Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Pontiy came by to see Cresspahl. Not at Town Hall, in his bed. Whether at midnight or two hours later he had him woken up, gave him two minutes to get dressed, and sat down beside him with a sigh for a chat about those nights by the sea when everything looks so low and yet the sky is the way it is over Leningrad, if not even higher. But Cresspahl had to play the host in his house just like Pontiy in the brickworks villa, which by this point included providing the vodka. (The mayor didn’t have to trade on the black market in person—the one he had threatened with punishment in his official announcements—because Jakob did it for him. Jakob had brand-name liquor in stock, believe it or not, hidden somewhere in the house that no one else ever found, and Cresspahl preferred not to ask the boy questions. Only he wished the boy would tell him its equivalent value, not say that it was part of the rent for his mother and himself.) One morning, Hanna and I were woken not by the sound of birds but by the sight of two swaying men, dim in the dawn light, one of them saying, in an odd, surprised voice: Deti, devushki. The other confirmed: Children, girls: in a foreign, angular voice, like a mechanical dictionary, and it was my father and he’d spent the night drinking as though with a friend.

  He didn’t understand him. K. A. Pontiy, major in an army in possession of the science of atheism, appeared in church on Sunday with a four-man escort, waved kindly up at the organ that had fallen silent, annoyed until it started up again, then walked benevolently up and down between the pews full of singing people, gesturing like a conductor, until Pastor Brüshaver started his sermon. He did everything but sit at the front of the congregation. The uniformed visitation was over in eight minutes. Then the delegation went on to take a look around the cemetery, and K. A. Pontiy commented on the shady cave that the trees created as shelter from the July heat. In addition, he criticized the untended condition of several graves. On Monday the town commandant forbade, per Order No. 11, any future burials in the cemetery as well as parking the corpses in the chapel on Brickworks Road. Before news of these first strikes against the State Church of Mecklenburg had even reached the other end of Town Street, Aggie Brüshaver had a dapper, practically gallant visitor to lead to her husband’s desk, K. A. Pontiy, military commandant. Brüshaver expected a ban on church services, and Pontiy asked for an explanation of the liturgy. He expressed how much he was looking forward to the next such performance. He noted with regret that the Nazis had indeed melted down the zinc and copper of the new bells to make cannons. A question about burials made him surly for a moment, as if his friendship were being repaid badly. When he left, Pastor Brüshaver was of the opinion that St. Peter’s Church had been promised new bells soon, from who knows where. They said around Jerichow that the Soviets treated only pastors who’d been in concentration camps like that. But K. A. Pontiy paid his respects to the Catholic rectory, too, though the priest lacked those credentials (and he asked Böhm to give Brüshaver a bell after all, at least a small one). If there was to be atheism, then it would be a type with pious song and the tolling of bells from right next to the faithless commander’s villa.

  – Public relations: Marie says. – Clever guy: she says, if that’s the right translation for smart cat. She thinks so long and hard about K. A. Pontiy, amused almost, as if she should venture to try to be friends with him (like the Gesine Cresspahl of back then. Like me!). She’s having a harder time getting to sleep, stretched out under the blanket, breathing as if counting every breath. And yet what comes to her mind is public relations work.

  – No, Marie. Here you’re wrong.

  – Okay, Gesine. Fine. I’m talking about people and times I don’t understand. Presumptuous, precocious, foreign. You tell me how it was.

  – No. That’s not what I think of you. Who would ever—

  – Never mind. Tell me.

  – K. A. Pontiy’s official attitude toward the church wasn’t from 1953; East Germany was years away from being a country.

  – Was the Pontiy from 1945 part of 1953?

  – He wasn’t in Jerichow anymore. We hadn’t heard anything about him for a long time.

  – So, he mostly wasn’t. So, 1945.

  – Cresspahl had Leslie Danzmann write up a memo about every Vergewaltigung reported to him, even the ones that didn’t happen in Jerichow town, or Jerichow parish, the ones in the Rande military region or on the estates. There were a lot, and Cresspahl described more than where they’d taken place. That evening he’d hand them in at headquarters, to Mr. Wassergahn, and since the commander couldn’t always read them right away

  – there were lots of nighttime phone calls, meetings, serious accusations among friends.

  – Right. At first K. A. Pontiy would have tried to be amicable. You know, young men, away from home too long, alone too long, Cresspahl’s a man, K. A. Pontiy’s a man . . .

  – Man to man. Nudges in the ribs.

  – Right. But no nudges.

  – Cresspahl didn’t go for it.

  – So then came the stories about young German men, away from home too long, alone too long . . .

  – And he had K. A. Pontiy shot for the comparison. Red Army and marauding Fascist killers.

  – Right, you see? Sometimes it’s okay, other times punishable by death.

  – You don’t understand?

  – Cresspahl didn’t understand.

  – And so he was shot.

  – Sentenced to be shot, if he ever brought another such memo without the name, rank, unit, and serial number of the perpetrator. Slanders against the Red Army that couldn’t be verified were punishable by death.

  – And slanders that could be verified?

  – They’d be shot. He promised Cresspahl that, and

  – out came the vodka again. Everything hunky-dory.

  – And Cresspahl got a big sign on his front door, and another on the back door, and all the refugees under his roof got a special ID card

  – Off-limits! Off-limits!

  – And for a long time K. A. Pontiy would say, over and over, almost like Avenarius Kollmorgen, head tilted, remembering: Satisfied, Meeyor? Sat is fied?

  – Gesine, what kind of crime is that exactly?

  – Vergewaltigung? Never mind.

  – Another water-butt story?

  – No. But I forgot to leave it out.

  – Gesine, I’m ten years old. Almost eleven.

  – Very well. A man used violence against a woman to make her—

  – Oh, that.

  – When have you ever heard of Vergewaltigung?

  – You mean rape, right?

  – I mean rape all right.

  –Gesine, what do you think is the number-one topic of conversation among every female person in New York? Don’t you listen when the ladies trade stories by the swimming pool under Hotel Marseilles? You want me to imitate Mrs. Carpenter?

  – Number-one topic of conversation in your class?

  – Number-one-and-a-half. So admit it, K. A. Pontiy did care about public relations.

  – I hope you don’t get old in New York, Marie.

  – You’re in Jerichow, Gesine. In Mecklenburg. In July 1945.

  – Right. During the first week, Pontiy asked his mayor: Why do the Germans see us, their liberators from the yoke of Fascism, and act like we’re the devil?

  – A negative theist then.

  – Cresspahl didn’t tell him that the English had tried their hardest to convince him to go with them, the night before they’d left. (That was Käthe Klupsch’s night under Town Hall.) He wouldn’t have been the only one they’d tried to convince. They left with loudspeaker cars and said no one but proven Nazis had anything to fear from their brothers-in-arms, but in secret they described their ally as the devil no less than the Americans did. A bunch of—

  – Subhumans.

  – The word was ready to hand. Untermenschen. Even K. A. Pontiy used it.

  – For Germans. For some Germans.

  – And in his innocence, he tried to get this sorted out with another order. He ordere
d, twelfthly, that the war was over, civilized behavior could rear its head once more. The custom of greeting one another, for instance. Now every member of the Red Army in Jerichow was to be greeted properly, parked vehicles too, on spec.

  – And the Jerichowers realized they’d forgotten the Austrian style of greeting. Something to do with the right arm, wasn’t it? Ancient Roman?

  – And Cresspahl didn’t understand Pontiy.

  – It’s because he didn’t help Pontiy understand the Germans. Or at least one of them, him.

  – Or only this one.

  – Anyone comes to their father’s defense. I’d have done the same.

  – But wasn’t K. A. Pontiy another crook?

  – I like crooks. As long as they just take their cut and don’t do any other damage. Don’t you like crooks? Didn’t Cresspahl like crooks?

  – Cresspahl could deal with crooks. He was clueless about them, he didn’t do business with them—they got along just fine, like pals.

  – Well, you don’t have to understand someone right off, Gesine. G’night.

  April 27, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  but we decided to spend our day off differently.

  For this is also the day on which the Veterans of Foreign Wars show their loyalty to the nation with parades, in dark ceremonial uniforms, white puttees, white sashes around the hips and chest, kepis with badges on their heads, rifles over their shoulders, flags of club and state in holders on their bellies. Parochial-school bands and youngsters from drum-and-bugle corps will march with them, Fourth Avenue in the Norwegian neighborhood of Brooklyn as well as Fifth Avenue in Manhattan will be nationalistically decked out, the archbishop will lead and will end the march with the mayor. This year’s parade, the twentieth since 1948, is also dedicated to the memory of the late Cardinal Spellman, one of the war’s first and most enthusiastic supporters, and for the last two years the Loyalty Day Parade has been a show of support for American servicemen in Vietnam and a threatening fist to those who oppose the war. We could have gone to see that.

  There was another option: The New York Times, on her Food, Fashion, Family, and Furnishings page, gives us a picture of the Scanlons and their daughters, Rebecca, five, and Caitlin, two, because someone bought an 1894 Brooklyn brownstone for $28,500 and didn’t tear it down, they renovated it, and one of their delights is the third-floor bathroom with its original bathtub on claw-and-ball feet, the marble sink, stained-glass windows, and a toilet complete with pull-chain, in New York City. John Scanlon’s Irish mustache could be one of ours, his Italian wife another, and the Times gave us their full address, 196 Berkeley Square. Subway to Grand Army Plaza. Marie doesn’t feel like going there either.

  She chose the peace parade in Central Park and dressed for the occasion as deliberately as a grown-up. There’ll be police there, you have to wear something you can run in. Marie insisted that her mother take her dress back off and instead wear pants and an old blue cotton shirt (that could withstand a policeman’s grip. That wouldn’t hurt the feelings of any of the dark-skinned demonstrators from Harlem). In the end Marie, too, stood there dressed in self-defense, in sneakers intentionally left dirty, and looked in the mirror, learning from it that she should untie her braids and hold her hair in place with just a black hairband. (Shawnee uprising under Tecumseh, 1811.) And so we walked up Ninety-Fifth Street, white squaw and half-grown, wiry, blond-haired Indian girl.

  On the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, we had to stop and scan the apartment buildings, the street, the corner store. Four children used to live here, friends if not great friends, and they let themselves be taken away from New York by their parents, to a suburb where the sapphire-green lawns are no more real than the imitation village streets made of plaster and aluminum. Marie can’t understand a move like that, and maybe at least the children have come back to the Upper West Side of New York. Not today.

  The streets were dry after a morning rain. The pale sun up ahead gave off some warmth, enough for a holiday.

  On our zigzag path through the blocks, we often passed houses like the one the Scanlons had decided to save—once proud middle-class home for a life on three stories. A whole row of them had had their stairs and windows torn off; some of their brownstone comrades had been entirely gutted. The doors from inside the dead house stood around the bare lot where it had been torn down, some of them cracked apart, kicked in, weathered into various colors—inadequate fences like those surrounding a grave.

  Marie didn’t let the scars of urban speculation bother her; she looked the passersby carefully, intently in the face, unfathomable like an Indian. But when people called out Hey, Great Chief or let out the whinnying cry of the native inhabitants of this land she didn’t give them the same closed-off expression she usually showed strangers. If she didn’t actually say anything back, she did smile. These were New Yorkers, and she was going the same direction. Kindred spirits, friends of peace and of the Indians.

  At eleven o’clock sharp we were on the corner of Central Park West and 101st Street, like the Times had told us to be, and the parade wasn’t there yet.

  The sky was cloudy by that point, letting the sun peek through only occasionally, grayly threatening rain.

  The people lining the sidewalks didn’t yet make them much more crowded than the usual pedestrian traffic, though they were waiting. Assistants of the parade committee were walking back and forth, trying to sell “original” buttons as souvenirs of the morning of April 27, 1968. Marie was disappointed that commerce had joined the march. She wasn’t surprised; she probably expected it; still, the party now started on a slightly false note.

  She took the free sheets of paper—the flyers in support of Senator Eugene McCarthy, depicting horrors of war. The Communist Party was handing out extras, too, but The Daily Worker offered her a language much like the one Neues Deutschland once offered me, and neither of us quite understood it. Lots of those sheets fluttered to the ground. Marie kept hers under her arm, as a favor to Mayor Lindsay (which I undertook solely to keep New York City clean).

  Then she saw children holding balloons, green and blue and yellow, painted PEACE, but the dignity of her ten and a half years didn’t permit her any more than a few kindly, slightly condescending glances at the littler kids. Then came adults with black balloons bearing the peace symbol. Marie clambered down the park wall and stretched so she could reach into her pants pocket. No more vendors walked by. She kept the dime in her fist anyway.

  She watched the policemen, her eyes narrowed, Indian-style, under her black hairband. These guardians of law and order stood in small groups at the crossings, along the curb, familiar with one another. Their conversations looked private. Now and then they got their hands dirty, moving wooden sawhorses from the side streets to preemptively corral the parade. There were still a few cars driving down the street but the buses were already rerouted. Marie asked how many demonstrations her mother had done in her life so far. She was readier to believe a number over fifty than that we hadn’t been allowed to just watch.

  – You had to march?: she asked. – That’s what we want to do too!

  On the third floor of a building across the street, a young shirtless man clambered out onto his rented windowsill. He hung a stenciled banner across his two grimy bay windows, opposing the military occupation of the Negro neighborhoods. The black neighborhoods in New York are not in fact under military occupation. Then the agitator appeared with a telephone receiver at his ear, said some defiant and belligerent things to his distant friends, and sat down on the ledge for good. Marie kept looking up at this unathletic person, as if he were bothering her. She refrained from making any remarks; he was acting normal for New York, she couldn’t tell him not to do it; she went looking for a place for us somewhere else.

  But now the edges of the parade route were packed so full that any spectators stepping up to fill the gaps seemed pushy. In the soft hum of voices, the chattering of the police and network helicopters came down from overhead—none of t
he copters themselves did, though.

  Ten minutes to twelve, and the parade got started with a group of men on motorcycles. The drivers were wearing brown suits with yellow stripes. The Magnificent Riders of Newark. Their bikes didn’t roar (though the Times can’t resist describing it that way), they whispered. The drivers had to keep putting their toes down on the ground for support, because of the slow pace. They were followed by the van with the famous people, under the protection of fifty sturdy bodyguards. Marie recognized Pete Seeger on the platform and waved to him (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”; “If I Had a Hammer”; “Turn, Turn, Turn”). Pete Seeger taking part in the demonstration made everything almost perfect again for Marie, but she was too shy to enter the parade right behind Pete Seeger’s bodyguards. She let a bunch of other groups go ahead, mentally comparing her knowledge of New York with the neighborhood names on the banners they carried. Everyone was in a good mood, like on an outing. Instigators shouted happily: WHAT DO WE WANT?, and the chorus answered in syncopated pleasure: PEACE, NOW. Or: WHAT? PEACE; WHEN? NOW! When she decided to step off the sidewalk and join the kindred spirits, the show started.

  The show was a row of young girls in Vietnamese clothing, black smocks under pointy straw hats. Short American girls dressed up as Vietnamese women. They wanted to show who the country was killing in their place in Vietnam. It wasn’t their place. As if they might be killed here and now, on the corner of Central Park West and 101st Street. And as if even so it was just a game for them.

  Marie could have gone with them, we would have found each other later. What spoiled it for her?

  Then we saw the senior police officers walking alongside the relatively narrow column of marchers, one with a radio, another with files. Next to Marie on the sidewalk was a ten-year-old black girl with a steno pad, wearing a PRESS badge on her blouse, earnestly paging through what she’d already noted down. Marie turned in such a way that the other girl could have asked her a question, but the other girl acted like she didn’t see her. Remarkably few signs in the parade that anyone had written and nailed themselves. People wearing crash helmets; in shabby military uniforms but with their shoes polished per army regulations. The occasional women tended to be wearing sunglasses; one of them, in a Pepita houndstooth suit, could have been me (in a photograph). By then we were walking on the sidewalk, looking for a subway entrance to escape down, neither of us admitting it to the other.