by Uwe Johnson
– Which party did you support in Western Germany, Gesine? You could vote now.
– In 1954 the Social Democrats, at a party congress in Berlin!, declared their willingness “to participate under certain conditions in joint efforts to safeguard peace and defend freedom, including by means of military action.”
– Now if I know you, that threw cold water on the Socialists as far as you were concerned.
– Look at that, you do know me. The president of the country was a member of the Free Democratic Party who in 1933 had helped prop up Hitler with the Enabling Act that finished off the Weimar Republic. Now he was telling his citizens about Vergangenheitsbewältigung—that they had to overcome or work through the past—and since this wasn’t an act of labor or a material object—
– To accomplish. To master.
– the only verbs left were “to prevail over,” “to subjugate.” All while he avoided any public “working through” where his own personal past was concerned. The chancellor, meanwhile, was a Christian Democrat—what kind of expression is that!—and he had a little dog which was allowed to yap “Quite right!” in the Bundestag whenever the chancellor spoke of a “reestablishment of German unity in freedom,” for example on the day of the June 17 uprising. Then, with his other hand, he drew his republic into the economic nexus of the European Coal and Steel Community and locked it into a military organization named after the North Atlantic. There was a national song about him, which premiered on May 16, 1950, in Munich.
– If only I wasn’t so shy, Gesine.
– So what you’re saying is that you’re embarrassed for your mother on a half-empty ferry where you don’t know a single tourist.
– Okay. If it’s a sing-along I’ll take the second part.
– On your mark. Get set. GO! “Oh my Papa/was a most amazing clown/ Oh my papa /was a gray-ayt ahtist!/Oh my papa /was so splendid to look at. . .”
– Defamatory to the state! Punishable by law.
– It definitely was in East Germany. In the West, anyone who sang it with tears of devotion wouldn’t know who they were praying for.
– Gesine. This was supposed to be your home country!
– Student Cresspahl tried to make it so, starting when she moved to Düsseldorf and had a job and was living in a furnished room near the Flingern North post office, with a widow who was the treasurer of her local Communist group and crabby about a tenant who’d left her party comrades in East Germany behind; no visits from men allowed. The dis-inherited child wasn’t looking for any men anyway—she divided her evenings between the central pool on Green Street and the state library on Grabbe Square, where people were considerate toward a patron who wanted to see newspapers from the past, year by year, one after the other. Catching up on the time she’d missed since 1929. Reading, reading; like after an insidious disease. She thought of Düsseldorf as the end of her travels; tried to get used to the smooth, joined facades of the row houses. Kept change at the ready on November 10, for the children carrying lanterns for St. Martin; wished she weren’t in town the next day, when the carnival started. Avoided the cartwheelers. Read up valiantly on Jan Wellem and Karl Immermann; started a collection, with the guidebook Welcome to Your New Home, with Düsseldorf at the Turn of the Century. Walked to Kaiserswerth; found a hint of Jerichow—a shed for unharnessing painted oxblood-red in a dilapidated garden behind an inn. In a pub, when she saw a master craftsman’s certificate with a swastika in the official seal, she furtively stuck a postage stamp over it, but then again the stamp still showed the head of the man who’d betrayed his state and was now head of state in this country here.
D’you see that guy telling off the waiter? Runs a photo shop now. If we’d won the war he’d’a been sitting pretty. Brought down sixty-four tanks, he did. One time he got ten with fourteen shells, broke open a whole flank. Knight’s Cross, they gave ’im some land in Bohemia too. He just let ’em get closer and closer, using the ones he’d already taken down as cover. His turret gunner panicked—said it wasn’t courage, he was just nuts. Nice guy, not conceited at all. You’re so quiet, Miss Cresspahl, is something wrong?
I can’t get a bite down with this kind of talk, even if I were hungry. Thanks for inviting me out. I have to go now.
Düsseldorf was a home once the name Cresspahl had a separate phone and a door to her own apartment she could lock. The allied British and American militaries, on whose behalf an employee in the woods outside Mönchengladbach was negotiating with local German officials over the assessment of and compensation for damages from maneuvers, wanted her safely housed and easily reachable. A simple converted attic—one big room with a small bedroom and kitchen, all the windows looking out at the sky. Düsseldorf-Bilk, that was my neighborhood, in pincers of rail noise from the streetcar lines and the tracks to Krefeld and Cologne. Near Old St. Mary’s; every day a view of the memorial plaque to “THE BILK OBSERVATORY, DESTROYED ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 11 TO 12, 1943”; center-aligned. In a building with brows over the windows and two balconies—truly like raised eyebrows. There were little parks, refreshment stands, you could stroll to the South Cemetery; a few blocks north was the city pool on Konkordia Street. Anything that was missing in the apartment when Jakob came to visit Düsseldorf he plastered on, screwed in, glued up, varnished over. For Jakob I splurged on a yellow silk blouse with a loosely hanging collar and long ribbons, even though I knew it was wasted on him—he looks me in the face.
– But before that you visited him in Jerichow!
– Who told you? . . .There’s someone who’s told stories about me, that I was on an official trip to Berlin and I broke the law on the East German stretch of the line and got off the train and snuck through the woods toward Jerichow. Well, since it’s you, I’ll admit it. It didn’t work out well. I got myself into a situation that Jakob had been trying to protect me from. One Mr. Rohlfs, who wanted to talk to me about Jakob; he already had me in his files, from Gneez to Berlin-Grunewald to Mönchengladbach. I can’t believe how completely we all trusted Jakob!
– How did my father like Düsseldorf, the West?
– He couldn’t care less. He wanted to know if I was getting my eight hours of sleep every night; he walked me to my bus to work every day; he asked when was the last time I’d been to a dentist. He brought me a shawl from Mecklenburg! When I got home to Bilk, by Old St. Mary’s, Jakob had roasted me sausages à la Jerichow—a man who can cook with blood and flour, raisins, marjoram, thyme, and apple slices, just so his Gesine can eat a meal like she remembers from back home! After he’d familiarized himself with the fine-food shops on Count Adolf Street in Düsseldorf there was no sign of envy. Okay, so the ten kinds of bread day in and day out, he wished that they had those in his country too, or rather the country he’d come for a visit from. When we walked past a construction site and saw bricks being unloaded as gently as porcelain, wrapped in thick paper, tied six times over, he sighed. And yes, he grumbled about the railway in the Western republic running express trains with just one engineer. Or because the trains would start suddenly, smoothly, without warning. He was just visiting, there to see Cresspahl’s daughter. There were some things he thought were funny. The jolly ol’ lady who’d gotten fat sitting behind the cinema’s ticket counter taking one last walk up and down the aisle before the feature presentation, with an atomizer, numbing the guests with bursts of scent. Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours on a day like any other. The words people said to the tune of the North German Radio call sign: “Is the rá-dyo páid fór?” How two kids fought: A Persian lambskin coat’s just sheep; You’re a sheep, my mother has one. He was bothered, though he didn’t show it except by a shudder in the shoulders, when he saw in an ad a character actor expelled from the East, turning a phone conversation into a chance to use and recommend an electric shaver, for filthy lucre. When Jakob recognized something in me that he knew from before, a smile would crinkle the corners of his eyes—like when I paid the bill without asking him at the Park Hotel on Cornelius Square in Düsseldorf, just
as I had at Pottel & Broskowsky on Orphanage Ring in Halle; he was in my city, he was my guest.
– He could have stayed.
– The things we discussed for the following year, and the years to come through 1983—arrangements in the invisible, plans for a future—now they’re all just stories like the ones where small children fall into a rain barrel; it hangs by the thread of a minute whether someone will come and save them.
– You know the drill, Gesine. Say it.
– He goes back east, across the Elbe; in the morning mist he crosses a railyard he’s been in charge of for two years and a shunting train gets him; he dies under the knife. Cresspahl arranged the funeral. Only told Mrs. Abs and his daughter after Jakob was in the ground. That was good for one of the women, bad for the other. The first one missed her chance to kill herself—she wanted to tidy everything up first, put her house in order. That’s how life arranges things so people will live. Later, by the time someone came along to prevent me from killing myself, I’d almost forgotten about it.
– Who can stop you from doing anything, Gesine!
– It was a very strong person. When I stuck my finger into her palm, she made a fist; she could dangle three feet in the air, holding on tight. A contented person, constantly sleeping, waking up with soft guttural sounds. Four weeks later, she looked at me like she trusted me. By the third month she knew my voice; returned the smile of a Communist widow in Flingern North. In October 1957, she listened to me, signaling agreement with her voice. On St. Martin’s Day she turned her head toward where my voice was coming from. By Christmas she was looking in the same direction with both eyes. In the new year she starts to talk, going in for the usual: yeah, yeah, my, my; she looks sweetly, but distantly, at her grandmother. In February she laughed when a bottle fell over, even though it was hers. She’s proud of her toys; she knows they’re hers. In April she crawled under my apron when Cresspahl came into the room. In May she tried to stand on her own. In June she knew the way to the South Cemetery, to the Hofgarten; she threw toys out of bed to make her mother get them back. In July she could crawl up steps, stand up for a moment or two, knew her name.
– It almost sounds like you liked me.
– When it came to you, the difference between good and bad had been wiped out—that’s why in North German mothers call their children: my heartbeat. Theyre so dumb, these mothers, theyve got their kid on their hip an theyre shouting Where are you my little chickadee, where are you?! We lived in a symbiosis, if you’d care to go look up that word; it’s something we’ll soon be putting a stop to. You got sick if I was even a little upset.
– You know the drill, Gesine. Say it only if you want to.
– In September, when we walked past our house with the raised eyebrows, the instruments were sharpened, the patient prepped. A trailer was on the curb, a yellow sign on the front fence. The next day wreckers knocked out the house’s teeth; they carefully carried the doors and windows off to the side, the reusable material. Then they sawed through the house’s bones, broke its spine, cut it apart from its neighbor—the neighbor played deaf. A red-and-white poster appears on all the doors next to the victim. At eleven a.m. the house suffers a blast wound and collapses into a heap, a pile so small you could hardly believe it. Beams are still sticking out, the remains of balcony railings. The dust tastes like an air war. Two Caterpillar power shovels pull up to clear the rubble, two conveyor belts. The cast-iron fence stays intact almost to the very end, until a single smash of the shovel breaks it and sweeps it away. A young tree gets tangled up in all this; a blow to the roots and it’s gone. The bared walls of the adjacent buildings look so unprotected, with their three sealed door openings, that they seem to be shivering in the sun. Up in the shimmering air, that’s where I lived with Jakob.
– And so what did I get sick with?
– A fever. Almost 106°, the medicine couldn’t fight it. You were unconscious for two days. When you woke up, there was Cresspahl again at your bedside, watching his heir.
– You were in line ahead of me though.
– Jakob’s child—she had priority. For a Marie, daughter of Jakob, Cresspahl even broke the law. According to East German law, people were to be arrested and sentenced if, in their letters abroad, Location 12 found any complaints about the wisdom of the custodian—imagine what the law threatened for private transactions in foreign currencies! But instead of notifying the Gneez tax office or the East German post office about his account at the Surrey Bank of Richmond, Cresspahl went to see a lawyer on Lietzenburg Street in West Berlin, Inge Schlegel was another client, and he drafted for him a letter in English. A postcard came to Jerichow with Easter wishes from Anita; version for the censor; translation: a bank is relieved to report from Richmond, England, bankers have human feelings too, believe you me!, that one Mr. Cresspahl will admit to all those pounds sterling that have been saved up and accruing compound interest since 1939, unfrozen three years ago and now at the disposal of former enemy aliens. Cresspahl, almost sixty-nine years old, boarded a plane for the first time in his life to bring a bank statement to Düsseldorf. That was half of it. From Düsseldorf, Cresspahl traveled to that office in the forest outside Mönchengladbach and made himself known by means of that half penny, minted 1940, on the front was a jaunty galleon and on the back was GEORGIVS VI and as many letters of DEI GRATIA OMNIUM REX ET FIDEI DEFENSOR as the coin had room for. Faith and loyalty were given their reward; Cresspahl received his thirty shillings. That was the other half. Cresspahl, citizen of East Germany, in a will drawn up in Düsseldorf, packed two big piles of pounds sterling into a box made of rods of the law that neither you nor I can break into; if needed a legal guardian with testamentary authority could.
– So who is my legal guardian, besides you?
– Just me for now I’m afraid.
– I want it to be your Erichson.
– He . . . he has enough problems at the moment; would Anita be all right?
– Maybe, after I’ve talked it over with D. E.; maybe. Was I hostile to my grandfather?
– At first his black overcoat from 1932 scared you; but then you liked the velvet lapels. Before long you thought it was funny to copy us; you’d sit down across from us, cross your legs, fold your hands, and look resigned, head hanging like you were sad. Cresspahl was upset that how he looked had saddened a child; he held out his hand to you, a big hard carpenter’s claw, and you punched it with your cat-paw fist. You went to sleep without fear when he told you stories about once upon a time when the devil was still a young lad who had to go fetch kümmel for his grandmother.
– And my own grandmother? Who I’m named after?
– Mrs. Abs was now afraid of a Jerichow where someone like Mr. Rohlfs with a Stasi badge might take her aside and start asking questions about one Gesine Cresspahl—she stayed in Hanover. We invited her to come live in Düsseldorf; she only came for visits. So by day you were brought up in a kindergarten, not by a grandmother. She would look at you, Jakob’s child, and the tears would come to her eyes. She was worried her grief might be bad for you. Wanted to live alone and die alone. She was buried behind the palace in Hanover.
– Why don’t I remember?
– Because it was kept from you.
– Why did Cresspahl go back to Jerichow? He could have stayed with us.
– When it comes to dying we’re all masters and apprentices. He wanted to take care of that alone. Just not be a burden to anyone, even his own daughter. He kept his promise: he took Joche and Muschi Altmann into the two rooms that had been managed by the German Reich Railway for Jakob. There was no danger
Fer me to be sittin here dead and none to see me
ol’ people can see farthest ahead.
– Am I going to be a rich woman when I turn twenty-one?
– It’ll be enough for five years of college.
– Still, Gesine. You could’ve used it when you needed it.
– It would have been three times more than I needed. Anyway, he
did give me something from it: for the child. A child who’d been thrown back into sublet rooms because commerce in the West German city centers was smashing to bits anything the bombs had left standing; how could a grandfather stand to see that! He furnished a garden apartment on Lohaus Dike—for the child. Paid the rent for a year, so that her mother could start another course of study, this time for banking—for the child.
– He should’ve given you a car.
– I paid for that myself, once you’d learned to talk; I was happier about it that way. From a big dealer who advertised his chariots with the sign of a hand (secondhand). You had to have a car. Hard for you to understand today.
– We took trips to Denmark.
– You spoke Italian as a small child, and French.
– But never went to England. For your father.
– I would tell you what stopped me, if I knew.
– The trips to London with D. E. cured you?
– Thanks, Doc.
– Now there’s something I have to say to you. Something serious. Düsseldorf had become your city, like Berlin for Anita.
– And like the Niebuhrs feel about Stuttgart.
– When you want a treat, you go eat in the Düsseldorf Central Station restaurant. When a bridge is dedicated in Düsseldorf and named after a president of the federal republic, you grumble about the old man and go see it. It’s your bridge. Heinrich Heine’s praise of Düsseldorf—you couldn’t agree more. You’re ashamed for this city when it disavows that same Heine. And suddenly you’re up and off to America with a defenseless child under your arm! Gesine!
– It wasn’t Gesine, it was Employee Cresspahl. When a bank “on friendly terms with us” offered her two years of advanced training in Brooklyn, New York, she had to act thrilled and grateful. Deference pays—maybe she wouldn’t be fired quite so soon. For propriety’s sake she demurred just a little; secretly she was relieved.
– You’ve let me believe to this day that New York was my decision!