Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  You know, Gesine, Gantlik wasn’t my real name.

  Was he your stepfather?

  I wish, Gesine! Unitam! If only he’ d been a stranger with no rights over me.

  “Anita,” is that a fake name too?

  My mother saw a movie with a Spanish scene, heard a 1933 hit song. “Juanita.” I forgive her.

  But not your father.

  Maybe when he’s dead.

  Our gentle Anita, thirsting for vengeance.

  We were living on the Memel, where it’s called the Neman, with a good Polish name that Gantlik’s the stump of. The Germans came and offered us blue IDs—German People’s Census Group One, for Persons of German Nationality with “Proven” Active Participation in the National Struggle—because of a grandfather from Westphalia. My bonehead father ups and joins the German Swastika Party because he likes seeing German tanks flatten Polish villages. Support for the Germans, and all of us along for the ride: mother, brothers and sisters. Gantlik.

  Without a German passport the Germans could’ve easily conscripted him to work in Old Germany, Anita. Without his family. You all had ration cards, you were allowed to go to school.

  A German school.

  A school. You were allowed to go to the movies.

  The City Mouse and the Country Mouse. Or Hitler Youth Quex.

  And your mother could go to cafés with you, to restaurants, could shop in the stores.

  And my father, as a citizen of the Reich under his German pseudonym, was compensated for the farm, was given a new one near Elbing. When the Red Army caught up to us in January 1945, we could show them in writing that we were Germans. My mother, my brothers and sisters, we buried them in an open field. My father, the German, he couldn’t take care of an eleven-year-old child.

  You pray, Anita. There’s a request in there, about forgiving.

  I do forgive. The three Russians who took me one after the other, all the Russians lock stock and barrel.

  But never your father.

  You mean Gantlik. Not till the day he dies. This was his war. He did it.

  And then you were curious about the Russians. The kind of people who could take revenge on an eleven-year-old girl.

  I was, Gesine. Still am today.

  Do you know what we used to say when Triple-J summoned you out of the classroom? “Anita’s off to give blood.” Because it always had to be you. Because you came back so exhausted.

  It was Pius who said that.

  Pius was a good man.

  I should say so. I didn’t used to tell anyone about the Neman, the Memel, because I was scared you’d all call me Volksdeutsch behind my back. Or “ foreign war-booty girl.”

  Student Gantlik rid herself of her father when she was able to trace, via the Red Cross, a sister of her mother’s—a widow with two children, starving in the Ruhr District, to whom the words “Gneez” and “Mecklenburg” sounded like dinners with meat again. On paper this aunt became the head of Anita’s household by the town moat, with Anita’s pay the mainstay of the household budget; no sooner was the Western zone cut off from the Soviet one than she started whining about the sacrifice she was making for her niece, living in a region whose money bought less of everything, from butter to wristwatches, complacently forgetting that Anita had given her a roof over her head, that Anita’s fees filled the common coffer, that it was Anita who was raising her aunt’s two sons, around eleven years old. Her father still came up when we had to recite our genealogy to the school in order to be eligible for educational stipends (twenty-two to thirty-two marks). – My father’s a worker: Anita said in as East Prussian an accent as she could manage—and wrote. Later the questionnaires became more nitpicky and general information was no longer allowed. – My father knocks rust off the Warnow shipyards in Rostock: Anita testified.

  Did we profess to each other that friendship was our destiny? We most certainly did not. Anita borrowed neither paper nor pencil from the Cresspahl/Pagenkopf collective; she was also suspicious of such playacting of marriage among high-school students, or else maybe wanted to show respect for it by keeping her distance. In was Pius who, while walking past her desk, put down his extensive set of compass instruments for her, because all she had for geometry homework was a homemade protractor with no degree scale; once again Pius was trying to rub Lise Wollenberg’s nose in something, plus it was hard for him to look on while someone was struggling. When Anita returned the things the next day, she thanked him with a giant sigh but ignored Student Cresspahl sitting next to him. While I was worried she would take any word from me as condescension, she was wanting not to impose. For she felt like an outsider, an undesirable, an intruder, a refugee. On a school trip, 9-A-II met a charcoal-maker building a pile and Kramritz the humanities scholar translated the sooty-skinned wanderer’s Czechified comments into scientific fluency; Anita started explaining, in a voice squeaky with agitation, this work she herself had had to do as a child. Schoolgirl Cresspahl was eager to learn how you made charcoal for flatirons; Anita’s voice grew softer, stammered, then ceased.

  Anita, the outsider, found a patch of meadow with a path through the reeds on the south shore of Gneez Lake and thought she could be alone there; how startled she was when students from all four ninth-grade classes turned up in her habitual swimming spot, still off the beaten track in April. She covered up with her towel at once, embarrassed because she was well along in terms of developing a bust; long slim thighs and firm calves remained visible. – Nice legs: Pius said as we swam across the lake to the boathouses. – FEISTY legs: I corrected him; I’d learned that once and for all. When we got back we found her besieged by young men from tenth grade wanting to borrow her towel, complimenting her wavy, copious hair, offering her cigarettes—the usual male courtship rituals. In her confusion Anita said something dismissive in a shaky voice about how dumb people were who learned all about the structure of the human lung in school and then went and spoiled it by inhaling tobacco smoke. We—Pius and I—looked around for Lockenvitz, even though we knew he wasn’t there, he was at a ZSGL session; the person who was, however, clearly visible on the edge of the group of swimmers with a cigarette between her fingers was the Cress girl, Cress on a Pole, Röbbertin his Gesin. What else can a person do in such a situation but proudly squint into the May sun and take a long slow draw of her cigarette—from Dresden, twelve pfennigs apiece you know, genuine imitation Lucky Strikes?

  That was rude of me, Gesine; I didn’t mean it.

  And how could I tell you in front of all the boys there that Pius had once held your godchild at his breast—six-month-old Alex—and told me about the refreshing air that babies exhale?

  Like fresh uncut silk crepe.

  A breath I thought I might still have. If I wanted to keep Pius from hungering for it, I had to start smoking.

  If I’d known I was causing you pain, Gesine!

  That was one rapprochement; it wandered off into the reeds of Gneez Lake and was lost forever. What could Anita be expected to see but more contempt? At the same time we felt deeply sorry for each other. She for me because I’d troubled the pastor of Jerichow with a show of sincerity; the concerned and pitying sidelong look she gave me, which I could merely feel in the dim light of the confirmation car, I remember it to this day. I for her because she understood absolutely all the assignments in our science classes (math: A; chemistry: B+; biology: A) and yet the bottom line of all her equations was inevitably a God present in the molecule, the atom, the sparrows he makes fall to the ground by shooting them off the roof with nuclear weapons. Anita, authorized for Gneez, took it upon herself to travel every Sunday to St. Peter’s Church in Jerichow, just because the dean in Gneez Cathedral supported the Mecklenburg pastor Schwartze (Ludwigslust) and denounced his very own bishop, Dibelius (West Berlin), as a warmonger and “instrument of American aggression,” as “Atom Dibelius”; Dibelius had spoken of the administration of the Soviet occupation zone and its K-5 as a “government construct,” and of the

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  overstepping all lawful bounds,

  inner lack of authenticity, and

  hostility to the Gospel of Christ;

  Brüshaver, on the other hand, wanted to try his luck again with Martin Niemöller, now on the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, signatory of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, and author of the proposition that every occupying power should withdraw from the remains of Germany and keep the peace through the UN. That was why Anita was missing every Sunday when we raked the city parks in our blue shirts or dug up a third of the schoolyard for a Michurin garden; she went to see Brüshaver in her little black dress, probably dropped in on the Kommandatura to see the Wendennyches too because unlike us she was never was reprimanded for unauthorized absences. By then her name was Anita the Red, because swimming under the sun of the spring of 1949 had bleached her hair and let a reddish note shine through.

  And I had a godchild in Jerichow, Gesine.

  And you took communion in Jerichow.

  Once every six months. Most times I wasn’t worthy to.

  Because of evil thoughts? Tell me, Anita.

  Due to envious thoughts, Gesine.

  Anita could have stayed as a child of the house with the Brüshavers, but she was afraid of seeming to intrude, afraid above all of pity. Plus Aggie was just a nurse, whatever her degrees; Anita needed someone bound by a doctor’s oath to keep her secret. If she’d trusted me I’d have come with Jakob’s mother on the spot. That aunt from the British occupation zone let Anita do all the housework, naturally including the laundry, and they shared a bathroom but she didn’t have the sense to ask a sixteen-year-old about her cycle. Everyone else Anita saw in the world were men. She went to the Gneez public health clinic, corner of Railroad Street and Town Moat, hoping the machine there might process her and let her come out the other side still anonymous. The bit about the machine was true enough. Behind those frosted-glass windows bordered with peacetime vines she learned about the gonorrhœ cervicitis that the Red Army had given her when she was eleven. She had almost fayassn, as they say in East Prussia—forgotten that act of revenge, thanks to constant efforts not to think about it.

  Anita would later describe the quarantine barracks in Schwerin, to which she was whisked off with an infectious-disease certificate, as a camp. She was locked in with young and older ladies who’d acquired such internal complaints voluntarily, sometimes for money. Anita remembered the head doctor as a harsh, prudish woman—a bitch, “a Naziess” whom she could easily picture with a swastika on her smock. Anita was snarled at like she was guilty, or because a different guilt had come to light. The woman, with her medical expertise, accused Anita of dillydallying, but Anita had been detained in Poland when the children around Jerichow were being officially ordered to report for VD examinations (signed H. Cresspahl, Mayor), and the course of the infection was almost entirely lacking in visible symptoms, except for moderate discharge. The finding was that the infection had advanced to the cavum uteri, with endometritis specifica as the result to date. They congratulated Anita on having gotten away without pain; – Stop making such a fuss!

  They used the formal, adult second-person with her because she’d been advanced into tenth grade; the radiation treatment and the sulfonamide drug that stained the urine red seemed risky to her. She escaped from the facility and made her way east, through forests and down footpaths, in the night. But there was one person who wanted her back—Triple-J in Gneez. Uniformed men in his service and pay were waiting from the Countess Woods to down in the “gray area” for just such a girl, creeping along by herself, unarmed, and claiming to be Russian. Alone in the jeep with a child who refused to give him information in his language or any other, he thought of a drinking buddy, Dr. Schürenberg, and gave him a bad scare by knocking on his door at midnight. Schürenberg at that time still had the right to place selected patients in the city hospital under his own care; it was he who finally notified the principal’s office of the high school. And who was the third man with whom these two had sung and caroused in the Dom Ofitserov? None other than Emil Knoop, the man with the heart of gold (“by weight, Yuri, by weight!”), who brought the antibiotic, penicillin, back from Brussels and Bremershaven. Here one man was doing his job, and anyway he was sworn to help and to keep secrets in confidence; the second man was being diplomatic, since Comrade Jenudkidse could hear the wind of an East German state blowing across the fields of Stalin’s foreign policy, and if the Soviet Military Administration was about to withdraw step by step from Gneez City Hall then a generous gesture would go over well. The third man, Emil, was not the sort to worry about laws and regulations describing such imports as a contamination of the anti-Fascist German People’s Movement with drugs of Anglo-American imperialism, not over a mere refugee girl (never mind that penicillin was being manufactured in the southern part of the Soviet Zone by a copycat people-owned pharma firm for the use of the higher echelons of the party and security force). You could learn a lot from Knoop—all of it illegal, unfortunately.

  Anita spent the whole summer vacation of 1949 lying in bed, at first for just four days, because of the four injections she was getting, and then on orders of the referring physician, for malnutrition; we traveled by water, traveled to the Black Forest, passed beneath Anita’s windows, and forgot her. The Twins of Jerichow, the Wendennych commandants, turned up at Anita’s bedside in visiting hours to give her sweets and a volume of poetry by Aleksandr Blok. Triple-J appeared with his entourage, bringing red carnations, and decided to interpret the word “cystitis” on Anita’s fever chart as tactfully as the Pagenkopf/Cresspahl students, who’d been sent—no, delegated—by their FDJ unit to call on Anita at the start of the school year. She looked disbelievingly at us, wide-eyed, not recognizing us right away—that’s how permanently prepared she was to be alone, to stay alone.

  Did praying help you, Anita?