by Uwe Johnson
March 6, 1968 Wednesday
When asked who he was, Che Guevara reportedly said his name and: Don’t kill me. I’m more valuable to you alive than dead.
The New York Times gathers information in Munich, too, but has brought specially from Prague the news that the new Communist leadership no longer wants Jiří Hendrych as secretary for ideological matters—the same Hendrych who so vehemently cursed rebellious writers and students last summer and autumn. The ČSSR is also said to soon be allowing the sale of foreign books and newspapers the same as normal ones.
For the official notice of people from the New York area killed in the line of duty in Vietnam, the Times today no longer uses the normal type size but the very smallest one.
Cresspahl had taken his child to the Paepckes. Once the Paepckes left Mecklenburg, they were known in the family as the “Berlin-Stettin relatives,” and to the child too they seemed very far away from Jerichow, from Cresspahl. It had been a safe night journey, and even though Cresspahl had explained it to her as a move, and her clothes and toys had come along in a suitcase, she still didn’t believe that her father would leave her there. There were two navy servicemen sitting at ease across the aisle in the train car, stretched out, giving each other a tongue-lashing out of boredom. – Stop it, Ill tell my mother: one of the two adults said, in a very thick Mecklenburgish accent. It sounded like he couldn’t even speak High German. They were two voices, two red cigarettes aglow. For the child, these were the very first “sailors.” The fact that she couldn’t be sure what they were laughing at stayed with her. She fell asleep on the train, and when she woke up the next morning she immediately clenched her eyes shut again, with the shock of having different people around her. Then she jumped up and ran through the Paepcke house, got lost, finally found the front door. Cresspahl had already left.
The two older Paepcke children kept a close eye on the Cresspahl child, to make sure she didn’t deprive them of anything. She didn’t. Alexandra kept her place next to her mother, chubby Eberhardt didn’t lose his next to Alexandra, Christine’s on Hilde’s other side was safe too. This Gesine sat at the foot of the table, kept her eyes on her plate, and ate her bread in a particular way: first all around the crusts, then into the soft middle in careful, slow bites, as though it were something precious. The Paepcke children could eat however they wanted, and if one of them licked the pat of butter right off, Hilde unflappably spread them a new one. The new child was not recalcitrant after breakfast either, she obediently went along with everything, said yes to every suggested game, didn’t act the eldest. After a while she went off to the attic and looked for a new place to cry. That afternoon she let the others tell her everything they had to say about Stettin—the cinemas, the harbor tours; clearly her Jerichow gave her nothing to brag about.
That evening it turned out that the new girl had acquired something after all. Her place was set next to Alexander Paepcke, who would’ve been happy to sit at the foot of the table by himself with enough room for his paper and his glass of beer. Tonight he practically forgot to eat, with all his questions for the child from Jerichow. Did Methfessel still ask people if they wanted to be a lion? Had Cresspahl given her an allowance yet? Did she want to see how to balance a cane on your nose? He showed her how to, and handed her five pfennigs more “pin money” than Alexandra’s, going strictly by age, and the Cresspahl child talked to him even though she didn’t like looking up. She remembered the obligations of a guest, which her father had impressed upon her, and tried to be well-behaved. Eventually Paepcke gave up. When it was over he wanted to stroke her hair, but he caught Hilde’s warning look in time. Then his own kids claimed the right they’d never had before. Paepcke’s face now looked practically fat, he hadn’t looked that exhausted before, he was slower—but he only had to try a little, he was a magician with children, a maker of jokes and the butt of jokes in one. That night he tried a lot, laughter filled the kitchen, but the Cresspahl child asked quite early if she could go upstairs.
That night, at great expense, Paepcke put through a call to JErichow-209. He wanted to appeal to Cresspahl’s conscience. It was only right and natural that Cresspahl not want his child in the clutches of Grandma Papenbrock’s religion, if only because he felt it had taught his own wife how to die; it was only right that Louise had to hear this without the old man or Hilde taking her side. She had sat there like a big fat bird, insulted, feathers ruffled. And she’d cried; the family was used to her tears, whatever the occasion. But Paepcke did not want an unhappy child under his roof, and he didn’t think he’d be able to console her because she took after Cresspahl and would stay stubborn even in grief. – A dog’d take pity on er, Hinrich: Paepcke said. There was a long silence from the other end of the line, but Paepcke didn’t think he could hear any sighs. Then Cresspahl said: Alex—, in a determined way, utterly devoid of hope, and Paepcke didn’t pester him further. He was unhappy, and that night Hilde didn’t once say: Stop drinking so much!
Around ten o’clock his daughter came downstairs because she’d found the Cresspahl girl’s bed empty. Alexandra didn’t say where the other girl was, though—she didn’t want a sermon about hospitality—and Paepcke had to search the whole house until he found Gesine in the attic, crouching in the dark between baskets and suitcases, where she could cry in peace. Paepcke was so upset that he screamed at everyone, not just the child, and fetched the maid out of bed to see, and the next morning the state councilman’s widow, Mrs. Heinricius, told everyone in the general (“Colonial Goods”) store that Paepcke had wanted to kill his wife in the night, shots had been fired, the fire department had come.
Paepcke sat there at breakfast and said, with a glance at the Cresspahl child: If you only knew what some people have to go through. And he was the head of a Military Ordnance Department by then. It didn’t seem right. That night he didn’t come home, he stayed in the Podejuch station pub until midnight. Paepcke couldn’t bear to see children unhappy. It’s true; it would eventually lead to his death. And if there was drinking he had to do, he’d rather do it outside the house.
You shouldn’t forgive me for that, Gesine.
I forgive you, Cresspahl.
March 7, 1968 Thursday
Cuba has received an offer from the United States. Two conditions for resuming trade in nonstrategic goods are on the table: severing military ties with the Soviet Union, and cessation of “hooliganism in the hemisphere.” The third condition, a settlement of claims resulting from the Cuban government’s expropriation of US government and private property, should go without saying.
As the Times understands it, a Czech general is now in this country because it was no longer possible for him to support President Novotný. It’s not quite clear how we should understand this, since back home the official case against this general was limited to charges that he’d misappropriated $20,000 worth of state-owned alfalfa and clover seed (even though he wasn’t a party secretary in the Department of Agriculture—he was in the Defense Department). Back home, they hoped the general wouldn’t meet with a fatal accident, and here they hope to get some of the defector’s valuable military intelligence.
– You’re trying to make Cresspahl out to be better than he was: Marie says. She says nothing about Francine. In school she looks right past her, never talks to her. She can’t imagine that Francine wouldn’t want to go back to her own mother. It’s like her understanding of Francine is broken, there’s a crack or a scratch in it that she has no Band-Aid for. It looks like Francine has insulted her. – Gesine!: she says.
– You don’t believe it?
– I don’t believe it of him. A carpenter, and if he’s living next to an air base. . . .
– He was employed at this air base, as a carpenter. The base commander had asked the Gneez guild for a recommendation, and most agreed that Böttcher should give him Cresspahl’s name. The man had just lost his wife, his workshop too. He needed work, otherwise his marbles’d be next.
– He doesn’t get any
farther into the airport than the door he’s supposed to fix. . . .
– The first of those doors was in the officers’ mess, where a party official in his cups had tried to shoot a swastika into Böttcher’s sturdy woodwork with his revolver. Really.
– You see? And maybe he adds a porch onto the civilian personnel’s vacation homes every now and then, as a side job . . .
– and in Semig’s house he had to build a whole new office, with six-foot-high wainscoting and a gap left for the safe Lieutenant Colonel von der Decken wanted built in. It was Cresspahl who made a door to hide it.
– You see? Now your father was a safecracker.
– He didn’t need to do that.
– Fine. But this lieutenant colonel of yours, a von der Decken no less, talked to tradesmen like dogs. “Good job, good boy.” You say so yourself. So maybe he saw a few planes from afar.
– From up close, Marie. And even from a distance he could have counted them. It was already quite a lot that he knew the number of civilian employees, and knew their job descriptions.
– So now you want to make out he had technical military knowledge too.
– No one’s making out anything. I’m just trying to tell you a story.
– Okay. Now the Brits know how many planes there are at Mariengabe Airfield near Jerichow.
– And which ones live there, and which ones are only visiting, and which ones are bringing deliveries or taking them away. The trucks of fuel or bombs, Cresspahl could see those just on Town Street. Of course his bosses, or the people who thought that’s what they were, would’ve much rather had someone like Professor Erichson, who would have been able to draw the airfield from memory that night. They had to make do with a tradesman who could memorize type numbers like HE 111 P and enough of the plane’s appearance that it could be identified as a fighter. That was enough for the Ju 52 transport, or the He 59 hydroplane, a little double-decker like that. As for the Ju 87, that beast, it wasn’t exactly the talk of the town around Jerichow. . . .
– I would have believed you, Gesine. Now you’re exaggerating again.
– The Ju 87 was a “Stuka,” a Sturzkampf plane. Dive-bomber. When one of them plunged down at a target, built-in sirens gave off a hellish shriek. That was the psychological side of warfare in those days. They were called the sirens of Jerichow.
– After the trumpets some priests blew while they marched around some city walls until they collapsed?
– That worked only on one city: the Jericho in Jordan. Joshua, chapter 6. And the account of that city’s destruction is a legend, by the way, you can ask our friend Red Anita about that, she helped excavate there to get her PhD.
– The sirens of Jericho. Now that’s one coincidence too many for me.
– And what should the people in the other Jerichow say—the bigger city near Magdeburg?
– I don’t like it when something comes together so perfectly. You’re telling me sirens of Jericho in Jerichow, that’s not made up.
– Not by me. Cresspahl also knew that the Ju 87s had machine guns on their wings, and that the DO 17 P long-distance reconnaissance planes had earlier been called DO 17 Fs, during the Spanish Civil War. That could come up in a conversation a harmless workman happened to walk past in town. It was also useful when he could add where the airplane fuel was hidden underground—that was already a target on the map in London.
– Harmless workman! He was someone who’d lived in London!
– And someone who just nodded when asked whether he’d stopped wanting to live outside the German Fatherland after its glorious rebirth. That made him reliable enough. The guy looked a bit slow, actually. Hadn’t done too well in England, had he. Anyway, he still had his work, that’s what counted. And his stories from London were pretty funny: In London therere bedrooms where you lie on the bare ground. Just a rope up at the top end, an you put yer head there, and in the mornin they let it drop and thats yer alarm: he said. He was having his fun with them.
– You know, when you talk in Platt, I sometimes feel like I understand a word or two.
– Say: Kattdreier.
– “Caterer”?
– You see? And Cresspahl wasn’t limited to the airfield. There’d suddenly be new people in the Forest Lodge or Rifle Club, in army uniforms, not from around there, who couldn’t resist showing off with their parachutist knives. That was not long before the offensive planned against England. So he also picked up that the paratroopers had schools in Stendal and Wittstock, that their day’s pay was fifty cents but every jump brought in twenty-seven marks, which was why they were sitting in the Forest Lodge drinking beer and trying out the bit about one last time before we die on anything with a skirt. Cresspahl didn’t have to do it alone either. Erwin Plath was in a bit of a tizzy that the national soccer team under Reich Coach Sepp Herberger would be playing against Hungary, Sunday the seventh of April 1940 was the historic date, but he was puzzling over why the motorboat Hanseatic City of Danzig had moored at the East Prussia Quay in Lübeck-Travemünde, now painted gray but still unmistakably familiar from the days when it still carried Baltic tourist traffic, not navy military. It had also docked in Rande, outside Jerichow. On Sunday they screamed and shouted over the heroic 2–2 in the Berlin Olympic Stadium; that night the Hanseatic City of Danzig sailed from Travemünde with the First Battalion of the 308th Infantry Regiment of the 198th Infantry Division in her belly—the division recruited in the collapsed Czechoslovak Republic, in the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” mostly Swabians and Sudeten Germans. Many had hoped that their annexation would be in the last act of war of the century. The day had begun with frost on the ground, then it warmed up to nine Celsius, the sky stayed clear. It wasn’t the start of spring, though—it was the start of the occupation of Denmark. The grunts could only guess at that, just like Cresspahl, for the orders weren’t opened until the 9th, by which time the Danzig was sailing through the Great Belt. Still, it wasn’t too late for London to get intelligence about which troops had been sent to Denmark, or a memo that such outings started not just in the Kiel and Swinemünde harbors but in Lübeck’s too.
– You mean there were more people like that in or near Swinemünde and Kiel? Who betrayed their country. . . ?
– They betrayed the Nazis. And as with Cresspahl, there was nothing special about them, they didn’t stand out. Cresspahl wasn’t in the party, of course; this counted as a point in his favor, if anything, as far as the air force was concerned—that swastika of bullet holes in the officers’ mess, remember. Cresspahl didn’t have a Blaupunkt radio (with the magic eye) like Alexander Paepcke, which it was forbidden to listen to since the start of the war since it could pick up foreign stations; Cresspahl had a thing named the People’s Receiver, Volksempfänger, VE 301, seventy-six reichmarks including the antenna, “manufactured in memory of the People’s Uprising of Jan. 30, 1933.” Cresspahl was hardly talked about in Jerichow at all. Maybe it was said that he’d gone a bit funny after his wife’s death. Held his head like an ornery horse, got in the habit of a nod that looked deaf, a titch too obedient. It was often taken for stupidity, too; sometimes an order was explained to him twice, as though he hadn’t understood it. Then it turned out he’d understood just fine, but he nodded again anyway. And some people in Jerichow had their own reasons for keeping their mouths shut—more than a little that was still usable had been stolen during the fire at Cresspahl’s workshop, Alwin Paap couldn’t be everywhere at once. There were mornings when tools labeled C were thrown over the fence. Maybe it wasn’t only because the C could betray them. And it was better, it was healthier, to keep your distance from someone who’d been that unlucky—
Go away, black blackbird,
If I am so black
It’s not only my fault,
It’s my mother’s too,
Because she didn’t wash me
When I was little,
When I—
and having blackbirds in a tree behind the house, that didn’t att
ract attention either. There were a lot, and many of them were braver than he was.
– That’s not what I meant, Gesine.
– Many were braver than he was when betraying their country.
At seven, the darkness was perfectly clear. The skyscraper across the Hudson is lit up as if for a party. From New Jersey, our Riverside Drive looks lit up as if for a party.
March 8, 1968 Friday
The New York Times is delighted that students at Harvard have now parodied her too. On the joke front page, among other news, the Parthenon collapses; there is a two-column headline on the top left about a failed airlift to Khesanh: since the parachutes didn’t open, Tanks, Heavy Guns Fall Mercilessly on Men Below / Marines Crushed. . . .
Longshoremen in New York have refused to load onto a freighter a ketch belonging to Dr. Benjamin Spock, who’d intended to sail around the Virgin Islands on it. Some months ago Dr. Spock took part in an antiwar demonstration in Lower Manhattan, and the dockworkers remember it.
As of midnight on Saturday, 19,251 Americans have fallen in Vietnam. Have died.
And the Czechoslovakians, invoking the extradition treaty of 1925 (supplemented by an annex in 1935), want their fugitive general back: Antonín Novotný’s supporter. Alfalfa and clover seed.
Cresspahl’s child spent a long time in Pommern with the Paepckes, more than six months; still, it wasn’t too long.
There were evenings like the ones in late May 1939, when the strawberries were ripe and released juice into the sugar. They were eaten with silver forks, at the table out in the garden, and Hilde kept piling more and more piles onto Gesine’s plate. The child was so rapt as she ate that only after she stopped did she notice that everyone had been watching her, helpless with silent laughter, no envy. By then the child had long since stopped feeling watched, suspect, unmasked. She could laugh along with them.
At the Paepckes’, a child had no duties, no cares. When Gesine and Alexandra offered to walk to the store, Hilde acted like she needed to think it over and often said no if she’d thought up another new game for the children instead. – May I turn the roast potatoes?: Gesine asked. Gesine had learned a lot of High German by then. – All right, turn the potatoes!: Hilde would snap, in a put-upon tone that threatened terrible punishments. She couldn’t keep it up for long, and soon laughed. But she’d rather keep the child away from the stove. A child can burn to death after all.