Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  We also saw a tall young man from a school with an average sports team, his face strangely red. He was holding a teeny-tiny Chinese woman by the elbow, trying to be encouraging; she was desperately unhappy. (From afar, we saw the self-promoter fidgeting around on his outside ledge again; he was, as he’d hoped, greeted and applauded by several groups of people.) On Ninety-Sixth Street we found ourselves next to the unhappy couple again, she wearing his jacket now, but she still couldn’t forgive him for something he couldn’t suspect, at least not until later that night.

  But it wasn’t over at Ninety-Sixth Street, we were supposed to keep going until Seventy-Second and then into the park, to Sheep Meadow, where the rally with the speakers was to take place that afternoon. Mrs. Martin Luther King was scheduled to speak, Pete Seeger was there, Mayor John Vliet Lindsay would come. Supposed to sit on the grass, sing in a group while waiting, chat familiarly with people nearby, about the weather, about the city.

  – John Lindsay?: Marie said, disbelieving. – He was just on the platform at the Loyalty Parade!

  Then she didn’t want to accept that the mayor might appear in front of both the enemies and the supporters of the foreign war, equally a friend to both, wanting all their votes equally for the period after December 31 of next year. It was the first time she said, not in heralding tones, but pleading: It’s still Saturday. Let’s make a South Ferry day of it.

  So we rode on the IND to the IRT, boarded the ferry John F. Kennedy at Battery Park, and traveled across the whole harbor to Staten Island. Marie braided her hair on the way, her head turned farther aside than usual and her fingers so slow that it was as if she were braiding in her thoughts. She cut up the hairband with the Indian symbols embroidered on it, with a shard of glass she found lying on the sidewalk, so that she could tie her braids. We took the bus from Staten Island over the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn and from there went back to Riverside Drive underground. Now it’s six thirty and a yellow stripe is hanging over the Palisades, sharply outlined against the blurry bluish upper reaches of the sky. The sun has a yellow hole. Minutes later, the yellow cell dissolves into darker colors.

  Marie knows not only her mayor John Vliet Lindsay’s birthday, but the names of his children and what schools they all go to, she keeps photos of him from The New York Times, she has adopted his line about “the fun of getting things done”—she considered him a friend. She said something, as she tore his pages out of her scrapbook, but it won’t get written down here, Comrade Writer. You can say that maybe she bawled while she was alone in her room, but nothing after that.

  April 28, 1968 Sunday, Start of Daylight Saving Time

  Sheep Meadow in Central Park: 522,725 square feet, divided by the minimal space required for one person to sit down comfortably—9 square feet—makes room to hold 58,080 persons (not counting a remainder of 5 square feet); that’s how meticulous The New York Times is. When Mrs. Martin Luther King arrived, the Meadow was only half filled. She read a decalogue of ten commandments on Vietnam, said to have been on Dr. King when he was assassinated, and the tenth said: Thou shalt not kill. Long, sustained applause.

  Another protest took place yesterday, on Washington Square, unauthorized but justified with “The streets belong to the people.” Someone who struggled against the police was wrestled to the ground by numerous plainclothes men, kicked, kneed, hit with a leather blackjack (a “sap”), and anyone who tried to photograph police loading demonstrators into a paddy wagon was arrested along with them. That doesn’t make Marie feel better—she wishes she hadn’t missed anything there either.

  The day before yesterday, a doctor in Czechoslovakia committed suicide—a former physician in Ruzyně prison in Prague—and the new interior minister, Josef Pavel, says he was tortured by that same doctor. And wants an official investigation too. What the Communist sister parties agree to do among themselves, the Czechoslovakian one wants to break the silence on, and a “Club for Independent Political Thought” has sprung up, and not been banned, even the Socialists are allowed, who want to bring about an unrestricted democratic life. What will become of this country?

  Cresspahl was now in his third month as mayor of Jerichow and still learning on the job.

  He couldn’t do much with his mirror image. If he tried to demand, as mayor, that the citizens of Jerichow do what he was expected to do as a citizen, that didn’t work. He remembered when he’d had to pay taxes and preemptively set the deadline well in advance: August 10 for business taxes, August 15 for property taxes, September 10 for income and corporate taxes, and so on each quarter. Leslie Danzmann helped him realize, though, that most of the May and June payments hadn’t been made, various people in Jerichow hadn’t paid even under the Nazis, had decided to wait out the British, and had no intention of delivering either the current or past due under the Soviets. K. A. Pontiy had no suggestions except ruthless full enforcement, relying on one of his Orders and the excuse that the nonmunicipal taxes were still “Reich taxes,” even if the Reich was no more (same as “German Reich Railway,” which wasn’t even run for Germans anymore either). Cresspahl had no one who could collect the back taxes; Leslie Danzmann had to calculate a collection surcharge of 5 percent of past due amounts, retroactive to the Reich’s March and February, on every index card. The mayor’s office might post it, could in totally flagrant cases send out notices—which only put the government bank in debt to schoolboys for messenger fees—but “Hitler’s taxes for Stalin” did not materialize. Since the town didn’t have any money it could only be in the townsfolk’s pockets, and anyway it was worthless in the age of barter, but the townsfolk insisted in stubbornly seeing themselves as subjects of the Soviets, not of the municipality of Jerichow.

  People like Peter Wulff authorized the town to deduct taxes from their bank accounts, for the time being. But the bank accounts were frozen, no one was allowed to make transactions—not Cresspahl, not the account owner, not even K. A. Pontiy.

  K. A. Pontiy ordered Cresspahl to charge the Jerichowers an additional 5 percent of any withheld moneys, as a penalty. Now Leslie Danzmann could do her calculations in units of ten, that was easier. It stayed on paper, and K. A. Pontiy ordered Cresspahl to “take executive action” with respect to the defaulters’ property if they didn’t pay cash. Cresspahl asked what he meant by “executive.”

  Town Commandant Pontiy meant the confiscation of tradeable objects: machines, motors, tools. And the like.

  Cresspahl suspected that if the means of production were taken away, labor might drop off, taxable labor included. K. A. Pontiy, with a sigh, bowed before the almighty power of dialectical materialism, and ordered such objects to be left in the owners’ hands, but not as their property.

  The mayor couldn’t make him understand, he could only repeat, that then the work really wouldn’t get done. Pontiy agreed to order the work. Sometimes Cresspahl even laughed, it looked like a coughing jerk of the shoulders, and Pontiy sighed. Strange country, this Mecklenburg.

  Well, khoroshó. Here’s an order: confiscate the real estate. All or part.

  Then they won’t have to pay property tax.

  K. A. Pontiy stretched in his seat as if he wanted to have the problem taken out and shot. It was formerly Papenbrock’s office chair, and two inlaid lions were interlocked over Pontiy’s shiny head. He turned around to look sternly at his second lieutenant, signaling he should take his hand off his holster. Then he ordered Cresspahl to secure the tax debt by confiscating furniture. As punishment and to set an example. Sat is fied, Meeyor?

  Cresspahl drank the liquor meant to indicate mutual understanding (Pontiy had put his Mauser down on the table so that his mayor would drink), but was unable to return to Town Hall satisfied. Many, perhaps most of the houses in Jerichow had belonged to the nobility, only a few from that class had left for the west, and they didn’t pay Jerichow property tax. But anyone who had left Jerichow after May 8 had had his property temporarily confiscated for the good of the town, and permanently if he didn’t return
within a year. Now the municipality owned a lot of its buildings, but had to pay property taxes to itself, and didn’t have the money to.

  (The mayor’s office could have raised the rents on the town’s property. Raising the rent was strictly forbidden. And the Jerichowers put aside the lease and rent money for the owners who had fled—in accord with the law, they felt, here too—and the government bank got nothing.)

  Cresspahl introduced monthly payment of wage and revenue taxes, instead of quarterly. (The commandant hereby orders that a state of emergency is in effect.)

  But Jerichow had been the workshop for the surrounding countryside; tradesmen didn’t get enough work from the town itself. The estates and village precincts in the area, now divided into independent “Kommandaturas,” paid in kind whenever they could (or were allowed to) hire someone in Jerichow. The farmers compensated their laborers not with money but with food and drink and a roof and the promise of wheat in the winter. Was Cresspahl supposed to impose a tax on payments in kind?

  Mrs. Köpcke, construction, ceded the government bank’s debt to Mrs. Köpcke to the government bank, to offset against any city and Reich taxes she owed, in advance, until March 3, 1946. She wrote off these payments as made. Cresspahl signed. Receipt of one (1) fence plus cash-free tax payments, confirmed.

  There was another nighttime fight with K. A. Pontiy. Pontiy placed himself on the side of the German Reich and pronounced all obligations toward the aforesaid valid past the date on which the German Reich had capitulated to him and the Western Allies. The freezing of bank accounts had no consequences of a legal or civil nature. The days of civil rights were over!

  Cresspahl, then, took it that the Red Army was a force majeure that had rendered the financial institutions insolvent.

  Pontiy didn’t fall for that and dismissed his mayor with the order to institute dog taxes. Droll and devoted creatures, dogs. Don’t you think so? Omitting to register: punishable. Per dog! Let’s say: 150 reichsmarks.

  Cresspahl canceled the corporate tax. There were no longer such corporations in Jerichow.

  Then he seized the cash reserves of the credit union and paid the concerned parties at the hospital, the gasworks, the sanitation department the wages he owed them for the past three weeks (“since the Russians”). He partly offset the amount, though, with the remaining assets of the estate owners, whose accounts hadn’t been frozen, but were now, since they’d left.

  – A mayor like that always has one foot in jail.

  – I know, Gesine. All ri-i-ight. But your dad wasn’t a crook. Like John-Vliet-Lindsay!: Marie said. That was yesterday. She refuses to be consoled, and Cresspahl’s inching toward Socialism had no effect on her.

  April 29, 1968 Monday

  If work awaits in midtown then you have to leave Riverside Drive at eight thirty, the same as before, but the sun is rising on a different timetable. The start of Daylight Saving Time has again moved it way over to the left so that it shines blindingly down from above as it did six weeks ago. Ninety-Sixth Street’s canyon floor was still deep in shadow, though, and the lost hour gives us a real feeling of shady early mornings.

  When Cresspahl’s child woke up, the July sun was already surrounding the house, the shade cooling the room. It was so early, though, that she still couldn’t hear any sound from the other people in the house, and everyone was really asleep in the commandant’s headquarters across the road. In the silence in the shadows Gesine clambered out the window and crept through house and yard looking for traces of Jakob.

  He wasn’t easy to find, and suddenly he’d be standing there, where just before there’d been nothing.

  Going looking for him was a bit desperate, and a twelve-year-old girl has her pride. Jakob wasn’t always in Jerichow. He’d rented himself out with his horses, in a village far to the west, hours away on foot. Two open windows by the front door were a good sign—Jakob’s mother kept them closed at night, despite the big notice proclaiming the house off-limits. Gesine Cresspahl walks past them now, almost without a sideways glance; she’s just on her way to the pump. She is up to nothing special when she walks out into the yard, every inch a girl out for a stroll, she can casually turn around and check if the chimney is smoking, an even better sign. Because nobody cooks breakfast as early as Jakob. But that wakes Cresspahl, who pads to the kitchen in his socks (so as not to wake a sleeping child) and joins Jakob for coffee. And now the daughter of the house could walk through the door and sit down at the table, she too has the right to breakfast, but it would stand out, it’s too early, the children in the house get their first meal from Jakob’s mother, and the one time she did join them after all Cresspahl spoke differently, as did Jakob. As if she weren’t grown up. Jakob’s year of birth, 1928, subtracted from her own comes out to the same annoying difference every time. Five whole years. You can sit in the shade next to the rotted beehives and calculate the years, and suddenly there’s Jakob standing at the pump, unwinding the scarf from around his neck. How could he walk barefoot so quietly! (There was sharp gravel on the path from the back door, scattered there years ago by Cresspahl to discourage his child from going out barefoot.) The wound on Jakob’s neck had closed up but it still looked red and raw, and Gesine Cresspahl felt very embarrassed. She was hoping to stay hidden, and now he was calling her. Now she is standing at the pump like a child and helping an eighteen-year-old grown-up splash water over his neck and head and making a face showing how exploited and ill-used she feels. But since Jakob nods instead of saying thank you, the child can’t say Don’t thank me! Then he’s off, without even a chance to ask him about the red fox, and everything’s all wrong, it would’ve been better not to have seen him at all.

  One weekend, late in the afternoon, almost evening, Gesine Cresspahl was sitting high in one of the walnut trees outside the house. Not to worry, she has things to do up there. She might be carving something into the bark with a knife. Or maybe, if she’s perched right up at the top, almost above the branches, a girl might be counting the roof tiles. Or the ones with too much moss on them. Or looking for broken ones. In no way shape or form was she up in the tree because you can look west from there without anyone seeing you. You can’t trust your own eyes when there’s a little mark on the horizon, trembling before the setting sun, and a quick breath later the country road is deserted. He could also come out of the forest, at the bare spot where it’s called the Rehberge. But to see that you have to climb up to the top of the tree, where it’s dangerously thin, and it would sway, and betray a child, who’s too clever for that. She had just decided that the figure at the corner of the Russian fence was a stranger, not Jakob, when she heard his voice. She was so startled her foot slipped and made a jagged sound. But that could easily have been a bird. Only she couldn’t find Jakob. The Abses’ windows were open but his voice didn’t sound indoors. It was soft, but as if he were in the yard. The yard was empty. – Devyatnadtsat': said the voice, “nineteen,” and down below she saw Wassergahn the Red Army soldier squatting by the tree trunk. He shook his head and started telling a long story: Posledniy den' . . . – Ne yasno: Jakob said pleasantly, “don’t know about that,” and now she saw him too. He was squatting there like Wassergahn, both of them staring over the green fence and up at the top floor of the villa, clearly not doing some kind of deal but working to improve the friendship between the German and Soviet peoples. Yet she saw a fistful of the blue-and-white Allies money, no one in Jerichow would accept it as payment, Jakob stuck it in his shirtsleeve. (In his shirtsleeve.) After too long a while Wassergahn stood up and stomped over to the gate in the green fence, where he belonged, and Jakob stayed crouching under the tree. He didn’t look up, oh no, but he stayed there relaxing until Cresspahl’s daughter was totally stiff from sitting without moving on one and a half branches.

  That night she was back up in the tree, and someone really did come out of the house, tinkling softly. Apparently a very fat man, because he walked as if on eggshells and his pants legs were exceedingly stuffed with s
omething. This unknown individual stopped at Gesine’s tree and gripped it hard enough that the upper branches actually did shake a little, then said, in Jakob’s voice, dreamily, appreciatively, in anticipation: I wonder when these walnuts’ll be ripe.

  Blushing is something you can feel happening to you; some people learn that as just a child, even on a dark night.

  And he liked Hanna Ohlerich more, that was obvious. Probably because she was a couple months older. True, he brought Gesine an egg too, but he just put hers down, he put Hanna’s right into her hand. She might say as casually as you like that Jakob was in the yard, she’s known it for the last half an hour, maybe she’s talked to him, and it wasn’t her waiting for him, was it? And you had to sleep at night next to this Hanna Ohlerich, and it didn’t matter how wide the bed was, you could never get far enough away from her. There she was, sleeping, she wasn’t thinking about . . . people tinkling like glass in the night. Hanna sat next to him on the milk-can rack and asked him questions! Like it was nothing! True, he called her “child,” and called Cresspahl’s by her name. Because Hanna’s parents were dead. She told him about when she’d worked as a machinist at sea, but it was only the Baltic, that flooded field, and she’d been allowed near the cutter’s engine only to clean it! Another girl definitely needs to sit there too, just to make sure the bragging doesn’t get out of control. Lurking there a ways off, not wanting to join the conversation or anything. So, Jakob was from Pommern? Gesine had known that for a long time, and the name of the village too, and that it had been on the Dievenow River. But some girls go on to ask about Usedom Island. So it hadn’t helped Jakob in the slightest that the Poles hadn’t taken it? Not at all. And so Jakob is planning to stay in Mecklenburg? And some girls hold their breath until he says: We dunno yet. How else is someone to hide her sinking feeling of disappointment than by asking if Jakob has ever been to Podejuch? Podejuch in Pommern. Jakob’s never heard of Podejuch. If someone doesn’t know what to say next she has to leave the conversation, and her whole body feels like it’s lost a battle. It feels shriveled up.