by Uwe Johnson
Alexander didn deserve that, Cresspahl.
An if I’d told him would he a deserved that, Gesine?
You didn trust him.
I didn want him to hafta trust me.
That night the Allies bombed Hamburg. You couldn’t see Hamburg from Fischland.
That summer, after a long time being embarrassed, Alexander dared to ask Cresspahl something. It was just a couple thousand marks more he owed than he could come up with right at the moment. Cresspahl wasn’t thought of as stingy, but frugal, yes, and Alexander, to his disbelieving amazement, found himself free of all his debts on the spot. Cresspahl didn’t even ask him for details. They briefly, in passing, mentioned repayment. Cresspahl trusted Alexander to make over a share in his Althagen house to Gesine when Alexander inherited it from his great-uncle. Alexander didn’t have to but he stuck to his word and put it into his will in Kiev. Hilde never knew. Cresspahl used to tuck away money for his child like this in lots of places all over Mecklenburg: in case they got him. Killed him.
It was a very quiet summer. There were no planes in the air the way there were in Jerichow. The morning booms from the coastal battery were forgotten by day, as was the nightly foghorn, also not visible.
Then Cresspahl had to settle an argument between the Paepckes: Was the beacon fire you could see from the Shoreline Cliff Warnemünde’s or Poel’s?
Then Alexander Paepcke told some vague stories about the civil administration of the occupied zone in France. He was not looking forward to the Berlin–Paris furlough train, and he gave an exaggerated sigh when he brought out a little leather suitcase that the children hadn’t noticed until then. In it was a kepi for Paepcke Junior. Christine got a Breton doll in folk costume and slept with it for the rest of her life. For Alexandra it was a set of dollhouse china, gilded. For Klaus Niebuhr there was a ruler with French markings, and the suitcase, a high-status toy, went to Gesine. And what did she get, the soldier’s wife? The children almost couldn’t believe that they were getting even more presents for Alexander’s departure, and Alexander, in his pleasure at their happiness, casually said, about the doll-house china: Took it from a hotel. The gold was a very convincing color, and his daughter asked, outraged: You can do that? Paepcke said, in his broad, delighted voice: Yeahhh; he noticed Cresspahl’s look, and added, embarrassed, every inch the major in the reserves: Hey, I paid for it, yknow!
One time, Hilde tried to ask about the night Lübeck was bombed. Cresspahl got out of it by saying he’d been in Wendisch Burg.
He did tell her, though, the story that was going around Jerichow: It had looked like a peaceful bonfire in the bright night. Luckily it had been so loud, despite the fifteen-mile distance.
And again Gesine faced a choice. She could stay in Althagen. Summer break lasted until September 1 in Mecklenburg, and she could go back to Pommern with the Paepckes until then. Cresspahl didn’t look at her at all, he held his hand over his eyes and looked for something in the evening sea. She looked up at him and could hardly see his face, and said, without thinking: I wanna go back to Jerichow. Take me with you.
It was lucky that the fire in Lübeck was so loud?
The bombs, Gesine. You imagined them less that way. The noise took that away.
March 18, 1968 Monday
Dear Marie. I’m telling you this on tape so that you’ll have to believe it.
“The old bum with the tattered brown bags has shaved and now he looks like an ordinary Jewish man.”
You said that. You were wanting to tell me the latest about the neighbors, that I miss during the day.
He’s not a bum: he begs. He is one of the ones I give to. I shouldn’t.
Remember the beggars in the subway. There’s a man who rides the IRT in the morning or the Lexington Avenue line in the afternoon, when it’s not rush hour: black, about thirty, unable to look anyone in the eye, maybe due to a sickness. He moves in a dazed stagger, leans against the door however he’s landed there, grips tight to the straps or poles as if hanging on them, and sings—yowling notes in which you can only occasionally make out anything like words, and none you can understand. He always breaks off very suddenly, holds a sign up in front of his belly—he’d been carrying it carefully under his arm after all—and walks with a little tin cup very close to the seated passengers, asking to get paid for his music. His neat purple lettering begins with the words: My mother has multiple sclerosis. . . . —with no spelling mistakes, written out like a doctor’s finding.
Another one, also black, around fifty, and actually blind, wearing a blue cap, feels his way through the car with his white cane and holds his cup close to his body, showing no sign of whether he’s heard a coin clink into it.
The rule is: Since “charity in small things and reform in large” do not work to change or rectify society, they should be avoided as sentimentality and wasted effort.
Occasionally someone gives them something. Black passengers reach into their pockets and show solidarity, or else that there are blacks who have money like normal people. Pink-skinned housewives feel entitled not only to give nothing but also to put on an act as upstanding citizens who have no need of such things, praise God, they have to make ends meet with the harsh (honest) wages of hard work. Some men, if they’re wearing suits and ties, feel from the looks of other passengers that it’s really they who should be the first to act, and so they comply with the general judgment. The contempt that is actually a defense mechanism is directed at the taker. No one is unselfconscious.
There are glances back and forth. These glances mean: scorn for anyone that gullible; contempt for the one who brags with his quarter where a dime would’ve been fine; condemnation of the black race, which does after all have money too.
Marie, I wish I were indifferent—that I could give and forget.
Then there’s the mistrust of the asker. They are seen in the subways too often, it’s as if they had an office there. The way they work their way through the moving trains has something professional about it. They can live off their takings, sometimes even have a little extra to spend on life’s pleasures. But they’re too sick for that, too broken. They may have let themselves drop out of society, but why don’t they make use of the admittedly meager emergency assistance set up for them? Have they arrived at this mode of employment on their own, or are they being sent out by a foot soldier or low-level boss in the Mafia, who repays the day’s earnings with nothing but a place to sleep? Is their pitiful decision to throw themselves upon the pity of strangers enough?
The woman I was once shut the door in an old man’s face, very slowly, embarrassed, before giving him the chance to explain how things stood with his lunch. That was back in Saxony, when I was a student and still believed what I’d learned in school—that in an already almost entirely Socialist state there were no beggars.
In the subway I have my hand in my purse when the beggars are still four steps away. I don’t give them quarters, not even dimes—I know the rules.
But I do drop a subway token into their cup, so that they can keep riding.
You will be able to say of me: My mother was a rather inconsistent person.
What you’re hearing now is more rain.
I would’ve liked to be more consistent, though, untouched by the influence of biography and the past, with the right kind of life in the right era, with the right people, working toward the right goals, at least a right goal. I know the rules.
“The old bum with the tattered brown bags has shaved and now he looks like an ordinary Jewish man.” Thank you for the report.
March 19, 1968 Tuesday
The Communists in the ČSSR do and don’t want to force out their president, Antonín Novotný. They describe him in the party newspaper with merely a Mr., not the party title of Comrade; they refuse to let him go on TV; but they’re waiting for him to step down on his own.
Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy began attending to the business of being a candidate for president, calling the current president’s poli
cy in Vietnam “bankrupt.” Then he even said to college students in Kansas: I will work for you and we will have a new America.
Don’t forget, spring officially starts tomorrow morning at 8:22!
In June 1942, life ceased to have any appeal for Dr. Avenarius Kollmorgen, retired lawyer, Jerichow, and he gave it up.
Until that point it hadn’t been known around Jerichow how he’d spent his last year. His practice had closed its doors for good in 1935. Since then he had sometimes been seen on walks around town, but he preferred roads where he was safe against running into people. Anyone who did want to hear him ask, yet again, All’s well?, encountered a distressingly disturbed person shuffling impatiently back and forth, desperate to end the conversation, and not even once did he ever again raise himself on his tiptoes and dispense his brand of opinions with earnestly shining eyes. At first he’d taken the walks for his health in the morning, by 1941 it was after lunch, and eventually they took place near twilight, before stopping altogether. The light from his windows, though, would creep out onto the market square ever later into the night; both it and the slowly moving shadow had looked professional.
During these nights, Avenarius had been preparing for his death. Most of the books no longer stood on the shelves with their spines facing out: they were in piles of equal height, lined up and ready for packing. Written in each book was the date when he had last read it; there were only two rows he hadn’t gotten to. In his desk there were lists that inventoried the whole household, with a column for who was to be the future owner, every line filled in. Geesche Helms’s sister, who had now worked for him more than twelve years, got all the Kollmorgen dishes, as well as the furniture. What wasn’t given away was to be converted to money and given to the University of Erlangen, as was the library. There was an index to the library. Dr. Kollmorgen had destroyed all his personal documents—he wanted nothing left behind but the Mystery of Avenarius. In the open desk drawer Ilse found, as she had been told she would, the page with instructions in the case of his death—from directions to Dr. Berling’s and Swenson’s to requests for the funeral. He took his leave from certain people with old-fashioned printed notes, but he didn’t need them, everything had been decided and paid for in advance. “Do not allow the participation of the church” stood there in painstakingly arabesqued handwriting. In this, in all the judicious arrangements, Dr. Kollmorgen’s voice could once again be heard, now no longer the pleasantly dozing one but stubborn, disappointed, not without contempt. Ultimately he hadn’t liked that the town had satisfied his need for solitude. There were not many people who came to his salon one morning to see him one last time. In life he had shrunk, children had to be told they mustn’t laugh; in the coffin he looked substantial and as if seeking approval and respect. He was dressed for a party in a bygone era, with his arms at his sides as if he were standing, an observer, an examiner. Around the eyes he looked softer, not very different from someone sleeping. Almost eighty years old he was, had been. Swenson looked in several times but the funeral guests continued to stand around Kollmorgen, not impatient, solemnly whispering, as though trying to make up for all the missed visits. Then, at the open grave, a lawyer from Hamburg said something in Latin that the Jerichow mourners couldn’t understand, while none of them wanted to say anything. It was Avenarius’s business, living alone and dying alone.
Ilse had taken the bequeathing of the china as a hint from Kollmorgen that the time had come for her to take a husband, and in the fall of 1942 she married a fisherman in Rande, who had waited five years for her. Ilse Grossjohann was her name now, a respected housewife, envied for her furniture. Now when she came to Jerichow to go shopping she no longer had the face of a helplessly marveling girl.
For Gesine Cresspahl there was a sealed package, “With compliments, to be opened on March 3, 1954.”
In November 1942, because Avenarius was dead and buried, Cresspahl had to bring a letter to Dr. Kliefoth. It was a French letter, postmarked in Leipzig, in Dora Semig’s handwriting. “Chers amis,” Cresspahl could figure that much out. And it was urgent.
He didn’t like going to Kliefoth with it. Kliefoth was from Malchow, a tanglepicker, an educated man. He had lived in England, but at universities. They had World War I in common, but by 1918 Kliefoth had long since been made lieutenant. He’d subscribed to French and English newspapers to the end, from a different département or new county every eight weeks, but he’d volunteered at once for the war against France after they hadn’t taken him for the one against Poland, due to certain blots in his Berlin file. Since then he’d been on continuous active service, reaching the rank of general staff officer in 1C (counterintelligence) under Baudissin, until finally they’d sent him home for reaching the age limit, and the whole time he was making his reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union his wife had hung the swastika flag out for him. Cresspahl couldn’t get a handle on this man in a hurry.
The evening was a long one, lasting almost till midnight. Kliefoth came to the door in full uniform, invited the carpenter in with casual but unmistakable politeness, saw the other man hesitate, and started right in, revealing who he was.
Kliefoth kept saying: Army. The army. As though that was all that mattered.
Before long they found a sector of the Russian front where they might have both been at the same time in 1916.
Cresspahl couldn’t decide.
Kliefoth told him about his flights over Jersey, as a member of the Second Army Corps, “at the King of England’s expense.” He’d been the only one who liked the English breakfast, “Bring on the porridge!,” and the Italian waiters were as delighted as the French ones were impressed when he’d revealed his familiarity with the national specialties. Bring on the porridge!
That didn’t help Cresspahl. He had heard from Böttcher’s son, Klaus, the world traveler, that during the march into France Kliefoth had driven past the marching columns in truly gentlemanly style, relaxed in the back-seat, with a leather-covered silver bottle of cognac at his lips.
Now Kliefoth tried again. Told him how in 1940 he had sworn that a student with a Jewish name was Aryan.
Katzengold, something like that.
Don’t tell me her name!
No?
Right, Mr. Kliefoth. That’s how it is.
And even if it was lying under oath, it was God’s work and I’d do it again.
She’s still alive then?
Living in Hamburg! It’s about time you learned to trust me too, ya ol tanglepicker.
Then Kliefoth translated Dora’s letter. Arthur, too, was still alive. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia they’d tried Switzerland but were only allowed to stay two days on straw in a camp. They had run out of money. They’d spent it in Paris. When the Germans came to France, they’d actually managed to escape into the unoccupied zone. During these seven days on foot and in overcrowded trains, Arthur had “woken up.” Not that he’d let himself be talked into Marseilles and trying get overseas—but he’d found an apartment near Cannes, arranged for false papers, and found a job, all within just over a week. Arthur hardly felt his sixty years even though he was working as a butcher. Having studied veterinary medicine turned out to be useful after all. He chopped up the animals clean and quick, the same way he’d learned to heal them. Impossible to give an address due to illegality of work and apartment. “Please pass this news along to my parents, too, who haven’t answered our letters. We think with warm love in our hearts about Lisbeth and the child. We really should have switched to informal pronouns before we left; Arthur is sorry not to have done that, it was his responsibility as the elder. Thank you too. Lisbeth, don’t always take everything so to heart. D. S.”
Kliefoth was sorry there was no address. He had people in the German Army who could have helped the Semigs, even now that the Italians had occupied the Riviera, and would have wanted to, too. Cresspahl believed him.
Kliefoth advised Cresspahl not to bring the letter back home. Kliefoth praised Dora’s French onc
e again; his own, he said, was “grade-school” in comparison. The letter was tucked into Chambers’s Encyclopedia, at page 467, “Vetch” and “Veterinary Medicine.”
Kliefoth was right. The Gestapo turned up at Cresspahl’s door the next morning and he could tell them in good conscience that he’d been unable to read the letter so he’d thrown it into the fire. Then they tried to nail him for not having reported it.
And why didn’t you ask your French POWs?
How could you not have recognized the handwriting?
Oh, it was your wife who always took care of the correspondence? Then we’d like to talk to your wife. On the double!
March 20, 1968 Wednesday
Word comes for Employee Cresspahl from West Berlin, Germany: at least she occasionally garnishes reports from Vietnam with unfriendly adjectives, “which is the least one could expect.”
So apparently there are people in Germany concerned about whether I’m acting properly. I’m supposed to be ending the Vietnam War, for them.
Which would surely be more than the least one could do.
I could write a letter to the editor of The New York Times; I could spend my life in prison for a failed attempt to assassinate President Johnson; I could publicly set myself on fire. Nothing I can do will stop the war machine, not by one penny, one soldier—nothing.