Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – And if all you’d ever learned in life was how to milk cows or boil potatoes for pigs?

  – Then lying would be just as bad, and guilt, and responsibility toward other people. But your memory would be less sharp—life would be easier, I think. Like Benn says, “To be stupid and have a job / that’s . . .”—sounds good to me. There’s no one else in the world I’d admit it to, Marie.

  – If you’d stayed in Jerichow you would’ve gotten married in St. Peter’s, three marks for the wedding decorations, four marks for choir and organ music, without the painful singing.

  – The grain of truth in that is that I’d like to be buried there. If you can get the town to open up the old cemetery one more time. It doesn’t need to be my own grave; Jakob’s is fine with me.

  – Because the earth never passes away.

  – Right. Because I’m superstitious. Official statement from the earth of today, thirty thousand feet over Chicago.

  – You’ll have to give that to Dr. Josephberg in writing. Because if we crash, we’ll die together.

  – I hope so.

  – D. E. will take care of it for us.

  – D. E. can cook, D. E. can bake / and the day after tomorrow / the child he’ll take. And there will be / an end of me.

  – Of him, Gesine. Rumpelstiltskin.

  – Saying goodbye in 1952 was like the first time, in 1944. Cresspahl took his daughter to the front door, leaned against the frame, said his last words to her. Make sure ya wear yer scarf. As if I was only going to Gustav Adolf Middle School in Gneez, not Martin Luther University in Halle, on the Saale River. Just tha he was smokin like a littl man bakes.

  – But my grandfather was tall!

  – The littl man—in Mecklenburg, that meant the poor man. He heats his stove with brushwood, which “smokes like a chimney.” The richer people used beech logs, which give off a fine, even smoke.

  – Ah, when someone’s about to lose something.

  – He chain-smokes.

  – Now tell me your dowry.

  – My dowry was a rented room in Halle, on the moat, five minutes walk to the Saale—Jakob had arranged that for me. They sure do get around, those railwaymen. A wooden chest with a compass-rose carved on the lid was delivered there: Herr Heinrich Cresspahl, Master Carpenter (ret.), Jerichow had equipped his daughter for a life on the Saale with a winter suit, two new summer dresses (Rawehn, Fine Apparel, Gneez Market). Dr. Julius Kliefoth had contributed: FEHR, English Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: With an Introduction to English Early-Romanticism; KELLER and FEHR, English Literature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment; WÜLKER, A History of English Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present; the Columbia Encyclopedia of 1950; a MURET-SANDERS bilingual dictionary from 1933. From Jakob’s mother: a bible, with an inscription on the flyleaf: 1947, acquired for a hare; God Bless G. C. away from home. There was also a bank account at the postal check office, Halle/Saale.

  – That’s pretty bold, having your scholarship money delivered by the state.

  – No scholarship money for me—I was from the Reactionary Middle Class.

  – But your father paid taxes! And you’d served the state’s youth group with flying colors!

  – For Cresspahl, the state was someone he didn’t have a contract with, but it had power over his labor. He didn’t want any help with his daughter’s tuition or expenses from them. Sent her 150 marks a month, thirty less than children with proletariat pedigrees could pick up from the dean of student affairs, 8–9 University Place.

  – That would’ve made me mad.

  – I was fine, Marie. I could buy butter.

  – Mad at the government, I mean.

  – Please step back from the platform edge! At a moment’s notice I could lose the offerings from the Department of English Language and Literature (6), fall semester, September 22 through December 19, 1952:

  History of American English;

  Modern English Syntax, with seminar;

  English Conversation Practice;

  Hist. of Eng. Lit. under Industrial and Monopoly Capitalism, with seminar;

  Hist. of Am. Lit. under Imperialism;

  and to get all that, Lib. Arts Stud. Cresspahl showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to the mandatory classes in Russian, pedagogy, and political economy; wrote up neat and tidy in social sciences that Trotsky, in his vanity, had once offered to die for the Revolution as long as three million party members watched him do it. When the Communist Party of France gave the university a banner showing Picasso’s dove of peace (third version), this student voiced no objection, she clapped along with everyone else at the ceremony—and even if she’d been enrolled in biology, she wouldn’t have said that doves are nasty creatures that destroy one another’s nests and that any house they choose as a nesting site is soon sorry.

  – Such a quiet child. That must’ve stood out.

  – The Cresspahl child had learned from her friends Pagenkopf and Lockenvitz. If she had to walk a tightrope, she’d make sure there was a net underneath. When asked for one of the most important sentences in American literature, she obediently recited what J. Lincoln Steffens (1866 to 1936) had said about his visits to the Soviet Union:

  I have been over into the future, and it works;

  and if you also knew and could produce on request that the English called a Kommode a chest of drawers, not a commode, you were in good shape. She’d learned her other insurance policy from Pius: societal activities. At Martin Luther University it was enough at first to sign up for a swim class in lifesaving. She swam fifty meters underwater in heavy clothes and with a weighted backpack, turning to come up for air; how could anyone spying on her guess that this was to make up for the disgusting shower on Moat Street that she could use only once a week? A student like her, who needs to squeeze in an additional fifteen hours a week just for English, has no time to hold office with the young German free. And if she’s offered one, then she’s seven steps ahead now that she has an upper-level swimming certificate to show them—she spends two hours a week going to a club that the interior ministry founded in August 1952 to teach young people telegraphy and marksmanship.

  – No, you’re lying, Gesine!

  – Pius Pagenkopf’s decision-making power as commander of an armed aircraft was now to be his friend’s, too, with the help of a small-caliber rifle. She thought she’d deliberate at her leisure over who she would finally aim the gun at and pull the trigger.

  – You don’t even have a gun license, Gesine!

  – Since when do I need a piece of paper to shoot?

  – You battle-ready amphibian, you!

  – Envy, my dear Mary, is not an attractive quality—even for a bank. Although bankers have human feelings, too.

  – I give up. I believe you.

  – You’re welcome. Service with a smile.

  – Now something about Saxony.

  – I’ll tell you about three or four people in Halle. The first two considered themselves a couple and charged twenty-five marks for a furnished room in the second-best neighborhood. The woman worked for the manager of a People-Owned Business and had strayed just a titch out of her marriage into getting to know her boss better. His mood was how her day went. One time she came home and proudly reported having straightened Comrade Director’s tie in the nick of time before a meeting. That wasn’t how I’d pictured things in a People-Owned Business; by now I have a feeling I know what an East German executive secretary had to do to get ahead in those days. The man who was merely her lawfully wedded husband felt forgotten, neglected; he developed a habit of knocking on the door of his female sublettor, at night when possible, to discuss wives who don’t understand, wives who go off to meetings and conferences past midnight. Student Cresspahl left the slopes of the Reilsberg before the second month was up and moved to a place near St. Gertrude’s Cemetery in Halle. The sign on the head of streetcar No. 1 gave its destination as “Happy Future” (a street name); the house by the stop
was impoverished, with one bathroom for four parties on a landing between the floors. The people living there were suspicious of the newcomer, partly because she was awkward with the local variety of German, partly because her clothes looked as if she could afford more than they could with their ration cards or coupons. The landlady made an effort—she needed the twenty marks. She washed the window, swept out the mansard that Anita recognized from a single description as “Schiller’s death chamber.” On January mornings the water in the lavoir was frozen. That was when I vowed to myself that if I ever had a child—

  – Thank you ever so kindly.

  – . . . that child would grow up in a room of his or her own, not sublet, with hot running water and a shower.

  – I’m so happy to have you as a mother. I’ll miss you so.

  – A tua disposizione, Fanta Giro. Now should we order some champagne from this miserable airline?

  – Live a little, they always say. I want my steak well done. If you please.

  – The fourth person in Halle was of the Gabriel Manfras variety.

  – Snooping out attitudes and opinions.

  – My file had been transferred from the district headquarters in Gneez by then, and just as Faust wanted to learn what held the world together in its innermost core, so too did the university’s party chapter want to learn Student Cresspahl’s. Any lingering effects, perchance, from her father’s stay in Fünfeichen concentration camp? or the failed house search last summer? The boy pretended to be a suitor, followed me around, acted surprised to happen upon his classmate at eleven at night on Peißnitz Island between the “natural” Saale and the “shipping” Saale, and oops, he’d given himself away by waiting on the Bridge of Friendship. He soon gave himself away for real, letting slip things about Gneez and Jerichow that an ordinary person living outside of Mecklenburg would hardly know. His victim acted innocent, though, and with plausible pauses and hesitations told him the stories that were no doubt already in her file and that he’d been briefed on. He was a fan of the dialectical principle that any fact, even the abolition of the name Nightingale Island, must be seen in the light of cui bono

  – We’ve had that! I know that one: “for whose benefit?”!

  – so that “your fact” has now been transformed, or extinguished. He also wanted to make out. He’d probably managed to sweet-talk his way into a girl’s bed once. The way men go on about my breasts—praising them as if I had anything to do with it! As if I could take them off and put them on!

  – Not to mention the prettiest legs on the whole number 5 bus north of Seventy-Second Street.

  – Grazie tanto, you American. I like it better when people look me in the face; that wasn’t easy for our little stool pigeon. He thought he was on his way to a complimentary fling; I kept him around to go places with me like a big dog, and it cost him, or rather the ministry’s “reptile fund,” quite a chunk of money. I wouldn’t go with him to the dance hall on Thälmann Square—the Tusculum, free admission, free feeling-up—but he could make things up to me with an invitation to the Golden Rose on Rannisch Street or old Café Zorn on Leipzig Street, now renamed after Klement Gottwald for geographic reasons. He might have thought he was in the home stretch when I watched his slim wrists gracefully twisting and turning as he spoke, which he clearly was well aware of as one of his good points. He tried to get his future lover drunk and trip her up with a more incriminating fact than that she’d also have liked to study Romance Languages; by the time she admitted, with reservations, that she considered a double major to be a “bourgeois remnant,” Grün’s Wine Cellar at the city hall had gotten the price of two bottles of Beaujolais out of him and the girl was still sober. She’d graduated from Cresspahl’s school, which taught that a slug of Richtenberg aquavit was medicine; she’d celebrated New Year’s Eve with Jakob at the Linden Pub in Gneez, where the unit of measure was a double shot of vodka—and she wasn’t going to tell a young agent in Saxony that she’d smacked the cap off a Red Army soldier’s head that same night, supposedly by mistake, but intentionally, as a sign of discontent with his outfit’s post in the Countess Woods, izvinite, pozhaluysta! When my second semester started, I was especially precious to this young man, having come back from mysterious Mecklenburg still on the fence about when to become his—then I ended our little game of spying via propositioning.

  – Too bad. I was kind of enjoying that. Still, he doesn’t deserve a name.

  – Let him go to . . . Really Existing Socialism! And he got there with an invitation to Frau von Carayon’s salon on Behren Street, aka Ludwig Wucherer Street in Halle, where older students behind splendid late-nineteenth-century facades discussed aspects of Diamat—Dialectical Materialism—that left them unfulfilled. Maybe Jean-Paul Sartre’s investigation into nothingness and being, Das Sein und das Nichts, Hamburg, 1952. Undergraduate Cresspahl knew these men from sharing study tables at the university library; they said hello when they saw her, with a certain scornful acknowledgment, and now she was out to get them. For the snooper’s sake, she started objecting to the rule that a female guest was welcome in these gatherings only when a male one vouched for her loyalty and discretion; now he had another reason to admire her, as a pioneering fighter for women’s emancipation. Now she got scared and called in reinforcements.

  – I know that one! In Platt, from you: My big brother, he’s got nails on is shoes.

  – Jakob showed up in the city of Halle on the Saale in a German Reich Railway Sunday uniform, a star or two on his epaulettes, and patiently took his lil sister around from one student hangout to the next until she found her handler and pointed him out. While I put on an untroubled smile, Jakob went over to him and played a few bars; on Sunday morning, when we strolled to Pottel & Broskowsky on Orphanage Ring, a middle-class restaurant and wine bar with neat clean tablecloths and silver cutlery, the snitch stared right past us—his expense account wouldn’t cover that. It was probably dawning on him that his victim wasn’t as defenseless as he thought; this dish was spicier than he’d be able to finish. He no longer aspired to scale my upper arms in darkened projection rooms. The smile was stiff on his face. Lib. Arts Stud. Cresspahl could act like she’d forgotten him.

  – What I wouldn’t give to know what Jakob told him!

  – I’m afraid I was curious too, unfortunately. . .

  – It’s not curiosity, it’s just that I always want to know everything.

  – Marie, your father always felt that a man does what he knows he needs to do and makes sure he gets it done, but he didn’t feel the need to tell a young woman about it.

  – Even if she’s grown up with him, twice, like a sister.

  – What do you think he said?

  – “I have a criminal record, sir. Grievous bodily harm.”

  – Such big guns for a two-bit kid? When I asked Jakob what he’d said, he remembered what it was and smiled—but he was smiling at me too, with a slight note of warning, as if wanting to keep me from unbecoming behavior. With Jakob I was always the younger one. He decided to celebrate with a morning at Pottel & Broskowsky, Cresspahl’s Gesine all to himself—she should conduct a privatissimum on one Professor Ertzenberger and how amusing he found the pronunciation of a certain first-semester student from Mecklenburg. Professor Ertzenberger had left for a university in western Germany after January 12, when Great Comrade Stalin discovered, brought to light, and crushed a conspiracy of Jewish doctors in his very own city of Moscow. After colleagues in the halls of a university in Halle stopped speaking to him.

  – I’d leave a country like that too. What I wouldn’t give to know why Jakob stayed!

  – You and me both. Maybe it was because he’d promised to work for the German Reich Railway—someone had to do it.

  – But you were already thinking about leaving the East.

  – That’s what you think because you know what happened later. There were so many things that started the process, I remember only the first one: I told Jakob and he nodded, even though we were
sitting under a roof with no holes, tended by gentlemen in long white aprons under their tail-coats, duck on our plates and wine in a bucket of ice. He asked me to think it over for three months.

  – Think what over? Whether to leave Halle on the Saale?

  – That part was easy—by the time I left I’d known that for six months. I knew which spires and towers were people’s favorites there; that they think a little square called Reileck is the best in the world; I’d learned to understand their language. But I avoided walks that went by Robert Franz Ring (they like Rings there instead of Streets), because the Saxony-Anhalt Ministerium für Staatssicherheit was located there. Penitentiary Halle I—the “Red Ox”—was at 20 Church Gate. I now knew that right around the corner from Grün’s Wine Cellar was Halle II prison; unfortunately I had places I needed to go on Short Stein Street between the polyclinic and the main post office. How would you feel slinking to the Paulus Quarter to stick an unsigned note under the door of an apartment on Ludwig Wucherer Street that says that someone wants to have confidential discussions of existentialism and can smile and smile and be a snitch!

  – So they didn’t need you there, and you left. We’re over Omaha, Nebraska.

  – Also, since May 1952 there was reason to think that the custodian, Sachwalter Walter, might close the borders. That was when the Stasi took over guarding the border. They drew a patrol strip ten meters wide along the demarcation line, plus a third-of-a-mile no-mans’-land, plus a three-mile restricted zone, from which they resettled anyone they knew to be unreliable: merchants, innkeepers, craftsmen, major farmers. You know, the ones the government had attacked with taxes and fines, making itself unpopular. The trap was shut right then.

  – Volunteer soldiers like that must realize they’ll have to move in on their neighbors?

  – A kid who’s grown up in the countryside, seeing backbreaking work all around him, usually for other people, with no hope of getting anything for himself—the recruiters for the Armed Police just promise him a decent uniform, better food than the farmhands get, light duty, and financial support for a whole long life and he’s more than happy to sign up. An apprentice in the city, tired of endless grinding and scraping, maybe tired of work altogether, signs up for a fixed term because then he too gets a ration card with more coupons and a housing permit. (Conscience doesn’t stand a chance against material incentives —ANITA.) Anyway, an experienced head of state will know to deploy his Thuringian recruits in Saxony, the Saxon ones in Mecklenburg. By the way, no more state of Mecklenburg.