Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – I like how you look in photos from then, Gesine. If I may say so myself.

  – But she was blond, Marie. That was considered pretty in those days. She was a grown-up; she was over my problems: what to do with your breasts, how a girl gets a baby. She was tall, almost willowy, but impressive. I loved to see how she held out her arm, or bent her knees to lean down. Such harmonious, flowing movements. She had a small, voluptuous mouth; I was mad at the language for saying my lips were “protruding.” Slata nodded with her eyes when she listened to you. She would pass me on the street with a closed, withdrawn expression, preferring not to acknowledge me; still, I felt invited to look back, be playful even. I would feel like we’d exchanged smiles after all, and said: Hi. Hey, how are you? You too.

  – Such an important character. And you try to keep her from me.

  – Then she disappeared. She was gone from my life. Once, when the midday train to Jerichow wasn’t running again, I dropped in on Mrs. Witte, not knowing, just remembering when I’d had my lunches at the City of Hamburg, I wasn’t thinking about Slata at all, and Slata was all Alma could talk about although she’d lost the power to form words. She just pointed around the room she’d given Slata as a bedroom, I followed the movements of her crippled finger, wanting to reassure her, and I set a nightstand back on its feet, swept up broken glass from the rug, hung some dresses back up, tidied up Fedya’s torn-apart bed, and was just about to dash off and run to Jerichow on foot to warn Cresspahl but I had to go into Alma’s kitchen and put on a kettle, get tea out of the can marked “Salt,” all following her helpless breathing and panting.

  – It happened to Slata because of a mistake, Gesine.

  – It happened very suddenly. J. J. J. had driven up to the hotel like he did every morning, whistled cheerfully up to her window, but this time he’d brought four armed men with him and whipped up his anger by stomping up the stairs. That’s how much he’d changed since the night before, but she hadn’t.

  – Did they beat her?

  – Yes, because she resisted. Her child had a fever and needed to stay in bed.

  – She was the wife of a Nazi, even if not legally. One who’d set villages in Ukraine on fire.

  – Triple-J knew that when he hired her and trusted her. He’d forgiven her.

  – She’d had a son with this Robert Papenbrock.

  – He spoke Russian better, his name wasn’t Fritz anymore, he answered to Fedya.

  – Her name turned up in Cresspahl’s files.

  – Yes. But that’s not why they picked her up.

  – Gesine, you didn’t want to tell me this because of that ax you have to grind. You think I’ll misunderstand the Soviets again. But I’m understanding them.

  – As long as no one gets beaten.

  – Gesine. I don’t like that kind of punishment. But I don’t like when someone betrays his country. You’re trying to tell me it’s a good thing. First Cresspahl, then Slata.

  – Tell it to Slata.

  – I see. She came back. We can talk to her, try to explain. Someone explained it to her a long time ago.

  – She didn’t come back. And Fedya survived the trip to the Soviet Union, then died in the camp.

  – Gesine, rewind the tape to Alma Witte. I wish I hadn’t said all that. Let me think it over first. Next time warn me. Say: “Stop.”

  – Here Mrs. Witte had lost something: Fedya, who’d learned to call her Grandma, not Louise Papenbrock. A little three-year-old boy. She could carry him in her arms. Where are you, where are you, my little chickee? And she’d lost the mother with the child. A mother who could’ve easily lorded it over her landlady but she’d been quiet, a shade too independent but occasionally daughterly. This young thing had given her the respect she was entitled to. A Mrs. Witte liked that. And when the proprietress of the City of Hamburg Hotel praises Miss Podyeraitska’s politeness for no apparent reason, it cuts a wide swath through public opinion, especially when she hints at the presence of other virtues too. The Angel of Gneez. In addition to that, Alma Witte had lost what the good townsfolk call pride. It takes more than hard work in a Mecklenburg country town to keep a hotel in second place behind the Archduke, with no close third. The district court judges had dined with her, the teachers and principals, army officers from good families. At night when she walked through the dining room the men would stand up to greet her. If someone from out of town wanted to be introduced to her, he’d better have one of the old well-established guests with him. One time, she’d told the Mecklenburg Reich governor’s entourage to keep it down, and hadn’t waited to see that her request was obeyed, and their corner had settled back down to the usual level. Commissioner Vick—from the police, not the Gestapo, because I’m an upstanding National Socialist!—had to watch his behavior or else she’d refuse to serve him. The Soviets had turned the building into an inn for functionaries of the new administration and visiting party officials, and yet she called Mr. Jenudkidse “chivalrous”; she’d joined them for dinner like an honorary chairman; merrymaking of the kind that went on at Louise Papenbrock’s was unthinkable. Whether Mrs. Witte felt affable or respectful behavior was appropriate, the behavior always was appropriate. The thing is that her whole sense of propriety depended on her being accepted, recognized, responded to. Such mutual partnership had been wiped out by the raid on her apartment. She no longer trusted in the exchange of similar manners and mutually agreed-upon forms. The Alma Witte of earlier days would have turned up at Town Hall in her best Sunday clothes and requested that the commandant clear up the incident, diplomatically assessing whether to demand an apology or if she’d ultimately have to let the faux pas go. But they hadn’t even waited for her to open the door, they’d crashed through it and broken all her rare frosted glass. They’d ignored her dignified protests and dragged guests out of her home, in defiance of all morality. They’d shoved her in the chest, and certainly not held out a hand to help her get up—a lady of sixty-five! Alma Witte submitted nothing in writing to the Kommandatura, neither a request for mercy for her young friend nor a petition for compensation for damages. She couldn’t even feel satisfaction at J. J. Jenudkidse now spending his evenings off at the Archduke Hotel, now known as the Dom Ofitserov—it wasn’t because he felt any embarrassment in front of her. Around town she was invited to comment on Slata’s departure, and declined with sad dignity, as if refusing a course at the dinner table; again she was leaving an exaggerated wake of Soviet renown behind her, but actually she’d only wanted to avoid complaining. From a child she could demand that a shameful sight be forgotten. And I didn’t need to be especially obedient to do that. To me she was a very old woman, why wouldn’t she have fits or bouts of something. I hoped she felt better soon.

  – You liked her too, Gesine.

  – I’ve liked lots of people in my life.

  – Couldn’t it have been pity, Gesine?

  – Pity for what. If she’d cried it would have been contagious and I would have too. But I couldn’t be a pitying child.

  – Am I jealous, Gesine? Of Slata? Of a proprietress of the City of Hamburg Hotel in Gneez? Is it possible?

  – “Stop.”

  – No. No. I need to know.

  – Mrs. Witte was never the same again, except outwardly. It wasn’t the Red Army’s manners that were her undoing—it was about her. Once, in spring 1946, I had to ask her if I could spend the night, the evening train to Jerichow had been canceled as well. She casually gave me permission, because one didn’t set foot in Alma Witte’s home as an imposition or to make some request, you had to follow the formalities of a social visit. Her salon had been repaired and she made me sit down in it for a proper conversation about the canceled train, sabotage?, requisition?, about the Gneez district administration office, about Cresspahl. She hadn’t become nervous or afraid. And along with all that she was educating me in the finer points of middle-class polite conversation: replies in complete sentences, clear enunciation, euphemisms where appropriate and the whole truth
when proper. She seemed undamaged to me. At about nine o’clock, unhurried, every inch a lady, she went downstairs with me into the former hotel reception desk, where she’d heard some noise that she planned to put a stop to. It was nothing but a lost Red Army soldier, two girls had caught his eye at the train station, a couple of junior teachers, guests of this establishment, chicks from out of town, they were supposed to just precede the young drunk to the Kommandatura, where he’d have gotten what was coming to him and a safe place to spend the night too. Now he’d stumbled into the Hamburg Hotel lobby and was waving his gun around in the half-open door to the reception area, admittedly too drunk to shoot, totally wasted in fact, but still drawn to the company of the young ladies who’d so mysteriously vanished into a wall here. That’s when I saw Alma Witte’s crooked index finger again. She pointed at the flailing figure in the lobby the same way she’d once indicated wrinkles in a tablecloth, spots on a knife, cigar stubs on the rug, whatever had to be straightened out, cleaned up, discreetly removed. But now there was no staff to leap to do her bidding; now she could not speak. This imperious person found herself surrounded by two educational experts, a woman who had almost qualified as a People’s Court judge, Comrade Schenk emerging slowly from the dining hall—a man by the look of him—but not one of them understood what Mrs. Witte’s trembling finger meant. It was a young female person who crept along the wall to the lobby, pushed the banging door shut, and turned the key in the lock, reaching up from her cautious kneel.

  – He could have fired!

  – He took his cue from the door. It was shut. The girls were gone. He just wanted some sleep.

  – Why didn’t any of you report him to the Kommandatura?

  – Someone would’ve had to go out the back of the hotel, down a swaying ladder from Mrs. Bolte’s apple yard, into the courtyard, over the wall, onto the street, and maybe right into the arms of another wandering lost soldier. Comrade Schenk forbade it, for the public good. At which Mrs. Witte forbade it again, pointing her finger at him outraged that he would give orders in her house. She wasn’t vindictive. The drunk kid would’ve gotten a terrible beating at Town Hall and then another round after Triple-J had been woken up, because he would have reminded Slata’s protector of where she’d lived. No, Alma Witte hadn’t become nervous or afraid, and wasn’t vindictive. She’d just lost her pride. The befuddled sleeper moved off before it was light out, and Mrs. Witte scrubbed the area between the inner and outer doors twice before anyone else in the hotel woke up. That’s how she was now.

  – And the person who locked the door, Gesine, was that you?

  – I stood there, unable to tear my eyes away from that crippled, humiliated finger. I kept telling myself, over and over and over again: Don’t laugh. Whatever you do, don’t laugh. Why aren’t you laughing, Marie?

  – You know a lot more stories like that, don’t you.

  – A lot more.

  – And you’re sure I’ll take them the wrong way.

  – I’m afraid you might.

  – Wait and see, Gesine. Wait and see.

  The East German Communists plan to demand even more money from citizens of West Germany on their way to West Berlin. Now these citizens will have to pay not only for the tracks their tires leave on the roads but also for a visa, whether they’re rich or poor, retirees or trucking companies; and a passport for foreign travel will be required too. There are three obvious reasons for the stratagem: They want to intimidate the people in the foreign city; they need hard currency to buy Western machinery and equipment; they are simply stressing their sovereignty and national dignity. They do not want to be misunderstood in such ignominious terms, and so they provide a reason of their own: it’s about retaliating for the West German emergency laws, which don’t apply to them.

  Because give them a whole basketful of Easter eggs and they’ll incorruptibly stick to the rules of international diplomacy. They do not get involved.

  June 13, 1968 Thursday

  The Czechoslovak Communists have put a new travel law before the National Assembly, all they have left to do is finalize the precise wording for the exceptions. The exceptions are citizens facing judicial proceedings, persons in active or upcoming military service, bearers of state or scientific secrets, and those who have damaged Czechoslovak interests on previous trips abroad. Everyone else is guaranteed the right to a passport valid for all countries and not requiring an exit visa, and they’ll be able to go wherever they want for as long as they want and the homeland will welcome them back in friendship upon their return. Hopefully the Soviets won’t be sad again when they read about this in a Prague paper, or in Freedom, out of Halle, East Germany.

  The weather. It’s supposed to be sunny, dry, and mild today, cool tonight.

  – All right Gesine, can I set a trap for you? I was clumsy yesterday. Today I’ll get you.

  – Can I set a trap for you too, Marie?

  – I know yours. You won’t see mine.

  – Mary Fenimore Cooper Cresspahl!

  – And Henriette. Ready?

  – The tape’s running.

  – Gesine, were the Soviets in your country more out of control than the British in India?

  – They behaved like occupiers. The country was theirs, they wielded the power, and along with the glory they wanted to make sure they didn’t get a raw deal.

  – But the losers weren’t all equally afraid of them. The ones who had something to lose. The middle class. What you call the bourgeoisie.

  – If they were scared of the New Order it wasn’t over their place in it. That had already been locked in.

  – It was such a fat index finger, Alma Witte’s. Chalk white, trembling. She was bourgeois.

  – No. Take just the people in Jerichow, they weren’t the Witte type. They genuinely wanted to surrender everything, starting with their sense of identity, if only they could keep their money, as a way to acquire possessions and more money. And the Soviets let them. The potatoes and wheat and milk went through their shops, just like before, and even the green Soviet fence went through their account books, they made money on others’ labor same as ever. Even Papenbrock had been able to keep his granary, and his representative managed it for him, Waldemar Kägebein, who’d turned out to be right after all with his copy of Aereboe’s Handbook of Agriculture. He charged a fee for receiving the grain, another for storing it, another for shipping it, and they weren’t only written down in Papenbrock’s books, they were deposited in the bank. If Louise could only charge forty-three reichpfennigs for bread, she just mixed in enough bran so that she could still make a profit. No one gives me anything for free either, she used to say, contentedly in a position to think: And no one’s gotten much off me.

  – They took her husband though.

  – He was replaced by a trustee. Exactly as under the old laws.

  – Wasn’t she in danger too?

  – If Albert came back and she hadn’t taken good care his property, never mind if she’d let it get frittered away, then she’d really be in danger, that’s what she thought. True, the Soviets might invite her on a little joyride who knows where: she thought she’d survive it, knowing she was innocent, the same way she expected Papenbrock home any day now, vindicated, pure as the driven snow. Besides, hadn’t she been nice to the Red Army, hospitable even, when Mr. Wassergahn’s crowd destroyed her living room parquet with their dancing? The only thing that could happen now was an accident of some kind, and for that eventuality she had Horst’s widow in reserve, admittedly of inferior background, from the shoemakers’ town, but still a daughter-in-law, predestined to take over managing the inheritance. Why would the chain be broken?

  – Her friends in the nobility had run away from the Russians.

  – That was a relief, as far as your middle class were concerned. The victors’ punishment had fallen on others’ heads, for now. How could your middle class keep up a friendship that had become impractical, which is to say bad for business? Pure friendship for morality�
�s sake, without any value? There was no longer any point in imagining an alliance with the Plessens, the Upper Bülows; in fact, quite a few things came to Louise’s mind that implied, if anything, a certain hostility: a greeting ignored or airily returned, failing to be invited to the von Zelck double wedding in 1942. Back then she would never have found fault, not even with a doubtful nod at the Lüsewitzes, at the fact that a member of the German landed aristocracy was keeping forced laborers locked in the farm stalls, foreign laborers but still—now she tucked her chin firmly into her collar and spoke of justice with pious severity. Another family, the von Haases, were staying in one of the Papenbrocks’ attic rooms. They’d been deported from southern Mecklenburg, farther from their estate than the prescribed thirty kilometers. Louise nagged at them in the kitchen when they came to get water, and if their daughter Marga gave her the slightest bit of back talk Louise would shout after her: I bet your mother used to hit prisoners of war too! Which she had no evidence for at all, beyond her imagination. She wanted these people and the uncomfortable memories out of her house. She would have slammed the door in a fugitive von Bothmer’s face.