by Uwe Johnson
She wanted to repay him for the food and lodging so she kept the house in order. He’d taken in more homeless refugees than he’d needed to or than K. A. Pontiy had wanted him to, and now the stovetop was crammed with pots and pans and casseroles. Mrs. Abs couldn’t stand the constant bickering, everyone hiding things, she had learned how to run a large kitchen, so after a while she had taken over cooking for everyone. The people staying in Cresspahl’s house, even the schoolteacher from Marienwerder, bowed to the authority of this tall gaunt woman who would look at you so silently, talk to you so evenly yet firmly. And she did have the head of the house behind her, and had been there longer than most of the others. There was no more sneaking meals in the bedrooms, in the attic; meals were served at the big tiled table in the kitchen. There were still a few hidden supplies of grain or potatoes, but the rule was introduced that everyone had to contribute something for meals, and after a while the possessions that had been such sources of conflict sat out in the open alongside one another in the pantry, behind an unlocked door. When Jakob came home with his earnings he was allowed to slip the children an egg, an apple, but the piece of bacon or the rabbit went into the common pot. Mrs. Abs got her own share to contribute, sometimes a big hunk of meat, by doing the laundry for the commandant and his two officers. There wasn’t always enough to make everyone feel full,
Mrs. Abs! Theres a horse lyin in the marsh path! A dead horse, Mrs. Abs!
How longs it been there?
Just today.
Who knows about it, Gesine.
Just me. But we cant eat horse!
Youll get somethin else. Can you keep quiet?
Quiet as a tree.
Then go get me the knife.
and the children would rather there’d have been a lock on the pantry door. But there were fewer arguments in the house, the grown-ups could go out with Cresspahl’s band of cripples and earn ration cards, and the teacher knew that her baby was being taken care of. The children learned from Mrs. Abs how to keep their room clean, Cresspahl’s too, and they were at least shown how to wash windows. She would have been happy to make dresses for Gesine and Hanna out of the ones hanging in Lisbeth’s bedroom; she asked Cresspahl for permission and the next morning they were gone. Jakob traded the patterns Cresspahl didn’t want to see again for parachute silk and uniform fabric, and a sewing machine came into the house, where it stayed for five days before it had to be converted into alcohol. There was work to do in Cresspahl’s house and that was enough for Mrs. Abs. She could put ointment on the children’s scrapes and scratches from the wheat and rapeseed stubble, she could treat swelling boils with an Ichthyol salve and send the children off to work with an ever-so-slightly thicker slice of bread spread with sugar-beet molasses. Sometimes the children felt like a reason for her to stay. She’d won Hanna Ohlerich over immediately; Gesine remained out of reach for a while, maybe because she’d surfaced from her fever in such hesitant baby steps and was able to recognize her only afterward. Neither of them called her Mother, but also not Auntie, and though they almost always stuck to calling her Mrs. Abs they did slip into first names often enough. Hanna Ohlerich was a guest of Cresspahl’s too, and she occasionally betrayed her thoughts of living elsewhere with narrowed, unfocused eyes—already it didn’t really matter to her who she’d have to live with. With Gesine, Mrs. Abs felt half welcome. She would give Mrs. Abs a faraway look, ask questions in roundabout ways, stand there mute and withdrawn when Mrs. Abs ran to meet the mailman and came back disappointed. When it was possible to hear Jakob with the children, Mrs. Abs pushed the kitchen window’s flap open a little. She heard Gesine’s sudden urgent questions about Podejuch, noticed how Jakob was pulling her leg, saw how Gesine slunk off and came back to the kitchen crushed. And if she ever smiled at such twelve-year-old misery, it was never in front of me. By the time I’d learned not to let it show anymore, she’d helped me.
In late August, Mrs. Abs was carrying around a clipping from a newspaper in her apron pocket, folded small. When she was alone she sometimes read about what Edwin Hoernle, cofounder of the old KPD and now president of the German Agriculture and Forestry Administration, had announced about land reform: “that what matters today is to fulfill the old dream of every German farmworker and small farmer, the dream of a little farm of his own. These people are linked to the democratic Germany for as long as they live,” and while she didn’t understand the word democratic she took the rest to be a promise. She wasn’t a farmworker, she had worn a white apron in the von Bonins’ kitchen, but she’d worked in the countryside until her thirty-second year. This time she felt the days until Jakob came back to Jerichow were even longer. She was fifty-five, she wanted to take a farmstead with him. Jakob was almost eighteen, he could run a farm.
She had a bad conscience and talked it over with Jakob only at the end of the day; she didn’t want to do it in the house, she went out onto the marsh path with him. Jakob didn’t like doing that, it couldn’t help but seem to Cresspahl like they had a secret.
Then he started talking to her like she was sick. He didn’t want to settle the land somewhere. He wouldn’t be able to farm anything with two horses, and a seventeen-year-old farmer. He admitted that the land around Jerichow grew lots of wheat; he’d seen the manor houses that were going to be torn down as emblems of feudalism, they would have to rebuild there. With the rubble? With wood? They had no plow, no harrow, no mowing machine, and there weren’t any to be had on the black market either. And you didn’t get the land for free, you had to pay for every hectare with the equivalent of a ton of rye, sometimes a ton and a half, and sure you could spread out the payments in installments until 1966 but did she want to start off with a debt like that? Not to mention the delivery costs: 550 liters of milk per cow, twenty eggs per chicken, and they didn’t have the animals yet, there was their liveweight too. He presented this all to her cheerfully, and his mother felt patronized, and even though she was shocked to hear the difficulties in such detail she thought he had ulterior motives.
She was almost angry at him. The boy should have property. Now isn’t the time for that: he explained, again in a dry, dismissive way, and she was so at a loss that she asked Cresspahl to help get her unreasonable offspring’s head screwed on straight.
Cresspahl sat on the front steps with both children, even though it was already dark, and they looked at the Abs boy as if they’d been waiting for this moment. Cresspahl stood up, put his hands in his pants pocket, and looked ready to stand there for as long as it took. He himself had thought about settling the land, whether with the von Zelcks’ permission or not, and he hoped Mrs. Abs would come with him. The children and Jakob made five, Jakob’s father would make six, maybe enough to get by on a farm, and even the loans didn’t scare him off. But he hadn’t expected Mrs. Abs to agree to it, and K. A. Pontiy certainly didn’t.
– Y’see? said Jakob cheerfully, although he hadn’t actually won the argument. It wasn’t the first time that there seemed to be some kind of arrangement between the two. She grabbed the children and took them inside. She could still see Jakob sitting down with this Cresspahl. Out of the brickworks villa’s gate came Second Lieutenant Wassergahn, pulling the shirt of his uniform into pleasant pleats, rubbing his hand over his chin, smelling his hand. Mr. Wassergahn was on his way to a dance in Louise Papenbrock’s parlor, and now Jakob and Cresspahl discussed the question of whether “these brothers” could be trusted. They were far from used to talking to each other, and what we could hear through the windows late into the night sounded a lot like an argument.
Mrs. Abs didn’t go back outside to them and kept her bedroom windows closed. She was outraged that such a proposal had been made to her, in front of the children. She wasn’t unhappy about the fact that Cresspahl wanted to settle the land only if she would come too. She figured out what lay behind all these clever arguments of Jakob’s. He didn’t want her to work in the fields. She should work standing up straight, or better yet sitting, not bent over; things should
be made easy for her. He thought she was too old. Cresspahl, even though nothing could come of his proposal—he didn’t think she was too old. She disagreed with both, and agreed with both. A week later, she showed them both that she wouldn’t let herself get tied down to Cresspahl’s house. She started working half days, in the hospital, as a cook.
Gesine didn’t like seeing Mrs. Abs get dressed to go into town and pack her black bag. It was a leather case you could go on a trip with. Someone who could leave the house to go to work for no good reason could leave town too. How was Mrs. Abs to be kept in Jerichow?
May 21, 1968 Tuesday
First the French Communists didn’t see the general strike coming, then they didn’t support it, and now they want an alliance with all the forces of the Left, a veritable republican regime, which they even see as opening the way to Socialism.
The Polish ones, on the other hand, have finally figured out why the Poles keep misunderstanding them: it’s the Czechoslovak ones’ fault. The way they keep letting themselves get questioned in public about their plans—that can only be damaging.
The East German ones have gotten caught in Sweden with buried radio transmitters and several fake mailboxes.
The Czechoslovak ones are still playing host to Alexei N. Kosygin. After two years of negotiations, they are helping to open a branch of Pan American Airways in Prague, eighteen years after it was shut down following the coup, and the airfare to London can be paid in crowns. In Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), the Soviet prime minister strolls openly through the streets and takes the famous healing waters.
Today we decided to no longer shop at Don Mauro’s.
Don Mauro has a shop on Broadway (take the last car of the West Side express, come out of the Ninety-Sixth Street station walking east and in the opposite direction from the train), a little trap with tobacco products, candy, and cheap stationery for teeth. A row of phone booths may lure in a few customers, but he doesn’t carry newspapers, he hasn’t even supplied a bench where customers could linger any longer than it takes to exchange some money for merchandise. It’s a shoebox of a trap, thriftily partitioned off from the business next door, and the slowly circling fan blades in the ceiling seem like luxurious furnishings. But the truth is that Don Mauro is a pillar of the Puerto Rican community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—a jewel on the church council, a man respected by the police, the head of the citizens’ association, and anyone intending to win an election in this district had better not try without Don Mauro’s goodwill. When Don Mauro arrived from his island eighteen years ago he could barely afford an apartment and had a hard time finding work, but he started off differently from the Negroes. The blacks still say, even today: See? That’s how they treat us. From the word go, he thought: They’re not going to treat us like that. From the beginning, Don Mauro had more equal rights, was more an American citizen than other people; he was helped by his family’s lighter skin and the “right hair.” Don Mauro started in this very shop and soon he was teaching his first son how to deal with the police and simple bookkeeping; by now he’s training nephews for the stores that he is going to find, stock, and lease to them. Those other people may still have to pay protection money to the guardians of law and order, at Don Mauro’s said guardians have to pay for their purchases and a proffered box of cigars is already an honor (one cigar per uniform). Don Mauro stands behind the counter in the back, chewing the same cold cigar stump from morning till night, or maybe all week. Sometimes the stump shifts around in the corner of Don Mauro’s mouth, transforming his thoughtful expression, as if he’s spit something out, but actually something’s just popped into his head. He monitors the nephew at the register, he runs the expiring lease of the laundry next door through the calculator in his head, he chews around at the hard nut of a rental clause, nimbly, delicately, until it opens under his clever bite. Don Mauro doesn’t merely look contented, the ceaseless plans and discoveries are depicted so joyfully in his face that clearly there’s real happiness behind them. When he goes back every other year to check on the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, visit his mother, attend mass in his native village, and see which younger relatives are ready for New York, he’ll tell them stories about this piece of Manhattan, willingly if a little moodily. There are some places there that look like home, with the shop names, the neon signs, the bodegas. The buildings may be taller, but there are holes in the bottom with the island’s music wafting and swimming up out of them. There are churches there that have service in Spanish, theaters showing only movies in their language—the homesickness isn’t bad, and it doesn’t get worse. The family sticks together there, just like here, and so do families; on Sundays you can see the girls in the park, respectable, dressed nicely, still Spanish looking. If your skin color’s light then a lack of English isn’t too big a problem. And so a new young man is standing at Don Mauro’s cash register every year, acquiring the English of the Yanquis, moving on with the rank of store manager, later he might own one himself. The ones who understand this can sometimes be left alone in the store while Don Mauro climbs the narrow stairs in the side of the building—the discreet entrance to a second-floor office where he talks on the phone (no one knows what he says), keeps his money in the safe, has his secret bottle of cough syrup. The stairs lead only to this office. Who’s going to know about it aside from the super? You hardly see anyone on the stairs. The door in the alley is half covered by the bins and bags with the hotel’s garbage—just a crack that opens and closes again before you know it. There’s a lot to think about regarding that office and the dime-store padlock on the door, the customers seem like a dream, and just a moment ago there weren’t any.
Is this one? A Yanqui, a man about fifty, in a white shirt but needing a shave, with razor burn on his neck, saying something about dimes. Is he wanting to exchange his small change for bills?
It’s the supplicant’s lucky day. He looks, concerned and paternal, at the youth behind the counter—a sixteen-year-old with a hard narrow head, a dreamy look in his eyes, kind of friendly beneath the furrowed brow and still childlike waves of ash-blond hair. He tries to repay the cashier’s favor with politeness, and is moved by his own feelings, too, to try to do something in return, so he says, a little recklessly: I’m not really a bum, you know. . . and he turns for support to the lady standing next to him, and she really does smile, not in pity, she’s trying to encourage him.
Enter Don Mauro. He sees the apprentice’s fingers in the till and no sale. The group stands paralyzed as he very quickly covers the distance from the door to them, though they’ve all seen him come marching in—an old man, shoulders stiff, his dignity only enhanced by the fury in his face. The youth gets a whipping from some Spanish whispered in a monotone, that won’t heal before Saturday. The beggar is driven out of the shop like an infectious cow, every one of his submissive gestures intercepted by Don Mauro with a thrust of the chest and hisses of abuse; he adroitly shifts his legs to maneuver his victim until the man manages to escape out onto the sidewalk: the beggar, the failure, the parasite, – You bum! You dirty bum!
Barely out of breath, Don Mauro steps up to the lady customer still in the shop, not triumphantly, just a realistic businessman who came up the hard way. The youth lurches aside as if shoved with two hands. Moody, menacing, demanding, Don Mauro snarls: Yes, ma’am?
He knows this customer, he knows what she buys. Now she apologizes. Says she’s made a mistake. She doesn’t need anything in this shop.
– You’re trying to give up smoking, Gesine?
– Not this way.
– You want to change the economic structure of the whole city of New York?
– Not this way.
– You want to go ten blocks farther every time, to the next Don Mauro, Don Fanto, Don Alfonso?
– No.
– You give to beggars, you said it was a personal choice.
– I know, Marie.
– You taught me it’s wrong.
– No I didn’t.
– Yes you did. So now you’ve showed your true colors, Gesine.
May 22, 1968 Wednesday
The New York Times, educated lady that she is, not only interprets for us what Charles de Gaulle might have meant with the soiled bed of his nation. She wants to give us an all-round education, and today she presents us with a key to the language of the American armed forces. Light losses are those that do not affect a unit’s capability to carry out its mission. Moderate losses or damages mean that the unit’s capability has been noticeably impaired, and finally heavy means that the unit can no longer perform its designated function. Decoded: If an installation in Vietnam reports light losses, a good hundred men might have been killed out of three thousand. In this language, those hundred don’t count yet.