Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Don’t get arrested.

  – Gesine, don’t you agree with the students?

  – Agree? Oh, sure, I agree.

  – There. They’re trying to make their university better, and after talking and talking they’re doing something now, you can see it. You must be in favor of the university stopping construction of the gym in Morningside Park and ending its affiliation with IDA, the Institute for Defense Analyses, it does research for the Pentagon.

  – Those are noble wishes.

  – They didn’t just write letters or carry signs around. They occupied buildings, you know that.

  – And barricaded themselves in with bookshelves.

  – Gesine, are you against violence? Since when?

  – I’m against violence to books.

  – Oh, that. They drank up the president’s sherry, they slept on his green carpet, leaving only cigarette butts and empty cans.

  – Almost half a million dollars in damage.

  – Columbia’s a capitalist enterprise, isn’t it? If the capitalists won’t comply they’ll have to pay.

  – And scare people off with the vandalism of the educated youth.

  – Okay, fine. A tactical mistake.

  – It didn’t have to be. That’s what the whites left behind, but in Hamilton Hall, where the dark-skinned students were, there was no garbage. They had their own sanitation teams cleaning the building every morning during the occupation, didn’t they?

  – They did. A point in favor of the Afro-American Society, and one against the SDS.

  – Students for a Democratic Society.

  – No?

  – Definitely, Marie. And last night the police came in the middle of the night and removed them. Seven hundred arrests.

  – A setback, a temporary setback. But it isn’t true anymore that only success counts in this country.

  – There’s also the publicity.

  – Gesine, you yourself would contribute ten dollars for the prisoners’ bail, if anyone asked you.

  – Fifteen. To be polite.

  – Isn’t it revolutionary to fight for something that helps other people?

  – It isn’t selfish, that’s true. Is it revolutionary when the first demand is nothing but amnesty?

  – If they want to go unpunished, maybe they think the punishment is unjust.

  – They can only go to school once in their lives?

  – If you insist, Gesine: Yes, they’re white middle-class students. Maybe they’re not exactly sure where they are. Any other objections?!

  – Point 2 on your flyer there.

  – Cease construction of the gymnasium in Morningside Park. Totally fine.

  – Marie, the university bought the land from the city seven years ago, there’ve been plans drawn up since 1959, and even then Morningside Park belonged to the people from Harlem, the blacks, and a separate swimming pool for the Harlem community was part of the plan, and the spokesmen for the blacks were happy for their children. What’s the difference in 1968?

  – That it’s harder to see.

  – That the public part, for Harlem, would be at the bottom, and that the blacks could get in only from the eastern side?

  – No, Gesine. Maybe the people of Harlem know who they are and what they deserve more now, maybe they don’t want charity from the whites’ university and don’t want to have to enter through the back door.

  – And that’s why the university should build on its white side, Riverside Drive.

  – Right.

  – Out of respect for the people of Harlem.

  – Right.

  – And Harlem still has no swimming pool in the park. Is that the right price?

  – It is, Gesine. The city should build them one. They deserve it.

  – I agree.

  – Are you just giving in or do you really agree with me now?

  – I really agree with you.

  – Anything else I can do for you, ma’am?

  – Point 4 on your flyer. The IDA.

  – They’re working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff! They’ve got blood on their hands! They evaluate weapons systems, do research for the Pentagon, help the government think up ways to fight uprisings!

  – They’ve existed since 1955 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped found it. Why was it okay then? Columbia only joined it in 1960. Why was that the wrong time?

  – Because now we’re in a war, and they’re working against Vietnam.

  – Why weren’t the students of 1955 and 1960 on the streets protesting the atomic bomb?

  – Okay, you’re right. The students were a bit late.

  – And they’re late again. Since March, Columbia as an institution has no longer been a member of the IDA. If Columbia professors did work for them, or consulted, they did so independently.

  – How do you know that?

  – Guess. From a future war criminal known in private circles around town as D. E.

  – This grown-up know-it-all-ness, it’s like a conspiracy you’re all in on!

  – Marie, why are the students demanding in late April that the university do what it did last March?

  – Yeah, well. A little late.

  – Is the university supposed to expel from its sacred garden any professor who refuses to give up his job with the IDA?

  – Exactly.

  – There’s nothing about that on your flyer.

  – Oh, Gesine. These tiny little inaccuracies—

  – It is inaccurate.

  – That’s all it takes for you to be opposed?

  – That’s all it takes.

  – It’s like you’re apolitical!

  – Maybe I’ve spent too long studying politics and don’t know how to put it into practice anymore.

  – If I invited you to take a little walk around the Columbia campus, would you come with me?

  – Yes.

  – To show the students that you’re on their side?

  – Riverside Park, or the promenade along the river, would be fine with me too, Marie.

  – And I wanted you to be lying. You’re tricking me, you just want to challenge me.

  – No, that’s not true.

  – If I didn’t know that you’d had a hard day at work today. . .

  – It’s not that I’m tired from today, Marie.

  – If you weren’t doing something every day to try to help that Socialism of yours in another country. . .

  – Then what.

  – I don’t want to insult you.

  – Go ahead, say it.

  – How’s your business going, the Socialist wheat from Canada and all that?

  – Say it.

  – And it’s your, what’s it called, “alma mater” too, isn’t it?

  – It’s a store where I once bought four semesters of economics. I was its customer, I paid, and I left unsatisfied.

  – So how’s your business going?

  The Communist Party secretariat in Prague denies that their Soviet friends have stopped the shipment of wheat. A gross fabrication, they say. On the contrary, they’ve received from Moscow a credit of $400 million in exchange for goods that the Soviet Union normally buys from countries with hard currency. Truly. Except the wheat shipments due to arrive haven’t come.

  May 2, 1968 Thursday

  Today The New York Times once again has news to report from her own family. She has visibly elevated two of her most faithful nephews in her undimmed eyes; one says that the paper has already become “lighter in appearance and more inviting to read” during his tenure to date. As if we haven’t noticed? He reiterates, though, that our aunt’s lofty intent remains unchanged: “To be the accurate, objective newspaper of record. To serve adult needs by being complete in our coverage. To explain, explain and explain again—not in the sense of a primer but in order to fill in the gaps for readers.” We’ll remember that, and not forget.

  We will not forget the girl in the film strip above and to the right of the ticket
counter in Grand Central, ceaselessly, perpetually, eternally combing her hair for the greater glory of a company.

  The child that I was had lost her hair in the summer after the war, from typhus. She kept her distance from people; there had been a few friendly types who’d tried to cheer her up by pulling the beret off her head, as though her appearance wasn’t that bad. Jakob acted like he didn’t see Maurice’s gift on Gesine’s head—with him she could forget it was there, remembering only from the sweat. He didn’t use force to try to help, didn’t even use words. He sent a stranger into the yard, head shaved like a Red Army soldier, and since he was wearing civilian pants, rolled up to the knees, and a shirt much too big for him he might have been a Red Army deserter, on the run, turning up unsuspectingly at a commandant’s headquarters. This unknown individual didn’t seem nervous, he just sat down on the uprights of the milk rack behind the house and waited. It was early in the morning, and even though it was during harvest time none other than Cresspahl’s daughter was the first to see him. She went outside, went inside to report the beggar, he called after her. His voice was so much like Jakob’s. She realized only when she came back with the mirror. He looked at himself in the mirror, its frame held firmly on his knees. She stood next to him. She saw almost no hair at all in the mirror, just a long, shiny skull with a bare face on it, vaguely familiar around the eyes. He looked into the mirror a bit grumpily, as if criticizing the work of the hairstylist who’d made him look like that. He didn’t have to say anything; she understood the bet, the child that I was, and took off her beret. In the mirror she was in the lead, hairwise, although the sight was still a shock. And then my hair grew back.

  May 3, 1968 Friday

  Now that the Communists in Prague have their $400 million from headquarters safe in hand, almost, they can admit that it wasn’t as bad as all that with the delayed wheat shipments from the Soviet Union. On the contrary. The latest reports have it that deliveries are coming in even bigger than requested—here The New York Times chides herself. The US government tries a different tack and speaks openly of its interest and sympathy in recent developments in Czechoslovakia, which “seem to represent” the wishes and needs of the Czechoslovak people; it is considering the transfer of gold to a Communist country, despite its own dwindling gold reserves, and in an election year no less. At the May 1 Parade, Dubček, unmoved, sends special greetings to the Soviet Union, “whence our freedom came and from which we can expect fraternal aid”—he doesn’t want to stir up trouble, he wants to smooth it down on the other side. Maybe the ČSSR can use USSR dollars to purchase manufacturing licenses in the US. And as for the US government offer, that is irresponsible and unacceptable. All right, all right, playtime’s over.

  The town of Jerichow was surrounded by wheat fields, with Baltic fish nearby, but was short of food. The townsfolk of an earlier time could have helped one another out, tradesmen swapping with townsman-farmers; now that refugees were being put up in rooms, attics, and barns, there wasn’t enough bread. The military commandant wanted to be not only a good father and provider but a proud one, and he ordered the unclaimed harvest brought in.

  The mayor went about it differently, decreeing that:

  Everyone who

  (1) owned a scythe

  (2) could use a scythe

  should report to Town Hall, room 4, henceforth to be called the Labor Office. As of July 12, the office had been notified of eight scythes in all of Jerichow, most of them reported not by their owners but by malicious neighbors. Ten times as many people as scythes turned up for the mowing, almost all of them women, refugees one and all, and they all claimed to know how to mow, they’d brought little children along too, to tie the sheaves, to steal the grain. It was a motley crowd, dressed in rags, some intending to tackle the stubble in the fields barefoot, all of them gaunt and weak with hunger. A bottle of clear water and the prospect of a handful of grain—that was their lunch. Cresspahl remembered how a scythe tore a heavy swing from your shoulders. He mustn’t sigh in front of these people. He led this heap of workers out of town on foot to a field that had once been part of one of the landed estates, mowed one length for them, along the side of a hundred-meter square, then took off his jacket and turned around to look at them. The mower women were a long way behind him, the children running around with sheaves even farther back, and now he lost a whole morning showing them, again and again, how to plant their legs against the ground and shift their weight so the swing of the scythe wouldn’t pull them off their feet. And the children, including children from town, couldn’t get how you can twist a skein of stalks under your elbow into a cord that you knot on the bottom. One of them, his Gesine, was so eager she had two left hands. By midday he had little more from his team than the promise to keep trying. “Cresspahl’s bunch of cripples,” the people of Jerichow called them, but on the second day there really were too many sheaves to count at a glance, even if the stubble looked a bit like a choppy sea. And the dummies who’d responded to Cresspahl’s decree were paid, half in cash and half in grain from the previous year’s harvest, weighed out daily in Papenbrock’s granary. For a while there were Jerichow townswomen who would have been glad to turn up with scythes they’d forgotten about, or just to tie sheaves.

  Then some of the women were assaulted by K. A. Pontiy’s comrades and didn’t return. One was found too late, in a hawthorn hedge, with a shattered jaw, and she died while being transported to the hospital. Transported meaning carried in a horse blanket, a heavy load for four women. K. A. Pontiy refused to be responsible for men under other Kommandaturas—he was already having a fight with the commandant of Knesebeck. A soldier had come back to quarters there with wounds from a reaping hook all down his arm and on his back, and said something about a Fascist attack, but it had just been children defending their mother against him. Pontiy started a hunt for Hitler’s Werewolf resistance forces in Jerichow, and Cresspahl was ordered to be shot several times over. Then came the reconciliation, and Pontiy solemnly declared himself prepared to give the volunteers an escort from among his men. Then the women refused to go to work under such protection. K. A. Pontiy ordered the harvest brought in at once.

  There were still men on Jerichow’s farms, and they had harvesting machines, but Cresspahl had trouble getting them onto the nobility’s fields, this time for legal reasons. The von Plessens had sowed the fields, the estates had always managed them—wasn’t it theft to reap the harvest there? In Jerichow, as elsewhere in Mecklenburg, it was considered a sin to let wheat rot on the stalk; the departed owners’ anger was still more frightening. Finally Cresspahl was able to talk them into saving the wheat, for its owners as it were. So now they cleared the fields outside the leased areas, and guarded the grain that wasn’t theirs at night with bludgeons and dogs (for which they didn’t pay the new tax). Those who stubbornly refused had their machines confiscated by Cresspahl as soon as they’d finished their own harvest. And he had an easier time finding people to operate the machines once he stopped distributing ration cards to any family in Jerichow without at least one member working. (When the mayor arranged a card for Gesine on the grounds that she was working and Mrs. Abs got one for her son, this was seen as cheating.) The machines were felt to have been taken by force, and the work was not performed with the zeal promoted by ownership, so the equipment broke down more than usual. Cresspahl could talk all he wanted about benefiting the town—people felt it was being done for the Russians. It didn’t help that Red Army soldiers could be seen racing their horses up and down the roads. Worse yet, a detachment showed up in a field in the Jerichow housing development and traded their two worn-out nags for a horse that was hitched to a cart, like during the war, at gunpoint. The cart could still be moved, if twenty people leaned against the spokes, but no more work was done that day. Gesine came back to town that evening leading the Russians’ sick horses, which no one had wanted to bring in, and waited for Cresspahl outside the Kommandatura door. Cresspahl was already inside, busy negotiating t
he return of a tractor that someone from the Red Army had “borrowed” because the commander had needed it to take him to Gneez on official business and had forgotten it there. K. A. Pontiy was somewhat uncomfortable, there was also the matter of some cans of diesel oil, and he mentioned Ukraine, just in passing. In Ukraine, you know, people carried the wheat to the threshing together, they didn’t need a vehicle, and women and children pulled plows there too, and you know what else, the milk production from the cows didn’t markedly decrease until after four months, cf. the lessons learned from Swiss husbandry. After listening to this instructive cultural information, Cresspahl repeated his question. – Tractor? What tractor?: K. A. Pontiy said, confused for a moment, at a loss for longer.

  He saw the horses Gesine had brought back as a sign of good faith—the return of army property—and he waved her around the corner onto the Bäk. But the child wanted new ones in exchange, – Novye: she said, scared though she was of making a language mistake, and Pontiy kindly explained to her that these horses weren’t novye, nothing like the fine Ukrainian breed! Cresspahl tore the reins out of the child’s hand and left the trampled front garden of the brickworks villa without saying goodbye. When it was dark, K. A. Pontiy paid his mayor a visit and threatened to have him shot if he didn’t ensure that the town had enough to eat.

  What troubled the commandant was the idea of anyone comparing the state of things under the Russians with that under the British. At one point he asked Cresspahl point-blank. My father decided to let Pontiy stew about this for a while and called English rule over Jerichow manageable, if not benevolent. They had managed things well because they knew when they were leaving. They’d lived on the supplies at hand, which were obviously enough for eight weeks. When they left there was no more coal for the trains, which couldn’t take milk to Gneez or bring back potatoes. They’d forced Jerichow to shut down the gasworks, which had damaged the furnaces; its workforce had wandered aimlessly around the fields, unskilled there, depressed. Even the bakeries were without fuel. The British had generously distributed sugar and salt and oil from their warehouses, and the villages and farms had faithfully tried to deliver their quotas of beef cattle and milk. The British had given Cresspahl access to the government bank to pay whatever he needed to—wages, past-due bills. Even school had been open under them, two days after they got here. They were trying to leave behind a good impression of Western methods to make it harder for the Soviets to do the same. Even from a distance, they won hearts and minds by supplying electricity to Jerichow from their Herrenwyk power station, and Pontiy was not happy to hear this. Cresspahl half expected an order to build an independent supply of electricity for Jerichow, but first things first: his job was to supply the people of Jerichow with food, as well as the British had done, and, within four weeks, better.