Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  Where had I acquired this questionable art? Was I born with it? Had I learned it at the knees of the gypsy women who went back and forth over the Free State’s borders and did more than sharpen scissors and mend kettles for the good people of Langfuhr? No, it was probably in the Upper Palatinate, in the camp where I killed time and stayed a very real hunger by taking the abstract cooking course: there must have also been a course in palmistry that attracted the likes of me.

  Whether my skill was inborn, gypsy-taught, or camp-learned, I must have been pretty low on scruples to have made a positive professional prediction in deepest Hunsrück: the more rewarding the woman’s lifeline was for her and the retiring French peasant who shared her table and bed, the more rewarding – that is, calorific – they were for me. And yet bacon was not the most important reward I reaped from the trip to Hunsrück. The peasant woman’s sister-in-law, who had been bombed out of her Ruhr residence and found refuge and work on the farm, did me a service whose worth went beyond the usual measure of weight or quantity.

  Much as my friend Kongo dogged her footsteps, he didn’t get anywhere with her: once he came staggering out of the sheepfold, scratched and cursing. Yet soon enough he was all smiles again: he was a broad-shouldered, good-natured sort, who took things as they came.

  The war had been too short for him: he was a great adventurer. That was probably why he stayed with me. My first play, a two-acter entitled Flood that premiered in the mid-fifties at a Frankfurt student theatre, featured a character very much like him, a soldier back from the Legion whom his comrade-in-arms calls Kongo. The two of them have been to Laos and Indochina and are now playing the prodigal son …

  I had a glimmer of what was to come on the way to the nearest station. The sister-in-law helped us transport in a handcart the things we’d squirrelled away: a sack of potatoes, cabbage, a slab of sheep’s-milk cheese, a hunk of bacon, and perhaps a bag of runner beans.

  The moon lit our way through the fields, the path rising slightly at first, then sloping for the remaining three or three and a half kilometres. Distances and times are only approximate in the memory.

  Kongo pulled the cart and would not let either of us take over, so we brought up the rear, silent at first, then chatty. Walking side by side but not holding hands or anything, we talked about films and discovered we both liked a young actress by the name of Hildegard Knef, soon to become one of German cinema’s brightest stars. The film, which I happen to have seen again on television recently, was Under the Bridges.

  Since the local to Bad Kreuznach wasn’t due in for another two hours or so, Kongo lay down on a bench in the waiting room. He immediately fell asleep. We stood outside by the shed whose flaking sign was the only indication it was a station. The moon or the clouds were scuttering along. What was there for us to see, to say, to do or even wish?

  Suddenly the young woman, or girl, as I saw her, asked me to accompany her with the handcart, not because she was afraid, just because …

  It must have been early summer and the moon was almost full. The haystacks on either side of the path, which ran through a newly mown field, had suggested nothing to me on the way there. They lay evenly spaced to the edge of the woods, which set off the sky like a dark band. Sometimes clouds shadowed their order, then lit them with a silvery brilliance. Perhaps the piled-up hay had made us offer after offer on the way to the station. I had the feeling the scent of the freshly mown hay had grown stronger.

  No sooner was the station, along with the sleeping friend and the haul, a stone’s throw away – or did we walk farther? – than I abandoned the cart and she took my hand, and the two of us drifted from the path to the nearest haystack.

  I must have been the one who let himself be drawn into the hay. Inge has remained clear in my memory, in more than a few details, and not only because she was the first. Her broad, flat, almost full moon of a face was sprinkled with freckles, but they didn’t count in the hay. It is fairly certain that her eyes, which she didn’t close, were green rather than grey. I remember her hands as large and coarse from work in the fields. But they knew how to come to my aid.

  Of course the hay smelled sweet beyond compare. As I was too eager, because starved, she had to teach me not to rush, not to buck, to use my fingers, use them all and gently, the way she did. There was so much to discover. Moist and fathomless. All there, waiting to be touched. Soft and round. Yielding. The noises, the animal sounds we made.

  Then the scent of hay overcame us. Intoxicated, we reached for more. Or was once enough? I only hope the novice proved a good learner.

  And then? Afterwards? Did we whisper in the hay, or was it only me? I’ve no idea what whisper words could be found in a haystack. All I know is that Inge spoke matter-of-factly: The familiar story of war. The bombed-out terrace house on the outskirts of Bochum, the fiancé who had fallen in action two years before in the Balkans ‘because the partisans were everywhere’. As a miner he was exempt from military service, she said, but then they sent him straight to Stalingrad and even put him in the engineers. They sent him to Gross-Boschpol for training, then to the front, and later, as he had written, to the mountains, to build bridges …

  She said more, but it’s gone now, as is the name of her fiancé, which she kept repeating, out of habit, out of intimacy, as if he were lying next to her.

  And was that really me, whispering this and that in the haystack? Profundities about the firmament? About the moon’s comings and goings? I probably tried to be original and lyrical, because whenever something threw me off course I used to wax poetic, in rhymed verse or free.

  Or did I stutter when she asked me out of concern or simple curiosity what I wanted to be, when I grew up, so to speak? Did I say there in the hay, ‘An artist. No two ways about it!’?

  Of the fleshy glow of skin under skin the onion knows nothing. Only gaps in a garbled text. Unless I myself try to decipher what appears illegible, and put together a rhyme …

  In my memory, overloaded with constantly shifting debris, I made Inge laugh, or wanted to make her laugh, goodness knows how. She did not try to make me laugh. The novice at her side, under the almost full moon, had suddenly grown animal-sad not knowing why, and no amount of stroking and coaxing could bring him out of it. What is more, he could no longer tolerate the scent of the mown meadow.

  Our haystack lay flat by the time we stood up, she searching for her knickers, I fumbling with my fly buttons. We plucked the hay off our clothes – each from our own, presumably – though I probably helped her to put the haystack back in order. Seen from afar: a couple working their fields by night.

  After that, the bleak feeling of isolation was gone. Not that there was any singing or humming as I helped Inge bring our bed in line with the other haystacks. Four busy hands.

  I am uncertain whether she said ‘Send me a postcard’ when she told me her family name, which ended in the Polish -kowiak or -ski like the names of our Ruhr Basin football players.

  And that was that. Or was it? Maybe a tiny pause. Then off we went in opposite directions, she with the empty handcart.

  I must have been the one who didn’t look back, even this first time. What had happened lay behind me. ‘Don’t turn round’ is a line in a children’s song and the title of a poem I wrote later, much later.

  But on the short, or was it actually long, way back someone sniffed the fingers of his left hand, as if to ensure what it had held a few minutes before a place in his memory.

  Inge’s scent and the haystack’s still clung to me as I sat in the waiting room next to my sleeping friend, whose face she had scratched. Kongo was still grinning cheerfully as we rode in the direction of Bad Kreuznach with our ‘hamster loot’, but he made no dirty remarks …

  EVEN NOW, THE hasty departure weighs heavily on me. Why the rush? You’d think I was running away out of fear. It lasted until the train finally came. Time passed unused.

  Too late, I tell myself: You could have had the girl named Inge in the next haystack too a
nd – you’d have been hungry again soon – the one after that. What was the point of going back to low-calorie Saarland? The Hunsrück – godforsaken, Catholic, and hilly as it was – would eventually have come to seem like home, material for a long TV mini-series.

  Your pal Kongo would soon be gone, taking the potatoes and cabbage, the slab of cheese, and the counterpart of your skill at palm-reading with him: he intended to go to Algeria or Morocco because he hadn’t had enough war and wanted to go to the dogs in the name of La Grande Nation. You could have done an occasional optimistic palm-reading for the peasant woman, to help her sleep and have an easy delivery. And if one day the husband missing in Russia should in fact turn up on her doorstep … A late homecoming … The man outside …

  In my mind I have often turned to haystacks left and right, less because of the young woman with the broad, flat face lit by the moon and dusted with countless freckles than in search of self, the vanished I of earlier years. Yet I never got further than the sound and the smell of my first, much too hasty attempt at making one flesh of two, an endeavour also known as love.

  THEN GAPS, INTERFERENCE. Nothing that smacks of conquest or even adventure. All that remains, nailed down, is the season: early summer, ’46.

  I’m constantly on the road, first in the Weserbergland, then along the Hessian border of the American Occupation Zone, and finally, legal again, with the Brits in Göttingen, after having spent a few days with the family of another comrade, a peasant boy with a slight speech impediment, in the area of Nörten-Hardenberg.

  No more haystacks, though. No more profitable palm-readings. Aimless, restless, a fixed abode no temptation. And yet I must have registered with the police here and there to gain access to the all-important ration cards.

  What was I after in Göttingen? Not the university, that’s for sure. What kind of school record could I offer? I hadn’t seen the inside of a school since the age of fifteen. Teachers put me off. That is why primary school teachers like Fräulein Spollenhauer in the ‘Timetable’ chapter of The Tin Drum, the gym teacher Mallenbrandt in Cat and Mouse, and the teacher Starusch in Local Anaesthetic, were destined to fill pages of my manuscripts. See how important my teachers were to me. One of my plays, too, a play called Thirty-Two Teeth, deals not only with dental hygiene but also with pedagogical hysteria.

  Even though I had been taught to strip down the ninety-eight carbine and reassemble it in no time flat into a battle-ready weapon; even though I could operate the fuse mechanism of an eight-point-eight anti-aircraft gun and, trained gunner that I was, the gun of a tank; even though I had been drilled in the art of seeking cover at lightning speed, saying ‘Jawoll!’ and marching in formation; even though I learned to ‘organize’ food, to sniff danger, to steer clear of the military police bloodhounds, and even endure the sight of bodies blown to bits and bodies hanging on a procession of trees; even though I pissed my pants out of fear and learned to sing in the woods, to sleep standing, to lie my way to safety, to invent roasts and soups without fat, fish, meat, or vegetables, to people my table with guests from distant times, and even to read fortunes from palms, I was a world away from the exam that would have admitted me to the university.

  One day in front of Göttingen Station – it was a habit of mine to roam the precincts of bustling stations – I met a classmate from my former life. I am not sure whether I sat on a bench next to him or behind him at the Conradinum or Saint Peter’s or Saint John’s.

  He kept at me until I agreed to cross the city, which had been largely spared, to where his mother, but no grown sister, lived in emergency quarters for refugees from the east.

  They were all in a row, Nissen barracks, tunnel-shaped, vaulted, corrugated-iron constructions, with washing hung between them. Barley soup with cabbage stalks was all she had to eat, a camp bed the only place she had to sleep. Her eldest son had fallen in the battle for Monte Cassino Abbey, her husband, whom the Russians had arrested and then dragged from pillar to post, was reported missing. It was the job of the remaining son to make up for what she had lost.

  After a few days I let him, my putative benchmate, take me to a school that specialized in helping its charges brush up on what they had forgotten or missed during the years they’d been away. You could get back into the school routine there, he said over and over, and then try your hand at the Abitur. Because, he said, passing that exam was as important to me, who still carried a haversack, as it was to him, who sported a real briefcase, artificial though its leather was. Without the Abitur, you were worth half as much. Plenty of others were in the same boat. ‘When will you understand? Without the Abitur you don’t count!’

  I barely made it beyond the first period. The first period was Latin, and Latin is Latin, what you’d expect. But the second period was history, my one-time favourite. Its extensive spatial and temporal territory supplied vacuums galore for my imagination to fill in and populate with characters I’d dreamed up, most of whom wore medieval garb and engaged in endless warfare. What is man? A mere particle, partner, fellow traveller, cog in the cogwheel of history. A colourful ball being kicked around – that is how I saw myself back in the schoolroom again.

  Although a good deal of what happened during my years on the road, my Wanderjahre, is gone for ever – for example, the number of students who followed us from the Latin class to the history class, though I do remember they were all war-years older than we were – I can still see the history teacher as if it were yesterday: short, wiry, close-cropped, no glasses, bow tie, scurrying up and down the rows of benches, turning on his heel, then coming to an abrupt halt, as if on the irrevocable command of the Weltgeist, and opening the class with the classic ‘Where did we leave off yesterday?’ only to answer immediately, ‘Ah, the Ems Dispatch.’

  I’m sure that was what the curriculum called for. I didn’t want to be stuck with Bismarck and his machinations. What did I care about the Franco-Prussian War?

  My crash course in what is called war experience was more recent: I had completed it the day before yesterday.

  I was still experiencing its repercussions in my dreams and nightmares. I hadn’t come to rest anywhere.

  What had a war that forged a united Germany out of blood and iron, to offer me?

  What did I care about the Ems Dispatch?

  What had to be chewed over, what dates nailed into my memory?

  What span of time – mine? – would that pedant skip, deny, gloss over as an embarrassment?

  It was as if the ominous dispatch had delivered a cue: I stood, reached for my ever ready haversack, and, ignoring the professor’s reproach, left not only the classroom for ex-servicemen wishing to make up for lost time, no, I also left school and its musty conservatism-on-principle for ever. I may even have relished the leave-taking.

  As for my classmate, who doubtless completed his Abitur and was therefore able to go through life a totally worthy person, I never saw him again. But since my publisher and his printing press are located on Göttingen’s Düstere Strasse, the city is still worth a trip, for more than one reason.

  ALTHOUGH THE FINE points of the previous episode are fuzzy, another meeting, which took place immediately thereafter, is as sharp as can be.

  I was in the station waiting room. Where was I heading? Had I any travel plans?

  Did I feel the call of the south? Up and away, illegal or not, into the American zone, where I might ferret out my pal Joseph in some Bavarian burg between Altötting and Freilassing and tell our fortunes again with my dice?

  I look around the waiting room of Göttingen Station helplessly: all the seats are taken. Suitcases and bundles everywhere. The stale air of overcrowding. Finally, a spot. The man next to me is a man I might well have chosen to sit next to, the kind I feel an affinity with: the eternal lance corporal in his dyed Wehrmacht uniform. I could have guessed his rank even without seeing the two chevrons on his left sleeve.

  I seemed destined to meet up with his kind. This fellow – like the other lance corporal,
who led me out of the wood in the guise of Hans-who-left-home, though this one was taller and more brawny, more rugged than him – this fellow was somebody you could trust. You can count on somebody who doesn’t need to make it to corporal, I said to myself. Crafty, cunning, sly, he will always come out on top. Advance, positional warfare, hand-to-hand combat, counter-attack, retreat – if it had to do with military operations he was at home with it. He would find the breach, he would get away, wounded or not. You could rely on him.

  His wooden leg stretched out in front of him, he was smoking a pipe filled with an indefinable substance only distantly related to tobacco. He looked as if he had survived not only the most recent war but also the Thirty Years’ War and Seven Years’ War: he was timeless. He wore his field cap on the back of his head.

  ‘So, my boy, don’t know where to go, do you?’ marked the start of our conversation.

  You couldn’t actually see the wooden leg, but you could tell it was there under the cloth, and this became significant before long. ‘What do you say we have a look at Hanover? It’s got a station too. Maybe we’ll find something there.’

  So we got on the next local and jolted our way through ten or fifteen stations. After a bit of shoving we found seats in a full non-smoking compartment, which didn’t interfere with my lance corporal’s pipe in the slightest. Smoke poured from it.

  Puffing away, he pulled a heel of bread and hunk of sausage out of his haversack. He said the sausage came from Eichsfeld, which, everybody knew, made the best in the country.

  With a paratrooper knife he sliced it into finger-thick pieces, more for me than for him. He was loath to take the pipe out of his mouth. He wanted to feed his pal, as he called me.

  It was air-cured blood sausage, if I remember correctly, though it had an aftertaste of pork. In any case, he smoked while I chewed and gazed out at the hilly countryside passing by us on both sides and thought my own jumbled thoughts.