by Uwe Johnson
That’s the kind of country you want to go back to, Gesine.
I haven’t attained honesty yet, Marie.
Maybe it’s happening here too.
Maybe we’ll stay.
See!
She doesn’t go near our host’s TV set. Six years ago Gesine Cresspahl concluded that American TV shows were damaging to children, and there’s no TV in our apartment. When Marie needs to watch something she goes over to friends’ houses, or down to Jason in the basement, but here she leaves even the radio alone. As a result, she can do two things: point out how true she is to a long-ago promise and show that she doesn’t want to disturb a vacation in the country by making noise.
She’s recently started getting uncomfortable about the fact that a certain someone is working forty hours a week not only for herself but for another person’s livelihood and tuition, her own. She has promised me that in return I’ll get a house in 1982, in the part of Richmond where Staten Island is quietest.
Every time Marie left the house for a walk she changed clothes. The nearby vacation homes are still almost all empty. She might run into the young woman at the gas station, and one or two dogs, and have the retired farmer at the store to talk to. Yet she trades her pants and sweater for an elaborate dress, suitable for churchgoing; she pulls her hair back into a neat ponytail, shines her shoes for the walk around the lake. She mustn’t give the locals a chance to say that a New York child doesn’t know how to behave in the country.
And after the first stranger has wished her good morning, she exchanges hellos with all the rest, for New York’s sake.
She came back and puzzled over people in New York who’d met Mrs. Cresspahl once at a party and promised her the keys to their summer house on Patton Lake after half an hour of conversation. (She brought that up only in passing; it was meant as a compliment to Mrs. Cresspahl. She had to be considerate—tomorrow morning her mother was going back to work.)
She brought me an article from The New York Times that had been overlooked on Saturday, and handed it over in businesslike fashion, officially, as something for work: We have a reliable old aunt in the city who’s looking out for us.
In thirty-six lines she covers the following: the foreign minister of the Czechoslovakian Republic, Jan Masaryk, fell out of a window in March 1948. Major Augustin Schramm, a security officer at the Foreign Ministry suspected in Masaryk’s death, was murdered. Now another major, Bedřich Pokorný, assigned to investigate both deaths, was found three weeks ago hanged in woods near Brno.
Did you believe that he fell out a window, in 1948? When you were fifteen?
Last night we only just got to July 1945. Do you want us to skip ahead in the story?
No. Anyway, I get it.
What do you get?
That you don’t want to talk about it, Gesine.
Then she had to get through a half hour with Sergeant Ted Sokorsky, the country policeman who looks after our hosts’ keys. Mr. Sokorsky sat himself down on the landing, shyly accepted a beer, and started bringing out tactful phrases about the weather. He spoke softly, which Marie took as a sign of his respect for Mrs. Cresspahl, a visitor from New York and a lady. He was young enough, and Marie would’ve liked to ask him to take her for a ride round the lake on his ungainly motorcycle but instead she decided to display the ladylike reserve that certain mothers raised their children to maintain. Mr. Sokorsky wasn’t sparing with his madams in addressing Mrs. Cresspahl, and he brought off a bow, from the neck, after locking up the house; Marie will never see him again, and for years to come when the conversation turns to the police she’ll bring up one named Ted Sokorsky, not brawny, almost delicate, and the deference with which he treated my mother, here I’ll show you.
But now the vacation in the country is over, we’ve long since reached the Palisades Parkway across from Manhattan, and Marie already thinks she can see the place in the finely sculpted apartment towers where the wet lilac-colored reflection of the evening sun comes off the five windows behind which she’s about to turn on the lights, all at once.
– If it’s okay with you, Gesine: she’ll say. By your gracious permission: she’ll say.
April 22, 1968 Monday
In the morning a heavy fog hung over the Hudson, astonishingly bright, and like a guest over breakfast it opened a white eye occasionally, blearily, blindly blinking.
But someone who still doesn’t get New York weather, even now, will end up caught in a sudden shower on the hill of Ninety-Sixth Street leading up to Broadway; she was already running from the newsstand down into the subway, and like many others she trotted to work down Lexington Avenue with The New York Times folded into a roof over her head.
Peeking up from under its edge at the traffic light on Forty-Fifth Street, she saw on the inside of the roof how the war had been waged this weekend: thirty-one Vietcong dead in battles northwest of Saigon on Saturday, another fifteen yesterday morning farther north . . . she moved forward with the crowd, hemmed in by strangers’ elbows. Not until lunchtime did she review the details in the dried-out paper, for instance that The New York Times would characterize the battles around the foreign capital not as an American defensive action but rather an offensive.
The paper’s weather forecast for today: Mostly sunny and mild. Not this slashing rain.
Bright, sunny days, shored up by steady heat—for Marie this was not enough, as the sole memory of the first summer of the New Era in Jerichow, never mind that it’s almost ninety-one seasons ago now, almost four thousand miles away too. Lazy storytelling, she calls it. Squatting in front of the fireplace in the summer house, feeding the fire until, probing carefully, she finds the kindling that can light that other fire. – I gather the Russian victors didn’t behave well: she said.
Tell her, Gesine.
I was just a child then. Twelve years old. What do I know?
What you heard from us. What you saw.
She’ll take the wrong information and use it.
She’s a child, Gesine.
It’s easy for the dead to talk. Were you honest with me?
Do better than we did.
And also so she’ll know where she’s going with me. To whom.
And for us, Gesine. Tell her.
Jerichow, all of western Mecklenburg, was still occupied by British troops, cordoned off with lines of armed soldiers, but the Soviets had long since arrived—they were nowhere to be seen and yet there, in conversations, in suppressed fears: as rumor. They were no longer the vague subhumans that the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had been importing into Germany since 1941; they weren’t even the photos from East Prussian villages where German units had managed to beat the Soviets back and could snap their shutters in front of battered women’s bodies or crosses of men nailed onto barn doors—the government had made up too many news reports with too many faked photographs as proof. There was a sick child at my father’s house, Hanna Ohlerich, from Wendisch Burg, whose parents hadn’t believed much from the government but they had believed this and so hanged themselves: prematurely, before they’d had a chance to see and hear the foreigners from the East with their own eyes and ears, said the survivors, including Jerichowers safe under British management. Then, by early May already, came rumors amounting almost to news reports—not from the fallen government but from friends and relatives in the rest of Mecklenburg, the part under Soviet occupation. In Waren, an enemy of the Nazis known to the very end as the “Red pharmacist” had celebrated all night long with his liberators from the Soviet Union until they’d forced themselves on all the women in the house anyway and everyone in the family killed themselves with the poisonous medicine they hadn’t been saving for such a purpose at all—this news was firmly grounded in a specific name, a specific market square, a specific business on the ground floor of a specific gabled building. In Malchin, in Güstrow, in Rostock the rumored Russians had tried to wash potatoes in toilet bowls by pulling the chain, then threatened to shoot the hapless Germans for sa
botage, for flushing the food away. From Wismar came the report that three Soviet soldiers had hauled a grandfather clock past British sentries one night and taken it to a clockmaker, telling him to turn it into thirteen wristwatches—much in demand in Soviet Mecklenburg due to the foreigners’ habit of never winding wall clocks and then throwing them into the bushes or the water, as broken. A number of country manors had burned down because spectral looters didn’t believe in electrical lights, even when the electricity still worked, and had lit spills of paper on fire to help them search. They used a microscope from the pathology division of a university clinic to buy two bottles of booze; they shot at pigeons, with live ammunition; they were reportedly incapable of singing their melancholy songs. All of this, along with the Russians’ infatuation with children, was both hard to believe and widely known in Jerichow when the British withdrew, and again various locals and refugees in town hanged, drowned, and poisoned themselves, but not all of them out of fear of the new occupiers: Pahl hadn’t known where to go next; Dr. Berling, MD, hadn’t found a cure for depression in all his studies. The rest—an estimated three and a half thousand people in Jerichow on July 3—stayed.
– Out of curiosity?: Marie said the day before yesterday. She hadn’t let herself laugh often enough; she’d kept her face hidden, near the fire, her gaze on the flames so unwaveringly that she seemed not to be listening, or maybe listening only to her thoughts.
– Out of curiosity.
– Curiosity backed by a sense of how much they’d lost?
– Not necessarily what they’d lost.
– Mr. and Mrs. Maass, 14 Market Square.
– Like them. Maybe nothing had happened to them personally, but they’d heard stories.
– So now they wanted to see if the rumors were true?
– Yes, and there was another reason.
– The children weren’t curious though: Marie decided.
– Maybe not. Since I don’t know the words for that curiosity, you’re probably right.
– And because of your Jews. The six million.
– How can you say something like that, Marie!
– I can to you. They were waiting for payback.
– Yes. Though they didn’t believe all the news reports.
– They wanted to see for themselves how the bill came due.
– Yes.
– Like always.
– Yes!
– So they were curious: she said.
People, whether locals or refugees, stayed in Jerichow because they had a roof over their heads, whether their own or borrowed. Besides, starting July 2 the British wouldn’t let anyone with household goods cross their new border, the Trave Canal—now you had to swim without luggage. Wulff stayed, not only because of his pub and general store but because he’d been a member of a banned party (Social Democrats), declared unfit for military service too, and if not exactly expecting a reward he still felt he could count on his business being treated fairly. (– He was curious: Marie said.) By this point it was fairly obvious what was keeping Papenbrock there. My father stayed because the British had made him mayor and he wanted to hand over his official duties properly. And the locals put their faith in Jerichow’s outward appearance.
Because what could the Russians possibly see in this little town, far from the main roads, tucked away in the country near the Baltic but without even a harbor? Whichever direction they came from, they’d see nothing but a low clump of modest buildings. The bishop’s-miter church tower, however tall it was, however densely surrounded by the leaves of six-hundred-year-old trees, was a sign of bygone prosperity, not current riches. They would likely have already seen the country seats of Mecklenburg, magnificent metropolitan showpieces surrounded by parks; they’d no doubt have marched down streets lined with commercial properties, tokens of imperial times, in various Mecklenburg administrative centers, the so-called fore-cities—but in Jerichow they found few buildings over two stories. Wartime economy had ripped open large holes in the stuccoed ones, exposing the bricks, while the wood in the half-timbered ones had gone far too long without paint or even Carbolineum. And what did the entitled victors come driving into town on? Not asphalt, just bumpy round cobblestones, and in Rande there wasn’t even a blue basalt double line for a bike path (which went with the rumor that the victors didn’t know how to ride bikes). There remained the brickworks villa, where they’d set up their headquarters. They’d retreated at once from the von Lassewitzes’ town house, now the Papenbrocks’, after finding all the rooms full of refugees (so maybe there was something to their alleged fear of epidemics). The English had set up their club in Lindemann’s Lübeck Court Hotel, now the Soviets would put their own name on it. To the uninitiated, the market square might well have seemed a bit too big—some who owned three-story properties there could be facing confiscation. Aside from that, however, the municipality of Jerichow could only have seemed uniformly impoverished to the Soviets, with nothing to loot, at least nothing that anyone let them know about.
Up until the Sunday after the entry of the first Soviet troops—until the night of July 8—only one single rumor had become fact. A Red Army man had forced his way into the shop belonging to Otto Quade, plumbing and heating, and pointed past the low partition at a floor model dating from prewar times. – Faucet: the soldier had said to Bergie Quade in his thick, h-less Russian accent: Wassergahn instead of Wasserhahn. Bergie—who, following the then-current advice, was dowdily dressed, with a filthy face and a rag smeared with chicken shit under her skirt—had answered, with typical Quadish presence of mind: Wassergehn? I’m not going in the water. Don’t need to. Are you wanting to know who from around here’s gone into the water? You mean drowned in the marsh, in the Baltic . . . ? The Red Army hadn’t waited to hear her whole list and marched off, shaking his head, which to Bergie looked reproachful, she couldn’t help it. This was the only unaccompanied soldier seen in Jerichow that whole first week. The commandant had shut himself up in the brickworks villa along with the whole occupying force, communicating with the Germans via orders he had Cresspahl post outside Town Hall. No Soviet airplane had yet landed at the Jerichow-North air base, that unfortunate token of the town’s having taken part in the war on the wrong side; even though the area, with its razor-wire fences, would have been perfect for a prison camp, the new right side didn’t use it for that either.
So, which way was the wind blowing in Jerichow that first week of July in 1945?
All them rumors, seems real overdone (B. Quade).
And even if they are not exaggerated, the Russians wouldn’t dare try anything among people with experience of the British occupation (Dr. Kliefoth).
Still, they really did rape Ilse Grossjohann (Frieda Klütz).
They’re not running the town, they’re not using the airfield—that won’t last (Mr. and Mrs. Maass).
Looks like the British’ll be back, Papenbrock (Creutz Sr.).
The things Cresspahl’s doing, an he’s not even embarrassed (Käthe Klupsch).
Maybe we’ll end up back in Sweden. ’S just two hundred years back (Mrs. Brüshaver).
Papenbrock’s in the elite, you know. Businesswise, I mean (Elsa Pienagel).
They’re the ones scared of us. A curfew! They’re scared! (Frieda Klütz).
Maybe they’re driving round the country in the middle a the night (Frieda Klütz).
In the war, gossip like that was called latrine talk (Alfred Bienmüller; Peter Wulff).
Töv man, du (Gesine Cresspahl).
April 23, 1968 Tuesday
She was still on her own for a moment. Yesterday evening’s sky, painted with broad brushstrokes, had crept into the last pictures in her mind before waking; in her clearing consciousness the dream remained, like a wall she could take shelter behind. Like getting up for the first time in a long while. She was no one—a field of memory in which strange grasses grew; a stormy sky over the Baltic Sea; the smell of grass after rain. Just a few glances out at the Hudson, and with the
light in her eyes the sense of time would run faster, and in it her, Gesine, Mrs. Cresspahl, employee, a four-digit number in the 753-exchange, not here, midtown. Not yet.
There were further postponements. Was for a while still I, Gesine, still I, Marie, still we, the child and I, still the voices from the dream. Gradually the felted sensation of sleep crumbled into dry powder. Although woozy, she could nonetheless show pleasure. Marie had tied her hair up in a ponytail so high and tight that it stood straight up for a while. Our roles separated us. How an eleven-year-old pours tea for her elder. How Gesine pulls herself together into Mrs. Cresspahl, mirrored in the child’s scrutiny: here’s my mother, thirty-five years old, she doesn’t see the one gray hair in all the dark ones. Disguised for an office, equipped for a day out of the house, less recognizable now. How a child sullen about school talks as if looking forward to the essay she has to write, to make it easier for her mother to go out into the world as a working woman. Marie’s worried, un-American face once more, soft with sleep, in the crack of the door. Then alone.
With time to continue to drift along for a while, though on set paths, from one square of the board to the next, punctually advancing in time—but still, on her own. It was she who promised the newspaper man a good morning, and that she would never burden him with anything more; a real connection born from acquaintance, that’s him. She was almost disappointed to find herself among strangers again on the express side of the subway platform, and relieved to see yesterday’s lovers come running down the scuffed stairs just in time, inexperienced, unsure of each other, separated on the train as it shot downtown. She wormed The New York Times out from under her arm: Good weather over North Vietnam; 151 bombing missions. It was she who let herself be shoved so close to the tips of a transit policeman’s shoes that he moved aside slightly, all but saluting her. On the Grand Central Shuttle she walked to the next car through the swaying doors, not to gain three seconds but to feel herself moving in something moving. She scanned the rows of underground store windows, satisfied to see all the products she could do without. At the ticket counters, again with fantasies of running away: that was her. And yet on Lexington Avenue she relaxed in the camaraderie of all the different people around her, the small-town brick buildings between the skyscrapers, the pizza chef she always saw, holding his large round disk up to her like a greeting. The lowceilinged retreat for men, the wooden table with the breakfast beer right by the window—she’s seen it so many times, she has not tried to understand it so many times. Between the facades with their many windows she looked up in search of the sky over the city, and sure enough the bulrushes swayed as they should in the drifting clouds. A few more steps and the stroll through the city of daily surprises has come to an end. The person flushed through the marble bank lobby, sucked out of one throng into a thinner one and then into the last elevator lane, that was no longer her, that was Mrs. Cresspahl, employee here for the past four years, formerly a foreign-language secretary, fourth floor, then eleventh floor, and now transferred to the sixteenth, integrated into the firm’s operations though no doubt dispensably, provisionally, temporarily. – How are you! she is repeatedly asked on her ride up in the closed cabin, and she will answer: How are you! with a drawn, thin-lipped smile, the corners of her eyes not budging. That’s someone else.