?
Shes a good woman, Gesine.
Is the child hers? She doesnt look like you.
She takes after me, I think.
And now youre drinking, Hinrich.
Is there anything I can do to help you?
No, Hinrich. Try to help yourself.
The next morning Cresspahl’s child was shocked when told to shake hands with the woman who’d brought her breakfast, but she obediently stood up. She had also tried her best to get dressed and washed by herself, without her father’s help, so as not to spoil the trip with him. She shook the woman’s hand, made the Papenbrock curtsy, and thanked her in High German. It was only later that she dared to ask if the woman had been crying. That was on the way to the station, by a school with a chorus of children’s voices coming out of an open window, and Cresspahl gave her a two-mark coin as “trip money” so that she would forget the tearful eyes of the strange woman, just as in the instructional verses of the children’s book.
You Can’t Trust the Fox in the Grassy Dew!
(Or any promise from a Jew!)
From Wendisch Burg they took a branch line running southwest from Neustrelitz, and then a postbus to the Niebuhrs. The driver dropped Cresspahl off in the middle of a mixed woodland. A low red roof in sluggishly creeping fog was visible between the leafless tree trunks. This was the Havel Sluice, Wend. Burg.
Already at the sluice-keeper’s house with Cresspahl’s sister and Niebuhr were Niebuhr’s brother Peter and Peter’s wife and child. It was with this Klaus Niebuhr, not quite five, a Berlin child who could barely speak Platt-deutsch and understood it not much better, that Gesine was sent off to play behind the house. There was a swing there, and the childless Niebuhrs had built a sandbox too. – But I don’t live here, I live in Berlin!: said the boy. . . .
Martin Niebuhr led his brother-in-law around the property with modest pride, showed him the sluice, the office, the two phones, the beehives, but for the rest of the afternoon Cresspahl was alone with Peter Niebuhr, who was trying to fix up a boat in the shed on the other side of the river. It was a wrecked H-Jolle dinghy with a broken mast that had lain out all through the previous winter too. Peter Niebuhr had bought it cheap, but he didn’t know enough about boat-building, so the conversation with Cresspahl started out rather uncomfortably.
Peter Niebuhr, thirty years old at the time, took cautious stock of the older man. He could not comprehend a life story like his: Mecklenburg, emigration, return to the Nazis. He couldn’t grasp the patience with which the other man held back what must have been his own questions: why a card-carrying member of the Communist Party had gone to the Eiche school for NCOs and from there to Darré’s Reich Agricultural Corporation. After they’d been working side by side in silence for a while, Peter started with Dr. Semig, not without a certain defiance, prepared to make only minimal apologies. – M’boy: Cresspahl said after a time, and the man of thirty, university, graduate degree, employed at a ministry in the capital of the Reich, not only accepted this mode of address but also the calm, testing look in the eyes of this relative he barely knew, nothing more than a master carpenter in a tiny Baltic town. Then Cresspahl recalled the other man’s education and said, in High German: It worked out well, just the way you probably had in mind. If you hadn’t done it we couldn’t have gotten him out of the country.
Cresspahl liked the kid. He had gotten all the stamina, strength, and horse sense of both Niebuhr brothers, leaving the elder, Martin, with nothing but muddleheadedness, dillydallying, and complacency. Cresspahl liked that Peter felt uneasy not only about giving up his party but about going over to the other side to feed his family. Cresspahl saw something of himself from fifteen years ago in it. And Peter could hardly have gone abroad with his career, unlike Cresspahl. He also liked the woman Peter had found to marry, this Martha Klünder, from Waren, still a girl, shy with everyone except her husband, not a trace left of the civil servant’s daughter she’d been when he met her. Cresspahl looked at this marriage, not much more recent than his, with a certain envy. He thought about Perceval too, T. P., whom he’d lost in England, and of Manning Susemihl. Maybe he wanted to take one last try at something like that. He let Peter tell his side of the Griem story, then told him how it had looked from Jerichow. He didn’t interrupt when the younger man started going into details about his superiors, who hadn’t wanted to take his side without a Nazi pin on his lapel. After a while, they quit work and walked down the river as far as the next village, and came back for dinner almost totally of one mind. As for the boat, Peter should send it to Jerichow, he wouldn’t pay for anything but the transportation. In return, Cresspahl wanted to learn how to sail.
The children were sent off to bed next to the living room. They’d spent all day telling each other about their parents, their houses, their neighbors, and they went right to sleep despite the murmur of voices in the next room, full of laughter, pleasure, an eagerness to be friends. Gesine had never in her life met so many new people in one day.
It was Gesine who heard the phone ring the next morning. Not the one connected to the Department of Waterways internal network but the regular one from the Reichspost. She had just reached the door to the office when Martin Niebuhr handed the receiver to Cresspahl. It was about six in the morning on November 10. My mother had already been dead for an hour.
February 16, 1968 Friday
The average woman industrial worker in Czechoslovakia is 5 feet 3 1/2 inches (161 cm) tall, weighs 139 pounds (63 kilos), and has a bust measurement of 35 inches (89 cm). These statistics are said to be important in helping industrial designers build machines better fitted to workers. Is this a mistranslation? Sometimes work follows Mrs. Cresspahl home to Riverside Drive.
– Gesine, I’m having problems with Francine.
– In school?
– There too.
– Are your white friends making you pay for having a black friend?
– They don’t see her as my friend.
– Because you avoid her in recess every day?
– Because Sister Magdalena has separated us.
– Is this more togetherness?
– No. Francine feels so sure of me now that she isn’t being careful.
– You were talking to each other in class?
– Almost never. It’s like this: when she doesn’t understand something, she relies on me.
– Are those Sister Magdalena’s words?
– More or less.
– Do you believe her?
– Yes, Gesine. I believe her.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk has written an angry letter to Senator J. W. Fulbright. The latter’s questions about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam did a disservice to the country. The letter does not explicitly rule out the existence of plans to deploy tactical weapons in Vietnam.
– Why is that a problem for you?
–
You’re saying it’s none of my business, Gesine?
– It’s Francine’s more.
– I helped her.