Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Emil Knoop never discovered who had dared to defy him; he’d written that letter in Schwerin out of sheer goodwill. He carried out the search for Klaus Böttcher in the sporting spirit we were used to from him. True, he did come back from Moscow alone. It was around Christmas when I saw a ragged young man on Station Street, dazed, staring at the people forming a line three persons wide, shivering in the cold, because the Renaissance Cinema was showing the Soviet war booty Die Fledermaus, with actors who’d been accessories to Fascism, as he had probably learned by then as well as we had. I didn’t know how to explain this to him as I took him to his parents, and I had to see a man of almost thirty cry before I understood why Böttcher had been so desperate to have a good reputation with the Soviets, even when it hurt a fellow guildsman, and what had moved Cresspahl to such a forgiving stance, and I apologized to my father, deeply; as they say when they’re ashamed: from the heart.

  Still nothing but hints from “reliable sources,” no indication of what the letter sent to Czechoslovakia from its allies actually said.

  July 18, 1968 Thursday

  The New York Times has read the letter to Czechoslovakia from the Warsaw comrades, and informs us that it included the following demands:

  “Decisive action against right-wing or other anti-Socialist forces.” Okay, that’s fine. Agreed.

  “Party control of the press, radio, and television.” Because they’d made “groundless” charges that Soviet troops in the ČSSR represented a threat to the nation’s sovereignty. Well, if they don’t represent a threat, then agreed. But let them tell the people what they see.

  “We do not appear before you as spokesmen of yesterday who would like to hamper you in rectifying your mistakes and shortcomings, including violations of Socialist legality.” If that stays true, then agreed.

  The New School taught us to rank one another according to our respective fathers. Just as Schoolgirl Cresspahl was a tradesman’s daughter, Pius Pagenkopf was appended to a father with a leadership role in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and high office in the Mecklenburg state government. Reactionary Middle Class and Progressive Intellectual—how could they share a desk from January 1949 all the way to graduation?

  Pius . . . he’d once gotten stuck declining this Latin adjective; he must have preferred that as a nickname to a translation of his last name from Platt into High German (Horsehead). He was also the only Catholic in our grade. Pius . . . if only the mind would do our bidding! Of Jakob I have a sense of his closeness, his voice, his calm movements; of Pius I have only the memory of a photograph. We were nineteen and eighteen, standing before bare April reeds on the shore of Gneez Lake. A tall lean boy with a hard head, shoulders thrown back, annoyed at the camera, in a posture of resistance. He held a lit cigarette like a grown-up. And the snapshot tries to convince me that Pius’s face was always so finished. All I know at the moment about the younger girl next to him, with the braids, is that her father wanted to forbid her from smoking, because she is concealing her burning tobacco product in a cupped hand. We look like a well-functioning married couple; we knew each other quite a bit better than our fathers cared to notice.

  When ninth grade started, Pius was for me too almost nothing but Mr. Pagenkopf’s son. Head of the Gneez finance office and a Socialist, he’d been removed in April 1933 and had to augment his 75 percent retirement pension in the freight department at the railroad station (preventive custody during Mussolini’s visit to Mecklenburg). In 1945, the people of Gneez decided to see it as only fair when the British made him interpreter for their city commandant; they held it against him that he became mayor under the Soviets, and the Social Democrats in particular found him suspect for his speeches in favor of unification with the Communists, all the more so now that he was helping the Soviet administration in the district capital. Since 1945, the Pagenkopfs, on paper a family of three, again resided in a four-room apartment—cause for resentment in an overcrowded, occupied city; moreover, Pius’s father showed his face in Gneez so rarely that even his son’s girlfriend knew him only from pictures of speakers’ podiums, or newspaper articles on the New Face of the Party or the Yugoslavian conspiracy. Of his nighttime Bohemianism in Schwerin, it was taken as fact that he had his pick of attractive women there, younger and wittier in conversation than Mrs. Pagenkopf, a farmer’s daughter with an elementary-school education—he had to sneak her onto the “In.” list, authorizing ration cards for the intelligentsia. With a father like this, Pius would obviously raise his hand at once in the FDJ constituent assembly; with a father like that behind him, he could simply wave aside his election to various FDJ offices as just another “societal activity”—Comrade Pagenkopf took care of his son to that extent. It came as a surprise to no one when Pius, after the new TO government stores opened, was wearing a fresh sports shirt every three days, a hundred marks each, and leather shoes, two hundred and ten for a pair of those; he kept up bourgeois appearances, he did. The son of such a father could permit himself walks with the daughter of a tradesman (bourgeois), but paying visits to a Heinrich Cresspahl’s daughter was pushing it, and she was not a little shocked to see him at the door in December 1948, on Sunday, at coffee time. Then she thought she saw through his excuse.

  They were under threat of a quiz in math class. If someone has a weak heart when it comes to math, surely he can go looking for a classmate—even if she lives in distant Jerichow. Now here he stands, a plausible smile of recognition in the corners of his mouth, nervousness in his eyes, because someone might get the idea that he’d been wandering around Jerichow Market Square just because, or else, say, trying to run into Lise Wollenberg, and not because he couldn’t figure out where Brickworks Road was (straight, then right at St. Peter’s Church). – Dobri den', Gesine: he says cautiously, almost pleadingly. Turns out she can speak Russian too: – Kak djela, gospodin, she asks; she brings him into Cresspahl’s room, sadites'; next comes na razvod, to work!, so that he’ll finally believe she’s believed him. Her feeling here was less compassionate, more urgent, the way seeing someone’s wound demands a bandage. There was nervousness too, though, and with it the thought: Oh my distant homeland! which was sung in Russian, Shiroka strana moya rodnaya, but meant in translation: Well this is a fine mess we’re in, and it may get dicey.

  But Pius did nothing halfway. When the geometry tutorial was over, the question was stuck in my throat and Pius answered it. We came to an understanding about our fathers—the younger man who served the Soviets and the older whom the Soviet had had in their clutches; both men had made it possible for us to do this, each in his own way. Cresspahl merely remarked that he hoped Pagenkopf Senior wasn’t sticking anyone’s head in the lion’s mouth but his own. Now all that was missing were tiny scraps of paper and Mrs. Habelschwerdt’s community spirit.

  Ol’ Habelschwerdt, nicknamed Hobel (the wood planer), had graduated high school in Breslau twenty-one years before and snagged a senior school-teacher to marry; unfortunately, with him missing “in the East” and her stuck with half-grown children, she’d gone to teacher training school surrounded by all sorts of young things. She taught us mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The boys in the class rated her as genuinely “acceptable” (“good enough for a new husband”); her legs were a solid A-minus given that she was forty; she’d acquired her nickname for her excessively harsh reprimands, overstraining her tiny voice. As a relative and now surviving dependant of a politically compromised person (NSDAP), she tried maybe a little too anxiously to guarantee at least one (“bourgeois”) son’s admission to the New School high school, plus she needed to hang on to her teacher’s salary—she’d zealously memorized the words of the New Progressive Pedagogy and perhaps understood the meanings a bit less well. And so, a week before Christmas, she whacked the desk with her metal ruler (several times over, as if beating a bad dog) when a handful of paper confetti blew into the aisle from Pius’s place; and thus she yelled at him, over all the thirty-nine student heads: You of all people should show some commun
ity spirit here!

  In an English or American school, “You of all people . . .” would probably have become her nickname. Eva Matschinsky was admonished like this: You don’t just lay your abundance down on the table like that, Eva Maria! You of all people . . . Habelschwerdt was taken aback by our laughter, having forgotten the youthful abundance of her own bosom; she had just been reminding Eva, and us, that as a barber’s daughter (Reactionary Middle Class) she had to make up for her social origins with at least unimpeachable conduct. And Pius, of all people, should come across as entirely agreeable, given his father (Progressive Intelligentsia). But given Mr. Pagenkopf’s position, she accepted with a sigh that Pius refused to give her—his teacher!—an apology. I alone knew: it was Zaychik who’d done it.

  Pius shared a desk with him, Dagobert Haase (Platt for Hase, “rabbit,” zaychik in Russian). They’d shared it since the start of 9-A-II, because they took the same route to school. Not a friend, a habit. High-spirited, pushy, clever, usable. But Zaychik just wouldn’t stop passing notes. Playing Battleship right under Mrs. Habelschwerdt’s nose, Pius cured him of that. But when a scrap of paper is passed from the right it’s considered an affront against solidarity to shake one’s head, and unfortunately this one was addressed to Pius himself (Eva’s already wearing a . . . ; Eva has already. . .); Pius had ripped the message into tiny bits and left them on his opened book. The teacher neared, the book was slammed shut, the telltale cloud between the legs of the desk testified to Pius’s lack of community spirit. Now it might be that such spirit abandoned Pius when it came to the community of teachers, but if such a sensibility was a virtue, a public virtue, then it was unjust to be told one lacked it because of someone else’s offense. Worst of all, Haase Zaychik failed to avail himself of the honor code to which a member of the Free German Youth was bound—he didn’t try to clear up the situation. The girl to whom he explained all of this, in a state of multilayered uneasiness, was also unattached.

  And so began the first “work collective” in the Fritz Reuter High School in Gneez, two years before such things were officially introduced, and it was scandalous. First of all, classroom seats could be traded when the school year started, never in the middle except on a teacher’s orders. Second, a boy or girl left over was to sit alone—if worst came to worst a boy and girl at the same desk might be allowed at the front of the room. But in any case . . . Cresspahl’s daughter was almost sixteen and Pius was already seventeen! On top of that, the desk Pius had moved to with me was in the very back corner of the room, hard for a teacher to keep her eye on, and since Pius had offered me the chair next to the window, he also screened me from view down the aisle. The school might be “New”—if you didn’t count the building, and the furniture, and most of the teachers—but this was an offense against propriety, letting young people of the opposite sex sit together at the same desk. Unheard of!

  “Oh, Angelina, you’ve got to wait . . .” was sung in our direction before first period the first day after Christmas break; there was a lot of anticipatory giggling around us, because a visit from the principal was expected—Dr. Kliefoth, was held to have old-fashioned ideas, and in fact a corner of his eye did twitch when he caught sight of us, as if a fly had attacked him there. He tested the class his way. He started with Matschinsky, jumped to C when W was up, took some P’s, then relaxed against the back of his chair, hands in his lap, initially with a stern sidelong glance from under his beetling brows. The stiff white tuft of hair on his skull was perfectly still, although the heat was by no means on full blast. Pagenkopf and Cresspahl had to translate, in alternating lines, the letter from E. A. Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” which, unfortunately, opens “My Dear” and goes on containing phrases that would also be appropriate in a love letter. We had to deal with foggy light from the frosted-glass lamps, we were in no mood to giggle. Lise Wollenberg, whom the slight had made reckless, forced herself to burst out laughing and in return got a mark against her in the record book for disrupting the class (a delicate matter for someone from the bourgeoisie). He gave each of us an A. Kliefoth’s position was murky: bourgeois, militarist, but on the other hand Progressive Intelligentsia as principal; after his tacit approval what could the Wood Planer do to us? Luckily for her, she saw the change in the seating plan actually recorded in the principal’s handwriting; we saw her sit up with a start at that. Never again would she convict Pius of a lack of community spirit; the following year she even invited us for an afternoon coffee—together.

  When the singing and jeering about our new desk started, Pius furrowed his eyebrows as if in pain and his lips grew taut the way they used to when he was standing under the horizontal bar, collecting himself for his leap. This was someone who’d stuck it out through every decision he’d had to make in his life. Since he stared straight ahead so haughtily, as if our intention alone guaranteed our success, I lost my trepidation and knew for certain that everything was going to work out fine. And since we’d apparently nodded at one another after Mrs. Habelschwerdt’s sigh like two horses who’d been sharing a harness for a long time, we were considered a couple from that moment on.

  Because of our fathers, it stayed a secret for quite some time that the Cresspahl girl went home from school with the Pagenkopf boy and did her homework with him, or that Pius gave up a half hour of sleep to meet Gesine at the milk train from Jerichow. We didn’t shove our compact in anyone’s face, even each other’s. Cresspahl got through it because custom dictated that you had to go with someone; by this point she was afraid to look too closely into how things stood between her and Jakob. And now Pius always had someone he could walk right past Lise Wollenberg with, as if the thing with her passport photo had been settled when he tore it up.

  July 19, 1968 Friday

  – It’s all gonna come down today. (Eagle-Eye Robinson)

  – It’s all gonna come down today, Gesine. And don’t smoke so much! (Eileen O’Brady)

  – Hope it all comes down today, my gardener made a bet with me. (de Rosny)

  If only it all would come down today—the heat that’s hanging over the city, making the mornings pale, the days hazy, the tops of buildings blurry at the edges, standing still in the sun unbearable because the heat from the sidewalk penetrates up through one’s soles. Last night the dirt in the air left nothing but a small sweltering hole for the sun. After you’ve swum eight blocks through the hot liquid air, the artificial climate of the bank hits you like a blow to the heart. If only it all would come down today.

  So what did Czechoslovak Communists’ peers in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union have to tell them, and what did the presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the ČSSR reply?

  They say: We’ve read it, and first off: greetings! But we have already addressed your concerns in our May plenary session.

  Yet how could we instantly clear up all the conflicts that have accumulated over the twenty years preceding our January plenary session? If we start with healthy Socialist activities, it’s inevitable that some of them will overshoot their marks, whether it be a little heap of anti-Socialist forces or the fronde of old dogmatic-sectarians. If we’re trying to unify our new line, not even the party itself can remain untouched. Many of us are so accustomed to rule from above that the wishes from below always fall short. We wish to admit these facts, to our own party and to our people. You know that.

  But you do have eyes in your head, so how can you possibly claim that our present situation is counterrevolutionary, that we want to give up Socialism, change our foreign policy, break our country loose from you. After everything you’ve done for us, during the war and in the years since, you mustn’t doubt us. That’s an insult to us.

  We are friends in Socialism. And things can only improve with mutual respect, sovereignty, and international solidarity. We’ll try harder. You can count on us.

  You mention our relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany. Well, it is our immediate neighbor. And we were the last to take defi
nite steps toward the partial regulation of mutual relations, particularly in the economic field. There were other Socialist countries that did so earlier and to a greater extent, without it causing any fears.

  We thoroughly respect and protect the interests of the DDR, hand in hand with it. It is our Socialist ally. We do all in our power to strengthen its international position and authority. We said so in January and have done so in all the months since.

  What we’ve promised to you, in agreements and treaties, we will respect. Our commitment to mutual cooperation, peace, and collective security is proved by our new friendship treaties with the Bulgarian and Hungarian People’s Republics, and also the prepared treaty with the Rumanian Socialist Republic. (You know why we here bracket out China. And Poland.) No hard feelings!

  The staff exercises of your forces on our territory are a concrete proof of our faithful fulfillment of our alliance commitments. We gave you a friendly welcome, we were where you needed us to be. The restlessness and doubts in the minds of our public occurred only after you repeatedly changed the time of your departure. Did we ever say to your face: Get going?