Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Jakob, in Cresspahl’s English household, had gotten used to tea, and there it was ready and waiting on the warmer at Tonya and Feliks’s (all that was missing was the juice of a fresh lemon; and the tea lights). A young man abroad, you have to take care of him, don’t you, and Tonya took an extra trip to Brno where there had been lemons the day before yesterday. Feliks built some tea lights.

  Tonya was embarrassed about her figure; Feliks didn’t mind it.

  A love affair under her supervision, she didn’t begrudge him that, despite the pain. But being lied to (betrayed), that went against her self-respect. A person’s got to keep her self-respect.

  Jakob learned from Feliks that in the Middle Ages sneezing was thought to be a sign of the plague, hence the good wishes. What do your Italians say about that, Gesine.

  Each of them thought, about the other: if they do it, it’s for the best.

  – So you knew back then what he wanted to discuss with you, Gesine?

  Now Marie wants to know why she’s never seen a letter from Jakob in Moravia. Because it’s safe in Düsseldorf. Will Gesine Cresspahl swear to her daughter that this letter exists? She will, she does, hand on heart. (And even if it was lying under oath, I’d do it again.)

  But the child is looking out at a beach in America. Next to beachgoers at leisure, there is work being done—a backhoe with its snout full is creeping on treads toward the point of a jetty, shaking its load into the net of a crane that’s making its own space to stand that much longer. Along the broad boardwalk, “colored” workmen are tearing the foundations of rotted bungalows out of the ground with crowbars, piling the slabs up neatly. May makes everything anew, as they say—the permanent season of speculation.

  Behind the boardwalk, crooked weather-beaten collapsing wooden shacks that one can rent as temporary apartments or summer houses, even if the owners’ phone numbers are bleached away, peeled off. One of the handwritten blurbs: All the bungalow people can kiss my dick. In the shimmering sky, airplanes towing advertisements. YOU LOOK SUNBURNED. COOL IT OFF WITH . . . Stands selling meat products that may as well be factory-made. Tin cans of twenty-seven different drinkable liquids. Marie trusts the ice cream she can buy here; not the kind you get abroad.

  Coming back on the wooden beach path, she gets a splinter in her foot by the second step, but keeps stoically still as she’s learned to do in camp, savoring her multicolor ice cream while her mother tears open her skin with the point of a scissors. But the splinter breaks apart into several pieces. A plump, quickly spherical drop of blood appears under the scissors. Again we have a limping child.

  When the beach narrows, the housing projects approach the water, the ones where the people live who want to be called Negroes—people with formal manners, looking friendly. Four seventeen-year-olds are trying to carry a fifth into the water, because a school of sharks was sighted off the coast last Saturday. In the abandoned shop windows are the advertising insignia of the “whites.” A grandfather with three children and their fishing rods to play with; he’s left his own at home. A region capable of lush vegetation, going to ruin under the industrial garbage. A single-story wasteland all around (as a writer once said). Amid the hurrahing of a crowded subway platform, one of the women is reading a book: The Loneliness of the Individual in Modern American Society, it says on the cover, in German. Marie saw it, she laughs. Sighing, brave, she says: Still, if we could only stay.

  August 14, 1968 Wednesday

  Two men entered Union Dime Savings Bank at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street at about 9:05 a.m. yesterday, dressed neither especially well nor especially badly (“about what a police lieutenant would wear,” in the police’s estimation); one was armed with a pistol, the other with a machete or meat cleaver. When they were back out on the street with $4,400, bank employees behind them shouted “Thief! Thief!” and no taxi would take the fare, during the morning rush hour and everything, and they spent the rest of the morning at the Seventeenth Precinct station. (One had just been released from Sing Sing in June, where he’d been serving time for additional episodes practicing the art of bank robbery.)

  The custodian of East Germany left Karlovy Vary so incensed at the refusal of his Czechoslovak colleagues to muzzle the press that he had his own press refuse to say where he’d been for twenty-seven hours.

  Citizens of Czechoslovakia have given forty pounds of gold and the equivalent of nearly $20 million to a fund to strengthen their Communist Party; the party, though, would rather they shortened their frequent breaks for coffee or beer; cut waste; worked harder. One worker, in a letter to Prace, the labor newspaper, asks why. When young workers have to wait for ten years to get an apartment, and still have to pay 40,000 crowns ($2,500). We need new machinery in our factories! And something like the feeling that work pays!

  Permission to leave high school—a diploma, a certificate of readiness, the Abitur: Student Cresspahl acquired it several times.

  Once from her teachers, in the form each saw fit to give it.

  From her Latin teacher, a hunchbacked, timorous old man who overlooked with a show of absentmindedness the fact that his favorite disciple in grammar, the famulus Lockenvitz, had left the class apparently never to return, while Miss Gantlik and Miss Cresspahl had been absent for ten days without the required excuse notes from their parents. He gave himself away by not calling on them until February, when they’d presumably caught up on what they’d missed. He flinched a little if anyone mentioned, in regard to his Marcus Tullius Cicero, that this orator against state corruption might have dipped into the till to satisfy his own need for ready cash, or, worse, if anyone brought up the fact that it was Christian missions to Western Europe that had been responsible for the spread of Latin; he’d already gotten burned once, and badly, by history: disciplinary transfer out of Schwerin. He would have had a heart attack and fluttered away on the spot if a class delegation, appealing to his well-proven moral sense, had requested instruction on how to react to the unfortunate custom of one student memorizing and reporting what the other students casually said during tours of gasworks and breweries. All he longed for was to reach retirement, leisure time in which he could compose his deeply personal monograph on the Schelf Church in Schwerin. Anyone who stood their ground with him on the ablative absolute received an A as a final grade: in gratitude for considerate treatment.

  In English, Hans-Gerhard Knick gave the graduating Cresspahl girl an A. He had learned this language with the help of LPs and believed he could speak it after he’d gone to the World Festival of School and College Students in Berlin in 1951, while still in short pants, and a group of socialistically inclined British girls had responded indulgently to his efforts at playing the translator. When Cresspahl, having carefully read T. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, slipped into conversation the word conductor instead of guard for a Schaffner, Knick at first tried to correct her, then quickly gave up on her. She also enjoyed a certain amount of protection given that she was planning to go to university and study a subject he himself could have used a review in; and another certain amount from something Lockenvitz had bequeathed to her in the FDJ: he’d known Mrs. Knick in their lost home-land, as a well-to-do bourgeois, not a daughter of the Workers and Peasants as befit the wife of a language instructor who hoped to be accepted as a candidate for the Unity Party.

  There was a B in Russian on G. Cresspahl’s final transcript, mainly because of her taking part in a plot to help a young teacher named von Bülow learn the language well enough to teach it. This von Bülow was already scared, due to her noble ancestry; the psychological tips she’d been offered in her training courses had thoroughly confounded her, since they had so little to do with the actual behavior of 12-A-II students in Mecklenburg. Instruction in Russian was therefore administered by Anita. Which was a sacrifice. For there on the lesson plan was Stalin’s essay “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” teeming with “Furthermore . . . Therefore . . .Therefore perhaps . . .Thus ends . . .Thus transforms . . .Thus must . . . Furt
hermore . . . ,” followed by the same author’s discussion of “Marxism and Questions of Linguistics.” Vas slushayu. None of us could have bought a pair of nail scissors in Kiev or Minsk with any of that. This Eva von Bülow left for Hamburg at the end of the 1951–52 school year and is still there, an interpreter in the West German/Soviet steel and shipbuilding business.

  In Music a B from Julie Westphal. Because the Cresspahl girl had been happy to remain among the second altos—gaining some extra free time when the first-string school choir had to rehearse for their summer tour of the Baltic resorts, followed by time for unsupervised vacations. Also because Candidate Manfras had informed this Westphal that the Cresspahl girl once described one of her, Westphal’s, teacherly opinions as “nonsense”: this being in reference to Julie’s verdict that the song “The Moon Has Arisen” should vanish from the musical repertory of a democracy due to the plea therein that our sick neighbor too should sleep peacefully: solicitude that undermined the ideological vigilance of the class-conscious member of society, since the neighbor might well be an enemy of the people in disguise, whom it would be criminal to let sleep in peace. Third, because, while the Cresspahl girl had listened to and recited back Mrs. Westphal’s lectures about the cosmopolitan reactionary nationalists and enemies of the Soviet Union such as Paderewski, Toscanini, Stravinsky, and other composers and musicians, she had then asked her teacher for a demonstration of these scandalous traits in the works of the condemned musicians—just a few bars on the piano, Mrs. Westphal, to give us an idea.

  In chemistry and biology, an A from a little old man, weak and womanish (an “Auntie”) like the Latin teacher but fat, almost spherical. It was from him that we were given, in tenth grade, the block of instruction meant to explain to children the sexual needs and abilities of the human being; that was when this drooler, a lady-killer in his own mind, had thrown a sop to his thwarted libido by reciting to the boys, with a wink, forefinger quivering erect near his eye, the line from Goethe—“The thought alone will lift Him”—followed by the poem:

  When you’re aware

  Of Him hanging there,

  So loose,

  So big

  In your trouser leg . . .

  You’ve a dirty mind!

  And I like your kind

  (“Heinrich Heine”)

  (Now where would a girl in 10-A-II know that from, where would she have heard it? Guess! Your best answer would be: osmosis.) He was still bustling around in front of us, getting all excited about examples of “e-vo-lution” in nature; in 1952 he offered his students the myth that bananas caused infantile paralysis, the same canard he’d offered the children of 1937, another period in which you couldn’t buy bananas. The students in chemistry and biology had their doubts that this teacher, given that he’d been trained at Heidelberg University, actually did revere Stalin’s favorite son the Soviet biologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko; still we dutifully recited to him that whether plants passed on acquired characteristics depended entirely on environmental conditions. The fact that they did this was the sum total of our knowledge in this field, which was why Anita, on a tour of a seed-growing and hybridization farm, went up to the man in charge with a question about Michurin and his pupil Lysenko. This man was a chaired professor, holder of multiple doctorates both earned and honorary, winner of the National Prize, who had decided it was more important to stay in his field of experimental study than to worry about the temporary circumstance of the New State appropriating his results. Anita speaks to such a man in a modest, respectful tone that he can’t help but notice. Maybe he had a backlog of anger stored up from a meeting in Rostock or a session of the academy, but furious, stern as a privy councilor, he laid it out for her and her alone that somatic detours might cause a fixing of genetic properties perhaps once in 106 million years—otherwise the theory of the evolutionary progression of life would collapse. You won’t find any Lysenkoist cultivation here, young lady! We were standing nearby, saw her downcast eyes and flushed face. At moments like that we missed them—Pagenkopf, Lockenvitz; they would have taken measures, each in their own way, to keep a girl in their class from being hurt. Fortunately, Comrade Professor himself realized in time that it was Anita’s school that should be ashamed of itself, not Anita; he put his arm around her shoulder and took her on a little stroll, to tell her a thing or two about productivity appraisal and seed-grain certification, as well as the fact that in a small country agriculture can’t afford to take chances with arbitrary measures in genetics. We stood around our school biology expert in a group, ignored his embarrassed babbling, and hoped that Anita would be brought back to us consoled. – Hail Moscow and Lysenko! Student Gantlik said (when no Youth Comrade Manfras was nearby either): that afternoon she renounced a career she’d been aspiring to.

  Both Gantlik and Cresspahl got A’s in math and physics, from Eberhard Martens, nicknamed “the Evil Eye” because he had kept from his days as an NCO a searching, hypnotic gaze ever on the lookout for criminal activity. The kind of teacher who sticks to his syllabus long after it should have dawned on him that only three of his students had grasped the concept of value assignment rules (not functions, because “the essential content of the concept of a function is the fact of assigning a certain value, by virtue of which certain objects may be defined as belonging to others, not the dependence of the magnitude assigned”). He was bashful with us, trying to solve the riddle of our stiff courtesy. We had heard him tell smugly confiding stories, in a broad Mecklenburg accent: I hardly ever sweat, the marches in Russia got me out a that habit; the others were always drinkin; theres just one sitcha-ation when I sweat . . .We’d also heard him tell Special Instructor H.-G. Knick, man-to-man, about a certain noteworthy encounter on the streets of Warsaw in 1942: Someone comes up to me, bats her eyelashes till I notice that her breasts are outta phase with her walk, so I put the make on her. Turns out the little monster’d crosslaced rubber bands from her garters to her bra, would ya believe it . . .Technically racial desecration, I spose. “The Evil Eye” tried to leave East Germany in 1954 but baggage check at the border found what looked like private photos of Heinrich Himmler and the SS general who’d ordered the Warsaw Ghetto leveled and the survivors sent to their deaths—two years in jail. We kept up our obedience to this teacher through graduation.

  We could have relaxed a bit more around our German and Contemporary Studies instructor, but as a rule we preferred not to. Because in 1952’s ninth grade there was a girl named Kress, half of Cresspahl, and when asked who Comrade Stalin was she offered the guess that he was President of the Soviet Union. – Sit down! F!: our little Bettina screeched, and in the same breath: Your whole family’s under suspicion as far as I’m concerned! Since Bettinikin had never seen this Kress before and knew nothing about her family either, a different girl in 12-A-II knew just which student she really had it in for.

  Serious of mien, we recited in German class stanzas from “The Cultivation of Millet,” a poem that the contemporary writer Bertolt Brecht had published the previous year:

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  Joseph Stalin spoke of millet.

  To Michurin’s pupils he spoke of dung

  and dry wind.

  And the Soviet people’s great Harvest Leader

  Called the millet an unmanageable child.

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  But she, the moody daughter of the steppes,

  Was not the accused as they interrogated her.

  In Lysenko’s greenhouse in faraway Moscow

  She testified to what helps her, what disturbs her.

  Her thoughts possibly dwelling on a different house, also far away, where a student named Lockenvitz was being interrogated about what was bothering him, Anita interpreted for Mrs. Selbich the poetic goals of these lines, namely, providing a scientific foundation for the Marxist concept of social development—mankind’s being shaped not only by his social milieu but also by the inheritance of virtues acquired therefrom (and she included the difference between this environmental theory a
nd those of Marx’s contemporaries, while strictly avoiding the term sociology, at the time still outlawed as an expression of imperialist pseudoscience).

  Moreover, “The Cultivation of Millet” had been adorned with a musical setting, which could be sung with a lengthening of the final “a” in each line:

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  Tchaganak Berziyev, the nomaaaad,

  Son of the free desert in the land of Kazakhstaaaan . . .

  and how was Bettinikin to take this if not as a somewhat childish excess of enthusiasm within the framework of the curriculum?

  In Frau Selbich’s class we studied another work by the same author, “The Herrnburg Report,” a poetic recollection of how the West German police at the border crossing of Herrnburg had treated West Germans returning from the All-German Rally of 1950. The Schleswig-Holstein interior ministry had ordered these young people to submit their personal information and place of employment for registration, and that they be given medical exams because they had slept on straw; they fought back with fists and stones, bivouacked in the open for a night and a half, then eventually gave in and held out their IDs to be stamped “Processed” or “Valid.” For Brecht the poet, this turned into their having “planted” the flag of the Free German Youth on the roof of the Lübeck main train station, and having been victorious; he also passed the following verdict on two party chairmen in the Federal Republic: