Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The Jerichow mayor’s office contracted with the Fishermen’s Association in Rande, represented by Ilse Grossjohann, for the delivery of at least two crates of fish per day. (This was the old association that the Nazis had dissolved, reestablished by the kind permission of the British.) What Grossjohann asked in return often changed: sometimes the fishermen needed sailcloth, sometimes nails, sometimes lubricating oil for the engines, and Cresspahl couldn’t always manage to find these things somewhere in Jerichow to confiscate. He told the town’s commandant nothing about this trade, and Pontiy didn’t mention it either, but after a week had passed Pontiy’s jeep appeared in Rande one morning, and the Red Army soldiers demanded the “fishes for Yerrichoff.” Ilse Grossjohann had learned something about the law from her time with Kollmorgen, and moreover she’d been a prosperous fisherman’s wife for three years, and she insisted on the terms of their agreement, force majeure or not. Before Cresspahl could lodge a complaint, two bundles of fish—flounder, gurnard—were delivered to his door: his cut under Pontiy’s socialism. He sent the fish to the hospital; he arranged a new loading point with the Fishermen’s Association, though even so Pontiy beat him to it often enough.

  Cresspahl was offered deliveries of both milk and beef cattle from the administrator of the Soviet Beckhorst farm (formerly the Kleineschulte farm). The farm needed baling twine, crude oil, and leather for machine belts. Cresspahl could picture the cows—tough old bags of bones—but he agreed to take them sight unseen. It was a complicated transaction. The town had to loan Alfred Bienmüller out to Beckhorst, so that he could repair the motor and combine, which needed the oil and the leather, but by that point Bienmüller’s business was the Jerichow Kommandatura’s official repair shop, and K. A. Pontiy’s trucks took precedence, especially the one he was planning to exchange for a convertible, to the Knesebeck commandant’s advantage and disadvantage, in the interests of reconciliation. Bienmüller applied for a propusk to go to Beckhorst for family reasons, and Pontiy had no choice but to sign it and have it stamped. Milk was in short supply in town because both the local cows and the ones confiscated from the refugees had been herded together onto seven farms, which made deliveries to the Red Army, not the district offices and the independent municipalities, and the Jerichow Kommandatura had a reputation, even among the well disposed, for being self-sufficient. Pontiy didn’t get milk from Beckhorst. One night Bienmüller took a walk along the coast and the next day he repaired the farm machines and the night after that he planned to escort the truck full of milk canisters back to Jerichow. At the edge of the woods, the mayor of the village met him and told him that he was having an argument with the Soviet administrator and needed the milk for the refugee children in his village since the farmers were now tamping butter into barrels. Cresspahl did not invoke force majeure, he recast this part of the deal into a trade of salt for butter, and he sent the twine from Papenbrock’s supplies. The cows got as far as the Rande country road, then the Red Army herded them into their little hideaway on the Bäk. At least that’s where Klein the butcher had to slaughter them, not in his own yard where people might have seen them; his shopwindow stayed empty. In late July it had been a long time since there’d been the hundred grams of meat per person in town. Cresspahl couldn’t even get the daily half pint of milk per child that he felt was essential (as did Pontiy. But Pontiy took as much as he wanted from the dairy, each time with the comment that he too had children in his stronghold). Cresspahl would have preferred it if the foreign commander had stolen the Germans’ food out of hatred, as punishment, on his own account; he couldn’t come to terms with the game Pontiy made of it, with his soulful nichevos and gentlemanly shustko yednos.

  Cresspahl ordered every poultry owner to deliver one egg per day. These eggs would be handed out only in exchange for coupons from children’s ration cards. All he got were complaints about stolen chickens, especially from the buildings whose backyards adjoined the Soviets’ green fence. He didn’t need to go chasing down the chickens, he could hear them on the Bäk, a street that had earlier been much too fancy for poultry keeping. Be cause the thieves sometimes left the hens’ and roosters’ twisted-off heads behind in the miraculously undamaged coops, the Jerichowers began to kill their own chickens without authorization. Cresspahl could forbid it. And Cress pahl could stuff his pockets full of hard-boiled eggs at Pontiy’s banquets.

  It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of anyone “going a bit hungry”—it wasn’t a hardship yet, that would come in winter. It was that he couldn’t keep the talk under control, the vague, insidious rumblings, not even malicious, just resigned: that nothing made any sense, everything was falling apart, it was all for the Russians. This talk might flower into panic, enough to make the supplying of food to town collapse.

  The mayor decreed:

  The town of Jerichow has sufficient potatoes from previous years’ harvests to meet its current needs

  and forbade the harvesting of new potatoes until August 15, 1945. This was taken to mean that he clearly expected a potato shortage and was actually trying to warn the town, in his heart of hearts he was a Mecklenburger after all, on the Mecklenburgers’ side—and the Jerichowers stole their own potatoes under cover of night, hid them in their cellars, and introduced them as a new currency for use with the refugees. The Jerichow Kommandatura stopped a group of workers on their way to the wheat fields one morning and made them dig up new potatoes, and it wasn’t even late July yet. Of course the mayor couldn’t forbid the Soviets anything; he didn’t begrudge them their enjoying the taste of fresh new potatoes; but he didn’t appreciate their making him look ridiculous when he was trying to keep the town fed.

  And so he started doing business on his own again, something that hadn’t been allowed since the victors had arrived,

  the US has been holding $20 million of Czechoslovak gold bullion since the end of World War II as security for the return of confiscated American property. The folks in Prague are offering 2 million as compensation and settlement. The US is demanding 110 million. Whose turn is it to bid? and he turned one of Alfred Bienmüller’s electric motors and a set of rubber tires in Knesebeck into a business transaction, equivalent exchange values with the help of a considerable addition of window glass and motor oil, and in Rande he didn’t find the harvest truck he’d planned to make drivable again but he did find maybe a pile of freshly dug potatoes, the dirt still on them, and a couple hundredweight of wheat, in factory-fresh sacks. Civilians were not allowed to accept foodstuffs or items of daily use from Soviet soldiers. But he’d given his word for the window glass, and the workers who’d dug potatoes for the Soviets had been allowed to take home from the Bäk two big pots of rich meaty stew, and he hadn’t been able to get any of that for the hospital.

  Meanwhile he’d managed to accomplish one thing, to the considerable consternation of the military commander. When K. A. Pontiy acted yet again like the crazed Queen of Hearts and threatened Off with your head!, Cresspahl could now nod pleasantly, as if in agreement, but without giving an inch. It was like with the Cheshire Cat, whose head was to be cut off because it wanted only to look at the king, not kiss his hand. But only the cat’s head is visible, and the executioner refuses to cut off a head when there’s no body to cut it off from. The King insists that anything that has a head can be beheaded, and don’t talk nonsense, while the Queen says that if something isn’t done about it in less than no time she’ll have everybody executed all round,

  in less than no time, Gesine!

  is he going to shoot you, Cresspahl?

  and the cat’s head stays up in the air and the executioner comes back and the cat has disappeared, head and smile and all.

  May 4, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  The Cheshire Cat’s grin followed me into my last dream, along with the sun shower from yesterday afternoon that lit the street from the side and made it black as the sound of the car tires suddenly picked up. Minutes later the sun vanished behind a thick bluish curtain, the same wa
y the Cheshire Cat’s grin did before I woke up.

  Marie has left “Saturday breakfast” on the table: hot tea, toast buried in napkins, all on a tray for easier transport, and The New York Times fresh from Broadway. Maybe she would learn how to live in a Prague hotel.

  What the students of Paris are having for breakfast are clashes with the police because some students want control over their education and want to overthrow the institutions of capitalism, the ones along Boulevard St. Michel, for example. In Prague the students are assembling at the foot of the statue of Jan Hus and thanking the Communist Party “for the present shortages in housing and transport, for bad worker morale, for legal insecurity, for a currency without value, for a low economic standard,” and will the Communists think it’s contagious? First of all they deny that they ever discussed a Soviet loan of $400 million with The New York Times. The truth is, rather, that Mr. Dubček has just now flown to Moscow to discuss the gold ruble, as well as such matters as natural gas and crude oil, possibly as payment for the Soviet debts of 425 million. The truth is, rather . . . and if they call Auntie Times, to her face, crowned in glory as she is, a lady who doesn’t speak the truth, then she will have to relay the message to us. Feeble. And, incidentally, she adds that Comrade Dubček arrived in Moscow last night for a weekend. The truth is, rather . . .

  Here we have someone chasing after her child—a person, a lady, you don’t know who I am. Walking north up Riverside Drive, by the buildings whose entrances are separated from the big road by hilly tree-covered islands, walking as if she grew up there, and yet she once gaped from afar at the mighty colossi of the apartment buildings with their weathered ornamentation as places she would never reach. She has friends and acquaintances here, though: Good morning, Mrs. Faure. We’re fine too. We’re going to see a child. The trees in the park are full of leaves now. There are no evergreens there, it’s bare in the winter. Foreigners insult the trees outside our windows by calling them Bergahorn, sycamore maples, when really with their mottled white bark they’re sycamore figs, the tree from the Bible. Now, at 100th Street, she detours all the way around the Firemen’s Memorial, she just wants to read the plaque again, the one that honors the lives of the horses, for they too died in the line of duty. The portals of the corner buildings are fancier, built to frame grand exits and entrances; some of them stand empty, though, dusty and double locked, and people use the entrances on the side streets where no one will catch them alone. As if muggers came out of the park at night. On 113th, where the Hungarians, a freedom-loving people, have put a certain Lajos Kossuth up on a pedestal, New Yorkers are said to have mourned after the events of fall 1956. We wouldn’t have gone to that. And on 116th there’s an evergreen after all, a spruce tucked into a grove. Will we see it in winter? But now we’ve climbed uphill enough, long since reached the elevation of Columbia University, and here, by the clumps of concrete and marble, obtrusive modest shoehorned into a row of town houses, blinding in the morning light, bare and inaccessible, there stands a sepulchre from the Far East, the much-admired marvel of New York modern architecture with a six-hundred-year-old stone from a Scottish monastery reverently set into its facade: Marie’s school.

  The school is having its spring art fair today—all the parents are invited, together with friends, yet the double glass doors in the gloomy passageway are closed. We too have to present ourselves at the porter’s lodge first, to a sister who makes sure we don’t have a knife up our sleeve or a gun under our jacket. There are strict rules in this building. A man without a tie would probably be sent packing. – Are you one of the parents, Mrs. . . . ?

  One of the parents. Cresspahl, class 5B. That’s who I am.

  The art fair is set up in the lobby and one of the adjoining classrooms around the corner—a sizable event dedicated to the higher glory of the budget, over and above the exorbitant tuition, and it will yield not one single stipend for a child of poor parents. We didn’t come to buy anything, we’re here to see on behalf of a child. The underage sales personnel, predominantly girls, stand behind tables and are having a hard time running the business with such a small amount of change. Here we might have some batik, there a belt made of sack string, there a chain of bone rings, and whatever else you might be missing in your life. We like this girl, the one with the green eyes, the gray eyes, with the braids, with the strong shoulders in the jacket of her uniform, watching us so strangely, as if she wanted to throw us out of the sacred building. She goes behind the counter with us, shows us the homemade goods, names a price, points at “$1.20” on a head-band, and says: Twelve tickets—it’s a steal, ma’am.

  She brings us over to a table in the second room with a dollhouse on display, behind ropes on stanchions, do not touch. It’s not a model of a city house, it’s more rustic, built low under its roof painted brick red and moss green, mullioned windows carved neatly in. The child slips under the rope divider. She touches the house. She lifts off the roof, holds it upside down, looks invitingly at us. Well? The workmanship on the beams couldn’t be better, we must admit. – The technical term is tongue and groove: she says, and now people come up to listen and ask questions, a real audience. Now there are rooms visible in the uncovered attic, one filled with toy firewood. Firewood in the house? – Maybe it would get stolen from outside: she says. There’s a smokehouse in the building, too, but empty. In another room the bare walls suddenly have old-fashioned wallpaper on them, the floor is varnished, the room is furnished with table and bed and wardrobe. – Servant’s quarters: one of the people standing around says, proud and amazed; he gets a nod in return and looks like a horse that’s just had its nose stroked. On the attic floor, in the corridors, stand wooden crates that don’t look like suitcases—the refugees’ luggage stored at Cresspahl’s—and Marie explains, like a fact from the dimmest, most distant past: Clearly the people who live here traveled a lot, I mean more than the statistical average. The grown-ups nod at this. Lifting up the attic roof reveals the compartments of the various rooms: Cresspahl’s daughter’s in front on the left, which the child calls a guest room, and next to that Cresspahl’s sleeping office, which our tour guide describes as a reception desk. She shows the furniture around in the palm of her hand, but these have been bought elsewhere, from the Museum of the City of New York, and she has a feeling they’re more Flemish-style. She lies whenever she can, turning the Frenchmen’s room into a sewing room, the pantry into a workshop, all in the dry, New England tone she brought back from Orr Island; it all comes off with a Yessir and an I’m sorry, ma’am? The spectators discuss the architectural style among themselves, one is in favor of Norwegian origin, he saw the same thing in Massachusetts, another claims to recognize it as Pennsylvania Dutch, and the child shrugs her shoulders, an expert, but beyond her competence here. Finally she’s managed to bring one of the onlookers to the first question: What it costs. How much you can buy it for.

  – It’s obviously not for sale: the child says. – Maybe it’ll be auctioned off this afternoon though.

  – Not a Dutch auction, an American one: she says.

  We won’t place any bids on a house like that, we’ll let it go. The child, on the other hand—her we take, fleeing the teachers sneaking up on us, and we ride the subway straight to the harbor where the ferry is waiting.

  She herself was the child who built that house, and when they asked her, she shook her head, not knowing.

  – One of us did: she said.

  May 5, 1968 Sunday

  Time to give up, Gesine. It might as well be today as tomorrow.

  Oh, please. Because of “ information reaching Paris”?

  Information that reached Paris and made it into Le Monde.

  Who is this General Yepishev?

  Aleksei A. Yepishev is head of the political administration of the Soviet armed forces.

  So now he’s the politburo of the CP of the USSR?

  Why wouldn’t the Red Army want to go on maneuvers again? They are the military, Gesine.

  They
won’t do it.

  Yepishev says that faithful Communists in Czechoslovakia need only appeal to the Soviet Union for help. If they do he’ll come and safeguard their Socialism.

  Old Believers like that have been in the minority for a long time.

  A letter’s enough, come at once. “The Soviet Army is ready to do its duty.”

  They won’t do it.

  They marched into Hungary in 1956.

  That’s why they’ll be extra careful now.

  This time they say “other” Socialist troops are coming with. To spread around the bad press.

  Possibly East Germans. They recommend their version of Socialism. German uniforms back in Prague again.

  They may not use only their uniforms, Gesine.

  They won’t send tanks to Prague. Not in 1968, twelve years after Budapest!

  You’ve only heard rumors about it until today.

  That makes sense. The rumors paint a rather different picture.

  Gesine, General Yepishev said it at a meeting of his party, on April 23. A French newspaper reported it yesterday. You read it today.

  I’ve already seen denials in print.