by Uwe Johnson
One time—I was sixteen—the rail service to Jerichow was canceled and I spent the night at the Pagenkopfs’, alone in a room. I didn’t wait up for Pius.
Pius would have refused to tell me anything about the modified second line of the song about that girl Angelina who had to wait.
We were careful never to hold each other’s hand.
In the summer of 1951, we were out biking and, at Cramon Lake, opposite the village of Drieberg, we stopped for a half-hour swim. While we were changing I was clumsy, he was clumsy, for the span of a breath our feet touched each other.
Just a fling wouldn’t have been enough for me, Gesine.
Where no love grows, it’s hard for sin to flourish.
Don’t say her name, Gesine.
Don’t ask me about Jakob.
But we didn’t say a word to each other that time, did we!
No, Pius. We swam right across the lake.
Pagenkopf and Cresspahl spent vacation together. They biked to Schönberg, to Rehna. Pius lived at the Cresspahls’ for two weeks! They went to the beach together every morning. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, what they do when they’re alone! That’s our couple.
New York, N.Y., July 21, 1968
“MARIE H. CRESSPAHL
Dear Anita Red Hair,
It’s still my birthday, but I want to write you my thank-you note today since you took the trouble to send me two full pages. Other than that I only got cards—one from Denmark, one from Switzerland, two from London, and the rest from the USA, mostly New York. Thirty-two in total.
I liked that your present can be worn in a blue leather envelope on a ribbon around my neck like a medallion and none of the clever nuns, not even Sister Magdalena, will suspect a watch. Because wearing a watch during class is ‘verboten.’ People say that here in German when a rule is totally unreasonable. Jewelry is also ‘verbotten’ (same), but they won’t be able to see this under the blouse of the school uniform. Thank you and I’ll remember you every time I wear it.
I hope the alarm built into this watch wasn’t meant to teach me something. Because I always get up at the same time as Gesine, so that I can see her awake at least once a day. On Tuesday she went straight from the door to her bed and stayed lying there till the next morning. On the other hand, I’m always on time to school and have never once needed to take the 5 bus there. ‘Don’t take the bus, pay the fare like everyone else.’
To tell you the truth, I’m also writing to you because I have stationery with my name printed on it for the first time. It’s a present from D. E. ‘Because everyone older than ten needs some.’ I turned eleven years old at seven thirty this morning.
I should tell you something about D. E., you probably know him as Erichson. Gesine’s going to marry him. In the fall, when we’re done with Prague. It’s going to be en petit comité, with you as our best friend (and a mother-in-law too). As a result Gesine will become a citizen of the USA, and I’ll be from a totally different country.
This was my first birthday without a party. I could have easily had ten people over. But it couldn’t happen without Francine, the black girl who lived with us for a while until welfare came and got her. We’ve looked for her everywhere on the Upper West Side and even D. E. found not a trace. Francine would’ve been the first on my list to invite. Maybe she’s dead. But D. E. would find a grave.
Anyway we need to learn how it goes as a trio, so this is the first birthday D. E. did for me. When I had to leave my room I put a blindfold on and went back to my room from memory too because I wanted to see the table only when they were both there. They were supposed to call me and most of all they needed to sing the song they sing in Mecklenburg to wake up the birthday girl or boy: ‘I’m happy you were born.’ D. E. sang it for me. Then I came in.
The table was set with the damask tablecloth that came to us from Gesine’s mother. We normally use it only on New Year’s Eve. How did they smuggle flowers into the apartment! But once you get to know D. E. you’ll stop being surprised by miracles. Eleven candles, in all four colors, and the one for 1962 had a ring painted around it, ‘because years are different from each other, of course.’
Before I’d cracked it myself. 1962 is when he met us. He likes to show you something to think about but then you’ve got to do the thinking yourself.
Your present was there. You know what, I just now saw the ‘HMC’ engraved on it. It’s probably part of your job to think so carefully about other people, isn’t it. Gesine gave me a model of the prewar English Daimler I’ve been missing for a long time. (Do you think it’s dumb to collect things like that?) Jason, Shakespeare, and Eagle-Eye Robinson gave me a deluxe carton of chewing gum, which was very good of them but now they’ve given away my secret to Gesine. She thinks chewing gum is bad for your teeth. Mrs. Erichson gave me a two-yard-long shawl in the Mecklenburg colors (she’s going to be my step-grandmother). From de Rosny, that’s Gesine’s highest-up boss, a savings account. (Seventy-five dollars.) From D. E. this printed stationery and a look as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Don’t trust anyone over forty.
But since he was watching like a hawk I acted like this was the end of it and innocently let them take me out for a walk in Riverside Park. Gesine was wearing the Copenhagen blouse, since he’d come over in a matching blue linen suit. (He still doesn’t have a closet here.) So you see, they’re arranging everything together.
At first I didn’t suspect anything, since it was Sunday, and families often go for walks on Sundays. (Even though I was born on a Sunday.) They were discussing, like people on TV, whether or not there were evergreens in the park. ‘You’ve got to keep your eyes open,’ D. E. said, letting me think this was another piece of education in disguise. I did have to listen to how the little white beech on the slope below the retaining wall across from Ninety-Eighth Street was the kind of tree used for the wall of trees in the gardens of Versailles. But if you had kept your eyes open you saw a package next to the trunk, wrapped in colored paper, with ribbons, something even the most respectable person would steal it looked so tempting. Give up. We’ll be fumbling around in the dark till the end of time if we try to figure out how he smuggled it there. I was walking behind him the whole way, he can’t have thrown it. Give up. It was an ID bracelet, a silver chain with a tag saying my name and:
A2
cde cDuE.
For if I need blood from someone. After an accident. This is something a Czechoslovakian doctor can read.
Now you realize that D. E. must have broken into a doctor’s office on Park Avenue. At least.
The third of the good things was an electronic calculator at the Memorial Fountain on 100th Street (‘To the heroic dead of the Fire Department’). It was sitting there shining, way below the plaque to honor the horses that died ‘in the line of duty’ too. And you know Gesine, the educational ideas she has—she of all people says I can use it for homework, all four arithmetical operations plus percents. (‘To get exponents you’d have to promise me something.’) Only at home.
This Erichson was imitating Alexander Paepcke. That’s an uncle of Gesine’s (dead), he was an expert in things like this. D. E. doesn’t want to be too much like a father. And that’s why I agree to it.
Then came another thing, but it was the fourth and good things come in threes so it doesn’t count. It was an apartment.
You’re probably thinking: an apartment for the future married couple, Cresspahl & Erichson. That too. Up by Columbia University, where it looks so much like Paris, a fourteenth floor on Riverside Drive, five rooms, and they walked around in there like people in a bus station who have time to kill before they need to board. They called one of the rooms “the Berlin room.” Obviously they’d secretly been here before. I don’t know any more than that.
Because there’s a door in the apartment and it had a sheet of paper like this one hanging on it, and behind it was mine. An apartment for me, with locks and a bolt, with its own bathroom, walk-in closet, air conditioner,
phone, a hundred and thirty feet above Riverside Drive, with a view of the Hudson, the George Washington Bridge, the Palisades Amusement Park, the shore of New Jersey all day. The open space of park drew me in so much I felt like I was falling out the window. Down below, the thick bustle of the treetops along the roads, not as thin as the forest in West Germany when you fly into the Rhein/Main Air Base. Between the trees the number 5 bus came creeping up like a long strong animal. It had a very clean roof. I’ll live a bit more alone in that apartment. Before we were two plus one. In the new apartment, he’s one of the Two, I’m the One. New math. Group theory.
At night when he paces back and forth here talking, she runs along after him, just to make sure she doesn’t miss any of his statements.
But she also lays into him. The Soviet Army has now signed the letter to the Czechs and Slovaks too. D. E. brings up airborne troops, she says he mustn’t. It goes by fast, they often lose me: ‘Not after Hungary!’ Erichson: ‘For most Americans the last war was in the Pacific . . .’ Now you’re supposed to think about Vietnam. But she’s denying ‘objectively comparable functions of power’ and he’s already ready and waiting with the concept of crowds.
It seems this apartment has another room with three windows facing the river. Now I hear them negotiating which one of them will get it—they both want the other one to take it. After their six years of practice it can’t help but go well, can it?
Dear Anita, are you coming to see us in Prague or have you made yourself unwelcome in the ČSSR too with your travel agency? If they’re rebuilding your Friedenau post office now, and you’re losing your PO box, you’ll have to shut up shop, won’t you. You’re hard to find in a PO box but in a four-room apartment with a phone the lights will give you away. (I’m sorry you lost your studio.)
There were relatives living in Friedenau until 1943, the Niebuhrs, also dead. We’ve just gotten a letter album from them, with photos, Gesine wanted to look through them alone. When she came back I thought she’d been crying. But does she let anything show?
My favorite dream about Friedenau is the market, because you can buy fish there and rhubarb and butter in bulk, not just sweaters and suits like sometimes at Fourteenth Street here. But how come the fishwife still asks after me?
When you come to New York I’ll take you to Park Avenue, where it becomes a poor neighborhood (I’m only allowed to go to Harlem with a grown-up), and I’ll show you La Marqueta with the Caribbean fruits, from habichuela blanca to aji dulce. The Puerto Ricans brought this market with them, and their neighborhood is called Spanish Harlem.
When you come for the wedding we’ll only need to go swimming in the Hotel Marseilles. You can stay with me. Be my guest.
M.
P.S.
But my name will still be what you see on the top left corner of this sheet of paper and on the letters on the watch you gave me.”
July 22, 1968 Monday
So what is it that threatens to end civilized life on earth? More than anything else, the bomb that produces heat through nuclear reactions: says one of the people who invented it, and he would now like to see the Soviet Union come to terms with this country, in this realm as in other hygienic regards. So industrious, scientists’ regrets are.
Another expert, this one renowned in mathematics and philosophy, sounds antsy. The Soviet prime minister needs to assure Lord Bertrand Russell and the world that the Red Army renounces all use of military force in the ČSSR. Just so we know what’s coming. Always these uncertainties about the future.
In fact the Soviets concluded their war games in Czechoslovakia three weeks ago and still they have their troops in the country. Their army newspaper reports from Moscow what they’re doing there. They’re looking for sacks of American weapons, and they’ve found another three.
From the late summer of 1948 on, the widower, the proud old bachelor Cresspahl was surrounded by three women. One you know; the second, a fifteen-year-old, you can guess; the third will surprise you. The first always wore an item of black clothing, a collar or scarf or something, mourning in advance, unfortunately; the second was often referred to behind her back as a hussy; and then there was the third, paying visits like back in the old days—Mrs. Brüshaver, the pastor’s wife. Plucky of mouth, glasses stuck up on her head at an awkward angle, a careless part in her now-dull ash-blond hair, this is how she came over, careful not to seem to be looking around like a stranger. But her old path, between the Creutzes’ greenhouses and the masters’ villa, was now a Soviet restricted zone, off limits, so she had to come openly, down Brickworks Road from Town Street, a coat over her apron for decorum’s sake, easy and relaxed from her first visit. But Cresspahl was pleased that she saw him busy in the kitchen with his daughter and Mrs. Abs, as if safe in a family, and dismissively asked her what they might do for her.
She started in as only a woman can, snatching something out of thin air; in her scattershot way she hit on how men were always bustling about and making a fuss and in general just you know. This was hard to contradict, and she tacked on, as it were reasonably, an invitation for Cresspahl to come by the pastorage and take a look at a window that was letting in rain, making puddles on Aggie’s waxed floor. She thereby reminded us that we used to know her as Agatha, and reminded Cresspahl that his job used to be fine woodworking and carpentry in general. She had her opening. Now we had to mind our manners, and since in her pride Gesine Cresspahl forgot them, Mrs. Abs offered the guest a chair and a tin mug of coffee made of roasted rye. She immediately praised it. Because if a certain husband, hers in fact, hadn’t taken her wifely advice then she’d now be drinking unhealthy imported coffee from a porcelain cup on a white tablecloth in Schwerin, as wife of the minister responsible for church matters in the state of Mecklenburg(-Vorpommern). In brief, Aggie was bustling and fussing and just-you-knowing as if the last time she’d dropped by was the day before yesterday and not ten years ago. Cresspahl kept his eyes on the stove into which he was putting more wood, maybe to warm the room a bit for her, and still he let himself be tempted into a question. – Right?: she said, the way only a woman who grew up somewhere between Grabow and Wismar can say it. The ministry post was something the Communists in the government had dreamed up as a reward for Brüshaver, whom they planned to introduce as a comrade from Sachsenhausen and Dachau. But they themselves had written a “P” in front of that, upset the apple cart, by mentioning their fellow soldier Brüshaver to their secret police K-5 a little too often, just because he kept bringing up, again and again, the matter of certain members of his congregation who’d disappeared and were staying wherever they were at the pleasure of the Soviet friends. (At this, someone in Cresspahl’s kitchen felt her ears turn red with shame. She’d been refusing to greet the pastor on the street because she thought he’d betrayed her father.) And just as with the secular authorities, Brüshaver’s stubbornness had made a hash of it with the religious ones, all because he’d had to refuse church rites to head senior detective Herbert Vick of the criminal police at his funeral. – Vick?: Cresspahl asked, dumbfounded, and not at the death. – Vick!: Aggie cried, quoting: “Because I am a faithful National Socialist!” Now the ten years between them were over and gone; now they were talking together again. The democratic civil administration of Mecklenburg had wanted to use Herbert Vick’s arts, at least the criminological kind, for educational purposes too, at K-5 in the Neubrandenburg zone, and had hoped to repay his service with a Christian final benediction, as if the whole thing were just for show. Brüshaver, though, felt professionally obliged to consider, as a German and an anti-Fascist Christian, how this honored keeper of the peace had abstained from religious service and communion throughout his life; Jerichow as place of baptism scarcely mattered. So the Volkspolizei had had to find a pastor in Gneez to do the final honors, and Brüshaver was summoned to the state superintendency for a gentle warning. The Mecklenburg State Church was hoping to avoid a collision course; they’d told him so in writing, Brüshaver could frame it, just like his o
fficial certificate as “Fighter against Fascism” (category 4), if there were any frames to be had, and speaking of which, she’d dropped by today to discuss something about a window frame . . . Not a word about the Cresspahls, or the Abses, failing to attend her husband’s sermons; not a word about Gesine’s haughtiness. Thank you for that, Fru Pastor Brüshaver.
The next morning, Cresspahl cleaned one of his carpenter’s rules, oiled the hinges, put it in his pocket, and really and truly walked partway into town, among other people, for the first time since October three years ago, since May of this one. Went out on a job.
It was a window ledge (window breast) on the upper floor of the pastorage. Aggie showed Cresspahl how she’d been bracing herself while polishing the window and the heel of her hand had gone right through what looked like perfectly intact enamel paint into the rotten wood, more than an inch, and she wasn’t kidding. It turned out you could scrape off two thirds of the sill with your bare fingers. Aggie wanted an explanation, since the window had been repaired as recently as 1944. A master craftsman knows how to watch his words and refrain from appraising someone else’s workmanship. In 1944 it had been Pastor Wallschläger—that shining light, annunciator of Nordic preeminence—reigning here. If someone had it in for him, all he needed to do was use the softest wood, black poplar it looked like, and make one or two channels in it with a spike or screwdriver, cover it all up with some paint, and leave Jerichow in good time. The rain, driven hence by the west and sea winds, will separate the ledge from the board (window sill) within a year, stealthily wash out the mortar, and before long leave nothing to keep frame and masonry together but the interior wallpaper. By that time it’s too late to repair it—we’re dealing with a total loss, which’ll take more than ten pounds of tobacco on the black market to fix. – I’ll have to make a botch of it: Cresspahl said soothingly, in English, since he had to get accustomed to his profession again gradually, and he didn’t want to translate it, because it meant two things: to mess it up, to cobble it together. – Emergency first-aid for the winter: he promised, and Aggie was calmed, because he measured the window as if it might be saved. His keeping the sabotage from her is what I consider the second step in Cresspahl’s return to life with people, instead of, as required, against them.