by Günter Grass
It didn’t help that I seemed dogged by bad luck. Because the one time I had a pleasantry ready, for a nurse with a Madonna-like face, who was out walking on her own, and some words of flattery in reserve, my goat, my albatross, began to piss loud and long.
What do I do? Look the other way? Seek support in the tombstones lining the street opposite the tracks? Make believe it wasn’t happening?
All in vain. The milk-goat’s piss went on and on. Some pair we made!
I might feel the blood rush to my face even now were it not for another memory, one capable of bringing Genoveva’s flow of urine to a halt: it was not long afterwards that I did finally score, though in a very different arena: the dance floor. My favourite halls were the Wedig and the Löwenburg. I was in demand as a dancer. And that young man’s limber-legged victory paid off a second time a few years ago, in the poetry of an old man who thought himself limber enough for ‘Last Dances’ – if only for the length of a tango mortale.
DANCE-MAD WEEKENDS. ON workdays, though, I continued, under Korneff’s guidance, to practise delivering blow after even blow with the mallet we called a club, and hewing and chiselling surfaces on rough limestone and Belgian granite. Soon I was able to make a groove round a piece of Silesian marble big enough for a child’s tomb. I even attempted an egg-and-dart edging for the stone of a professor emeritus.
Old man Singer taught me how to use a three-legged instrument called a pointing machine to transfer point after point from the plaster-of-Paris model of Christ on the Cross to the still formless chunks of dolerite while I kept hewing away. A movable needle measured the deepest and highest points on the model of the body, as the machine shifted back and forth between plaster and stone. The surface had to be not only hewn but also gouge-grooved to ensure the accuracy of the needle’s readings. Anyone who tried to cut corners would be caught in the act by Singer, peering over his glasses. Singer, who had chiselled at Hamburg’s Bismarck monument in his youth, taught me to give stone a face.
I developed calluses: my skin grew hard under the stippling iron. My muscles grew hard as well, which was good for display purposes. I looked like a manual labourer and in the coming years nursed the belief that if need be, in the case of political backsliding – for instance, a return of censorship and an official ban on writing I could support my family as a stonemason, a thought that soothed me and gave me self-confidence. Because as everybody knows, the tombstone business is brisk even in the worst of times. Death takes no holidays. Göbel’s supply of tombstones, single or double, was always in demand.
So away we chiselled, swallowing the dust that billowed up from the Belgian granite, as sulphurous as an old man’s fart. The final polish was provided by a grinder. Over the weekend, the dust settled: Saturdays and Sundays were for dancing.
THIS IS HOW it started. The monk watching over the hacking greybeards and us, the bunk-bed youths, the friar rushing about with flapping habit and clanging keys, would stand stock-still in the open door of his cell on Saturday afternoons, looking on in pious reverence as we made ourselves presentable.
I would climb into the black trousers I had fished out of Father Fulgentius’s used-clothing box. In the laundry room, the monk serving there had ironed sharp creases into them. These in combination with my herringbone jacket must have given me the air of a professional gigolo. Unfortunately, there was no mirror in our ten-bed room.
An engineering student who was getting on in years, who fitted my lance-corporal image but eventually became a manager for Mannesmann, where he made a fortune in tubes during the economic boom, taught me how to tie the medium-large knot. Some gave their shoes a mirror shine, others smoothed down their hair with sugar-water. Everybody got all spruced up.
And through it all our reverent monk would stand there, hands in his habit sleeves, looking on motionless, until we whooped off to the dance hall as if we had just discovered buried treasure.
I had an easy time of it: I’d been a dancer for as long as I could remember. At various non-church festivities at Zinglers Höhe or Kleinhammerpark, Langfuhr’s popular garden restaurant, I was there before and after the beginning of the war, not only as spectator and note-taker for future works. Whenever the local petit bourgeois gathered in civvies or shit-brown uniforms to take the floor, the thirteen-year-old boy I was at the time, led by lonely soldiers’ brides, learned to dance: the Rheinländer, the one-step, the foxtrot, the English waltz, I even learned the tango, young, and was therefore considered desirable on the dance floors of the post-war years. The Dixieland band that played ‘Shoeshine Boy’ and ‘Tiger Rag’ and ‘Hey Bob a Rebop’ could also be persuaded to strike up a tango.
There were dance joints all over the place: in the cellars of Düsseldorf Old Town, in Gerresheim, and in nearby Grafenberg, a suburb bordering on the woods whose sanatorium later gained a certain notoriety, thanks to a patient with a memory mania, and whose meandering paths the overheated dancer found refreshing when escorting this or that telephone operator to an inviting bench, or the much desired mossy patch of ground.
Change your partners and blindman’s buff – imprecise memories of touching lost in more black holes. No names to name except for a busty Helma, who asked me to dance at the Löwenburg one night when the lights dimmed and a ladies’ choice was announced, and who clung to me after a foxtrot.
It was a dance-crazy time. We, the defeated, couldn’t get enough of the twelve-bar liberation offered by our transatlantic victors. ‘Don’t Fence Me In …’
We needed to celebrate our survival and forget the chance scenes staged by war. What was shameful or horrific we left to lurk below the surface. The past, and the hills rising above its mass graves, were levelled on Saturdays and Sundays to the dance floor.
It was only after many years that I could have the Grafenberg sanatorium occupant dance a one-step to the tune of ‘Rosa-munde’, that Oskar was allowed to call things I had passed over in silence by their names, to put into words what I had suppressed as burdensome. Yet even now, a half-century later, horrors come knocking at the door, demanding to be let in.
Memory rests on memories, which themselves go back to memories. In that, memory resembles the onion, which, as each skin peels away, reveals something long forgotten, all the way down to the milk teeth of early childhood. Then comes the knife and fulfils another function: chopping the skins, it provokes tears that cloud the sight.
YET I HAVE no trouble picturing myself on the benches under the chestnut trees that supply the Caritas House courtyard with shade. I sit there each time with a different old man, trying to get his face down on paper. I do pencil sketches of the misty, impassive eyes and tear ducts, the dry ears, frayed and crumbly around the edges, the constantly muttering mouth. I draw the forehead, a furrowed field, the bald spot enshrouded in a fleece of sparse hair, the gently throbbing skin above the temples, and the neck, the shiny, wrinkled leather.
With the special lustre of soft lead I can give a three-dimensional quality to the jaw and the ridge of the nose, the pendulous lower lip, the receding chin. Folds transverse and vertical form the forehead; the pencil lines swell and disappear in the shadows behind the lenses of his glasses. Two craters: nostrils sprouting grey hair. Endless grey tones between black and white: my credo.
From childhood I have drawn with pencil. Close-ups of gloomy, crusty brick walls. Eraser at hand until it crumbles into nothing. Later, much later, I sang the praises of this, the pencil’s orderly, in a cycle called ‘My Eraser and the Moon, Both Waning’.
The old men would sit on the benches of Caritas House in half-profile, heeding my order to keep their eyes focused on an object. I kept them for one or two hours, during which many of them had asthma attacks. Their whistling breath. Sometimes their babble was threaded with World War I, Verdun, the inflation. I rewarded them with cigarettes, my personal currency, two or three of them, which they would smoke right after the sitting – or after a lengthy coughing fit – down to the last draw. Still a non-smoker, I always had th
e wherewithal to pay them: I gave precedence to drawing from live models and was careful not to deplete my supply. Only once did an old man with a wildly wavy mop of hair offer to sit gratis ‘just for art’s sake’, as he put it.
THE ARTIST UNDER the chestnut trees, however hard he worked, missed a guiding hand. What I would have given to be able to show a few of the woodpaper pencil drawings the stonecutter’s assistant thought were reasonably successful to the art teacher who was doing her compulsory civilian service soon after Stalingrad, when the total war began. I was fourteen or so when she gave a class at Saint Peter’s. Every Saturday she was expected to deal with a group of rude, visibly bored oafs, some of whom managed to put down hairy cunts or stick figures with ridiculously long willies on paper.
Those too dull even for this she left to their own devices, that is, to playing skat or sleeping their way through the double period; the rest she provided with lessons in perspective. There were only two or three she cared about, the ones she felt had a sliver of talent.
I was one of those who enjoyed her attentions. Not only that, she invited me to visit her at her garden studio in Zoppot. She was married to a lawyer much her senior, a quartermaster behind the lines on the eastern front, and lived in a cottage surrounded by weeds. I went to see her there I can’t say how many times.
In shorts or in the long trousers of the Hitler Youth winter uniform, I would take the tram to Glettkau via Oliva and walk from there, all anticipation, either along the dunes or down where the waves rolled in, but instead of looking for amber amid the seaweed washing ashore, I would turn left, just before Zoppot’s first villas, past hedges just beginning to bloom or, in late summer, full of rose hips. The garden gate squeaked.
She was from Königsberg, but it was at the Danzig School of Technology rather than at the art academy in her home town that she had found her teacher, Professor Pfuhle, the well-known equestrian painter, the one whose evening course I later attended.
She wore her hair straight and short, in the style of the twenties, and it goes without saying that the schoolboy bearing my name was what you might call distantly in love with her. But there were no furtive glances, no touching. She got close to me, turned my head, in a completely different manner.
On the ‘smoking table’ – she was a chain-smoker – she had placed, unintentionally or by design, a pile of art journals and catalogues as old as I was, or older, some in black-and-white, others in colour.
So the schoolboy leafed through them and saw forbidden paintings by Dix and Klee, Hofer and Feininger, sculptures by Barlach – the monastic scholar reading – and Lehmbruck’s large kneeling woman.
I saw other works as well, but what exactly? All I remember is the thrill they gave me. I was fascinated by these things I’d never seen before – fascinated and terrified. It was banned, the lot of it, as ‘degenerate art’.
The newsreels had shown the moviegoer what the Third Reich considered beautiful: sculptors like Breker and Thorak outdid one another producing larger-than-life marble heroes. Lilli Kröhnert, chain-smoker, whose squint put me off a bit, the young woman with the bobbed hair and the faraway husband, my beloved teacher, who always had another Lehmbruck to show me but also made reference to sculptors tolerated by the regime, like Wimmer and Kolbe – Lilli Kröhnert ran the risk of being turned in by this pupil she took to be not without talent. Betrayal was the norm. An anonymous tip was enough. In those years, ideologically zealous pupils were not beyond sending their teachers – witness the case of my Latin teacher Monsignor Stachnik – to concentration camps.
Lilli Kröhnert survived the war. In the early sixties, when I was touring Schleswig-Holstein with my five-year-old twin sons, Franz and Raoul, and stopped in Kiel to give a reading from Dog Years, I got together with her and her husband – he, too, had come out of it alive – in neighbouring Flensburg the next day. Still the chain-smoker, she smiled when I expressed my gratitude for her daring art lessons.
If only she could also have given me pointers when I, still the non-smoker, sketched coughing old men with soft lead and paid them in cigarettes …
AFTER MY PRIMARY hunger was stilled by tasteless Caritas soups that nonetheless left an aftertaste and my other hunger, which, though intensified by my workday tram rides, was tempered by affectionate dance partners over the weekend, there remained the third, my lust for art.
I see myself in cheap seats in Gründgens’s theatre – was that the year they did Goethe’s Tasso or was it the following year? – and intoxicated by the flood of images from the exhibitions of Chagall, Kirchner, Schlemmer, Macke, and who else?
At Caritas House, Father Stanislaus fed me Rilke, Trakl, a selection of Baroque poets, and the earliest Expressionists. I read everything he had managed to safeguard in the Franciscan library through the Nazi years.
And accompanied by an approachable teacher’s daughter – the two had fled Bunzlau together – I tamed my lust for everything stimulating to the ear in addition to the eye at least for the length of an evening at the Robert Schumann Hall.
But my reading mania coupled with the passive consumption of artistic products merely heightened my hunger and drove me to produce art of my own.
I turned out poems by the yard. My lyrical metabolism working overtime. And instead of working harder for Göbel, I did my first small sculptures in limestone: two female torsos, an expressive girl’s head. I also went on filling up Pelikan pads with whatever my asthmatic old men had to offer in exchange for tobacco: page after page of the most varied, scarred, burned-out, dried-up, skin-and-bone faces. Stubbly or bearded, eyes blinking or tearing, they were the true faces of age. Whenever I rewind time, and the benches under the chestnut trees in the bright spring, summer, or autumn light flash into sight again, I watch myself sketching on my pad those half-awake faces awaiting death.
Since the result of the non-smoker’s efforts has gone astray, I am uncertain whether I also perceived my roommates as models. Or it may be that Father Fulgentius, Prior of Caritas House, he of the sullen and pock-marked countenance, or Father Stanislaus, the Rilke lover, an aesthete who trod softly and enjoyed quoting passages from ‘Die Trutznachtigall’, by the Baroque monk Spee von Langenfeld, also made their way into my pad. I so wish there were a page on which our ever watchful friar, the one whose gaze was always expecting a Marian miracle, had been depicted as an angel. Though among the missing multitude only the sketches of the old men are a certainty.
AFTER A YEAR with Julius Göbel, Korneff the senior journeyman, and Singer the stonecutter and his three-legged pointing machine, after weeks and weeks of vegetable soup and of leading Genoveva the milk-goat ever farther for her weeds, the trainee thought it was time to move on.
Away from the bleating beast, from the punctured plaster torsos of athletic Christs on the Cross, from the contrapposto of marble Madonnas on crescent moons, from the glossy shine – forbidden by law – of polished granite and from the roses I sculpted into medallions on children’s tombs. I never wanted to see another Leghorn pecking between tombstones.
I was attracted by a larger firm, Moog, at the far end of Bittweg. They dealt primarily in sandstone, tuff, and basalt fresh from the Eifel quarries. They weren’t likely to do new inscriptions for giant old slabs. They wouldn’t give me a goat to tend.
Still, it wasn’t easy to say goodbye to Korneff and his journeyman charm. In the spring we had cemented a number of one-to three-body tombs and their pedestals onto foundations in cemeteries swarming with birds. We had also seen to the reburial of corpses desirous of switching graves. Working with him made working with death more or less bearable. He had a wicked tongue.
Since Korneff later had the chance to lug around marble and dolerite with his assistant Oskar Matzerath all the way to the ‘Fortuna North’ chapter, to witness those reburials, and to hand over the Henkelmanns full of nondescript soup at the cemetery crematorium at noon to be warmed up (a piece of advice he gave to me as well as to Oskar), we shall assume that we have exhausted the
theme of tombstones and cemeteries, except perhaps with respect to the issue of literature and reality: who put what in whose mouth; who is the better liar, Oskar or I; whom should one believe in the end; what is missing both here and there; and who guided whose pen.
Given that Herr Matzerath was never an employee of the Moog concern, however, I hope I may now proceed with the late birth of my early years without further ado.
Entertaining as it may be to sweep up the eggshells of one’s own incubator children, the dustpan usually shows remains of questionable origin: the pedant’s details or once discarded ideas waiting to be revived – for example, the rumour that no sooner had I left Göbel’s concern with Master Singer’s blessing than Genoveva and her rope jerked themselves loose from the apprentice in charge of her midday expedition and that instead of going out into the world she uttered her final bleat under a tram on its way to Bilk. Göbel’s wife, the cow-eyed matron, is said to have opined that it was out of grief at my departure that Genoveva flung herself under its wheels.
DURING MY FIRST months with the firm of Moog I took part in a project with the apprentices and journeymen that instead of beautifying the surrounding cemeteries was meant to deal with the war damage still very much in evidence in the city’s parks and also in the Hofgarten.
Where sandstone figures had been decapitated or turned into one-armed invalids by bomb fragments our job was to provide the goddess Diana or the gorgon Medusa with an appropriate new head based on photographic or plaster models, to restore lost limbs and cloven angel’s wings. But Moog was also commissioned to create whole new putti with cute little hands, rolls of fat, dimples all over the place, and luxuriant locks. The forward-looking Herr Moog had clearly found his way to the authorities’ hearts.
And so we spent our days repairing war damage, patching and mending. From the apprentices, each of whom came from a long line of stonemasons, I learned that a false blow of the hammer in stone was irremediable unless it could be hidden by a clever ruse. The recipe for a putty that was neither too thick nor too thin I owed to Master Singer, who had entrusted it to me – he considered it a professional secret – as a going-away present.