by Günter Grass
Göbel’s wife would cook masterfully seasoned soups in the house just next to the workshop. I remember her as a cow-eyed matron with a crown of plaits in the style of the Reich women’s Führerin. It looked good on her. Childless though she was, she deserved the Golden Mother Cross awarded in earlier times to mothers of particularly large broods, so attentive was she to the needs of those at her table.
When selling tombstones to peasants from the Rhine’s left bank, Göbel charged ten kilos of legumes, a side of pork, and several unplucked chickens above and beyond the cash price. For a double tomb of Main River sandstone Frau Göbel could expect a sheep, whose ribs and flabby stomach would end up in her soup. And a child’s pillow-sized tombstone would bring two Saint Martin’s Day geese, of which we especially savoured the smaller pieces – wings, neck, heart, stomach – in a rich broth.
She fed us all, everyone who ingested the stone dust of the workshop: three sickly apprentices, a pair of Silesian journeymen brothers who specialized in text-carving, the senior journeyman Korneff, the stonecutter Singer, and me, the self-confident neophyte whom one of the Silesian brothers immediately advised not to think so highly of himself, not as an artist at least.
Later he told me about Breslau, undamaged at first, fiercely fought over at the end of the war, then totally destroyed. What he deplored more than the untold dead dumped by clean-up crews into mass graves was the missed opportunity to make their tombstones.
The Silesian brothers knew their literature. They could recite the epigrams by Angelus Silesium and would carve them into stone: Be to the spirit true, For when the world doth fade, And Fortune fadeth too, The spirit’s not gainsaid.
SO I BECAME AN apprentice with the firm of Göbel & Co. The question now was where to live. The duffel bag and faithful haversack spoke volumes about the trainee’s homelessness. But since a trace of my mother’s Catholicism still clung to me, and I could call the Only True Church by its name when asked about my religion by Herr Göbel, help was soon on the way. He put a call through from his office to God the Father apparently, and having recommended me as a disciple of the Faith, secured for me, on the spot, a place to sleep, if not in paradise then in its local branch, the church’s Caritas House, in the Rath district of town.
From the Bittweg tram stop, where, as I have pointed out, a number of stonecutting establishments bordered on one another, including the firm of Moog, which specialized in sandstone and basalt and appears in The Tin Drum as C. Schmoog, my future home was within easy reach by tram: I had only to change at Schadowplatz. It was as if, thanks to my mother’s intervention, a guardian angel had descended and seen to everything without my having to lift a finger.
AT THIS POINT memory makes gratis offers by the dozen – so much happened at once – and leaves the choice to the narrator: Shall I stick to stonecutting or run through my inner life piece by piece? Is this the time to do a survey of the Danzig cemeteries in anticipation of my late novella The Call of the Toad, or does it make sense to move in straight away?
The Düsseldorf-Rath Caritas House, not far from the badly bombed Mannesmann plant, was run by the Franciscans. Two or three fathers and a half-dozen friars operated an institution that had at one time cared for wandering artisans, then more and more for the homeless and lonely old men. The monks are even said to have taken in a serial killer by the name of Kürten during the twenties. And because the need for it had never abated, the building complex, which emerged from the war miraculously unharmed, still set off only by low walls and a fence, had outlived every regime change, remaining an effective enclave of good works: in peace, as in war, it was always full.
The Prior of the establishment was Father Fulgentius. He was middle-aged, wore a habit, and had a gruff look about him, but instead of quizzing me on my belief system, he rummaged around in a musty used-clothing box: he thought the newcomer, the young man in the dyed uniform, should have a set of civilian clothes to wear. I also needed proper overalls for Göbel’s workshop: the coupler boy had given his underground gear too severe a beating.
I was allowed to outfit myself from head to foot. The Prior even fished underpants and two shirts out of the box so I could change regularly. Then there was a sweater that had clearly been knitted out of multicoloured ends of wool but that kept me warm for a long, long time. Last but not least, Father Fulgentius forced a blue tie with red polka dots on me. ‘For Sundays,’ as he put it – a bald hint at the possibility of my attending the Caritas Chapel services.
It all matched. As for my new self-image, I must have looked fabulous, because what do I see when my memory opens like a wardrobe door but a pair of trousers ironed for feast days and my first post-war jacket – with a distinct herringbone pattern.
The dormitory of the main building, which owed its solidity to the architectural practices of the 1880s, was at best a variation on the usual. My sleeping accommodation was, as it had been when I was a Luftwaffe auxiliary, a Labour Serviceman, a tank gunner, a prisoner of war, and finally a coupler boy, the upper deck of a bunk bed. The bed was one of five in a windowless room, which, as became evident by evening, was inhabited by students and apprentices either slightly younger or a few years older than me. And like me they lusted after girls and talked endlessly about women and their fleshly attributes. In better days they could have taken one or another willing young lady to the nearby Grafenberg Woods, but in the winter of ’47 the woods, like everything around, were frozen solid.
And by the way, the paths criss-crossing those woods led to the sanatorium where several years later a patient would ask his male nurse, Bruno, for five hundred sheets of innocent paper, a request that had its consequences.
NEXT TO OUR room, windowless because trapped in the middle of the building and never free of the smell of young men, yet nice and warm, was the cell of a serving brother, whose monk name I have forgotten, though I have retained every feature of his lanky frame, always rushing off somewhere in his habit.
We looked upon him as an angelic apparition: even when he was overseeing the most mundane of operations – the distribution of bread rations, for instance – his eyes, forever red, seemed to be gazing on the Virgin Mary. He also had a ring of keys hanging from a rope round his middle that announced his comings and goings from two corners away. I never saw him sitting. He was constantly on the go. He ran here, he ran there as if answering a call. No one knew how many locks he presided over.
This friar, who seemed so timeless that we cannot pin an age on him, kept an unobtrusive but ever friendly eye not only on us, who were denied ‘female visitors’ by signs nailed to our doors, but also on a large room full of permanently wheezing old men, as many as a hundred of them, though no fewer than seventy, bunk after bunk of the dying and self-renewing clientele that made up the Caritas mission.
He could peer into the dormitory any time day or night through a trapdoor-like window in his cell and so keep track of his superannuated charges, whether frail or lifeless, or collectively overcome by coughing fits, or engaged in a sudden squabble. As we drifted off, we could hear him talking through the opening, lulling the men to sleep as if they were children, his intonation retaining a trace of his Westphalian roots.
Sometimes the nameless monk let me look through the opening. What I saw, the multifarious fragility of human existence, has so retained its immediacy that I can see myself and hear my by now incurable smoker’s cough in one of those seventy to one hundred bunks: a serious case in the friar’s care. And sometimes when against all rules I crawl under the covers and light my pipe, he scolds me through the opening, gentle yet insistent.
The door to the old men’s refectory, to which only he had access, was on the other side of our dormitory, and the refectory’s high windows looked onto a courtyard that in summer enjoyed the shade of chestnut trees. The benches under the trees were always taken by the old men, most of whom suffered from permanent coughs or asthma.
Every morning two kitchen monks placed a large pot of semolina porridge on the ta
ble in our room. It was made with powdered milk contributed by Canadian Franciscans. Despite loud and repeated complaints about its burnt aftertaste it never improved. On some days it didn’t linger very long; on others it clung stubbornly. My gums never forgot it.
After us, the old men were fed the morning gruel. The kitchen monks ladled it out through a cafeteria window. They, too, spoke to the men as if they were children.
Caritas House having provided me with cheap room and board for years, I can state that up to and even beyond the currency reform, which so changed everything, my breakfast consisted of semolina-and-milk porridge, two slices of wholemeal bread, a bit of margarine, and, depending on what was available, plum jam, artificial honey, or a gummy cheese spread.
Sometimes on Sundays and regularly on high church holidays, like Corpus Christi, we got a hard-boiled egg as well. On Sunday noon we would have meatloaf or chicken fricassee followed by jelly or vanilla pudding. The evening meal was similar and similarly forgettable.
On workdays each student on his way to lectures or apprentice on his way to work would pick up a small tin pot that could be snapped shut, known as a Henkelmann, containing a portion of soup too nondescript to reveal its ingredients.
The kitchen kept our food ration cards, but we ate our fill; the only cards we received were for clothes and cigarettes.
SO SUPPLIED, I went to work day after day. Compared to the general poverty outside Caritas House, I was in good shape but for the fact that my secondary hunger made itself felt, habitually and with special insistence, the moment I got on a tram.
I would board the invariably crowded vehicle near Caritas House and take it, ringing its way from stop to stop, as far as Schadowplatz, where I changed to the tram for Bilk and the Wersten cemetery.
I never got a seat. Half-asleep and wide-awake, silent and talkative, passengers of both sexes stood jammed together. I smoked, I watched, I listened to the babble of the Rhineland dialect. I smelled threadbare clothing and looked at the women who because of the war outnumbered the men. Half shoving, half shoved, I would insert myself between young girls, find myself forced between old women. Even when I wasn’t wedged between them, my trousers would rub against female clothes. With every stop, with every start of the tram, cloth and cloth, flesh and flesh beneath the cloth moved closer.
Winter coats and quilted jackets steamed, but when spring came, thinner clothes rubbed together. Knee met knee. Naked underarms, hands stretching up to the straps, too close.
No wonder my penis, which had a mind of its own and excited easily, was either half erect or fully throughout the half-hour ride. Nor did it relax when I changed trams. It made my trousers tight. And not even my intensive thinking about neutral topics could lay it to rest. Satisfied by the morning porridge, the one hunger had ceded to the other. And did so day after day.
I was always embarrassed, constantly worried somebody would notice the bulky thing and take it as an indecent offence or, worse, call indignant attention to it.
But none of the skirted, bloused passengers I stood too close to ever got upset. No one whispered umbrage into the ticket-collector’s ear with her eyes fixed on me. Only the owner of the rebellious willie was aware of the revolt in his pants and of his inability to put it down.
In time, the passengers came to know one another by sight. They arrived punctually for a tram that was generally there on time. They would venture a smile, quickly erase it, and try again. They would nod, and though still strangers, get closer and closer.
From the giggles and chatter of the women and girls, I knew or sensed that they worked in department stores, telephone exchanges, offices, or on the conveyor belt at the Klöckner plant. I pushed my way determinedly between working women and seldom rubbed against housewives.
When autumn came, the morning crush landed me between two students from the acting school, both in floral dresses. Quite affected and not worried about being overheard, they went on about Hamlet and Faust and the current celebrities of the Düsseldorf stage, the famous Elisabeth Flickenschildt and the even more famous Marianne Hoppe, but most of all Gustav Gründgens, the shady master of the art of disguise, the embodiment of traditional stage discipline, and my idol since I first saw him on the silver screen when I was a schoolboy.
Hearing all that gossip, I suddenly felt the hunger for art awakening next to the other one. It made me want to chime in with my ideas on Grabbe’s Comedy, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning, which I believe was part of the repertory that season. But I just mutely moved closer to the future actresses, flat-chested and bony as the calorie-poor times had made them; they, caught up in their enthusiastic babble, were unaware of what my over-active imagination had in mind for them: both together or one right after the other.
Both tried to look like Goethe’s Gretchen or Kleist’s Kätchen von Heilbronn, and both practised bits of monologues they were working up. They had mastered Flickenschildt’s trilled r, but they lacked the sophistication to get Hoppe right, the bubbling flow of her delivery. We never exchanged a word. I later saw Sartre’s Flies directed by Gründgens in a makeshift theatre, and thought I spied my rubbing partners in the chorus wearing insect costumes.
But most of the time it was the office girls or telephone operators I rubbed up against and who rubbed up against me and caused me such blissful torment. I barely remember the faces, but one of the girls I came too close to had eyes wide apart that looked impassively past me.
Not until I was face-to-face with the rows of highly polished tombstones in front of Bittweg’s stonecutting establishments, waiting for names and dates, did my regular morning half-hour arousal die down. Likewise the aftertaste of burnt porridge.
I would hand over my Henkelmann full of nondescript soup to the master’s wife, and she would warm it up in a pan of hot water at noon together with the canteens of Singer the sculptor, Korneff the senior journeyman, the Silesian text-carvers, and the sickly apprentices.
Only on Tuesdays and Fridays did I leave for work without my Henkelmann. Those were the days of the delicious and nutritious meat-and-vegetable soup. They had their price, however, a price exacted promptly in equal measure from the apprentices and myself.
NEXT TO THE area where the stones were stored was a shed where the master’s wife, who came of peasant stock from the left bank of the Rhine, and a great animal-lover, kept five Leghorns and a goat that was supposed to give milk and that required a daily supply of green fodder. The goat had a shaggy white coat and a pink udder. Its facial expression was not free of arrogance. Whether it actually gave milk I am uncertain, but the moment I ask the onion I see an udder full to bursting demanding to be milked by the master’s wife.
Day after day the apprentices and I took turns leading the goat on a string to a spot where there was a supply of weeds. There was no green fodder to be had among the tombstones on display, because the Leghorns had the run of the place which eventually gave me a subject for a poem entitled, ‘Fowl in the Central Cemetery’ – but there were plenty of weeds on the other side of the fence.
When everything green along Bittweg, down to the nettles, had been grazed clean, the only meadow left was the tram tracks heading towards Wersten and on to Holthausen. There was enough for days along both sides.
The apprentices, or lads, as Korneff called them, were perfectly happy to see to their obligation even if it deprived them of a good part of their lunch break. One of them, a boy with glasses who had a hard time with the stonework, and later switched to the post office, where he is said to have made quite a career for himself, would stay out longer than required, much longer than the break, looking for food.
For my part, the more I had to do with the goat, Genoveva by name, the more it rankled. In itself, and because of the spectators. The thing is, the buildings of the Municipal Clinic stretched along the tracks behind a row of trees. It is not unusual, after all, for hospitals to be located in the vicinity of cemeteries and stonecutting establishments. There was always a lively flow of pedestria
n traffic to and from the main gate, and it consisted of more than visitors. Nurses, alone or in cheery groups, walked under the trees. Ah, how they twittered! The sight of me, young man with stubborn goat, raised more than just a smile.
I had to endure all kinds of remarks, mostly mocking. My work clothes, with their coarse, stained material, and the stubborn beast, always tugging in another direction and bleating its lungs out, made a laughing stock of me, or at least that’s what I thought. I attracted barbs the way Saint Sebastian attracted arrows.
I was too shy at the time to fling them back at the nurses in their starched white uniforms. Instead, I merely blushed, and the moment the wicked tongues were out of sight, kicked Genoveva the goat.
When you think you’ve been pilloried, you long for revenge. Usually it falls flat or, as in my case, takes ineffectual forms such as the swallowed insults and curses that should have been mating calls.
My noontime forays had the following consequence: my hero Oskar Matzerath, who at about the time I was out feeding the goat was having growing pains and had therefore been admitted to the Municipal Clinic, succeeds at first go in getting one of the nurses attending him to agree to an assignation, and no sooner is he released as cured, than he takes her out for coffee and cake. I could not even bring myself to speak to a nurse, let alone ask her out. I was merely the tragicomic sidekick of a mulish goat with a dangling udder.
Oskar knew how to make the most of words; I seemed always at a loss for them. He, who could market even his hump, had dozens of ideas in store; all I could come up with were awkward and hence misleading gestures. The most ancient tricks in the art of seduction flowed gracefully from his lips; I was heard swallowing, swallowing words.
If only I had been as brazen as Oskar! If only I had had his wit!