by Uwe Johnson
He taught her:
What I see, what I hear, what I know is mine and mine alone.
Even if I know that a name is false or a place is wrong, I must stick to the false one.
What my father does and knows belongs to him. Only he is allowed to talk about it, I’m not.
It’s not wrong to lie as long as that protects the truth. It’s funny that other kids learn something different, but not dangerous.
We have a different truth, everyone has his own; it is only with Cresspahl that I’m allowed to share mine.
March 12, 1968 Tuesday
Around eleven in the morning and again at one thirty in the afternoon, snow rustled against the office windows. The flakes burst apart on the street, melted on the warmed sidewalk. At five, when the people were let out of their glass cages onto the street, fat rain was coming down. The upper floors had disappeared; they’ll be waiting tomorrow morning, good as new. Grand Central and the trains for Times Square were strangely overcrowded and some of the transit cops had grown hoarse from shouting. The trees in Riverside Park had been strangled by something white.
When German troops occupied Prague in March 1939, there were snowflakes floating in the air.
Cresspahl had sure been right about his war. That same year the Germans marched into Poland. The following year they took Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France. In August 1940 they tried to clobber England.
This was one of Cresspahl’s worries. A German could never go back to England again.
In 1941 it was Bulgaria’s, Greece’s, and Yugoslavia’s turn. He sometimes knew it a day in advance, occasionally a week. But he didn’t know if the information reached London.
Meanwhile the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian states lost their independence. The Soviet Union was represented in Slovakia by an embassy. East Poland came as a bonus. Finland came at more of a cost. On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was murdered. And the Soviet Union said nothing.
On June 22, 1941, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, and it ceased to say nothing.
Papenbrock: That’ll be the end of us.
Meta Wulff: In times like these, Cresspahl. Can’t we be friends again?
Mayor Tamms, June 1941: The resplendent flag of National Socialism. . . . February 1942: He hadta go an try that too. . . .
From Papenbrock’s calendar, February and March 1942: Meeting of the horse insurance union, Rehna. Regional farm-holders meeting in the Archduke Hotel, Gneez. Heroes’ Memorial Ceremony at the Schönberg Monument. Members’ meeting for the cattle insurance union. Entering cattle into the 1942 stud book, Gneez parade grounds.
From Friedrich Jansen’s diary: Death penalty for Rostock enemy of the people. When it comes to the winter collection we know no mercy, not even for a pair of gloves! Battle Squadron Lützow, what a movie. But shown from the regional film car! Pathetic! Jerichow needs a movie theater! They’re starving in Leningrad. The Communists are using bras as earmuffs in Lemberg. Java capitulates! Malta in a hail of bombs. Litvinov’s call for a second front is met by deaf ears in London!
Käthe Klupsch’s, Frieda Klütz’s, and Elsa Pienagel’s proof that victory is inevitable: Bananas are an enemy invention; bananas cause polio. How can Germany be facing defeat if there are still medals for the Reich street collections, the bird medals: blackbirds, bullfinches, chaffinches, titmouses, orioles, robins; I need one a those misself. You can buy People’s Gas Masks at the NSV, but you don’t have to; if there was any danger you’d have to. The final drawing for the Sixth German Reich Lottery is on the 9th—oh if I could only winnit this time.
Tamms’s official proclamations: It is forbidden to operate bath boilers, flow-type water heaters, refrigerators, gas heaters, or cooking stoves, because the transportation arteries are overloaded or frozen. The following reductions are hereby in force for the 35th ticket period of food rationing: As of 4/6/42 children between the ages of 6 and 10 will receive 350g of meat per week instead of 400g, still 266g of fat. Blackout in force between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. I reiterate: Anyone traveling for pleasure will be fined, or in serious cases sent to a concentration camp!
Everyone in Jerichow was worried about the Poles. At the Schwenzin farm one Pole had thrown the payroll book in the inspector’s face, screamed at him, hit him with a pitchfork. In Granzlin, one had thrown a pot of hot coffee at the farmwife’s head. They’d been dependably sentenced to death but that wasn’t enough to reassure anyone—something must’ve come along to give them the courage to put up a fight. What that something might be was not said out loud. And now a Pole named Henrik Grudinski had thrown Police Commissioner Engelhardt down the stairs in the Wismar paper factory on March 19 and was later seen near Proseken. He must’ve crossed the ice in Wismar Bay and come through Jerichow, imagine! right through my backyard! Cresspahl had worked things out to his own advantage again—he had Frenchmen in the house, and a guard too.
Cresspahl’s daughter had few worries. On Air Force Day in Jerichow-North, Cresspahl had pocketed a paperweight made from an enemy aircraft before it could be auctioned off with the other war booty; now, for the past three weeks, Gesine had more friends in school than usual and had to take the thing out of her satchel and show it around again and again.
She did have one minor worry. The song that Head Teacher Stoffregen drilled into them refused to get out of her head:
Adolf Hitler is the Leader.
Adolf Hitler loves the children.
The children lo-ove Adolf Hitler.
The children pray for Adolf Hitler.
It wasn’t having to learn it that bothered her, it was the fact that it came back to her in moments when she didn’t have to say it. It felt so firmly lodged in her thoughts. How does that work, when you don’t believe something and you can’t get rid of it anyway?
Cresspahl had a different kind of worry. The halfpenny with George VI on the back hadn’t been enough for him, even if it was dated 1940.
– I was about to say that the Saturday before last! An English fighter pilot who’d been shot down might have had it in his pocket because he’d forgotten about it, or as a good-luck charm. And it was the Germans tempting him with it! Maybe he was working for them the whole time, not for those utter scoundrels the English: Marie says, not entirely certain, but hopeful. She’s been saving this objection up for ten days, for the moment it would have the maximum effect. She doesn’t like people betraying their country.
– It wouldn’t have taken him ten days to figure that out.
– Okay. He figured it out right away.
– And pretended that that was enough proof. He didn’t insist on any more; he brought up the subject again only once.
– He was scared?
– It wasn’t that bad. Anyway, he did want to get out in one piece, maybe even for the child’s sake—
– A child meant nothing.
– . . . and at the end of March he got an answer. It was at a meeting to which he was supposed to bring the letter that Werner Mölders, a fighter-plane inspector, had supposedly written to the provost of Stettin before he crashed in November 1941, near Breslau. This letter made the Nazis so mad that they threatened to throw anyone distributing copies of it into a concentration camp; the British wanted it very much for their leaflet propaganda, whether it was a fake or not. Cresspahl hadn’t been able to find a copy; occasionally at Jerichow-North airfield a silent toast was drunk to Mölders.
– Doesn’t everyone say the Germans didn’t know anything about the concentration camps?
– Maybe the Germans who didn’t read The Lübeck Gazette. Cresspahl had told Gesine about Alexander Paepcke’s radio with the magic eye, and on March 25 he took a trip, basically for pleasure, even though a camp was the penalty for that.
– A man with a child!
– It didn’t seem like a serious infraction; it might have looked necessary. Anyway, it wasn’t only a pleasure trip—he was supposed to have a look around near Rechlin, see what was up with the nightly booms and exp
losions. Sounded like rockets. From there it wasn’t far to Wendisch Burg, so Gertrud Niebuhr could get her annual Gesine visit too. When Cresspahl was sitting in front of Alexander’s magic eye in Podejuch, Dr. Kliefoth was on leave from the Russian front in Jerichow, and listening to the BBC, and was very surprised indeed at the story he heard on the broadcast after the opening four Beethoven notes. He remembered it differently.
– Alexander was risking his neck.
– Alexander was with the Military Ordnance Department, you see what I mean. Who would mess with him? The children were probably sent out of the room, he probably stayed next to the receiver, ready to shove the needle to another station immediately. But if Heinrich wanted to know what it was like to hear London, he would do him that favor.
– Go ahead, Gesine. You win. I believe you again. I’m a sucker every time. Go ahead.
– “The memorable hero Robin Hood—”
– I knew it.
– “ having been unjustly accused by two policemen in Richmond Park, was condemned to be an outdoor and went and lived with a maid who was called Lizzie Pope near a brook where there was no forest. . . .”
– “Lizzie Pope near a brook.” Lisbeth, Papen, Brock. They could have spared him that.
– Actually they couldn’t. They were proving they knew about him.
– And what had the policemen in Richmond Park wanted him for?
– Only he knew that. In the summer of 1931, before he married Lisbeth, he was out for a walk in the park in Richmond at night, at a time when the police were on the hunt for a purse snatcher. “Would you mind being of some service to us, sir?” Half an hour on guard at the church square. Do you remember the blue plaque?
– Yes. And there was no forest in Jerichow.
– There were the Countess Woods near Jerichow, to the west, far enough away. And now he was condemned to live on the outside, outside of England’s doors. Outdoors.
– They thought of everything, like friends.
– It did have sentimental value.
– Dammit! I believe you, Gesine.
– So now that’s enough for you? Do you need yet another story, about an English pilot shot down in Germany and making his way to Cresspahl’s house at night and living for a while in the attic, behind an impenetrable wall of stacked-up firewood, until Gesine can take him by the hand and bring him to a certain address in Gneez, again a man with a child . . . ?
– It’s enough for me. I don’t need any more, Gesine.
– And when the Royal Air Force hit Lübeck on the night of March 28 to 29 with two hundred and thirty bombs, and as it were inadvertently blasted to pieces a hangar in Jerichow-North, Cresspahl was safely far away in southeast Mecklenburg, at a sluice, in the forest.
– You’re overdoing it again. Again it all fits together! You and your exaggerations, Gesine!
– That one was a coincidence, Marie. It wasn’t worth it to send someone like Cresspahl away from a location the RAF was planning to drop some shit on. He wasn’t that important. He was one little thread in a net, not even a knot. He was replaceable. The net was easy to repair.
– Gesine: If. Then.
– If it was treason then at least it should have been impressive?
– Not minimized.
– Treason’s boring, Marie.
– Now that I don’t need to believe.
– Gestapo! – Gestapo!: cry the students in Warsaw at the militia beating them with billy clubs.
March 13, 1968 Wednesday, Purim
Since sundown, the Jews have been reading in their synagogues and temples the story of Queen Esther, who saved them from the Persian tyrant Haman, viceroy to the Persian king Ahasuerus. Mordecai told her about Haman’s dark plot and so the Jews didn’t have to die on the Purim days, “the fateful days” appointed for their death. When children hear the story, they whirl their rattles so that the noise drowns out Haman’s name whenever it comes up, and the children get treats that are only for that day.
It’s a celebration that not only Rebecca Ferwalter takes part in; Pamela Blumenroth, too, is missing from the swimming pool under the Hotel Marseilles this evening. So Marie has time for a vague reconciliation with Francine. The reconciliation is not a success; they don’t want to be alone together, they avoid touching each other, sit far apart. Francine has adopted a general demeanor—negligent, inattentive—as though we weren’t really worth the trouble.
This country that I—
As the West Germans say: where I sleep well, that gets the job done, that’s got my number, cross my heart—
—where I sought hospitality after the first time I came back here from Europe, the moment I caught sight of the blurry nighttime colors over Idlewild.
All it takes is whitefish for me to feel put through the wringer.
You want that for gefilte fish? (Whispers)
(Whispers) But that’s one of the others. Looks German.
Oh, you want it for fish dumplings. Very good, ma’am. Get out!
– Gesine. Gee-sign. You’ve been talking to the recorder all night.
– It has to be typed up right at nine, Marie. This is work.
– Don’t be offended.
– ’Night.
Riverside Park is on city maps, and the people here say it, and I believe it. But they all have a secret, and among one another they say: Shabbas Park.
Giving me a shock, yet again, yet again.
March 14, 1968 Thursday
More than thirty-five hundred students and one hundred faculty members refused to attend classes at Columbia University yesterday as a protest against the draft and the Vietnam War. Most faculty members canceled their classes rather than force students to cut if they wanted to join the boycott. An astounded administration official remarked: “Goodness, I’ve never seen so many of them with ties and jackets. They are being gentlemen.”
What do the students in Warsaw want from their government? Respect for the constitution, especially its guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly; the release of all students arrested since the first demonstrations last Friday; punishment for those who called the police onto the extraterritorial school grounds; guarantees against further persecution. . . .
“D. E., to live with you.
To stand me.
You wanted to avoid the positive form but the negative form is an admission.
At school in Gneez, along with the unforgettable schoolyard sayings, there was also a dumb one, about who you’d marry: ‘If you can stand his (her) face en face but not in profile, forget it.’ Advice like that, passed on among girlfriends (or groups of male friends) and from the upper grades in the school to the lower: these were rules for a summer crush. I’ve tried it, now and then, and it’s true, I feel a slight shimmer of vertigo when his profile tells me something different than his face purported to. A dumb saying. Is saying you could stand me that much smarter?
If you take the face, seen from every angle—I’m not that face.
You see a space bordered or divided as usual, by forehead eyes mouth nose; in it are continuations of Cresspahlian or Papenbrockian bone structures and sculptural forms, news from great-grandparents, remains of their possibilities, which I don’t know and which you don’t know. What you see might be perceptible but surely not comprehensible. When you carefully remove your gaze, look aside in a shocked or concerned way, and try to seem merely pensive: I understand more or less what you’re thinking. It arises from the situation, maybe from the history of your judgments—whatever the face expresses, it is not entirely you. Not you. And not me.
You won’t see uniqueness as anything worthy of praise; the typically unique visual juxtaposition of rarely unique facial features whispers to the observer: ‘individuality.’ This observer thinks he sees signs of relationships. Faces are described as expressive surfaces. I’ve tricked you here, D. E.
You would have to presuppose infallible communication between the cerebral electrical system and the facial musculature—you’re
the chemistry professor, you tell me the right words. Also presuppose that impulses in nerves appear to be more expressively reliable than those in electrical measurements, by virtue of being visualized in more appropriate material: a medium as superior as it is amenable to those impulses, almost creative where the movements that enter it need to be varied (in intensity at least). In a literary book, the author can say: a more emphatic grin. What that really means is a more visible grin. When I notice the intention, though, I have fallen out of any natural expression; I am no longer presenting myself at all, just the grins I am thenceforth taken to be.
I’m not exaggerating. I do this every morning at the bank—the smile of greeting, the American smile I can’t pull off.
You should see it sometime. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to stand it.
Everyone seems old enough to use his or her face. Does that mean any more than having it within his or her power?
A face’s reactions to stimuli seem recognizable, if not exactly comprehensible, if you assume that those experiences are like one’s own—comparable, analogous if not identical. The observer identifies with the universal, by perceiving the universal.
Don’t be shocked—it’s taken me half an hour to get to this point.
D. E.: If someone wants to see another person’s face, with all these possibilities, every morning of every day from now on (i.e., live with it): does he mean the consciousness it signifies or what he’s worked out in his mind as the system of consciousness he can recognize? His counterpart, sure, a different person, but Difference itself?
What would it mean if, behind this arbitrary intersection of general forms, what consciousness thinks and is really were hidden? What would it mean if consciousness uses contemporary or biographically cultivated models, and expectations of certain images, along with breakdowns of mimicry in these respective modes, for purposes of deception?