Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The committee’s little men in black wind busily around and between the rows of chairs, distributing forms, to the exhausted questioner too, who’d tried to scare the gathering in the name of justice and honor but is now grateful simply to be permitted to write his name. Cresspahl has attempted an unfamiliar expression, not far from head shaking, and yet the functionary repeats his question: Are you a stockholder? Your name please?

  – No: the employee says. – I’m here for the bank! With that she gets a motherly, worrying sidelong look from the matron.

  The CEO is not happy with his employers’ patience. He talks comfortably to himself, again as if in a family circle, at the dinner table, talking to his kids between courses. – I wish: he says: we at least had the lady here who voted against me in ’67, with her five shares. I wish at least she was here today! Then he can finally put down his pencil, which he’d tried to sharpen with a Swiss Army knife in the meantime, and read the results of the vote. He shakes his head, concerned; he puts on a pair of glasses especially to be able to look reproachfully out at the people in the room over them. He says: One lone vote against me, what’s that supposed to mean!

  The names of the executives and employees present are again read out. The executives are obliged to stand up, the employees are allowed to merely acknowledge their presence with a nod. The disappointed boss has the last word—he has come here full of strength and fighting spirit, almost none of which he’s had occasion to use, and now all he has to look forward to is yet another lunch. – So, until next year.

  As they file out he waits to catch Employee Cresspahl and asks her her name. He comes across like someone painfully aware of how awkwardly he’s behaving, but it simply must be done.

  – You were the one vote against me, weren’t you? he asks, confidentially, in gleeful anticipation. With his broad back he cuts this lady off from everyone else; only a few searching looks get through the barrier to her.

  – No: Cresspahl says, and explains her status under the procedural rules. – I wasn’t authorized to cast a vote: she says.

  At around four o’clock she makes her report of this little gathering of de Rosny’s friends to Mrs. Lazar, and ten minutes later, before de Rosny leaves for the day, she’s put through to him. – I’m supposed to say hello to you too! he says, and today the connection is so clean that it’s like the boss’s squeaky pleased voice is right there in the room. – Apparently you were a knockout! he says. You were a seasoned pro, you’re a natural!

  Those are the views on human nature in this bank.

  May 14, 1968 Tuesday

  The new Economic Council of the ČSSR is discussing a plan to make the Czechoslovak crown exchangeable with other world currencies now, not in five years. This would be the first Eastern Bloc currency acceptable on the capitalist market; conflict seems inevitable. The country could then pay its debts or trade deficits with its own money, so it would no longer need loans in dollars, and Mrs. Cresspahl would not have to be transferred away from New York.

  Cresspahl sometimes thought about moving away from Jerichow. It was he, not K. A. Pontiy, who would have to go to jail for the illegal acts by means of which he carried out the commandant’s orders—from fudged bookkeeping to black-market barter while in office, sometimes to the town’s advantage, sometimes not. But he couldn’t imagine that Pontiy would forget himself to the point of removing his mayor from office, assuming that it still wasn’t enough to get him shot. There wasn’t much he needed to bring with him to the West, basically just his child and the Ohlerichs’ Hanna, if she wanted to come. But before he left he should at least know where he’d be taking them.

  Someone told him. It was a man my father’s age but skinny like a boy of eighteen, though his hair was white, and not from the dust of the road; he was standing next to the pump on a Sunday afternoon as early as August 1945, as if he’d appeared out of thin air. He asked Cresspahl’s daughter if he might have a little drink of water from the pump. She hadn’t encountered such manners in a long time, and she claims she immediately took him for someone from Cresspahl’s part of the world. She shook her head and went back into the cool stone house to get him a glass of water. He was standing there in the same place, and while he drank the water he looked at her as if his gaze had to jump off the end of his nose, he was crinkling it so much. For some incomprehensible reason he asked her what time it was, and when Gesine looked up at the sky he sat down on the pump stone, sighing at the aches and pains of age, which were not what he had. He was wearing his watch just above his ankle, he was clever, and he had made it, the whole long way and across the border too. Now she recognized him: Erwin Plath, not so much one of the guests at a funeral in 1938 as one of Cresspahl’s wartime secrets. She brought him into Cresspahl’s office without anyone seeing them and took off at a run for the fields; she couldn’t bring him with her through Jerichow.

  This was one of the few times that Cresspahl acted like the man of the house and told Mrs. Abs to serve him dinner in his room—he didn’t want to miss even fifteen minutes of a visit like this. Then Gesine was sent for a bottle of Jakob’s procurement, and when it was time for her to go to bed Erwin Plath pulled her back onto a chair, solemnly explaining that he simply had to look at her a little longer. Cresspahl looked quizzically at his child, his eyes lost in a memory, and he didn’t send her to bed, or Hanna either. The children looked at the grown-ups enjoying this reunion like children: eager, trusting, enjoying each other’s company, continually happy at the prospect of more, and they kept telling each other how it had been. Then Cresspahl came out with his question.

  Plath started nodding, but he pulled his lips back from his teeth as if he’d bitten into something rotten. He wasn’t living in Lübeck anymore, he’d ended up in Itzehoe. He didn’t get into specifics about his move, or about his new line of work along the Stör River, but was happy to do so about the British. Clearly they didn’t care as much about how they behaved in occupied territory of their own as they did in places they were about to hand over to their Soviet brothers-in-arms, ideally not with a bad impression of British governance. Was Cresspahl familiar with the barracks in Itzehoe—the Gudewill, the Waldersee, the Gallwitz at Long Peter, the Hanseatic by the cemetery? Cresspahl was. The British were there and there wasn’t nearly enough room for them. At the end of May they’d requisitioned the best residential neighborhood in town, the Sude, ninety-five houses, most of them mansions with modern furnishings; they gave the occupants three hours to get out, with nothing but valuables, clothes, and sheets. Now English families with one or two children were in these houses, while the Germans were crammed into every last attic, shed, even basement. And Cresspahl surely knew about Itzehoe’s sewer system. That there wasn’t one. He did. The Military Government had permitted one sealed room per house where the Germans could store their things; these things soon turned up on the black market, that was how much respect the British showed seals. They were in the Hammonia Hotel on Holzkamp Street, in the old covered cattle market, in both movie theaters; they’d set aside the sports grounds for themselves. A lot of the requisitioned living space was standing empty, but they held on to it anyway. Sude was off-limits to Germans unless they worked there. One morning the mayor walks into his office and sees that his desk is gone, along with all the other furniture—occupation headquarters had come and taken it away. The British went and raided German houses personally, too, taking furniture, pictures, radios, cameras, stamp collections, and other items essential to the war effort, not even bothering to hide behind orders. They drove their jeeps through Itzehoe like maniacs, they didn’t care if they killed anybody. One division was called the Desert Rats, they were housed in the Hanseatic barracks, which they called the Richmond Barracks. Desert Rats.

  Hanna asked about the net factory, where she had some relatives. Plath knew them, they were still living near the gasworks waiting for it to restart operation, they had no raw materials, they were producing nothing. Hanna thanked him, daunted. She was looking for so
mewhere else she might live besides Jerichow—now here was another one lost to her.

  – Richmond Barracks?: Cresspahl said, confused, but what he was confused by was the behavior of the British.

  Plath waved that off, suddenly intent on business. He hadn’t come because of the British. Cresspahl had been given some kind of order to form political parties, hadn’t he? The British didn’t allow such things. But look, the Soviets!

  – Yes and no: Cresspahl said, with a not entirely clear conscience. There had been an order from K. A. Pontiy, but he’d lost sight of it. The commandant was demanding a local branch of the Social Democrats, another of the Christian Democratic Union, and a Communist one. Cresspahl couldn’t go around like God creating the world now could he? Political parties from scratch in Jerichow!

  Now Plath woke the sleepy children up, by saying goodnight to them. He led them into the bedroom like sheep, so sweetly that they hardly noticed, and said something nice to each girl about her hair. When he got back to Cresspahl it was quiet for a long time, and the children fell asleep to gentle rustling sounds. It was the night creatures flying in through the open windows and hitting the globe of the kerosene lamp.

  Plath reproached his old Socialist friend that he couldn’t leave Jerichow without having a successor, assuming that he was planning to leave.

  Cresspahl grumbled something. Maybe it meant that things would probably run better without him.

  So, Cresspahl was supposed to set up a party to the commandant’s liking. The Communist Party. And this Pontiy would get his next mayor from there.

  Cresspahl couldn’t even manage a Social Democratic Party.

  – The SPD? What about it! Plath said, as if his own party left a bad taste in his mouth. Then it came out that he’d already been scouting around in Jerichow for former members. They’d all snubbed him, and one of them, Peter Wulff, apparently cited the views of none other than Cresspahl himself, who also thought that this parliamentary stuff was full of shit.

  – All this shit all over again . . . : Cresspahl muttered, suddenly confrontational.

  Plath had found only one man for the CDU, a guy named Kägebein.

  Cresspahl was fine with an outsider doing his work for him. He couldn’t repay him, not even with a joke.

  At this Plath turned patient, and eager, and started talking indirectly. Cresspahl was reminded of his time in the SPD—the secret agreements reached before the meeting started, the prearranged interruptions or questions of order, until the results of a vote “stood” before even one hand was raised. The results had been little mice. And one battleship. Cresspahl just kept his mouth shut.

  Plath ignored the reminder that he’d been Cresspahl’s junior back in the artillery barracks in Güstrow. He put it to Cresspahl that the Communists only wanted a Social Democratic Party to exist so they could swallow it up in a coalition later. The stuff about acting in unity with the Communists, 1931, 1935. Erwin Plath had come to make sure that the right people got in on the ground floor with the Communists. Not just refugees hoping for new land, no, local people who wouldn’t be accused of opportunism. Communists from the very beginning, but actually secret assets of Social Democracy. Alfred Bienmüller, the Jerichow blacksmith, was prepared to make the sacrifice. Why wouldn’t Cresspahl do it?

  It was for this that Erwin Plath had slipped over the “green border” near Ratzeburg, and Cresspahl managed to spin out the evening longer with Plath’s reminiscences of bygone things and another half bottle of vodka, and he didn’t even let his disappointment slip out. But it was there. He thought Plath had come to see him, not for the cause. For a moment he considered whether he could say yes, just for Plath’s sake. The next morning he was relieved to discover that Plath had moved on in the night, to a new local branch. For the children, though, the visit had been wonderful, and Hanna Ohlerich asked Cresspahl to write out this friendly Itzehoe man’s address for her then and there.

  Meanwhile, K. A. Pontiy didn’t once ask Cresspahl to become the Communist Party chairman. His mayor was supposed to create parties for him, not join any. That’s how it looked.

  Rudé Právo, the party newspaper of the Czech and Slovak Communists, turns to its readers with a questionnaire, more than two-thirds of a page long:

  Does the internal democratization of a Communist party provide a sufficient guarantee of democracy?

  Should the Communist Party carry out its leadership role by devotedly promoting free progressive socialist development or by ruling over society?

  Can you speak of a democracy as being socialist when the leading role is held only by the Communist Party?

  Can you imagine that?

  May 15, 1968 Wednesday

  This morning the subway was even more packed than usual, and at Ninety-Sixth Street a young man kept pushing back against an old man who was trying a bit too desperately to force his way in. – Stop grabbin like that! he said, and he actually managed to get the old man back onto the platform. You could still see him cursing behind the closed door as the train pulled away. The old man tried to hide among those left behind on the platform, white in the face, avoiding all looks; from his accent, he seemed to be a Jew from Eastern Europe.

  The East Germans have written a letter to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. In it, it says: “The victims of German fascism in Buchenwald, Majdanek and Mauthausen as well as Lidiče are a warning signal that should keep one from illusions about the possibilities of cooperation with German imperialism.” Prague Radio felt handicapped by the millions of dead resting behind these names, otherwise one could describe it as downright piquant that the victims of the concentration camps are being called to mind in Berlin, of all places! That was the day before yesterday.

  Today we hear from Moscow, again, that Thomas Masaryk, founder of the Czechoslovak Republic, paid an anti-Bolshevist terrorist 200,000 rubles to kill Lenin. In Prague they’re wanting to rename a street after Thomas Masaryk.

  Mrs. Ferwalter no longer cares about the news from Czechoslovakia. Back in March she already dismissed such matters with a gesture of throwing something away, and since she used both hands, it must have been heavy and dangerous too. Maybe it seemed that way because of the testy, disgusted look of her turned-down lips, even as she smiles. Today she catches us coming out of “her” bakery, and her face is entirely transformed in a happy grimace that’s only a little rigid. – Mrs. Cresspahl! she cried. – Marie, my dear Mariechen! she cried, so pressingly did she need to share her happy news with us. She hasn’t found another of her long-lost relatives, her husband hasn't been given a raise for his backbreaking job at the shoe store—she has her papers.

  She has to tell us about it, we’re friends of the family, and besides, we helped her. We would be sitting in the park and discussing the children’s progress in school or the price of bread and suddenly she would turn her big friendly bulk to face us and say, with a sly wink: 1776? and we would confirm that that was indeed the year when the states declared their independence. We listened to her recite the amendments to the Constitution, tell us who General Grant was, and how someone becomes president, and she would keep switching to a different topic with every piece of knowledge that came back into her mind. She was often discouraged—an old woman, her brain harrowed with nervous twitching and insomnia, no longer capable of studying—and she let herself be comforted like a child. When we didn’t succeed in doing so, she would leave with a protracted handshake, her face averted, walking off sadly and clumsily on the legs that the Germans and Austrians had ruined for her. But she also sometimes started in with concealed glee that broadened her lips into a smile until her whole obese face was kneaded soft with the joy of being an American citizen. Now, as of yesterday, she has been given her second, third, and fourth papers.

  She was reluctant to admit her pleasure outright, so as not to jinx it; she mentioned tax benefits. But she could not hide that the prospect of an American passport was like a new protective shell, another bulwark against the past.

&nb
sp; We were also supposed to improve her German. It wasn’t easy—she may not realize herself whether any given one of her words comes from her stock of Yiddish, Czech, American English, Hebrew, or German; she rarely manages a whole sentence in one language. We have talked her out of “German Federation” to help her learn to believe in the Federal Republic of Germany; we’ve told her she can’t say she has a Liebelei with her daughter Rebecca—a “flirtation”—or even a Liebschaft, a “love affair,” even though these are actually the more precise words for the Liebe, or love, she feels for her last-born child. But we have let her get away with using a form of address that belongs in letters, Meine sehr geehrte Frau Cressepfal, which she says to express her friendship, and Marie allows herself to be called Liebe Mariechen, however much she despises that diminutive; Mrs. Ferwalter still makes mistakes with various other German forms of address. Hopefully the West German embassy won’t demand such things.

  For when our Mrs. Ferwalter becomes a US citizen she will be allowed to put in a claim for personal compensation from the West Germans; were she an Israeli citizen, as she once wanted to be, the money would bypass her on its way to the state treasury. We’ve gathered that much, and are reluctant to get into further details with her about offsetting murders with money. The survivor also has to prove that she once lived under German rule; apparently the American certificate of discharge from Mauthausen concentration camp is not sufficient. The corner of Ruthenia where her native village was has ended up now on this side of the border and now on that side, and were she ever to admit Hungarian sovereignty she would be directed to an as yet nonexistent consulate. That’s what she says. She won’t actually have to go to Park Avenue and say in German where on a map of Slovakia she was picked up. She’ll have to write a letter. She came over and asked our advice about who she is. – Am I a Hausfrau, a house wife, Mrs. Cresspahl? she said. We agreed, although we know other words that would describe her. She so insisted on honesty that instead of taking the corrected draft of her letter back home, she copied it out at our table, perched uncomfortably on the edge of her chair, knees wide apart, awkwardly bent over the sheet of paper, writing swiftly, interrupted by sudden anxiety attacks. She considered this less fraudulent. If it was fraud, it’s one we’d commit again.