Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – The British, of course. Since Cresspahl was involved with the English, it had to be the English who came to him. Everything in your stories always has to fit together, link up with no snag, not the tiniest little mousehole of a gap!: she said. It was her last try. I had one final chance to admit that Cresspahl’s dealings with the English were more likely, given their entry into Jerichow, but still not true. For the last time, Marie tried to clear her grandfather’s name of treason.

  – It was the British, and Cresspahl couldn’t care less, Marie. He was done with them. His work was over. In January 1945 he’d gotten word from Hamburg that he should go undercover as completely as possible, not endanger himself any longer.

  – Decent people, the English.

  – Decent, and not talkative. Not once did they bother him again, until Ludwig Krahnstöwer ran off at the mouth just because he’d turned seventy.

  – Cresspahl couldn’t have not cared whether his daughter grew up under the Russians! Gesine!

  – He didn’t try to get me to Holstein. He had a cousin there, on a farm, who could have seen us through. The commander of Mariengabe—

  – I wish you’d say “Jerichow-North.” It’s like you’re trying to draw me in by using my name.

  – The commander would have handed him travel orders to East Holstein, no questions asked, stamped safe as could be. But all he wanted, along with the rest of the civilian airfield personnel, was to be formally discharged from the German Air Force, backdated to mid-April. Kutschen-reuther even offered the soldiers discharge papers, but so few of them wanted to leave that even on the morning of May 2 there were operations as usual at the air base, hoisting the flag, drills and exercises, equipment training.

  – Why was Jerichow safer than anywhere else?

  – Because it was in the middle. On April 29 the British entered Bremen and the Soviets occupied Wendisch Burg. From Jerichow you could wait and see who got to Wismar first. If you went west too soon you would end up in the fighting. Even so, an old woman on School Street was doing brisk business as a fortune-teller. And one night there was a break-in at the town pharmacy, because Dr. Berling refused to prescribe deadly pills, not even if it did turn out to be the Russians who came. There were no more sleeping pills to be had, the NSDAP leadership had confiscated them for their own use after the party officials had to give all their guns to the fighting troops.

  – And Cresspahl was still building “dispatch boxes” at the airfield for the German victory?

  – He borrowed a team of horses and got his machinery and drove it to a brick shed next to the house. I feel like he just unloaded the machines, covered them, locked the door, and that was that. Sat in the sun, pipe comfortably slanting down from between his teeth, and warmed his hands. Waiting.

  – He didn’t want to abandon his property.

  – Well, legally it was my property, Marie.

  – You know me too well, Gesine. You know I’m a sucker for fathers.

  – He hadn’t even been letting me go to Gneez for school. The first time I came back and told him that we only had to recite poems, “Archibald Douglas” and the like, so the school wouldn’t lose face, he sent them a note from Dr. Berling and another of his own: “My daughter is needed at home.” Those were happy days.

  – You lazy student, Gesine!

  – True. And I sat on the milk rack with “our” Frenchmen and taught them the forbidden song. In the army they would punish you for singing it; in Jerichow-North you’d break off in the middle if you saw a superior coming, but Cresspahl just stood there pleased, listening to Maurice and Albert’s clumsy attempts. Zherman eez deefeecult languewich.

  – Sing it for me.

  – Everything is finished,

  Everything is through;

  In March, it’s, Hitler’s turn,

  In May the Party too. . . .

  – Boy, you really can’t sing. Sorry.

  – And here come the English, Sixth Airborne Division.

  – Excellent. White parachutes filling a sky like this one, drifting down onto the Jerichow-North airfield.

  – The Sixth Airborne came through Gneez on May 2 and hurried off toward Wismar. All they sent to Jerichow were a couple of men in a truck.

  – Not even tanks?

  – The Eleventh Tank Division entered Lübeck. Why would they need tanks in Jerichow?

  – You never make the war exciting, Gesine!

  – For your sake?

  – Well. Kind of. Yeah.

  – They accepted Kutschenreuther’s surrender of the airfield and ordered him to continue to run it. They removed Mayor Tamms and ordered him to continue to serve in a provisional capacity. Then they went looking for a new mayor.

  – And Cresspahl showed them his halfpenny minted in 1940!

  – It wasn’t like in the movies, Marie. They thought of Kliefoth first, but he felt it necessary to report to them in full uniform, with all his medals of honor and decorations pinned on. Next in line was Papenbrock. The officers were billeted at his house, and Papenbrock slipped back into the old days, tried to wangle something, hand out this, get back that. They had a look at the strange old guy’s son-in-law, and since he could actually talk to them in their language they made him mayor, with Tamms as deputy.

  – Gesine.

  – If you insist. In the first week of June, intelligence officers from the Second Army came following the combat troops and questioned the mayors. They had Cresspahl on one of their lists. For them he took out a piece of wood that had once been a level, unscrewed the brass in the middle, and showed them the coin.

  – I can’t picture that without a manly embrace. Or some fine words.

  – These were officers, Marie. Career military men. By doing his work on time and acting dumb, Cresspahl had gotten along fine with Kutschen-reuther, who in the end was only reserve, a shoe manufacturer from Osnabrück, hardworking and prudent enough, a little man who gave orders as if he didn’t quite believe they’d be followed. The men who’d come to see Cresspahl were different: the kind who thought they stood apart from the rest of society, single-minded about their work as a sacred duty, their gaze turned inward. And they really carried their batons clamped between their elbow and lower ribs, just like I’d seen in pictures.

  – What did they say, Gesine.

  – Thank you for taking the trouble to see us. We’re dreadfully sorry to be taking up any of your time.

  – And Cresspahl?

  – That he’d rather keep it a secret. They took that as a faux pas, as if he were doubting their professional honor. Nodded to him, drove out of the courtyard. They’d walked right past the refugees in the house without seeing them.

  – Was Jakob already there?

  – Yes.

  – Not now, Gesine.

  – Whenever you want.

  – And really, nothing else touch-and-go with the English? Shots in the night? Attempts to blow up Jerichow Town Hall? Anything exciting at all?

  April 14, 1968 Sunday

  – You dialed West Berlin, Mrs. Krissauer?

  – Two minutes ago. Eight-five, five-three, five- . . . .

  – West Berlin is on the line.

  – Seat reservation.

  – Is that your code for today, Anita?

  – It is. Gesine. Where are you? At the airport? Tempelhof or Tegel?

  – I’m at home.

  – I know you. You’re in the Hospiz Hotel in Friedenau two blocks away trying to trick me. Come over right now!

  – I’m on Riverside Drive. It’s seventy degrees here, Fahrenheit.

  – It’s not true.

  – Anita, listen. I just wanted to ask you something. Whether you’re still alive.

  – Ask me something easier. Why wouldn’t we still be alive, Gesine?

  – Last summer, during the riots in Newark, you called me to—

  – These aren’t riots, Gesine. You know what it usually takes to make a revolution.

  – It says in The New York Times
that several thousand students blocked traffic on the Kurfürstendamm for more than two hours last night, that the police used horses and water cannons—

  – That’s right. Today too. Almost four thousand. I saw it. The police charged like mad into the crowd clubbing anyone within reach. The students fought back with sticks, with cans of spray paint, firecrackers, even apples!

  – Were you there?

  – As an old lady, you know, thirty-five. . . .

  – I am too, Anita.

  – Yeah well I can’t do it anymore. They run at the police chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” My feet don’t join in and my mouth doesn’t open.

  – We really are alike. Why Ho Chi Minh? Isn’t it about the killing of Herr Dutschke?

  – It’s about Rudi Dutschke and Herr Professor Doktor Springer, said to have brought about Dutschke’s murder with his newspapers.

  – The New York Times says: The murder was inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King.

  – It was!

  – Then I don’t understand it, Anita.

  – The president of the Republic of North Vietnam as a symbol of the revolutionary war of liberation, and a newspaper publisher as a symbol of the powers of oppression. Something like that, Gesine.

  – There’s a quote here: Not with violence but through the force of the argument. . . .

  – Dutschke?

  – Yes.

  – Well maybe we’re not supposed to understand it, Gesine.

  – Don’t trust anyone over thirty. So it’s not an uprising.

  – No, it’s just that you shouldn’t go down the Kurfürstendamm, Gesine. We built a little protective floodgate. . . .

  – Hey, be careful.

  – Just a piece of sugar for the horses listening in.

  – With their little ears and big heads.

  – Nasty creatures when they get scared. Feel bad when they kick out. Peace March, that’s what they called it. At the head an older man, with a wooden cross—

  – Celebrating Easter there too?

  – and the police aimed six big jets of water at him, thicker than an arm. At one point a Negro appeared, an American apparently, and the police were suddenly gentle as doves. Photographers everywhere, from the papers, the TV stations, the student organizations keeping track of police contact. The police beating a citizen of the protecting power, America! Then they arrested him after all. The police have 350 people in their bunker now.

  – And you a proper matron on the sidewalk.

  – Hey, I’m a society lady! My dress is gone, my back needs a plumber. Those are some serious water cannons, you know! You’d have gotten knocked over too.

  – “Anita, my child!”

  – Yeah, I wouldn’t bring my grandmother to something like this. Soaking wet in the tram. Which is free today. If you look like a student going to the march, the East Germans will let you ride for free.

  – Since they’re not allowed to meddle in the domestic affairs of West Berlin, right.

  – In theory, no. What have you been up to?

  – We went all the way to Coney Island yesterday afternoon just to have a Nathan’s little-sausage, oh you really should come. I’d show you everything. Everything. We left around seven thirty, and at twenty past eight the Negroes attacked the area, the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenue, youths, children!, broke windows and fought with the police. One patrol-man was hit over the head with a bottle, he needed six stitches. Then the trouble spread into the subway station, into the trains, the Negroes were racing through the trains, knocking whites to the ground, robbing them, breaking more windows—

  – Because of King’s assassination.

  – Because of Martin Luther King. And it was very hot. But now everything’s back to normal in the city.

  – What’s wrong, Gesine?

  – You think they canceled their Easter Parade on Fifth? Complete with a fashion show—Nehru jackets, bonnets—everyone bouncy as a puppy?!

  – But it’s only a week since they shot Martin Luther King!

  – That’s the kind of country this is.

  – Were you two at the parade?

  – No.

  – Still, Gesine, don’t come back here. We’re not getting anywhere here either.

  – What do you mean, Anita.

  – Gesine. What we wanted, as children.

  – Socialism and all that.

  – Right. You know, I was at a teach-in at the Technical University yesterday and the young people actually didn’t kick me out. They discussed why they were still being beaten and dispersed by the police. How it happens that only twenty cars were there to block the distribution of the Springer newspapers, when they’d expected six to eight hundred. Then a young man stood up, twenty-three years old, psychology student, and he explained it to them. He hadn’t come to the last protest, he said, because the car belonged to his father. He can’t put it at risk. He’s perfectly willing to break with society, just not with his father. Destroying other people’s property, sure, but don’t let any harm come to his own. All with talk of the working class they’re supposed to be convincing to overthrow society. Using a vocabulary that even a well-educated person would need a special course to understand.

  – Don’t get so angry.

  – And you can get beaten up or shot just as well there too, on Stillwell Avenue, or Riverside Drive.

  – Listen, I’m sorry about your back.

  – Gesine, is it true about the plague? That it’s being carried back to you in America from Vietnam?

  – You can’t expect otherwise with five thousand cases a year. One of them will infect an American.

  – It says that in your newspapers?

  – It does. What have you been doing? Besides business?

  – Other than business we’re still operating our business. And the old man is on a lecture tour in Poland.

  – Sounds like you’re both still risking your necks. How can you!

  – We’re a proper academic couple, Gesine, you should take a leaf out of our book. Who would ever guess that people like us run a travel agency for one-way trips?

  – Not me.

  – Why don’t you come around anymore wanting someone brought from Rostock to Lübeck? We’d do it for you at cost.

  – Most of my people are dead, and the children from my year in school have left. All the ones who wanted to.

  – Look at all this treasure we’re burying under the Atlantic. Pure gold.

  – I know, right?

  – What time is it there?

  – Six in the afternoon. The park out the window is all colorful with people on the grass.

  – Keep going.

  – The sky above the Hudson is puffed clear except for a couple of fat white clouds. The Palisades are brown now, the skyscrapers above them flashing in the light. Shimmering between the thin trees, you know.

  – And Marie?

  – Gone swimming.

  – Like it’s peacetime.

  – And for you it’s the middle of the night. Are you in bed?

  – In bed, with a bent back. The middle of the night, the mail plane overhead. Good night, New York.

  – Good night, Berlin. Come visit.

  – I will! And just to see you. Imagine that!

  – Yes.

  April 15, 1968 Monday

  5:20 p.m.

  Two Negroes are standing between the cars on the West Side subway line, singing something wailing, howling, a bit like a religious service. The Negroes in the car look serious and conceal their faces behind fatigue, suffer under the damp air that’s crept into the tunnel. (Thin nets of rain had hung in the air around Grand Central.) A white tries to get the others to grin, by casting glances at the singing Negro, but in vain. All the passengers in the racing, swaying train are entirely indifferent to the danger that the black men will slip and fall. If the transit police drag them off the train before we get to our stop, we ourselves will definitely be late, and we don’t want that, we wan
t to get home, we’re coming home from work, rabotat', rabotat'! The men are singing, they’re trying to put some life into somebody.

  April 16, 1968 Tuesday

  The New York Times discusses the student revolt in West Germany indulgently, forbearingly, making an effort to be fair—an old lady who feels that she understands the youth of today. Her true concern, though, is that the East German Communists might exploit the unrest for their own purposes, and all of a sudden her opinion turns into a letter to the Soviet Union: May it refrain from encouraging Mr. Ulbricht on this dangerous course.

  The Soviet Union had long since sent its Ulbricht Group to Friedrichsfelde, near Berlin—even before the German forces capitulated. But Jerichow thought it was safely British.

  The British in Jerichow wanted to show that their mayor deserved respect, and they sent a jeep with a driver for him every morning, which was to take him to work, from one end of the tiny town to the other. They flew a Union Jack from Town Hall and stationed an armed guard outside his room. They helped him and turned his official pronouncements into realities:

  The military court imposed a year in prison as punishment for stealing 30 kg of potatoes, and six months for 15 kg; nine months for using a motorcycle without permission from the military government; three months for being out after curfew;

  and anyone who spit on Cresspahl would get nine months in prison for insulting a representative of the British Crown, which they would have to spend in the basement under his office. Cresspahl was the only German in Jerichow who was allowed to use electricity for anything other than operating a radio. For the counterintelligence officers who came to question Cresspahl had felt compelled to take Eduard Tamms off to prison camp after all, despite Cresspahl’s asking them not to, so the uneducated mayor often had to stay up late in Town Hall, constructing official statements, out of words, with Leslie Danzmann at the typewriter, under electric lights.

  And so Jerichow gradually came to look quite respectable. When Karsch snuck through the Soviet-occupied zone to Jerichow, the town seemed downright opulent to him. The shopwindows may have been empty, and even the tradesmen had signs on their doors saying that no one would answer no matter how long people knocked, and his bottle of kerosene from Wendisch Burg was enough to make him practically rich in cigarettes; but there were no lines of people outside the Town Hall offices, no refugees who had to sleep out in the open, and a stray soldier would be picked up right at the entrance to town, driven to the Jerichow-North camp, questioned, fed (officers ranked major or higher in accord with Air Force Daily Rations Class I, thanks to Kutschenreuther still managing the base), and after a few days driven west, even if he wanted to stay in Jerichow. The town lay small and peaceful under the white summer sky, as if in peacetime. On June 15, Montgomery canceled one of his orders from March: now British soldiers were allowed to speak to, and play with, German children. Every night at nine the town turned obediently quiet and dark; the children too had learned about hunger by that point. The one house that wasn’t tidy and respectable was Cresspahl’s.