by Uwe Johnson
The way Hilde carried on with Alexander—I’ve never seen anything like it since. Alexander would come home and hang up the coat from his uniform; Hilde would come up next to him and put her arms around his neck. – You’re not feeling well!: she would accuse him, and he would shiver as though having swallowed some bitter medicine. – What WOULD I do without you and the li’l potaters: he’d say. Hilde could tell from a distance if it was an evening on which he would brook no delay, even with words; then all Hilde cared about was getting dinner over with, the big girls had to look after the little one, they all got a stroke on their hair, their back, then Hilde would follow her man to the bedroom and not be seen again for the rest of the night.
Heard from afar, without looking, when very tired, Hilde’s voice was my mother’s. That voice taught the Cresspahl child how Lisbeth had stopped talking to her. With a long, ringing second vowel in the first name—not as an order or a warning, the way people did later, but with affection, always taken by surprise with new delight.
Hilde stood at the stove and Alexander looked her dreamily up and down. After he’d thought it over for long enough, he said: I used to think you had pretty legs. ’S’not true though.
Hilde looked at him questioningly, slightly sad really, and Alexander decreed for all time: FEISTY legs, that’s what you have!
Neither of them cared that the children could hear. What remains is a feeling of infectious enthusiasm, of pleasure in being part of such a life. (The other side was jealousy; that was kept from the children.)
When Alexander let loose with long rants about the “Nazi pigs,” then too Hilde watched him closely, agreement showing in her mouth. Lisbeth used to interrupt with frightened accusations. (Heinrich Cresspahl! Think of the child!)
Alexandra and Gesine were supposed to go to the doctor for shots, and Hilde wrote them an excuse note: My children cannot come on March 21, because we are celebrating the first day of spring.
My children. Gesine had no doubt about it. She knew she was Cresspahl’s child and that she had to live with him—that was an inner certainty. From the outside, she was one of Hilde’s children.
Whether the first day of spring or one of the cats’ birthdays, events were celebrated in style. Even if the sky threatened rain, Hilde helped Auguste the maid string up lanterns in the garden. She invited over enough children to fill the garden, every time, except never the children of SS Commander Bindeband, even though he had six to offer, with names like Gerlinde and Sieglinde and Brunhilde and Kriemhild. There was tiddlywinks and musical chairs and Squeak Piggy Squeak, and Hilde would shamelessly cheat if a child was at risk of losing too often. As she shoved the pot closer to the blindfolded child with the helplessly waving stick, she would look at the others conspiratorially, and everyone would agree to forfeit some of their own chance of winning. The writer here may not want to say so, but it really was true of Hilde: she had a beautiful (crossed out).
Then Mrs. Bindeband invited Alexandra and Gesine over to play. The Bindeband children had braids all the way down their backs. They wore sackcloth clothes, burlap aprons. The games, though, were the celebration of a heathen Easter festival in a villa that used to belong to a Stettin Jew. The Persian rugs, the oil paintings, all seemed preserved intact. Along with a bad conscience came the sensation: My God we’re poor. When they came back home, Hilde wasn’t mad but she was disappointed. From that point on, the children never let themselves get tempted into the Bindeband house.
Hilde had lost a maid over a Hitler picture. Her name was Frieda Lämmerhirt, she was from Berlin, and she’d cut a photograph of Hitler out of the newspaper. She received a harsh reprimand, and later another from Alexander. She’d messed up the newspaper! But no one had ever saved The North German Observer in this house. She gave notice on the spot, packed her things in silence, and left, taking with her the Hitler picture she’d so carefully pinned up on the wall of her room. Bindeband heard this too about the Paepckes, and afterwards less.
In the Stettin Military Ordnance Department, Paepcke had in fact found people he didn’t have to include among the “Nazi pigs,” and he often brought three or four home with him, without warning, and those were long nights for the children too. No one paid attention to the children—they just joined the fun of the grown-ups. They knew they were not unwelcome. Alexandra sat next to her seriously pontificating father (We’re gonna lose this war too; at least we’ve learned how it’s done) and pushed him until he finally toppled over in a harrowing pantomime, like a night swimmer plunging from a great height into a bottomless sea.
There were evenings when Alexander would read to them. How King Henry found the Fair Rosamund. Sometimes he lost his place in the book and happily read the same passage several times, one that Cresspahl as a student later found in Fontane: “There is nothing so crazy that it cannot seem thrilling for the moment, or even correct, when a certain artistic light is shined upon it, but it is all an illusion. No one starves in Mecklenburg, hundreds starve in London, and yet England is the pride and model of all nations and Mecklenburg cuts a comic figure. One is the very image of higher things, the other of lower!” – Remember that, Gesine! He quickly bethought himself and included the others, and threatened them with “the pit” if they failed to think on it for the rest of their lives. Then he went on reading.
And no matter how often he threatened to refrain from stroking their hair, never once did a child have to “go to bed bareheaded.”
And when they went to go swimming in the Oder, Alexander never failed to sing on the ride there:
To horse! We ride to Linlithgow,
I and you by my side;
There we will hunt and fish, with joy,
As in the days gone by.
Giant picnic baskets were brought on these trips, full of bread and cakes and hard-boiled eggs and milk and fruit. Children at the Paepckes never stopped getting fed. When someone was by no means hungry yet—when he or she just barely sensed a minor creeping idea of hunger in the distance—more food appeared. Sour milk with sugar.
The Paepckes had a bellows camera to take photographs with—an article of faith for them. The subject had to be precisely two meters away, the sun at the photographer’s back if possible. Hilde kept the thing in the kitchen cupboard; no sooner had Christine torn down a curtain than she had her picture taken. (Am I two meters away?: she asked the tiny little Christine.) The big kids had a costume ball with the remains of the curtain; they too had their pictures taken.
When the children wanted to go swimming, a tin tub with elaborately curved edges was set up in the garden that morning. But only in the afternoon they could swim: by then the water was sure to have gotten warm enough.
At the Paepckes’, a child would be sitting there painting, or cutting up fabric, and Hilde would never walk past without praising the work, and not with fawning but with detailed questions. At the Paepckes’, the children learned to feel who they were.
Hilde knew that the neighbors expected her to show her husband’s occupation and rank with her clothes; she preferred to wear her hair wrapped in a scarf tied in back, like the farm women. She did a lot of her own sewing, wore pants, and answered reproachful greetings with innocent, friendly replies as though she hadn’t noticed a thing.
At the Paepckes’, you could lie around on the property as if in a forest, beneath the pines and acacias, on ground soft with needles. No one would come bother a child there. If the child came back inside from the solitude, Hilde would have a ribbon in her hand and tie it around the child’s forehead, and she wasn’t wrong: the child really had been out among the Indians.
In the summer the Paepckes took the children to Fischland on holiday. The war hadn’t started yet. Evening on the Shoreline Cliff looked strangely different than it did on the north shore near Jerichow. On their last day in Althagen, Cresspahl came. He looked old, shorter than they remembered, emaciated. Without warning there he was on Border Road, and Gesine knew he’d come to fetch her.
Since she
knew the Paepckes were standing behind her, she felt too embarrassed to run up to Cresspahl. Then she heard Alexander saying something in a very loud voice about bird nests, and she realized that none of them was looking at her, and she ran.
The next morning, nothing could be more right than to leave for Jerichow with him. But it was already wrong to leave the Paepckes behind.
Gesine, if you’d written all this down it would’ve been be a real thank-you letter!
As it should be.
You grieve for us too?
I do.
We wouldn’t have believed it of you when alive. When we were alive.
March 9, 1968 Saturday
Cloudy, mild, twelve degrees (53°)—not a South Ferry day. Marie got dressed as though for the ship, in pants and a parka with a hood, and for bad weather, where the clothes need to be old and not too valuable. Marie had picked a non-school day to try to clear things up with her friend Francine, but she couldn’t reach her by phone in the city homeless shelter. So now Marie wanted to go looking for her on the streets, in the slums of the Upper West Side. You don’t wear a coat from London for that, she might get curses hurled at her for that, and not just curses.
Our slums are around the corner, and a foreign country. Elendsquartiere is what they’re called in German, but the slums in our neighborhood are not “housing” meant especially for the “destitute,” unlike the blocks thrown up for workers by the land speculators in the German big cities: a bidonville in Paris, a Barackendorf for refugees, a shantytown. The slums in New York weren’t built as slums; here the slum is like a jellyfish in society, it moves around.
On the side streets between the avenues, they’re now in a lot of the brownstones—the four-story buildings named for their original facades of reddish-brown sandstone—and after the Civil War they were in fact a sign of bourgeois prosperity. The spacious lobbies were made for dignified entrances. The four floors were meant for a single family, plus servants—richly furnished interiors with fine wood wainscoting, oak parquet floors, marble fireplaces, carved doors, lathed banister posts in the stairways. They held salons, splendid parties, with fancy carriages stopping outside. These were luxury residences, and even though now the fronts have started to peel off or else have been sloppily painted over, the buildings themselves don’t seem to go with the dirt on the front stoops, the rotting furniture and mattresses, the uncovered garbage bins, the smeared windows, the remains of the sanitation workers’ strike, the scattered garbage that will remain if it can withstand the rain and is too heavy for the wind.
These buildings have been given up on. They were built for whites, Anglo-Saxons, Protestants. The Irish, who began moving here in large numbers in the seventies of the last century, gathered in the apartment buildings along Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, but many of them saved up for one of these fashionable brown houses and took advantage of possession by renting out rooms. The Irish were the most powerful political group in the neighborhood before the Jews arrived from Harlem, unable to cope with the growing proximity of the Negro. Then came the Negroes from the ghettos of New York, and the wave of Puerto Ricans after World War II; the white-skinned immigrants, long since accustomed to the scale of values they’d encountered on these shores, gave up one street after another. Not entirely, though. The owner can turn one of these single-family houses into four apartments first, one per floor, and make up the lost property value with higher rental income. The landlord can then turn these small apartments into single rooms. Now he makes many times the old rent. Since his renters see even such living conditions as an improvement, if they come from Harlem or Brownsville, and the Spanish-speaking ones are incapable of resistance to begin with, the landlord is free to delay repairs, save money on heating, not bother with a super. The laws are specific and impose fines on all such acts of negligence, but people without education or sufficient knowledge of the language rebound off the bureaucratic system, and the courts are inclined to treat the slumlord mildly for it is he who embodies the concepts of income and property.
Income and property are what created the slums in the first place: the ugliness and permeability of the dividing walls, the unreplaced window-panes, the defective door locks, the broken mailboxes, the slippery encrusted dirt in the hallways, the rusted kitchens, the cells infested with vermin and the rats about which the representatives of the people laughed out loud last summer. Mrs. Daphne Davis, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, got to the point last summer where her daughter was playing with a rat. It was so big the child was calling: “Here, kitty, here kitty.” When it gets to that point, the city inspectors give up, whether they’re supposed to come for the plumbing or the fire escapes, and the sanitation workers get the picture too. The garbage here is picked up less often than in middle-class streets, and in a perfunctory way that knows nothing of sweeping up. But Income and Property are not the ones to whom the riot act or the book of Leviticus is read.
When a family like the Carpenter III’s on West End Avenue wishes all the best for the Negroes—an apartment in their own respectable if not elegant apartment building not included—then Liz Carpenter III if not her husband brings up, with no doubt in her mind, the slums as proof that these blacks simply would not understand how to live in a civilized community. As if such understanding were an innate gift of nature. Scarcely any of the arguments intended to forestall a reasonably equal distribution of property in society bothers to try to be cogent or have even the appearance of logic; this one, moreover, ignores the fact that not all Negroes live in slums and not all slum dwellers are Negroes. The prejudice of the American nation against a long-established tenth of its members may be incomprehensible, but what this prejudice is used to defend is perfectly tangible and concrete: jobs as a means of income, education as a means to a better income, the right to rights that safeguard income. It’s known as a race among rats, and handicapping some competitors can certainly help one’s own chances of winning.
No group has had to battle for their rights as long as the Negroes. The freed and escaped slaves who came to the more easygoing, less conceited North last century were still isolated, in designated neighborhoods; still exploited by “white” homeowners and businesspeople; still excluded from equal education; always fired first, always hired last; while one group after another immigrated from abroad and found their footing before their eyes. The Germans, the Italians, the Jews, in the fifties the Puerto Ricans were recognized as citizens. It’s been eight years and the classic numbers John F. Kennedy cited still hold true: “The Negro baby. . . has, irrespective of ability, statistically one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, and twice as much chance of becoming unemployed.” John Kennedy said that in a 1963 TV address. Whatever the roots of this traumatic exclusion by the whites, the consequence is that Negroes as a group must accept the greatest losses in the struggle for work, and as a result they represent the highest proportion of citizens who have given up hoping to find a job, who were never in a position to have that hope, who let themselves fall into the slum.
The slum is a prison into which society deports those whom it itself has mutilated. These are apartments in which bedbugs and roaches cannot be kept under control by even the most patient efforts, in which the refrigerator functions not to cool food but as a safe that the bugs can’t crack. When whole families have to live in a single room without any money for recreation or escape, the children witness inevitable fights and get to school tired and haggard, their homework unfinished; their accomplishments necessarily lag behind the demands of the curriculum, they leave school as soon as they can, they “drop out” and start working in lesser jobs, which will be obsolete with continued technological development; they are educated for poverty. If two-thirds of the Negroes on the Upper West Side are single men, this is because families abandoned by the breadwinner thereby gain the right to welfare support; sociology has dutifully invented a “sin
gle-room occupancy factor.” The Negroes in the slums feel neglected by the police—their streets are more sparsely patrolled; break-ins are met with more boredom than anything else; in a brawl they are more likely to arrest the dark-skinned man than the light-skinned; still, the Negroes wish there were more police, more reliable protection (while the whites can afford to demand a civilian supervisory board for the forces of law and order). (The Communist Party of America is a nonstarter.)
Resistance is useless. If the residents of the slum attempt a rent strike against the building’s owner, the court will be on the owner’s side. If he doesn’t manage to evict the tenants, he’ll let the building fall to pieces. If nothing else, he can always count on the cold. Then the city shuffles the tenants into the armories and they’re not his problem anymore. It’s worth paying a little tax on the property so the city doesn’t take the building, staggering as it is under mortgages and Brother Wind; there’s always the hope that the city will eventually condemn the property to public use. If stubborn tenants stay, they’ll be hounded by rowdies, junkies, vandals, and metal thieves, not all of whom are neighborly enough to turn off the water before they steal the pipes. When it’s dripping from the ceiling and the doors have all been broken in, the last tenants move out, and the property soon finds itself in proper condition again.
Where there’s no longer any question of restoring order, the garbage will come flying out the windows, and if it lands in a back courtyard then it might be a message: “air mail.” The whites as a group do not get the message; maybe the isolated white passerby hears something, a bottle exploding next to him on the sidewalk. When I hear “the whites,” I often think of figures in sheets, ghosts, corpses on their way to the cemetery. Since the whites as a group refuse to help, why not stick a knife in an individual white person’s heart and get what you need from his briefcase, his cash register, his apartment. Since people trapped in the slum have all their ways out to a worthwhile life blocked, why delay escaping into the illusions and sickness of drug addiction? Since society has put up a fence around this life, why follow the norms of that society, why treat a social worker as anything other than someone bringing a check, why not send kids out to beg, why live under a roof. Since the bonds with society have been broken, why not rip out public phone cables; why leave a forwarding address when you go somewhere else, under a bridge, onto the Bowery, into jail, off to the war in Vietnam?