by Uwe Johnson
– You can say that again. He’s their ally. He knows that. He’s grateful to them, and not in the bourgeois way either, where all that matters is material things. Though of course they help you that way too. When you need a car the commandant sends you one, complete with driver and as much gas as you need, vouchers too. Grimm doesn’t get all that, Christian Democrat as he’s unmasked himself as being—he doesn’t even get time off for campaign trips, he needs to get the district administration in order first. If a bourgeois local branch in Old Demweis seems a little fishy, you can just say so and before you know it the SMA has revoked its registration. There were 2,404 municipalities in Mecklenburg and the Liberals wanted 152 local branches for them—they should be happy with 65! The Christian Democrats tried to register 707 local branches; they’ll be lucky to get 237! Your party, though, gets an office everywhere, and your New Germany is for sale in every store, and the Tägliche Rundschau too, daily as promised; you think the Soviets should slog away with things like Neue Zeit or Der Morgen, which come out only twice a week anyway? At first your jaw drops when your party gets eight hundred tons of paper for marketing while the CDU and LDPD are allocated just nine tons between them—but then you see why. What do they have to say anyway. What do they know. The people have to be given the right information, you won’t disappoint your friends; while the bourgeoisie are still wrangling with the local commandants for permits for their meetings or posters, you’ve already been sweeping through five villages. You don’t need to submit your speeches for approval, and anyway you speak without a script. And if you’re stuck in the deepest woods near the coast with engine trouble, who comes and gets you, in a jeep, with a spare car? The Red Army—they sacrifice time and manpower to get you to your next meeting, in Beidendorf, almost on time. And anyway, a Communist is the only man friends can know for sure is a natural-born foe of Fascism to the death; there was nothing to worry about there, that tremor, which passed through his brain as he fell asleep and sometimes half the night through, couldn’t be coming from that.
– What else does he need to be grateful for, Gesine? It’s like having Rockefeller help you in an election!
– What else is he grateful for? For being taught the right way to think! The Red Army doesn’t just give him rent-free housing with Alma Witte, bring him food from the city’s communal provisions, eventually give him a leather jacket and a pair of ankle boots, used but that’s all right. No, his bodily comforts are not enough, and he would forgo those if he had to, as long as your friends go on making sure that your mouth doesn’t get stuck, like the flounder’s after he’d gulped down a dozen herring. The things they taught him! Let’s take the word: election. In the beginning he used it to refer to something that actually exists. Everyone means the same thing by it, no one has more control over it than anyone else, it’s a simple label for your current assignment from the party. Then J. J. Jenudkidse summons you to Town Hall, in the middle of a workday, and these are five minutes you will never forget. Triple-J, all fake unapproachability, is sitting behind an empty desk, in front of a three-foot-wide three-foot-high portrait of Goethe, next to Dr. Beese who is supplementing her income by giving German lessons in Town Hall. Both of them are giving you a silent, roguish look, as if to say that you’re in for a surprise. But no one purses his lips as impishly as Jenudkidse. He asks you one single question—just one word, a German one: Wahlkampf. “Election.” And you’ve grasped once and for all your special ownership over the Wahl or choice, the different choices, the Kampf or struggle, the hostilities, and of course the enemies required for there to be such a thing; you wanted to explain it to Elise Bock but she just put the folder of signatures down in front of you again, perfectly calm, not interested in your excitement. You can hardly wait the few days until the meetings, until the moment when the respective mayor introduces you as the comrade from the district and at last you can start your speech! You don’t come to the office for days, you can be reached only by phone and chance in the villages around Gneez, ten meetings a day are one too few as far as you’re concerned and you show up to the eleventh like a boxer, and wherever you wake up you find a slip of paper next to the bed that you’ve scribbled full of the ideas that’ve come to you, that’ll help you do even better! Then you think maybe you’re feeling guilty.
– Keep talking, Gesine.
– The first harvest on free soil. The Junkers’ ruthless exploitation, from the twenties right through to the liberation. Three hundred thousand more acres cultivated than in 1945. The Red Army halts the dismantling of the Neptun docks in Rostock, creates jobs by setting up an SAG. The Hanseatic dockyard in Wismar is expanded around the Dornier factory, given harbor equipment from Szczecin (formerly known as Stettin). The Soviet Union is helping, as brothers, and not only today, it always has. The Krassin, the same Soviet icebreaker that saved the crew of the airship Italia in the summer of 1928 after it crashed and was trapped in the ice off Spitsbergen, also battled to rescue the icebound ships off Warnemünde in the winter of 1929, including the ferryboat to Denmark. But it wasn’t about the Soviets, it wasn’t about the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was about the New Beginning, the Reconstruction, in alliance with the anti-Fascist forces, including the bourgeois ones, insofar as they’re honest. Neglect of the victors’ anti-Fascist obligations on the part of the English and Americans, Nazis left in the government there, in the police, in the Schutzpolizei, in the Gneez gendarmerie. Swept out of power, the country cleaned up, parliamentary democracy, all democratic rights and freedoms to the people—under the protection of the Soviet Union.
– “SAG”?
– Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaft. Soviet joint-stock corporation.
– I wasn’t asking for a definition, I was heckling.
– When in Rome. . . . Use the bourgeois economic forms at hand.
– Equal rights for women. Women get less tobacco rations on their cards than men!
– Alcohol too. Well, there it is. That’s why Comrade District Councilman always carried a packet containing two cigarettes on him. He’d throw it in the general direction of the woman complaining, shouting: Take them! My last ones! And first things first: massive election turnout, victory for the Socialist Unity Party (for the name if nothing else), then we’ll handle this. It looked cute, actually, him shrugging his shoulders in his leather jacket and giving a slightly pained smile—giving up his last two cigarettes!
– He wasn’t a smoker himself.
– Of course not. Got his pairs of single cigarettes from the Red Army commissary.
– And then he lost the vote.
– Then he lost. In the September 15 municipal elections the LDPD and CDU received almost twenty-five percent of the votes cast. His party, along with the allied Farmers’ Aid and Women’s Committees, received a mere sixty-six out of a hundred. He was truly crestfallen, avoided Triple-J and everything. Only got through his first night by drinking. No matter how insistently he told himself that it had, after all, been a fight, the fact was he hadn’t won it overwhelmingly. More than a quarter of the people in Mecklenburg didn’t trust him. Plus he’d disappointed his friends. Now he thought he could put his finger on what he’d been feeling during the past few weeks: fear of failure, a premonition of defeat. Someone older would have felt relieved at least to know; at twenty-three, he was almost beyond help.
June 22, 1968 Saturday
In České Budějovice there’s a bishop who’d been out of commission for sixteen years, i.e., expelled from his diocese and under house arrest. Last Sunday he was permitted to celebrate mass once again in his St. Nikolaus Cathedral, in the presence of three representatives of the secular authorities, who acted perfectly polite. The very next Tuesday, the police called him to tell him about a man who’d lost a large sum of money while counting it on a train at an open window. Might the custodians of law and order bring this unfortunate man over, to receive from the bishop the kind of consolation a police precinct couldn’t give?
The Bishop from Budwe
is could only consider such a request, from the selfsame state that had deported him in March 1951 (then too using a detail of three men), as a most heartening symbol of his future in the ČSSR.
In the second autumn after the war, Cresspahl’s daughter stopped giving Pastor Brüshaver the time of day. She didn’t even try to pretend she hadn’t noticed this man of the cloth. She saw him all right—who didn’t? His thinness was not from the past year’s hunger—the Nazi camp seemed to have restructured his whole body into a small-boned frugal model; the pants and coats of 1937 flapped about him, flapped from his careful, almost stiff movements too. Nor did Gesine give Brüshaver an ostentatious refusal to greet him—she showed that she recognized him, the way a person walks right by something familiar and of no further use. Just as Brüshaver had managed in the past without pride and severity, he tried for a while to nod at her—first, even though he was the elder! Then he’d just look at the child, without reproach, without seeming puzzled; so then the child could top it off by denying outright any acquaintance at all in this exchange of glances.
Jakob generally recognized soon enough when Cresspahl’s daughter got such a bee in her bonnet; it’s just he rarely managed to talk the bee back out. Jakob was dissatisfied with himself as head of the household.
The household had shrunk: he’d had only three people to report on the People’s Census, plus Cresspahl, Heinrich, under the heading “Resident But Absent.” The NKVD’s Sunday labors in September had done their job, even more so the rumors trying to make all paths lead back to the mayor who’d been hauled off. By the end of September all the refugees moved out, even the teacher from Marienwerder, who’d rather live way out in the Wehrlich forester’s lodge with two other families and look after her baby boy on her own than stay any longer among such dangerous enemies of the Soviets. The housing office didn’t make up for these departures; even the new batch of Sudeten German resettlers were warned in time by the refugees already established in Jerichow to avoid the lonely house on Brickworks Road, right across from the Kommandatura—a place of countless house searches, a dead loss for future prospects. Living in isolation, like in a haunted house, were Gesine in her little room, Mrs. Abs in Cresspahl’s big parlor, and Jakob on the other side of the hall. In the back part they used only the kitchen and, every now and then, put Mr. Krijgerstam or kindred business partners up in one of the pantries. It was a real household only in the evenings; at breakfast Mrs. Abs made lunch for the two others, then the door was locked until everyone came home from work and school, unsupervised. At that point there was sometimes a light on where Cresspahl used to do his writing: the child was doing her homework, Mrs. Abs was carding wool, and Jakob, on nights without overtime or business appointments, would furtively watch the others over the top of his Russian dictionary, head of the household, dissatisfied with himself.
His mother had handed him both the official status of head of household and the actual responsibility of running it even before Cresspahl’s disappearance, as soon as he’d refused to participate in the land lottery. However much he’d disappointed her, the farm property had been intended to be his in any case. She didn’t want to discuss it any further, not even attempts at explanation or apology. Her job cooking at the hospital left her just enough energy to make dinner and keep things moderately clean. It was he who’d decided that they should stay with this utterly parentless child, in a strange house, in a rural part of Mecklenburg without more than a few dozen square feet of garden—let him manage it. He was old enough. Let him be responsible. Anyway she was busy waiting for her husband. She described neither him nor Cresspahl as someone who would return as a judge to condemn Jakob’s stewardship. And as for her, Jakob thought she was resigned, if not content. This strange child, Gesine Cresspahl, on the other hand was unfathomable to him. She had shaken hands with Brüshaver at Amalie Creutz’s grave. Was it only because they’d been there to assist the mourners? She had obediently accompanied her father to the first church service this Brüshaver had held after the war—the fourth time total she had set foot in St. Peter’s Church since her christening, same as Cresspahl. So why not since? She was only thirteen, after all; what could a child like that know about the pros and cons of the Protestant congregation?
He did see her making distinctions. If it was in fact contempt she was showing to various particular adults. If there was anything at all she was trying to show. So, for instance, she would sometimes come back on the same train as Dr. Kliefoth—they’d have shared a compartment and would walk together down Station Street to the corner of the market square; the old man and the child had no need to talk, they clearly belonged together. Were allies. From earlier times? Jakob had no way of knowing. This Kliefoth was a university-educated man, like Brüshaver, someone to show respect to—to him she practically curtseyed, while Brüshaver she left in the dust like an empty shopwindow. Then there was Louise Papenbrock, the girl’s natural grandmother, and the girl would cross the street to avoid her. That might go back to habits from her father’s time—impossible to know, as always. But she’d let Heinz Wollenberg stop her for a chat. Just because she took the train to school with his Lise? With Peter Wulff she would stop on her own; she would talk to him. Jakob could see this with his own eyes, and she’d tell him about it. Usually it was about Cresspahl. Then Jakob would keep his mouth shut and his eyes on the Cyrillic column in his book—he didn’t think Cresspahl was coming back. (In his view, Cresspahl was dead.) If she needed comfort, she should go get it from the man whose job was to provide it. But to him she wouldn’t give the time of day.
While well brought up children always greet their elders. Right, Jakob?
We certainly wanted you to learn such things.
Because you’d never been around people like Stoffregen.
There was something between you and the church, Gesine. After a year in Jerichow I knew that much.
Did you go to St. Peter’s Church on Sundays, or out to Johnny’s?
Gesine, we weren’t from your denomination. I didn’t feel like going to Gneez just because there was someone there from the Old Lutheran Church in Schwerin every three months.
Didn’t I go to the Old Lutheran services in Gneez with your mother? I brought her there. I stayed there. I sang along with them!
Stoffregen was with the Nazis. He’d beaten children. Brüshaver spent seven years in the camps. Lost four children of his own. And instead of giving himself a rest he goes into politics.
Exactly.
And you won’t say hello on the street.
He went into politics with the Soviets. The Soviets had my father. Brüshaver didn’t get Cresspahl out of Soviet hands. He didn’t even try.
That’s how you divided people up? Into friends and enemies? Is that what children are like?
What were you like when you were thirteen, Jakob?
Lately the incomprehensible Cresspahl child had gotten involved in the black market. Johnny Schlegel had been able to unload another two sacks of wheat flour at Brickworks Road on the wagon’s way back from the town scales—all aboveboard and in good faith, though Kägebein and the Papenbrock granary would probably have to chalk up a little extra loss to the Red Army. Or to himself. Or to no one at all. Whatever these two sacks might have turned into on the highways and byways of bookkeeping, in reality: Jakob thought: they’d been standing in the back pantry for some two days. Suddenly this Gesine forbade the conversion of the wheat. Because half belonged to Hanna? Her share of the profit could be forwarded. No. Because only Gesine was entitled to make decisions about her property? He’d be happy to discuss it with her. She didn’t give a damn about his discussions, she didn’t want to sell. He calculated for her that she had six thousand marks sitting in those two sacks, but money that would go bad. That was 160 hundredweight of coal. She could get a winter coat out of it—thread, lining, dependable tailoring—with a fortune left over. He knew someone who would part with a pair of winter boots in her size, used of course, for 560 marks, ten percent cheaper
if paid for in wheat flour. This was an evening during the winter of 1946, when he was explaining to her the ways to commercially exploit her harvest earnings: the stove was already burning coal converted from butter (four pounds per hundredweight), the lamp burning the oil he’d laid in for the winter (one mandel-dozen eggs). He hardly seemed very enthusiastic in laying out these calculations for her because such transactions would cost him a lot of time, not to mention the distances, but he was happy to do his part toward paying a real rent in this house. He was even sure that he hadn’t used a didactic tone, he certainly hoped not; all of a sudden the child leapt up—you try to understand it—snatched up her school notebooks as if someone was trying to rip them out of her hands, and ran off. Jakob was left with the slam of the door; a shake of the head from his mother, whose veiled derision was aimed at him, not the girl; and two shouts from Gesine that scared him. Not because they were unjust but simply because he couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was shouting. Is this how children are?
Jakob didn’t understand. The next morning the child apologized to him. Breathing heavily as she chewed. Asked if he’d really meant it. What, accepting her apology? Of course, it was nothing. No, his plan for the winter. Then this child stands facing the window and resists so stubbornly as he tries to pull her by her braids that eventually the older boy lets go and promises, in a dignified, distinctly reserved manner: Whatever you want, Gesine.
Vilami na vodje?
No. Not written with a fork in the water, as you put it.
This was on the Sunday before the state elections, so they had plenty of time to draw up the plan according to which the wheat would be converted into enough supplies to last until next spring. For a long time Jakob felt uneasy in these meetings because of Gesine’s submissive acquiescence to everything. He felt like he was cheating her. She approved of whatever he wanted to lay in—shoe soles, new wool, fire starters; he’d have preferred an occasional protest. He was all the more taken aback by her one and only condition, which he had blindly promised to accept: not only the list of commodities was to be agreed on between them but every trade route, every business partner had to be discussed with her.