Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  But on June 30 the Soviet Military Administration shut the borders between their zone and the Allies’. Too many people had run away from their New Life (not Leslie Danzmann)—one and a half million going over to the British alone. Hanna might have recognized in this a law of political economy, but all she saw was that yet another possibility had been taken from her. Again she felt trapped with us. How could Jakob have talked her into staying in Jerichow?

  For the harvest he loaned us out to the Schlegels. She went uncomplainingly. We’d had enough of waking up every morning with shriveled stomachs, walking around all day bent almost double with hunger, having to leave the table bravely every evening while the Marienwerder schoolteacher was still feeding her baby son. Besides, Jakob had promised to visit us on the weekends.

  At the Schlegel farm we were greeted as “Jakob’s girls” and put to work that same afternoon, but our only job was to eat thickened milk with sugar. We were allowed to accompany Inge on all her chores around the farm, but not help with any. She’d have let us pluck strawberries, but only as many as we could eat. From the outside the house looked like an ordinary half-timbered building under a thatched roof, standard Lower Saxony style that textbooks would call classic; nothing inside it was to be hidden from us. We could climb into the space under the living room and examine the still, we were shown the tobacco field disguised by the sunflowers planted throughout (more than two hundred of them), we even got to take a look at the collection of Karabiners in the bench next to the stove that looked so solid to the uninitiated. That’s how good an introduction Jakob had given us. But we never did find out where he slept here. It wasn’t a farmhouse anymore. Where the wings of a farmhouse would usually have open stalls for horses and cows and sheep and pigs, these had been partitioned off with walls between the roof beams, a carpenter had laid wooden floors over the beaten earth inside, and the stall hatches had been neatly enlarged into double-leaf casement windows, so now there were three nearly square rooms on either side of the hall and six doors opening onto the big dining table that reached almost from the front door to the kitchen. A sea breeze came in from the northeast, it smelled of warm clean wood everywhere, the walls were intact as well as the doors and the windows, as if the war hadn’t passed through these parts. And Inge Schlegel wasn’t nervous at all about being alone on the farm with one polite Doberman and two half-grown girls. The agricultural work all took place on the other side of the farm, in a brick building that looked like a factory only at first glance, before you noticed the moss-free thatched roof. Inside it, the ten-year-old Schütte-Lanz threshing machine looked more like two years old, all oiled and polished; there was a smithy neat enough to be in a museum; the shelves in the storerooms were fully stocked with boxes, kegs, and other containers; the stalls smelled occupied and active; the pigs were running free in their wallow; and again the girls couldn’t shake their sense of peace, a false sense, for all this couldn’t be explained by the semicircle of forest ringing the farmstead to the east and toward the sea. That evening, with the return of the mowing machines and harvest wagons, they realized that the war had passed through here after all, and settled down to stay. The rooms along the hall, once apartments for workers and sometimes summer visitors, were now occupied by refugees. But these weren’t like the refugees in Jerichow—they had come to Schlegel’s farm with their eyes open, they didn’t immediately lie down and wait for pity but wanted to earn their keep with work. Even though it was work on someone else’s property, not on their own which they’d lost in the East, most of them had nonetheless been here for more than a year and few of them wanted to move on. Johnny Schlegel had laid down rules for his farm; newcomers were given a share of the profits according to how many horses they’d brought and how much work they’d done, the same as when he’d been starting out before the war, going by the books about land resettlement until the National Socialists had outlawed it. Still, except for the estates left behind by the local nobility who had fled, there was only one large farm like this in 1946—not even Kleineschulte had left anything comparable behind—and the girls from Jerichow remained mystified. Later, as time went on, they started to understand what was going on, but on that first night Johnny treated them differently. They were happy to keep their heads bent over their plates, for once not because they were hungry but because they were almost frightened of the man who would be their employer for the next few weeks—a little worried about where Jakob had sent them. They noticed that no one said prayers at this table. From fleeting glances they got the impression of an older man (he was fifty-eight) who had worked outside his whole life: one-armed, ridiculously tall (in the evenings he was six foot three), oxycephalic, bald (though a little tuft of curly blond hair had sat high atop his turret-shaped head for many years), an educated man because he sometimes raised a pair of fabulously tiny oval-lensed glasses to his eyes. While the rest of the group, all equals, chatted harmlessly across the table, especially with their children, Dr. Schlegel said nothing; he looked like he was grimly calculating things in his mind, and the girls from Jerichow were scared of him. Nor did they see a chair for Jakob. Then they heard Johnny’s booming bass voice, without any throat clearing or other warning, and they nearly jumped out of their skins. Because he was talking about them, and by name. They almost stood up out of sheer obedience. They learned that they were the children of my friend Cresspahl and of Gustav Ohlerich, a good man, from Wendisch Burch. They were good Meeklnburg chilren our Jååkob’s entrusted to us. They long to uur farm now. That was all. It transformed their tablemates’ friendly looks into something like encouragement, and now they felt welcome. Inge Schlegel was still wearing her engagement ring from Alwin Paap, she probably had quite a lot she could say about Cresspahl, and about where he no longer was, and Johnny most definitely knew more than he said about how Hanna’s parents had died. In spite of their relief, they still felt their wages of hundred-weights of wheat were in danger, and they asked what their jobs would be. – Jobs’ll turn up: Johnny said in an offhand way. What jobs? they shyly asked. Johnny’d imagined them as a kind of fire department maybe, or kitchen help when necessary, maybe pick some apples, churn some butter (nothing about tending geese). And didn’t we protest together, practically as one, probably proud of our ages of thirteen and fourteen? We hadn’t come here for a vacation! We’d come to do serious work in the harvest! We were instinctively of one mind, right?

  Full work in a harvest. That’s what we wanted? No mercy? Out to the fields we went. Johnny Schlegel’s commune had wheat as far as the eye could see, fifty or sixty feet above sea level, gently rolling hills that at first we thought would make for a nice change. The previous summer we’d distributed the wheat sheaves across the whole field; here the latest science sent us to the edges, out of the dips, and we were constantly running, pursued by the magically returning machines and carrying sheaves not much smaller than ourselves. The days went by fast. Where we’d been the day before, the stubble was already being plowed over, deep for the seed and fertilizer drills, shallow for the sugar beets, because a day in July’s worth as much as a week in August: as Johnny taught us on his frequent visits out to see if “Jakob’s girls” were ready to give up. We would have been ashamed to look Jakob in the face if we gave up; what he’d brought back from Schlegel’s farm were earnings, not presents. Sometimes Hanna was older than me—she said about the thirst: It’s worse at sea. When the sheaf-binding harvesters had to be run without twine, those were bad days, because the straw rope didn’t easily reach around the sheaves the machine could tie, and also because it was harder to tell when our work would be over. It gradually dawned on us that Schlegel might not have just cut some pages out of the land registry to save his nearly four hundred acres from confiscation; probably the Soviet officers from the Beckhorst farm had helped him out, the ones who often came by at dusk, greeted casually and without fear, like ordinary visitors. Maybe. But why was Johnny’s missing arm inevitably the cause of such laughter, even from Johnny himself? We w
ere equipped with pieces of truck tires that we tied onto our feet with gas-mask straps, as sandals, but still the ankle-high stubble found its way in, and at night Hanna would put balm and bandages on my feet, and I on hers. We dreamed gray and white and yellow, the massive clouds in the sky, the ears of wheat, the stubble, the firm sandy paths. Over breakfast there was a BBC program in which, again and again, the Austrian was made to scream out his thing about the last battalion on earth. We learned how to pack cartloads of wheat. Our skin hardened, much too slowly. Awns of wheat in our face continued to startle us. Grain is what the earth bears and everywhere in the world what’s most important is called corn, Korn: maize in America, rye in Germany, wheat in France and Mecklenburg. Triticum vulgare: Johnny said. When the carts drove in, Hanna took the spot up on top of the wheat, I liked walking next to Jakob’s sorrel and wanted the horse to recognize me. I meant it as affection when I took hold of the harness as if to lead him, but it was more like hanging on for support. When the thresher started up with its flapping belt it looked ingenious yet cruder than the simple trick nature might still have up her sleeve for exploiting the corn. The wheat. The other children spent the harvesttime in the orchard, or cleaning out the stables, or helping in the kitchen—Hanna and I were taught to operate the Schütte-Lanz. She was allowed to go onto the threshing floor before me, to cut the ropes around the sheaves and pass the wheat, fanned out in a flat sheet over her arm, to Mrs. von Alvensleben. The names on the farm were: Inge, Johnny, Johnny sin Olsch (his missus), Mr. Sünderhauf, Mrs. Sünderhauf, Mrs. von Alvensleben, Mr. Leutnant, Mrs. Lakenmacher, Mrs. Schurig, Mrs. Bliemeister, Mrs. Winse, Anne-Dörte, Jesus, Axel Ohr, Hen and Chickee, the Englishmin, Epi, and then the children under thirteen; there was an old strip of film in the drawer, but it was for a box camera, and that had been left behind in Jerichow and couldn’t be fetched, so all but four of the faces are now forgotten. Anne-Dörte had stuck close to us out in the fields; back at the farm she pretended to be Johnny’s goddaughter. We suspected her, if only vaguely, of having had something to do with our new clogs: newly carved, with an arched sole, padded with cloth under the leather, held together with real tacks and wire, they were hanging from our ladder one morning, and they fit, once our feet had healed up. Cresspahl’s daughter reigned behind the threshing machine, leaning on the handle of a pitchfork, and every couple of minutes she would fork a load of the long straw onto a box wagon. If there was twine for the baler, though, the other children had to help out, the ones stationed by the chaff, the sack openings, the short straw. The whirling hum of the machine slowly peeled your brain away from the inside of your skull. Every hour Hanna and Gesine would trade places so that we could keep working, as a team. Anne-Dörte was nineteen and we’d never in our lives seen anyone so pretty—we would never be like that. The clogs couldn’t be from her. Johnny crouched under the machine with us and taught us, there in the dark, the path that the precleaned wheat took through the bucket elevator. He was so pleased. When August 20 arrived he had actually done what he’d planned, forty double-centners of wheat had been driven off to the Soviet Beckhorst farm and he’d been given his receipts, bilingual, with stamps, and now the gentlemen there owed him twine and crude oil and a good reputation. When weren’t Hanna and I together? We always sat together at the table, at the same places, a flask of barley coffee would be sent out to the fields for us and us alone, we were occasionally addressed as a single person, we slept next to each other in the hay in the apple loft above the living room. Of course we didn’t tell each other everything. I was now sure that Cresspahl had slept like this, next to pears and apples arrayed on slats, at Schmoog’s farm when Our Little Granny had died; I wasn’t going to bring up relatives dying with Hanna. Though by this point she knew about her resemblance to Alexandra, and asked about her. Where Alexandra might be now, if. Whether Alexandra would’ve been strong enough to handle the wheat harvest, if. On other nights we would decide—shyly, cautiously—that some other adults might be exceptions. Mrs. von Alvensleben, definitely. Johnny, with reservations. Hanna would fall asleep with a great sigh, as if sinking down deep into something. Not a word about Anne-Dörte.

  Yes, Jakob kept his promise and visited. Before long we could tell when he was near the farm: Anne-Dörte’s chair would remain empty at dinner, and at around our bedtime she would reemerge from the woods and come into the hall, her hair more carefully combed than usual, in her one, gray knit dress. A few minutes more and there would be Jakob in the doorway, relaxed, cheerful, not like he’d just been walking for two hours. Maybe it was the wind off the sea that had tousled his hair like that. Then, before disappearing into the living room for his business with Johnny, he would talk to us. Have a little chat. Concern himself with the children. Like a legal guardian. He’d never promised us any more than that. We never followed Anne-Dörte, even though we’d see her on the footpath leading to the sea between the pines. Sometimes her hair would be wet when she came back, Jakob’s too. Now we knew why we’d never found Jakob’s bed. On the nights of Jakob’s visits we would lie in the moonlight shining from over the sea, silently pretending to each other that we were asleep; neither of us would be woken by the other one’s tears, and we were too tired to talk in our sleep.

  That was also how we lay there the night of the rain that destroyed the rest of the harvest across the whole region. It was on August 27, 1946, and people said there’d never been a storm like it in living memory. The clouds poured down with a violence that Johnny decided to describe as tropical,

  like the torrents of rain a little while ago, at 2:45 p.m., filling the space between the buildings on Third Avenue with such deep darkness. When brightness flashed up, the racing drops seemed sharp. New darkness, now accompanied by thunderclaps, made the riverbed of the street look wintry, the slick pavement full of reflected light from the shopwindows, like at night. The thick panes rattled under the blows of a normal New York rainstorm

  and people were assigned only work that could be done indoors. A thick sack folded into a hood would be wringing wet after the fifty feet to the farm building. Not even the animals calmly endured what was darkening their stall doors for so long. There were places in the farmyard that looked like deep lakes. Johnny taught us the average August precipitation in the region: 2.6 inches. That evening he said he estimated there’d been 7.5 inches of rain that day alone. The forced inactivity, the creeping damp soon emptied the hall; we couldn’t stick it out any longer with Johnny either and lay down on our tarps in the apple loft. The thatch roof crackled and smelled more and more like a crushing weight. It was already dark, because of night, but we couldn’t close our eyes. Worse than during our dreary monotonous motions in the wheat, a single thought kept turning around and around in our heads, returning again unchanged every time: It was not our fate to be a countess like Anne-Dörte. But someday we too would be nineteen, with faces as lively as hers, with visible breasts, firm bodies, aware too of our legs—just not at the right time. It would be too late. In our cave under the pelting rain it was so quiet that maybe Hanna thought I was asleep. The empty blackness woke to her furious voice: I’m not a child anymore! It sounded determined, unrepentant, and I hated her, because she wasn’t suffering enough under the calamity I’d thought was as huge for her as it was for me. Again she was older than me.

  “When the young fellows talk to you don’t you answer them and don’t look at them and don’t turn around. If they still won’t stop then get rid of them nice and quick: Yes. No. Might be. Don’t know. I see.

  When a young fellow’s peeled an apple or pear and wants to give it to you, just let it be, don’t eat it.

  When the young fellows sit next to you and want to talk to you and want to hold your hand, just pull your hand right back and stick it in your apron, and then if they won’t stop turn your back on them and don’t give them any answer at all.

  Then when the young fellows bring some musicians in the night or act crazy some other way, like they’ll probably do, and right outside your
room too, say: You think I’m here for you? I don’t think so. You don’t look the type to me.