Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  He thought she was curious—children are like that. He agreed, with misgivings. He tried to keep some things secret; this Gesine was liable to go to a partner and start asking questions. She was Cresspahl’s daughter and she got answers, since they thought she already knew in any case. There was no way around it, he had to tell her Mr. Krijgerstam’s business, and from then on this skillful veteran from the Baltic fleet rarely got from the firm of Abs & Cresspahl the bacon he needed to exchange for the oil painting in his Razno-Export, however set on it his sense of art appreciation might be. The connection with Knoop the bigwig ran dry for a while too—here Gesine had heard around town in Gneez more precise information than Jakob could come by in Jerichow: Knoop had been nabbed, he’d tried to go big a bit too fast. The NEP isn’t so easy to tackle for everyone, Emil had to learn that the hard way. There was no doubt that she knew more about people in Jerichow. That’s how Jakob ended up with Jöche, a friend until fall 1956; that’s what brought him together with Peter Wulff, a bond as lasting and irrevocable as any on this earth.

  Jakob had heard that the children in both Jerichow and Gneez schools carried on a trade in the ration stamps they were meant to hand in for their school meals. But this Gesine wanted to know about every shoemaker he approached, every lawyer who turned up, and this even after they were long since past the two hundred pounds of wheat flour. She learned too much. She ended up involved in business that was dangerous, and not only for children. This isn’t how you teach children by example. This isn’t how you head a household.

  And why wouldn’t she have it any other way—who could figure it out?

  Maybe his mother was right and this Cresspahl child was in need of religious instruction. Gesine had a bee in her bonnet about that, he’d certainly realized that by now. But how should he try to talk the bee out of it?

  June 23, 1968 Sunday

  At midnight the American war in Southeast Asia became the longest in the history of the United States, if we assume that the Revolutionary War ended with the British surrender at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781. This war has lasted six years, six months, and now two days.

  Yesterday five Vietnamese children arrived at LaGuardia Airport in a military aircraft on their way to hospitals here. The boys are named Nguyen Bien, ten, hit by a bullet that went through his back on Jan. 8; Doan Van Yen, twelve, wounded by rocket fire on March 4; Le Sam, eleven, third-degree burns by napalm on March 31; and Nguyen Lau, nine, paralyzed below the waist by a gunshot wound in the spine about nine months ago. The New York Times photographed the girl, eight-year-old Le Thi Thum, who came down the staircase in white pajamas, eager and smiling. The Times did not get any closer. In words she adds that the girl has a scar across her face and that her nose is there but lacks a bridge. A Nasenbrücke? Nasensteg?

  – No. Nasenbein.

  For Mrs. Cresspahl is traveling with her daughter through the towns and forests north of New York, on trains, on buses, in taxis, so they share the paper and one corrects the other’s language. Every child has a right to an education. The town squares are quiet, looking forward to lunchtime; in one park, a policeman is motionless on his spot like a monument to himself, an equestrian statue with a radio to his ear; in the woods the creeks running down from the mountains are so clear that you’d think you could drink from them without risk of death. It’s a day trip; it’s a business trip. Every year around this time we have to find somewhere for the child to spend the summer: Marie has a right to a vacation. She inspects country manors, shantytowns, campsites in New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Peekskill; what she cares about is how long the bus ride is to New York. For we’ve agreed to just four weeks in Prague and she might want to stay here and wait. She pesters the foreman of one construction site with serious negotiations: paying children are apparently supposed to transform the plot into a recreation area with their own hands, since the brochure promises “creative activities.” The man is genuinely tormented—clearly it gives him a headache to confront matters like sculpture . . . cardiovascular activity. . . French courses in the rain. Two hundred dollars a month. Late in the afternoon, Marie finds a camp on Long Island Sound, half an hour from Riverside Drive, with a brisk lady at the counter holding out no creative prospects at all. She rattles off in military fashion what the place offers: Size of camp (in sq. ft.), two pools, completely supervised athletics, thirty-five years of day-camp experience, regular service to and from Manhattan, insurmountable chain-link fence cordoning off the camp from life-threatening natural water. And, due to the planes taking off or landing every two minutes from LaGuardia Airport across the Sound, a discount price of thirty-five dollars a week.

  For six hours we’ve been meeting Americans who’ve been acting like friends, far above and beyond the requirements of business: the teacher whose art practice involves making mobiles, the custodian, the woman driving the taxi, even the hapless man asked to market a desolate construction site as a children’s paradise thanks to the presence of a few forests on steep hills nearby. On one train, the conductor not only invited Marie into his cabin but let her hold the lever and push it forward and now she knows what’s it’s like to be all the way in the front when you drive into the tunnel under North River. In Yonkers we were allowed into a bar even though the male clientele had just started their afternoon drinking; the owner may have wanted to offer to one and all the Italian cuisine listed on his sign, and he brought out pizza, Italian-style. Marie decided in Yonkers. The soldierly conduct had won the day. That’s where it’d be. Across from LaGuardia.

  – You know, huh? You think you know me? Tell me, Gesine.

  – Forty-five dollars for children.

  – Fifteen dollars a week saved. That makes sixty.

  – This committee is acting in the name of “responsibility,” Marie?

  – I’m not responsible and neither are you. Does the money bother you?

  – No. It’s just that you’re doing it out of pity.

  – I’m not necessarily the kind of child you were, Gesine.

  – Pity isn’t genuine, Marie.

  – Pity’s not bad. I soothe my conscience for four weeks. It’s practical, is what it is, don’t you think?

  June 24, 1968 Monday

  The results of the Mecklenburg state election of October 20, 1946, are known. The Socialist Unity Party won forty-five seats, the Conservatives thirty-one, the Liberals eleven; Farmers’ Mutual Aid were able to send three representatives to Schwerin, and the Cultural League for a Democratic Renewal of Germany received not enough votes for even one.

  In this new election as well, the campaign manager for the Gneez district had made his rounds with an uneasy feeling, perhaps due to his defeat in September; moreover, the feeling was different. True, the honor of the assignment had once again fallen to him, though this time more than just towns and villages were at stake so his failure could be all the more dire. He drove such fears out of his mind, once he’d recognized that they were selfish. A similar sensation remained, though: the certainty that something was coming that might ruin everything. He could feel it in the back of his neck, like the premonition of a blow. He could ward off a sudden attack, he knew how to deal with insubordination—he’d made his name doing such things—but what should he do in case of a real disaster? All you could see by looking at him was fatigue; on the inside he felt limp and weak. It wasn’t because of the many repeat performances each and every day—those were fine, they enacted the truth. So what was it then?

  When he drove into Jerichow he thought he’d caught a glimpse of at least a little piece of it. It was the last day before the election and he’d never set foot in this windy backwater that called itself a town. Perhaps he felt some pricks of conscience for having avoided this Jerichow. Slata, the intended wife of a murderous Fascist arsonist, had lived here for three years in a capitalist businessman’s house; he had no desire to see the house, and especially not these in-laws of hers. The father, Papenbrock was his name wasn’t it, was probably long since lining his pockets ag
ain as a middleman, under the Red Army’s nose, safe and sound under its New Economic Policy; what a pleasure it would be to deal with him once they’d turned a new page. He decided not to ask about this Papenbrock. Admittedly there was a private aspect to this resolution; maybe for now, or until the votes were counted, it was enough not to admit such weaknesses to anyone but himself.

  He stood with his back to the window of Papenbrock’s emptied office, incognito, since without his car, driver, and leather coat he thought himself unrecognizable enough. The woman who squeezed out the door next to him was Louise Papenbrock, who used to have a maid to send on such errands. Now she had to walk down Town Street in person to alert her comrades, and the Liberals too, out of Christian duty, for the SMA had again denied them a list of candidates. Even Alfred Bienmüller learned within an hour that a stranger had come to town and had a car with driver and leather coat parked behind the freight shed.

  For now, the evening’s speaker was strolling down Town Street like someone who wanted to buy himself a little treat in this new place, not that he had anything definite in mind. Nothing he was secretly worried about could ever happen to him here. Plus he didn’t know the object of his fear, which made the sensation inherently unscientific. The mayor here was from his own party, though his two advisers were Christian Democrats, and as a result the town hadn’t received the full allotments on its ration cards in the past few weeks, though it certainly had gotten almost half the printed matter. That would help. His friends had also availed themselves of an element of bourgeois democracy in which a French Conservative would give amnesty to political enemies or a German Social Democrat would send flowers to a war criminal’s daughter, assuring themselves of correct votes—here the dialectic had merely brought about a reversal: no flowers, arrest instead of amnesty. Gerd Schumann had ceased to find such rhetoric from this Ottje Stoffregen fellow witty or amusing; Ottje Stoffregen was now, today, unbolting rails on the Gneez–Herrnburg line and using his delicate teacher’s hands to carry them off for transport to the Soviet Union. They certainly hadn’t skimped on using the printed matter they’d received, either—almost every shopwindow, every yard gate had a poster of sufficient size stuck to it.

  As soon as he read the first one, he knew for certain that his worries had turned up and reported for duty in the right place. What a godforsaken dump, this Jerichow. If only he’d never set foot in it.

  The notices summoned the public to appear at tonight’s political rally and were signed by Alfred Bienmüller on behalf of the Unity Party. The text opened with a personal description: Gerd Schumann, member of the German Army, admitted to the National Committee for a Free Germany after his desertion to the Red Army, twenty-three years old, district councilman. There were countless posters, all saying the same thing. At the brickworks he turned back, for there was Town Street’s name visible for the first time on a sign on the cemetery wall. It was clearly the main street and did not bear the name of Generalissimo Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. An old-fashioned sign, with trim lines around the Gothic script, written white on blue, all so attractive and undamaged that it looked like it had spent a few years wrapped in wool in a drawer.

  The evening’s speaker hurried back to the market square. Which was called Market Square.

  And he was in the right place, the location gave him an almost complete view of the train station’s facade (“Most everyone in Jerichow has to go to the station at least once a day”). He could see his driver on the steps, slapping his arms for warmth, right under the bedsheets with a slogan painted in black on it:

  FOR IMMEDIATE MERGER WITH THE SOVIET UNION!

  VOTE SOCIALIST UNITY PARTY (SED)

  and not even centered.

  He got into an argument with Bienmüller almost immediately. As a district councilman, he was used to being invited into the parlor for a little bite, a little drink. As a comrade, as campaign manager, he took it for granted that people would agree with him. This Bienmüller didn’t leave his muddy workshop yard, held a truck crank in his left hand as though it weighed nothing, even kept his felt hat on so his face was largely hidden, and actually bent down to continue his work.

  – That business at the station—that’s provocation! It’s worse than in Gneez, where they sent postcards saying things like “Are you a intellectual? Vote SED! For the Latin scholars: that’s BUT!”

  – Huh.

  – And you claim to be a comrade!

  – Innt that watcha want, m’boy? Doncha wanna join the Sooviet Union?

  – I demand that we clear this up right now with the commandant!

  – We don have one. Got two.

  – You’ll explain your posters there, my friend.

  – Cant go there withiss jeep. Occapation orders.

  – Listen, comrade, you’re not going to be mayor here for long!

  – Spose not. I’mma third one already.

  The evening’s speaker, in the middle of his march on the double to the Kommandatura, was held up again, this time by the sign on Peter Wulff’s shop. He was vaguely familiar with that name. He’d had its file card pulled from the lists of the old SPD in Gneez: member until the Socialists were banned in 1933; courier services; illegal actions (voluntary); arrested during Mussolini’s visit to Mecklenburg (Bützow-Dreibergen); KZ Sachsenhausen 1939–1940; unfit for military service; not yet unified into the SED. Sloppy recordkeeping, probably. He was close to sixty, tall but bent as if he’d been a stevedore not a bartender, pale in the face, still blond. In the hallway shadows he looked merely massive, soft, but outdoors he unexpectedly proved forceful, much more aggressive than Bienmüller. In fact Peter Wulff had immediately taken a shovel off a hook and gone to dig in the garden (“Our Petey’s a good guy he juss forgets himself a little an lashes out sometimes”). If you keep digging you don’t have a free hand to start a fight with.

  – Hello, comrade.

  – Red Front yer sposed ta say.

  – Red Front, comrade.

  – Notcher comrade.

  – But you’re a member of the Socialist Party, aren’t you?

  – Was.

  – Your name’s still in the card file. Now you just need to unify.

  – Yeah Im thinkin it over.

  – Yes, why don’t we talk it over together?

  – Nope. Juss bring me Cresspahl.

  – What on earth is that?

  – Our mayor.

  – Don’t you like Bienmüller then? Is he being removed?

  – Cresspahls who we wanted. Now your guys have im. Bring im back. Go ask about it inna Kommandatura.

  – I will just have to do that, Mr. Wulff.

  – Or ask yer Slata, she knows bout it too!

  The evening’s speaker might have been shaken by this reference to Slata. How could he realize that Wulff’s singular possessive might have been just a grammatical plural in Platt—“Slata who’s with you Russians”? The district councillor probably did announce himself a bit too forcefully at the Kommandatura, since he was a district councillor, and he was perchance not quite polite enough when the gentlemen didn’t choose to receive him. In the end it would have been smarter, politically, to have his dispute on the administrative level, as the Wendennych comrades suggested, who had all sorts of second-rate complaints to deal with about supplying their district with adequate food, fuel, building materials. The district councilman, a friend of Triple-J’s, may have taken the wrong tone in trying to show them the errors they had committed in their political work among the people of Jerichow. In any case, that in no way justified their taking away his gun. The moment stayed in his memory as a kind of pantomime: while he was distracted by Jerichow’s favorite guessing game—which twin was in charge of politics and which in charge of military matters—an orderly had twirled him around on his axis, uncoiling from his body in one smooth, dreamlike motion his belt, his holster, his firearm. They handed him the army decree about German civilians’ possession of weapons, in German, while he kept insisting that he spoke Russian
perfectly, comprehension, speaking, even written Russian! They had him taken back out to Brickworks Road, with the firm promise: The request to punish him would be submitted to the SMA in Russian, not to worry, but only on Monday because of the election.

  Later, he seemed to remember trying to take shelter in a house diagonally across from the Kommandatura—a strangely solitary building that made him feel like it stood at a great distance from this town. All he wanted was three hours of peace and quiet before the rally started. He couldn’t face people again so soon. But he was refused, by a child, a girl, thirteen years old at most, who kept answering him in two sentences, now separately, now connected, sometimes in Low German or in standard German if he wanted: Cant do it.

  – Why not?

  – The Russiansre right over there.

  – What’s that got to do with it?

  – Can’t do it. The Russians are right over there.

  He finally gave her up as crazy, feebleminded, a figment of his imagination. A man can imagine things like that in moments of severe emotional strain. Mirages, illusions like that, do exist.

  As six o’clock drew near the market square was packed. He stood on the balcony of Town Hall with Mayor Bienmüller, flanked by the Wendennych Twins. The rally started half an hour later, because these commandants had insisted on a written list of his key points, signed and dated before witnesses. How are you supposed to give a speech like that! He began faint-heartedly with the harvest, industrialization; it was still with far less than his usual verve, the swelling in his breast from within, that he mentioned the Bolshevik Leonid Borisovich Krasin, explosives expert and bank robber under the czars, representative of the new Soviet Russia in London and Paris, who had also managed, as commander of an icebreaker in 1929, to free a German rail ferry trapped by the ice off Warnemünde. Then he deployed the two weapons the party had put in his hands to ensure that the embarrassing results from September would not be repeated. The market square was quite quiet when he repeated the line from the election appeal of October 7: Our party stands for the protection of property rightfully acquired the workers’ own labor.