Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  As long as I was a believing Catholic – the transition to non-belief was smooth – my penis paid off as a ready perennial subject for confession. I ascribed the most outrageous sins to it: illicit relations with angels. With a virgin sheep. Even Father Wiehnke, my highly experienced confessor, to whose ear nothing human was meant to sound alien, found its deeds and misdeeds astonishing. But confession helped me to release what was assigned to, ascribed to the pig-headed appendage as pleasure. It was my weekly relief.

  Later, however, when the fourteen-year-old had reached the stage of absolute godlessness, his correspondingly more mature member was of more concern to him than the military situation on the eastern front, where the till then unstoppable progress of our Panzer divisions ground to a halt: first in the mud, then in the snow and ice. Father Frost rescued Russia.

  And what helped me in my need?

  The goal of all my desires had gradually acquired a name: I experienced the pain of first love. No later fit of love’s madness had so powerful an effect. Toothache is nothing in comparison, though the love torture too was accompanied by swellings and achings that came and went.

  Since I cannot with any precision date the onset of my first love, and since it did not lead to a course of action that can be described as steps in the direction of physical contact to say nothing of more intrusive possession, I am left with mere words, the stutter that leads to perfervid outpourings and has circulated in letters and bed whispers since Goethe’s Werther. I shall be brief.

  THE GIRL ON whom I trained my desire like a hound would pass me on the way to school. For a time the Conradinum building was used not only by its own male students but also by female students of the Gudrun School (the former Helene Lange School), which had been requisitioned. We attended classes in morning and afternoon shifts. She was the oncoming traffic on Uphagenweg: she came, I went. That is, I was on my way home from five hours of lessons; she had the same number of hours yet to sit through. She was always with a bunch of girls, while I, the notorious loner, was on my own. I would walk straight through the bevy of gigglers, risking no more than a glance at her.

  She was neither pretty nor ugly, just a black-haired girl with rather long plaits. The dark frame made her face look small: two dots the eyes, a comma the nose, a dash the mouth. Her lips were thin, her mouth pinched. Her eyebrows grew together over her nose.

  I knew prettier girls. I had even groped a cousin of mine in my grandfather’s woodshed. And there was another girl named Dorchen, who came from Bartenstein in East Prussia, spoke the local dialect, and stayed all summer long.

  No, I will not identify my black-plaited love by name. She may be alive somewhere, and having, like me, survived, not wish to be molested in her old age by an old man, his mind full of vague memories, who struck her as awkward during their schooldays, and in the end grievously offended her.

  So my first love shall remain nameless, unless when I reach for the amber I find her in an encapsulated mosquito or spider whom I wish to summon, invoke, curse …

  I was tenacious. It is a trait that has become part of me and continues to grant me staying power in my various endeavours. Since we schoolboys were more or less aware of where each Gudrun girl sat in our classroom, I planted notes for her – the unfillable receptacle of my desires – at her seat, secret missives stuck under the lid of her desk, silly trifles that sometimes spawned silly replies. No, there was no verse in my classroom correspondence. I cannot even say for sure whether her notes or mine were signed.

  This went on until I was forced to change schools and take the tram, Line Five, from the suburb of Landform to Danzig and my new school, and then from the Old Town back home. The narrow streets, the towering brick edifices, the medieval spirit behind the lopsided walls and gabled façades – history’s petrified offerings – I found, if not soothing, then at least distracting, especially during the winter of 1942–1943, before and after the battle of Stalingrad, when a young woman by the name of Lilli, who was fulfilling her compulsory civilian war service as an art teacher at Saint Peter’s, came to be more important to me.

  Not until I had changed schools twice and the students in my year had been called up as Luftwaffe auxiliaries and given spiffy uniforms to wear did I receive a letter from my first love. I received it in the field, where I had been trained as an artilleryman sixth class with the Kaiserhafen battery.

  I don’t remember what she wrote in her best handwriting, but the newly baked artilleryman was arrogant enough to correct her spelling, give the letter a mark in red ink as if he were her teacher, and send it back to her together with a note of his own, possibly of a poetic nature.

  That was the last I heard of my first love. Prone to spelling errors at fifteen – and even now less than confident in matters orthographical – I had destroyed something I was only vaguely beginning to understand, something that had promised more than enough for my ever ready Caravaggio-sized member.

  A vacuum. Gratification pursued in isolation. Desire now dozing, now wide-awake and lasting well after my days as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, which found expression in the description of barracks life in the desolate port area, far from home, in the novel Dog Years: with completely different stories told in the school slang of completely different boys, but who were, like me at the time, relieved that both their Hitler Youth service, which was growing increasingly idiotic, and school were over.

  Although love plays an incidental role in the plot, I hasten to point out that the spindly Tulla Pokriefke, who plagues the boys of the Kaiserhafen battery during weekend visiting hours, has nothing in common with my first love.

  AMBER MAY TELL us more than we wish to remember: it preserves what should have been digested and secreted long ago. It retains everything it receives in its soft, still liquid state. It refutes excuses. And it is amber, which forgets nothing and takes the deepest-buried secrets to market, which steadfastly maintains that the boy bearing my name, twelve years old and still religious – that is, he still believed in Mary if not in God – teased the girl with the plaits during catechism. A curate was preparing my coevals and me for our First Communion in the rectory of the Sacred Heart Church. The list of sins we would be expected to confess – and which were venial, which grave, and which mortal – flowed from our lips. I was even supposed to serve as an altar boy by the side of one of her brothers, bell and censer in hand, eye on the tabernacle and the monstrance.

  And yes, to this day I can recite the introit. Like Mulligan at the beginning of Ulysses, I whisper ‘Introibo ad altare Dei …’ while shaving.

  If at thirteen – that is, beyond the miracles of the Catholic bag of tricks – I still went to church, it was only to ambush the girl on Saturday afternoon, to get as close to the confessional as possible, one pew behind her plaits.

  That honey-coloured piece of petrified resin even reveals the secrets of the confessional: it reports that the details of my youthful masturbation procedure rolled from my tongue so unimpeded into the priest’s ear that the name of their object, the harbour of my desire, would spring from my lips, whereupon His Reverence, seasoned as he was, could be heard to clear his throat behind the grill.

  It goes on to state that later, while the girl with the plaits was sitting next to the confessional sorting out her sins, I would jump out of the pew and go up to the Altar of Our Lady and with either mischief or malice aforethought …

  No, I say, placing the piece with the mosquito next to the pieces containing the fly, the spider, the tiny beetle. That wasn’t me. That is in the book and is true only in the book. There is no evidence for the crime. Recently, early in the summer of 2005, when my editor, Helmut Frielinghaus, and I met in Gdańsk with ten translators from all over the world having another crack at my first effort, we visited one scene of the crime after another in the novel’s energetically shifting plot, including the Church of the Sacred Heart, which had survived the war and in which a copy of the Madonna of Vilnius with her tin-gilt wreath sends forth radiance and draws in piou
s Poles. Just next door, in a niche behind the candles, we saw photographs of the Polish Pope’s public death and of his recently elected German successor.

  And there, at this neo-Gothic scene of a youthful crime, a young priest with a cryptic smile, a man with more than a passing resemblance to Father Wiehnke, asked me to sign a copy of the Polish edition of the book in question, and the author, to the astonishment of his translators and editor, did not hesitate to write his name under the title. Because it was not I who tore the censer from the Christ Child’s hand that day at the Altar of Our Lady; it was someone with a completely different will: someone who had never renounced evil, someone who had refused to grow …

  I grew and grew. By the time I was sixteen and eligible for Labour Service, I was considered full-grown. Or did I not measure one metre and seventy-two centimetres – five feet, six and a half inches – until I became a soldier, who survived the war’s end only by luck or chance?

  That is an issue neither onion nor amber cares about. They want accurate information about other things, about what else has been encapsulated, about what has been swallowed in shame, about secrets in varying disguise, about nits nesting in sackhair. Eloquently avoided words. Slivers of thought. Things that hurt. Even now …

  HIS NAME WAS WEDONTDOTHAT

  I’D CATCH MYSELF leafing back, watch myself skipping pages, and when gaping blanks came up I doodled flourishes and stick figures. Facile, beside-the-point stories flowed from my pen – a diversionary tactic – only to be crossed out at once. Off with you!

  What is lacking are the links in a process no one stopped, an irreversible process whose traces no eraser can rub out. But no onion need be peeled, no amber consulted in the case of the fatal step of the fifteen-year-old schoolboy in uniform. It is clear: I volunteered for active duty. When? Why?

  Since I do not know the date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus and on other fronts, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision finally to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, by my zeal to volunteer.

  It happened while I was serving as a Luftwaffe auxiliary – which was not voluntary, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills.

  The way we boys saw it, our uniforms attracted all eyes. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. To the east the flats leading down to the Vistula; to the west the loading cranes, the grain silos, and the far-off towers of the city. At first there were attempts to keep school going, but as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery.

  Finally we were taken seriously. Six artillery weapons had to be aimed at their target. We had had the appropriate training and could, should it come to that, help to protect the city and port from the enemy’s attacks. In test drills we reached our command posts within seconds.

  We got to use our eight-point-eight guns only two or three times, when a few enemy bombers were sighted in our air space in the beam of the searchlights. It all looked very festive. But massive raids – the kind known as firestorms that Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and the Ruhr Basin cities suffered, and that we knew of only through rumours – we did not experience. No damage worthy of the name: two houses hit on the Fuchswall near the Schichau Shipyard, few casualties. We were proud to have shot down a four-engined Lancaster bomber, even if the hit was attributed to the Zigankenberg battery on the southern border of the city rather than to ours. The ‘rather charred’ crew members were said to have been Canadians.

  As a rule, however, service in the Luftwaffe auxiliary was dreary, though dreary in a different way from school. We were especially turned off by nightly guard duty and ballistic classes, which dragged on for ever in the musty classroom barracks. When bored, we fell back into childlike behaviour, or regaled one another with made-up sexual exploits. So the days passed.

  We had every other weekend off. We could, as they put it, ‘go home to Mama’. And each time my joy at the thought of the visit was tempered by my pain at the thought of our cramped quarters.

  Not even the vanilla pudding with almond slivers that Father, who loved to cook for the family, made from ingredients he skimmed off his meagre deliveries and hoarded for special occasions was of any help. Having loosened the pudding from the mould, he would douse my portion with chocolate sauce and serve it to me as a welcome at the table set specially for his son.

  No, no sweet could offset the cramped feeling. I kept bumping into things and into the lack of things: a bathroom and toilet, for instance. All we had at the Kaiserhafen battery was a common shower room and, beyond it, a common latrine. There we would squat next to one another shitting into a pit, and that didn’t bother me at all.

  But at home, the toilet on the landing, shared by four flats, had grown more and more distasteful to me: it was always filthy from the neighbours’ children or occupied when you needed it. It stank, and its walls were smeared with fingerprints.

  I was ashamed of that shared toilet and hid its existence from my schoolmates, who took bathtubs and private toilets for granted. I would never ask them over. Only Egon Heinert, who also had an outside toilet that stank, would come and lend me books.

  The two-room hole. The family trap. Everything there conspired to constrain the weekend visitor. Not even the mother’s hand could smooth away the son’s distress. True, he was no longer expected to sleep in his parents’ bedroom, like his sister, but even on the couch made up for him in the living room he remained a witness to the married life that continued unbroken from Saturday to Sunday, that is, I could hear – or thought I could hear – sounds I had heard, muffled as they were, from childhood on, sounds that had lodged in my mind in the form of a monstrous ritual: the anticipatory whispers, the lip-smacking, the creaking bedsprings, the sighing horsehair mattress, the moaning, the groaning, the entire aural repertory of lovemaking, so potent, especially in the dark.

  As a child I had been curious about the nearby noises, but accepted them innocently. What the Luftwaffe auxiliary who wore a uniform by day heard in his pyjamas, when his father fell upon his mother during his weekends on leave, was unbearable. Yet it is far from certain that the two of them went at it when the son lay awake on the couch within hearing range; in fact, it is more likely they took his presence into account and left each other alone. But the mere expectation of those noises in their more or less unchanging sequence was enough to keep me awake.

  In the dark I had a clear picture of all the variations on marital coupling, and in my cinematic version of the act the mother was always the victim: she yielded, she gave the go-ahead, she held out to the point of exhaustion.

  The hatred of a mother’s boy for his father, the subliminal battleground that determined the course of Greek tragedies and has been so eloquently and sensitively updated by Dr Freud and his disciples, was thus, if not the primary cause, then at least one of the factors in my push to leave home.

  I racked my brain for flight routes. They all ran in one direction: the front, one of the many fronts, as quickly as possible.

  I tried to pick a quarrel with my father. It wasn’t easy. It would have taken massive recriminations, and, peace-loving family man that he was, he was quick to give in. Anything to maintain harmony. The progenitor had a constant wish for the offspring on his lips: ‘I want your life to be better. … You will have a better life than ours …’

  Try as I might to turn him into a bugbear, he was not made for the role. Seen through his bright blue eyes, I was an alien being; I might as well have been illegitimate. That my little sister was devoted to him may have made amends for her brother’s
coldness.

  And our mother? She would sit at the piano without playing, worn down from having to deal in an ever diminishing supply of goods or depressed, like the father and sister, by the son-and-brother’s brief visits and the burdens he seemed to be shouldering.

  YET THE SUDDENLY unbearable two-room flat and four-family toilet on the half-landing could not have been the sole cause for my urge to enlist. My schoolmates had grown up in five-room flats that had their own bathrooms, toilets supplied with rolls of toilet paper instead of the newsprint we tore into squares. Some of them even lived in fancy private houses on Uphagenweg and the Hindenburgallee and had rooms of their own, yet they, too, yearned to get away, go to the front. Like me they wanted to face danger without fear, sink ship after ship, knock out tank after tank, or fly through the skies in the latest-model Messerschmitts, picking off enemy bombers.

  After Stalingrad, however, the front situation went downhill. Anyone who, like my Uncle Friedel, was tracking it with coloured thumbtacks on specially enlarged, cardboard-backed maps had trouble keeping up with developments in the East and in North Africa. At best, they could register the successes of our ally Japan at sea and in Burma, though our submarines occasionally padded the bulletins with the number and register tonnage of ships they had sunk. In the Atlantic and up near the Arctic they would attack convoys in packs.

  Not one newsreel failed to show submarines returning home victorious, and since the Luftwaffe auxiliary home on leave would lie awake for hours on the living-room couch after seeing them on the screen, I had plenty of opportunity to picture myself as a ship’s mate during a stormy tower watch, swathed in oilskins, covered with spray, spyglass trained on the dancing horizon …