Assentierung (Part I)

I promised, I kept it. Early in the morning I left home. It looked to be an agreeable autumn day. Television happily had not yet arrived here, and the weather prognosis I always received from American forces radio, broadcast from the American sector in Berlin, and every day the report came to be a hundred percent accurate with the weather in my town, even though a straight line to Berlin would exceed a good two hundred kilometers. 

Clean-cut and fresh, I dressed in the style of General Douglas MacArthur as he presented himself on 2 September 1945 on the battleship USS Missouri, meaning: a military shirt and pants, cotton army tropics, and because it was already fall, I put on a fat wool sweater, dark blue, with a big collar that had buttons with anchors on it characteristic of the US NAVY. The whole of the outfit was completed by dark blue shoes on white rubber soles, cotton white socks, and a white sackcloth belt in the style of the military police. I don’t have to add that everything I had on me, to the shoelaces, was Made In The USA. It cost a hefty amount, but I wanted to separate myself somehow from the omnipresent communist rabble. 

I always took a little bit of feeling like Humphrey Bogart, from the many times that I watched CASABLANCA, unfortunately already some time ago; American movies were pulled as the grip of the Iron Curtain strengthened. This time I was only half-way Bogart, and the other half I felt to the rank of an American sailor back to his US Navy base from an all night furlough, a wild night, which he had in fact spent… with whores. I lit a Chesterfield. 

Passing me the pedestrian country folk always gawked, everything offended them and everything bewildered them. Sometimes one of them, finding himself at a safe enough distance, would call out “Bikinier!” Who knows why with such intransigence they insisted at all costs, and actually with relative success, to graft the attitudes of their once serfdom and their rabble mentality onto city life. And though the distance of decades separated them from their origins, in the most unexpected situations the most unexpected people would tip their hands as one of them. I got into a taxi.

Punctually at five to seven I entered the government building, standing at the city’s main plaza, caddy corner to the market, the city’s main square. There I was to report. The assentierung began slowly but to schedule. Through the plaza from all directions the swarm of peasant youth descended upon the building, the occasional horse-drawn cart bringing them in to the city for recruitment. Already by their faces you could tell these were not the nation’s leading youth. 

The whole thing was ironic fate because I knew my attitude towards peasants as a social class and political force was not positive. My mother’s family, as landed aristocracy in Galicia, was taken to near ruin by the peasant uprising led by Jakub Szela in 1846. Luckily, my family’s lives were spared, but its manor and property was absolutely destroyed and the family relocated to Lwow, and through the years the cold blood of history transferred to successive generations mainly the depths of the abject mean-spiritedness of the peasantry. This social class was considered by my family a great destructive power.