Anniversaries

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by Uwe Johnson


  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION It’s just a game, for us both.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Your nationality is German.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION West German?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION East German nationality?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION West German nationality?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Earlier you said, “I have about seven dollars in my wallet.”

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION “Maybe eight with the change.”

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You’re here because your bank wants to give you a sensitive, confidential assignment.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You understand that your bank has to insure itself against risk.

  ANSWER Oh yes. Yes.

  QUESTION Do you feel loyalty to your bank?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Do you mean the bank where you have an account?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Do you mean the bank where you work?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You came to the United States on April 29, 1961.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION On April 28, 1961.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION With a visa that let you work.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Your name is Gesine L. Cresspahl.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Do you go by only this name?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Have you ever gone by a different name?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Was that different name intended to evade an existing law?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Multiple laws?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Did you believe you were right to break those laws?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You are not married.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION You have never been married.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION You reject the institution of marriage.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Will you ever get married?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You had a happy childhood.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Not always happy.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION When you think about your biographical background, do you think it possible that you are psychologically damaged?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Would you call yourself a stable person?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION An unstable person?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION You have never been married.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Do you feel guilty toward anyone now alive?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Toward anyone now dead?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION More than five people?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Five.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Three.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You have promised not to talk to anyone about your assignment.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Have you ever broken this promise?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Would carrying out your confidential assignment pose any risk to you?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Your daughter was born in New York.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTIONS She was born in Düsseldorf.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You have no loyalty to the bank you work for?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Do you have an account at that bank?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Do you have an account at another bank as well?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You come from a Communist country.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION You come from a country that is now located on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION In fleeing that country you have suffered losses.

  ANSWER . . .No.

  QUESTION You regret these losses.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Would you betray the hospitality of the United States?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Have you ever betrayed it?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION You have never been divorced?

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Are you suspicious of the practice of polygraphy?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You consider the measurements from the so-called lie detector unreliable?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION Do you have the rest of the day off?

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION All right, we’re done.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Would you prefer to take the sensors off yourself, or would you rather my colleague . . .

  ANSWER Yes. No.

  QUESTION You don’t have any questions.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Usually, other people, they have questions, you know.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION They can hardly wait. But the results are still strictly confidential.

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION In your case, I have permission to tell you your percentage of truthfulness. If you asked. A very cultured man, a real gentleman—French name, de Rosny. . .

  ANSWER Yes.

  QUESTION You are ninety percent truthful. That’s confidential, of course.

  ANSWER No.

  QUESTION Yes. You’re young, Mrs. Cresspahl, you still have lots of opportunities!

  The man in the tunnel of the Ninety-Sixth Street subway station who always demands that the Jews get fucked has an opponent, who always crosses his graffiti out. Today the invitation has been forcefully restored.

  And, please, who’s writing “YOPA!” on the train cars, posters, electricity meters, and station pillars? What does it mean?

  It’s only quarter past eleven. The sun is making a cozy cave out of the garage on Ninety-Sixth Street. A policeman is there, questioning two employees, one white and one colored. They’re sitting on a bench that’s too narrow for two people, asses pressed uncomfortably together. The Negro doesn’t look up. He lets the white answer. Only after being explicitly asked does he confirm the other man’s statement, his eyes still on the floor: Yes, that’s pretty much it, you could say that, mister, sir.

  July 10, 1968 Wednesday

  Now the Communist Parties of Bulgaria and Hungary have written to Prague too. (Romania is keeping out of it, apparently understanding the principle of noninterference in the exact same sense as the Soviet Union claims it applies with respect to its own affairs.) The letters are similar in content: all charge that the Czechoslovak Central Committee had not been sufficiently firm in dealing with the “revisionists” in its ranks, nor with the “counterrevolutionaries” outside the party, both of which groups were misusing the press, radio, and television to spread the truth about the past as well as the present. But Alexander Dubček, as well as Josef Smrkovksý, do not wish to appear before a tribunal of their peers; they are more than happy to talk with individual partners. Meanwhile two Soviet regiments remain in the ČSSR, despite the maneuvers having ended on June 30. There weren’t any repair facilities for their vehicles: they explain. They weren’t given enough transport space on the railroads: they complain.

  The blue workman’s overalls Cresspahl borrowed from Johnny Schlegel were definitely clean—Inge had washed them. Cresspahl wore them for only a few hours a day. As if the half-day bath at Johnny’s hadn’t gotten him clean enough, he would often sit in a tub of water in the kitchen when we were out of the house.

  – Well at least you’ve gotten him back from the Russians. Thank you: Marie says. – Congratulations, too, you deserve it. But this is you telling the story, it’s not like you’ll have the Red Army bring him back in a Mercedes with a motorcycle escort. Since he was innocent an
d all.

  – He’d been sentenced.

  – Release is a sentence.

  – He wasn’t sure of the exact words, and the numbers had only been read to him. But since there were three of them, it must have been paragraphs 6, 7, and 12 of §58.

  – Under Soviet law?

  – Soviet law. From 1927, partly.

  – He was in England then, Gesine.

  – And that’s why the British had made him mayor of Jerichow; and maybe he’d betrayed something to the British about the Jerichow airfield before the Soviet commandant K. A. Pontiy arrived in all his glory. Up to three years deprivation of freedom per par. 6, Espionage.

  – Paragraph 7?

  – Sabotage against Business, Transportation, or Monetary Circulation, including to the benefit of earlier proprietors.

  – If there was anyone in postwar Jerichow living like a . . . a movie star, Gesine, it was your man Pontiy.

  – K. A. Pontiy hadn’t changed his testimony. We tried to find him; by that point he was probably locked up in Krasnogorsk for the same paragraph.

  – He really did interfere in Jerichow business.

  – But Cresspahl did too. Hadn’t he retroactively withdrawn, from the frozen accounts of the estate owners who’d fled, whatever he needed to borrow to pay municipal wages?

  – And par. 12 punishes the fact of being locked up by the Soviets.

  – No, par. 10 did that. Under par. 10 he faced imprisonment for having told them something about his life: Anti-Soviet Propaganda and Agitation. Under par. 12 he was charged with Failure to Denounce Counterrevolutionary Crimes. Six months minimum sentence.

  – Robert Papenbrock.

  – Or not reporting the visits from Emil Plath. The secret SPD. Or that he hadn’t managed to pull together an official SPD in Jerichow himself, because Alfred Bienmüller thought it was ridiculous.

  – But the Soviet commandant had forbidden the forming of political parties!

  – Pontiy wasn’t a witness in Schwerin. In Schwerin there was someone from the Soviet military police, with a machine gun strapped on him, and three judges in uniform. He could request others, by the way, if he thought these ones were biased.

  – Well in that case he got out much too soon! According to just paragraph 6 and 12 he should have stayed in jail until October 1949.

  – And if the punishment started on the day the sentence was pronounced it would have been till August 1952.

  – You and he were lucky, Gesine.

  – It was pure luck. Little Father Stalin abolished the death penalty, the “highest form of social defense,” only in June 1947. As a rule, an SMT in Germany handed out twenty-five years in the labor camp. Releases from camps on Soviet-German soil started only in July ’48. In August the Schwerin military tribunal sentenced a Rostock man named Gustav Cub and eight others to a total of 185 years in the labor camp for communication with a foreign news agency.

  – Why was Cresspahl the exception, Gesine?

  – That was his bad luck. It made people suspect him of having been given a little something for denouncing others.

  – The people in Jerichow had known him since 1932! Since 1931!

  – He hadn’t been keeping tabs on the people in Jerichow. Today we think that the Soviets found out something about Cresspahl’s news-gathering for the British in the war after all, and wanted to save him for possible use later.

  – Since there was a par. 10, how could he ever tell you anything about Schwerin?

  – He never did. It was probably eight years later, after I’d long since left Mecklenburg, that Jakob heard a word or two about it. He didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

  – Now he was scared. I’d have been too. Honest.

  – He was sick, Marie. These water cures of his. . . .We had trouble keeping him from going to Town Hall to register that first night, with the official certification explaining his absence. The Cresspahl of the old days would’ve had the mayor come to him. The mayor now, for a change, was Berthold Knever—he’d risen higher than the postmaster Lichtwark ever did and become tentative and jittery under the burden of his new honor. Knever would’ve come as if following binding orders, with an uneasy conscience. If anything he was glad that Jakob had held the certificate up to him and asked for a ration card for Cresspahl without the necessary personal verification. Knever stood with his back to Jakob for quite a while, sighing; he was the first person in Jerichow to feel embarrassed at the return of his former superior. You know, when Jakob was telling a story he’d sometimes be overtaken by a laugh in his throat as if adding to his own amusement the pleasure he was giving his listener. It was easy to tell when Jakob was happy about something. Cresspahl was still worried he might have gone against regulations. As if rules were right simply because they’d been defined as what was right.

  – Aftereffects of imprisonment.

  – You are not allowed to read the books on the top shelf!

  – I’ve read about that in The New York Times.

  – It wasn’t so bad that whenever I saw him, wherever he was in the house, he’d be sitting down. Meek and quiet, at Lisbeth’s desk, at the kitchen table, on the milk stand. He still twitched when he walked and he hadn’t minded letting Johnny and Inge see it, Axel Ohr was allowed to see how he’d gotten off the cart, but he didn’t want me to see him like that.

  – I would have been proud of him for that. As a daughter.

  – His daughter was more nervous, until the limp went away. It was bad that he hadn’t let Axel Ohr drive him down Town Street, Stalin Street, to let the citizens of Jerichow have a look—that we’d snuck in from the west on Cemetery Road and that for a while he stayed just a rumor. That he put Jakob off whenever he suggested in passing that they go into town. That sometimes as I sat doing my homework I could feel him looking at me as if he just couldn’t get used to my profile softening along this line or that, around the eyes, that my hair was that smooth and straight and yet curled in a tiny wave above the braids. No one had ever stared at me like that.

  – Someone has stared at me like that, Gesine. And I know who, too. But he wasn’t being Mecklenburgish enough for you?

  – I’ve learned it too now. This job of being a single parent.

  – That’s what I meant, Gesine. But you’d lost some respect for him?

  – Not at all! I was embarrassed, nervous. Didn’t talk to him without being asked. I was scared of having taken dancing lessons while he was in the camp, or maybe dead. Not to mention the reception I’d given Robert Papenbrock.

  – What grade did he give you?

  – Hanna Ohlerich had left very suddenly. Cresspahl didn’t seem to care about that. I told him about it again, about what I’d said, I even resorted to lying. He nodded. I was breathing so hard that I had to turn away—he was staring so fixedly at me, in that new way of his. For Robert Papenbrock I had Jakob join me, as a witness, but in his telling Cresspahl’s brother-inlaw had left the house voluntarily after exchanging a few pleasantries about the weather. When Cresspahl learned the truth, he was almost glad. The dancing lessons: he thanked Mrs. Abs for those. He was on eggshells with Jakob; he seemed to feel he owed Jakob something it’d be hard to repay. As for my uptight behavior toward Brüshaver or Granny Papenbrock, he just abolished it. Brüshaver’s mouth practically hung open when Cresspahl’s daughter greeted him first, and deferentially. I was vindicated in my battle with Brüshaver over religion, and then I went to confirmation class on my own.

  – So you passed.

  – By the skin of my teeth. Cresspahl could talk to Jakob much more easily—Jakob was the more skillful doctor. I, on the other hand, brought up Alexander Paepcke’s Aunt Françoise, the worthy old lady, who as a Mecklenburg MP had gotten the Althagen house released for her personal use; Cresspahl’s daughter was afraid of what was to come, you see, and catching up on the past inevitably meant confronting losses. While Jakob, of course, had kept the pamphlet for the Mecklenburg parliament, first term, and updated it too: the MP
s starting on page 64 had been neatly checked off if they still had a right to a seat, while others had had their biographies crossed out or their arrest by the NKVD indicated, their flight to West Berlin, to West Germany, their suicide. That’s how Cresspahl learned a little something about the lay of the land he’d been released into.

  – You were jealous of Jakob.

  – I sat and listened, silently pleased. Anyone who talked like that wasn’t planning to leave Jerichow for Schleswig-Holstein.

  – But why did you stay! Cresspahl had friends in Hamburg, in England!

  – He didn’t have his Mecklenburg affairs in any kind of order yet. Of course he’d lost all his accumulated fixed or cash possessions while in service to the Soviets; for my sake he wanted to wait and see whether they’d honor my name in the land registry or confiscate the house too. He wasn’t better; he would lock himself into the house for half a day whenever another wife came to visit this miraculous returnee to life from “Neubrandenburg” and asked for news of her son, her husband. Only one of his Hamburg friends had sent word, and that wasn’t a friend, it was his old-time party comrade Eduard Tamms who needed a letter of absolution—they weren’t done with denazification in Hamburg yet. He would never, ever work up the courage for England. That was where Mr. Smith had been killed in 1940 in a German air raid. No Arthur Salomon was alive there who might have put a word in for him; notification of his death had been sent out by the firm of Burse & Dunaway in 1946. And where else would he have wanted to go besides Richmond? The Richmond Town Hall had been damaged by German bombs. It’s true that there was a hydraulic engineer in the British Sector of West Berlin to whom Cresspahl had once sold a dog with an excellent pedigree, and Gesine had run into him the previous summer on Village Road in Ahrenshoop, Cresspahl would be welcome to stay with him for a week. But he was too damaged for that.

  – When was Cresspahl better?

  – On the day when he managed to write a letter to Mr. Oskar Tannebaum, fur merchant, Stockholm, and thank him for a package. Written in one go. That was near the middle of June 1948.

  – Now you all could leave.

  – Now the Soviet Military Administration in Germany had shut down rail, car, and foot traffic between its zone and the Western ones.

  July 11, 1968 Thursday

  Alexander Dubček did call the two thousand Czechoslovak words disruptive, a reason for concern, and was far from subscribing to them; now the Literaturnaya Gazeta (place of pub.: Moscow) informs him what we should truly think of these words: If someone calls for public criticism, demonstrations, resolutions, strikes, and boycotts to bring down people who have misused power and caused public harm, this is, in direct language, a provocative, inflammatory program of action. It is counterrevolutionary. We can certainly hear the invitation to conceive of literaturka as revolutionary, especially in connection with the misuse of power.

 

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