by Uwe Johnson
He’d been doing occasional work the whole time. The word Chad was now on people’s lips in the bank, painfully familiar to some people, and de Rosny spread knowledge of other parts of the world too. Headquarters has moved from Chicago, the head of the family now lives on top of one of the towers, with a roof garden and swimming pool, wearing the emperor’s new clothes while de Rosny is doing the work. All day long people come up out of the subways under Lexington Avenue, are swept north from Grand Central, and de Rosny has scorned neither their savings accounts nor their direct deposits. He made the building more than a few feet taller than Union Dime Savings’s on Forty-Second Street, and he must have enjoyed seeing Chemical come after him, quite a bit later, and building on Third Avenue. And ads like the young lady with her lips softly, voluptuously open:
when she thinks of a bank,
her reaction is CHEMICAL
—none of those for him; he only barely accepted the marketing department’s new logo of five lines derived from the company’s initials, and the guards in the lobby may wear it embroidered over their hearts but de Rosny doesn’t let his chauffeur, whose uniform is more in the British style. Everything in the building matches, every part of the machine fits together, from the square footage allotted to every workspace to the underground garage, but the template is not visible, it exists in de Rosny’s head. He is considered strict, merciless even, in his role as boss; he’s referred to in the building as D. R., dee-arr, in a respectfully amused undertone. The president, the head of the family, may make announcements over the company intercom in the cafeteria, but people pay less attention than they do to the rain rebounding off the sealed double windows; de Rosny’s coldhearted utterances produce laughter, and one rumor among the employees is the almost sincere wish that the damn PA system someday finally be converted to television. This, they feel, will let them get at the truth, as if a de Rosny ever lets the cat out of the bag before the deal is done. So far only three people in the whole bank know what de Rosny has planned for the ČSSR, and one of them estimates the plan’s worth in the neighborhood of $400 million, based on these bloodthirsty short-term loans he’s been reading about in the paper.
De Rosny seems puzzled. He rushes out his door to meet Employee Cresspahl, hastily closes the door behind her, starts marching with long strides up and down his spacious carpet. A man thinking hard. A man thunderstruck. He could be a teacher, the kind who looks around the schoolroom absentminded, thin lipped, even after ten years giving no sign of his accumulated familiarity and friendship, just moving on to the next item in the lesson plan.
De Rosny cannot understand these Communists, especially not the Czech or Slovak ones. How could they go and count their money right out in the open, in front of civilians! And then say what they plan to do with it too!
Correct behavior, in Employee Cresspahl’s view.
Against the rules, in de Rosny’s. Not only are the Communists behaving like Communists, they’re ruining the market for the loan he wants to slip them under the table, on the sly.
So that would be playing by de Rosny’s rules. By this point Employee Cresspahl is permitted such comments, in this room, harmless, knees together, gaze fixed attentively on the bridge of de Rosny’s nose—the schoolgirl. De Rosny amuses himself setting a little trap. Would his faithful and hardworking Gesine Cresspahl like to take a quick trip to Prague, pretending to be a tourist, and share a bit of de Rosny’s inner life with the new leaders?
Employee Cresspahl doesn’t want to be de Rosny’s faithful and hardworking tool, she would have to discuss such a trip with her daughter first, she has a dentist appointment tomorrow, hairdresser’s too. She doesn’t want to, and she has to say: Of course. I’d be happy to. Tonight?
No. The Communists wouldn’t take a woman seriously enough. As someone authorized to speak for a New York bank.
Employee Cresspahl begs to differ. Women’s equal rights in Socialist countries.
De Rosny, with an unexpected twitch of his eyelid, reminds her of the statistics she’s prepared on this topic too. Then he has her at his mercy and he starts by evaluating her report from Tuesday. He says: But with me, in the pay of us murderous man-eating capitalists, you’ll get equal rights like you’ve never seen! Just wait four months!
– Very good. I can wait. Sir: Employee Cresspahl says.
So this is our life. This is what we live on.
April 26, 1968 Friday
Yesterday, in the middle of Times Square, New York observed the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising twenty-five years ago, and we missed it. More than forty thousand men, women, and children died after a forty-day fight against German soldiers, and yesterday three thousand of the living stood on the sidewalk and traffic island where Broadway and Seventh Avenue diverge, and we weren’t there. Fifty-five Jewish groups united to commemorate as well the six million people whom the Germans killed elsewhere, and we didn’t know. Speeches were given, telegrams read, a tenor of the Metropolitan Opera wearing a yarmulke sang Yiskor for the dead, and we wouldn’t have gone to that. But that doesn’t help, the place where the rally was held is now, since yesterday, called Warsaw Ghetto Square, and we’ll have to keep that in mind.
Cresspahl turned his town commandant’s orders into regulations and behaviors in Jerichow, and would have liked to know what he was doing, and hardly once managed to understand K. A. Pontiy.
It wasn’t the language. Since early July there’d been a Soviet Military Administration for the State of Mecklenburg and Vorpommern, in Schwerin, and it issued orders in German, signed General Fedyuninsky, countersigned Major General Skossyrev, and one after another they were brought to Cresspahl in the brickworks villa ready to be posted. K. A. Pontiy’s German, too, may not have been good enough to teach the language but was good enough to make himself understood, at least in terms of what he wanted from the people of Jerichow. And yet Cresspahl didn’t understand him. His child was given short answers
Thats how he wants it.
But he cant just do that.
He can.
Then why are you doing it?
Cause he won.
Thats what winning means, Cresspahl?
Times have changed, Gesine. Now—
and soon stopped asking questions. (The child was busy enough with other things.)
When Cresspahl tried to understand it in military terms, he got somewhere, sometimes. If he had to build a fortified headquarters in a small town, one that wouldn’t be easy to see into, he would probably have started much like the Soviet commander. The houses on the west side of Town Street stood harmlessly outside the fence, betraying nothing. The mouth of the Bäk was closed off with painted wood, no barbed wire, much less a gate, and now that street was practically a blind spot in the town. Anyone wanting to get at the Soviet fort from the west would have to trample ripe grain. To the southeast the only access was a sandy turnoff into what looked like a back road petering out between the cemetery wall and the hop kiln, not like a military headquarters with armed guards, triumphal arch, and barbed wire. Cresspahl hadn’t been promoted in 1917 to a rank involving officer training, so Pontiy’s camp was a hideaway strictly by the tactical book as far as he knew.
By this point he’d had two weeks to observe his town commandant—in the middle of nights and early in mornings, charged with crimes and immune from prosecution at least for the time being—and whatever it was he managed to see, he hadn’t been able to put it all together. K. A. Pontiy with his mussel-colored glances, no eyebrows, blunt naturally bald head, sluggish with age or from his shoulder wound, he might have been Cresspahl’s age, maybe a little younger. His constant unconscious sighs might be due to illness, or grief, it didn’t make him frail. Maybe he didn’t stand up with Cresspahl because then the German would be able to look down on his bald skull, and after a while Cresspahl was ordered to sit down, officially. He would walk in the door and K. A. Pontiy would be hooking the clasp of his uniform at the neck, especially for the foreigner, possibly for militar
y dignity. Their discussions quickly turned into questioning, practically tribunals, for K. A. Pontiy would give a stretch with his numerous papers before him, and next to him there would be a lieutenant standing stiff and straight, hand on his pistol holster sometimes, adjutant and prosecuting attorney in one. Sometimes Cresspahl thought that Pontiy didn’t want to lose something again, maybe his uniform, maybe his dignity. When angered Pontiy would stand up and put his cap stiffly on his head. He was suspicious of the Germans, and that was all right with Cresspahl, but he didn’t threaten Cresspahl with removal from office, he threatened him with pieces of his life story. He was quite familiar with agricultural problems: Pontiy would tell him, his voice soft, sharp, and dangerous, accompanied by an unexpected wink. You couldn’t pull wool over the eyes of an engineer like him: Pontiy would warn, contemptuous, but quickly shifting into an almost brotherly tone. As a sometime graduate of the Frunse Academy he stood up for the Red Army’s honor! K. A. Pontiy revealed to his mayor, in obviously blind rage, right before sentencing him to arrest and execution, but then might take Cresspahl’s measure with a satisfied look and dismiss him from the audience, like a badly raised child it’d be good to put a little fear into. Cresspahl couldn’t figure him out, not even superficially.
If K. A. Pontiy had been to the Red Army’s military academy, and was sixty years old, why was he a major with a little row of medals and nothing more? Why did his army assign him to a tiny town like Jerichow?
He’d said his parents were farmers, and marveled at charring the ends of fenceposts before digging them into the ground, and didn’t know he could have demanded Carbolineum and tar oil? (He’d wanted a fence in Jerichow, and never in the Soviet Union?)
He was an engineer, and he tried to measure his fence’s square footage with a field compass, enjoying the ingenious (if imprecise) instrument, like he’d never heard of a surveyor’s tripod in his life!
He wanted to defend the Red Army’s honor, as head
of the military branch
of the government bank
of the Soviet occupation forces
of the town of Jerichow
and his nation’s representative to the German nation, and then he demanded, not from it, but from individuals, their gold and silver, and English and Dutch stocks, and every bit of platinum that turned up in Jerichow—whether the owners had come by such property during the war or not, whether they’d followed the Nazis or shunned them—and then didn’t hand over these precious objects to his country, but kept them for himself, traded them for liquor, handed them out to guests or underlings. When Cresspahl was asked about Order No. 4, he might say things like: We’re in the middle of the harvest, and he himself hadn’t turned over much more than his outof-date statements from the Surrey Bank of Richmond. He discovered the Red Army soldier known as Wassergahn making a fire with them in the brickworks-villa fireplace, so the Red Army and its government bank lost one or two pounds sterling. Cresspahl didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to get the guy with the inexplicable name punished, but he didn’t understand the thing about defending the army’s honor.
When the Red Army had put Dr. Kliefoth’s coin collection into circulation as valid tender in Jerichow, Cresspahl put two Lübeck thalers, dated 1672, Schwerin, in his commander’s palm, and K. A. Pontiy pounced on the coins like a chicken, examined the recent bite marks, and slipped the museum pieces into his breast pocket. He was head of the military branch of the government bank. Cresspahl was informed that the German Army had done the same thing in K. A. Pontiy’s fatherlands, and what could he do but nod. In doing so, he had slandered the Red Army by comparing them to the Fascists and should have been shot at once, up against the cemetery wall! Cresspahl was freed with a passing question about the names of streets in town. He went to complain when the stupid child, Gesine, had obliviously worn a piece of jewelry around her neck that a nighttime looting patrol could tear off her. It was the five-mark coin from the Kaiser’s time that Lisbeth Cresspahl had had Ahlreep’s Clocks make into a brooch in October 1938, in defiance of the Nazis’ robbery of everyone’s gold, and at two in the morning Cresspahl had to explain to Major Pontiy the difference between coins and pieces of jewelry. K. A. Pontiy gave a grave nod, whether with fatigue or satisfaction; tried once with screaming; seemed relieved when the German didn’t give in. He admitted he was right. Two days later, an abashed Red Army soldier walked into Cresspahl’s kitchen, beckoned the child Gesine to come out, and handed her back the brooch, knotted in a silk kerchief. Izvini pozhaluysta means: “please excuse me”; ne plakat' means: “don’t cry.” Cresspahl went by the Ahlreeps to thank them for not having reported the hidden property, and K. A. Pontiy reminded him, days later, with a smile as pleased as it was mischievous, that he had restored the honor of the Red Army.
There were confidences exchanged. Cresspahl had wanted to know whether the commandant wanted a temporary or permanent fence, and K. A. Pontiy refused to tell him whether he would be handing the territory back to the British soon or the Jerichowers later. (The result was that Mrs. Köpcke had to set the fenceposts more solidly in stone.) What the Russian had answered, with an almost Mecklenburgish pleasure in a trap seen through and leapt over, was: For e-v-ver, Meeyor.
If only we could ask Cresspahl! From the child’s point of view, the dealings between the two men often looked like hearty friendship, lurching between plain unconditional loyalty, murderous conflict, and stubborn-yet-heartfelt reconciliation. Would Cresspahl today be able to remember that far back?
When Cresspahl went walking through town with the two mysterious Karabiner 98k rifles, he didn’t get home until late. K. A. Pontiy had had him picked up at Town Hall and escorted to the brickworks villa, and it turned into a party. Cresspahl was greeted with his very first handshake, given food and drink until midnight, and on the outside stairs K. A. Pontiy missed several times before managing to clap Cresspahl’s shoulder, with feeling too.
Cresspahl turned in his telephone, and his Receiver for the People, because he and his house would be more severely punished than people who had only read the order. But that was the wrong thing to do. For all that his commandant spoke of the many telephones and microscopes that Germany owed the Soviets, he’d thought Cresspahl had more brains than that. Socialism had been promised, and Socialism wasn’t life without telephones and radios, was it? For some it might be, but Cresspahl needed to be able to hear Pontiy, didn’t he, whether by phone or over the radio. This time there was a parting handshake because Cresspahl had nodded about Socialism, and K. A. Pontiy sent him, from his personal stock, the eight-tube superhet that the refugees in Dr. Berling’s apartment had turned in out of gratitude or superstition. Now the mighty blue-and-black thing sat silently on Cresspahl’s desk, together with the memories of Lisbeth’s first attempt and Dr. Berling’s stubborn death too. Pontiy came by to see whether his mayor had consigned to the attic this proof of his trust in a select few.