Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  He had split up half the house among refugees from Pommern, later from East Prussia; he didn’t have time to keep it tidy there too. In his own house there were two children lying sick with typhus. He counted on Mrs. Abs and her groats to keep them alive, maybe even cure them. It was Jakob’s mother’s face I saw above me that summer—gaunt, parched, squinting; distressed when we were too weak to eat.

  Cresspahl had put his child in the bed he’d built in London in 1931 for himself and Lisbeth; now I lay in it not alone but with a fourteen-year-old girl who, in my fever, I kept thinking was Alexandra Paepcke, and I wasn’t scared even though I knew she was dead. She lay in a big nest of white hair, bright sandy blond like Alexa’s; like Alexa’s, it ruffled out over her forehead a tiny bit when Jakob’s mother combed it; from the side her nose resembled Alexa’s, and all she had to do was close her eyes to look like Alexa asleep. I could only see her from the side. At night I would start up out of a dream and cry for help, from Alexandra, lying next to me. In her dreams she cried out for her parents.

  Her parents, the Ohlerichs in Wendisch Burg, had sent Hanna to Warnemünde, to some fisherman relatives, so that she’d be safely at sea during the last acts of war. That’s what she talked about when she was awake. On May 1, she had set out from Warnemünde on her uncle’s cutter, along with German U-boats. There were still German warships off the coast. At Rerik Reef, German planes came out of the sky and shot holes in the cutter. After three days on Poel Island, they had the cutter shipshape again. In the Timmendorf harbor, launches were still delivering conscripts. Then Polish forced laborers tried to ransack the cutter, and they set out for Wismar. German warships were still anchored in the roads. From a Wismar merchant ship the Ohlerichs replenished their stores and received instructions to scuttle their boat if Soviet craft got close. Hanna tried to figure out the time from the position of the sun, and how many hours of swimming it would take to reach the Danish coast. When they got to Gedser, they were shot at by British planes, which stopped only when the family hoisted a white sheet. It was still Greater Germany in Gedser, an army commander was in charge of the port and the SS in charge of him. There were relatives from Rerik in Gedser but they had set sail before May 2 and didn’t know anything about Hanna’s parents in Wendisch Burg. Refugees from East Pommern and East Prussia were living in the cattle-loading stalls, on straw. A German Railroad ferry was docked in the harbor, with an army general and his sister-in-law living in its saloon. His staff officers were camped out on the bridge of the ship. After the capitulation, people from the Danish resistance took charge of the port and the refugees were given food from the SS field kitchens, then butter and bread and cheese too, and because the food was distributed by Germans the butter was star-shaped. In mid-May the refugees were let out of the locked stalls and taken to a prison in Nykøbing; the fishermen were ordered to sail to Flensburg. The Ohlerichs went to Niendorf, where they’d had friends since the twenties, when they’d fished together, with seines. After five weeks, at Hanna’s insistence, they went south, and from Travemünde they were deployed to Wismar, where the people were starving. The Englishman in charge of the town welcomed the fishermen. They were very valuable to him, and he sent patrol boats out with the cutters because by then the Soviets were already on Poel and trying to capture fishing boats for themselves. The patrol boat sped in circles around the ten cutters, you try gettin a fish out a the water like that. The Wismar commander realized that fishing in a group didn’t bring in enough of a catch and the cutters were allowed to sail on their own, each with an English soldier on board. The Ohlerichs had to get their soldier out of bed in Wismar and then he slept belowdecks again until four. Then he made tea, and gave some to Hanna, with some sugar too. Just when Ohlerich was about to send his eldest boy to Itzehoe to buy nets, the news reached Wismar that the area was being exchanged. The Soviets were already stationed at the eastern border of Wismar and that night they came through the border zone into town. The Ohlerichs decided to go back to Warnemünde, they had a house in town there, and Hanna thought that was closer to Wendisch Burg. Off Kühlungsborn they were shelled despite their white armbands and the ticking on the mast. There were a lot of cutters on the water and women visible on board every one. It was a Sunday when they pulled into Warnemünde, the townspeople promenading along the boardwalk in their holiday best. The fishermen were taken off their boats by the Soviet military the moment they moored at the pier and led to a kitchen space on Front Road. The Russians shoved in a bucket of kasha and the Germans, afraid of poison, didn’t touch it. At night they were taken one floor up, one at a time along a red coconut-matt runner, for interrogation. Two officers with plank-like epaulettes divided up the work: one wrote, the other frisked. From the other rooms you could hear Russians celebrating their victory. How could she explain that a wooden clothespin with a coil spring wasn’t a murder weapon? Why did the victors refuse to believe that Hanna had ordinary scraps of cotton in her pocket because she’d had to clean machinery on the cutter, not to tie colored threads together into a signal? The next day, three of the boat captains were taken to the commander; the others had to march on foot, under guard, to Neubukow. Fishermen marching! In Neubukow, Hanna thought of Cresspahl, who used to come and see her parents in Wendisch Burg, and she ran away from the guard and came running, ducking left and right, down Road 105 through the Soviet lines to Jerichow. Hanna had avoided the war, like the Ohlerichs wanted; now she was lying sick in Jerichow and couldn’t go back to them.

  – Are these adventures at sea exciting enough for you, Marie?

  – And Jakob?: Marie says.

  – Jakob wasn’t in the house. He’d taken the Abs horses and gone to work in a village on the coast, in exchange for part of the harvest. He didn’t come to Jerichow much.

  – Tell me how it started, Gesine.

  – When the refugee carts from the east had been unloaded, Jakob took all the horses and rode out into the marsh. Cresspahl had told him where to find a watering hole safe enough to use as a horse pond. He was five years older than me. He was one of the grown-ups. He had a grown-up face, secretive, stubborn, severe. He had a bandage around his neck, and under it a wound from a strafer. I wanted to help him and I pretended I knew my way around horses. After leaving the pond the horses were frisky and Jakob asked if I knew how to canter. Again I said yes. He’d given me a sorrel to ride, a playful young thing, and I didn’t have to bring it to a gallop, it started jumping when it saw its friend jumping. To the animal’s amazement I flew headfirst over its head and landed in front of its feet. It had stopped so abruptly that it looked from below like it was about to tip forwards. Looking accusingly at me. After that I kind of avoided Jakob. Even though he’d been worried when he lifted me back up onto my feet, and he’d put me back on the horse only after a lot of reassurance, he stared straight ahead in such silence that I thought he was laughing at me on the inside.

  – And then?

  – Then I hid. The typhus had made my hair fall out and given me rheumatism in my shoulders and knees, my bones were all crooked. I didn’t want him to see me like that.

  – And when he did see you?

  – He said: Itll grow back, wacht man. And I understood he was promising me new hair, but I didn’t understand the rest. It meant, “Just wait.” He was from East Pommern. In Mecklenburg they say, Töv man. Töv man, du.

  – So you still didn’t know each other!

  – No.

  – And that was the first day of the rest of your life?

  – Would you know on the spot?

  – Of course, Gesine. I’m not from Mecklenburg. I’ll know.

  April 17, 1968 Wednesday

  In the last week of June 1945, Cresspahl announced that the Western Allies had come to an agreement with Stalin about the date on which they would clear out of their occupied territories of Mecklenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, and in exchange enter the Western Sector of Berlin. The Soviets would be coming to Jerichow on Sunday, July 1, 1945. The Br
itish had long since lifted the travel restrictions in their occupied zone, the roads were open from Mecklenburg to Holstein, to Lübeck, to Hamburg, to the Lauenburg Lakes, to Lower Saxony. Should we go with the English or should we stay?

  You couldn’t take Brüshaver as an example. Brüshaver hadn’t found his wife in Rostock; he thought she was dead back when the Royal Air Force coventried Rostock the first time, and then in the concentration camp none of the red preprinted cards came on which the survivors of air attacks could check off whether they’d survived. Brüshaver thought he would find his wife in Jerichow, if anywhere; he reached the town after three days on foot, cadaverous, covered with dust, found the pastor’s house vacated by Wallschläger and his wife busy scrubbing the floor. After that, Brüshaver didn’t think about fleeing the Russians, he thought about his Sunday sermon.

  You would’ve expected the Papenbrocks to go. The old man had made his money with deliveries to the air force, among other things—they’d take that away from him. And the bakery. And the house full of refugees, he wouldn’t get that to himself again. It was baffling that he stayed. It’s true he’d missed the nobility’s retreat from the area, he couldn’t get a single horse-drawn cart for his things anymore—could it be that Albert was ashamed to go on foot? Was it possible that Albert, in his all encompassing wisdom, had neglected to squirrel away land and money in the British zone? Papenbrock hadn’t aged well, when he turned up on the street his shoulders were bent, his flyaway hair sticking out under a bald patch that no longer looked elegant, it looked ill. When Papenbrock stayed, it was his first blunder.

  A lot of people thought that one person would come back: Arthur Semig, Dr. Vet. Med.

  They called it an act of infamy and betrayal on the part of the English to hand Jerichow over to the Russians! In their time under the British, the Mecklenburg soul had already manufactured for itself a right to be taken care of.

  On the morning of July 1, the Soviet advance staff arrived in Jerichow, in two big American trucks. They didn’t stop in town. At the airfield they found the remains of the British occupying forces. Any planes that had been left intact, the British had fueled up and flown into their zone; there were empty buildings and the runway that Kutschenreuther had been supposed to blow up. The British had taken their prisoners with them, down to the last man. These included a lieutenant general who had said in front of Papenbrock that the Greater German Air Force could never have become the Greater German Air Force without the technical armament assistance of the Soviet Union and the Lipetsk Fighter-Pilot School in the twenties. Clearly he’d decided to take his chances with the Russians. Then he let himself be hauled off to the west after all.

  There was still time before the next morning.

  Pahl the tailor had lost his relatives in the Hamburg firebombing. He didn’t want to live among strangers, depending on the same charity from his fellow Germans that he had denied to homeless refugees himself. He and his family went out into the marsh and drowned themselves in the bog. Others tried it in the Baltic.

  Dr. Berling swallowed the pills he hadn’t wanted to prescribe to his patients. He had treated the forced laborers and POWs almost like human beings, even giving them sick leave when necessary; in Gneez there were doctors who put a pencil on their hearts, not a stethoscope, and said: Ah. Off you go! Dr. Berling had no reason to be afraid of payback from the Russians, and he took his life anyway, the big depressed blue devil.

  There was no news of Robert Papenbrock except that the Soviets planned to kill him as soon as they got their hands on him. About Horst’s wife, that she’d been taken prisoner outside Danzig as a truck driver for the army. The Böttchers knew about their son that he was in a camp in southern Russia; they’d gotten eight anonymous letters before his name was read out on the Moscow radio. Methfessel the butcher, who’d lost heart after a few weeks in the concentration camp, had been hauled off to a nursing home by the Nazis and, on the Führer’s orders, been given a lethal injection as a creature unworthy to live. Friedrich Jansen had gone to ground in the Lauenburg area, where no one knew about what he’d done in Mecklenburg; the pistol he kept with him in case of emergency was discovered at a checkpoint and the British sentenced him to death for possessing a firearm and shot him in Lübeck, without any idea who he was.

  A stray soldier had brought to Jerichow a letter from Alexander Paepcke. It was written in Kiev, dated early June 1944. In it Alexander promised his niece, Gesine Cresspahl, a share of his Althagen house if he should inherit it himself. In September 1944 he had reopened the letter and begged Cresspahl to convince Hilde to move from the right bank of the Oder to the left, or if possible farther west to Mecklenburg. Alexander asked Cresspahl to take his family in if he fell in the war. A Frenchman had written around the bloodstains on the letter that the possessor had died on September 29, 1944, but not where he was buried.

  Maurice and Albert left for Lübeck with the English. (There was a third Frenchman with them, his name forgotten. A farmer’s son from the Clermont-Ferrand region, who’d kept aloof from the city French as well as the Germans.) They didn’t say goodbye to the Cresspahl child, and she was disappointed when she found other people in their room. They had taught her how to ask what time it is in their language. They had sung together. The child had believed that they weren’t enemies, not hers.

  On the night of July 1, many things were buried in the soil of the gardens and courtyards of Jerichow. Papenbrock brought the family silver to Cresspahl, who had to reopen the part of the basement he had already walled shut.

  – Did Cresspahl stay because of Lisbeth’s grave?

  – He didn’t want to travel the country road with two children sick with typhus.

  – Wasn’t he scared of the Russians?

  – Why, Marie?

  – Gesine, he left you in Soviet hands!

  – It was a good education, I wouldn’t have missed it. And after eight years I could leave.

  And after eight years I could leave.

  The walnut trees in front of Cresspahl’s house were still standing. Gun stocks are made of wood like that.

  Hanna Ohlerich still didn’t know why she’d been sent off to sea. Her parents had hanged themselves in Wendisch Burg as soon as she was out of the house. Karsch hadn’t wanted to tell her when he saw her lying in a fever.

  On the morning of July 2, the Soviet occupation forces marched into Jerichow on the Gneez Road, the men in low clattering horse carts, the officers in American jeeps. The city commander was installed in the brickworks villa across from Cresspahl’s house. There they raised the fourth flag of the century. And that one stayed.

  That evening, the green picket fence around the headquarters was almost finished.

  That evening, Cresspahl was driven there from Town Hall. The commandant wanted to see how his mayor lived. He saw the refugees’ cramped quarters in Cresspahl’s house, and that the mayor slept in the room that was also his office. He offered to have the house cleared of strangers at once, and wasn’t happy with Cresspahl’s headshake of refusal. Whenever he could, Cresspahl avoided talking to the Russian—there was so much observing of him to do.

  The Soviet major was an old man, stocky, burly, sad. He sighed a lot. He didn’t realize he was doing it, but whenever he sat down or started talking, a heavy breath with a slightly throaty tone came out of him. He asked Cresspahl to clear off the table. Then he had his orderly put three bottles of vodka on the table, sent him out of the room, lowered himself into a chair with a sigh, and began the process of getting to know this German. – Pleess, Meeyor: he said, and pointed at the other chair.

  It was still light outside. Since night refused to fall, Cresspahl’s child crept up to the door to take a look at the stranger, and he tolerantly called her in and had her stand before him.

  – You, Fascist: he said teasingly.

  The child had wished him good night with the Papenbrock curtsy and was confused that this wasn’t enough for him. Her shoulder hurt like it was being beaten. She
was embarrassed about the cloth on her head. She was dizzy from fever again, half deaf. Cresspahl watched her like she was facing a test she needed to pass and he wasn’t allowed to help. She could barely keep her eyes open. The man looked at her like he was trying to have some kind of fun with her. She wanted to go back to bed and lie down, so she obliged him. This clearly pleased him, and he repeated the game.

  – You, Fascist!: he said, in a voice of threat and delight.

  – Me Fascist: the child said.

  April 18, 1968 Thursday

  The New York Times is feeling generous toward John Vliet Lindsay today, and mentions only in passing that he has rejected the proposal to broadcast commercials on city subways as “an invasion of privacy.” The passengers’ privacy is the fierce withdrawn silence of people trapped, solitary, driven back into themselves.

  In the ČSSR, the party newspaper can now report that district organizations representing thirty-one percent of the party’s membership were in favor of an extraordinary congress to elect a new Central Committee. According to party statutes, thirty percent is enough. Then the editor of Rudé Právo shows up before a session of the presidium and leaves the article out of the second edition, as though it weren’t true. On radio and television, however, it can still be reported as the truth.