Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Now you try to find some cement in Jerichow or Gneez, just a paper cone full!, to slap over the masonry and bandage the rest of the ledge with, in exchange for the reformed currency of East Germany and some cheap words. You’d be more likely to run across a full sack of wheat. Then there’s the problem of finding a hunk of beech or Cornish oak, 20" x 6" x 3", and let’s not even mention the sodium silicate solution or synthetic resin to waterproof it with. If that’s what you’re looking for you’ve got to make your way around, offer at least conversation, and then when you come to inspect the wound in the wall with its makeshift covering you’ll see Pastor Brüshaver standing in the garden, bent over the flowerbeds he’s spading but still looking up as if he knew you. Conversation topics in that situation might include the days when the pastor had to make an appointment to talk to Mayor Cresspahl in Town Hall about a permit to hold an assembly (religious service). Or: that it’s May again and here we have a new constitution, whose Article 44 sanctions religious instruction in secular schools, except maybe in Jerichow, where Brüshaver finds his charges waiting outside a looked door on School Street and the district commissioner conducts himself during the pleadings as though the Evangelical Church were a dispensable social group for an upright Communist and its Jerichow pastor more of a burdensome supplicant than a comrade in anti-Fascism. Potatoes need loose soil, Pastor. Hoe em before the sprouts show. When they get four inches high, hoe them again and pile them, pile em again when the plants are as big as your hand, it’ll do your waistline loads of good. And then Brüshaver, with all his Greek and Latin, had to ask what this meant, and Cresspahl informed him: Juss thins people say.

  Being neighbors. Teasing. Aggie Brüshaver now brought the ration cards over to the house, Street Representative for South Jerichow as she was (“since someone had to do it, and from me they’ll get only the receipts, no character references”). When Cresspahl tried to refuse the vegetable fat and bacon Aggie had diverted for him from the Swedish Aid, he heard back that she was acting out of a sense of medical need, not charity, and a sixty-one-year-old patient needed to follow a state-registered nurse’s orders. She’d noticed how my father held his head and before long I came upon her massaging his shoulder and neck muscles, and felt jealous, because he’d never asked his daughter to do that. – Surely I’m closest to hand now: Aggie said when he thanked her, and she gave him a pat to tell him to put his shirt back on. One time Jakob was with us for the weekend and she came in and fussed and bustled and lectured him as if reading him the riot act, or Leviticus. Jakob had gone to St. Peter’s for Easter 1949, for the sermon on the resurrection, and she accused him of having sat there with his arms crossed till the end, even if in the back pew. – Like you were considering an offer!: she shouted, and after a while Jakob nodded, as if admitting it. And because I can still hear her, it gives me another chance to see him. Brüshaver had been getting along without teeth for three years now—they’d knocked them out of him in Sachsenhausen; finally Aggie talked him out of his suspicion of “German doctors” and he turned up with yellowish plastic structures in his mouth, chewing and chewing like someone when something tastes bad. – Say “sixpence”: my father told him, and Brüshaver would attempt the English word, and they went on babbling away at each other in made-up words like two little boys. I once saw Jakob’s mother looking at them, her lips stretched so tight it seemed they had to hurt—she was attempting a furtive smile. When Jakob’s mother wanted to speak severely to Aggie, she called her “young Fru!” They had gotten to the point of confidences in the hospital. And if some forgave me out of Christian duty, others had to only, let’s say, for reasons of residence—because I lived and belonged there.

  For the Gesine Cresspahl of 1948 wanted only to tolerate her neighbors. First of all, she was now a student at the academic high school and had settled the matter of God for herself, in a way she considered entirely original; second, she could soothe her unbelief simply enough, by recalling the prayer that a Lutheran chaplain of the US Air Force had offered up for the crew of the plane about to drop the first atomic bomb on populated territory; she credited Protestant theology with enough tactical and strategic judgment to realize that a conventional destruction of the city of Hiroshima would have sufficed, given the state of war as of August 6, 1945, 9:15 p.m. (Washington time). Student Cresspahl was well aware of why the New State in its New Era tended to schedule its parades, conventions, and work details to coincide with religious holidays; she felt she was superfluous in this duel, believed she was taking neither side by keeping silent about how the cigar butt had ended up in the schoolroom, which was the justification and excuse for shutting out the church: the boy Ludwig Methfessel was severely reprimanded and told to obey his new teachers’ every word. Anything else would’ve meant being a tattletale. And anyway, what did she care about the church!

  The heathen girl, she cannot live in peace / If other heathens do not let her be. Look at Jakob, carrying a rain-soaked cat into the house and holding the dripping bundle up by the nape of its neck before dropping it with the report: Wet as Jonah! and only then does he notice Cresspahl’s Gesine sitting there and he lets his glance slip right off her, idly, as if she didn’t know about biblical whales anyway. Hear the proverbs Heinrich Cresspahl comes out with that summer, English and Protestant at once: Don’t preach to the converted! Don’t mock the afflicted! and Gesine has to translate them for him into current German, as if she were too uncultured for Luther’s. Jakob’s mother lets him tease her for her Old Lutheran peculiarities since that at least gives her the rare chance to discuss religious matters, but this fall she goes for the first time to Brüshaver’s church, takes communion from him. Finally, in October, the daughter of Johann Heinrich Cresspahl, b. 1933, well known to the authorities already, appears in the pastor’s house of St. Peter’s Church in Jerichow to request for a second time, in person, permission to take confirmation class. Enjoying already the blessings of her elders’ permission and agreement. So eager to please, this child.

  In the warmer season Pastor Brüshaver had gone for walks with his charges, holding lessons in a clearing in the Countess Woods; there were not enough of them to keep warm under the oversized dome of the church. He tried to borrow a living room for this one hour a week on Saturday afternoons, trying the Quades, trying the Maasses (strictly avoiding Cresspahl’s house); the good citizens complained about all the dirt the fifteen-year-old children would track onto their sacred floors. Right after the war, Mrs. Methfessel had been pleased to refer to the “community of destiny” in which Brüshaver and her husband had found themselves; now she was no match for her bullheaded boy, Ludwig, practicing with his soccer ball right outside the parlor just when the pastor was holding his classes. Mrs. Albert Papenbrock had the biggest hall in Jerichow—and the firmest faith in the Evangelical Church, to hear her tell it; she was afraid to stir up the displeasure of Albert’s wardens by having hopefuls for church membership in the house. She wrung her hands with scruples and hesitations, she lamented in a slight whine: people were always expecting more from her than from anyone else. . . . Brüshaver reserved the back room of the Lübeck Court, now a rathskeller. The tenant, Lindemann, let it be known that gatherings had to be registered and authorized, just like club meetings. The Jerichow mayor’s office prohibited the use of secular premises for religious propaganda. (This was the one after Bienmüller: Schettlicht, the bright-eyed agnostic from Saxony.) Brüshaver thought he could see Red Army policy behind this; he hesitated to test out his theory at the Jerichow Kommandatura; how could he have known that the Wendennych Twins would have bit Comrade Schettlicht’s head off! Eventually Jakob lost patience and the German Railway shunted a workshop car onto Papenbrock’s now governmental siding, with benches, as if set up for a meeting, and a stove, for which the gasworks donated a wheelbarrow full of coal; because wherever Jakob worked with people they were always willing to do him a favor, as he was for them, the way friends do. In this train car, under the light of barn lanterns, Cresspahl’s daug
hter stuck it out till Christmastime.

  She tried to play the humble child, eager to repent through hard work; she was also prepared to accept as only fair that she got little praise for rattling off the main elements of the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is not just plain water, obviously. But she had to force herself to sit still and she avoided looking at Brüshaver’s face too much. It seemed to be stuck in a perpetual smile, but it was just strained muscles, torn tendons that pulled the corners of his mouth into a grimace, froze his crow’s feet into the involuntary semblance of a grin. He also acted like the pinky of his right hand had always stuck out from his palm like that, the stiff hook at the end of a sweep of pain pulling his shoulder down. When he lifted his book with his index and ring finger before pushing his thumb onto it, as though by accident, his hand looked artificial, sinister. He didn’t realize he groaned every time he used his lower arm—that’s the kind of thing it hurts to look at. Religious instruction takes the form of a catechism; there was no refuge from Brüshaver’s damaged voice, which sounded like there was something unpleasantly sandy in his throat, being turned around and around, every syllable another wound to the sensitive tissue there. Gesine obsessively told herself that these were what he’d brought back from six years in Oranienburg and near Weimar, to be counterbalanced against an official certificate that by now his comrades at the town hall, the Gneez district school commission, the district council authorities raised their hands in front of as though shooing something away. But she couldn’t keep perfect control over herself, and it was certainly against her will when she heard herself say, through a drone in her ears as if she were talking underwater: she knew the part about the doctrine of ubiquity by heart and could recite it at will but couldn’t bring herself to believe in it.

  She said it and ran so blindly to the train car door that she almost toppled down the high step onto the platform and ran down wet cold Station Street into the dim abyss of Market Square, hid in the broken lightless telephone booth, racked by wheezing sobs, afraid of the twilight when everyone would see her.

  Cresspahl remembered the winter of 1944 when she’d sought out that same booth to hide from school and the authorities; he came to rescue her before dinner even. He led her off like a child, one arm around her shoulder, and the route they took spared her the light on at home and the look from Jakob’s mother, with her dark eyes, enlarged by her glasses; the journey took them into the marsh where only rabbits and foxes could hear that the bodily presence of Christ in the communion wafer seemed like cannibalism, and they didn’t care. This was the last time he held her and walked her somewhere like a father; she retained one of his efforts to console her, the one that absolved her: You gave him a chance. You tried, Gesine.

  The next afternoon she saw Mrs. Brüshaver come into the yard and disappeared lightning-fast into the Frenchmen’s room, which Jakob’s mother, in her proper way, had cleared out for us to use as a dining room. In her hiding place, Gesine tried as fast as she could to think up various arguments against this emissary of the church—weapons in case she was discovered: Aggie had stopped instructing children in the Christian faith as early as 1937. Did she doubt what her husband proclaimed as articles of faith? She told Cresspahl to have himself hung upside down in front of an x-ray to get at the roots of the pains in his neck while she let her husband walk around with a case of Dupuytren’s contracture, knots of tissue creating a thick cord in the palm of the hand, and a surgeon could take care of that; she was a nurse but turned her back on her husband’s troubles with this government too, and went off to Jerichow’s hospital leaving him to deal with all the paperwork of the parish too; are these the precepts for a Christian marriage, then, Aggie?

  Aggie’s response came through the closed door. She was in the hall with my father, thought no one else was listening, and asked him, despondently, as if asking for forgiveness for herself: What if the child’s right, Cresspahl?

  The sun hung in the western mist, already a quarter turned away from the earth; its low rays filled the room with a thick, blood-colored light. It was the first time I’d ever been in such a menacing red haze.

  In March Cresspahl installed a new window ledge in the parsonage, handmade from a rail tie so soaked in carbolineum that dewdrops would sit on its surface without seeping in or running off. Meanwhile the Brüshavers had found a three-foot-wide section of crumbling wall, running alongside the chimney from the attic to the ground floor, bequeathed by enemies of the Mecklenburg State Church in 1944 with a few chisel blows to the copper flange. This was part of what Brüshaver had inherited. The pastor of Jerichow lived in a house that was falling apart.

  The Sunday after Palm Sunday, 1949, there was a christening at the Brüshavers’. Aggie (“everything just grows like that with me”) had had another child, a boy, Alex.

  Those who challenge the omnipresence of Christ are neither worthy of confirmation nor equal to the duties of a godparent, it goes without saying, and Cresspahl’s daughter wasn’t jealous when she heard that, along with Jakob’s mother, another child from confirmation class had been chosen to watch over Alexander Brüshaver’s Christian conduct—a girl from former East Prussia who could not only recite the doctrine of ubiquity but believe it. Gantlik’s daughter is who it was. Her name was Anita.

  – Bit heavy on the church stuff, Marie?

  – Did your pastor lose his hair too?

  – Brüshaver without his biretta was a sight you did not want to see. The remains of a wound were still visible on his temple—a reddish indentation the size of a walnut.

  – What was the Old Lutheran Church?

  – Idiosyncrasies about justification, atonement, the trinity. If you ask me, a dispute about the right of association.

  – Jakob’s mother gave it up for you?

  – Only children, who think they’re the center of the world, believe things like that. No, she could only make it to the Old Lutherans in Gneez or Wismar once a month. She wanted to be able to go to church every Sunday.

  – Were you being honest when you ran away and fell off the side step of the train car?

  – Maybe I was being arrogant with my idea. Anyway it serves me to this day.

  – Since you all had to lie everywhere, you took your own truth out on Brüshaver. Admit it.

  – I admit it, Marie. And I wanted it to finally be over.

  – You were much too young, Gesine. How’s a child supposed to decide whether she believes or not. I’ll get confirmed when I know for sure—maybe when I’m eighteen.

  July 23, 1968 Tuesday

  Enter Anita.

  Not a “little Anna”—a big tall girl with strong shoulders like a boy, practically athletic from the work in the fields she’d had to do in the village of Wehrlich for nothing but food and a straw-sack pallet under a dripping thatched roof, because she was no local child, she was displaced, with almost no property to protect her, no mother, and a father who left her in servitude to the farmers and kept his pay from the Jerichow police for himself, apparently wishing ruin and death on his daughter. That’s how things looked, and when the child came to town for religious services and confirmation classes, one and a half hours’ walk and barefoot, she went right past her father with a calm, indifferent look, no anger. How could such a child—with no guardian, no support—escape from day labor to the state capital of Gneez, to an academic high school, to an apartment in the most desirable neighborhood, by the town moat, in a three-story building with running water coming out of the walls and light out of the ceiling?

  When she first entered ninth grade the rumors had preceded her and gave her a nasty welcome: “the Russians” had helped her out. That was true insofar as the gentlemen commandants of Jerichow, the Wendennych Twins, when they wanted to tour the country as conquerors from the Red Land, took a detour through Wehrlich and had Anita, a fifteen-year-old child, sit with them so she could translate what these Germans in Mecklenburg were trying to say. That was fair to the extent that the Comrades Wendennych compensated
her for her services as though she were one of their own: with a purchase coupon for a bicycle, a Swedish import no less, the crown jewel of the government store on Stalin Street in Gneez; the citizens of Gneez called this the first bike in Mecklenburg that “the Russians” paid cash for; they called Anita “the Russians’ sweetheart” while they were at it. As a result, Anita could bike to Fritz Reuter High School punctually on September 1, 1948—one and a half hours every morning, one and a half hours back to Wehrlich, over unpaved country roads, into the rain and the west wind of that cold wet fall. She only had to lock the bike—it was safe from damage because even though dealings with “the Russians” hardly constituted a recommendation, crossing “the Russians” was a bad idea. A bicycle with white tires, TRELLEBORG stamped on the tire rims. It’s true that the Wendennych gentlemen also asked her how she was doing and were scandalized at her habit of doing homework in the former municipal library, now run by the Cultural League (for a D. R. of G.), since she had no home and her slave driver of a host—he doesn’t need a name—might at any moment send her away from her books to go clean out a pigsty; Jerichow’s Kommandatura arranged with Gneez’s to get her a change-of-residence permit and have her assigned to Frau Dr. Weidling’s living room—out of turn, a favor. A dangerous one, only worsening her reputation, even though Dr. Weidling had been hauled in by the Kontrrazvedka that November because of her carefree travels through German-occupied country with a man in a black uniform, not because she meant to leave Anita Gantlik a whole apartment to herself. But that’s what people said. And we were there the first time Anita was called on in class by Baroness von Mikolaitis, who was allowed, as an act of mercy, to sell her Baltic origins to us in the form of Russian lessons; Anita humbly stood up, suggested a curtsy, and gave the jittery older lady a longish answer. Its length was about all we could understand of it, even after our three years of instruction in Russian; it sounded a bit like: The Russian word for “train station,” ma’am, voskal, is derived from the amusement park near London’s Vauxhall station, much like the park that Czar Alexander II Nikolayevich built in his city of Pavlovsk, rayon Voronezh. Anyway the word “voskal” definitely came up. The baroness was not used to such fluent, unforced, natural speaking from us, and not up to following it either; in pure self-defense she found fault with the way Anita pronounced her o’s. Anita had made them sound dry, not elongated as in our Mecklenburgish. She thanked the baroness for her guidance, in Russian. The following week she raised her hand and told Mikolaitis that she’d pronounced her o for some native speakers (said in Russian, not English!) and they’d given it their seal of approval as standard Moscow pronunciation. If she sounded helpless, pleading, it wasn’t an act—she was asking her instructor for a decision. The end of the story was that Mikolaitis invited Anita to take private lessons, hoping to learn a more natural Russian herself. A Solomonic move; in fact she was a coward; in general we found little worth emulating in adults. It was incontrovertible, though, that the loudspeaker above the blackboard would crackle three or four times a week and the voice of Elise Bock, school secretary now as before, would come through it: Gantlik to the principal’s office. Anita said goodbye to her German or biology teacher with a slight sigh, curtsied per regulations, and packed up her notebooks as though saying goodbye forever. Two periods later, sometimes after three o’clock, she’d be back at her seat—having translated for Mr. Jenudkidse in City Hall; since Slata was gone. A modest girl. Walked into the school in her well-worn black suit as if joining a solemn rite. Spoke softly, eyes downcast. She probably thought that wearing her long dark-brown hair in braided loops around her head was the fashion in Gneez. A wide, squat forehead behind which there was a lot of worrying that fall. She was clumsy, too—borrowing notes for the classes she missed from none other than our top student, Dieter Lockenvitz. His hair stood up straight and white with distraction; under the pressure of his cogitations he failed to notice that this girl would have liked very much to sit down at his desk for a minute and have him point out various of his lines and formulas, especially for her, so that for once he’d notice her. When Lockenvitz would stand up at the board and try to force his way through to an algebraic victory—for in math his wheat bloomed half-choked with wheatgrass—her wide-open eyes would be fixed on him, visibly hoping for him, longing to help him; I trembled a little for her, she would’ve been a tasty morsel for Lise Wollenberg to gulp down. But only Pius and I saw the hopes and dreams going to waste. If she was ever happy that winter, it was when she’d forced her father to register her as a resident in Gneez and then skedaddle by return train—for the first time she was alone in a room, behind ice-cold glass, with a view of the fog and the freezing tops of the linden trees, in a foreign land, but on her own.