by Uwe Johnson
I sometimes pictured myself in an English boarding school. It was in the countryside, far from any train station so I’d be caught in time if I tried to escape. The whole day divided up with no recourse; one hour of free time. I could only imagine the teachers as unforgiving ladies, so sparing with praise or recognition, in word or look, that I wouldn’t get any. I would never be alone—in the dorms, in the giant dining halls, in my free time—and would always be alone. In England, too, food was rationed, but even if the Brits had closed Cresspahl’s account at the Richmond Bank of Surrey they would still allow a ration card for his daughter. Enough for pocket money. Waiting for the post. School uniform. Permission to leave for the day. Hours and half hours punctuated by the tolling of the church bell: chiming the foreignness through the sleepless night. Practicing the “th” over and over in front of the mirror, tongue between the teeth! then forgetting the tongue between the teeth. The bustle of cricket on a blazing field of grass, and me in the middle as the German child, the Fascist child, she deserves it, never getting visitors, in her third year already.
– Were your reasons good enough for Cresspahl?
– He never let me get as far as my reasons. After a whole summer. He looked at me and nodded, and I was scared. Now I wished I had another day to think it over after all.
– It would’ve been better for you: Marie says, this fearless child who howls with homesickness on her first night of summer camp. Look at her, coolly lying on the grass in this hot humid garden; look how she hides her fear in a squint of her eyes.
– It would’ve been better for Cresspahl. So now I’d done him wrong, and I’d been a coward.
– I’m a coward too, Gesine. I don’t like being without you either. Just because I think you care about me.
July 15, 1968 Monday
The Soviet Union, via Pravda, gives us the truth: how puzzled it is by the West’s “morbid interest” in its war games in the North Atlantic. It complains about NATO reconnaissance planes in the exercise area and the presence of a British destroyer. Therefore, anyone who couldn’t care less what Soviet warships are doing there with their Polish and East German pact mates must be healthy.
The Soviets have halted the withdrawal of their troops from Czechoslovakia. Since yesterday they’ve been meeting in Warsaw with their Polish, East German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian friends, about and without the ČSSR, and now that the official organ of the press has stated that “a decided rebuff to the forces of reaction and imperialist maneuvers” in that country “is of vital interest,” de Rosny might as well give up. On the contrary, though, he sticks with Tito, according to whom no one in the Soviet Union could possibly be so “shortsighted” as to use force against the Czechs and Slovaks. De Rosny is a Titoist.
We were all required to be very mad at Tito. Immediately upon our official matriculation at Fritz Reuter High School this was presented to us as one of our main occupations, and that fall we often marched through Gneez to City Hall in a column of four hundred students, with banners on which we demanded Tito’s overthrow, maybe adding a musical number about Spain’s heaven that spreads its brightest stars above our trenches. There was no mention of the cold in that song, but now I get cold when I think of the word Spain. We had to stand in the cold for a long time until the market square was filled with columns of demonstrators (the ones from the Panzenhagen Sawmill were always late) and the three people on the City Hall balcony could begin their speeches. Whenever one was finished, we shouted our grievances against Tito in chorus, and I would have been glad to be as enthusiastic as Lise Wollenberg, who just that morning in Contemporary Studies had given me a wink while reciting Comrade Stalin’s five criticisms of Tito, one of which (the false priority of agriculture) I’d had to whisper to her. Since she was my friend.
That’s what she called me. When two girls have spent whole years of schooldays on the train for an hour, and walking to the station too, they’ll eventually either ride in the same compartment on good terms or in separate ones on bad. The Cresspahl girl didn’t have the courage for an open feud at that point. She and Wollenberg had been almost the only ones to find themselves reunited in the waiting room that ninth grade turned out to be, and Lise was many teachers’ favorite—blond as she was, shyly girlish as she knew how to look at dangerous moments, jokily confidential when sucking up was called for. Cresspahl would have found it hard to say exactly what bothered her about Wollenberg. In the end, she secretly thought that this Yugoslav might know the economic situation in his own country more precisely than the wise Leader of Peoples in the far-off Kremlin, but still she called him the Marshal of Traitors on demand—we all lied, to please our elders. Lise exaggerated it, maybe, in the way she looked around her, a tolerant smile on her gentle lips, as though trying to tell us, tempt us: It won’t hurt our grades . . . it’s just a joke . . .we’re just tricking Kramritz . . . it doesn’t really matter. . . .
The mistake was sealed when we picked a desk together in 9-A-II. That keeps you together even when you’re pursuing other interests. She remained at my side while the boys in the upper grades checked out us girls in ninth grade for our suitability, taking our willingness for granted. Breaks between classes were like a marketplace. But one time it was just me, alone, who was asked to step aside with messieurs Sieboldt and Gollantz, eleventh grade, wearing long pants already. These gentlemen wanted to know what the people in Jerichow thought about blowing up the barracks and potential refugee housing. I had barely drawn breath, blushing with the honor I’d received, when Lise started gushing: Oh, the clouds from the explosions were like parachutes rising up from the ground, now she had a better sense of what atomic bombs must be like . . .word for word what I had told her. Sieboldt and Gollantz left at once. Lise answered my protest by saying they’d been asking her, and anyway, what difference did a word make? Gollantz did take me aside one more time, alone; he wanted to talk about the election of a class representative for the student government, headed by Sieboldt. Unfortunately I told Lise. She was only annoyed that the gentlemen hadn’t approached her. She consoled herself in that grown-up way she sometimes had: Ah, well, they graduate two years before we do, where would that’ve left us. (Us.)
She probably realized how pretty it looked when she tossed her long blond curls next to another girl trying to keep her dark braids still, and so Wollenberg stuck with Cresspahl when she got invited to go for a walk or to the movies; she accepted for both of us. Up came Gabriel Manfras, stranded in 9-A-I; up came Pius Pagenkopf, Dieter Lockenvitz . . . and she’d already sworn that we were inseparable so I had to tag along like a chaperone. Sometimes I looked at her from the side when a bright scene was projected on-screen—hordes of horsemen thundering across the steppe to retrieve stupid Zukhra for noble Takhir—and she was cheering for the extras at the top of her lungs along with everyone else around us, the same as for the extras in Kolberg in April 1945, portraying the Final Germany Victory. She could get so carried away. She lived entirely in the present moment. At the performance of Noah’s Flood by Ernst Barlach, I felt lots of people staring at us and at Lise’s rapt intensity, so pensive, so poignant; during the intermission she could hardly control herself, she was giggling so hard over Mrs. Lindsetter, wife of the district court chief justice, who had fallen asleep and whose wheezing during the performance had not impressed Lise one bit.
With the boys she acted sarcastic and snippy to the point of total indecipherability. They had to talk seriously with the third party, me; even Manfras, who never talked much, suddenly had quite a lot to say about interior end moraines as exemplified by Gneez Lake. With almost every one of these boys I managed to beat a retreat under some plausible pretext. The next day Gabriel Manfras was even more introspective than usual. Pius Pagenkopf, tall, dark, and the oldest in the class, kept his head bent low over his notebooks for days after his time alone with Lise, so that he’d be sure to avoid catching sight of her. Lockenvitz, the shy, lanky, glasses-wearing top of the class, slumped to Cs in several subjects afte
r declaring himself to Lise. And in early November, when new personal IDs were to be issued to everyone over fifteen, all three of these boys, separately, took me aside in secret and asked me to sneak a spare print when I went to Stellmann’s with Lise. I told her. She laughed, deep in her throat, amused; she giggled getting herself ready for the occasion. A lot of sweet encouragement found its way into that passport photo. She gave me one, which I let Pius have. But one time Lockenvitz dropped something from his wallet—it was a passport photo of Lise Wollenberg, and before her very eyes he slipped it into his jacket at just the place where his heart lived and worked; she burst out laughing, flinging her head high like a colt. Manfras was said to have her standing on his dresser at home in 8 x 10 format, and not an enlargement of the passport photo either. One day, Pius Pagenkopf, walking by the first row, took Lise’s ID picture out of his shirt pocket, tore it up, and threw the scraps onto her desk. She smiled quite happily and later asked him if he wanted another one. What was I supposed to say when she told me she acted that way because the boys were “so silly”? Neither Pagenkopf nor Lockenvitz was silly; no one would ever say Gabriel was.
We all wanted Pius as our class representative, and he would have been chosen if only Lise had kept her mouth shut about a kind of boy who was more serious, able to defend us in storm and tempest; Pius furrowed his dark eyebrows, like someone with a toothache, and crossed the name Pagenkopf off the list. Lise was by no means left speechless and started nagging Lockenvitz. He resisted for a while—he was a refugee and would have a hard time of it with the locals—but he put his name up for her sake and was elected on the third ballot. He would have to atone for that for a long time, because in December, when student self-government was banned, the members of the Free German Youth (FDJ) chose him as the head of our class group—he’d been our representative, after all. We’d get a day off and he’d have to go to meetings of the Central School Group Authority (ZSGL), where he found himself reunited with Sieboldt and Gollantz. We didn’t unfold the notes he sent Lise during class, he was huffy enough already; he saw her laugh out loud as if overjoyed, but he got embarrassed, so we were mad at him. Once she sent a piece of paper to him—there was nothing written on it. Lockenvitz was being silly, he let his wistful gaze rest on me for a while (and he owned a passport picture of me. I’d given exactly one print away, to Lise). She arranged it so that a passage in our 1949 Class Day newspaper affirmed that Lockenvitz, friend to youth, loved em all, he didn’t care, / loved all women, dark or fair.
“Us.” She and I were supposed to put our names down together for the Society for the Study of Soviet Culture, which later become the German-Soviet Friendship Society. Dr. Kramritz had mentioned the benefits and advantages of “societal activities”; this was one of the less taxing ones. There was no doubt that Mr. Wollenberg had advised his daughter to join—he wanted to secure other flanks besides the one facing the LDPD; Cresspahl, who really could have used the extra protection, advised his not to. As a well-nigh British schoolchild, I was on the British side anyway and cursed them soundly when they crashed a Berlin Airlift plane near us and had to go to the Schönberg hospital. To make Lise, all by herself, step up to a desk with a stranger sitting behind it—I thought it couldn’t happen to a better person. I’d gone with her as far as the door just to humor her.
But Jakob didn’t think it was a good idea to let this Lise know about my aversion to Soviet culture, my profound dislike of it; he turned his head slowly back and forth. His categorical headshake. I grasped the damage I’d done only after he suggested: Keep on her good side.
For Jakob, I forced myself to thank Lise when she gave me a dress, now that she was getting more fashionable ones from the new government stores. Anyway, Jakob’s mother was glad to see me dressed properly under my black coat; Cresspahl, like Jakob, looked me in the face or would notice the slightest scratch on my hand but worn collars were somehow invisible to them. That Lise was trying to spruce me up like a shabby backdrop really was too much, but I was spared an open breach because after the Christmas break Heinz Wollenberg at last decided it was beneath a businessman’s dignity to send his daughter on the cold and dirty train twice a day; for people like Wollenberg the Gneez housing office could find a room for Lise at “a relative’s.” Besides, the ration cards had by that point been declared valid only at their place of issue; in Gneez there was often sugar or fire starters when there weren’t any in Jerichow; Lise could bring some home on the weekends.
Now that we had different routes to school, I had to sit somewhere else in the classroom. When we saw each other only during the schoolday, I could march a few rows behind her and watch her from afar. There she was, swinging her legs in the air and zealously belting out the FDJ songs: “You HAVE a goal in si-ight / that GUIDES you through the world! . . . .”; there she was, hopping around merrily shouting the slogan against the Greek government, or the celebrations of Mao’s victory in Suzhou, or the songs of hate toward that renegade Tito. We had grown apart.
She had a goal in sight; today she’s a tax adviser in the Sauerland, West Germany. That dress from her, green organza with large polka dots, would have looked good on me on that Class Day, or for birthdays—but I only tried it on.
July 16, 1968 Tuesday
The worst part is that the bosses do it without warning. And then someone’s standing exposed at the podium in the staff cafeteria, under the eyes of four hundred people, maybe in a suit that clashes with the yellow walls, but they have to keep quiet and act like they’ve completely risen to the dignity of the occasion. The ceremony is ridiculous but in the moment it does take your breath away—everyone acting reverent, following the lead of the CEO standing stiff as a board across from the person, trying to seem taller than he really is, and disgorging a speech of praise so tensely that the victim feels spat upon. This is one of the occasions de Rosny has set up especially for the titular head of the company so that he can feel like he’s doing something. An unlucky victim may find herself on that day dressed to match the crisscrossed American flags on display behind the CEO; and some people have even made the mistake of wearing sandals.
Anyone whose number has come up would love to have slipped out for a haircut during lunch, but it takes you by surprise. It can happen on any workday of the year, so you half forget about it; this is why we have to submit our vacation requests six weeks in advance, though. Anyway, if you reflect on how ardent your work for this bank is, why would you be afraid of such a distinction. On top of that, participation in the event is considered voluntary, so some of the victims go just to show how devoted they are to the firm. All employees have to neatly initial a form to attest their attendance at the morning’s events; anyone who dares can be free and out on the street by four. Employee Cresspahl has a sense of what’s waiting for her outside—the cars are standing on Third Avenue with their hoods open because the engine coolant is boiling; how she’d love to get through the muggy heat of this afternoon in a less crowded train car, before rush hour. But no, she has a visitor.
– Give it up, de Rosny, sir: she says. It has turned into a game between her and her boss, ever since he’s recently started making use of her and her office “for tea.” He demonstrates the growth of the Czechoslovakian loan to her; today she’s refuted him with the Warsaw communiqué announcing a severe letter to the leadership of the ČSSR from their comrades in the struggle. And where are these “aggressive imperialist forces” with their “subversive actions” going to go if not hell in a handbasket, assuming the central committee in Prague decides to show a little backbone before the thrones of brothers instead of bowing meekly? Now they’re wanting to rewrite the terms of the Warsaw Pact to give every member country its turn as the supreme commander and put a stop to the political misuse of the alliance. That’s got to be the end of the line, a bridge too far for the Soviets. De Rosny tilts his head at this and narrows his eyes in a way expressing doubt, as though he knew something more reliable than that, but in so doing he notices his wristwatch.
– Should we go downstairs again? he says, urgent like a schoolboy suggesting they cut school. – Take another look at the big production?
He’s allowed to call it that—he invented it. Employee Cresspahl is well and truly annoyed at the loss of a whole hour of time, but she doesn’t want to give him any leverage by being impolite; she’s already been led past all the possible escape routes (stairs, ladies’ rooms) and is now sitting in the second row, in front of the podium, cut off from the aisle by de Rosny, who has one leg bent over the other at an angle as sharp as a stork’s. Surrounded by his young men, Carmody and Gelliston, he can carry on a perfectly uninhibited conversation with his “young student.” She feels the assembled gazes of the staff on her and remembers the other names people in the bank refer to her by; in sudden fury she decides that de Rosny’s white double mane is a wig, or at least dyed bluish to match his eyes. De Rosny is pontificating. “We” are not aggressive, “we” are not subversive, “we” are going to teach “our” West German friends to hold their tongues so that “we” and “our” friends in England, in Denmark, won’t get mad at a bungled deal. And what does Mrs. Cresspahl think about the Communists in Romania? They’ve come out against interference in Czechoslovak matters, haven’t they, just like Tito? She’s almost grateful when the dribble of music falls silent, making him do the same. The chairman is already standing on his platform and has cleared his throat several times. De Rosny feels compelled to whisper to his “young friend”: Next time we’ll use a curtain for this production!