Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Then the airfield fell silent. Takeoffs weren’t worth counting, landings barely. Mariengabe Airfield, the pride of Jerichow, was starting to die.

  Ham-burg and Lü-beck and Bre-men,

  there’s no need to be a-shamed in;

  the devil always shits on the biggest pile

  so Jerichow’s gonna stay clean for a while. . . .

  And Otto Quade got a slap to the head. For years the song wouldn’t have gone like that—Jerichow had had the air force there.

  Really, Mariengabe Airfield had been typical Jerichow-style all along. When it was still part of Air District III Berlin, it was meant to be just an operational base, one small node in an expansive network, a 500 x 1,000 meter airstrip aiming west with a perpendicular one added later. The fact that it took three and a half years to finish was due not just to inadequacies in the local construction industry but also to plans for a long-range bomber, later abandoned along with any sense of Jerichow’s importance. That too was something of a blow to the town’s pride. True, the number of troops stationed there increased past the three hundred who’d arrived in October 1938, for appearances’ sake, but then the airfield was reassigned to Air District XI Hanover, just Hanover, under Air Force Command 2 (North) in Braunschweig, just Braunschweig, and Air Force General Hellmuth Felmy hadn’t even bothered to visit Mariengabe, despite the celebrations that would have welcomed him in Jerichow, complete with a brass band on Market Square and a torchlit procession at night.

  The first commander of Jerichow-North, Lieut. Col. von der Decken, left town before town could really get used to him. His home in what had once been Dr. Semig’s villa was always quiet. The residents of the Bäk got to see him mornings and evenings, when his car and adjutant stopped outside the door—as if an airfield commander were an ordinary employee going to an ordinary workplace. He accepted a few invitations to the estates in the area, where he had relatives, but the town got nothing from that. Von der Decken’s wife had what she needed brought to the house, and treated tradesman and contractors as though she couldn’t quite see them. When Cresspahl installed a safe for her husband, she left him a bowl of stew in the kitchen. Her Hanover airs, trips to the Schwerin state theater, bored expression—that was all appropriate for Jerichow, but previous masters had at least showed themselves a little more, offered up more stories about their lives for public consumption. The two von der Decken girls remained in memory: fourteen-year-old twins, blond, very Berlin, sharp of feature like their mother. They didn’t go to school in Jerichow but were taken in an air force car to the Gneez academic middle school. Nicknamed “The Dolls.” Their horses were kept in the former veterinary stables; during the harvest, they would go for rides in the Countess Woods, or along the coast, often accompanied by a cadet, and Jerichow had another example of how to provide for children’s entertainment—an even better example than the Papenbrocks. Then the commander was sent with his combat brigade to the eastern front, and the family moved to Lower Saxony; one and a half companies from the brigade came back, the numbers were replenished, they flew back to the Soviet front, and they didn’t return. By that point Jerichow was on its fifth commander, what with transfers and redeployments. Each one was younger than the last and now they were all majors, who didn’t bring their families and who lived at the air base, not in town. The last Air Force Day, when the base was open to the public, was held in 1940—after that there wasn’t enough fuel, or money, and Mariengabe became Jerichow’s secret: tightly fenced in; secured by guards, sentries, patrols; a sound often heard in passing that woke up the town only when the wind was out of the northwest.

  That’s how things stood until 1944. The unit that took over the base in 1940 had trained pilots until it withdrew to France; a battalion was left behind for basic training and a company added for air-signals instruction. The task of earning the right to live in this community, as von der Decken had promised to do, was now pursued, somewhat less ambitiously, by the airfield staff officers, older men from the reserve. The Gneez paper published a dramatic article about the events of the night of March 28 to 29, 1942, so that people near the airfield would know that it was more or less still in operation: how the crews with gas masks, steel helmets, and rifles ran into the bunkers and the ditches; how the medics, mechanics, and fuel attendants manned their posts so that landing fighters could be taken care of as swiftly as possible, “and, with engine thundering, the slender bird rises up into the night to face the British terrorists.” This was not enough to produce any new children’s games in Jerichow. One time, the upper grades of the Hermann Göring School were taken to the Archduke Hotel in Gneez to hear a holder of the Knight’s Iron Cross with Oak Leaves describe his personal experiences; the number of men of serving age called up into the air force was increasing, as hoped. Since 1943, privates were housed at the base and stayed up all night with march music blaring from their standby barracks; they hurtled out across the Baltic in their Messerschmitts, or to Berlin, and not only the British shot them down, German antiaircraft fire did too. The airfield garrison still raced out into position, or to take cover, whenever the siren sounded, but their own fighters didn’t come back to Jerichow-North, and the Allies soared high above the Baltic coast in broad daylight, heading into Germany, untouchable and proud.

  Just as there had been Rostock schoolboys who resented that Lübeck got bombed first, the boys in Jerichow were annoyed that the British and Americans didn’t think their base was worth even a minor air raid. All they got were the strips of tinfoil the Allies dropped to confuse the German radio system. In Wismar, in Rostock, there was a trade in antiaircraft fragments. In Jerichow they’d just gotten antiaircraft machine guns; in other places, there was already artillery.

  Ham-burg and Lü-beck and Bre-men,

  there’s no need to be a-shamed in. . . .

  Cresspahl was asked about Mariengabe less and less often now that it was no longer a fighter base. The conversion of direction finders on VHF equipment and their repurposing for instrument flying and night interception was the last thing his employers were keen to have confirmed. After that they didn’t even mind that he couldn’t find any trace of the new bomb-sighting mechanism they thought Jerichow was testing. He occasionally reported which air force engineer had been put in charge of civilian airfield personnel, or who was looking after the day-to-day administration of the site; starting in early 1944, what he was supposed to do was take trips with Leslie Danzmann’s permits from work or the air force stamps from Jerichow-North. Anyone who traveled near the Rechlin Air Force testing station needed relatives to visit there, or replacement parts and wood to look for; near Ribnitz there was not only the Walther Bachmann Aircraft Works AG but also a child to fetch from her vacation. Wherever relevant, he added information about the Mecklenburg concentration camps to his reports so that they’d hit the Heinkel factory branches but not the foreign forced laborers in Krakow am See, in Retzow outside of Rechlin, in Neustadt-Glewe, Rövershagen, Reiherhorst near Wöbbelin, and, especially, Comthurey near Alt-Strelitz. He had seen the prisoners there near the train station, being herded to work on SS Major General Oswald Pohl’s estate—beaten half dead, human beings trudging like starved beasts.

  All the Germans knew, Gesine. The SS called them KL.

  The right abbreviation for Konzentrations-Lager.

  But the Germans made it easier on the mouth, from the beginning.

  KZ. “Concert Camp.”

  Not even KZL.

  You still say you’re not keeping score, Cresspahl?

  Nah, Gesine. I’m just keeping track of it all for myself.

  So Cresspahl was in the clear, still in one piece. The airfield commander had done everything he could to tighten security. But Cresspahl’s doors on the base were always kept closed per regulations. One time, a 1C had come from air force headquarters, an elderly major, and Cresspahl felt under observation for two days. It turned out to be just that he knew Lisbeth’s story, from the von der Deckens. Counterintelligence had infiltrate
d people into the base who said they’d been transferred, but they always asked random questions, made disparaging comments about the SS to encourage confidences, and gave up on him every time as a harmless old man, not all there—he’d gone a little bit soft in the head from a tragedy with his wife.

  Maybe I had, Gesine.

  Yes. Well, no more than me.

  Once again, the word around Jerichow was that Cresspahl knew how to take care of number one. After the boys and the old men were called up to drills in the last-ditch People’s Force, Cresspahl wore the uniform of an air force sergeant and had a proper service book in his pocket. At the airfield the war would come quietly to an end, and again he was one of the people who’d get through it without shooting, without being shot.

  Jerichow-North had no more fuel and nothing happened there but some basic training, a new course every three months. The airfield was silent.

  At the end of January, a collection was taken up for the army and the People’s Force, things like laundry and clothes “of all kinds,” knapsacks, shovels, sunglasses, and still the Hitler Youth came back to the party headquarters with their handcarts almost empty this time. Among the donations was footwear worth less than it would cost to repair it. Some people turned in tattered horse blankets just so Friedrich Jansen wouldn’t come looking for anything. From Käthe Klupsch there was the belt from her father’s World War I uniform, for Käthe Klupsch was superstitious and thought that one person’s goodwill could make up for where others had given up. Cresspahl donated nothing.

  You knew how to wait, didn’t you, Cresspahl.

  I’d given up waiting, Gesine. There was nothing left, just you. Someone like me had nothing to wait for.

  April 8, 1968 Monday

  Yesterday Martin Luther King’s family was photographed by the open coffin: Yolanda, Bernice, Martin Luther III, Dexter, and their mother. Their father’s head is lying strangely low. The youngest daughter, Bernice, whose chin barely comes up to the edge of the coffin, tries to look away over him. The other children know that they have to look at the body. But they aren’t used to looking down like this.

  The attorney general has declared the murder a federal crime. The justification for this exception is based on a law stating that the Department of Justice has jurisdiction over crimes that violate a person’s civil rights, in this case that of Dr. King to his life.

  In our neighborhood, on the west side of Broadway at Ninety-Sixth Street, a clothing store next to Charlie’s Good Eats has been robbed, its windows broken in, for the second time. Stuck to the planks where the shopwindow used to be there are pieces of paper with clumsy, handwritten complaints. A few passersby stop to read them, to sign the petitions. They are watched by Negroes standing there in a waiting posture.

  On one of the pieces of paper, the store owner asked the question: What’s next?

  Written below that in red ink, in another ductus: Next we kill you. You’ll see. You’re soft.

  April 9, 1968 Tuesday

  Martin Luther King was buried today.

  Families and lovers were sitting on blankets on the lawns in Central Park, having picnics in the sun.

  Schools, banks, and stock exchanges closed.

  The four thousand seats at the orchestra clamshell in Central Park were packed, with many more people standing behind police barricades. Leopold Stokowski’s hair kept falling into his face while he was conducting. There was a girls’ choir in red robes and the American Symphony Orchestra. When we got there they were playing excerpts from the German Requiem and the St. Matthew’s Passion, then the Ode to Joy.

  The zoo, the carousel, and the stables in Central Park were full of children intending to enjoy their day off school. The park was in full spring bloom, green dotted with red and yellow flowers, and brightly colored bicyclists, too, and girls with dogs, and people walking. From the transistor radios came reports of the progress of the burial.

  At Columbus Circle a hot-dog vendor had run out of sauerkraut and kept apologizing. He hadn’t done business like this all year. In the subways the seats were almost empty. Maybe the Negroes among the workforce hadn’t all come to work because of the TV broadcast from Atlanta.

  Young people, mostly students, were keeping a silent vigil outside City Hall, bareheaded. They’ve been standing there since ten and they stayed until the clock struck noon.

  The signs in the closed businesses, no longer all handwritten, said: We are mourning Martin Luther King. Some of the signs, with printed, em-bossed, or neatly painted letters, now inform those who see them that this store is not only honoring the dead but doing so in respectable fashion.

  People standing behind us occasionally say something about Negroes having threatened store owners who didn’t want to close voluntarily.

  We often heard: It’s like with Kennedy. All the bells in the air. . . .

  Females are allowed to have lunch in Wes’s bar if they don’t ask to be served at the bar themselves. We had a good view of Wes from our booth. One time he went over with his arms outstretched to a girl who was standing and waiting behind a group of male customers. Welcoming, delighted, he held his arms out—come to me—until the girl said: Two bottles of such and such. – Ah: Wes said, disappointed, hopes shattered. As he handed her what she’d ordered over the men’s shoulders, he invited the men to share a secret grin.

  Some of the conversations from the bar reached us:

  – Why aren’t there any tow trucks here today! The traffic hasn’t been this normal in a long time.

  – They’re all in Harlem today. Otherwise things’d get out of hand there.

  – At least something good.

  – So, Wes, what’s the good news?

  – Yes indeed, sir! The country’s in flames!

  He didn’t notice us, and Marie didn’t ask why we came here.

  In the afternoon the big department stores on Fifth and Lexington reopened. In the morning the streets had looked like the day after a holiday, quiet and almost empty, but now the cars were crowding one another again, horns honking, pedestrians were bumping into one another with their shopping bags.

  At around five o’clock we found ourselves on Third Avenue at the window of a store selling TV sets. The business advertised its wares by having all the sets in the window on. For a long time, the color pictures showed only the coffin in Atlanta, glinting in the sun, resting on an oxcart stuck in the crowd of people, unable to move. The camera tried panning to the brightly colored US and UN flags above the mourners’ heads then swiveled hopefully back to the cart, but the coffin still hadn’t budged. The only difference was that the sun was gone and now the coffin looked dull.

  Tonight, before the theaters begin their performances, they are supposed to have a minute of silence. Then the play can start.

  – Talk to me, Gesine. Listen to me!

  – Okay.

  – If you don’t buy a TV set now then I’ll ask someone to give me one—D. E., Mr. Robinson, I don’t care!

  – No. We can rent one.

  – At least that!

  – But for what? King’s funeral is over.

  – For the next one, Gesine. For the next one they kill. For the next one!

  April 10, 1968 Wednesday

  The assassination of Martin Luther King unleashed violence in a hundred and ten cities. The whole city of Washington was shut down: banks, restaurants, businesses, stores—all closed. The Chicago jails held nearly twice the number of people they were built for. Across the river in Newark it’s still burning. Dr. King has been buried, and The New York Times is concerned about the future of the American soul: Nothing of irreplaceable material value has been lost, but. . . .

  Baseball season opens today.

  The Czechoslovak Communist Party has now completely staffed the government with people who were not the Stalinists’ accomplices. The interior minister, General Pavel, has many years’ familiarity with the country’s prisons from the inside. In addition, the party is demanding of itself that the state
security organ only protect the country against hostile acts from abroad, not be used to solve questions of internal policy. It sounds like something out of a textbook.

  In March 1945, a forgotten crocus came up in Lisbeth’s garden. Colonies of bees flew in the sun, cleaning themselves. The tree behind Cresspahl’s house was black with starlings. The first lapwings were making noise in the marsh.

  In March, a Stettin Military Ordnance Department truck on a country road in Vorpommern was strafed by low-flying Soviet planes and went up in flames. Everyone in it was killed except for the driver. Cresspahl got the telegram only after Hilde Paepcke was already buried with Alexandra and Eberhardt and Christine in a single grave that we couldn’t find after the war.

  April 11, 1968 Thursday

  It begins again. The questions are like the ones following the assassination of John Kennedy.

  Why did the Memphis police, shortly after the killing, broadcast an alert for a white Mustang, adding that it was equipped with a radio antenna similar to those on cars with citizens band radio receivers and transmitters?

  Who was “police car 160” that put out a false report on April 5 at 6:35 p.m., thirty-four minutes after King was shot, saying that they were following a white Mustang in an easterly direction through north Memphis?

  Is there someone in the Memphis police force who wanted to divert the Memphis police force so that King’s killer could escape west into Arkansas or south into Mississippi?