by Uwe Johnson
– I don’t talk in my sleep, Marie!
– I know. Dr. Rydz explained it to me. It’s part of the sickness. You don’t always know who you are.
– I do too.
– And what’s with 1906? November 12?
– That’s when Lisbeth Papenbrock was born.
– You were talking about that. For a long time.
– I want to go to the hospital.
– You can’t go to the hospital. Mrs. Erichson is coming tonight.
– I don’t want her to.
– She’ll sleep in your room so you’re not alone if you wake up in the night. It’s no trouble for her, she doesn’t sleep much anyway.
– But I don’t want Louise Papenbrock sitting at my bedside at night.
– There’s nothing you can do about it, Gesine. D. E. sent her, she must be in Bayonne by now.
– And you called a Jewish veterinarian too!
– A Jewish pediatrician, Gesine.
– You see!
– It’s the fever, Gesine. Dr. Rydz explained it to me, and now I’m not scared anymore.
– Marie. Did I say anything else?
– Yes, about a fire. In Brooklyn and a man and his child burned to death.
– In Brooklyn?
– Yes, in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
– When was that?
– This morning.
– This morning you were in school. You yourself said it’s Friday.
– It’s Tuesday. And we didn’t go to school. You’re still contagious. Maybe you heard us talking about the fire in Brooklyn.
– Who was here before, Marie?
– That was the doctor, Dr.—
– I know that. I’m not asking about that. Sorry.
– It’s the fever, Gesine.
– But there was someone else here. A girl. Back from somewhere.
– That was Francine. I’m also sorry I had a fight with you about her.
– That wasn’t so long ago.
– Friday evening.
– You see! Friday!
– Francine has been with us since the Sunday before last.
– All right, Sunday. And there’s no child here.
– Francine went to the pharmacy.
– Marie, but, there are more people here, I just can’t see them in the dark.
– You were dreaming, Gesine. You dreamed about people in black suits and dresses.
– Yes. On Sunday.
– And now you need to sleep.
– I want a sleeping pill, but it has to be the kind where you don’t dream.
– I’ll get you one tomorrow.
– I need it now.
– It’s the middle of the night, Gesine.
– You’re talking to me like I’m a child. And calling pediatricians! Anyway you’re right, I am one.
– You are one, Gesine. You’re asleep.
February 21, 1968 Wednesday
On Friday morning, after Cresspahl left for the train back to Gneez, Pastor Brüshaver went to work on his funeral sermon.
Cresspahl had not requested a sermon.
He had come from the scene of the fire, face sooty, coat streaked with dirt and debris, and listened to Brüshaver’s account. Sat patiently on the visitor’s chair, his unseeing eyes on the man across from him, hands held loosely in his lap, not folded. He’d washed his hands. His eyes were screwed up, tense with remembering, and Brüshaver realized he was the final eyewitness Cresspahl wanted to hear from.
She had lain on the north side of Brickworks Road, by the Creutzes’ fence, reposing on the coat from a brown uniform. There’d been a lot of people standing around her—Friedrich Jansen, Alwin Paap, the Labor Service girl, old Creutz, Amalie Creutz, Aggie Brüshaver, Brüshaver, and others whose names Brüshaver didn’t know. It was still night, dark, the light from the fire only flickering this far. He decided not to mention Lisbeth’s clothes. Cresspahl asked. Lisbeth had had on a blue housecoat but it was open, and he’d noticed spots where the nightgown underneath had burned through. Brüshaver had gone over to her just as Berling slipped his hand out from behind her head. He continued to kneel, though, and he’d closed her eyes before Brüshaver kneeled down. He saw no damage to her face except some fresh blood from her nose and a patch of open skin under one eye. The right eye. Berling had later called the blood under her nose “pulmonary blood,” from the asphyxiation. Then Aggie had covered her with her own coat. Friedrich Jansen got the phone number for Wendisch Burg from Alwin Paap, then left. At half past six, the police from Gneez had arrived. They’d brought an ambulance and by seven, after inspecting the house and the scene of the fire, they’d driven off.
Cresspahl also wanted to know who had laid the body onto the stretcher, seemed satisfied to hear that it was the two orderlies from the ambulance, and stood up. Brüshaver had suggested Sunday for the funeral. Cresspahl said: Monday, at three. Brüshaver had had a church funeral in mind, and Cresspahl said: She doesn’t need to go into the church. Brüshaver asked about the text for the graveside ceremony, and Cresspahl pulled the page that was now missing from the City of Hamburg Hotel Bible out of his coat pocket. It was Psalm 39, with some verses crossed out. Cresspahl placed the page on the desk, as if not sure the pastor would find it in his own Bible.
What remained for Cresspahl to ask came easily, he had thought about it so many times. The request wasn’t for him at all, it was for Lisbeth. Brüshaver felt like he was being asked for a casual favor more than anything else. He knew it wasn’t customary: Cresspahl said. But his wife shouldn’t lack for anything at the grave.
And thou shalt not want.
This Cresspahl had requested: invocation, lesson, prayer, Lord’s Prayer, consecration, benediction. That was three items more than the Church of Mecklenburg allowed to suicides.
Brüshaver followed Cresspahl into the kitchen, where Aggie had set up a washbowl for him and was brushing his coat. After Cresspahl had dried his face, Brüshaver asked him about the blessing in the house. – Nooo: Cresspahl said, and Brüshaver already understood that this man did not want the church in his house anymore, now that he was alone there. Cresspahl hadn’t needed to drape the hand towel so neatly over the back of a chair, like something he had now used for the last time.
Then Brüshaver had to watch his own wife throw herself on the other man’s chest, as if seeking forgiveness for something.
His wife put fresh coffee on his desk every two hours, even brought him his meals so that he wouldn’t have to get up from his work, not even for fifteen minutes. A woman in the house with eyes red from crying, and three children creeping past the door as though beaten into silence, how was anyone supposed to work like that!
Aggie wanted the Sunday sermon to discuss Lisbeth. That went against every rule and custom. She could be mentioned by name in the religious service for the congregation on the following Sunday, when she was in the ground. The woman knew that. He didn’t want to lose face with her. This Cresspahl wanted the church to acknowledge partial responsibility for the death of his wife. Brüshaver would never see him in church again whatever he did; still, he didn’t like the thought of spending his life next door to someone who didn’t respect him at all. That’s vanity, Brüshaver. You don’t want to put up with someone refusing to say hello to you in the street for as long as you live in this town. That’s not vanity.
Brüshaver hadn’t gotten three words down on paper when someone came to bother him. Vick, from the Gneez police (not the Gestapo). Wanting to hear about conflict between Friedrich Jansen and Cresspahl. He didn’t understand that in Jerichow the two men might as well have been on opposite ends of the earth, and that it was the town’s other inhabitants who’d whipped up any conflict between them and kept it going. Was Jansen capable of seeking revenge? Jansen was capable of seeking revenge, but only when in his cups and with Cresspahl out of town—sensing a trap, Brüshaver said nothing. Why would a man like Vick suspect a, let us say, worthy champion of National Socialism? What did he n
eed this denunciation for, was he trying to get Jansen safely locked up in jail before saddling him with irregularities in the Jerichow city finances? – Because we have to purge the rabble from our ranks! – Because I am a faithful National Socialist!
There is no passage in the Bible that explicitly forbids suicide. Young Mrs. Cresspahl had asked about that, when she was still alive. If you looked at it properly, this was an unmistakable cry for help. There may have been other people in the town from whom she had sought reassurance, support, information; they were under no obligation to admit it. The pastor had a duty to confess it. But you can’t start a sermon for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity like that.
On Thursday at around noon, Brüshaver had gone to see the Tannebaums after they hadn’t come to see him about Marie’s funeral. Brüshaver had planned to offer them a burial (a “quiet” one) in his cemetery, assuming Oskar had final say and his wife didn’t want to take the child to the Catholics. He found the family in the wagon shed in the yard. They had set the coffin on the ground and were sitting on chairs around it. It was a mass-produced coffin, with shiny black varnish. The Gestapo had sent it from Gneez, and Swenson was to bring it back to Gneez that evening for a nighttime burial. The child looked very tall stretched out inside it, head tilted sharply back, arms at her sides. The blood that had run out of the hole in her temple had been dabbed away so cautiously that the traces were still visible, and they had avoided touching the wound itself. Oskar stood up in front of Brüshaver as though wanting to block his way to the body. He said, in a stubborn but not hostile voice: Now that shes died like a Jew, shes gonna get a Jewish burial. When Swenson drove up in his hearse that evening, the house was empty, as messy and waterlogged as the SA had left it. The von Bobziens owned the house; that was why Jansen had wanted to prevent the fire that wasn’t there. The Tannebaums had left town on Field Street, with the coffin and the dead girl’s little brother on a farm cart, the parents on foot, wife next to the horse, Oskar next to the boy, who sat facing backward. If they were trying to get to Lübeck, they had many miles of sodden roads ahead of them before they reached a main road. Now it was Friday afternoon, and no one had seen them in any farm, in any village. Brüshaver had thus been spared the fuss with the church authorities and the Gestapo over giving the little Jewish girl a Christian burial. Now, for Lisbeth Cresspahl, he was about to risk much more than a warning.
True, the Bible does not explicitly forbid suicide. But in place of the prohibition there is the reminder of God’s mercy offered to those in despair. Now it was also the case that suicide made it impossible to repent, and thus be forgiven. He certainly couldn’t stand up before the congregation and deny forgiveness to Lisbeth Cresspahl. Brüshaver took up his book and read. He sought proof that God reserved to Himself the right to end a life, because He alone knew the end to which He was directing that life. Reading like this gave him a fleeting, uncomfortable feeling; it was excused by the task, it was an excuse to avoid the task.
Late that afternoon it occurred to Brüshaver that he didn’t know for certain whether Lisbeth had deliberately and premeditatedly taken her own life. It was only Cresspahl who had admitted it, by asking for the exception; Cresspahl had been far from Jerichow on the night of Wednesday to Thursday. Word around town was of an accident, and Jansen had started rumors of murder by so stubbornly insisting that it had been suicide. Brüshaver took the six o’clock train to Gneez. He found Cresspahl in Böttcher’s workshop. Böttcher brought the Jerichow pastor only as far as the door. Böttcher could understand that Cresspahl wanted to make his wife’s coffin with his own hands; it was still a bit embarrassing, though, and he didn’t like having anyone watch his colleague do this work.
Cresspahl gave Brüshaver a pleasant look and rested his arms, laying them along the bottom part of the box, which after eight hours work he’d finished. Brüshaver asked his question. He heard his voice take on a pleading tone, and on top of that Cresspahl was looking at him the way a teacher looks at a pupil who even after a simple explanation still hasn’t understood. – Yesss: he said patiently, with something like amusement in the corners of his eyes. Brüshaver repeated his question. Lisbeth had, after all, believed in God. Now Cresspahl filled himself a pipe, lit it, clapped the cover shut, spat at the match. – Now maybe he’ll believe her too: he said. He stood up, not because Brüshaver had found nothing to sit on but to stretch, his pipe held high in his fist. He waited for the next question. Brüshaver looked with a kind of horror at this man who could impugn his own wife with such a death and accept the loss of the insurance money for the workshop and machines so that she could keep this death of hers forever. He let Cresspahl wish him good night and left, but stopped again out in the yard. Cresspahl had sat back down next to the coffin, hunched over, letting his hands hang into the box, still holding the pipe. Clearly he wanted to use this burdensome interruption at least as a work break. He didn’t look the least bit out of place in the other man’s workshop.
If God does not forbid suicide, does He not guide the desperate person’s hand when He permits such an end? If God arrogates to Himself the right to let live, is it not also God’s purpose when that life ends? Now Brüshaver had only Saturday left, and less than half a page written.
On Saturday Cresspahl’s notice appeared in The Gneez Daily News. It was signed by the Papenbrock, Paepcke, and Niebuhr families, but Cresspahl had written it. There was no mention of tragic fate, of God’s (inscrutable) wisdom, or of Lisbeth having been taken (snatched) from life. It said: Lisbeth Cresspahl has passed away.
The police had released her. Early that morning Swenson brought her to Jerichow, but before the news had gotten round town, there was new barbed wire strung up around Cresspahl’s property. Anyone passing by, as though just by chance while out for a stroll, probably saw Cresspahl, Paap, and Heine Klaproth clearing a path to the house door through the piles of charred wood and broken bricks; no one dared go up to the house. Clearly Vick, too, no longer considered the yard a crime scene. And Aggie Brüshaver went to her husband in the study and told him that people had been pestering her all morning about when exactly the Cresspahl funeral was going to be, more eager than grieved, and that Frieda Klütz was going to have a new black dress made for herself in the two days left until Monday.
After that, the words came to Brüshaver quickly and easily. By noon Aggie could sit down at the typewriter. He paid visits that afternoon, and everyone who saw him so relaxed and cheerful couldn’t believe it the next day.
Twenty-two weeks after Trinity Sunday was, as decreed by the government in Berlin, one of the monthly “stew Sundays,” when the money for Sunday dinner was to go instead to the Winter Relief Program. But Friedrich Jansen was out, on something he called a matter of honor, and without him the SA didn’t dare to make social calls as a pretext for checking whether a household had a roast on the table after all. The church was no more crowded than usual. Cresspahl was not there.
Brüshaver opened with Matthew 18, the requirements for entry into the kingdom of heaven: Except ye be converted, and become as little children. Then there’s talk of he who offends the child, and it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Brüshaver left out the part about the necessity of such evil in the world, and the misery threatened to those who commit it.) Then came the bit about the hundred sheep. If one of them goes astray, doth a man not leave the ninety and nine behind and go seek the one? And if he finds it, that one is most precious to him. And you should forgive seventy times seven.
Then he gave the people of Jerichow the speech that Cresspahl hadn’t wanted to hear at the grave. He gave it for Louise Papenbrock, who even now couldn’t keep from showing, with her stiff back and raised chin, pride that in the end it was none other than she who had lost her youngest daughter. He gave it for Albert Papenbrock, who at first stared rigidly at the pulpit, as though performing a duty and a scandalous one too, then thoughtfully, as though pondering a suggestion. He g
ave it for people like Richard Maass, who saw going to church that day as more of a rebuke of improper behavior than anything else. He gave it for the man who took transcriptions of his sermons to the Gestapo. He gave it for Hilde Paepcke, who was crying. He gave it for Lisbeth, and he apologized to her. He gave it for Cresspahl.
It was none of the Jerichowers’ business how Lisbeth Cresspahl had died. Suicide was not reprehensible before man or on moral grounds. It was a matter between Lisbeth and her God that she had expected more from Him than He had been willing to give. She had been as free to die as she was to live, and if it would have been better to leave the death to Him, she had at least offered up a sacrifice to atone for another life—a murder of self for the murder of a child. Whether that was a mistake or not would not be decided in Jerichow.
On the other hand, it was very much the Jerichowers’ business that Lisbeth Cresspahl had died. They had contributed to the life she could no longer bear. Now came the catalogue that formed the basis of the verdict against Brüshaver. He started with Voss, flogged to death in Rande; he omitted neither the mutilation of Methfessel in the concentration camp nor the death of his own son in the war against the Spanish government; until he came to Wednesday night outside Tannebaum’s shop. Indifference. Acceptance. Greed. Betrayal. The egotism of a pastor, too, who was concerned only with the persecution of his own church and who had, in violation of his mandate, kept silent—who had let a member of his community seek her own, implacable, unhallowed death before his very eyes. Where all had rejected the Lord’s everlasting offer of a new life, one woman alone was no longer able to believe in it. Benediction. Final chorus. The End.
And you typed it up for him, Aggie.
It was like he had seen the light.
But you knew the price.
Brüshaver wasn’t vain, Gesine.
And if he’d thought of his family?
He didn’t need to anymore. What Aggie was was proud of Brüshaver.