Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  The child was unhappy with her coat. Not because it failed to serve its purpose. Slash pockets, once they tear, need crude seams; you can reattach patch pockets easily and it won’t show. She didn’t want a coat with a collar named after a little boy, and someone could grab her by it and the belt. She found herself in crowds so often these days, and the buttons seemed to come off by themselves; if they’d been concealed she would’ve kept them longer. She had planned the coat as one to do more than just live in: it had been meant as a durable shelter for the trip that the Russians might send her on, as they had her father. Now Gesine Cresspahl had a coat that was merely contemporary and elegant.

  Ask Countess Seydlitz—she’ll say she knows all about this subject too. She predicts that the child of a successful marriage will mature much earlier and more fully, acquiring a stronger sense of self or at least of the place from which it wants or desires, maybe also the place where it knows itself and can show that self to the world.

  Marie Luise Kaschnitz, on the other hand, has seen how the perfect union of two parents can do damage to a child. They band together against the child, don’t let her individuate, forestall her search for different possible avenues for loving, keep her trapped in inevitable self-denial; even at thirteen barely more than the child of her parents, almost entirely defined through them.

  Both of these children can run back to their parents when the world refuses to understand them or hurts them—there is also the big-brother figure, hes got nails on is shoes—secure in their protection while still not lacking in self-understanding. The elders only set right what such children have not yet been able to learn to do for themselves; children learn from them how to remain undamaged even when things go wrong.

  The mother had abandoned the child Gesine Cresspahl back in November 1938—at four and a half she’d already been betrayed. The father, indispensable and not only for that reason, but also as her ally in the English secret, had served as the mayor of Jerichow in a way that angered the Red Army, whether it was the business of the abortions or a certain insubordination, and now the Russians had him, unreachable, less in charge of the child every day, for he didn’t see what she saw. There was a woman from the island of Wolin living in her house, whom she craved as a permanent mother, but she could hardly ask her: Take me as your very own child! This woman helped—more than that, she accepted help, when a stove had been lit by the time she got home in the afternoon she was happy with this child who wasn’t hers. Another thing I learned from her: Now you can have children of your own, Gesine.

  There was Jakob Abs, Mrs. Abs’s son, who treated her like a little sister. Whatever time he didn’t spend working he spent thinking about his business affairs, and most of all about a girl who wasn’t too young for him, a creature of unimaginable beauty, Anne-Dörte was her name. He left, not only to go see her but to get away from Jerichow. He studied his Russian from a book of zheleznodorozhnykh terminov; he was headed from the gasworks to an apprenticeship with the railway that would take him away, to Gneez, to Schwerin, and someday out of Mecklenburg altogether.

  Those were who she had left.

  So what is a child like this Gesine Cresspahl to do when she’s about to turn fourteen on March 3, 1947, and doesn’t have a single person in Jerichow or its surroundings she can count on? Will she become so blind with fear that she runs after anyone who happens to be around, from her father’s friends to a teacher who for once doesn’t ask where her father is? Or, another option, she could see herself as alone against the grown-ups—not in open hostility but without any chance of help from them? Can’t she, too, regard herself as an “I” with desires, with prospects that just have to be kept hidden for the time being?

  The child that I was, Gesine Cresspahl—half orphan, at odds with her surviving relatives in memory of her father, owner on paper of a farmhouse by the Jerichow cemetery, wrapped in a black coat—she must have decided one day to give the adults what they wanted while smuggling herself out of their reach and into a life where she’d be able to be what she would then want to be. If nobody told her, she’d just have to find out for herself. It’s not about being brave.

  Strangely enough, she thought of school as a way out. Her father had withdrawn her from the school in Jerichow and tucked her away in the Gneez academic middle school because the teacher in Jerichow, Stoffregen, liked to hit; also because she might accidentally betray him one day to the Sudeten German Gefeller, principal in Jerichow and regional speaker for the Nazis. The child concluded from the move that her father wanted her to pursue a higher education. That being the case, she had no choice but to take a deep breath and forward march all the way to where school ended at that fairy-tale place called Abitur, finals, graduation, and permission to make her own choice. No, she wasn’t particularly brave. She was scared.

  She started by lying. To enter seventh grade at the Bridge School in Gneez she’d had to turn in not only a sixth-grade transcript but also an autobiographical statement. This was a school administered by the Red Army, and her father was not on good terms with the Soviets. Or maybe vice versa. She couldn’t know. But there was something else she’d learned. She put him in her statement, she described him as a master carpenter, self-employed, minimized his role in the construction of the Mariengabe Airfield, confining it to that of a construction worker, brought up the liberation by the Soviet Union, and implied that he was still living, working, and residing in Jerichow.

  Anyone comparing the various autobiographical statements made by this Gesine Cresspahl over the years will be forced to conclude that there were several different people by this name. Or maybe one person who turned into a new one every year and didn’t know who she was from one day to the next!

  Zeal attracted attention—she decided on diligence. Just as she’d been able to supply Fontane’s ballad “John Maynard” in her old school, whether as memorized recitation, answers in class, or essays, so too she delivered to her teachers in this new school the description they wanted of present-day life in Mecklenburg:

  Structure of the Anti-Fascist/Democratic Constitution. I. Definition. The initial prefix, an attribute used only in compounds, expresses opposition. It is here directed against a form of government that in ancient Rome was symbolized by the bundled rods of the lictors, which oppressed the people through violence at the disposal of the few. We have no violence in Mecklenburg. Democracy, a combination of the Greek words for people and rule (demos + kratein), means the exercise of power by the people themselves. We can see in the Gneez district how the exploiters robbing the people were chased away by that same people or at least forced to find housing a minimum of thirty kilometers away from their property and forced to work. The people consists of the workers, the farmers, the petite bourgeoisie, and the middle bourgeoisie, in that order. (This was a dicey part for her, because her position in this ranking was rather unfortunate, as a tradesman’s child.) All this taken together characterizes a constitution. II. Implementation. One example is the recent Educational Reform Law.

  In Physics she wrote on demand: Aleksandr Stepanovič Popov, Russian physicist, born March 17, 1859, in Bogoslovsk, guberniya of Perm, died January 13, 1906, in what was then St. Petersburg, invented the telephone in 1895. (She believed it, too, taking no further interest in the origin of this story; up to age sixteen she could only think of telephones in the context of authorities and a few select bourgeois families, minions of the NEP.) Even in her final exams, in June 1952, this would still have been the right answer. One day, accidentally, certainly not looking for anything in particular, she opened the encyclopedia inherited from the Papenbrocks in 1950 to the page giving Alexander Graham Bell’s life story. Even much later, she wished she didn’t have to forget the year 1895 for that reason, and that she might find another reason to look forward to visiting Edinburgh.

  In 1947 she was taking third-year Russian, still from Charlotte Pagels. The topic was the derivation of Mecklenburg words from the Slavic, a language group preceding Russian, well then.
At the end Cresspahl raised her hand, with all the timidity this child had by then become known for, and asked permission to say something about Gneez. Maybe the name was derived from the Soviet word for “nest,” gnezdo? An A in the roll book! (Such things hurt her standing with the other girls in the class, even Lise Wollenberg; she had to make up for it by bringing up her house’s location right across from the Jerichow Kommandatura and stories about Lieutenant Wassergahn. Finally Lise came to her aid. – It’s true: she said. – The Cresspahls were practically occupied territory!)

  As long as you didn’t take the slightest peek to either side of the lesson plan—you’d lose your balance and fall:

  Bow your head and bend your knee,

  Silently think of the SED;

  Give us not just potatoes and cabbage,

  Also give what the First Secretary and also the Deputy of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany get to eat and take home in their baggage!

  When a classroom full of girls is left alone just before lunch, freezing in their coats, fifty or fifty-five degrees in the room in the very best case, what crazy song-and-dance routines they put on, shrieking and hopping on the tables like madwomen!

  Eat less sugar?

  Wrong, wrong, wrong!

  Eat more sugar!

  Sugar makes you strong!

  until Fifi Pagels came rushing in, entirely forgetting the price of sweeteners on the black market, remembering only her dream of well-behaved children circa 1912, wounded, crying: You wicked, wicked children!

  In February 1947 Dr. Kramritz’s class was studying the new Mecklenburg constitution, which the parliament resulting from the previous year’s election had just adopted. All inhabitants of German nationality are citizens of the country. Civil servants are servants of the people and must at all times prove themselves worthy of the people’s trust. II. Citizens’ Basic Rights and Basic Obligations, Article 8: The freedom of the individual is inviolable.

  Persons who have been deprived of their freedom.

  Must be informed on the following day at the latest.

  Which authorities have done so and for what reasons.

  This curtailment of freedom was ordered.

  They are to be given the opportunity without delay.

  Of objecting to the curtailment of their freedom.

  Herr Dr. phil. Kramritz rented two rooms in Knoop’s building, the prince’s mansion. When Knoop came back from his curtailment of freedom in March, that was the first his loyally worrying mother had heard of him since February 3. Knoop said nothing, even to trusted friends, about his place of detention or other events connected to his diminished freedom. What he liked to say in response, smugly, wearing a smirk no one could prove he wore, in broad High German, was: The charges were struck down. Just like Emil.

  In March, Mrs. Weidling called on Student Gesine in English class even though she had long since reached the middle of the alphabet, going in fair and proper order. And for this lesson Mrs. Weidling had brought with her a young man in city civilian clothes, introducing him as a future New Teacher whose training included sitting in on classes like this one. Dr. Weidling already had Soviet counterintelligence going after her husband pretty hard, you could scarcely blame her for not warning us. Who wanted something to be blamed for from those times. After a few grammatical questions to the N, O, and P parts of the class, the Cresspahl girl was called on and asked to recite a poem that had been distributed in parts for memorization. She always thought it was a mistake for the Soviets to allow English as a second foreign language; she was more than willing to spare Mrs. Weidling any disgrace; she started and kept going, with vile pronunciation and a childishly singsong rhythm but a perfectly automatic and acceptable sentence melody, the way she’d learned it from her father since 1943, whenever they were without earwitnesses, and which Mrs. Weidling’s instruction had been unable to modify:

  Recuerdo

  by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  born 1892

  RECITED BY HEART

  “We were very tired, we were very merry—

  We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  We hailed, ‘Good morrow, mother!’ to a shawl-covered head,

  And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

  And she wept, ‘God bless you!’ for the apples and pears,

  And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.”

  Marie may not believe it, since we take that ferry to Manhattan and then use the subway to get to Riverside Drive. Marie is suspicious of stories where everything fits together—I’ve taught her that much. The truth is that in teacher conferences Mrs. Weidling had already been introduced to certain signs of the times: having us learn poems like “The Song of the Shirt,” by Thomas Hood, 1799–1845, With fingers weary and worn, / With eyelids heavy and red,/A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, / Plying her needle and thread for her daily bread, the sociocritical indictment. It’s just that she’d had acquired her academic rank at a university, not by marriage; she had traveled through numerous countries, thanks to the favors her husband did for the army; she may even have actually owned a copy of A Few Figs from Thistles (1922), and she really and truly did subject her visiting auditor from the land of the Soviets to a recitation of this ferry poem with the pernicious message that personal charity could take the place of systematic reform, if indeed it had any message at all—she did not permit herself, or her students, any sycophancy; as with Leslie Danzmann, it was important to her to think of herself as a lady. The Cresspahl child suffered a terrible defeat.

  Whend you realize, Gesine?

  Oh Cresspahl. You cant forgive me!

  I forgive you. Tell me.

  I didn see im at first. Then I realized he hadn talked the whole time. Just sat lookin mute. When I was done he said something to Weidling in English. Thats when I knew: Hes a Russian.

  Wasnt too bad, Gesine.

  It was for me. That was the first time I knew for sure you were still alive. But I’d betrayed us. You had to spend another year in Fünfeichen.

  Please, Gesine. He was just sposed to check if I’d really spent years in Inglant.

  And whether they could send you back to South London with a child who could pass for a native speaker.

  That’s right, Gesine. You might still have had the chance to learn Richmond English.

  Would you have gone to England for the Russians?

  I would’ve for you. That’s what I wanted to ask you as soon as they let me go back to you.

  We’re getting to that soon. When we do, I’ll say the wrong thing again.

  Fer me, Gesine.

  June 30, 1968 Sunday

  Colonel Emil Zátopek, the man himself, who’d been held up to us as a model for the link between humanism and sports under the benevolent Soviet aegis ever since his victory in the 5,000-meter at the International Allied Meet in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in early September 1946,

  Emil Zátopek, who’d wanted to speak those two thousand words to all the people in his country, now doesn’t understand why the party is angry at his hope that the guilty will finally be treated as guilty. – I see nothing counterrevolutionary in it: he says. He says: All those who signed the statement are concerned with the fast construction of democratic Socialism and human freedom. That’s what he says.

  And he’s not alone—Zemědělské Noviny, the farmer’s newspaper, says something similar, as does Mladá Fronta, the Communist youth paper for the whole ČSSRepublic. Now even the carpenter’s son, winner of a gold and a silver at the 1948 Olympic Games in London, master of interval training, not only an icon for long-distance runners but a live model for the Soviets during a year spent living in Crimea, winner of three gold medals in the superfluous 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, for running

  5,000 meters in 14:06.6

  10,000 meters in 29:17.0

  42,200 meters in 2:23:03.2;

  holder of nineteen
world records in total, head of Czechoslovakian military sports since 1958, chosen as athlete of the year in his country as recently as 1966, living in Prague, near the main train station, at U pujčavny (Pawnshop) 8, the Czech Locomotive, him too: Emil Zátopek.

  The Abses managed to get me into Pastor Brüshaver’s confirmation class for only two hours, then he kicked me out; I had to take dancing lessons two afternoons a week at the Sun Hotel in Gneez behind the district council office—but in the spring of 1947, because in the winter there had been neither heat nor daylight enough. I had no time for my homework, came back grumpy to Jerichow on the evening train, but my grumbling didn't sway Jakob or his mother: the child had to get what was proper for her. Dancing lessons.

  They could see it in Jerichow, Jakob could see it at his training courses in Gneez: some things about bourgeois ways were to be preserved. They saw me as a middle-class child, never mind that my father had disappeared and one of my uncles was guilty of unspeakable crimes; it was almost like they had taken on the job of giving me a fancy education. In Jerichow as in the district capital, they saw high society unscathed, except for those who’d been caught with weapons in the Soviet Union, or in the Nazi Party’s files, or with noble titles and title deeds too and overly profitable business deals with the old Reich. Or else in anonymous notes. The others were left to believe they would still be needed, and believe it they did. Whether trading in shoe heels or weighing out twenty-gram slivers of butter for the workers, they all felt certain that the system for feeding and provisioning the population would have been running even worse without them. No one in our class at school said so out loud, but almost from the beginning we’d thought of ourselves as divided into the natives and the refugees. The grown-ups extended the distinction to long-established citizenry versus newly arrived lowlifes; in part, no doubt, because the decorative wood carvings of the Sudeten Germans and East Prussians took a little money out of their own pockets. These newcomers had had to leave practically all their possessions behind; as for the articles of gold or paintings in oil that the right people in Jerichow owned, the plundering Soviets hadn’t managed to find them all, not by a long shot, and in times of greater need these could be exchanged at the Red Army’s Razno-Export for cigarettes, exchangeable in turn for butter or a sailor suit (Bleyle), worn just twice, that a refugee boy had managed to hold on to. This better sort had rarely lost sight of one another—even Gneez was small enough for that—and now they congregated again, in conservative political parties for instance, where they discussed the minimal or “night-watchman” state, or a future annexation by a Scandinavian country. The revolutionary Red Army had even left them Mecklenburg as an autonomous province; the irritating addition, “-Vorpommern,” had been removed by the law of March 1, 1947, so now they had less to say and really you had to chalk that up as a win for Mecklenburg. The province of Mecklenburg. Land Mecklenburg. Article I, §1, paragraph 3 of the new Mecklenburg constitution defined the official state colors as: blue, yellow, red. These were also the traditional colors, but what business of anyone’s is that.