Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Meanwhile, there could now be found traveling through the countryside around Jerichow a young man, Gerd Schumann he called himself, formerly in the National Committee for a Free Germany in the Soviet Union, and dispatched, after a management course in Stargard, Pommern, to this outof-the-way spot as a canvasser for the Communist Party. Cresspahl had talked to him and found him agreeable enough, if a little too High German for around here. Twenty-three years young, stocky and already running to fat, with an aggressive but at the same time withdrawn look, invariably dressed in a military tunic that, oddly, showed no signs of wear and tear, and he squared his shoulders in military fashion too. Redhead, he was nicknamed, even though his hair was somewhere between white and gray, with a silvery sheen. – From now on

  the great flag

  of the freedom

  of all peoples

  and the peace

  of all nations

  shall wave over

  Europe! he would shout, oblivious to his listeners’ aversion to any more flags. He brought out such proclamations in a carefully calibrated tone that rose and fell in a kind of singsong, and, again like Pastor Brüshaver in church, the young man could quote chapter and verse: Generalissimo Stalin, May 9, 1945. This manner of speaking had become second nature with him; he would work his way through the KPD’s whole ten-point program like that, to an audience of tired day laborers and farmers that the village commandant rounded up and brought to him after work, and because the Communist Party of Germany was demanding things like a war against hunger, unemployment, and housing shortages, a few coins would eventually drop into his collection plate, and he would hand out his leaflets and membership applications. He had far more power than Cresspahl. He carried a very visible pistol in his belt, and with that and the Russian language he could defend himself against uninformed Red Army soldiers; he had a say in the allocation of housing, he had money, he could use bedsheets and red paint to make banners with slogans that stretched across village streets, and when refugees asked him about their old East Pommern territory he would simply bang his fist on the table and calmly expound the guilt of the entire German people for the war, in singsong paragraphs, reverberating pauses, and elevated pitch. By the end of June his party had almost a thousand members in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; it had more than three thousand by the end of July, almost eight thousand by the end of August. Cresspahl probably realized that the young man liked his unfettered movement from place to place, and his evening performances, his ever-changing overnight stays, but still he invited him to stay in Jerichow. Once this able and fearless man had a place to live in the town, he could probably be offered the post of police chief. (Secretly, Cresspahl hoped that this rival king might succeed him as mayor.) The young man refused to even hold a meeting in Jerichow. – That’s your business, Cresspahl: he said, in an unexpectedly Berlin tone—so mocking, so amused around the corners of his eyes, that Cresspahl thought the man must have seen through him.

  The man demanded power and didn’t take it. Cresspahl was stuck with the problems he had with his police force: like the cuckoo’s stuck with his song.

  Yesterday around noon the Soviet general Aleksei A. Yepishev arrived in Prague. He was taken aback when asked whether the Red Army really did stand ready to move in response to a call from Prague for help, and perhaps because it was a young lady thrusting the microphone in his face, a brunette in a powder-blue shirt, the short, plump man wearing many medals finally answered her with a slight smile: This is a stupid thing. What stupidity.

  May 19, 1968 Sunday

  Today in the column for Commercial Notices, under an ad for shipping your car, the American Society for the Study of the German Democratic Republic steps up to offer a lecture this Friday on European Disarmament and the Two German States. To ship our car we should call 227-6334; to study the GDR, MOnument 6-4073. That number might live right around the corner from us.

  Where we live is on the park named after the river.

  For seven years we have lived across from Riverside Park, this wide expanse of meadows, gentle hills, walking paths, retaining walls, highway cuttings, tunnels to the river, old trees, hawthorn bushes, monuments, and pergolas, we have walked almost every one of its 106 hectares, and because we didn’t grow up next to it—because we had no right to it, even by proximity—we tried to earn it by using it, and reading about it too, the way only newcomers, foreigners do.

  A hundred years ago there was no park, only the railroad Cornelius Vanderbilt ran along the shore of the Hudson: seven long-distance trains per day in both directions, plus seven slow trains stopping at every station from Thirtieth Street to Poughkeepsie. Then the landowners—the Martins, the de Lanceys, the Stryckers—campaigned for a park on their property, and the city had to buy it off them, strip by strip, for more than $6 million. By 1879 the inner edge of the park was finished, a civic playground with paths for bicycles and horses, with little temples and secluded, restful corners. The river was still closer to the buildings than it is today; in 1910 it was pushed back with stone excavated from the Catskill Aqueduct, in the 1920s still farther with the rock that had been in the IND subway’s path. Even in 1930, there was still a lot of empty land between the park and the railroad tracks; in 1937 the tracks were built over, hidden inside natural-looking hills, and by 1940 the park looked like it had a hundred years earlier—mildly civilized with angular paths and other signs of artificial construction, but thoroughly disguised as a pristine landscape. Henry Hudson’s parkway, hidden by mounds and hedges, is like a miracle, looking every time as if it sprang up naturally.

  In summer the park is like the site of a continuous public festival, and we are among the attendees. The banks along the shoreline promenade are packed with day-trippers from the poorer areas, the tennis courts are in use, chess players are sitting astride the benches and teaching kibbitzers lessons, people with the day before yesterday’s newspaper draped over their face are asleep as if in their own apartment (which the park may well be), on the field at Seventy-Fourth Street the walkers let their dogs run free and are happy to stand and have a long conversation about their animals, picnics are spread out on the grass, half-naked children are jumping and squealing under the glittering cool fountains in the playgrounds, or chasing after the swings, or crowding around the man with the ice-cream cart. Long-distance runners are on their way, a bike parade with balloons came by around two. In the city marina on Seventy-Ninth a child can see how a boat is rigged up, on Eighty-Eighth a clientele that always looks the same is busy holding their rods and hoping for fish with robust constitutions—they catch a pathetic eel every now and then, and the sport of it is enough for them. We can see what street we’re at without needing to leave or even look outside the park: there are number plates on the lampposts, PL 38310 corresponds to Eighty-Third Street, and the fact that the lights were designed by Henry Bacon, who built the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, is one that we’ve looked up, so that we might be more at home here.

  The park is built for use, and it has found favor with the police. They drive their patrol cars there for breaks and man-to-man talks, and at warm times of year the forces of law and order rest their horses in the deep shadows of the shrubbery. You can see them, and people on the benches don’t need to know one another to start a conversation. The park seems to be a picture composed of nothing but peaceful occurrences, and in fact many of the inhabitants of Riverside Drive feel a sense of solidarity. They are like one another in their level of education, their incomes are comparable, they lack pink skin only in exceptional cases, they send their children to the same schools, they all have the same housing conditions to defend, they act as a bloc in political and parental meetings. Someone around here who waits for the bus in the morning holding a child’s hand can be almost sure of going to kindergarten or to school accompanied by no one she does not know, at least by sight, and the bus driver, who has escaped from the traffic crush of the city into the swiftly flowing river of Riverside Drive, speaks to the people getting o
n here as if to a family that’s nicer than the other families.

  The dark-skinned parkgoers, on the other hand, come from neighborhoods where parks are not provided, or are less in favor with the police and now destroyed, the grass withered and trampled, the few trees damaged, the ground covered with shards of glass from bottles broken there in neat, clean, steady rage. On weekdays the dark-skinned children are a minority in Riverside Park, they play in their own groups, and the Negro woman keeping an eye on a pack of kids running wild is watching her white employer’s boys, not her own. The Puerto Ricans are among themselves on the baseball fields, the Negroes practicing for themselves alone on the basketball courts, and the West Indians play soccer with one another. They are borrowing the landscape that is theirs by right.

  We can take the Promenade along the Hudson from the narrow paths running alongside the highway, past the magnificent paved play areas and well-tended fences under lampposts, up to the unprotected grassy roads and to 124th Street, where a stone tablet has been placed in the shadow of a large-tooth aspen to honor the efforts of the Women’s League for the Protection of Riverside Park. We wouldn’t have been a member of that. We have the river. The river under the unobstructed sky pulls you in toward the nearby sea, presents slowly moving ships, foghorns at night, green and gray and blue colors mixed with those of the park, a holiday view, and so poisoned is the river by industry that people aren’t even allowed to swim in it. The river gathers up from the sky both its light and its dirt, which helps give the sunsets their ominous coloring. The smell of the river comes with us back to Riverside Drive. The leaves in the park are already holding the lamplight under them in glowing caves. The goods trains are rumbling through the belly of the park, bringing meat for the New York markets from Iowa and Nebraska, the Maine and Canadian woods transformed into paper for tomorrow’s New York Times, for the diary of the world. Above the sparkling terraces of New Jersey’s lights, above the tangle of colors of the amusement park in the Palisades, above the gray river, that wide gateway to the north, there are white bulbs arrayed on nearly horizontal arcs of cables; above the double-decker shelf between the two piers of the George Washington Bridge, headlights and taillights grope their way along, and Europe’s tour guides recommend the view. We can’t recommend more than the view ourselves.

  We live here.

  May 20, 1968 Monday

  Charles de Gaulle has found the word he was looking for to describe the general strike in France: “Reform, yes. Shit-the-bed, no.” Chienlit. The Grand Old Man.

  Near Manhattan Avenue and 119th Street, in the vicinity of Morningside Park, the following method has been noted: The bus driver sees a pretty girl standing at the bus stop, pulls over to the right, and opens the door. In steps not the girl but three or four gang members who have crouched down and crept up along the side of the bus, unseen by the driver. They hold a knife to the driver’s throat, grab the money changer, and vanish. The whole operation takes less than thirty seconds. The New York Times calls the scene of the crime the Upper West Side, where we live; actually it’s only near here.

  Shifting clouds and white bursts of sunshine, like one more snowball a child throws onto the roof so that it’ll roll off, leaving a thick track, bursting apart in the hand.

  In winter 1945 one of Cresspahl’s daughter’s troubles was over.

  She didn’t want the two members of the Abs family to move. Jakob should stay; Jakob’s mother should stay. She cooked my meals and showed me how to do my hair, she helped me in a strange land. I still remember the evening when I was standing with my hands behind my back, – Gesine: she said, lightly and politely touching my shoulder with her rough hard hand; I still remember her fast subdued voice. I remember her face: long and bony and far advanced into old age in the narrow dry eyes. I always had a mother. Always.

  Mrs. Abs felt that in Jerichow she was in the wrong place, and the wrong house there too.

  Her husband couldn’t find her in this small town, tucked away near the sea, tucked away in the wheat fields. He hadn’t promised to find her and the boy. When he was released from the military prison in Anklam and dispatched to the East Prussian front, he’d made a secret detour across the Dievenow in order to spend two hours in the middle of the night on the Bonin estate, to give her his last will and testament verbally. She hadn’t believed it. She’d promised him she would go west, cross the Oder, cross the Elbe even, but so he could find her. That was only five months ago. When the Wolin regional party leader threatened anyone who set off for the west with death, von Bonin drove off with nine heavy covered wagons; all that was left for the wife of the missing estate manager was an open potato cart, an extremely old horse, and instructions to look after the estate. Long before the regional party leader ordered the evacuation west, she’d left the island. Near Augustwalde she found herself on the autobahn to Berlin and under fire from Soviet strafers. Jakob was more scared than she was, and she had blood from his neck wound on her face. After they laid the dead to one side there was an extra horse, the sorrel. She’d wanted to take the boy to the Podejuch hospital but he didn’t agree to stop now that they could hitch two horses to their cart. From then on, it was probably him in charge. He held their course through Neubrandenburg and Malchow toward the so-called gray area in western Mecklenburg, and after passing the mouth of the Elde they were forced ever more to the north, no matter how small the roads they took, as far as Wismar, and they’d come to Jerichow because the road by the sea was so empty and seemed safe from army and party patrols. She’d stayed because for the first time they were offered a place to stay; because Jakob wanted to wait out the war, and then because of the British occupation of the town, and then because of the two sick girls in Cresspahl’s house, and then to wait for the British to come back. But her husband wouldn’t be able to find them in Jerichow. He had taken her from a farm in the gray area, the seventh child, the unpaid maid—a dairy inspector, educated at Neukloster Seminary, and he’d wanted her for his wife. She had not left her family on good terms, she couldn’t go back there for some time; still, he would look for her near Eldena, if anywhere. She’d obediently learned the job of cooking in Hamburg, thirty years old already, spending three years there while her husband was in Brazil looking around for somewhere they could move to together, until at least he was forced to return to shattered Germany. She was thirty-eight when Jakob was born in an estate manager’s apartment near Crivitz; that too was where her husband might be looking for them—in Crivitz, in Hamburg, near Hagenow. Once the post office started accepting postcards again she had sent Cresspahl’s address to eleven estate managers, schoolteachers, and church offices, wherever her husband might think she was; she had even made herself write to her family. No answer had come back, and she didn’t believe Cresspahl when he said he’d find the man if he ever turned up in Mecklenburg. Cresspahl was trying to comfort her. She was willing to believe that his offer of hospitality was good indefinitely.

  There was so much about the house that she didn’t understand. This Cresspahl didn’t own it—it was the property of his daughter, a twelve-year-old girl, and if you didn’t believe that you could go ask Papenbrock. Papenbrock as a father-in-law, with his mighty palace of a house on Market Square: how did that go with the remains of a woodworking shop behind the cemetery. He had one dead son he was allowed to put up a memorial plaque for at the family tomb and another that couldn’t be mentioned, he’d killed children in Ukraine, set villages on fire. Yet the Papenbrocks had a Ukrainian girl living with them, at first as a maid and starting in December 1944 officially as a fiancée, and the Germans would say hello to her on the street, because of the Papenbrocks. In Pommern, on the Bonin estate, the forced laborers were treated like cattle that could talk. This Slata hadn’t been deported “to Siberia” by the Red Army, she was working as an assistant in district military headquarters, she’d apparently earned her nickname the Angel of Gneez and now the people in Jerichow were denying the rumors that she’d knelt at Pontiy’s feet and kissed
his hands. Now rich old Papenbrock had been ordered off to a Soviet farm south of Gneez, to work as a supervisor, and refugees and Russian soldiers had taken over the house from his wife and were turning the big parlor into a dance hall at night. Cresspahl was the mayor, he could have stood by his mother-in-law; she never came to ask for anything, he always walked right past her house. Cresspahl’s child hadn’t been allowed to visit her grandmother for several years. People said. Every now and then Mrs. Abs heard talk about someone called Our Lisbeth. Lisbeth could’ve pointed the mayor in the right direction; Lisbeth had been dead seven years now. “Our Lisbeth” came up in conversations outside empty shopwindows, during breaks in the fields. For a long time Mrs. Abs thought she was someone living in Jerichow, maybe sick. Jakob discovered that she had been Cresspahl’s wife, and since November 1938 could be visited only in the cemetery. She had died in a fire, possibly suicide. Her husband didn’t look after the grave, and Amalie Creutz hadn’t been able to do much for it since early 1945, the mound had almost fallen apart. Mrs. Abs took Cresspahl’s child with her and showed her how to replant and maintain such places; the husband averted his eyes now when the child set out for the cemetery with the watering can. But when Mrs. Abs set up a kitchen garden behind the house he was almost overcome with surprise, he even thanked her. He knew what people in Jerichow had been telling her for three months—about the house, his wife’s death, the Papenbrock clan. He praised her cooking, talked about the weather, asked after Jakob, whenever his duties gave him time to come home. Plus the Soviets liked having him as mayor since it had been the British who’d appointed him. Then again he’d since had any number of risky fights with the commandant, involving shouting matches and shrewd reconciliations; he couldn’t count on a salary, or gratitude, but could on a hard time for years to come, what with the nasty ideas the people in Jerichow were cultivating. He’d said something on the topic once, which made sense to Mrs. Abs. Someone had to do it, didn’t they? That she understood. Someone has to do it. But there was too much about him that remained baffling.