by Uwe Johnson
It’s not because of his increased fee, even though it amounts to two taxi fares per session, which he can pocket almost entirely by taking the bus and subway: the playfulness and complicity his face now offers is due to mutual understanding. His first time in the Lexington Avenue building he said: He had walked past Petschek Bank in Prague so many times, never dreaming that the lords of finance rested their eyes on paintings, or kept their feet cool or warm on tapestry-like rugs, or that their self-image required antique furniture. He spoke without anger, without rebellion, if anything amused, surprised, as if at foolishness. Mrs. Cresspahl tried to deny that she was guilty of, or part of, the splendor of her false environment; Professor Kreslil could not give even this his full and serious attention, and he looked her in the eye with such pleasure, as if wanting to acknowledge only her, not where she is.
You are Slavic, Mrs. Cresspahl. A member of the Obotrite tribes—close relatives.
Maybe that’s it, Professor.
You say you are from the German Baltic? But there’s no land in the Baltic.
What about Bohemia near the sea?
Still, you’re definitely not a German.
I most definitely am, Professor.
Ne. Ne. Smîm se Vás na ně co ptáti?
Prosím.
If you would say “Anatol,” I could say “Gesine.”
You’re older, Professor.
Perhaps then it might be my privilege. I’ve grown wary of privileges.
Whenever you want, pane Kreslil.
Now, under his supervision, Mrs. Cresspahl no longer reads solemn texts from the nineteenth century but Študáci a kantoři by Jaroslav Žák: Students vs. Teachers: Strategies, Schemes, and Self-Defense, a 1937 handbook in pseudoscientific style that pretends to give high-school students lessons in how to do battle in a hostile environment. It never ceases to delight Kreslil the teacher that we in Mecklenburg did much the same things as the students of the ČSR described here, from diverting a teacher’s attention onto his favorite topic to dealing with snitches, and when it comes to finding equivalent student expressions for school authorities, Professor Kreslil is able to forget himself and try out a German term after all. Questions about the state of battle at the high school in “Meeklenburg” led to answers out of which emerged information about Cresspahl’s position as mayor after the war, until gradually parts of our life stories began to intertwine. While I was supposed to be learning the Gothic German script, Anatol Kreslil the high-school teacher was hiding his wife and relatives and self in a village outside Vyšší Brod, near the former border with Austria. The schoolgirl Cresspahl was on vacation in Fischland; that summer, the Kreslils were betrayed to the German occupying forces by his father-in-law’s neighbors and lived in hiding from that point on in the suburbs of Prague, with four families, who in Kreslil’s stories do not appear as “Czechs” but as Alžbĕta and Bohumír, Viktorie and Jakub, Jiřina and Mikuláš, Růžena and Emil. While Cresspahl’s child lay in her own room in her own bed and listened half asleep to her father’s stories of Robin Hood’s time on earth, the Kreslils in their hiding place overheard a Jewish neighbor visiting Růžena, wanting to buy with her last money a pair of boots for her five-year-old child’s deportation to the extermination camp. When Růžena gave her the boots, knowing the child’s destination, the Kreslils no longer wanted to stay with her, they’d rather starve with others, and Mrs. Kreslil died of hunger only a few days before the Allies arrived, and the Cresspahl child was neatly eating around the crusts of her bread first to save the tasty middle for last.
It’s in the past, Mrs. Cresspahl.
No it isn’t.
You hear how I tell you about it. Like something that was.
Yes, something that was.
Let me change the subject to something else, child.
– Please summarize today’s article in the Times about Czechoslovakia, Mrs. Cresspahl.
– The country’s foreign minister protests to the East German ambassador for interfering in domestic affairs.
– Because.
– The East Germans criticized democratization in Czechoslovakia, for endangering the ties of friendship between the Eastern bloc countries and thus serving West German monopoly capitalism.
– Whereas,
– the Czechoslovak Communist Party newspaper said there was no reason for Czechoslovakia to pursue the same policy toward West Germany as East Germany does.
– Correct.
– Don’t you ever think that maybe you could live there again, Professor Kreslil?
– Ne. Ne. Never again. Never with the Czechs.
This is what Thursday afternoons are now.
March 29, 1968 Friday
Antonín Novotný is unwilling to personally acknowledge that the party is always right, always, every time. Others might lose but he is unwilling to, and he pushes out of the way a radio newsman’s microphone, into which he could have said so.
The new president of the Czech and Slovakian Socialist Republic is considered a friend of the Soviets. Holder of the Czarist St. George Cross, Hero of the Soviet Union, holder of the Order of Lenin, former defense minister, later deputy premier in charge of physical culture and sports until the Stalinist purges demoted him. Then along came Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, asking to see his old friend. Novotný rushed to summon General Ludvík Svoboda from his work on a collective farm, and Khrushchev hugged him and gave him a seat on the presidium at his side.
The naming of Ludvík Svoboda as a candidate for president is seen as an attempt to placate the Soviets, and the Soviets furiously deny that they want to stifle democratization in Czechoslovakia. The only thing that’s happening in the ČSSR, in their view, is an “activation of Communist Party organizations and the state administration apparatus,” and they appear to be fine with that.
In Memphis, Reverend King marched with three thousand demonstrators, but there were youths who ran away from the protest, smashed windows, and looted stores. The police began using riot sticks and tear gas. A sixteen-year-old is dead.
In the summer of 1943, the Friedenau Niebuhrs wanted to spend their vacation somewhere other than the sluice in Wendisch Burg, namely on the Baltic, near Cresspahl. They asked Cresspahl to find them a place. He thought it was too dangerous in Rande near the Jerichow airfield and found them a place in Rerik. Plus Cresspahl preferred to remain alone, unobserved. In Rerik there was only Antiaircraft Artillery School I (lecturer in the antiaircraft commander training course: First Lieutenant Max Wachtel), and also he’d managed to get the Niebuhrs an air force officer’s house for two weeks there, instead of just a hotel room for two adults and two children, including one, Günter Niebuhr, only a couple of months old.
Gesine was sent to Rerik for the second week. This meant trains from Jerichow to Gneez, then to Wismar, then to Neubukow on the Rostock line; from there the postbus did the eight miles to Rerik in half an hour. She wasn’t happy about leaving Jerichow and did it only out of obedience. She was also confused by his telling her not to ask older people about “Rerik,” instead to say “Alt Gaarz,” as the settlement had been known until 1938, when the Nazis elevated it into a town and gave it a new name to recall the lost trading town from which only scattered rubble remained. At the Neubukow train station, right when she boarded the bus, the child asked if they were definitely going to Alt Gaarz, and the driver nodded at her, several times, reassuring, approving. Now this was a well brought up child. He gave her a seat in the front row.
Waiting at the Rerik post office was Klaus Niebuhr, unhappy yet again that this Gesine should be allowed to travel around the world without parents, but too much an expert on Rerik, after a week, not to appoint himself as her guide through a town with straw-roofed farmhouses in the middle, not at all like in Berlin-Friedenau. The church, with its massive spire, on high ground, could be seen from almost everywhere, and still Klaus disparagingly compared it to the church Zum Guten Hirten that he had back home. But he took his time, showed her the dolmens, told h
er they were locally known as the Giants’ Tombs, walked her along the promenade on the shoreline cliff. The land was totally bare under the white sky, treeless. You could look down onto the Salzhaff spit, the roaring surf. To the west, though, was Poel Island, the coastal cliffs of Rande, Jerichow.
As in Jerichow, there were constant air-raid alarms, and Gesine didn’t understand these Niebuhrs who felt safe just because the Wustrow peninsula wasn’t Berlin. She got up from the table at the first howl of the siren, ready to run into the basement, and even though Klaus’s parents had told him that he mustn’t make fun of her, she felt their smiles. The Niebuhrs seemed strange to her in other ways too. Peter was acting like he had a hard time calling her by her first name. He treated her with a kind of distant politeness, asked her if she agreed to every plan they made, reprimanded Klaus but not her, as though he had an adult’s rights. An unusually tall man, thin everywhere on his body. He had so little flesh on his cheekbones that his lips looked pursed, as if from something sour. Eyes behind dark glass. Played games with the children, but not like the games Alexander Paepcke played; he quickly left them alone and went to wherever his wife was. I didn’t know at the time that he had ceased to be indispensable at the ministry and was going to be sent to the eastern front after his vacation. He’d invited Cresspahl’s child to join them because he believed in fulfilling his obligations; he would have preferred to spend the time alone with his family. It was the last time. Cresspahl also said after the war that Peter would’ve defected to the Soviets the first chance he got.
Martha Niebuhr, that summer, was also showing a side of herself no one had ever seen. If you came upon her in the kitchen, you would find her crying. She was always impatient with Klaus, always after him. Klaus would look up, surprised, showing that he too didn’t recognize her sometimes; he had reached the point of avoiding her. If she saw him fall down, he didn’t care about the pain or the wound, he would only brace himself for his mother’s scolding. She looks cheerful in photographs from other years, though—loving, happy, lips half open in anticipation, large dark eyes, head resting on Peter’s arm at every opportunity. Gesine was counting the days until her return to Jerichow.
There weren’t many. Maybe a rowboat trip across the Salzhaff to the Tessmannsdorf fir woods. Walks to the Bastorf lighthouse maybe, or up Diedrichshäger Hill in the Kühlung ridge. Then came Sunday.
The Sunday-afternoon sirens had been on for three hours. All the grownups had emerged from the air-raid shelter into the open, as had the bigger kids, Klaus first. Gesine stayed sitting inside with the baby, Günter, embarrassed because she was excluding herself, stubborn because she was following Cresspahl’s rules. Baby Günter was asleep, half naked, breathing hard in the heat. Gesine blew air in his face from time to time. It was a pinched, laborious face. She was alone with the child in the big, homey basement. The house belonged to the air force and the shelter was built per German Industrial Standards. There was a supporting wall under the middle of the ceiling. Bunk beds fixed to the walls. A murmured voice from a radio somewhere, giving the grid-square references for the Allied planes’ advance. At the top of the steps leading out was an iron door in a rubber frame, ajar, and behind it a little anteroom with another airtight door, standing wide open. This was explained to Gesine as a gas lock. She stood up and went over to the steps, so that she’d be able to describe the gas lock to Cresspahl better later. The grown-ups were standing in the garden, including an officer with a telescope. The planes hung in the sky, neat and orderly, like a net, shining in the sun. Suddenly the officer’s voice rang out, shocked and alarmed. – They’re releasing!: Gesine heard. She went back and stood in the middle of the basement. She saw Klaus Niebuhr fall into the open gas lock and slip down to the basement floor, strangely slowly. Immediately after the first impact there was mortar dust filling the air like flour. There was a hole in one of the side walls of the basement. The lights went out. Gesine heard the baby screaming, felt her way over to him, and ran back to the hole in the wall with him, holding the bawling creature up to the air. She was very deep underground. But they went looking for the children by the almost completely destroyed gas lock. The detonations had been so loud that she only realized after a minute that people had been calling for her, several times. Since she had the baby in her arms, she had to kick Klaus, still lying on the floor, in the side to wake him up. She was the oldest child. Then he crawled outside over the slanting surface of rubble, pulling her after him. Now she had only one arm to hold the baby with. The baby’s head hung back at a horrible angle. She knew that wasn’t right. She was scared because the baby was only whimpering now.
Outside she didn’t see all the adults because many of them were lying on the lawn. The house—Air Force General Pirrmann’s—looked intact, but there were craters in the ground all around it. There were adults lying in the street too.
No one asked the children questions when the buses came from the antiaircraft school. They were loaded in, driven to Kühlungsborn, put up in hotels. There was another alarm that night. This basement was not built per GIS. She saw the walls full of water pipes, whispered to wake Klaus Niebuhr up, and slipped through the crowd with him and baby Günter over to some stairs with the night visible at the top. Now she realized that she was scared. The next morning, Cresspahl was in Arendsee (which was now called Kühlungsborn. Arend Lake had been “Aaron Lake” in the years when Jews were still allowed to swim there).
The telegram to Cresspahl had said CHILDREN ALIVE, as if one of them might be missing a leg or something.
That was how Gertrud and Martin Niebuhr got two children they could call their own for ten more years.
That was how Gesine lost a little blue straw hat.
That was how Peter got to stay with his wife, Martha, in a shared coffin in the soil of Wustrow.
The child Gesine was familiar with funerals by that point. She knew all about the bit with the three handfuls of earth thrown onto the coffin.
March 30, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
It is now the case in the ČSSR that students can shout for the First Secretary of the Party to come downstairs at midnight, and that Mr. Alexander Dubček will come down to them.
– What are the guarantees that the old days will not be back? was one question asked, and the answer was: You, the young, there is only one path and that is forward, etc.
It is also the case there that the Communist Party newspaper is asking the United States to return 18.4 tons of gold to Czechoslovakia. This is part of the gold that the Germans stole from the country. In 1948, the United States returned 6.1 tons, but it kept the rest to this day because of the American property nationalized when the Communists took power.
On that topic, de Rosny is taking a trip to Washington and paying visits to various government departments not listed in his itinerary, trying to sort things out inconspicuously. But the Communists don’t care about the message he’s so carefully sent them, they just go public! On Monday he’ll ask: Mrs. Cresspahl, is this the Communist mentality or the Czech one. . . . Explain it to me! and he will put on an expression of enormous curiosity.
But today he can’t find us, today Marie has proclaimed a South Ferry day, and we are unreachable aboard the John F. Kennedy crossing the smooth New York harbor. The ships look like they’re resting at many of the piers even though there’s still a backlog of work from an almost eleven-day waterfront strike. Cold waves of air are coming in from the Atlantic, but Marie wants to stand in the wind, swinging thoughtfully by her elbows on the railing. When she sights Staten Island Borough Hall, she looks like she’s examining it as meticulously as possible, checking whether the changes in the silhouette of the coast match her usual expectations. And yet she asks about a bygone time a quarter century ago, about a child.
– What were you like as a child, Gesine?
Waiting in the ferry terminal on the Manhattan side, the little glass circles in the doors looked like holes in a prison when the faces of arriving passengers appeared thr
ough them. Childhood fears always live on.
– What do you mean you weren’t fit for school! she says, indignant, a little disturbed too. Now she’ll have a harder time bragging that her mother may not have inherited much but she can still support her family just by selling what she’s learned.
– Because I was one of the new fifth graders in the Gustav Adolf Middle School in Gneez, and from a backwater like Jerichow too, it was my job to stand in the hall and run into the classroom with a warning shout whenever the enemy approached, so the whole class would be standing with arm outstretched when the teacher walked in, ready to shout their Heil and their Hitler. This routine was new to me and should have been enough to keep me on my toes if only I’d understood it. Instead I stood daydreaming by the open door and the teacher clamped her hand onto my shoulder and dragged me into the classroom, where blackboard erasers were still flying around or a big question mark was being chalked on the seat of the teacher’s chair. I got a thrashing.
– Did it help?
– What? You don’t mind that they pulled your mother’s pinafore up over her head and beat her mercilessly? You’re supposed to respect your mother!
– I’ve been beaten in school too, without you warning me. And anyway, I’m supposed to love you! And respect you too.
– It helped scare me, but didn’t make me reliable. So someone else got that job. They’d given up on me as too stupid.
– Sure, for that! But you were a straight-A student in other things.
– Yes, like Adolf Hitler’s biography. They rammed that into our heads so hard that I could crank it out in my sleep. But when it came to anything that required thinking, like fractions—