Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  That’s our German, that’s our Danish girl. She’s single, available; married; a widow. Engaged—Wes saw her on Third Avenue with some guy from Kansas. Nah, Nebraska. Has a foster child, two, no actually the kid’s hers. Geesign. Has a sense of humor; she might say: You wouldn’t find my village on the map, I’d have to write it in myself, but she also says: I was born in Jerichow, that’s in Mecklenburg. Yerry Show. Looks taller than five four. Has a thing going with the VP’s son; only took her three years to make it into the tower with all the fat cats. She’s allowed to eat in the bosses’ restaurant but goes down to Sam’s for lunch—bad move. Good move, goes back and visits her old departments, doesn’t burn any bridges. Helps a friend a hers check his letters of credit; must be cause she used to be a Communist. One of the vice president’s little games, de Rosny’s like that. Special assignment. Don’t get memos from her, her number’s not in the directory. Yesterday she took a French heir out to lunch; she’s just de Rosny’s left hand. She has a corner office; the bank’s given her a safe. Miss Cresspahl. No, Mrs. So she is available. Personnel won’t say. Who is she? A girl on the sixteenth floor where men work. Won’t be long ’fore she’s transferred to the Milwaukee branch. Ten thousand a year. More like eleven. Cresspahl, name sounds Jewish. Celtic. In short: No one knows her. Maybe that’s just what the fat cats on the sixteenth floor want. Bottom line: Unknown. Anonymous, camouflaged. Unknowable.

  The sun beating through the unprotected windows takes her back again. Here in the spacious office full of functional and residential furniture is the same hot, semi-high eastern sunlight that ignites the haze over the low settlements of Long Island City to the color of a sea seventeen years ago. She was there once—held a sextant up to the sun. That was her once.

  Cresspahl’s in-box is stacked no higher than usual, but today for the first time there’s newspaper in it: page 12 from The New York Times. An article is circled in big exuberant loops; her boss has put his URGENT stamp into the ad space next to it. He’s even taken the trouble to dash off initials meant to denote de Rosny, and again they look more than anything like a prince’s little crown.

  “Memo

  From: Cp

  To: de Rosny, Vice President

  Re: N.Y.T., 4/23/68; Czechosl.

  With reference to the claim that subsidies in the Czechoslovak economy are distributed in accord with an ‘arbitrarily set plan,’ I refer to my report on the 1966–1970 Five Year Plan, memo no. deR 193-A-22.

  The declared figure for subsidies in fiscal year 1967–1968, 30 billion crowns, is remarkably close to the actual sum, which according to my calculations amounts to slightly more than 15 percent of the net national income (deR 193-CD 48).

  The Czechoslovakian ruble account in the Soviet Union, estimated by the N.Y.T. as ten billion crowns, may actually have since exceeded the nominal equivalent of sixteen billion dollars. However, in addition to the lack of USSR products worth purchasing, this also represents what may someday partially eliminate Comecon’s leverage (deR 23-CF-1238).

  The reform efforts are presented in exceptionally general and simplified terms. The N.Y.T. describes in detail the delegation of responsibility to the enterprises themselves and the plan for gradually withdrawing subsidies. More precise information about the leveling off of differential taxes on unprofitable businesses would have been useful (above-cited source not applicable here).

  If functionaries of the Czechoslovak government are communicating with organs such as The New York Times, not only about personal political struggles in the background of the debates around reform but also to indicate the real possibility of the country’s return into the International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, this suggests that, more than wanting foreigners to think they are creditworthy, as previously assumed, they also want to publicize the advocates for reform in their own country. Would a further report on this topic be of interest?

  Negotiations of loans from capitalist countries are here mentioned in print for the first time. I would like to assure you, for the record, that the leak did not come from this office. Still, the unofficial admission should excite more than the market (see prev. par.).

  Best regards,

  G. C.”

  What on earth did you do to my English, writer?

  It wasn’t yours.

  It wasn’t this miserable limping German you’ve translated it into.

  Your English was as business as it gets, Gesine.

  I wasn’t insane when I wrote it!

  But you were tired. Distracted too.

  The employer has added delighted exclamation marks next to a paragraph in the Times report from Prague:

  “The state of Czechoslovakia’s economic health is like that of an injured man so full of morphine that he not only is likely to be permanently stupefied but he is unable even to tell the doctor where it hurts.”

  You can see de Rosny here, in his underlining: after such prolonged strain from peering downward a moment of refreshment has been granted him. This man full of morphine might get employee Cp. a new code number.

  Later, day sinks into evening against venetian blinds tilted perpendicular to block the sun, sinks into the slow return trip to Riverside Drive, to us, where we live.

  – This is what Mecklenburg looks like? Marie asks. She has stood up specially from her homework, is standing behind her mother’s chair, even bringing her cheek close, to have a line of vision that’s parallel at least.

  It was nothing. Ragged fog drifting over the river. A gap in the always astonishing green of the leaves seems to open onto an overcast inland lake, behind which memory sees, again, and gladly, a bluish pine woods on the other bank’s Palisades, sees the region of bygone times made again and again transparent and unreal by the stage-set trees.

  – Hm: Marie says, reassured, reassuring, as if to a shying horse. Where would she be if her New York, river and riverbank included, were something different, or even comparable to something different! To her it’s incomparable. Her time living here still stretches before her.

  April 24, 1968 Wednesday

  In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic three employees of the judiciary have been dismissed—no mere bailiffs or janitors but three high-ranking deputy general prosecutors, one of them the chief military prosecutor himself. The new government’s spokesmen provide no further explanation. It seems as if these guardians of the law in former times have now become guilty of crimes.

  The Soviets had been occupying Jerichow for barely a week but by the second Monday in the first July after the war the locals had already decided that there was one man responsible: Cresspahl, my father. “The Russians are his fault,” the verdict ran, and it covered more than just complaints about the foreigners. It really did a person good to say these words. As if without Cresspahl the Russians would never have come in the first place.

  It had started with throwing Käthe Klupsch in jail, and Cresspahl hadn’t done that. The British, while they were there, had threatened to punish anyone who spread rumors that they were going to leave Jerichow to their comrades-in-arms from the east. One bright June day, on the crowded sidewalk outside Klein the butcher’s empty shopwindow, Käthe Klupsch, however impossible she thought such a fate was, couldn’t resist giving herself a pleasant shudder by uttering the forbidden prediction. Two Tommies marched Käthe Klupsch off to Town Hall between them. The soldiers made sure not to get too close to this stout lady with the heaving bosom, and for her this was “bodily assault.” The four-hour wait outside Cresspahl’s office: that she’d felt was “a cynical effort to wear her down”—she’d been told only that she wasn’t allowed to talk. After that, the process of determining the facts had been a “spiritual ordeal” and “brainwashing” too, since Cresspahl had been obliged to translate his British visitor’s questions for her. Having admitted that she was able to read, for example typed public regulations, she was given a warning; because Cresspahl didn’t have time to write out a special pass that nigh
t, the British held her in a cell under Town Hall until curfew ended. Käthe Klupsch now thought she’d “been alone in the building with Cresspahl until six in the morning,” and probably got herself a bit mixed up with the two refugees in Rande who’d had to stay in jail until the Soviets took them as prisoners for the same offense. This was how Klupsch talked until the Soviets did move into Jerichow; afterward her only complaint about Cresspahl was his secret alliance with them. Cause in the end they did come, didn they? And for that they’d turned a blameless woman into a political prisoner, didn they?

  The Russians were Cresspahl’s fault.

  No. It hadn’t started like that.

  The British had made Cresspahl mayor of Jerichow. While they could have seen him as just another German, one who’d betrayed his sometime British home even, they instead seemed to trust him, like a friend almost. The British intelligence officers hadn’t found anything to worry about, they’d saluted him when they left! a military salute, too! Even Americans had come, from their area around Schwerin, and spent nights in Cresspahl’s office, and if they had questioned him over his (Western) reliability there’d still been drinks and fine words. Then the Soviets had moved in and they let Cresspahl stay mayor. That was their military cunning—trying to hide their secret conflict with their Anglo-Saxon allies. Still, they hadn’t exactly adopted Cresspahl, much less confirmed his official position. They’d installed him. Under the reign of the swastika, that word “install,” Einsatz, had carried connotations of something irregular—manpower shortages, stopgaps, “emergency measures,” whether putting a special unit to work “to help with” the harvest or deploying scattered troops or installing an unelected official, sometimes without even asking him first. Now Cresspahl had betrayed the British again, posting a notice on Town Hall that by order of the Soviet commandant he was henceforth a henchman of the Russians, a tool in their hands—“installed” as mayor.

  In May and June it had been the American Eighteenth Airborne, as represented by the British Sixth Airborne division, under B. L. Montgomery—the people of Jerichow had gotten quite used to their old occupiers. No sooner had they left than Cresspahl was serving the new occupiers, the local commander K. A. Pontiy, the Russians.

  Cresspahl had helped the Russians to an eighth of the town. Their fence around the brickworks villa had by no means been the end of it. On the fourth day after their arrival, it became clear why they’d merely run a few lines of razor wire through the golden rain bushes on the west side of the property. That morning, eight able-bodied men were ordered to report to Cresspahl’s office in Town Hall, summoned by name, and Mina Köpcke had to come too, representing her husband’s construction firm. And was their job to clean up the Lübeck Court, wrecked by the British, so that Jerichow would get its hotel back? No, they were to build a fence. A fence running due west from the commandant’s headquarters, through the back gardens of the houses on the Bäk, then straight north to Field Road, east to the edge of the yards of the houses on Town Street, and back to the property they’d already occupied! Mina Köpcke had been managing the books and supervising repairs for her husband ever since he’d gone missing with an antiaircraft gun in Lithuania; now she was eager to show him what she could do with a project of her own, and was put in charge. Cresspahl yet again showed what a Russian stooge he was, by giving them his whole stock of wood, and when that ran out Mina was free to tear down fence boards anywhere in Jerichow she wanted and her enemies didn’t. She had a requisition order with a Soviet stamp to prove it, to which she could add: It (the confiscation; the Russians’ construction project) was Cresspahl’s fault. Unlike him, she wanted to be patriotic, she didn’t set the fenceposts as deep in their stone foundations as she would have for a fence of her own, and when she had the paint mixed thinner than it would have been for a German customer she thought she could use the harsh sea wind as an excuse. But now what did this Cresspahl do, this fellow businessman and protector of Jerichow’s interests back in the day? He had one of her fence boards sent to her, as a sample; when her second paint job still turned out pale lime green, the barrel of synthetic resin was weighed on the town scales before her eyes and she had to sign a receipt. Then she came to Town Hall with her bill, and did Cresspahl file it away in good faith like a fellow victim of a foreign power? Late that night Cresspahl was seen with his buddy K. A. Pontiy pacing the length of Mina’s fence, like two friends out for a stroll, one wielding a surveyor’s rod and the other delighting in the wide swerving arcs the compass made. Köpcke & Co. was summoned back to Town Hall and Cresspahl calculated her chicanery out for her in square feet and cubic feet. He said nothing about fraud or even about innocent mistakes—he just asked for a revised bill. Sat hunched at his mayor’s desk, elbows too close together, and however tired he was he could have looked her in the eyes more than just that once, from deep under his brows, so surprised. Mina Köpcke stuck to her numbers, signed her aggressive bill, and accepted a draft on the government bank for later payment. For now she received no money at all, and she attributed that to Cresspahl, as the Russian way of doing business and as his fault.

  Not only was he betraying Jerichow to the Russians, he was taking his own cut! While Mrs. Köpcke and her seven men were fencing in a whole street, the Bäk, and a notice saying “Requisitioned” was being nailed up on one house after another, and since the construction was proceeding from both south ends, the Bäk was turning into a sack whose opening narrowed day by day. The Bäk had formerly been a residential street of respectable brick houses, less than forty years old and often with generously proportioned attics, among them Dr. Semig’s practically princely villa, all with sizable gardens separating them from the narrow lots on Town Street, and now the homeowners in this prosperous area had to move out, into the overcrowded town, billeted where papers signed by Cresspahl ordered them to go. They were allowed to take only what they could carry; they had to leave every room in a condition permitting immediate occupation by the foreigners. And Cresspahl refused to let anyone come complain about the single room they now had at Quade’s, or above the pharmacy, sometimes even shared with refugees! He would agree to see the refugees who themselves had been billeted in the Bäk, waiting so much more patiently now that they were on their third or fourth relocation in six months, and he allocated to them the rooms that the Jerichowers had been wanting to keep for themselves or their relatives, because he knew every building in town as well as the locals knew his. Then the north end of the fence was extended right across the Bäk, and that was the last time this street was ever seen in Jerichow, to this day. The people in houses adjoining the fence on Town Street complained about the shadows it cast on their gardens, the plants that didn’t like so much shade. And whose fault was that?

  Meanwhile Cresspahl’s own house and property lay outside the fence, on the other side of Brickworks Road. He’d looked after his friends: Creutz’s vegetable garden was within the fence and even though all its products had to be handed over to headquarters Amalie was allowed to go on using the path to Town Street running alongside the pastor’s house, and the land the Creutzes leased from the church had been fenced in for them too, as though permanently theirs now. Pastor Brüshaver, once again a neighbor of Cresspahl’s, could also stay in his house unmolested, though it occupied a strategic weak point that should have been fenced in to make the army enclosure a solid stronghold. And Cresspahl had secured himself, too, against looters and unwanted visitors, since the only approach to his property was on Brickworks Road but now there was a road sign, the first in its history, a board sharpened to an arrow, and it said: КОММАНДАНТУРА. Who would go down that road unless they had to? Cresspahl hadn’t even arranged for a German translation. It practically looked like a call to learn Russian—they wouldn’t put that past Cresspahl either.

  And he’d forced Bergie Quade to come to the commandant’s headquarters. The Red Army soldier she’d so glibly enlightened about “Wassergahn” came back to her store with a boy, a refugee from Pommern who wa
s staying in Cresspahl’s house. About seventeen but broad shouldered. He looked Bergie in the eye as if he’d long been a man, and a silent type too; she couldn’t put him off, talk him out of the store. The Red Army soldier looked at Mrs. Quade as he talked, and she felt almost attractive under his remembering gaze. The boy didn’t smile, he just translated. It sounded reliably North German, even when he had to ask the Red Army for clarification. Bergie Quade couldn’t resist the urge to wash her hands again. By that point she’d decided to be cooperative, so she invited the visitors into her kitchen. She hid her satisfaction while walking down Town Street between them, as if being led away, an upstanding German housewife under arrest, she even managed the requisite look of grim determination. She followed them across the Creutz property, stopped for a minute to talk to Amalie, who was supervising the fence builders as they transplanted some gooseberry bushes, and then really and truly set foot in the occupying power’s sealed compound. The Kommandatura. Over the next few hours the Red Army learned swear words that would circulate for some time, a bit garbled, in the Jerichow Soviets’ vocabulary; Bergie Quade also complimented Jakob Abs for following her instructions with delicate precision, like an expert plumber. The last German owners of the brickworks villa had decided to leave the Soviets with sawn-through drainpipes rather than whole ones, and the kitchen and bathroom faucets looked to Bergie suspiciously as though they’d been pounded with hammers, and secretly she couldn’t believe that people who were, after all, nobility could have treated their house in such fashion. Then Bergie Quade had the choice between submitting a bill to the government bank or receiving a half-liter bottle of unlabeled vodka, she accepted her husband’s balm, and had a drink on the house, too, with Wassergahn the Red Army soldier, who’d helped with the repairs. When Jakob brought her out through the brickworks villa’s front door onto the civilian Brickworks Road, she was tempted to check in at Cresspahl house, to see if he didn’t need help after all, with all his refugees and the child. But Jakob shook his head and Bergie walked the length of the cemetery wall to Town Street like everything was normal—tool bag in her fist, bottle under her skirt where she’d earlier had her shit-smeared rag, deep in thought about who she could tell all this to. If she wasn’t mistaken, her tactics had cost Cresspahl time as well as effort. So that at least wasn’t his fault. But Mrs. Quade’s unwillingness to give her neighbors a full report was enough to ensure that they had something to blame him for.