Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Well then.

  – Why did the meeting between the SPD and SED in Hanover fall through?

  – Because it wasn’t supposed to be a conversation between two sovereign states. The Hungarian guest has to get the right answer handed to him by the man taking the entrance money, who translates the word Handschellengesetz, “handcuff law,” from East German propagandaspeak via American English safe conduct back into West German: freies Geleit. The East German speakers don’t want a guarantee that they won’t be prosecuted, they want diplomatic immunity. Bravo to the man at the entrance!

  There was someone else with a question about West Berlin. Why does the East German press always refer to West Berlin as “on” GDR territory instead of “in” it, as both natural and political facts would suggest? We’d like to hear the answer to that one ourselves. How did the western sectors of Berlin find themselves on GDR territory before the GDR even existed. That question got in reply a gesture of helplessly raised arms, already weak from the flood of other questions: Hungarians can be so likeable. How dearly he’d love to answer this question, of all questions, if they’d only let him. The man with relatives in West Berlin doesn’t raise his hand again. Cresspahl is afraid she’d offend him if she repeated the question. So we won’t hear the answer from this man whose mind has been made up for so many years and will remain so.

  The president of the Society for the Study of the GDR is, in conclusion, in favor of goodwill. Of appreciating the GDR, once it’s been studied. And we’re in the red to the tune of $250, which is why there’s a genuine, antique, Methodist collection plate set up at the door. Thank you.

  And just like on the old collection days, an assistant puts three five-dollar bills on the plate at once, to fool the later contributors. Mrs. Cresspahl unloads her cent there, wishing only it were a red one.

  May 25, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  In the IRT subway line, the management—may they suffocate in the heat—have removed one of the pair of fans in every car! When the cars creep screeching in the tight squeeze up to the curved platforms under the ferry terminal, the passengers in the front cars first have to walk between dark tunnel walls, and inside the station there are ramps to the train doors. Only then are the doors opened, and today the sticky air intensified the fear that they wouldn’t open at all.

  – So both my grandfathers had criminal records: Marie said the moment we were aboard. She was trying to take this news of her forefathers like a devil-may-care desperado, but ancestors like that have always made her uncomfortable. Whatever she hears at home doesn’t stand a chance against what she learns in school, which is that being arrested proves you’re guilty. She wasn’t supposed to learn that: white middle-class thinking. But that’s how she thinks.

  – Jakob’s father was never put on trial, Marie.

  – He was in a military prison, in Anklam, you admit that. Did he at least avoid the draft?

  – You may not have liked what he did. And I don’t know what he did.

  – He could have been your father-in-law. It’s my grandfather, Gesine.

  – All I know about him is that he was born in 1889, Neukloster Seminary, Brazil in the twenties, jobs as an estate manager in Mecklenburg and Pommern, drafted into the army in 1943, and prison—what I picked up in conversation over those fifteen years with Jakob and his mother. I was in no hurry to ask questions and then Jakob died. I didn’t want to press his mother and then she died. Neither liked to talk about Wilhelm Abs, and I only know his first name from the will. If I had to say his birthday, I could only say July, I’d have to look up the exact date.

  – And where’s he buried?

  – His wife refused to believe he was dead until she was. He’ll be seventy-nine in five or six weeks, if that’s what you want to believe.

  – In the Soviet Union. We wouldn’t recognize him.

  – You wouldn’t mind a stranger, would you, Marie?

  – Tonight I want to write down his birthday. Not to celebrate it, but so at least one of us knows it.

  – And no criminal record.

  – Make Cresspahl innocent, Gesine. Even if you have to lie a little.

  – The officers who arrested him started off treating him like he was innocent. He wasn’t pushed into the jeep, they patiently held the door open for him until he found his seat in the dark. He wasn’t handcuffed. They gave him a blanket. There was a little chat about the chill in the air, winter’s coming, hope the frost doesn’t get the potatoes. When Cresspahl asked them to let him go to his house for five minutes, they didn’t refuse rudely, it was more bemused, like he was someone new to a different world. They gave him some coarse makhorka for his pipe, like hosts. At Wehrlich station they locked him into a chicken coop.

  – That was something he could never forget. He could never even speak of it!

  – They did apologize. They didn’t want to keep driving that night, one of them had a friend in the Wehrlich Kommandatura, there were no prison cells set up at the ranger station. Plus he wasn’t supposed to be seen by the German staff. What else would you have done with a prisoner if you were them?

  – Good, just keep on lying, Gesine. Then they brought him dinner on a tray.

  – Maybe they forgot about that because they were so happy to see their friend again and the party was so fun. Cresspahl could hear their voices late into the night, singing, toasting, why would they think about a chicken coop.

  – Now the escape.

  – The lock was meant to protect the bygone chickens from both foxes and robbers on two legs. It was hard to pick in the dark. They’d moved the jeep in front of the door, he couldn’t tip that over. There was no window, the walls were solid brick, the hatch was for chickens. He also might not have wanted to admit guilt straight off by running away. And in fact Soviet soldiers searched our rooms several times over the next few weeks, they were waiting for him in Jerichow. The chicken coop wasn’t bad to sleep in; they’d left him the blanket. It’s just that he banged into the low perches at first, and the stink of old droppings revived with the humidity of the night air. A sour smell, the legacy of three generations of chickens. Seeps into a person’s clothes. Still, the Russians found their prisoner asleep the next morning. And now they were driving in a stinking jeep, trapped with the smell by the rain, and they all told jokes, every joke they could think of about roosters and chickens. Cresspahl got a hunk of bread, a sip of vodka, makhorka, like one comrade among others on a holiday trip, only he was the only one who didn’t know where they were going. Where they were going was the basement under the Gneez district courthouse; his companions took their leave with encouraging if cautious claps on his shoulder. Ever since then Cresspahl thought that an arrest wasn’t seen as anything to be ashamed of in the Red Army, at most it was a bit of bad luck that could happen to anyone. Good luck, they wished him. That was the start of the first phase.

  – You walked to school above his head.

  – The girls’ high school in Gneez had been converted into a Red Army hospital. The lower grades were put in the Sacred Heart School—

  – a parochial school, like me!

  – a city school named after a convent and a chapel, long since burned down, commemorating the ritual persecution of the Jews in 1330. From the ruins of that pious quadrangle to the station I only had to cross two streets diagonally, and then I was right by my father though I never knew it. All I saw was the monument for the Franco-Prussian War, black and shining like a freshly polished train engine, and the two red flags like tongues sticking out of the courthouse roof. That was where the German police took the people dealing in food on the black market, gun owners, members of the German Army arrested during the July registration, young men under suspicion of being in the Werewolf resistance—it never crossed my mind that Cresspahl might be locked up under that building. Language dictated that anyone the Soviets picked up was sent “to Siberia,” no one had to tell me.

  – And now we have the tortures, the water chamber, the starvat
ion diet.

  – Cresspahl felt like they’d arrested him just to put him away somewhere and then they’d forgotten about him. The jailers brought food to his cell twice a day, sometimes in the evening too—bread from their field bakery, fish soup made of water and cod heads, leftovers from the soldiers’ meals. At school we learned to write and speak Russian but Charlotte Pagels might have been using a book from the German Army’s supply: she told us kasha was cabbage soup,

  shchi i kasha

  pishcha nasha

  when actually it was buckwheat or semolina groats with jam or a few shreds of meat, my father in prison would have marked those days on the calendar if he’d been allowed a calendar. When the cell door was unlocked he had to stand at attention against the wall, head touching it, so that he couldn’t see into the hall. When he did this according to regulations they would hand him the bowl. They didn’t like it if he talked. They called him otets and durak, Father and Fool, neither meant in a bad way, and gradually he learned. Apparently they’d counted the inscriptions and drawings on the saltpeter-covered wall and he wasn’t allowed to add to them, so he got himself a day with no food when he started a calendar. He found month grids from spring 1945 scratched into the wall, final remarks before transport to Bützow-Dreibergen, the notes of the British national anthem accompanied by a blasphemous text, swastikas with entreaties for luck in battle—those could all stay. It might have once been Dr. Semig’s cell, but he found no sign of him. To teach him about secret possessions they ripped open his straw mattress every now and then and scattered the filling across the cell; they praised him like a child when he’d reassembled a mattress from it by nighttime. In December they noticed him shivering and stuck a thermometer in his mouth. He wasn’t allowed to see what it showed, and his next meal came with a blanket. More horrible than the cold was the lack of light: it came in through a round tapered shaft terminating below a grate at the back of the building, for only a few hours a day. There were two or three voices in the next cell; he remained alone. His departure was quite a ceremony. The young men in their exquisitely spick-and-span uniforms had taken him to the washroom lots of times, with gentle nudges of his arm, because he seemed blind; this time they helped him remove his beard and gave him warm water. He was given parts of uniforms—air force on the bottom, army on the top—and for the first time in seventeen weeks he didn’t smell like chicken shit. Sitting all alone on the bed of a covered truck he was driven south, and he learned to see again from the blurry spring green by Schwerin Lake. He was taken to the Soviet Military Tribunal in the capital, and now he was supposed to talk.

  – The unauthorized withdrawals from the nobility’s accounts.

  – He’d paid those back as soon as enough taxes had come in (and as a result the Jerichow government bank stayed empty to the floorboards). Maybe he hadn’t been able to bring himself to pay interest on the loans, and such transgressions were part of Phase One.

  – Woken up in the middle of the night and made to recite numbers.

  – In Schwerin the Soviets were working round the clock, the court calendar decided when it was his turn. For days on end they didn’t need him for anything, of course, and in the heated cell, with the plentiful light from above, he almost relearned what it was like to have a place to live, then without warning they’d come get him in the middle of the night. The court ran like a machine, demanding trot and walk and gallop from a standing start from both defendants and prosecutors; Cresspahl couldn’t blame the specific people in charge of his case. One of them seemed like a military man to him, the other an auditor, they traded off. They’d prepared their case, they had the Jerichow Town Hall files on the table, and at first Cresspahl only had to tell them about everything he’d done. If one of his stories pleased them, he was allowed to repeat it. They watched him uneasily; they were expecting him to defend himself, not agree to one judgment after another against himself.

  – With a clear conscience, Gesine. He hadn’t taken anything for himself.

  – It was for someone else’s benefit, not his. While K. A. Pontiy had bindingly abolished civil rights in Jerichow, he had not explained the new kinds of guilt. So now the gentlemen of the Schwerin SMT read Cresspahl Law No. 4 of the Allied Control Council, and took it to mean that the laws in force on January 30, 1933, were valid for the time being. He hadn’t been able to follow them.

  – What he’d done was its own defense.

  – What an American! You and your truth! The truth can be used in the service of anything.

  – But it’s what really happened!

  – Cresspahl wasn’t interested in going beyond his own truth. He did find out some new information. He’d confiscated two bags of roasted coffee beans from Böhnhase, with the permission of the Gneez DA’s office, but now in Schwerin the hoarded merchandise was described to him as originating in an illegal act, and it wasn’t even coffee anymore, it had magically transformed into crude oil for the generator powering the hospital lights. In other words, Cresspahl was supposed to answer for the hidden hands through which the coffee had previously passed—for a past he knew nothing about. He didn’t see how he could do that, so he didn’t sign. The two interrogators found his rigidity amusing. They went along with his quirk of not naming any names other than those on paper in front of him—they had names, they helped him out. He was gradually led to believe that not only Leslie Danzmann but Gantlik was in jail, and Slata, and Amalie Creutz, and Peter Wulff, and Böhnhase, and the mayor of Beckhorst village. For a long time the conversations stayed friendly—he wasn’t kept standing, they moved his chair from the edge of the room up to the desk, and when it came to tricky memories he stood next to the interrogator like a colleague, bent over the files, searching, turning pages. Since he was used to smoking a pipe he was allowed to go pick one out from the seized-property room and he found one of English manufacture, barely damaged, with a curved mouthpiece, like the kind Uncle Joe used to smoke; it would be taken out of a drawer at the start of each session and locked away again at the end, like a medical instrument. Sometimes he even got Krüll instead of makhorka.

  – Uncle Joe, I should know that one.

  – You should, you American. Josif Vissarionovič was shown with just such a pipe when he was introduced to the public here, back when he was still supposed to be an ally. The photograph shows him with a mischievous look in his eye, like a good uncle.

  – The defendant with his resemblance to the supreme lord of the court.

  – The interrogators didn’t care. They were from another country, they might not ever have seen that picture.

  – Did they also call Cresspahl “Little Father”?

  – They addressed him in bourgeois fashion. They wanted him to feel competent, an adult who’d made mistakes while of sound mind and body. The mistakes had been established, now he needed to recognize the crimes. And to help him along they presented various bits and pieces the way they saw it: Slata had been taken to another court, in the Soviet Union. Her name had served only to prove Cresspahl’s connection with a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. Amalie Creutz wasn’t in jail at all. And why would she be, from Cresspahl’s own statements he’d been perfectly willing to believe she was pregnant, his request to have an abortion approved had been found in the Schwerin Department of Health and countersigned by him as proof

  of the goal

  of the defamation

  of the honor

  of the Red Army,

  they didn’t need Mrs. Creutz as a witness anymore. And the gentlemen were certainly prepared to summon Fritz Schenk for a face-to-face confrontation, they were very interested indeed in such a thing, only Schenk was no longer in Jerichow, and the German comrades reported that he was indispensable. Even a Soviet examining magistrate has his limitations, you see. All that talk about omnipotence is greatly exaggerated.

  – Whose side are you on, Gesine! You belong on Cresspahl’s but you’re not advocating for him.

  – Why should I be on just one side
? What I know has more than two sides.

  – Would Cresspahl be okay with that?

  – They covered everything with him all the way back to 1935. He had done carpentry work for the Jerichow-North air base, until 1938, and until 1945. He admitted it. He had, therefore, starting in 1935, with no evidence of coercion, helped German militarism up onto its feet and into the air. Although Cresspahl realized that the one implied the other, and that they were trying to cast him as someone who’d paved the way for the Nazis, he didn’t want to follow them across the bridge to economic sabotage in Jerichow as a past and present Fascist. He wouldn’t sign. They tried it again, this time offering something in return. When he would ask about his child in Jerichow, they would sternly refuse to say anything, shaking their heads at his denseness; after two weeks, they revealed after all that Schoolgirl Cresspahl had been transferred to the Bridge School in Gneez with a B in Russian. He thanked them for bending the rules; he didn’t deviate from his own. They scolded him, not without a certain sadness; they had failed in their goal of at least moving him to somewhere between the subjective and the objective truth. By that point they had enough facts, they no longer needed him. He was sent to a camp where the Nazis had once kept their prisoners, he was supposed to help straighten it up.

  – Was that his sentence?

  – It was a holding camp. The gentlemen of the Schwerin SMT hadn’t threatened him with any specific punishment. Only once, when they didn’t know what else to say, had they asked: if he’d really rather spend thirty years in prison than fifteen, or at most twenty.

  – He was clever enough. You got mail from him.

  – The camp was well guarded, with dog patrols between the two rows of barbed wire, searchlights at night. He was there with other people but they were quickly taken off to sentencing and other countries, they couldn’t take messages. Even in his work he couldn’t smuggle out any messages—the bedframes, the window crosspieces, the barrack sections, everything stayed inside the fence. Anyway, he could only guess at the nearest town or village. He might be anywhere in southwestern Mecklenburg. Other people knew more precisely, Neustadt-Glewe they said; that didn’t fit the route he’d been brought on, as far as he could tell from the night transport.