by Uwe Johnson
In the week after Kristallnacht, Cresspahl was still in Jerichow. It was a perfectly ordinary week.
On November 14, Monday night, the NSDAP held a social gathering for party comrades at the Beach Hotel in Rande. The Beach Hotel stood opposite the harbor bridge, on Street of the SA. The Gneez Music Academy took part, performing instrumental pieces, and a group of Jungmädel sang “The Red Flags Burn in the Wind.” Jungmädel was what they called the girls who were still too young for the BDM. Friedrich Jansen gave the opening speech in a quiet, almost docile voice. The Beach Hotel’s large hall was full except for a few seats, and Jansen thanked the county head of the party for his presence. Swantenius, from Gneez, watched him with a suppressed smile, which the other man might have taken for comradely if it hadn’t reminded him of the services Swantenius had provided for him before the party tribunal. Jansen cried “Sieg Heil!” three times, and three times the auditorium answered him with “Sieg Heil!” Then the Jungmädel in Mecklenburg folk costumes performed some folk dances. The National Socialist Women’s Association had rehearsed some songs. Finally there was a play performed in Plattdeutsch to much laughter, and the marksmanship and dice prizes were handed out.
The dance went on until midnight. When the Jerichowers came back from the party, the city was dark except for two windows in Papenbrock’s house. There sat the old man, who didn’t want to let Cresspahl go home. He was tired from drinking, and roused himself only seldom, with loud sighs. Cresspahl stayed until Papenbrock no longer noticed that he was being put to bed on the office sofa.
On Tuesday, the bag for the pound collection was dropped off at Cresspahl’s house. Printed on the bag was a stylized Reich eagle perched on a swastika. Later Mrs. Jansen came over to apologize on behalf of the BDM girls, who had thoughtlessly followed their list, but the bag was standing ready, filled with semolina. The Labor Service girl couldn’t tell Mrs. Jansen where Cresspahl was. Cresspahl was with Koepcke, the head of the construction firm, and that afternoon the first trucks arrived with the workers who would finish demolishing the barn and carry off the first loads of debris.
On Wednesday, Richard Maass put a globe in his window. He noted on a sheet of paper that this globe showed the new borders of Germany. It was only a sample, to his customers’ disappointment, but Maass received twenty-one orders.
Head Teacher Stoffregen borrowed the sample for one of his classes. More debris was hauled off of Cresspahl’s property. The child was not in Papenbrock’s house, and apparently their maid had been strictly warned not to gossip. It was impossible to get out of Edith why Gesine was still living with her father instead of her grandmother. Meanwhile, more people than usual were standing in front of the parish bulletin board, but it still hadn’t been announced whether Brüshaver would be back for the Sunday sermon. Brüshaver’s eldest son had not come to school.
On Thursday, a lot of people from Jerichow went to Gneez. Stoffregen had reserved one and a half train cars for the school. In Gneez the new recruits were being sworn in. With the coming of the air force, Jerichow now had all the same delegations that Gneez had, except for the National Socialist Brotherhood of Hunters. It was generally thought that the Jerichow celebration had been more uplifting. It was also said that it was Brüshaver’s fault if the Jerichow celebration hadn’t quite come off. In Gneez the church bells rang before the swearing in. There was a Protestant chaplain and a Catholic one, each making points about the significance of the oath to the flag. Then “Now We Gather to Pray” was sung. The “Sieg Heil” had come in more punctually on the Jerichow market square, and the echo had been better too. That evening, the building that had been Cresspahl’s shop finished being leveled to the ground.
On Friday morning, two of von Zelck’s harnessed teams arrived and started plowing the area where the barn had once stood. Cresspahl and Paap put up fence posts along the line of what had been the east wall. If you imagined the line continuing, it cut off a third of the garden. It looked as if Cresspahl was planning to sell or rent out the strip of land. By late afternoon all the charred wood was gone from the yard and the teams were plowing up the soil of the yard. Then Koepcke came with his steamroller and turned the fresh furrows in the yard into a neat, flat surface.
On Saturday morning, the air force invited the population to a Christmas display. It consisted of broken toys that had been fixed and were meant for the children of needy fellow Germans. Gneez might have its army, but Jerichow could be proud of its air force. Even the Royal Eagle had a different look than usual, with wider wings and an elongated neck. It looked elegant, even on a wreath ribbon. One such wreath ribbon had been stolen from the Cresspahl grave. Stoffregen the head teacher surprised three boys making a deal to resell it during recess and forced them to give the piece of fabric back to Cresspahl with their apologies. They came back and reported that Alwin Paap hadn’t let them on the property, and that Cresspahl wasn’t there.
Anyone who called JErichow-209 in the afternoon always reached Alwin Paap. He refused to answer questions, was so businesslike it was downright unfriendly, Cresspahl must have arranged things with him. So now people had to wait until Monday morning. But neither of the Labor Service girls came in to do their shopping. They’d both driven off with their suitcases. Had Paap learned to cook, then? No, he’d started boarding at Creutz’s, but he didn’t go to their house, the food was brought to him at Cresspahl’s yard so he wouldn’t have to leave. Papenbrock, in his treacherous way, asked into the phone what the reason might be why the caller was asking him about Cresspahl. Koepcke had made arrangements with Cresspahl to not be paid until December 31, but still it worried him that the man had left town. Koepcke didn’t want to tell Papenbrock that he had any doubts about Papenbrock’s son-in-law’s payment ethics, and said nothing more. No one wanted to get on Papenbrock’s bad side.
So presumably Cresspahl left Jerichow on Saturday morning. With the child.
February 27, 1968 Tuesday
The White House says that President Johnson is satisfied that Congress had been given the full facts before it approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing the expansion of the war. Senator Fulbright still doesn’t buy it.
A Pentagon spokesman in Saigon said today that the new censorship policy would have no effect on the Defense Department’s daily and weekly updating of totals of killed and wounded.
Louis Schein, a Bronx real estate man, is supposed to tell a grand jury if he was either threatened with death or beaten up by John (Buster) Ardito over a loan of $5,000. John Ardito is said to be a major power in the Mafia family of Vito Genovese, and Louis Schein doesn’t want to say anything. He would rather face the penalty for contempt than the penalty from the Mafia. He won’t even say if he knows Ardito.
At the end of December, two days after Christmas, Cresspahl returned to Jerichow.
– You can’t do this to me!: Marie says. For four days she has not wanted to talk about Francine. She sees Francine in school, she dodges my questions with a scowl as though they’re tactless. So now we need something else to fill our evenings. She seems eager, attentive; she’s trying to push something aside.
– He brought the child.
– Where was he, Gesine! Where was he!
– There was a branch office of the HAPAG, the Hamburg America Line, at the market square in Lübeck. They had an express service from Hamburg to New York via Southampton and Cherbourg.
– You’re kidding me. Cresspahl in New York?
– Adult tickets started at 605 marks, which included a six-day stay in New York. Don’t you think he would have done it?
– Gesine, is this another water-butt story?
– No. And we’re not talking about my mother anymore. She’s dead by now.
– Did she, in the fire—? Okay. I don’t want to know. I promise.
– So you don’t think Cresspahl would’ve wanted to see New York?
– That wouldn’t feel right. It would fit too perfectly. First a random Robert Papenbrock in New York, then
your father, and thirty years later here we are. It would be too contrived, like a novel.
– Well, that’s 905 marks less for HAPAG.
– You’re trying to test me, Gesine. You said something not too long ago about a transfer to Copenhagen, on some lake, with a view of an island, and before that there was a British consulate in Lübeck. On Schüsselbuden Street. On that Schüsselbuden, you said. So there must have been a Danish one too.
– On An der Untertrave. But if he went via Rostock, he could pass by Grosse Mönchenstrasse, the Danes were there too, and the German Railroad had connections every day, on the Schwerin or the Mecklenburg, to Gedser forty-two kilometers away. To Denmark.
– I don’t understand. Wasn’t Germany a dictatorship?
– That wasn’t what I said. It was ruled and administered by criminals.
– A dictatorship lets people out?
– The majority of Germans were happy with Hitler and Company. No one suspected them of wanting to leave the country by the millions. So yes, there was even an excursion ticket you didn’t need a passport for, Warnemünde–Gedser. A visa was enough, and you could buy one on board for twenty-five cents. The crooks kept their eyes peeled only when it came to money. Travelers could take only ten marks with them, and in coins, not bills. Then they could land in Denmark, and it’s true, the Danes would by no means force them back onto the Nazi ship.
– Warnemünde?
– The mouth of the Warnow—where the Warnow mündet. One of Rostock’s peripheral harbors at the time. The express train from Berlin went onto a ship there. If it was the Schwerin, twelve years old, not much over three thousand tons, 106 meters long. . . .
– A South Ferry! A North Ferry!
– With smoking and nonsmoking lounges. . . .
– I like it, Gesine.
– Sleeping cabins, bathing cabins, balconies, promenade decks, and a grand restaurant, since the trip lasted two hours. . . .
– You’re making our South Ferry look bad. It can’t have a restaurant for a twenty-minute trip! Or sleeping cabins.
– Marie, that was the ship that the Schwerin head of the German Railroad had in service. I didn’t make it up.
– Cresspahl was carrying the illegal money under his hat. He might have done that.
– He had the child carry it, sewn into her bedtime doll. He might have done that.
– He was doing some business for Erwin Plath in Denmark.
– That I don’t know. I don’t even know if he went to Denmark.
– But you can prove it. You have his passport.
– I stole his passport in 1951: the GDR one, not the one with the swastika. There’s no one left in Jerichow who knows anymore, and after the war I didn’t want to ask him what he was doing at the end of 1938. What I do know was told to me in bits and pieces, but this wasn’t.
– So let’s assume Denmark. A man alone with a child.
– Later in my life I took a lot of train rides—from Mecklenburg to Saxony, from Bavaria to Italy, from Wales to Scotland—and I didn’t have to get used to it. I already was. Maybe I learned it when I was five. I sometimes dream stretches of line running hundreds of kilometers, dense mixed forest next to the second track until the exact spot where the grassy fields start, and it’s not a line I recognize, even when I’m awake. When I came to New York with you, I didn’t have to learn what a large ship is like; I already knew.
– It’s not like that with me.
– With you it didn’t last six weeks.
– All right, then, Denmark.
– Maybe. When you and I took the train from Copenhagen to Esbjerg. . . .
– Déjà vu.
– That’s too intellectual for me, Marie. Maybe it was a fake memory when I recognized the landscape on either side of the train, the islands in the Great Belt, the Middelfart Bridge, and finally the ferry to Harwich. But your déjà vu doesn’t just mean what’s been seen before, it means what’s been experienced, and I don’t have that, or a premonition of what’s about to happen. And two years ago I really wasn’t turning my attention away from life, so that the present moment would be immediately dismissed as memory . . .
– I was just showing off with “déjà vu.”
– . . . because we’d just been to see Ingrid Bøtersen in Klampenborg and were on our way to England.
– You just recognized it, that’s all.
– And I didn’t realize I did. I couldn’t. At the moment of seeing, what was seen got snapped into a preprepared place in my brain and became real; the moment it stopped being seen, it was forgotten. That’s what happened to me with Nyhavn in Copenhagen, with Amaliegade, with the main station; not with the Museum of Danish Resistance in Churchill Park, Kastrup Airport, or Klampenborg. The other feeling, déjà vu. . . .
– You don’t have to rub it in.
– But I also had it in a school hallway in London, in Victoria Station, in Glasgow on the right bank of the Clyde, in the town center. Why. . . .
– You were there, Gesine. Cresspahl was there. He went to take another look around in England, in Denmark, maybe even in the Netherlands. To see if there was a place for him there. He wanted to emigrate, Gesine!
– I wish.
– A man, alone with a child, traveling for six weeks.
– It’s unclear. Lots of nights alone with him in bare rooms. As if I woke up and he wasn’t there and I went running through lots of rooms, none of which I recognized, and turned on the electric light, wailing pitifully, and when I had people around none of them understood me. Not because they were laughing too much. Because I couldn’t tell them what I wanted. That might be a dream. I also remember something about a thatched-roof house with rounded dormer windows, and four children I was handed over to—I’ve never consciously seen a house like that in my life, and yet we were near the water. Little waves, bright clean sand in the rain. But as if I’d never been unhappy, because Cresspahl had promised to come back, and did come back. And that we were almost never in the same place for more than a day. If you want to imagine that you can believe it too.
– Believe it, Gesine!
– But there’s no way to prove it.
– I’d rather have proof of why Cresspahl went back to Germany, to Jerichow.
– I don’t know.
– Gesine, the town hadn’t become what Richmond was. The relatives would be fine without him, his friends too. And fifty yards from his house there was a mound of dirt with his dead wife under it.
– Maybe Cresspahl had given up.
– Do you think he had?
– Not yet.
February 28, 1968 Wednesday
And still West Germany has as president an old man said to have signed construction plans for a concentration camp in 1944. He doesn’t believe that he did, but he couldn’t swear to it under oath. An American graphologist recognized the 1944 signatures on the plans as the president’s. A Bonn student who added “concentration camp builder” after the president’s name on an honor roll in the rector’s office has been expelled. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, in the ruling coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), responded to demands that the accused step down by saying: Those demanding it are only trying to pressure the coalition and switch tracks for another one. That’s how much West German politics cares about concentration camps; that’s the kind of country it is; and Mrs. Ferwalter says: I’m sure he had to do it, he must have had a wife.
Mrs. Ferwalter lost part of her life in the Germans’ concentration camps; she knows that and speaks of it casually, the way other people talk about their Abitur exams. She is a squat woman, broad-shouldered like maids from the country who used to work so hard they never got a chance to live and who fell into bed at night like a sack of potatoes; Mrs. Ferwalter should be able to get a good night’s sleep. But she can’t. Since the Americans found and freed her in southeast Europe, she’s been anxious—in her sleep, running the household, when she talks, she can’t quite lose an expression
of horror and disgust no matter how friendly a face she’s making; she keeps her eyes narrowed, though they are big and gentle and capable of great tenderness. In the middle of Broadway, in the middle of hurried evening shoppers, she carries herself as if encircled by hidden dangers. This Cresspahl, the German, is no danger to her—she plants herself carelessly in her path, laughs her awkward laugh, walks with her a bit, looks sideways at her every so often as if at something horribly repulsive, in an affectionate, friendly way. Hello, Mrs. Ferwalter.
Mrs. Ferwalter is coming back from the Bronx with Rebecca, where they went to see a relative who works as a barber. First, he does it for them cheaper; second, he knows how to cut Rebecca’s hair in layers so that it looks more European.
What counts in Mrs. Ferwalter’s eyes is not that Cresspahl is German but that she’s European. You can talk to this Cresspahl about Austria and she’ll know where it is. Mauthausen’s there. Mrs. Cresspahl doesn’t go blank even at the mention of České Budějovice, she knows the lost old country, even the lost tip of Slovakia now occupied by the Soviet Union. Were they the ones who handed the Jews over to the Germans in 1944, before their uprising? We can’t ask about that. And Mrs. Ferwalter doesn’t care, what she cares about are the other woman’s boots—yellow leather, lacing all the way up on hooks. Are they European? They’re from London, Mrs. Ferwalter. She is very pleased. One of the things she appreciates about Cresspahl is her familiarity with other kinds of style than the American one, and her understanding that Rebecca’s mother must be insulted that her child’s birthday wasn’t acknowledged even if it’s because she was sick. Yesterday Marie did go and deliver a gift, as one should in Europe. And it was a pencil case from Switzerland! Rebecca doesn’t get to use it, though; it will be shown to guests and then put behind glass in the cupboard as a sign that the Ferwalter household is still upholding European values. – From Saks Fifth Avenue!: Mrs. Ferwalter cries. – You must always shop there? Denial is useless, Mrs. Ferwalter will believe it anyway. She considers Cresspahl someone from “a good family,” she’s said so to Prof. Kreslil; such origins probably help in the friendship. The point is that the pencil case is from Zurich; that Cresspahl has to do a lot of writing in her job and so she knows what’s good to write with. Of course it would have been even better if the present came from Germany, the workmanship there is the best anywhere.