Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  What with trying so hard to disguise his looks to the side with glances at his paper, he’s let the child he’s here with run away. Maybe it’s Drea. We saw him dash around almost desperately in search of this child, from one playground structure to the next, back and forth, and he was already halfway up the stairs to Riverside Drive when he succeeded in getting what he would have denied he was looking for: a wave from the woman.

  She raised her hand and swung her outstretched arm until he saw her and she could point to his child at a corner of the fence, drinking from the water fountain; she had already walked over and said something to the child and returned to her place before he was standing at the fountain.

  Holding his child’s hand, he walked over to the woman and explained: She did not understand you. She does not speak English. The woman nodded. Her own child was sitting under her arm; she moved her arm gently. She made sure she had something to occupy herself with. In her other hand she held her magazine, waiting; both she and her child looked patiently at the man and his child.

  We’ve seen him suaver than that. He stood with the soles of his feet stuck fast to the concrete ground. He’d started a conversation and wanted to extend it. – Thank you: he said, instead of asking to borrow the magazine. The woman said Hmm, twice, with such finality that he finally let his child drag him away.

  Later I saw him on his bench staring helplessly at the woman as she went past him to the ice cream man, who had just parked his cart on the park path; I passed right into his line of sight but he had eyes only for the woman’s firm petite ass.

  Later he was with his child at the swings, two places away from the woman with hers, and sometimes he missed a push busy as he was storing up for the weeks to come the memory of how she let the box with her child hit her raised hands and then with a firm little push, only slightly visible in her beautiful bare feet, sent it back up into the air.

  He was still there when everyone left for dinner; when I sat down by the window at around nine, I could still see, through a gap in the leaves, the young gentleman standing in his stylish wool shirt, looking up, with jutting chin; and if he’d recognized me a few hours earlier—

  (but Mrs. Cresspahl wears her sunglasses in front of her eyes, or in her dress pocket, never pushed up on her head. The oils in her hair can leave traces on the lenses, which would then look like dirt to anyone standing behind you)

  —I’d have been able to, maybe even would have wanted to, tell him he’d be waiting in vain till next Saturday, and so, in his desperate need to take the sunglasses off this woman too, just once, would he dare to tell her what happened to come to his mind?

  Mrs. Cresspahl was tempted to go out to the street, make herself known, invite Mr. Kristlein up for a nighttime glass of something, one for the road. But she realized in time that he was waiting for someone else, wanting to get to someone else. He’ll definitely make the attempt; we can leave him to it.

  And to flick his fingers like that, in such a year.

  August 4, 1968 Sunday, South Ferry day

  – Gesine! You were up past midnight listening to the record of the variations for that student Goldberg. The quodlibet twice!

  – Sowwy. There was a party in the apartment upstairs. I wanted my own noise.

  – Got you! You thought I was picking a fight! The music gave me sweet dreams.

  – Marie, I want to make a bet with you: We’re not going to have any fights with each other until October. Starting in October.

  – I bet I’ll win!

  The joint communiqué out of Bratislava from the Soviet Union and its charges: twist and turn it however you want, all it says is what they’ve been saying all along, from the victories scored by Socialism to the West German thirst for revenge. It closes with a mild affirmation of national self-determination from all signatories, without mentioning Czechoslovakia. The Soviets promise to withdraw their last sixteen thousand soldiers. Censorship is still abolished. Freedom of assembly and association remains in place. One single concession: the leadership in Prague has asked newspaper editors to refrain from printing articles with opinions that might sadden their allies. Articles with facts seem to be allowed.

  On the second to last day of October, part of the trial of Sieboldt and Gollantz was held in the auditorium of the Fritz Reuter High School in Gneez. Principal Kramritz had been instructed to put a sheet of paper on Elise Bock’s desk; those who wished to testify had to print their names and sign it. They all received postage-paid postcards, machine-numbered, with letterhead but no text: their invitations. But if they turned up outside the auditorium on Monday afternoon with nothing but their FDJ membership booklet, the two uniformed women at the check-in table promptly turned them away. The women wanted to see each student’s “PID,” the new personal ID—maybe because they were suspicious of the administrative approach apparently in style in the youth chapter headquarters (mimeographing stencils and paper gone missing!). Also, police-issued documents are harder to forge and easier to trace. Then anyone who showed up in a lumberjack instead of a blue shirt was turned away by Bettina Selbich: for “insufficient consciousness.” That meant, in the end, that there weren’t many students in the assembly hall; it was largely minders from out of town.

  – A shirt in October?

  – Student Cresspahl had bought a blue one two sizes too big for her so she could wear a sweater underneath. Pius pretended not to notice. Lockenvitz froze.

  – I wish I knew what you think about him!

  – Work it out for yourself.

  – A “lumberjack”?

  – See? You don’t know Canadian!

  – Do too. A woodcutter. Every man jack.

  – In the fall of 1950 it came into fashion to wear jackets of lightly ribbed crepe, with wide collars, a zipper you’d leave open, and inside and outside zippered pockets. The way the woodcutters supposedly dressed in Canada.

  – That’s called a lumber jacket!

  – We didn’t know Canadian either.

  – Like the Indian headbands here?

  – What those jackets meant was: the wearer comes from people with Western money; he likes Canada.

  – But Pius had one.

  – Elementary, my dear Watson.

  – Like blue jeans these days in Budapest? And East Germany?

  – What do I care! Where people obey a custodian who’s jeered at and whistled at outside City Hall in Bratislava!

  – Gesine, you said: not till after October.

  In memory the auditorium is an oak-dark room, lined with paneling six feet high, filled with benches as sturdy as in a church, topped with a coffered wooden ceiling. At the moment it was a great hall for displaying the colors of flags, in which the FDJ didn’t come off too well—there were twice as many of the Unity Party’s reds, sometimes with the clasped hands, sometimes not, as well as the black, red, and gold of the national flag adorned with the symbols of the peasants (ring of grain opening upward) and the workers (hammer). (Contemporary Studies with Selbich: We are proud to leave the eagle, that circling vulture of bankruptcy, to the reactionary forces in West Germany!) On the front wall, above the red-draped table for the judges, was Picasso’s dove of peace, second version. The décor made it clear that this was an official gathering, not that of a club or some other group. Manfras and Lockenvitz, the highest-ranking functionaries, were sitting on the 11-A-II bench most compliantly for the occasion. Silence, as in a funeral hall, viewing the coffin. Once the blue of the People’s Police completely surrounded the school building, the armored transport vehicle from Rostock drove up to the gates. An armed company escorted the accused up the six turns in the stairs to the auditorium. We heard the clicks from the open doorway and we knew: their handcuffs were just then being taken off. Sieboldt and Gollantz presented straight, almost rigid backs and a deliberately relaxed gait as they were led to the podium and took their seats between four constables. Two boys, nineteen and twenty years old, dressed in their dead fathers’ Sunday suits. Imperturbable faces
avoiding the least sign of greeting, even one they could’ve managed unnoticed with the corners of their mouths or their eyelashes. But they were looking, very carefully too, to see who’d come to bid them goodbye. Then the presiding judge realized his mistake and ordered them to look to the side. This judge was a chatty man, helpless, fussy as an aunt: How could you, but that’s terrible, this depravity at such a young age—that’s how he talked. The prosecutor was likewise hampered by a bourgeois upbringing; he had a penchant for nasty insinuations which he offered as delicate irony. About the defense attorney, not one word—except that he too was wearing the state party’s button on his lapel. They’d brought along their own lackey, who called them the Honorable Court for our benefit. It was cold in the auditorium. From the high windows came the pale glowing light that exists only in October.

  – Now Burly Sieboldt will be able to tell you all what was on those fliers!

  – Student Cresspahl had come to see Gollantz and him one more time. The way you go to see someone you’re never going to see again.

  – To pay your last respects?

  – When you’re seventeen you can feel that way. But we did know the verdict in advance. Little Father Stalin had reintroduced the death penalty on January 13—the highest measure of social protection—but for these two it’d only be twenty-five years. The usual.

  – For a few fliers.

  – And Pius had proven to me once and for all that we were friends. Because of his father, the Pagenkopfs were thought to agree with the custodian’s government, and they of all people got something slipped through their mail slot. One time in June, Pius waited for me to ask him for the table of logarithms, and what I found between the pages might have been left there by accident. So when he handed the picture with the barbed wire and printed words over to Section D, fulfilling his obligations as a vigilant friend of peace, he’d be able to swear with a clean conscience that he hadn’t shown it to anyone. When I finished reading it, a look hung in the air between us of the kind you experience maybe three times in your life, at most, if you’re lucky.

  – You dried off with the same towel! You slept under the same roof! But you only trusted each other once you could get him sent to prison?

  – From that moment on I had another brother.

  Ex-Students Sieboldt and Gollantz were accused of private and conspiratorial visits to West Berlin. The East Office of the West German SPD was located there, the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists was housed there, the Task Force Against Inhumanity was operating there. East German courts had proven that these groups had blown up a bridge, had set fire to a barn. Jakob, on the other hand, had told stories—and I believed him—of a railcar found in Rostock with forged freight papers, diverted from Saxony, the butter in it now not going to the people of Leipzig, assuming it was still edible at all. But Sieboldt and Gollantz had no interest in taking out other people’s anti-Communism on their friends and neighbors and relatives, for instance by disrupting the distribution of food any more than the East German authorities had managed to do by themselves just fine; they’d gone to West Berlin with an idea of their own. So much the worse: concluded the court. They’d accepted from one of these groups, which were all registered with the West Berlin district courts, a picture of young people marching in a column behind reinforced wires, but had done so on the condition that their own text be added to it. So much the worse: concluded the court. The defendants were merely forced to admit the shameful infamy of these printed remarks, while at least two students had them more or less memorized: That the slogans about Peace and the Struggle for Peace were just euphemisms for the securing of what the Soviets had acquired in Central and Eastern Europe; since the Soviet Union, too, now possessed (by theft) the atomic bomb, it had started preparing an offensive, by manpower reinforcements and additional arming of the Volkspolizei, by propaganda among the members of the FDJ to join this army-in-disguise, by appointing one of its leading officers to the Volkspolizei’s central administration; what are you marching for, members of the FDJ? That was what Students Sieboldt and Gollantz had worked out. Aggravating circumstance: Verbal disparagement of the World Peace Movement. Namely by claiming that Picasso’s dove of peace had appeared in French newspapers armed with a hammer and sickle. The English apparently described it as “the dove that goes bang,” now would you mind translating for us this outrageous insult to the striving for world peace? Die Taube kommt mitm Knall but a little less casual. My stars, where ever did you hear such a thing?

  – Gesine, you daredevil!

  – I was a little scared when it came up. But Burly Sieboldt said, unhurried: Oh, it’s in the air; and he directed his gaze to the air over Student Cresspahl’s head, but toward where the balcony around the assembly hall, blocked off for the day, was filled with armed men.

  – What if he’d suspected you! Just the idea that you had betrayed him and he’d have brought you down with him!

  – Things were carefully set up to deal with such matters in that German democratic country. If Cresspahl’s daughter tells her classmate Sieboldt what she’s heard on BBC radio, he is required to report her. If Sieboldt seems happy to hear something worth knowing from his classmate’s mouth, she is required to report him. But Sieboldt’s family would have disowned him forever if he’d denounced someone. That’s what denunciation meant. Cresspahl would’ve never spoken to or looked at his daughter again if she’d been praised for the arrest of a neighbor’s child.

  – To hear you tell it, it’s all pretty easy. But someone denounced them.

  – Everyone knew that Gollantz was practically engaged to a girl from his senior class, one Lisette von Probandt. They were “the Couple” in their year; the children in ninth grade just watched them . . . the same way the former ninth graders had watched Pius and me. Now if you put a girl under arrest and give her the third degree . . .

  – So Sieboldt had something to blame Gollantz for.

  – Meanwhile the Honorable Court tried to get Gollantz to admit that Sieboldt had led him astray. Gollantz stood his ground so that he’d be given exactly as many years as his friend.

  – That darn Statue of Liberty, do you see how her arm is drooping? They’re going to close it off to visitors any day now, it’s not safe.

  – Elementary, my dear Mary.

  The accused were repeatedly told to express greater contrition. For they seemed quite content when they were shouted at, threatened, and cursed, as if they’d have been disappointed more than anything if they weren’t. As if they were expecting it. And the children in their blue shirts sitting before them could tell what the accused considered reason enough to be happy, reason enough to feel the meager serenity that stiffened their backs in the face of twenty-five years of forced labor for sabotage:

  attempted continuation

  of reactionary student self-governance,

  a vestige

  of the pseudodemocratic inheritance

  of the Weimar Republic,

  by means of

  obtaining under false pretenses

  high

  and highest

  ranks

  of the Central School-Group Authority

  of the Free German Youth;

  for espionage:

  scouting out

  the vulnerable flank

  of the Peace Movement

  of the Republic;

  for terrorism: since they truly had undertaken to spread a view in Gneez and its high school different from the view that the ministry of the interior (which they insisted on calling the ministry of war) expected;

  for illegal association (Sieboldt with Gollantz). Then Mr. Kramritz stood up and thundered about the “Abiturs obtained under false pretenses”—in fact they had gained acceptance to the university by working hard in the subjects being tested. Then one Bettina Selbich took the floor, stammering, recalling nighttime visits from FDJ officeholder Sieboldt; if her victim had chosen to speak, he would surely have said: The cavalier takes his pleasure and hold
s his tongue. He spared her, and if it was hard for him, it was after all how he wanted to think of himself later. Manfras, too, spoke up, with a “position statement” of the kind that the new tradition of democratic justice called for; his indignation, his voice trembling with rage, were perfectly understandable to the defendants, and to us too. For it was just when the FDJ school group had been about to mail off its protest against the murderous incursion of US troops into the peaceful land of Korea that they’d set him up. Disgraced him. Wounded his political conscience.

  – Now of the circa eight million people earning their living in the vicinity of this ferry the John F. Kennedy, surely one or two of them remember that it was the other way around?

  – We knew it too. Because when we were ordered to a schoolwide assembly at noon on June 26, Bettina’s efforts at the lectern were aimed at making everything the imperialists’ fault. That was one piece of edification. To demand we approve lies by acclamation, vote yes to untruths, was a mockery and a game to any child who knew how to use a radio. And who had been chosen, outside the auditorium door, to suggest the wording? Who came back with a mosaic flawlessly assembled from the costume jewelry of newspaper language? Sieboldt and Gollantz. And whom did they thank for his resolute editorial assistance, whose skill with words did they extol for the succession of FDJ leadership in the Gneez high school? Gabriel Manfras. They’d chosen him to ascend the Town Hall balcony that afternoon and read in passionate tones to the people marching on the square below a text that seemed unobjectionable to him; now it turned out he’d been manipulated into cooperating with a falsehood, rewarded for his political work with the taint of doubting the cause of peace. He had a right to be mad about that; the defendants could respect that.

  – In conclusion.

  – Sieboldt and Gollantz thanked the court for its efforts, again denied any consciousness of wrongdoing, each for himself, and voiced one final qualm: Maybe it would have been more appropriate under the circumstances if they’d been allowed to witness the afternoon’s proceedings wearing the garb of honor of the Free German Youth?