by Uwe Johnson
– Look at that. She’s trying to make the sale.
– This was one last remaining bit of the earlier Bettina, wanting to win over a boy not much younger than she was: Come on, we’re not so different, you and me, we can come to some kind of agreement . . . It’s just that Bettina had developed some blind spots. She had no sense that her students might possibly be agonizing over the news from January 1 that ration cards had been abolished in the territory allegedly facing such imminent economic demise. No eyes to see that he was avoiding the gaze of the pair of students in the southeast corner of the classroom, because only recently he’d debated with them whether the much-lauded collective labor contract of May 1950, with its mandated acceptance of centralized planning, wasn’t actually a total abnegation of worker’s rights, and whether a woman gutting fish in the people-owned business FishCan really was in a position to comprehend her individual share in the ownership of the factory or at least of her labor. Bettina should have realized that Student Lockenvitz’s recitation was stumbling over his own thoughts.
– And the fact that you all were lying like an American president—minor detail, right?
– Since when is school an institution we trust with anything more than the prescribed curriculum? I’m sure that when it comes to your Sister Magdalena, too, you know in advance who’s going to win any argument.
– I just wish you’d won once.
– I did. By the length of a bathing suit.
– Tell me! You tell such good lies!
– “Now comes the time of victories”: the nation’s custodian had said in April, but coal sometimes failed to turn up for the evening train to Jerichow, where my swimsuit for the Baltic was. If I woke up in the morning at the Pagenkopfs’, I would head out with my bathing suit for Gneez Lake and swim a few hundred meters there, usually with Pius, who would’ve preferred to sleep longer but who forced himself to be the good chaperone. When we didn’t have time to detour to Helene Pagenkopf’s laundry line on the way back, we’d take the wet things to school. It was May, the windows were open, they’d be dry by fourth period on the sill in the sun. Keeping my face turned to the teacher, I would sometimes stick my hand out the window and feel the fabric, which smelled of fresh water.
– And Selbich had it in for you.
– Maybe, since the sight of me reminded her of a time and a situation when things were going better for her. When she caught me with my forearm on the window ledge, she yelled at me and said all sorts of infuriated things about people who fondle swimsuits; she got tangled for a minute in the fact that when a person is changing into a bathing suit he or she is naked for a moment . . . and this while someone is standing here telling you about the personality of Comrade Stalin, the wise leader and guarantor of the world peace bloc!
– Telling “you” with a plural? Who were “you” besides you?
– She meant Pius and me. Even though the Gneez swimming area had separate changing rooms available and mandatory. Pius was already halfway out of his chair.
– What a sight! Big strapping boy decks helpless New Teacher!
– He’d have been sorry, that’s for sure. I held his jacket tight with my right hand and moved my lips as if telling him something. If he understood it, it was the word “Kliefoth.” For in 1939 Kliefoth had resigned from his teaching post because he’d pulled an eighth grader back from thin ice but the boy was in uniform and started proceedings: You, sir, have insulted the honor of the Führer’s coat. Bettina, too, was wearing her heraldic blue that day, and assaulting it might have cost Pius his graduation. Instead of him, Schoolgirl Cresspahl rose, leaving Pius with all his thwarted manhood behind, and walked up to Bettina Selbich, perfectly calm, without any permission to do so. Selbich started to panic and shouted: Sit down! and eventually, in the informal form: Stop, Gesine!
– It was like she suddenly recognized you again.
– If being in tenth grade has any advantages, one is that pupils are to be addressed with adult, formal pronouns—but I could let that go. The other one is that teachers aren’t allowed to grab or touch you.
– Oh to be in tenth grade!
– I stopped right in front of her, one girl facing another, and looked at her as obligingly as I knew how—like this, look—
– That’s your nicest one, Gesine.
– and pursed my lips a little and showed her the tiniest bit of the tip of my tongue.
– No one else saw it.
– It was nothing she could ever prove. She alone had understood what I was telling her there, one woman to another; she was shaking in her blue shirt as I turned and walked out the door. She was shrieking, this Bettina was.
– A tenth grader could let that go.
– And could march, wrapped in all her dignity, straight to the principal’s office where she asks Elise Bock for a piece of paper and an envelope, accepting Elise’s invitation for a cup of coffee. Rumor later turned that into: FDJ-member Cresspahl wrote to the FDJ ZSGL
– What on earth is that?
– to the Free German Youth’s Central School-Group Authority and filed a complaint against FDJ-member Bettina Selbich, Principal (pro tem). The truth is that I hid in the map room, so now Bettina also had to worry that I’d run out onto the street; punctually at the start of the next class I was standing behind my desk. Pius smiled the way Jakob sometimes did: relieved, just a hint in the corners of his eyes, up from under his brows.
– He was grateful.
– No, but he forgave me for having ruined his chivalry. We were scared. The principal’s office had a cabinet full of radio equipment and a microphone, she could issue an order through the loudspeaker in our classroom that I come to her office. That would not have been good.
– But not a peep.
– On the other hand, the rumor I mentioned started going around, peeping with all its might. It said Mrs. Selbich had slapped Cresspahl’s daughter in the face so hard that the girl had to see a dentist. It insisted that after Student Cresspahl left the room, class 10-A-II started acting up—she had friends and allies, of course—so that Mrs. Selbich felt the need to put her chair on the front desk and climb this tower with the aid of a second chair to keep the class under surveillance from above, putting on quite a show of the Riepschläger calves and thighs in the process. (Unfortunately for Bettina, rumor wasn’t exaggerating in this case; Pius swore that had actually happened.) The alleged complaint miraculously turned into charges of mistreating a student, filed at the city’s DA office: it was said that Mrs. Selbich had tried to strip Cresspahl’s daughter; Pius and I refused to comment. But in town I was often and ardently greeted, the way I imagine beautiful princesses passing through town used to be in the old days; news of the spunky schoolgirl defying the throne of the principal had already reached Jerichow, too. I went to get our milk at Emma Senkpiel’s and she took my can to the back room and brought it back heavier than usual. Twelve people watched me weigh the free extra weight in my hand, all looking like gleeful co-conspirators. So it cost a few marks extra. Back home Jakob’s mother found a dozen eggs in the milk; during the ten-day ration periods in May, we redeemed our egg coupons for margarine.
– You’re lying, Gesine. Those are my eggs that exploded!
– And thank you very much, otherwise I would’ve forgotten about Senkpiel’s.
– Now for the complaint.
– Burly Sieboldt caught up to us the next day at the swimming place off the beaten track; he used to just come up to me publicly in the school-yard. He had an air of secrecy, of something circumspect. Talked to everyone there until he had me alone and could take me aside. As Chapter Secretary of the FDJ ZSGL, he had nothing but praise for my having Elise Bock’s sheet of paper in my breast pocket, blank, and the envelope, unaddressed; – now thatsa matter for my mothers own son: he said, every inch the functionary in charge, clearly having premeditated what he wanted to do, and not telling me. He acted like an unexpected task had suddenly appeared in the middle of his neatly organized sche
dule, an impossible but rewarding mission. He was known as Burly because he had something bull-like about him—Bullen not pigs, remember; anyone who didn’t know him and unexpectedly found themselves in Sieboldt’s paddock would feel menaced, but I was Cresspahl sin Gesin to him. He liked keeping it vague, and he knew his reputation.
– Gesine, is this going to be another water-butt story?
– Don’t worry. All that happened was that Granny Rehse, whom Bettina Selbich in her new magnificence had hired as a cleaning lady, gave notice; now Bettina had to clean her own apartment on Cathedral Court. The landlord gave notice, too; Bettina won that suit but the general tone on the stairs in the building was quite different now. A garbage can might be left somewhere in the dark hall, for instance, and Bettina might take a little spill.
– You’re all so mean.
– I agree. And Jakob, two hours away at the Güstrow Locomotive Engineers School, had by then been friends with Jöche for a long time; Jöche liked being Jakob’s lieutenant. Bettina ran into a patch of bad luck traveling by train. The conductors always checked her ticket much more suspiciously than the other passengers’, who then tended to move away from her. The railroad police would walk through the whole train not paying attention to anyone, and then pounce on Bettina, check her ID—only hers, openly suspicious. How could they know by sight someone who’d moved there from far-off Ludwigslust! Bettina got careless; she misplaced her ticket somewhere between Schwerin and Gneez. Questioning at the Gneez main station, a report filed. How did the passenger present herself? Distracted. Sufficient grounds to consider her capable of the offense (subreption of conveyance services)? Premeditation is suspected.
– The main station . . .
– Yes indeed. Connection to Jerichow.
– She had no way of knowing that a railroad employee was a registered resident with the Cresspahls in Jerichow!
– That thread of Ariadne was unwound for her by someone else. Someone who had something bulky about him.
– Oh my distant homeland!
– The Chapter Secretary at Fritz Reuter High School had certain questions from the FDJ head office that he needed to discuss with the principal, also an FDJ-member. Overburdened as he was by his duties in office, as well as preparing for his finals, he could only manage appointments in the late evening hours. He was observed in Cathedral Court during the night several times.
– Oh my distant homeland!
– We had an ally on the faculty too: the beanpole gym teacher. He never failed to wave us over when he saw his former star swimming with Pius (we were The Couple). And so we heard that someone had suggested at the grading conference that Colleague Selbich give Student Cresspahl a higher grade than her usual “Good” in Conduct this year. She apparently sat there stiff as a board. But in fact this student had not been caught in the slightest breach of school rules all year. She finished tenth grade with a grade in Conduct of: Very Good.
– And once bitten, twice shy?
– Mrs. Selbich ignored the back right-hand desk in 10-A-II whenever she could. She had to spend three weeks, too, on a page in the class book which she’d had to replace by hand, having written something reckless on the original page before coming to her senses and tearing it up in front of the class.
– I’d have felt sorry for her by now.
– Me too. She even started combing her hair in class, unconsciously I’m sure—the Riepschlägers hadn’t raised their Bettina like that. Two years earlier she’d have never allowed that, neither from us nor from herself. She usually noticed the wide-toothed comb in her hand only after she’d passed it through her hair—not especially helping her hair either, by the way.
– You and your bathing suit and Comrade Stalin.
– Now hanging—the suit, not the comrade—with Loerbrocks the painter. He’d been made our janitor. And there it was for all to see at the edge of the schoolyard. The Cresspahl Monument. Bettina probably wished it was back on the window ledge outside 10-A-II.
– Make it up to her!
– We were obedient. She expounded the decline of capitalism in general (miners’ strike in the USA) and particular (a month of every West German’s salary goes to pay for the military occupation); we repeated this back on demand and refrained from asking how much per capita the East German worker paid for the Soviet occupation. The rise, in contrast, of Socialism: the pact between Stalin and Mao, a $330 million development credit. If anyone wanted to hear why such sums were calculated in dollars, that desire was duly suppressed. While Bettina combed her hair. Zaychik interpreted the liberation of India as the fall of the British Empire; the sound of the British airplanes helping to break the blockade of Berlin still rang in our ears. Gabriel Manfras spoke at length about the Soviet gift of work standards, numbers of work units, time norms—flush with quiet enthusiasm, it seemed. Bettina Selbich praised the vigilance of the Socialist battalions, the trial of ten priests in Czechoslovakia for treason and espionage in April 1950, sentences up to life in prison; Anita recalled the troubles that had befallen Pastor Brüshaver on account of Herbert Vick’s bequest, obeyed Bettina, and regurgitated what Bettina wanted; Bettina kept combing, head to one side, with tugging motions. Triumph of the World Peace Movement! The British have had to stop their bombing of Helgoland. We sat before her in the hot June light, the scent of the linden blossoms wafting in; rather inattentive, since the only thing we could learn in this class was a way of behaving. Bettina confirmed the younger Seneca yet again: Non vitae, sed scholae discimus. We learn not for life, but for school. One student, at least, was definitely daydreaming about a time when trips to the vicinity of Helgoland would be permitted once more. In any case, this New Teacher had ruined any chance she had to ask about our obedience, our patience. Like we would tell her anything. We were exaggeratedly polite and deferential in her classes, you could hear a pin drop—half a pin drop; her class put us to sleep. That was the first time I hoped I would never become a teacher anywhere they were trained and transformed from Bettina Riepschlägers to B. Selbichs. After three such classes at most I would have crawled out of the classroom in tears, without argument or discussion. She kept at it, though. Now you say what you wish for, Marie.
– I wish you could sleep as late as you want and need to, every night. Yours, truly.
July 28, 1968 Sunday, South Ferry day,
even though it’s the second-to-last day to edit Karsch’s book. Are we really cocky enough to smuggle the proofs into the office disguised as work? Written words are getting the upper hand here. J. B. since June; for almost a year, the days that the other friend of our youth, Comrade Writer, has wanted to write up. We’ll be so happy when there’s an end to all this unpublished writing.
The New York Times brings us my dream from yesterday morning.
And says that the East German Communists are again spreading what they call the fact that “life may appear quiet and normal in the streets of Prague these days,” but it’s a facade—apparently they know all about facades—and behind this one is “a creeping counterrevolution.” “The counterrevolutionary tactics employed in Czechoslovakia are more refined than they were in Hungary.” And the blows against the rectification of this country, how refined will they be?
Down with Bettina! that’s what Marie wants. But the teacher and acting principal only stumbled in the summer of 1950, though repeatedly; she might have fallen.
We tried. As 10-A-II’s teacher, Bettina let Pius register our candidates for the trip to the FDJ’s Whitsunday rally in Berlin but insisted on examining them herself, primarily with respect to the added condition that they keep their distance from the Western sectors of the city. She accepted Pius of course—he was our class president, after all, and son of the meritorious Comrade Pagenkopf in the district capital, where via the Department of Popular Education he could spit in the soup of an unprotected New Teacher whenever he wanted. The deputy class president, Cresspahl, claimed homework as her reason for not wanting to go, would you believe it. She didn�
�t bring up her father’s warning. In early May they were still saying “Free German Youth to Storm Berlin!” and Heinrich Cresspahl considered the lessons that Gesine had brought home from her New School. According to which the West had thoughtlessly picked up right where the Weimar Republic had gone off the rails; he remembered policemen in shakos attacking demonstrators with billy clubs, or shooting, and didn’t want to have his child “storming” Berlin or anywhere else, nor did he want his daughter returned to him all beaten up. He practically begged her, promising her a solo trip to “Berlin” over the summer to make up for it. Gesine reserved the right to refuse that trip too; she always willingly submitted to her father’s concerns; so eager to please, this child. (And because it was still a comfort to Cresspahl when someone listened to him, paid attention to him.) She didn’t tell him the real reason, of course: It might happen that Jakob remembered his filial duty on Whitsunday and paid a visit to Cresspahl’s house. Gesine thought to await this eventuality in a deck chair by the milk rack behind the house, pretending, for Jakob, to be reading for school.
So Student Cresspahl was absent. Gabriel Manfras declared, in a guarded way: Everywhere we go we must show how sincerely we stand for peace; Bettina believed him (as did we). Lise wanted to take the opportunity to go shopping in West Berlin and made no bones about it, neither to us nor to Gabriel, who was disconcerted to hear her parrot what he’d just said, cheerfully, not quite exactly. Anita was smart; she talked her way out of the trip with interpreting duties for Triple-J and Emil Knoop. In fact, she wanted to make some money at Emil’s adding machine. Student Matschinsky had every right to feel tricked. She’d wanted to go so that she could be with Zaychik over the holiday too (Dagobert Haase was dreaming of going to see the West Berlin car show but pretended he was curious about the new construction in the “democratic” sector); now Eva awkwardly hemmed and hawed. Dieter Lockenvitz took the same line as Zaychik, if rather more finely drawn: he spoke of the limited autonomy of the superstructure, i.e., new Berlin architecture as an expression of national form. Since he did so with a straight face, and citations, moreover, from the works of J. V. Stalin on Marxist linguistics, what could Selbich do to him? (He’d never been to Berlin: we thought.) Eva got her permission, maybe because Selbich felt a need to ingratiate herself with 10-A-II. Where the earlier Bettina would have smiled and heightened Eva’s anticipation, today’s Bettina said dismissively, contemptuously: Ah well. You don’t have the consciousness.