Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Boys from next door are always the worst.”

  On the way back home, honorably discharged, thanked man-to-man, we couldn’t believe our eyes. In the forest one of us always walked ahead of the other with her hand behind her back, ready to give the sign: Someone’s coming (on the right or on the left); no one came, we thought we’d just been lucky. The people in the village, who’d always given Schlegel’s people such grumpy answers or better yet none at all, looked angrily right past us as usual—but we saw an open farm gate, and a box on undamaged rubber wheels in the yard, with a long bar that you could attach to a jeep, it was new, in five hops we could have had it and been long gone. It was eerie seeing the gate open like that, unguarded. On the long walk down the shoreline cliffs, the wind from the sea hid the smell of the motorcycle that shot out of the Countess Woods and was right in front of us before we could even start running; the Red Army men drove right past us, not looking at us, looking mad, all officers, one huddling in the sidecar as if sick. We were positive we recognized the uniforms. We couldn’t believe it. In Jerichow, though, by the time we got to the Rande road, the Germans were truly taking it too far. We saw a girl in a skirt and a white blouse, right there on the street, well within sight of the Soviets guarding the airfield; from a distance she looked a bit like Lise Wollenberg, who knew better. Then a woman passed us riding a bicycle in broad daylight, through this area, and she had an honest-to-God canister of milk hanging on the handlebars. Walking down Town Street we realized how many women there were in Jerichow now, because suddenly they were wearing dresses again, and we could see who was poor because they were still wearing pants. Bergie Quade walked by as we were scouting out Brickworks Road, and she had buttons open at her neck, her stocky arms were bare and immodest, and Bergie told us. We’d been in the country, we weren’t up to speed on Jerichow. No! The Russians were gone.

  But we saw some on the Rehberge too. Are the Swedes coming?

  Children. No. The Russians aren’t allowed out anymore.

  Like a kinda curfew?

  No, seriously. Sokolovsky worked it out on his own with the party. “My dad is in the party / My mom is in the party . . .”

  Marshal Sokolovsky? The commander in chief?

  He’s confined em all to barracks. They’re living in their rooms. No more going out alone. Almost makes you feel sorry for em, locked up like that.

  Is the commandant still here?

  Yeah, not exactly, Gesine. But otherwise the last few days have been like living at peace.

  Oh. Peace.

  You two might wanna go pritty yourselfs up a little too. And they’re going to be holding elections soon.

  We’re not pritty enough how we are?

  You are. You both are. So its all working out. Everything in life comes in fits and starts

  like when you’re milking a bull.

  What depraved little girls you’ve turned into!

  Hanna promised us again that she’d stay. If Vassily Danilovič Sokolovsky could impose such order, then surely the next thing he’d do would be send Cresspahl back. Hanna could have her apprenticeship.

  Meanwhile the Soviet Military Administration had increased the rationing. With our Card 5, Hanna and I could get three hundred grams of bread instead of a quarter pound. And we had our fat bags of wheat on top of that. We would definitely survive the winter.

  Cresspahl’s front door, previously sealed shut with the board of the protection order, now stood open late into the evenings. The Russians in the Kommandatura were ones we didn’t know. This was apparently the third crowd since K. A. Pontiy.

  – It’s the Twins: Jakob said. We were sitting with his mother, telling her about the farm. We were back from a long trip. She’d kept us close to her while we talked, one arm around each of us, and she exclaimed in the pleading tone that she otherwise used to express disappointment at naughty children: Girls, what a sight you are! She was so quiet and hollow-eyed that she would have looked dead if she weren’t moving. It felt totally and completely like Sunday evening in the house. We bragged about how much food we’d had and refused our dinner. Hanna politely asked who was looking out for Gesine’s grandfather now that the Demwies Twins were in charge in Jerichow. Jakob, the psychologist, the appointed guardian, the expert on girls, let slip: Papenbrock’s been . . . transferred. They’ve transferred him.

  Hanna finished it for him: – Arrested. Gesine was more shocked, but merely blinked. This house was a magnet for danger. It wasn’t safe here.

  And she wasn’t given time to reflect. On September 8, the NKVD worked on Sunday. The following people were hauled away from their breakfasts in Jerichow: Mrs. Ahlreep of Ahlreep’s Clocks, Leslie Danzmann, Peter Wulff, Brüshaver, Kliefoth. The rumors that wouldn’t stop going around Jerichow were quite sure that a carrier pigeon had been sighted over the town. By this point Hanna had lived in Jerichow long enough and was more inclined to notice that all these names had a connection to Cresspahl than to think that the Red Army had gotten worked up over some unsurrendered pigeons or a banned club. That evening the arrested people were released, to avoid attracting notice in their places of work. Rumor had already put them in Neubrandenburg concentration camp, to keep Papenbrock company; in fact they’d been held in the basement under Town Hall. All had been strictly sworn to silence. Having started with Leslie Danzman, Jakob wasted an hour—she lied from fear. Wulff, Kliefoth, and Brüshaver assured him: during their questioning, there’d been maybe two questions about Cresspahl. One poking into Cresspahl’s service on the eastern front in 1917, the other trying to link him to a certain privy councilor in Malchow named Hähn. Kliefoth had heard that name only once before, in connection with some arms deal back in the early twenties.

  Hanna thanked Jakob when he came back from Warnemünde, but only as if he’d done his job. (In our new mode, we only talked to this person in the most cursory way.) Her fishermen relatives had gotten into trouble with the Volkspolizei during the municipal elections. Apparently they’d already sent for Hanna. Hanna was to board the boat in Rande, so that her departure for the British zone wouldn’t attract attention.

  Jakob wasn’t to bring her there. While Hanna said goodbye to him in the house, Gesine stood outside the door, not wanting to see how Hanna and Jakob were going to leave things. In Rande, Hanna didn’t want to board Ilse Grossjohann’s cutter alone. Around midnight we were at the spot known as de Huuk, 11° 7' East, 54° 2' 4" North. Later Gesine realized that Hanna had hugged her as she would a boy.

  For days she could still feel in her arms the sensation of pushing Hanna onto the other boat. She also found it easy to think that Hanna should have stayed with her after all.

  When Gesine came back to the empty bed at sunrise, she found Hanna’s wooden clogs next to hers, all four placed neatly in a row.

  June 4, 1968 Tuesday

  This country now has more than three and a half million men in its armed forces, almost as many as it had in 1953 during the Korean War; today the voters in California will tell Robert F. Kennedy something preliminary about his suitability for the presidency; today’s armed robbery happened at 71 West Thirty-Fifth Street; the citizens of Czechoslovakia, with the permission of the new Communists there, can now know officially as well that the great and good Antonín Novotný was dishonest about political activities not only in 1952 but also in 1954, 1955, 1957, and 1963;

  the East German Communists have released a Columbia University art historian even though “forbidden” buildings may have ended up in front of his camera during his dissertation research on Berlin architecture, and without the Americans having to give anything in return. “You could say it was done with mirrors.”

  That was something that Cresspahl the certified translator, living in New York for the past seven years, had to go look up—just to make sure she wouldn’t feel too at home in the language: “done with a trick.” Nine months in jail and then returned to the outside world without a trial. Sleight of hand. Magic.

  Cresspahl hadn’t been
in jail twenty months yet and he wanted a trial. Wherever things led, he had to get beyond waiting for nothing but the next day.

  Through the wet March of 1946 he’d been busy, which at least felt like movement. The camp on the western border of Soviet Mecklenburg had been meant as a holding camp, but a prisoner was allowed to volunteer for work without risk of punishment. The commandant didn’t thank you if you went through a barracks from floor to ceiling until it was waterproof and draftproof as a house, so the other German prisoners wouldn’t have anything to hold against Cresspahl either. But meanwhile he had his skill to set him apart from the future prospects that made the others crazy with rumors, arguments, bragging. So if he wanted to keep such a facility in good shape it wasn’t to get thanks in return. When he carved himself a birchwood spoon, why not carve another for his bunkmate—though he would have preferred to teach that intellectual’s two left hands how to do it themselves. If a thank-you wasn’t enough, he might accept two pinches of tobacco, but he didn’t let himself get talked into manufacture or trade. And since he divulged almost nothing beyond his name and, more or less, Jerichow, he thought he was simply being ignored in his bunkhouse, at best tolerated. Then, without warning, a sentry came to take him to the guardroom; he didn’t get back until around midnight, and found that not a few people had waited up for him. This was a story he could tell. A wooden trunk was sitting in front of the commandant—Cresspahl had made several. This one had been confiscated direct from the woodshop, not yet bearing the initials of the person who’d ordered it. When challenged he confessed to having built this item of evidence. Questioned over its false bottom, he misunderstood even the second translation before finally admitting the possibility. Then came the order. It earned Cresspahl more sympathy than suspicion from his fellow prisoners—commiseration for forced labor. He spent almost a month over the birthday present for the commandant’s granddaughter: a little chest eight inches high with three divided drawers, a rolltop, a wooden bolt, and, at your command sir, a secret compartment. This thorny assignment had, for once, let him think about something different, his own children: how he would someday build them an even more ingenious miniature dresser, and with real tools. His fee was two packets of Krüll, which he shared with anyone who asked—he knew all about how to act in the slammer by that point. But he needn’t have bothered. The others had started acting like good neighbors; they were more worked up about the lower ranks of their guards ordering trunks too, for what could that mean if not that the Russians would be leaving soon, possibly as early as next week? Cresspahl, though, had to produce even more such containers for Germans, for their trips back to Röbel or Lauenburg, and so was protected from the masses’ preposterous spiritual crises. He had been told: You, wait. That’s how he managed.

  He did not end up spending the winter in the barracks from which, despite the nearby Elde River, he’d hoped for some warmth at least in the morning hours. Starting in December 1946, he was kept beneath a solid house that he imagined was the arsenal in Schwerin. The basement was damp, but not from Pastor’s Pond. His task was to write his life story again. He didn’t produce much, for if running water froze in the cell overnight how were his fingers supposed to relearn how to manage a pencil? Also, the light from the yard, chopped into gray pieces by a grate in the ground overhead, made him go somewhat blind again. The first version of his second autobiography came out in basically tabular form, and so he was severely beaten; he counted himself lucky that the blows hardly ever broke his skin. He’d survived and starved too long on soup to trust his body to heal open wounds. He grasped that his invisible masters were interested in a complete delivery, not a quick one; and thus he was deprived of his childhood years. Born in 1888, son of the wheelwright Heinrich Cresspahl and his wife, Berta née Niemann, a day laborer’s daughter, I was apprenticed to master carpenter Redebrecht in Malchow, Mecklenburg, in 1900, at Easter. They were all dead but there might still be some von Haases, whom Cresspahl remembered not only from when he was a five-year-old shepherd boy but from when he was a thirty-one-year-old member of the Waren Workers Council who’d dug up weapons on their family estate to be used in the agriculturalist Wolfgang Kapp’s putsch. He knew all too well how that family treated sick estate laborers, even before his mother’s death. He was very glad to have such people chased out of Mecklenburg to the other side of the Elbe, even if it went against the grain for him to denounce them personally. This produced such gaps in his chronological account that he got blows in the kidneys from a rifle butt when a year was graded as Poor in the interrogation room, in the neck if it came out Unsatisfactory. The young guys working for the MGB knew the approximate extent of treatment requested but not the daily reason for it, so in the underground corridors they seemed to be merely urging their charges on. They hardly ever seemed to care too passionately. No hatred was required to keep a prisoner awake, the truck engines making music outside in the yard during the interrogations took care of that, and for four nights straight a circular saw too. During the days he had to continue work on his writing assignment. Cresspahl earned himself a lonely week by taking the genealogical aspect of the question a little too seriously and detouring to his grandparents and the years after 1875. Solitary seemed fair. He was free to choose, after all. His new superiors, the expert from Kontrrazvedka and the auditor from the SMT, had handed him an analysis of his class position and his personal role in the wrong turns of world history, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, and it was his choice not to sign it. He didn’t resist out of stubbornness, since he must have been wanting to go back home to his girls. It couldn’t have been solely in service of the truth, since he was soon describing himself as a man who had been in this world for fifty-eight years and had never once made deals or spoken or cooperated with anyone. Possibly he was trying to come clean with the New Justice only to the extent that he could keep others out of it. Sometimes the men evaluating his learning process put an idea or two into his head, for instance an essay on the year 1922, and the name Hähn, privy councilor and arms dealer. Whenever the pupil failed a lesson he could almost perfectly picture the beating he’d be getting the next morning at daybreak, but even so he would sometimes escape from his life into blithe carefree daydreams of a different one, which could equally really have been his: not parting from Gesine Redebrecht in 1904, spending a while with her, with Mrs. Trowbridge starting in 1930, in Bristol, consistently avoiding Richmond, with a thirteen-year-old son Henry, or killed with them both by a bomb, being with Mina Goudelier starting in 1920, but not for long on Kostverlorenvaart behind the Great Market in Amsterdam, better on the Fella River, in Chiusaforte, where he could have not only learned fine inlay work but practiced it too, no not there, not where the Germans would occupy, so . . . Australia, if Goudelier’s daughter would have gone that far with him, across other seas than Papenbrock’s Lisbeth, who in this case would have survived November 1938, or else with all four women together, remembering other High Streets, lakeshores, Broadways, sunrises, picnics in the grass. He didn’t take it personally that he was marginal to those lazily unspooling pictures, or hardly present at all. But when the Red Army gave him a pill it was nothing but aspirin. These didn’t have to be dreams. Nor did his conscience bother him at being confined with food and lodging and a job he had a very poor understanding of while all around the prison people were helping each other get back to normal life through hard work (that was how he imagined it). Responsibility for his actions had been handed to the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, let them answer for his useless sitting around. With such abundant encouragement he had, by January 1947, written his way through his military service in Güstrow (which his idiot daughter never asked about), in February to his touchy feud with the SPD (and his idiot daughter thought she’d hold off on her questions), which added up to 260 pages of his life story but still only two pages typed up and signed, the first version. He persisted in considering himself his judges’ partner, known by name and number, possessing the right to a trial and verd
ict, moving along a more or less agreed-on path, not only moving in time. In late February they canceled the agreement. He was ordered to report “with all his belongings” for transport.

  “Belongings” were something he’d not had since his last move, and he joined the group in the barracks yard like someone just out for an evening stroll. The transport was on foot, in columns of unkempt men who’d been arrested just days before and carried out their guards’ orders with downright Prussian ceremony. They took the doddering old man along out of curiosity, holding his arm as he groggily put one foot in front of the other, but they soon gave up on him, since all he could say when asked about his “case” was: I-I d-d-unno . . . He spoke haltingly, his sentences broke apart, there seemed to be something the matter with his throat too. – ’m fittyeight! he said, maybe because they’d called him Grandpa, but really more to himself, and they all chipped in to give the strange ragtag fellow a cigarette. It was his first tobacco in eleven weeks, it made him feel like his Australian dreams did, to the point where he later wasn’t sure that their march hadn’t actually started in Schwerin. Anyway his eyes weren’t working too well either. Near Rabensteinfeld he realized which way they were moving, and when they reached various crossroads and the others cursed at their steadily eastward direction he thought the whole thing might be for his benefit. For the way through Crivitz should have reminded him of something, maybe a promise, he couldn’t put his finger on it. At Mestlin there was something else he needed to think of, it nagged at him for the next six miles, then he remembered: the turnoff to Sternberg and Wismar and Jerichow, so now he’d missed it. Past Karow it was distressing not to see the rails that should have been off to the left of the road, it was like he was going the wrong way. He reluctantly believed it when he caught sight of Old Schwerin—something was missing at the train station, Krebs Lake confused him, but finally he saw the compass rose on the vane-less old windmill outside of town and stopped resisting: they were giving him one more look at Malchow. Only it was all high, high above him. Knowingly in disguise, as in a dream, he stepped back into the summer of 1904, with wavering songs from the lakeside boulevard wafting over the water of a Friday evening, he walked into the children’s playground for the fair that lasted the whole next day, the Parchim dragoon band was playing, wearing their colorful fairy-tale uniforms, and three horsemen rode out through the town gate, and right in the middle of the leisurely crowd of the dead stood a young man with the master’s daughter between Linden Alley and the big canvas tents, seen by all, discovered by no one, Oh you’re my darling but you’ve got no money, no clogs, no shoes, in 1920 the workers seized the town of Waren and Baron Stephan le Fort of Boek shelled Town Hall with a cannon and the Strikers Council delegates couldn’t get any farther with the people of Malchow, those fellows’re shootin at us now, and a forester on a count’s estate who’d refused to supply the estate owners with wagons for collecting wood and tried to bamboozle them was the only one to be driven out of his house. Never hit man nor beast with a stick stripped of bark, whenever you do they’re bound to die. And that was Olden Malchow on the island, it was, the Gierathschen water between the island and the new town lined with lawns and landings and gables, Mill Hill—the one small bit of the mainland that hadn’t let churches on—a storm a hundred fifty years ago’d helped—the subterranean folk needed somewhere for their Midsummers. A hole had been blasted in the embankment on the other side and sloppily filled in like the soil there couldn’t bear it anymore, you could just about swim over to Wenches Hill, the old Wendish castle mound that a six-year-old had herded geese past, nowadays the subterranean folk were invisible when they walked out on Laschendorf farm in the daytime but a shepherd had once heard them cry Give a hat, give a hat! and he called for his hat and put it on and saw them standing in front of him, Teeny little men with their three-corner hats, they jumped at him and scratched his eyes out and took his magic cap. The little folk in Wenches Hill made such lovely music, they say.