by Uwe Johnson
After that, Wallschläger had to send a request in writing for every delivery in kind around Michaelmas, and at the other holidays too, and likewise for the cash payments for the sacristan’s benefice. A lot of people in Jerichow did the same, and the question did sometimes occur to Wallschläger of whether he might have not gone about things quite the right way.
– Bit heavy on the church stuff: Marie says.
March 2, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
Yesterday the West German president, Heinrich Lübke, appeared on his country’s TV. He stated that he could not recall having signed blueprints for concentration camps in the Nazi Reich. Nor not having signed them.
The secretary-general of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of which Mr. Lübke is a member, attacked the man who had once again brought up the matter in his mass-circulation magazine. He too had been an impassioned follower of Hitler.
I forgot to ask when Cresspahl started it; by September 1939, he had already been working for British counterintelligence for several months.
– I don’t like it: Marie says, stubborn, indignant. It is so cold and windy today that she has paced the length of her ship without going outside. Sits there reluctantly, bored, watching the shapeless clouds above the harbor. She doesn’t like it.
– Because he was betraying his country?
– That too.
– But wasn’t his country in the wrong?
– Gesine, isn’t this country in the wrong? Can’t you talk about how for hours, and that’s just the list? Is that enough to make you go betray it?
– We’re guests here.
– We live here.
– Okay, Marie. If I decide to do that, I’ll ask you first.
– There’s no way I’ll help you.
– And what’s your other reason?
– Everyone in your family worked hand in glove with the Nazis. Cresspahl most of all. Now you want to save the honor of at least one of them, and of course you pick your father.
– I have proof.
– This is a totally ordinary halfpenny with George VI on the back.
– Look at the year.
– 1940. Maybe you found it in England just recently and brought it back.
– They mailed it to me from Jerichow when my father died. That was in 1962, and he’d never set foot in England since the start of the war.
– Tell me! Tell me! Why didn’t you tell me sooner!
– Would you have understood it?
– No. And I don’t understand it now either. Tell me.
– Life insurance with Allianz Bank. . . .
– Listen, Gesine. I thought you’d made it up. I’ve agreed to your making things up, I’ve signed on, but I’d rather that this was the truth. Is it true?
– It started with money.
– You really know how to hook me. You’re at such an advantage, Gesine, you know me.
– Cresspahl took out life insurance only for the child’s and Lisbeth’s sakes; now Lisbeth’s death brought in no money. He hadn’t even reported to the fire-insurance company in Hamburg the loss of the workshop building and machinery; then they noticed they hadn’t received a December payment. In January they sent a warning, but still no money came. Jerichow, from Hamburg’s point of view, was in the flatlands, possibly the hinterlands, in any case not a place where written correspondence was worth much. In mid-February, then, they sent someone in a car with HH plates, left parked in the middle of town as though the driver had gotten out merely to have lunch at the Lübeck Court. Cresspahl later said: a tennis guy, so I imagine him like Dr. Ramdohr—tall, gangly, with a small head, a kind of sleepy expression, but wide awake, not easy to catch off guard and not a chance to browbeat him. Maybe because Ramdohr had so much business in Hamburg then. This other man attracted no attention in town, even with his briefcase; he didn’t walk to Gneez Street but through the churchyard like a sightseer, walked out of the chapel gate onto Brickworks Road, and was on Cresspahl’s property with almost no one having seen him. Now comes something I don’t know.
– So imagine it, Gesine!
– I imagine: They knew each other from Denmark in November (or England in December); that way the conversation could have opened with a memory. I also imagine: that this was the first request. That way the man might have made the suggestion naturally, casually, like something obvious; not as if it could cost him his neck. And Cresspahl might have said no less calmly that he wanted to think it over. Or: think it over a bit more. Then the man might have showed him the police report on the fire he had in his hand and said: It’s easy for a lamp to fall over in a wooden building storing wood.
– But Cresspahl was owed the money!
– Not if it was suicide.
– Suicide, what?! Okay. I know. Sorry.
– Cresspahl wanted to test them first. He took the train to Lübeck and asked around among Erwin Plath’s friends, but they were busy with Franco’s victory over the legal government of Spain, and when they did talk about England they cursed the British government, which had contributed to starving out the People’s Front. And at that point the Social Democrats were beginning to dig themselves in. Then the visitor came again, and this time Cresspahl found it easy to believe him. Because this time what the man brought with him was a page with the Foreign Exchange Control Law of February 1935 on it. That law threatened anyone who failed to report foreign assets with ten years in prison. Cresspahl had failed, for three and a half years now, and a court could have proven: deliberately.
– Why is it the government’s business where I keep my money?
– Listen to you, you American. The government was in the hands of crooks, and what they wanted was to get their subjects’ foreign assets into their own pockets. Sorry—a law like that with a ten-year prison term had already been passed in 1931.
– Wasn’t your father careful?
– He certainly kept an eye on the law. But why should he follow this one, when only Salomon, of Burse, Dunaway & Salomon, and the Surrey Bank of Richmond knew about the rest of his English account? And by the end of 1938, it would no doubt have already been emptied, with the monthly payments to Mrs. Elizabeth Trowbridge. She, though, had decided to raise her child without the help of someone who’d decided to marry another woman, and sent the remittances straight back until Salomon gave up.
– And wrote to Germany?
– Salomon did not entrust his clients’ secrets to the mail, especially not the German mail. There were enough fugitives in London by then who could have warned him not to. Besides, Salomon could afford to ignore the laws they had in Germany—he respected the English ones.
– So Mr. Smith betrayed Cresspahl? I don’t believe it.
– Not him, and not Perceval either. T. P. had wanted to get so far away from Richmond and memories of Mrs. Cresspahl that he had to join the Royal Navy. It was Gosling.
– Hence “Gosling the patriot.”
– Gosling couldn’t get over the fact that the German had stopped managing Reggie Pascal’s workshop for him, without permission, of his own free will. It hadn’t been a cash cow, quite, but he had managed it so that Reggie’s nephew could live like a lord. Gosling had found Mrs. Trowbridge outside of Bristol and nor had he failed to notice the child. He could only suspect that Cresspahl was paying for the child, that it was his; he denounced him as a stab in the dark, who knows why. He wanted the German’s money to go to the English state at least, and maybe a nice reward for him crossed his mind.
– And they sent him packing like a lunatic.
– Right. Then a few weeks later, the government he’d been trying to help paid him a little visit. Represented for the occasion by two sinister gentleman, one of whom kept softly sniffling, as though it smelled unpleasant when Gosling was there. When they left, Albert A. Gosling, Esq., had firmly and most fearfully decided to forget the whole affair and, especially, with a solemn oath, forget about the money.
– So the British could blackmail their man in J
erichow, Cresspahl.
– And he didn’t mind.
– I’m glad I don’t have to write an essay about this one.
– It’s simple, Marie. As long as they thought they had him by a rope around his neck, ten years in prison, they wouldn’t know the real reason he wanted to help them.
– He didn’t trust them. They were blackmailers.
– And he hadn’t told them he had a score of his own to settle with the Nazis. On the balance sheet stood his wife, Voss in Rande (he hadn’t even known him personally), Brüshaver, the war.
– The war hadn’t started yet, Gesine.
– As long as the Nazis hadn’t started the war yet, Cresspahl did sometimes feel uncomfortable. Once they marched into Poland, he felt sure of himself and furious with the inaction of the English on top of that.
– Would the Nazis have strung him up?
– Oh they would have loved to.
– So a child meant nothing to him.
– He didn’t feel like he could raise a girl anyway. He had money hidden away in the country for the child; he trusted Hilde Paepcke, and not only because she was Lisbeth’s sister.
– And you forgive him for that.
– I forgive him for that. And now he could call the English “utter scoundrels” in another sense. Except that Alwin Paap knew hardly anything about Cresspahl’s time in England, and the wife who might have listened to him wasn’t there.
– Okay, I’ll accept that.
– And Cresspahl, again, didn’t mind. As soon as he accepted, the fire insurance money came. When a lamp falls over in a woodworking business it could be an accident. Or nothing but clumsiness. It was a lot of money. German money was still worth a lot then.
– So now they’d bought him off too.
– Blackmailed, bought and paid for, safe and sound. But in fact he’d decided for himself, and kept his freedom.
– Y’know, I’d keep all of this to myself if I were you.
– I agree. Jakob knew; D. E. knows. Now you know.
– It’s like a skeleton in the closet.
– Not for me. It’s just that it’s my father’s business, and I don’t care to tell it to everyone.
– Five years we’ve been taking the South Ferry and we’ve never once caught a storm! Yesterday’s could’ve waited till Saturday. Taking the South Ferry in a storm—I wish I could do that.
March 3, 1968 Sunday
The West Germans have released Robert Mulka—the former adjunct commandant of Auschwitz, convicted of helping in three thousand murders—from Kassel prison, for health reasons. The Times came into our apartment with two inserts of Greek advertisements. In New Haven, Church Street and the university campus were swept bare of pedestrians by a harsh wind, eighteen degrees. Now a thin bowl of moon is lying on its back above Riverside Drive. The sky is almost black.
“Dear G. C.,
Handwritten, for you. That’s how you like your letters, you daughter of Cresspahl. This one wouldn’t get written any faster on the typewriter anyway, and maybe not at all, because the standardized font would imply an objectivity the letter doesn’t have. Whatever the reasons, handwriting softens things. That’s not what you mean.
I won’t use the word. Not because it would be too imprecise for me but because it’s already had its day with you. By now it’s so contemptible to you that you use it only when you’re wanting to play in your foreign language, and etymology is playing too. For in English it has Latin forebears, lubēre, libēre, trying merely to suggest a pleasure, a delight, a favor being performed. For instance, you might say to a not unpleasant suggestion: I’d love to. You’d say that; the other thing you won’t say. I like that.
It’s not that I’m trying to cop out. You tease me for liking precise words; in my mind I do use the word that you don’t want to hear and that I have no other opportunity to use. Like you, it bothers me that it fits into the HaveHaveHave Syndrome, whether applied to consumer products, persons, or life. I can live with it when it secures the past. I accept it in a literary book when it’s applied to a dead man who is no longer there to reap the reward, who is free from the need to repay it, whether in money, affection, or words themselves. It’s better if it’s an old book. To make a long story short and insufficient, I can use the word for the sum of the relations between one person and another—relations that contain a history, that are kept up, whose quiescence shuts down a part of the person. There certainly is a need involved, but mere self-interest couldn’t survive there; a coupled system of person and person requires sustenance from all sides, reciprocal, a feedback loop.
This detour around the word has cost me twenty-nine minutes. I write that down too, and you laugh.
You shouldn’t marry me—you should live with me. You’re the one who talks about ‘should’s: what I mean is that’s what I want.
It’s attachment. Not the way Klothilde Schumann meant it. She was my landlady in East Berlin, and she accused me of that once, because one time she came into the room without knocking and Eva Mau and I fell off her sofa. It’s that kind of attachment too. But it’s more that I can tolerate G. C. in any and every situation. That is not a generalization, that’s the sum of almost six years of addition. (And don’t tell me that I feel this way simply because you’re so tolerable.) There was only one time that I couldn’t stand your face. It was last week, when you had a fever, when you let a pediatrician treat you and even in your sleep issued orders against hospitals and against where I’d have wanted to have you taken. I did like your stubbornness, you’ve bundled up good reasons in it often enough, but I didn’t like that you were in danger and wouldn’t let me do anything to ward it off. Incidentally, that’s the occasion for this letter. Since I wasn’t permitted to do anything about your possessed burning sleep, go against your unconscious orders, I didn’t come back. Only now do I set foot in your apartment again, with a bow from the waist, the way little boys are taught to make on the Misdroy boardwalk so that they know how to express deference.
I’m not asking you; I’m explaining a suggestion.
This is what you think my life is. When you observe it you politely mock me, but you do create a certain distance. You’ve seen a lot; I don’t deny anymore that this is how it looks. That I’m not really present in my work—only my ability is, not the whole person. That I’ve long since given up trying to justify my career. What the Soviets did in Mecklenburg after the war, that’s not enough; what the Americans are doing in the world, now that the phase of consumption is over, that’s not enough. I would have a function in this intertwined system no matter what my job was; this is the job I have. I wouldn’t be of any use on either side above and beyond the use of my employer. The other side: it wouldn’t work there. At least I’m indifferent to this side. Even my lack of biographical motivations infuriates you—I have no biography, just a CV. In such situations of ennui, one can make a lot of noise with planes and cars and the machinery of the job; that may fool other people but not oneself. And not you either. If I stayed alone, I would only be watching to see what happens in the next twenty years, not especially hoping that my prognosis comes true, just curious; there’s not much else left. Call it waiting.
You don’t live like that; for you there are still real things: death, the rain, the sea. I remember all that; I can’t get back to that place. What feels real to me is you.
Where I have an old woman with her eccentricities, because she’s still alive, you have a past that’s alive all around you, a present that includes the dead, and your Marie knows more about who she is too because she’s learning where she comes from. There’s something there I can’t put into words. I will never be able to say of my own mother that she was anything more than what I saw in her, heard from her, heard about her; you on the other hand go right ahead and say: My father wasn’t out for revenge, he just didn’t want to get his hands dirty with the Nazis. Which is really an incomprehensible claim since it can never be proven. And from you I believe it completely: as a tr
uth that you use to get through life; most of the time as the truth. Of course I know living people where they’re doing their jobs, turning into their functions; there are some of those people I’ll miss. That sounds nice, and friendly, and behind it are a few hours of companionship without giving or taking offense, and then again all it really amounted to was a little more wasted time. You, though, don’t pass a horse without looking it in the eye, touching it, until the horse knows who was there. That’s not why you’re doing it, but that’s what others get from it. I wish you would live with me.
You can talk; I can’t. You say, about Amanda Williams: She’s flat on the floor with her soul. From anyone else I would take that as a clumsy remark, and either argue it away or leave it there naked—from you it suddenly illuminates the whole sum of relations that go to make up a person, including the unexplained or still-unrecognized part. You also said about her once: She’s not heated all the way through; this should go against my systems engineering but instead it expands it. I laughed when you said it, and it delighted me for days. I hope you’ve reheated her by now. Whatever I say, even if it’s something new and newly described, is already in quotation marks the moment I say it. An actual event in Wendisch Burg that really happened not many years ago: from me it turns dry, maybe amusing but nothing more than an anecdote. While you tell Marie about one named Shitface, ‘and the other one was named Peter,’ and she sees before her eyes a cat and another cat, because they’ve stayed alive in you. In me they’ve turned into words. All of these are things I can’t explain. They are the kinds of thing I don’t even want to take apart; I only want to be around them.
You haven’t given up. Needless to say, I would find that unbelievable in myself. I agree, you’re right. Even now you haven’t gotten tired of taking the promises of Socialism at their word; you stubbornly challenge the imperialist democracies with the noble values of their own constitutions; to this day you refuse to forget that the church, in blessing the recruits in the barracks yard in Gneez, included their instruments of war. If it were naiveté, I would eagerly take up this perennial pedagogical task too. But no, it’s hope. You don’t say it out loud, and not only for the usual Mecklenburg reasons. Forget that I originally tried to talk you out of your Czech business; now all I want is for those people to come to their senses so that for once you won’t have to bear the brunt. Forget our bet.