Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  On the street he noticed a pile of trash he hadn’t seen before. These were the things from his apartment that the occupiers had no use for—an almost complete run of the Yearbook of the Association of Mecklenburg History and Antiquities, the Papers of the Mecklenburg Local History League, the seventeenth-century law books, the medieval poetry, the Merian engravings, the Homann and Laurenberg maps, the pewter. The copperplate prints and maps were punctured all over from the broken glass; the pewter plates had been gathered up by the neighbors. But they didn’t come out of their houses to give him back what they’d rescued, they didn’t help him gather up the debris, they let him crouch there alone in the gathering darkness, not long before curfew.

  He found his wife’s family Mecklenburg Hymnal, printed in Schwerin, 1791, His Grace the Duke’s Special-Privilegio. This Example of Fine Printing with Gospels and Epistles unbound Costs 14 Schillings Courant. The Kirchdorf copy was a bound one, in shiny black leather, and the silver plates on the covers together with the corner fittings kept the book from being damaged. Only the clasps were broken. The plate on the front cover bore the initials J. L. with the year 1791; the tools of his trade were engraved on the back—a compass, a T-square, a protractor divided into degrees. On the last page his wife’s ancestors had kept records one after the other. “My Son Friederich Gottsch. Johann, born on April 3 and baptized Aprill 19, Anno 1794.” “Father died on August 29, morning, 7 o’clock 1834, Buried September 3.” Now Kliefoth had to add another line to the last page, and he could prove that his wife had belonged in Kirchdorf. At least he’d brought her part of the way there.

  In such a hot summer, Miss Cresspahl. A person gets some crazy ideas.

  I would’ve too, Dr. Kliefoth.

  It was just an idea.

  They moved her to Kirchdorf in 1950, though, didn’t they, Herr Kliefoth?

  You see! I would have forgotten about that.

  Why do I keep picturing an apple?

  That’s how it is, Miss Cresspahl. She didn’t look dead. When I came home from the field, she lay there as if she were alive.

  Why didn’t you let Cresspahl help? We would’ve come out to you.

  Your father, my dear girl, already had his head half in a noose. I didn’t want to bother him. Was I really hobbling when I talked to that woman during our agricultural activities?

  Gobbling, Herr Kliefoth.

  You mean I talked like a turkey?

  From deep in the throat. “Oo-ah, get a hold of yourself, why wouldn’t your husband be alive, we’ll take a break in a minute.” Wanting so much to help.

  Then someone else can hear me.

  Yes, Herr Kliefoth. I can hear you perfectly. Are you dead now too?

  All someone needs to get into your club is a modest membership fee. And that I have.

  When, Herr Kliefoth?

  Sometime around evening, I should say, when it’s afternoon in New York. Sometime this coming November, I should say.

  The military commander received a report that the indomitable militarist took only one of his two days’ vacation. K. A. Pontiy issued Order No. 23, making it punishable for any inhabitant of Jerichow to house a member of the Red Army without the commandant’s written permission. He didn’t try to put Kliefoth back in his apartment or restore the stolen goods. He wasn’t omnipotent.

  May 17, 1968 Friday

  We want to tell you something, Gesine.

  I don’t want to hear from the dead every day.

  Just listen, this will help you.

  Do what?

  Get back up after English ran you down.

  It didn’t, as far as I know.

  Last Thursday, Gesine. The Fifth Horseman Is Fear.

  Okay, tell me.

  “And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”

  The conqueror on the first horse.

  Let Lisbeth do it. She has a clearer voice.

  “And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.” The war of all against all. But my English is just what Mary Hahn taught me, and Aggie learned hers at the Schnappauf und Sellschopp boarding school on Alexandrinen Strasse in Rostock. You go now, Aggie.

  “And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.” The third rider, on the black horse, famine, starvation.

  Exploitation.

  That’s how you learned it, Gesine. Now it’s Kliefoth’s turn.

  “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” The fourth horseman brings death, Miss Cresspahl. That’s the point.

  It’s just the Apocalypse! The book with the seven seals!

  Just the Apocalypse, Gesine.

  Nothing but a piece of the Bible I forgot. I’d have failed a confirmation test, nothing else.

  And English.

  But if I’m counting correctly there are only four horsemen.

  And The Fifth Horseman Is Fear.

  There is no fifth.

  There was for the Czechs. For them the Germans were all four plagues of the apocalypse in one, and more—more than conquest and war, hunger, pestilence, and death. The Germans brought with them a fifth horsemen of their own, especially for the Czechs, fear.

  That’s what they offer foreigners.

  That’s what they offer the Germans in New York.

  The Nazis.

  And the people talking about Mauthausen and Belzec. Remember? It was only Tuesday.

  That’s why I shouldn’t go to Prague?

  You can’t talk there. Or work. Or live. Give it up.

  May 18, 1968 Saturday

  Yesterday the mayors of Moscow and New York were observed on a black leather sofa in Mr. Lindsay’s office. How the other man deals with strikes by municipal employees, Lindsay wanted to know. – Strike? replied Vladimir Fedorovič Promyslov. – In fifty years of Soviet power it has not happened once.

  Cresspahl had problems with his police force.

  He needed someone a few years younger than him, someone who’d lived in Jerichow since before the Nazis, respected if not admired by the townsfolk, levelheaded, unbribable, and Peter Wulff had turned the job down. Cresspahl had caught up to this friend two days after the war, six and a half years after the quarrel the Social Democratic Party had ordered; they’d told each other who had smuggled flowers onto Friedrich Laabs’s grave every March, in unsacred memory of the Kapp Putsch; who had watched from in hiding when the flagpole outside the Nazi headquarters was sawn almost through in the night. Cresspahl didn’t mention his business with the British; Lisbeth’s death could not be discussed. As far as the SPD was concerned, they had reached a tacit agreement not to forgive them for their meddling in personal friendships. There were plenty of other things, for both of them liked spending their leisure time together, and soon it was not just for old times’ sake anymore but with the joint intention of getting Jerichow back on the rails and moving it in a new direction. Wulff was glad that the British had made the other man mayor; under the Soviets he’d continued to help out with kidding and advice, but was not willing to back him up as the police. Wulff would rather turn
up at the schoolyard each morning when work was being assigned and haul sacks of grain or help dig the holes for K. A. Pontiy’s fence than go down into his fellow townsmen’s cellars or up into their attics. He could see that Cresspahl was stuck with his job for the Russians and didn’t want to risk getting caught the same way. He suggested Fritz Schenk.

  Pontiy and Jerichow needed a manly figure.

  Cresspahl would rather have Mrs. Bergie Quade at his side.

  The war had left few of the men of Jerichow behind, and Fritz Schenk was one of them. Since 1939 he’d avoided conscription with an inexhaustible stream of attestations, petitions, and testimonials; to prevent the women of Jerichow from looking askance at him, he’d given the town numerous and thorough descriptions of all his abdominal complaints, sometimes without anyone asking. He had joined the Social Democratic Party in 1928 for his job as town clerk and registrar, was expelled (willingly) in December 1932 for conspicuous remarks criticizing a Reich government’s refusal to use violence, reinstated under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, loud in his praise of his beloved Führer and Reich chancellor, coy about invitations to join that party, deaf to all such suggestions after February 2, 1943, and registered as unfit for military service all the way through to Total Surrender in 1945. Cresspahl was inclined to see all this as skillful maneuvering; he recalled some rather exaggerated congratulations he’d received upon registering the birth of a child in March 1933. He didn’t trust his dislike of the man and recommended him to Pontiy. Maybe what bothered him about Fritz Schenk was his stay-at-home complexion, his long thin stick body, his smooth, affected manners, his lips too full for a man of fifty and pursed when he scented victory. Schenk was his name; Sourbeer would have suited him. And Peter Wulff suggested him mainly to watch him put his foot in it, not to mention keeping his own hands clean. Cresspahl tried to find someone else. He couldn’t pick a refugee who wouldn’t know the town’s back alleys and back doors. He wasn’t pleased—appointing Schenk as chief of police meant he had to pile more paperwork from the housing and registrar’s office onto his own desk. Schenk took it as an insult, and Wulff’s scheme slowly dawned on Cresspahl. Just recently a paper-pushing clerk, Schenk now faced the choice of filling in bomb craters or being Alfred Bienmüller’s dogsbody. So he decided to work for the authorities, and spoke just as he had twelve years earlier of the sacrifice he was making for the new era. – I vouch for the files up until and including today! he said. Cresspahl recognized Schenk’s anticipation of things finally going wrong for this carpenter turned mayor, this cobbler who hadn’t stuck to his last. – You’re the boss! he cried, carried away by his own obedience, taking this tack rather than responsibility for what he was going to be asked to do.

  At the swearing in, Pontiy asked him, playfully, enticingly: You Fasceest? Schenk was unaware of the commandant’s addiction to private jokes and, breathing heavily, rejected any such suspicion. He spoke of the German People’s sense that when the war was over life itself would be over, and the German People’s relief upon finding that it was not in fact over. Cresspahl watched Schenk’s fussing in embarrassment; that kind of patter might be all right coming from someone like Wulff, but Wulff’s lips would never utter such stuff. Pontiy was merely disappointed that his chief of police had concocted such a speech; he called him You Good Example, You Go First and You Become Communist, put his cap on his head, and swore the man in. Cresspahl still didn’t know what Schenk was planning to get out of a job like this. And when Schenk was asked about the Social Democratic Party he had shuddered with such palpable disgust that in the end Pontiy decided to use him to found the German Communist Party, Jerichow Branch. Again Cresspahl mistrusted his own instincts. If Schenk had hated the Nazis as much as he now exclaimed he had, maybe that had been how it really was and Jerichow just hadn’t seen it.

  For his subordinate Schenk picked Knever, Berthold Knever, former senior postal clerk, demoted as a result of his indefatigable altercations with the head office to working behind the counter and finally to mail carrier. Cresspahl didn’t object to his choice. If Knever chose not to believe that there would be a postal service under the Soviets, that was Knever’s business, and he thought the old man might keep an eye on Schenk. Knever had always been a stickler, down to the gram when manning the postal scale, also in his attire, patched though it might be, and the shopkeepers could set their clocks by Mrs. Knever back in the day, so strict was he in demanding punctual meals. If Cresspahl was right in his suspicions, Knever could dispel them and keep tabs on Schenk’s every last move—glowering, observant, bristling, perfectly fitting his nickname, the Silent Parrot. So Cresspahl gave Knever a uniform too, as well as a third man, from East Prussia, Friedrich Gantlik. These were German Army uniforms stripped of insignia, with the swastika cut out of the middle of the white armbands with a pocketknife and POLICE painted on instead, the seal of the town of Jerichow stamped underneath.

  They’d begun their service on July 4, and right on their very first shift they failed to carry the Karabiner 98k rifles they’d been ordered to take with them. Pontiy was probably trying to let his man Cresspahl know that he really meant it about the Red Army’s chivalry toward women, and that if a black sheep ever did turn up it was up to the German police to deal with him, armed. That struck Cresspahl’s policemen as rather gruesome. He could hardly blame Gantlik for wanting to avoid an exchange of gunfire with the Red Army—he had taken the job with the town mainly to acquire residence papers. He was short but tough, a farmer without land, and maybe he’d lost his harmless appearance on the long trip from the Memel to Jerichow. Cresspahl sent the three men to Pontiy, to test their marksmanship, and they came back with good results and a stern warning from the commandant that the negligent wounding of a Red Army soldier would be, in his words, unforgivable. Schenk looked blankly at his mayor, his swelling lips pursed. Cresspahl spoiled Schenk’s schadenfreude by appealing to his men’s manhood. After that they sometimes made their rounds armed. But when the full-scale looting of Karstadt’s department store was under way, half of Town Street overrun with people, strewn with bales of fabric and cooking utensils, the police hopped around the edges of the excited crowd, almost as confused as the crowd was, like chickens, never thinking even to fire shots into the air. Schenk fired a shot into the air when Hanna Ohlerich ran away from him after coming down from a cherry tree Amalie Creutz had pressured her to climb. The police took their guns with them when they were called out to an argument between Germans; when a Soviet assault was reported, they marched tamely out of Town Hall so as not to get there in time to do anything, rifles over their shoulders instead of at the ready, and Miss Senkpiel came to complain that they’d picked her shop to leave their guns in, just for fifteen minutes, and sometimes it was evening before they came to get them. So the squads of harvest workers lacked protection, few infractions against Soviet chivalry were reported to the commandant, and two Red Army soldiers with their followers could put eight people out on the street from Kliefoth’s apartment.

  Jerichow’s police were conscientious in performing their lesser duties. Anyone digging up new potatoes in defiance of the law was reported. Anyone putting up a sign offering to swap baby clothes for a work shirt on his own gate instead of on the official noticeboard at Town Hall was brought into Cresspahl for punishment—he had actually needed to forbid the posting of such signs. After Pontiy thought it over and decided not to take part in a rally of former members of the SPD, the police appeared and ordered the group to disperse. A stretch of street not swept clean enough, that made them really mad. Dogs without license tags had it rough.

  What Cresspahl’s police liked best, though, was going into people’s homes. They had enough orders to do so from the commandant or the town government. There was cattle and poultry to be counted, so that the deliveries to start August 10 could be planned. When a sheep was put to the knife on schedule, there was still the skin to be seen to. The children had to turn in their textbooks for German (antholo
gies and grammar books), history, geography, and biology; everyone had to turn in the books they owned in Cyrillic script—so here came the police again, to plant themselves in front of the bookcases. The tradesmen’s businesses were required to report their supplies of raw materials and fuel, so the police checked, lifted floorboards, crawled around under the roof, rummaged around in water butts, to make sure the lists were complete. The hunt was on for Köpcke’s motorcycle because it hadn’t been registered with the mayor’s office, until one day Mina Köpcke dismounted and showed her propusk, signed not by the Soviet Military Administration in Schwerin but by K. A. Pontiy in person so his fence would be finished faster, and the motorcycle had been turned overnight into a little truck. On their treks through the kitchens and parlors and stables of Jerichow, Mr. Schenk, Mr. Knever, and Mr. Gantlik saw more than enough to amuse them. Their eyes would light on beanpoles only partly concealing a barrel; they’d say nothing for the time being and then report such discoveries to Cresspahl. He couldn’t object, he needed anything that was in short supply for his deals with the Soviet Beckhorst farm or the Fishermen’s Association in Rande, so he’d write out his request for permission to confiscate and send it to the DA’s office in Gneez and hope for a good word from Slata in district military headquarters. The district of Gneez was a large one, it was up to Slata to present reports on emergencies in Jerichow and she probably didn’t want to remind people too often of her previous life there; sometimes the form came back from the courthouse too late. Sometimes Schenk seized the property before it was authorized, “to avoid any risk of suppression of evidence,” as he put it, snippy because unassailable. It wasn’t Schenk who was cursed out for hauling off an eighteen-month supply of artificial fertilizer—the guilt was hung around Cresspahl’s neck. He was happy as long as Knever didn’t report him for embezzlement. Then, in one of the townsman-farmer’s houses, which hadn’t been thought to have a cellar, they found coal: the house was sitting on a mine of briquettes, enough to supply Jerichow with gas for five days, and next door lived Duvenspeck, gasworks superintendent, and so a brigade of women with handcarts had to go bring back the black gold; in the end half a ton was missing from the quantity Duvenspeck was willing to admit. That was more than the two briquettes each refugee had sneaked under her apron added up to. Cresspahl’s police had gone in on it with the guy who’d revealed the storage space, and the loyal and faithful Knever, upholder of the law, hadn’t reported the misappropriation because he himself has built a neat tower of briquettes in his pantry, edges lined up perfectly, elegantly tapering toward the top, camouflaged as a wall. Gesine had seen it when she’d gone to bring him a message; these days she couldn’t take her eyes off pantries. For Cresspahl it wasn’t just about upholding the law, it was that the district commandant sometimes came to Jerichow and hauled off things Cresspahl had applied for, and it didn’t go well for him if there were shortages. He preferred not to have his policemen’s apartments searched on the evidence of a child, so instead he went to the commandant and suggested he give his forces of law and order a little extra training in their jobs. Pontiy would not rest until he knew the nature of the goods in question. He was delighted to hear that there was coal in the gasworks for his winter. He invented on the spot the proverb of the ox which thou shalt not muzzle when he treadeth out the corn. – Yes, the ox: Cresspahl said. Pontiy agreed with an emphatic nod.